Of Sapho and Syphilis: Alphonse Daudet on and in Illness - Johns Hopkins University
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Of Sapho and Syphilis: Alphonse Daudet on and in Illness
Michael Worton
L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 37, Number 3, Fall 1997, pp. 38-49 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.0.0162
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/264029/summary
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Of Sapho and Syphilis:
Alphonse Daudet on and in Illness
Michael Worton
L'homme est un apprenti, la douleur est son maître.
—Alfred de Musset
Apprends à penser avec douleur.
—Maurice Blanchot
THE INTERACTION between literature and medicine has a long
history, with Apollo, god of medicine and poetry, as its titular
deity, and yet, as G. S. Rousseau has pointed out, medicine has
long been omitted from the cultural debate. * Interestingly, many fewer
patients than doctors have written about illness,2 with the perhaps in-
evitable result that for both writers and readers there has been a concern
with the processes of infection, contagion and healing and with the
thematics of suffering rather than with the poetics of illness. The Aris-
totelian association of art with catharsis has tended to dominate con-
sideration of literary and artistic texts, and, indeed, from Aeschylus
onwards, western culture has privileged the notion of pathei mathein
(suffering alone teaches), thereby making of illness an ethical and epis-
temológica! phenomenon and ensuring that the aesthetics of illness (or,
at least, its representation) remains a largely unexplored area.
Before the nineteenth century, the literary function of illness was gen-
erally thematic, advancing narrative development or serving to comment
on a character's personality or moral make-up. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, however, hospital and laboratory medicine became more sophis-
ticated and widespread in France, and in 1880 Zola set out his concepts
of naturalism in Le Roman expérimental, which is explicitly and repeat-
edly indebted to the physiologist Claude Bernard's L'Introduction à la
medicine expérimentale (1865), the classic manifesto of nineteenth-
century scientific medicine. Although Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourts
and Stendhal all included descriptions of illness and suffering in their
works, Zola surpassed all of them in his detailed chronicling of a range
of diseases from anthracosis to peritonsilar abscess, smallpox and wound
sepsis. There is, however, one singular medical absence in Zola and gen-
38 Fall 1997WORTON
erally in all the literature of the nineteenth century, this absence being all
the remarkable for the fact that it was responsible for the death of many
of the century's greatest writers, including Alphonse Daudet, Flaubert,
Jules de Goncourt, Gautier, Maupassant and, possibly, Baudelaire:
syphilis.
This disease attained epidemic proportions in nineteenth-century
France, with contemporary venereologists estimating that at the mid-
century at least 15% of the Parisian population was syphilitic, and with
Parent-Duchâtelet maintaining in his vastly influential De la prostitution
dans la ville de Paris that syphilis was the most serious, most dangerous
and most fearsome of all the contagious diseases,3 and in 1884, the year
that Daudet published Sapho, Huysmans's des Esseintes was to sigh in
fin-de-siècle wonder at the extraordinary episode of the flowers and the
Virus: "Tout n'est que syphilis."4
Although it was a profoundly social disease (in all senses of the term),
syphilis was associated with prostitution, with dégénérescence and with
madness, and so was percceived with even more moral anxiety than other
diseases—and was consequently veiled in silence, at least in literary dis-
courses. Even in medical circles, its history is one of uncertainty, with
Cullerier and Ratier opening their entry on syphilis in an 1836 medical
dictionary as follows: "Dénomination bizarre, synonyme de maladie
vénérienne, qui n'est ni plus exacte ni plus significative," and suggesting
that the very name of the disease needed considering in order to under-
stand its working: "Dans un ouvrage spécial, il serait à propos peut-être
d'examiner dans l'histoire des mots l'histoire des choses.. ."5 The greatest
and most famous specialist of syphilis was Philippe Ricord, whose main
achievements were to distinguish it from gonorrhea and other venereal
diseases and to insist on the fact that symptoms follow each other in a
strict chronology, not, as his predecessors had believed, in confusion and
a haphazard order. He crucially identified what he himself called "Ie
poison morbide qui produit la syphilis," affirming that "Ce poison, on
peut l'appeler de son nom, c'est le virus syphilitique," whereas previous-
ly even the most eminent doctors had refused such an appellation:
"C'était le temps où le savant Jourdan, dans un accès de bizarre colère,
s'écriait: appelez-le comme vous voudrez, mais ne lui donnez pas le nom
de virus!"6 Insistent almost as much on finding and using appropriate
terms as on disseminating the fact that syphilis is wholly methodical in its
development and "repudiates anarchy,"7 Ricord himself nonetheless
cannot avoid using a vocabulary of morality when discussing it, describ-
VOL. XXXVII, NO. 3 39L'Esprit Créateur
ing it as "[a] disease which attaches itself for ever to the body of its
victim, —a diathesis [...] which may extend itself as an indelible mark to
his posterity, —a transmissible, an hereditary constitutional vice" (Lec-
tures on chancre, 151, my emphasis).
