Jules Henrouille’s Hypertension Anxiety

Jules Henrouille’s hypertension anxiety is a change in the object of a fear that has governed his life for decades. Once the mortgage is paid, he begins to attend to dizziness and whistling in his ears; a doctor names high blood pressure, and Jules turns that diagnosis into a tangible reason to fear death. The symptoms do not free him from his old anxieties so much as give them a new focus, while his wife’s indifference leaves him alone with the sounds he cannot stop attending to.

From financial insecurity to illness

For fifty years Jules had worked as a petty clerk in a notary’s office, and the family’s long effort to pay for their house had shaped his sense of danger. His father’s bankruptcy had prevented Jules from studying to become a teacher and sent him directly into clerical work. The household eventually owned its home outright, but relief did not last: shortly after the final payments were settled, Jules began dwelling on dizzy spells and a whistling in both ears that he had noticed before without treating as a defining problem.

The timing matters. For years, the unpaid house and his son’s bills had supplied a recurring threat; once the house was secure, that established worry no longer occupied the same place in his mind. The new physical complaint filled the gap. The episode presents anxiety not as a fear that disappears when its practical cause is removed, but as a need that can attach itself to another danger.

Diagnosis and the fear of death

After the family could afford to buy a newspaper, Jules encountered an advertisement describing symptoms like his own. He bought the advertised medicine, but it did not help, and the whistling seemed to worsen. The couple eventually went to a dispensary, where the doctor diagnosed high blood pressure. For Jules, the diagnosis transformed an unsettling sensation into a medical explanation that could serve as evidence of a fatal threat.

He began listening closely to the pressure beating in his ears. At night he got out of bed to feel his pulse, then stood still beside it, attentive to the faint movement he felt with each heartbeat. He understood these sensations as signs of his death. The narrator connects this new fixation to Jules’s earlier fear: he had always been afraid of life, but now he attached that fear to death and blood pressure, as previously he had attached it to the danger of never paying off the house.

The doctor’s reported reading of twenty-two gave Jules a number on which to fasten his dread. He wanted a substantial reason for being unhappy, rather than merely naming unhappiness; the diagnosis supplied one. In this account, the medical fact and the emotional meaning Jules gives it are distinct: the doctor identifies high blood pressure, while Jules makes the reading proof that he is nearing death. The narrative does not establish that his fear accurately predicts an outcome.

Marriage, money, and competing fears

Jules’s wife, Madame Henrouille, does not share his preoccupation with death. She complains about old age and the cost of living, but does not dwell on mortality. She regards the household’s effort to save as an ongoing necessity, even after the house has been paid off. Their son, who works in the feather business, seldom visits; with nothing left to lend him, his parents have little reason to expect him.

The mother-in-law’s upkeep becomes a point of pressure between the couple. She lives in a shed at the far end of the garden, among old brooms and chicken crates, and rarely comes out. She refuses to admit visitors, including Jules, saying she fears being murdered. His wife raises the possibility of sending the old woman to St. Vincent’s Convent, where the Sisters care for feeble-minded elderly women. Jules gives no answer: his attention is occupied by the whistling and his worry that it will keep him from sleeping.

His wife does not try to understand why the noise troubles him. When he insists that he will never sleep, she answers that he can hear her speaking and redirects the discussion to the expense of his mother and the smell of the shed. The exchange makes their fears parallel but incompatible: Jules turns inward toward bodily signs and sleeplessness, while his wife looks outward to the household’s costs and obligations.

A cycle of anxious attention

As Jules’s immediate anxiety gradually wears itself out, he and his wife resume trips to the market at Saint-Ouen, which they consider the cheapest for miles around. They leave in the morning and spend the day comparing prices and calculating possible savings, returning around eleven at night. The routine of thrift does not displace their fear of being murdered at home. It is especially strong for his wife, while Jules returns to the sounds in his ears and repeats aloud that he will not be able to sleep, intensifying his own alarm.

The household’s precautions make this shared insecurity visible. Before going upstairs, Jules and his wife carefully close the doors and windows and check each other’s work; then they go into the garden to confirm that his mother’s lamp is still burning, a sign that she is alive. The old woman keeps the lamp alight and her windows shut in every season, fearing both murderers and her son and daughter-in-law. Her persistent watchfulness surrounds Jules’s medical fear with a wider household atmosphere of suspicion, without resolving it.

Narrative significance

Jules’s anxiety is presented as ordinary, cumulative, and self-reinforcing rather than as a sudden break. A paid-off house, a newspaper advertisement, a dispensary diagnosis, and a numerical reading successively give shape to fears that had previously attached to debt. His habit of attending to the whistling then makes the symptom central to his nights, while his wife’s response redirects attention toward their financial and family burdens.

The episode also places his private distress within the material conditions of the Henrouille household: years of clerical work, fear of bills, a son who rarely visits, and the cost of caring for an elderly relative. Jules’s blood-pressure anxiety is therefore both personal and domestic. It reveals how, for him, the end of one long insecurity does not bring peace; the mind finds another danger to monitor, and the family continues its routines under the pressure of several fears at once.