University of Virginia Library

1. THE RED FLOWER OF THE MADMAN.

BY M. GARSHINE.

"IN the name of his majesty, the Czar, Peter the First, I order an immediate inspection of this asylum for the insane!"

These words were uttered in a shrill, sharp voice. The secretary of the establishment seated before a table stained with blotches of ink, and about to inscribe in an enormous register the name, age, etc., of the new patient, could not restrain a smile. As to the two young men that accompanied the madman, they did not feel much like laughing; they were hardly in a condition to keep on their legs, owing to the two nights they had passed on the railroad with the patient. At the station before the last, he had had a furious attack, and they had been obliged to procure in all haste a straight waistcoat in the city, and to force him into it with the assistance of the gendarmes and several employés of the road. In this manner they had brought him to the asylum.

His appearance was repulsive. A blouse of coarse cloth, widely open at the breast, covered his gray suit, which he had torn into shreds during his late outburst of frenzy. The long sleeves drew his arms across in front and were tied behind his back in a large knot. His red, inflamed eyes (he had not slept for ten days) glared with a fixed and haggard look; his lower lip writhed, jerked by a nervous spasm, and his curling hair hung in disorder over his forehead. He strode up and down the office with rapid steps, making the pavement resound loudly under his boots, casting defiant looks around him—on the boxes stuffed with dusty papers, on the furniture covered with waxed cloth, and on his companions.

"Lead him into the apartment to the right!"

"I know, I know! I was here before, last year. We passed in review the entire establishment. I know all; it will be difficult to conceal anything from me, no matter what," said the patient.

He turned towards the door. The guardian opened it for him. With the same automatic step, firm and resounding, and holding high his uneasy head, he left the office and walked rapidly to the right where the cells reserved for the insane were placed. His companions found it hard to keep up with him.

"Ring the bell!"

"I can't. You have tied my hands."

The attendant opened the door. They entered the mad-house.

It was an old building in massive stone and antiquated style. There were two immense halls. The dining room and a room common to the quiet patients, a wide vestibule with a glass door, leading into a flower garden; then about twenty separate cells, where ordinary patients were kept, formed the ground floor. Besides these, there were two other gloomy apartments, the one padded and lined with thick cushions, and the other, wainscoted over the entire wall where the patients were carried during their mad fits, and finally a vast room built with a cupola, and the bath-room, with several huge bathing tanks. The upper story

was for women. A fearful noise of howls and cries could be heard.

The house had been arranged for eighty patients, but as the surrounding districts had no institution of this kind, there were at present three hundred packed within its walls. In each of the narrow cells were four or five beds. In winter when the patients could not go into the garden, and when the barred windows were hermetically closed, the air in the asylum was pestiferous and insufferably heavy.

The new patient was introduced into the bath-room. This apartment could not fail to make a painful impression on a man of sound mind; how much more painfully must it impress a diseased and irritable imagination. It was large and paved, with the ceiling in the form of a cupola, and lighted only on one side by a small window. The walls and arches were painted dark red.

In the dirty gray soil two enormous basins were hollowed out. They looked like two graves of an oval form. A big copper furnace with cylindrical reservoir and a complete system of pipes for douching, occupied a space opposite the window. Every thing in this room had a strange, lugubrious aspect, as though contrived to produce a vivid impression on a sick brain. The attendant at the baths, a coarse and powerful Sokal, who never spoke a word, added not a little with his sinister face to the horror of the apartment.

When they had led the madman into his chamber to bathe him, and (following the sanitary method of the head physician) to apply a huge blister plaster to the back of his neck, the patient was seized with horror and fell into a terrible rage. Mad fancies, each one more horrible than the other, hurtled and clashed in his brain. His hair stood erect; he was bathed in cold sweat.

What was this? A chamber of torture? A place of execution where his enemies wished to get rid of him? Perhaps even—hell! And if it was hell! Then the idea shot through his brain that he was going to be questioned as in the Middle Ages.

They undressed him in spite of his desperate resistance. With a strength rendered triply great by his malady, he tore himself loose from the attendants and overturned them. At last he was thrown to the ground by four strong men, seized hand and foot, and lowered into the basin filled with hot water.

The water seemed to him boiling, and his poor sick brain engendered the insane thought that he was being subjected to the torture of fire and water. The warm water entered his mouth. He stiffened himself and dealt blows and kicks about him, although held by the attendants. And in the midst of howlings interrupted by endless lamentation, prayers burst from his lips at one moment, and at the other, blasphemies. He shouted until he could speak no more, and ended by moaning pitifully with great burning tears rolling down his cheeks.

"Great and holy St. Gregory, into thy hands I commit my body. As to my spirit—no—oh, no!"

The keepers did not let go of him, although, thanks to the warm bath and the bladder full of ice that they had placed on his head, he had become a little calmer. However, when they had taken him out of the bath, and seated him on a stool in order to apply the big blister to the back of his neck, a remnant of his vigor re-appeared and the mad fancies took possession of him with renewed force.

"Why? Why?" he howled. "I don't want to do harm to any one. Why do you torture me? Oh! oh! oh! God! You martyrs that have gone before me, deliver me!"

The burning of the plaster carried his madness to its climax. He beat the air anew with his feet and hands. The attendants could not master him. They stood there disheartened.

"There is nothing to do," said the attendant that directed the operation. "All must be destroyed."

The patient started at these words. He was frightened. A trembling seized him.

"Destroyed? Destroy what? Me," he thought.

Frightened to death, horrified, he closed his eyes. The attendant took a coarse napkin at both ends and rubbed him with it rapidly, pressing hard on the back of his neck, and tearing the plaster off with the skin. It stuck to it so well that a large and bleeding wound was formed.

The pain that the patient suffered, and that would have exasperated a healthy man,

seemed to the miserable madman unspeakable. With a desperate wrench of his back he escaped from the hands of the nurses, and threw himself on the stone pavement. Then he imagined they had beheaded him. He wished to cry and groan, but he could not. The keepers laid him on a litter and bore him away. He fell into a deep sleep, a sleep so long and heavy that it was like death.