By the late nineteenth century, both research and treatment were not
only exceptionally advanced but also highly theorized medically and
sociologically; indeed, as Claude Quétel puts it: "Never before has a
disease threatening the human race produced such a degree of theoretical
elaboration."8 The general silence in literature regarding syphilis as a
real disease from which one suffers is thus all the more surprising,
explicable perhaps only through the fact that it was perceived in socio-
cultural terms as a vulgar and demeaning one. Strangely, given the many
scientific advances, illness in nineteenth-century France continued to be
seen in essentially moral terms, hence Ferdinand Brunetière's character-
istic thundering response in Le Roman naturaliste to Daudet's
L'Évangéliste (1883): "La maladie, si l'on veut qu'il y ait maladie, n'est
une matière pour un romancier qu'autant qu'elle demeure une maladie
morale."9 A disease like tuberculosis could be used as a metaphor for
venereal disease, but it could also be positively symbolized and was even
imagined to be an aphrodisiac and to confer extraordinary powers of
seduction, being eulogized under the name of consumption. Syphilis,
however, seemed destined not only to become a trope, but to become a
trope that was consistently used negatively; indeed, it was invariably
demonized. More recently, Susan Sontag has argued: "Nothing is more
punitive than to give disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a
moralistic one. [...] The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then [...] the
disease becomes adjectival."10 For Sontag, the patent causality of the
disease, the absence of mystery about syphilis, meant that its resonance
as a metaphor was limited, at least certainly much more so than is the
case with cancer or AIDS today. Nonetheless, despite the fact that the
work of Ricord and his followers established a clear etiology for it and
greatly advanced treatments of it, syphilis was perceived for a long time
(and perhaps still is) as a punishment for transgression—of both moral
codes and social mores. In the nineteenth century, the more that was
understood about the workings of syphilis and the more that its name
and associated terms were articulated by the medical profession, the
more metaphorical and symbolic it became for the layman—and for
writers. This paradox resulted in syphilis becoming a nexus of such
powerful connotations that it would always necessarily mean more (and
40 Fall 1997WORTON
other) than any single author or context might intend, and so self-
defining "literary" writers almost inevitably felt that it could be present
in works of literary invention (if at all!) only by allusion or under the
mask of some figure or trope—as "Syphilis, puissante inspiratrice, sans
visage ni lieu, porteuse d'un nom mythique."11
In this context, the case of Alphonse Daudet is particularly fascinat-
ing, since he not only kept a journal of his suffering through the tertiary
stage of syphilis (La Doulou) but also wrote Sapho, which is one of the
century's most powerful anatomizings of the intense and often neurotic
bond that kept a man and a woman locked together in a ' 'collage' ' or un-
married cohabitation. The dedication of the novel is "Pour mes fils
quand ils auront vingt ans," thus programming the reader to expect an
edifying tale, and there is certainly a confessional quality to the novel: his
Sapho, Fanny Legrand, is based on his former mistress, Marie Rieu or
"Chien Vert [...] cette femelle folle, enragée, détraquée, dont il a hérité
de Nadar."12 Goncourt testifies to the consciously autobiographical
dimension, noting in 1883:
