Ferdinand loses control while examining a child and is driven out by the family

Ferdinand loses control while examining a child and is driven out by the family in a scene where a doctor's attempt at care gives way to an outburst of despair. Already shaken by Robinson's return and sleeping worse, Ferdinand examines a sick young boy in a poor household. When the child cries, he directs his accumulated bitterness at him; the family takes the boy away and expels Ferdinand. The incident exposes the fragility of Ferdinand's role as a physician: his own distress overwhelms the care he is meant to provide, while the family's fear turns his outburst into proof that he is mad.

Background: A Doctor Under Strain

Ferdinand's stability has been deteriorating since he encountered Robinson again. He initially tries to dismiss his spells and continues visiting patients, but feels increasingly uneasy, in a way he associates with his earlier experience in New York, and his already poor sleep worsens. He describes the reunion as a shock that has made him seem to be falling sick again. Robinson's presence brings back a bad dream Ferdinand has never escaped; he fears meeting him and finds that even the ordinary people he sees in the street remind him of Robinson's misery and the violence he associates with human life.

The strain is visible in Ferdinand's medical work. Patients sometimes have to send for him two or three times before he decides to go, and by the time he arrives they have often called in someone else. For the visit to 12 Rue Saint-Vincent, on the fourth floor, the family comes to fetch him by car. Ferdinand recognizes the grandfather, who had previously wiped his feet carefully on Ferdinand's doormat, and remembers the daughter's circumstances. She is an unmarried mother with a two-year-old son living with the grandparents; the child's putative father has left, and her family still hopes she will marry. The boy's illness brings the family's distress about his lack of a legitimate father into the examination room, alongside the immediate need for medical care.

The Examination and Outburst

The grandfather asks Ferdinand to hurry because his grandson is sick. In a dimly lit dining room, the family places the child on the table, swaddled on his back. Ferdinand presses carefully along the child's abdomen, from the navel toward the testicles, and listens to his heartbeat. It is sharp and nervous, like a kitten's. The boy then begins to cry loudly, and Ferdinand, already depleted and unsettled since Robinson's return, cannot bear the sound.

Ferdinand admits that another thought may have helped provoke his behavior: in his exasperation, he blurts out rancor and disgust that he has held in too long. He tells the child not to hurry to cry, since there will be ample misery later, and urges him to save his strength. The words are not medical reassurance. They turn Ferdinand's broad despair about the suffering that awaits the child into a direct rebuke, spoken during an examination when the family has entrusted the boy to his care.

The Family's Response and Immediate Consequences

The grandmother reacts with alarm and asks what Ferdinand is saying. When the daughter, described as having responsibilities, takes up the disturbance, she screams and declares that the doctor has gone mad. She asks her mother to take her baby away from him. The episode moves quickly from an examination to a family emergency: the daughter's alarm gives voice to the family's fear, and Ferdinand is no longer treated as the person responsible for examining the child.

The family snatches the boy from Ferdinand as if rescuing him from danger. The grandfather, who had been deferential earlier, takes a large mahogany thermometer from the wall and pursues Ferdinand toward the door. He slams it shut behind him with a kick. The family uses the incident as a reason not to pay for the visit. Ferdinand returns to the street dissatisfied, less because of his already damaged local reputation than because the confrontation has not freed him from his preoccupation with Robinson.

The Scandal as Failed Escape

Ferdinand later explains that he had hoped to rid himself of Robinson by deliberately provoking a scandal. He had thought that an outburst of frankness might give him the strength never to see Robinson again. Instead, the scene does not resolve the pressure that produced it: after leaving the house, he reflects that such scenes are never finished, because it is impossible to know how far frankness will go or what other people may reveal. The business, he concludes, would have to start all over again.

That failure makes the episode more than a lapse in bedside manner. Ferdinand's attempt to turn private distress into a decisive public rupture only creates another conflict, and the child's family bears the immediate disruption. The encounter also echoes the institutional settings that have already treated Ferdinand as a body to be assessed, watched, and directed. During the war, wounded soldiers were kept under observation at a school in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where staff sought confessions from men considered dangerously unpatriotic; the forms and tags surrounding them made their suspected return to the front feel like a sentence. At Ford's, an examination established that Ferdinand's health did not matter for the work, and he was told that he was not there to think but to perform instructed movements. These experiences do not excuse his conduct in the child's home, but they sharpen the contrast between his nominal authority as a doctor and the institutional pressures and personal distress that leave him poorly equipped to care.

Medical Authority and the Limits of Care

The episode reverses the expected relation between doctor and patient. Ferdinand begins by examining the child carefully, but his own agitation overtakes the clinical task; the family's trust gives way to alarm, and his medical presence becomes a source of conflict. His words articulate a bleak vision of future suffering, yet their target is a crying child who cannot answer or understand it. The scene therefore makes visible the ethical cost of Ferdinand's collapse without presenting the outburst as an adequate form of honesty or help.

Elsewhere, Ferdinand's medical work is also shaped by practices that manage patients rather than simply care for them. At the rest home in Vigny, he conducts evening rounds after roll call, including efforts to keep patients from masturbating before families visit on Sunday, and recalls administering an anti-masturbation syrup first associated with Bébert. The practices differ from his uncontrolled response in the family home, but both episodes place medical work amid systems of observation and reputational concern. At 12 Rue Saint-Vincent, by contrast, there is no institutional routine to contain the crisis: the examination ends in expulsion, nonpayment, and Ferdinand's continued inability to escape the distress tied to Robinson.