The spell of the heart of France: the towns, villages and châteaux about Paris

by André Hallays

This report gives us a high idea of the prudence, the method and the scruples of the physicians who prepared it. As we read these clear and judicious pages, we are obliged to recognize that if the science of mental maladies has made little progress since 1816, the specialists resort to boldness of diagnosis and obscurities of language which Pinel and Royer-Collard knew nothing of. These two doctors knew that their work would pass under the King's eyes, and they doubtless put particular care into it. Nevertheless, not one of our most famous alienists would consent today to sign such an avowal of uncertainty, nor, above all, to express his doubts and reserves in a fashion as limpid and as intelligible, without once dissimulating by a barbarous jargon the fragility of his knowledge.

The doctors begin by an exposition of the facts, the apparitions of the archangel, the confidences of Martin to his curate, his trip to Paris and his arrival at Charenton. They report that after having submitted him to a detailed examination, they had found in him no sign of malady nor any symptom of derangement of mind: he is sound of body, reasons well, manifests neither overexcitement nor violence; he accepts his internment with resignation and asks only that he be permitted to accomplish his mission, for he continues to receive the visits and the admonitions of the archangel. We shall see that he finally obtained entry to the presence of the King. But let us see first, according to expert medical testimony, whether Martin was an impostor or an illuminate.

"If Martin is an impostor," say the doctors, "he can have become so only in one of two ways: either by imagining his rôle alone and executing it without any outside assistance, or by obeying the influence of other persons more enlightened than himself and by receiving their counsel and their instruction."

The physicians discard the first hypothesis; what they themselves have observed of the character of Martin and what they have learned through information brought from Gallardon, prevents their believing in trickery. "Martin was the last man in the world whom one would suspect of forming a project such as this and of cleverly bringing together all the parties to it; he did not have the religious and political acquaintances which this requires, and he would never have been able to compose by himself alone the discourses which he assures us were addressed to him; but even supposing, contrary to all probability, that he might have been capable of conceiving such a plan, his skill would have come to an end at the first difficulty of execution. Let us imagine him in this contingency face to face with the different persons who have questioned him; let one oppose his inexperience to their penetration, his ignorance to the artifice of their questions, his timidity to the impression of respect which the exercise of authority always calls forth, and let one ask one's self if he would not have been disconcerted a score of times and fallen into the traps which were laid for him in all directions. Let us add that, if he had only been an adroit rogue, he would have infallibly sought to turn this roguery to his own profit by making it a means of fortune or of credit. Now, he has not dreamed for a single instant of taking advantage of the extraordinary things which happened to him; he has not even been willing to accept a small sum of money which was offered him for his traveling expenses; he has never worked to acquire partisans, and finally, he has returned to his village as simple and with as little pretension as before. Has one ever seen rogues so disinterested?"

Must we believe that Martin is not the sole author of the imposture and that he was guided by outside advice? The physicians combat equally this hypothesis which would have made policemen smile in the beginning. Here is their reasoning, and it is very strong: "To admit this second hypothesis, it is necessary to admit also that a certain number of men, attached to some political or religious faction and knowing Martin directly or indirectly, should have entered into close relations with him at some time before January 15, and have continued these relations from January 15 up to the time of Martin's removal to Paris, and also in Paris itself, during the sojourn which he made there, and even at Charenton during the three weeks which he passed there...." Without these precautions, Martin, abandoned to himself and now obedient only to vague and insufficient guidance, would not have been able to escape the perils which surrounded him.... Previous to January 15, Martin associated only with his family or the people of his village; he has never been known to have had any acquaintance or association with persons of a higher class; consequently he has not had them; for in a village nothing remains secret; every one knows what his neighbor is doing. From January 15 up to the time of his removal to Paris, the most authentic reports certify that he has seen only his curate, the Bishop of Versailles and the prefect of Eure-et-Loir, and we know exactly what passed between them and Martin. In the journey from Gallardon to Paris, and during the stay which he made in that city, Martin was accompanied by an officer of gendarmes who left him neither by day nor by night, and who affirms that, with the exception of M. Pinel, no one at all has had an interview with him. As to Charenton, we certify that he there met only three strangers: one was the commandant and the two others [M. Sosthène de La Rochefoucauld and the Abbé Dulondel, sent by the Archbishop of Rheims, to whom the King had entrusted the care and the solution of the Martin affair.], discreet persons, incapable of becoming the instruments of trickery; that all three have had communication with Martin only in the presence of the director, and that they were rigorously restricted to addressing a few questions to him without making any kind of insinuation.... Martin talked of his visions neither to the patients, nor to the attendants, nor to the gardeners. Besides, no letter, no advice, had reached him from outside... Then Martin is neither an impostor nor an accomplice in an imposture. He thus actually experienced the sensations which he reports.