Aujourd'hui, de retour d'une demi-semaine de travail à Champrosay, Daudet s'ouvre, se
répand, et conte le roman qu'il fait actuellement. C'est un collage, l'histoire de son attache-
ment et de sa rupture avec le Monstre vert, la maîtresse de Banville, de Nadar, de toute la
bohème.13
Later, in 1885 and after the publication of Sapho, Goncourt describes
how during a train journey back to Paris from the Midi, Daudet, who
was by then suffering acute and repeated pangs of pain, whiled away the
time by describing not only "ses marmiteux voyages en diligence du Midi
à Paris, dans les temps passés" but also "les excès de la jeunesse." The
reminiscences were catalysed by his awareness of the difference in physi-
cal comfort between his present and past journeys, yet they soon took on
a moral aspect, with Daudet finally revealing that he saw his illness as
some sort of just punishment for past sins:
[...] c'est une expansive causerie de Daudet sur les excès de sa jeunesse, causerie coupée de
douleurs lancinantes, qui de temps en temps interrompent sa parole et le font terminer ses
confidences par ces mots: qu'il a bien mérité ce qui lui arrive mais que, vraiment, il y avait
chez lui un instinct irrésistible qui le poussait à abuser de son corps.14
Like his hero, Jean Gaussin, Daudet had spent his youth in philan-
dering pleasures before settling into his collage with Marie Rieu, and
although he told Goncourt he accepted the "punishment" of pain for
Vol. XXXVII, No. 3 41L'Esprit Créateur
this, like his contemporaries he associated both vice and illness with
women, writing of Gaussin's new-found sense of security in the collage:
"Est-ce que sa vie n'était pas plus propre que lorsqu'il allait de fille en
fille, risquant sa santé?" (51). Male writers have traditionally tended to
stigmatize women as the carriers of sexually transmissible diseases,
notably feminizing syphilis (when it is metaphorical) in order to transfer
guilt: for instance, in the flower/Virus scene in À Rebours, the ghostly
figure seen is first of all "Cette figure ambiguë, sans sexe" but soon
becomes "une femme très pâle" (170, 173).
Daudet had considered many other mythological or figurative names
as titles before deciding on Sapho, amongst them Danaé, Thaïs, Psyché,
Ariane, Cérée, Léda, Salomé, Pomone, Lesbie, Alceste, Camille, Didon,
Hélène, Cybèle, Le monstre, Le mouton noir, and La Faunesse.15 He had
also hesitated over the choice of work of art for which his heroine would
have posed and which would symbolise her in the novel, having initially
envisaged a painting but finally deciding on a sculpture based on the
classically sensuous Sapho (1852) by James Pradier. This final decision
was far from arbitrary or innocent, for it enabled Daudet to stigmatize
Fanny as syphilitic implicitly and by association:
Joli, le bronze de Sapho...du bronze de commerce, qui a traîné partout, banal comme un
air d'orgue, comme ce mot de Sapho qui à force de rouler les siècles s'est encrassé de
légendes immondes sur sa grâce première, et d'un nom de déesse est devenu l'étiquette
d'une maladie... Quel dégoût que tout cela, mon Dieu!... (67)
Although wholly erroneous,16 Daudet's etymological equation of
Sapho and syphilis is nonetheless revelatory of a certain misogyny as well
as of a late-come sense of moral rectitude—and it would lend credence to
Michel Tournier's belief that the novel is in fact all about syphilis,
figured in the person of Fanny Legrand but never named explicitly:
On ne peut que s'étonner que ce gros roman naturaliste où est décrit en détail le milieu le
plus "à risque de syphilis" du monde ne comporte pas la moindre allusion à cette maladie.
