The Auguste Demarre Clinic is a Swiss psychiatric institution that Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, and Piero Morini visit to see the painter Edwin Johns. Its secluded grounds and controlled entrance frame an encounter with a celebrated artist who has withdrawn from ordinary life after a radical artistic act. The visit also places Morini’s wheelchair and practical needs within the scene, making the clinic not simply a backdrop but a space structured by access, observation, and uncertain knowledge.

Setting and Approach

Manuel Espinoza recounts the excursion to Liz Norton after the three critics have reunited. The journey begins by train and continues by hired car along a winding but carefully paved road toward the clinic, situated in the countryside between Montreux and the foothills of the Bernese Alps. The institution bears the name of a late-nineteenth-century Swiss politician or financier; behind this respectable designation, Espinoza says, is a discreet psychiatric asylum.

The clinic is not Jean-Claude Pelletier’s or Manuel Espinoza’s destination of choice. Piero Morini has learned that Edwin Johns, whom he regards as one of the twentieth century’s most disturbing painters, is living there, and it is Morini who proposes the visit. Johns is known for cutting off his painting hand, having it preserved, and incorporating it into a multiple self-portrait. The institution thus brings the critics into contact with an artist whose public reputation is bound to an act they can discuss but cannot fully explain.

Boundaries and the Visit

On arrival, the visitors survey an iron gate and railings extending away beneath a carefully tended grove of trees. The gate seems to welcome them while also blocking the way out and discouraging uninvited entry. Pelletier is partly out of the car, arranging for the driver to return at an agreed time; Espinoza and Morini, in his wheelchair, wait at the boundary. The clinic’s imposing bulk is visible farther along the road, its effect likened to a fortress through its inertness rather than its architecture.

The visitors pass through the asylum’s formal procedures without seeing any of the patients. A middle-aged nurse then leads them to a cottage at the rear of the extensive grounds. The land slopes downward, which Pelletier considers potentially unsettling for patients who are disturbed or severely disturbed. The cottage itself offers a contrast to the image of confinement: it is surrounded by pine trees and rosebushes, and contains armchairs, a fireplace, an oak table, a partly filled bookcase, a computer and modem, a Turkish divan, and a bathroom with a shower. Espinoza remarks that the residents do not seem to have it too bad. The contrast does not erase the institution’s restrictions, but it complicates the visitors’ first impressions of what life there entails.

Edwin Johns and the Encounter

At the cottage, the critics meet Johns, whose decision to amputate and preserve his painting hand is the reason Morini sought him out. Morini asks Johns why he did it and admits that he does not know the reason. As dusk settles, a nurse moves as if to turn on a light, but Pelletier quietly stops her. The scene holds on the visitors’ shoes: white for the nurse and Johns, black for Pelletier and Espinoza, brown for Morini. Those details are the last things Pelletier sees before darkness overtakes the group.

Johns says he will explain his decision and bends toward Morini to speak privately in his ear. The narrative does not disclose what he tells him. Johns then straightens, politely shakes hands with Espinoza and Pelletier, and leaves the cottage, followed by the nurse. The private explanation and its withheld content define the visit’s limit: the critics gain access to Johns, but not to the reason behind his act.

Later References and Narrative Significance

The clinic returns in the novel through reports of events associated with its setting. During a stay in Salonika, Morini wakes in his hotel room unable to see. After panic, he feels for his wheelchair, makes his way toward the window, and eventually manages to dress and leave for a conference. The episode establishes temporary blindness as a bodily crisis he navigates through deliberate, practical actions; it is not presented as an event occurring at the clinic.

Later, Morini tells a first-person interviewer that Johns died in an accident after going out to sketch a small waterfall near the sanatorium. Johns climbed onto a rock, slipped, and was found at the bottom of a ravine 150 feet below. The clinic therefore remains associated with Johns’s residence, while his death is described as occurring during a walk near the sanatorium rather than inside it.

Across these appearances, the institution links a controlled setting to episodes of limited access and incomplete explanation. The visitors see the gate and cottage but not the clinic’s patients; Morini receives Johns’s explanation, but the reader does not; and Johns’s death is later recounted as an accident beyond the institution’s walls. The location gathers these partial views without resolving them, leaving the clinic at the edge of several stories about disability, artistic identity, and what remains unknown about another person.