Dr. Baryton

Dr. Baryton is the owner of a private psychotherapeutic institute whose commercial instincts and growing mental disorientation meet in an abrupt decision to abandon his establishment and go to England. He hires Ferdinand Bardamu when Bardamu is nearly out of money, turns his travels into entertainment at the dinner table, and eventually places the institute in his care. Baryton’s departure is both a practical transfer of authority and a break with the habits and identity that have governed his life.

Identity and the Institute

Dr. Baryton is an alienist and the proprietor of a rest home for people with mental illness. His establishment admits patients who are comparatively easy to manage, rather than the vicious and openly homicidal. Its clientele ranges across social classes: the most affluent occupy heavily padded Louis XV rooms, and Baryton visits them for a fee. The arrangement makes treatment, accommodation, and the proprietor’s own financial interests difficult to separate.

The institute depends on the confidence of families with money, who continually demand newer and more impressive methods. In response, Baryton modernizes under Serge Parapine’s guidance, acquiring electrical, pneumatic, and hydraulic apparatus second-hand and at clearance prices. The equipment need not be useful so long as it helps the establishment appear better equipped than its competitors and satisfies the manias of well-to-do inmates. His enterprise therefore presents a wry picture of commercial medicine: elaborate machinery and therapeutic promise become part of the contest for clientele.

Bardamu’s Employment and Place in the Household

When Bardamu returns from Toulouse with only 150 francs and no clear employment prospects, Parapine finds him a small job at the institute where Parapine has been working for several months. Baryton takes Bardamu on at very low pay and binds him with a long contract full of clauses to the employer’s advantage. The job is poorly paid, but the food is good and the lodging excellent; the staff’s sexual relations with nurses are tacitly tolerated. Baryton has noticed that this latitude helps attach employees to the house. For Bardamu, who needs a livelihood urgently, the arrangement is a timely refuge, though he cannot understand why Parapine has suddenly taken such an active interest in him.

Baryton also gains more than labor from his new employee. Bardamu’s journeys provide the stories and echoes of adventure that the proprietor craves, while saving him the expense and effort of visiting those countries himself. At meals Bardamu recounts his travels at length, making them more literary and entertaining as he goes. Baryton praises the performances and enjoys the money saved; Parapine, who had formerly been expected to keep the conversation going, is freed from that duty. The employment thus becomes an exchange: Bardamu receives a place to stay, while Baryton receives travel by narration.

Baryton’s rules for conversation reveal the discomfort beneath his genial demand for entertainment. Although he makes his living among patients, he does not want their manias discussed at the table, declaring that they have no place in the conversation of normal people. He is strict about this rule of mental hygiene and insists that meals be amusing, reassuring, and sane. His antipathy toward the patients is instinctive, and he is content to leave it unexamined. The man who treats mental illness thus protects his own ordinary life by excluding it from speech.

Business, Authority, and Contradiction

Baryton is attentive to profit as well as to reputation. Parapine’s assessment that he lacks ethics once nettles him, but their disagreement passes without a lasting quarrel. His accounts, the narrator observes, have long been the one sacred element in his existence. Even the padded rooms and visits to wealthy patients participate in this economic order: a blow from a patient can be entered on the bill as “special treatment.”

His commercial pragmatism sits beside a pronounced fear of cultural change. Looking back on the early years of his institute, Baryton laments that alienists once formed a smaller, less curious, and less depraved group. He objects to practitioners who imitate their patients’ madness in the name of treatment, and worries that distinctions and common sense are dissolving. Yet his own institute is adapting to fashionable demands, acquiring ever more elaborate apparatus to keep pace with competitors and please clients. His alarm about a world that has lost its boundaries coexists with a business that profits by accommodating the latest fashion.

Baryton’s judgment of Parapine exposes another limit to his tolerance. He confides to Bardamu that Parapine is Russian, treating the fact as if it were an irreversible diagnosis, and complains that Parapine’s intelligence is arbitrary and that he cannot adapt to work or to the world. Baryton presents himself as adaptable, even imagining that he could cope if the earth began turning in the wrong direction. The exchange makes adaptability a measure of his self-image: his confidence in adjusting to circumstances contrasts with the unease he attributes to Parapine.

Decline and the Decision to Leave

During their readings in English literature, Baryton loses much of his assurance and optimism. As he and Bardamu approach the Elizabethan poets, Baryton’s once razor-edged mind begins to wander into long, improbable digressions. He daydreams for hours while physically present in the institute, and the world around them takes on a slow, dreamlike, diminished quality. Bardamu feels remorse and suspects that he has some responsibility for Baryton’s spiritual confusion. He proposes a pause in their studies under the pretext of renewing their documentary sources, but Baryton recognizes the evasion and refuses to stop. He fears that the life remaining to him may not be long enough to complete their undertaking.

The study of England becomes more than an exercise in language or literature. Confronted with the story of Monmouth, Baryton experiences vertigo; the thin thread joining him to the common lot seems to snap. Later, he summons Bardamu to his office, where Bardamu expects a major decision such as dismissal. Instead, Baryton announces that he is leaving. He speaks of having abandoned, within a few months, the habits and certainties of a career built on patient verification, and insists that his past has ceased to exist. He is torn by the decision, but says that he will not turn back even if he has left an eye behind in the mire.

The departure grows out of the very change Bardamu has watched with unease. Baryton describes an intense disgust with the life that has kept him at the institute for years, accompanied by a feeling of detachment and exhilaration. Bardamu initially tries to bring him back to ordinary considerations, but Baryton’s resolve holds. The transformation is striking precisely because Baryton has been defined by sedentary habits and by his faith in careful verification: now he treats flight, rather than adjustment, as the only acceptable course.

Transfer of Power and Departure for England

Baryton has considered what will happen to the institute. He appoints Bardamu to manage it while he is away, trusting that the clientele will accept him as director; Parapine is to oversee the machinery and laboratory. Baryton’s former conviction that no one’s presence is indispensable has itself changed. The transfer is not a formal ending to the business but a practical arrangement that allows him to leave without waiting for the establishment to collapse.

He chooses England as the destination. The next day, Bardamu and Parapine help him with his luggage. A passport, with its pages and visas, surprises Baryton, who has never seen one and would like to obtain several spares until they explain that this is impossible. Even near departure, he hesitates over whether to take hard or soft collars and how many of each, a small domestic indecision that nearly brings them to train time. He takes only a small suitcase, intending to travel lightly and preserve his mobility.

The final scene makes his escape physical and irreversible. The three men take the last streetcar to Paris, where Baryton studies the high steps of the international train as though they were a monument. After help from his companions, he boards with a second-class ticket and remarks that first class is no better. They shake hands; the train pulls out with a jolt and a crash of steel that cuts short their farewells. Baryton has time to say goodbye before his hand slips from theirs, waving in the smoke as the train recedes into darkness. His exit leaves Bardamu not only with the institute’s management but with the uneasy lesson that a life organized around stability can end in a sudden, deliberate flight.