Dès lors n'est-elle pas l'Arlésienne de toute l'histoire? Sapho n'est-ce pas la traduction per-
sonnifiée de Syphilis?17
The moral intention behind Daudet's novel surfaces through repeated
references to Fanny's responsibility for the debauchery of Gaussin which
is described as "toute la gloire horrible de Sapho" (90). Men are not
entirely exonerated from the guilt of lust, but they are viewed as led by
women, and the "poison" of lust (and, by extension, disease) is por-
42 Fall 1997Worton
trayed as spreading itself:
Les hommes sont tous pareils, enragés de vice et de corruption, ce petit-là [Jean Gaussin]
comme les autres. [...] Et ce qu'elle [Fanny] savait, ces dépravations du plaisir qu'on lui
avait inoculées, Jean les apprenait à son tour pour les passer à d'autres. Ainsi le poison va,
se propage, brûlure de corps et d'âme, semblable à ces flambeaux dont parle le poète, et qui
couraient de main en main par le stade. (90)
Sapho's realism is grounded in close (and personal) observation of
contemporary life, yet it is essentially a moral tale. Henry James wrote to
Daudet: "Je trouve dans Sapho énormément de vérité et de vie. Ce n'est
pas du roman, c'est de l'histoire...," but he added that the figure of Jean
Gauvin [sic] was perhaps insufficiently drawn for "l'intérêt moral" and
"la valeur tragique" of the novel to be communicated.18
Although there is no sermonizing about the situation of the collage
or, indeed, the courtesan Fanny, the "poison" or "vice" that is lust and
dangerous female sexuality is exposed time and again—and is linked
metaphorically with disease.
Susan Sontag has convincingly argued that the metaphorizing of
cancer as a judgment on the individual is complicit with modern secular
ideas of selfhood and that the metaphorizing of AIDS in pre-modern
terms as a "plague" enables collective judgments to be passed on com-
munities and even whole societies.19 Her aim is to encourage us to regard
those diseases that have been over-metaphorized and invested with cul-
tural power as "simply" diseases, as physical conditions which are un-
doubtedly serious and threatening but which have no value beyond the
physical: "Not a curse, not a punishment, not an embarrassment. With-
out 'meaning' " (AIDS, 14). In effect, Sontag is arguing for a (re)literal-
ization of disease that will "cleanse" it of the cultural nexus of moralistic
overtones. Such a social revision of language is generally necessary with
regard to stigmatized diseases, since their meaning and their psycho-
somatic power are acquired from the human context, from the ways in
which they infiltrate the lives of people, from the reactions they provoke
and from the ways in which they give expression to cultural and political
values. However, linguistic revision must occur also on the individual
level—in the socially approved texts that are literature.
For a long time, it was believed that for those writers infected with
syphilis, the impact was much more psychological than physiological,
since what they feared above all else was that their creative vitality be
reduced.20 Part of the reason for this perception of the response of
VOL. XXXVII, NO. 3 43L Έ sprit C réateur
writers to syphilis is the fact that so few of them mentioned, let alone dis-
cussed, the disease either in their literary works or in their correspon-
dence or even their "journaux intimes." Another cause is romanticism's
legacy of an idealization of the emotional intensity provoked by terminal
disease, as, for example, in the case of consumption. While the notion of
the victim (of physical suffering) as a hero (of voyance) is an ancient one,
its maintenance in the nineteenth-century world of public discourses and
debates of medicine is surprising, testifying to a human compulsion to
justify or explain rather than simply understand and accept. Even
Daudet, whose La Doulou is one of the century's most compelling
accounts of physical and mental suffering,21 asserted several years before
his life was ravaged by the intense back pain, lack of muscular coordina-
tion and general wasting caused by locomotor ataxia (or tabes dorsalis):
"Quand on veut que les rossignols chantent bien, on leur crève les yeux.
Quand Dieu veut avoir de grands poètes, il en choisit deux ou trois aux-
quels il envoie de grandes douleurs."22
Interestingly, if perhaps not surprisingly, when Daudet later writes in
La Doulou about his suffering from locomotor ataxia (which he knew
from his physician, the celebrated Dr Charcot, to be the tertiary stage of
syphilis), he both avoids any consideration of the social implications of
the disease and repeatedly states his personal, lived conviction as a physi-
cal sufferer that pain should not be over-endowed with a moral value:
"Croissance morale et intellectuelle par la douleur, mais jusqu'Ã un cer-
tain point" (30) and "Passée, la phase où le mal rend meilleur, aide Ã
comprendre..." (45). His concern is not with syphilis as socially or
morally significant nor does his journal invoke or treat his own experi-
ence of the disease as a screen onto which to project his aesthetic or
philosophical preoccupations; above all else, he seeks to anatomize his
own responses to the various types and degrees of pain that wrack him.