Having established the sincerity of Martin, the physicians asked themselves how his intellectual condition should be characterized.

Martin is the puppet of hallucinations. Therefore his affection approaches insanity in certain characteristics. "It is for this reason," adds Royer-Collard, "that M. Pinel and myself did not hesitate at first sight to regard this affection as a particular kind of insanity, and it is probable that any other physician would have thought as we do on this point. But if Martin's affection approaches insanity in some particulars, it also differs from it in important and basic respects..." What were they? "In the case of ordinary mental patients, the hallucination of the senses is almost always led up to and brought on by causes which have acted strongly upon their imagination, or disturbed more or less the exercise of their intellectual faculties; it never manifests itself without a special concentration of efforts of the attention or the imagination upon a single idea or upon a particular series of ideas, at least in the period which immediately precedes the vision." Now, in Martin's case, there is nothing like this. He has religious visions, although he had a mind little inclined to the mystic and was even a rather lukewarm Christian. His visions relate to politics, yet he was a stranger to the passions of his fellow citizens and did not read the newspapers. Among ordinary insane, visions are always accompanied by a certain ecstatic exaltation which gives the seer the attitude of the inspired, of the prophet, and never permit him to relate his visions with calmness and tranquillity. Now Martin remains constantly the same. He confides his visions only to his superiors, he appears more annoyed than glorified by them, he relates them with simplicity; he is not turned for one instant from his habitual occupations. Singular coincidences justified certain of the prophecies of Martin: "If it is necessary to make use of the testimony of the officer of gendarmes who accompanied him, Martin announced to him in the morning the visit which M. Pinel was to make in the afternoon, without there being any way in which he could learn of this.... We are equally assured that he had actually written to his brother under date of March 12, to warn him that the authorities were going to have information collected in his neighborhood, in regard to the persons with whom he habitually associated there, while the letter by which these inquiries were ordered was not written until the sixteenth of the same month...." Pinel and Royer-Collard willingly admit that there exist "incontestable occurrences of previsions and presentiments which were later realized by the event." But what appears not less certain "is that these occurrences are met with only in the case of persons who enjoy all their faculties and never among the mentally afflicted. This is a side of our nature which remains inexplicable to us even to this day and which will probably long escape our researches." Finally, Martin is distinguished by his excellent health from other hallucinate insane, who are always the victims of physical troubles.

What can then be the nature of this condition, so individual and so different from insanity as it is usually observed?

I have had to abridge this long scientific discussion, but I will copy the conclusions of the report verbatim:

"We here find ourselves arrested by important considerations. On the one hand, it very often happens that true insanity shows itself at first only by indefinite symptoms and takes its real form and its complete development only at a period more or less remote from its first appearance; on the other hand, the methods of classification applied even to this day in medicine are still very imperfect, and lack much of that degree of precision which seems to belong especially to the other physical sciences.... The external and tangible properties of objects are the only ones which receive the attention of the doctor: it is by the examination of these that he regulates his ministry, and intellectual facts are almost always surrounded with so many obscurities that it is extremely difficult to assert rigorously exact analogies or differences.