Hôtel-Dieu Hospital

Hôtel-Dieu Hospital is where Annie Duchesne’s attempt to manage a clandestine abortion on her own gives way to emergency treatment and involuntary exposure to medical authority. After a doctor orders her there, she is admitted, undergoes a procedure, and remains for five days. In her account, the hospital is at once a place of care and a site of judgment: its staff treat an immediate medical crisis, but their words and routines also make visible the unequal standing of women who seek abortions and those who give birth outside marriage.

Admission and Medical Authority

After a hemorrhage, the night-duty doctor examined Duchesne and ordered her to Hôtel-Dieu Hospital. She had wanted a clinic, but he insisted on a hospital. Unable to stand, she watched him take the consultation fee from her wallet. The journey downstairs on a stretcher marked the failure of the measures she had relied on before the emergency, including antibiotics and her determination to manage without a doctor. The hospital was no longer a contingency she could avoid; it had become the destination imposed by the crisis.

The admission also changed the terms of the encounter. At home, Duchesne had tried to retain control over what happened to her and who knew about it. In the doctor’s presence, that privacy gave way to questioning and admonition. He demanded to know why and how she had acted, and pressed her to promise she would not do it again. She believed his anger might put her life at risk if she refused. The episode presents medical authority not simply as expertise: at the point when she most needed assistance, it arrived with moral judgment attached.

The Hospital as a Social Setting

Duchesne was left on a rollaway bed in a corridor opposite the elevator, among the movement of people waiting and being taken elsewhere. There she encountered another young woman, heavily pregnant and accompanied by an older woman whom Duchesne took to be her mother. The young woman said she was ready to give birth, but a nurse dismissed her claim as premature; after an argument, the pair left. Duchesne understood the encounter as evidence that keeping a pregnancy did not protect a young, unmarried woman from contempt.

The contrast between the women sharpened the social meaning of the hospital. Duchesne had had an abortion; the other young woman had continued her pregnancy. Yet both, in Duchesne’s reading, were treated harshly. She connected that shared treatment to their position as working-class women in Rouen, rather than to a simple division between women who abort and women who do not. The corridor scene thus extends the account beyond her individual emergency: the institution becomes a place where different reproductive outcomes meet the same social stigma, though not necessarily in identical forms.

This setting also belongs to a history in which abortion was criminalized. In reflecting on the past, Duchesne notes that the ending of legal prohibition can itself encourage silence: former victims may be treated as though the matter is settled, leaving the experience surrounded by secrecy. Her hospital account resists that disappearance by recording both the emergency and the ordinary institutional encounters around it. The hospital does not stand outside the law’s social effects; in the memoir, its authority is encountered by a woman whose choices have already been shaped by clandestinity and stigma.

Procedure and Recovery

In the operating room, Duchesne asked the young surgeon to explain what he intended to do. His response was dismissive, and she lost consciousness under anesthesia before receiving an explanation she could understand. When she woke at night in a hospital room, she asked whether her ovaries had been removed. A woman reassured her that she had undergone only a curettage. The scene makes the gap between treatment and understanding central: the procedure has been performed, but Duchesne experiences the hospital’s explanations as insufficient to restore a sense of control over her body.

Her recovery lasted five days. She recalls not reading during that time and notes that transistor radios were forbidden. With nothing to wait for after three months of pregnancy, she lay looking through the window at the hospital roofs. Newborns cried intermittently nearby, while she considered her own experience a kind of delivery, though one joining life and death rather than ending in the arrival of a child. In the hospital, she felt newly connected to other women and to generations passing through reproductive life. This sense of connection did not erase the isolation of her admission; it grew within it.

Duchesne was discharged on Saturday, January 25. LB and JB handled the paperwork and drove her to the station. From a nearby post office she called Doctor N, who advised her to take penicillin because the hospital had given her no medicine. At her parents’ home, she concealed the abortion by pretending to have a cold and arranged for the family doctor to examine her discreetly and prescribe the antibiotic. Discharge therefore ended the hospital stay without ending the need for secrecy or follow-up care.

Memory and Narrative Significance

Hôtel-Dieu Hospital remains important in Duchesne’s narrative not only because it is where she receives treatment, but because the scenes there persist in precise verbal and visual form. The doctor’s rebuke, the corridor encounter, the surgeon’s refusal to explain, and the quiet days looking toward the roofs are remembered as distinct moments in which vulnerability takes different shapes. The account does not flatten them into a single judgment of medical care: emergency treatment occurs, while impatience, shame, and unequal power also leave their mark.

The hospital episode belongs to Duchesne’s wider effort to turn a once-secret experience into writing. She rejects the idea that a change in law makes testimony unnecessary, and treats the physical and social realities of the abortion as material that must be recounted. In this sense, the hospital is both a remembered place and a structure of encounters: a corridor, an operating room, a room with a view of the roofs, and a route back into a life still organized by concealment. By narrating those details, she makes an experience she once carried privately intelligible to others.