In this respect, his response to the disease is radically different from that
perceived elsewhere in nineteenth-century writing by WaId Lasowski:
"Syphilis est d'abord cet objet d'émerveillement, le centre rayonnant
d'un grand nombre de textes, l'inspiratrice de la modernité dans ses
masques et la singularité même de son écriture" (Syphilis, 165). Rather,
taking as his title the Provençal word for pain that he used as a child, he
simply writes, soys his suffering—because he has to, because he must talk
about his suffering, even if only to himself. Far from seeing his writing as
a form of cure or therapy, he writes the journal in order to maintain
himself as a writing subject, now that he has been confronted by the
44 Fall 1997WORTON
urgency of the life of the body outside pleasure.
What is important and valuable about La Doulou is that Daudet does
not deny pain, that he forces himself to speak it here—haltingly, frag-
mentedly, painfully. And he is saying his pain in writing, because writing
and reading enable a relationship that is honest but, usefully, not direct
and immediate. Although it may in one sense be true that "le vrai, pour
souffrir, c'est être seul" (55; see also 30), there is also always a need to
fracture or transcend that solitude, to attempt to do something with the
suffering, to make it matter. Daudet undoubtedly believes that suffering
can open up an ethical dimension within the sufferer, in the sense that an
individual's pain—which has no point in itself—can nonetheless take on
a charge of meaning if it becomes the occasion for the empathetic, even
suffering response of a reader. Furthermore, while pain is a fundamen-
tally solitary experience, it is also deeply social, in many ways a socially
constructed and relative phenomenon. Consequently, although we feel
wholly alone and separated from our culture and society when experienc-
ing acute pain, it is impossible to write about our suffering in a wholly
individualistic way, since both the pain and our experience of it are
shaped by that very culture from which we feel cut off.
Thus the experience of pain, whilst singularly intense in its physicality,
is psychologically an experience of division. In Daudet's case, the con-
cept of a split within the self had an urgency that haunts all his auto-
biographical writings, as is indicated, for instance, by the opening to
Notes sur la vie:
Homo duplex, Homo duplex! [...] Cette horrible dualité m'a souvent fait songer. Oh! ce
terrible second MOI toujours assis pendant que l'autre est debout, agit, vit, souffre, se
démène! Ce second MOI queje n'ai jamais pu ni griser ni faire pleurer, ni endormir! (1-2)
In his various musings on the self before La Doulou, Daudet locates
his (sense of) duality in the tension between being/doing and thinking,
this tension being predicated on assumptions of difference and alterna-
tivity. In La Doulou, we encounter a discourse seeking itself as much as
its subject. Referring to his difficulty in tracing characters on the page as
a result of the damage caused to his nervous system, he notes: "Modifi-
cation de l'écriture" (22). The same can be said of his discourse, which is
equally modified by the disease.
Jean-Paul Clébert has suggested that "Quand on se trouve une
maladie, on découvre aussi les mots pour la dire."23 Perhaps... The new
words that Daudet finds are medical and pharmaceutical terms, some of
VOL. XXXVII, NO. 3 45L ' E sprit C réateur
which were in wide public use, others being familiar only to physicians or
patients: "la morphine," "le tabès," "l'hydrocèle," "la suspension,"
"l'appareil de Seyre," "le choral," "la bromure," "la seringue
Pravaz," "l'antipyrine," "l'acétanilide," and so on. He encounters and
of necessity familiarizes himself with the vocabularies of medical diag-
nosis and treatment, but there is no lexicon of pain, no thesaurus of suf-
fering for him to consult. As he writes after a night of particularly
intolerable agony in both his ribs and his heel:
La torture... pas de mots pour rendre ça, il faut des cris.
