Ferdinand Bardamu berates a sick child and is thrown out of the home after the boy’s screams overwhelm him during an examination. The episode is more than a professional lapse: it makes visible the return of Bardamu’s war-shaped fear and the renewed distress brought on by Léon Robinson, while converting his private exhaustion into a public scandal that costs him the family’s confidence and his fee.

Causes and Background

By the time of the visit, Robinson’s sudden reappearance has unsettled Bardamu’s already precarious routine. He suspects Robinson is responsible for his trouble starting up again. At first he treats the spells as something he can work through, dragging himself from patient to patient; then the uneasiness grows, he sleeps worse, and the encounter begins to feel like a shock that has brought back an old, persistent bad dream. Robinson’s misery seems to Bardamu to carry the weight of a life from which he cannot free himself. He even fears meeting him in the neighborhood and avoids going out.

The deterioration has practical consequences before the scandal. Patients sometimes have to send for Bardamu two or three times before he decides to visit, and by the time he arrives they have often called another doctor. The Gagat family’s summons reaches him in a car, taking him to 12 Rue Saint-Vincent, on the fourth floor of a house he has visited once before. The grandfather, gray and stooped, wipes his feet carefully on Bardamu’s doormat and urges him to hurry because his grandson is ill. That deferential reception makes the later expulsion a sharp reversal.

The child’s illness sits within a strained family situation. His mother, the grandfather’s daughter, is an unmarried woman who has returned to her parents for abortions; the grandparents are raising her two-year-old son. The child’s putative father has left after repeated talk of marriage. The family grieves over the boy’s illness, and Bardamu observes that they connect his vulnerability with his illegitimacy, though they do not quite admit that belief to themselves. The household’s distress and Bardamu’s own agitation meet in the dining room, where the child is laid on the table for examination.

The Examination and Outburst

Bardamu examines the boy with deliberate care, palpating his abdomen from the navel toward the testicles and then listening to his chest. He registers the child’s heartbeat as sharp and nervous, like a kitten’s. The boy soon has had enough of the examination and begins to scream. Bardamu, already feeling strange in body and mind since Robinson’s return, cannot bear the noise. He describes himself as being at the end of his rope, and the child’s cries become the immediate trigger for words he has been holding back.

Instead of soothing or reassuring the patient, Bardamu tells him not to hurry, because there will be plenty of time to bellow and enough misery ahead to melt his eyes, his head, and everything else. The cruelty lies partly in the mismatch between the helpless child before him and the vast, hopeless forecast Bardamu lays upon him. His speech turns the doctor’s encounter with a particular sick boy into an eruption of his own accumulated rancor and disgust. Bardamu later recognizes that he has deliberately let loose what he had been holding in, but the outburst does not free him from the source of his distress.

The family’s response becomes another performance of alarm. The grandmother starts in surprise; the mother, described by Bardamu as being invested in her new responsibilities, makes a strange face and launches into prolonged screams of her own. She kicks, chokes, and squints, cries that the doctor is mad, and demands that her mother take the baby away. Bardamu’s pessimistic remarks have reversed the expected roles of the examination: the doctor is now treated as the immediate danger, and the child is seized from his hands as if rescued from flames.

Expulsion and Consequences

The grandfather’s conduct changes just as abruptly. After having been deferential enough to wipe his feet on the doctor’s mat and fetch him by car, he unhooks an enormous mahogany thermometer from the wall. He uses it like a club and pursues Bardamu at a distance to the door, which he slams violently behind him with a kick. The family does not pay for the visit. Bardamu is left outside, dissatisfied with what has happened, though he says his damaged neighborhood reputation is not the main reason for his displeasure.

He had hoped that an outburst of frankness would help him deliver himself from Robinson and give him the strength never to see him again. Instead, the scandal offers no such escape. Bardamu understands the scene as an experiment in how much trouble one eruption can make, but it also reveals the futility of expecting a single frank gesture to end a larger entanglement. In his view, scenes and tantrums do not finish cleanly: they leave the possibility of further revelations and further exposure, and the whole business may have to begin again.

The incident spreads beyond the house. By the time Bardamu is caring for Bébert, the story of the girl with the new responsibilities has circulated through the neighborhood and been widely discussed. The gossip makes it easier for others to distrust him, but it does not immediately end his medical work: other doctors are reluctant to take Bébert’s typhoid case, so Bardamu remains responsible for the boy. His outburst thus follows him into the next crisis, becoming part of the social environment in which he tries, unsuccessfully, to treat the sick.

Fear, Recurrence, and Narrative Significance

The visit belongs to a longer pattern in which fear returns through ordinary surroundings and sounds. Earlier, a wedding target at a shooting gallery had led Bardamu to feel that shots were being fired at him; walking away with Lola, he remained preoccupied with the painted wedding and forgot to kiss her. At Duval’s, the sight of diners seated in rows made him imagine them waiting for bullets. When he later explains his fear to Lola, he says he rejects the war and everything in it because he does not want to die. The child’s screams at the Gagat home reactivate that unsettled state: Bardamu’s response is not a measured medical judgment but a bodily and verbal loss of control.

The memory of the episode also sits beside his account of arriving in New York. In the dark room at the Laugh Calvin Hotel, the Elevated Railway passes at speed, its trembling, echoing presence intensifying his depression; he says that it was what horrified him most. These scenes do not make the Gagat household another battlefield, but they establish a recurrent structure: external noise and movement meet a fear that Bardamu cannot contain, and the disturbance spills into his relations with other people. At the house, that spillover has immediate material consequences—an endangered doctor-patient relationship, an unpaid visit, and a neighborhood scandal.

Later, Bardamu describes nights in which the memory of Grandma Henrouille’s fall into the mummy crypt drives fear up from his bowels, pounds his heart, and makes him pace through darkness until dawn. He says that he never again fully recovers the ability to sleep or the trust in other people that sleep requires. The Gagat episode is earlier and distinct from that later recollection, but both show how a past shock can return in the present through involuntary bodily agitation. Here the return of Robinson’s misery, Bardamu’s worsening sleep, and the child’s cries converge in a scene where the doctor’s professional role cannot hold.

The event’s decisive reversal is therefore not simply that Bardamu insults a patient and is expelled. He hopes to use frankness as a severing act against Robinson, yet his speech instead exposes his entanglement more publicly and leaves him with new consequences. The household’s alarm, the grandfather’s thermometer raised like a club, the slammed door, and the unpaid call make visible the collapse of trust; the later neighborhood gossip ensures that the scene continues after Bardamu has left the room.