D'abord, à quoi ça sert, les mots, pour tout ce qu'il y a de vraiment senti en douleur
(comme en passion)? Ils arrivent quand c'est fini, apaisé. Ils parlent de souvenir,
impuissants ou menteurs. (13)
Daudet's journal was edited by his widow, who hesitated 30 years
before publishing it and who certainly viewed editing as a mode of hagio-
graphie censorship. Fortunately, the editing cannot diminish the force of
Daudet's honesty with regard to his suffering, although one can only
speculate on what might be revealed of his thoughts about relationships
in the suppressed passages. Throughout the journal, we see a writer con-
fronting the inadequacy of language in situations of suffering, when the
sense of meaning itself becomes unclear and uncertain. As David Morris
argues: "Pain in effect spends its existence moving in-between the
extremes of absolute meaninglessness and full meaning."24 For a writer
with an ethical imperative to say as well as a life-threatening disease, this
oscillation is true of language almost as much as it is of pain. The specific
vocabulary of illness that he encounters in his many conversations with
Charcot (both as patient and as friend) is inappropriate, at least for him,
and in his writing he makes no attempt to exploit its potential for
poeticization or metaphoricization. Rather, he chooses metaphors that
he had used before, in different contexts, and re-examines them. One
example is the metaphor of a ship:
"Le navire est engagé," dit-on dans la langue maritime. Il faudrait un mot de ce genre pour
traduire la crise où je suis...
Le navire est engagé. Se relèvera-t-il? (7)
Daudet is here retrieving a dead metaphor which he had himself used
quite conventionally in Les Femmes d'artistes in discussing marriage,25
but whose semantic functioning he now chooses to question. He does
46 Fall 1997WORTON
not, however, discard the metaphor once he recognizes it to be inade-
quate; on the contrary, he continues to thread his notebook with it as a
sustained metaphor, culminating with the sigh "Mes amis, je coule"
(36), thereby demanding that the reader reconsider the original grounds
for the metaphor and engaging him or her in a process of reinvention,
whereby figurative language is reborn and remotivated.
Given the intimately personal but also determinedly honest nature of
La Doulou, it is perhaps not surprising that no single metaphor has
stability or consistency: even the urgently painful reality of the assault on
his body by tertiary stage syphilis is described in very different con-
ceptual ways: as "l'Invasion" (7), as "une infiltration" (18), and even as
something that goes well beyond his body: "Ma douleur tient l'horizon,
emplit tout" (45). As the writer searches for a language in pain, he finds
support less in his doctors than in the brotherhood of "mes sosies en
douleur du passé" (28), who are Baudelaire, Flaubert, Jules de Gon-
court, Heine, Leopardi, Rousseau, Tasso (26-28). As his body becomes
ever weaker and more painful, he feels the world closing in on him and
imprisoning him. This impression is experienced and expressed meta-
phorically by reference to prison-cells ("cachots") and "in-pace," the
cells where scandalous monks were locked away (19); it is also culturally
contextualized by reference to the prison dialogues of Leopardi and of
Tasso (35). Daudet's experience is, however, also literally, one of
imprisonment. As a result of his experience of illness, his discourse is
modified as the literal and the figurative dimensions of metaphor come
to challenge and replace each other in a constant oscillation within his
writing. La Doulou was not Daudet's last text, nor was it intended to be:
"Je voudrais que mon prochain livre ne fût pas trop cruel. [...] Pauvres
humains! Il ne faut pas tout leur dire, leur donner mon expérience, ma
fin de vie douloureuse et savante" (33).
When a nightingale has actually been blinded, it does not in fact sing
more sweetly, and when Daudet had actually entered on the intense suf-
fering of tertiary phase syphilis, he realized that poetry was perhaps not
his main aim here. He now knew the reality of pain, but perhaps knew it
too well, in too much detail for it to be made into literature or moral
tract. His notebook alerts us, though, to the importance of minds and
cultures in the construction of pain, whilst also exposing one individual's
perception of pain and his endeavours to express this pain through the
anatomizing of tropological play as much as of physiological decay. In
this, La Doulou is a very modern text, one which revitalizes the uses
Vol. XXXVII, No. 3 47L Έ SPRIT C RÉATEUR
made of metaphor in illness, whilst also challenging the facile use of ill-
ness as metaphor.
University College, London
Notes
1. G. S. Rousseau, Enlightenment Borders: Pre- and Post-Modern Discourses: Medical,
Scientific (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991), 29.
2. See Rousseau, Enlightenment Borders, 42, and M. Faith McLellan and Anne Hudson
Jones, "Why Literature and Medicine?," The Lancet, 348 (July 13, 1996): 109-11.
3. See Alexandre Jean Baptiste B. Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de
Paris, considérée sous le rapport de l'hygiène publique, de la morale et de l'admin-
istration (Paris: 1836), vol. 1, ch. XVI: "Des soins sanitaires donnés aux prostituées
de Paris."
4. J.-K. Huysmans, À Rebours/Le drageoir aux épices (Paris: Union Générale d'Édi-
tions, 1975), 167.
5. Cullerier and Ratier, "Syphilis," Dictionnaire de médecine et de chirurgie pratiques,
t. XV (Paris: Méquignon-Marvis, J.-B. Baillière, 1836), 176.
6. Philippe Ricord, "Onzième lettre," Lettres sur la syphilis (Paris: Aux Bureaux de
l'Union Médicale, 1851), 81. In Sapho, Daudet uses the metaphor of poison to
describe the lust or "la fièvre de marécage" that takes possession of men: "Ainsi le
poison va, se propage, brûlure de corps et d'âme...," Sapho: Mœurs parisiennes
(Paris: G. Charpentier & Cie, Éditeurs, 1884), 90.
7. Philippe Ricord, Lectures on chancre, published by M. Fournier, with notes and
cases, and translated from the French by C. F. Maunder (London: John Churchill,
1859), 92.
8. Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis, trans. Judith Braddock and Brian Pike (Cam-
bridge: Polity Press, 1990), 6.
9. Ferdinand Brunetière, Le Roman naturaliste (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1883), 389.
10. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books Ltd., 1979),
58.
11. Patrick WaId Lasowski, Syphilis. Essai sur la littérature française du XIXe siècle
(Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 8.
12. Edmond et Jules Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire, t. II: 1866-1886
(Paris: Robert Laffont, Collection Bouquins, 1989), 859 (entry of 28 mars 1880).
13. Goncourt, Journal, II: 1014 (entry of 5 juillet 1883). In fact, Banville's Monstre vert
was Marie Daubrun, who served also to inspire Baudelaire, rather than Marie Rieu.
14. Goncourt, Journal, II: 1190 (entry of 11 oct 1885).
15. See Alphonse Daudet, Œuvres, III, texte établi, présenté et annoté par Roger Ripoli
(Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1161.
16. The origin of the name of the disease is disputed, although the most generally held
view is that it is a corrupt form of Sipylus, one of Niobe's sons in Ovid's Metamor-
phoses(book VI, lines 146 and 231), and that it was applied to the disease in 1530 by
the Italian physician and poet Girolamo Fracastro in his epic poem Syphilis, sive
Morbus Gallicus.
17. Michel Tournier, "Du bon usage de la maladie," preface to Alphonse Daudet, Le
Trésor d'Arlatan (Paris: Éditions Viviane Hamy, 1991), 18.
18. Henry James, Letters, vol. III: 1883-1895, ed. Leon Edel (London: Macmillan, 1980),
45.
19. See Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (London: Allen
Lane The Penguin Press, 1989).
20. See, for example, Claude Pichois, "La Maladie de Baudelaire," La Médecine de
France, 92 (1958): 37^12.
21. Alphonse Daudet, La Doulou (La Douleur): 1887-1895 and Le Trésor d'Arlatan:
1897, Œuvres complètes, vol. 17 of the Édition Ne Varietur (Paris: Librairie de
France, 1930). The edition was prepared under the family's supervision.
22. Alphonse Daudet, Notes sur la vie (Paris: Fasquelle, 1899), 12. Published post-
humously, these notes were edited by his widow Julia and date from 1868, the year
after their marriage.
48 Fall 1997WORTON
23. Jean-Paul Clébert, Une famille bien française: Les Daudet: 1840-1940 (Paris: Presses
de la Renaissance, 1988), 194.
24. David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: U of Cali-
fornia P, 1991), 35.
25. See Alphonse Daudet, Les Femmes d'artistes (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, Éditeur,
1924), 10-11.
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