Professor Jean-Martin Charcot

Professor Jean-Martin Charcot is a Parisian physician and lecturer whom Bella Baxter encounters at the Salpêtrière. Her account presents him through two meetings: first, an attempted hypnosis that Bella secretly fakes; later, a request for help that becomes an invitation to retell her experiences before a fashionable audience. Charcot’s interest in Bella is both personal and professional, but their exchanges also expose the unequal roles he assigns them: he is the lecturer, and she is to be his subject.

Identity and Introduction

Bella recalls visiting Charcot during an earlier stay in Paris, when he tried to hypnotize her before a large audience of admiring students. Rather than let the demonstration end in his embarrassment, she pretended that he had succeeded. She believes he recognized the deception: he smiled knowingly and announced that she was the sanest English woman he had ever professionally examined. The episode introduces a relationship founded on mutual awareness rather than straightforward clinical authority. Charcot attempts to read Bella through hypnosis; Bella, in turn, reads the social situation and chooses to protect him from public failure.

The recollection also gives Charcot a place in Bella’s personal geography of Paris. She links the visit to the Louvre and the Tuileries Gardens, recalling an earlier time when she and her companion looked at large paintings and ate at small tables beneath the trees. Against those shared pleasures, Charcot’s public experiment becomes another scene she can revisit and reinterpret. Her account does not establish the details of his medical career beyond his professional examination of her, his hypnosis demonstration, and his lectures; his character is chiefly revealed through the encounters she narrates.

The Return to the Salpêtrière

After leaving the Hôtel de Notre-Dame, Bella uses the remaining francs from the money that had brought her and Duncan Wedderburn to Paris to hire a cab to the Salpêtrière. She gives the leftover money to an attendant with a note identifying herself as Bella Baxter, niece of Godwin Baxter of Glasgow, and asking to see Charcot. The attendant explains that the professor will be occupied for an hour or more, but Bella is offered a place in his office and coffee from his secretary while she waits.

When Charcot arrives, he greets her warmly and remembers their earlier encounter, calling her the “one completely sane English!” He asks after Godwin Baxter and wants to know what has brought her back. Bella tells him what has happened; his questions draw out the account, and he grows increasingly solemn as he listens. He then cuts through the explanation with a practical judgment: “You need money.” Bella says she needs enough to return to Glasgow and that her guardian will repay him by money order. Charcot initially says nothing, frowns, and drums his fingers on the desk while she stands to thank him and take her leave.

That silence does not end the meeting. Charcot interrupts Bella’s departure to clarify that he was distracted, not refusing her: she needs money and will have it, enough to travel comfortably to Scotland whenever she chooses, provided she spends that night as his guest. He insists that the payment is not a gift. Bella prefers earning money to receiving charity, he observes, and he approves; the money will compensate her for helping him in a way she has already experienced. His response offers immediate support while converting her earlier, involuntary-seeming encounter with hypnosis into the basis of a paid arrangement.

The Lecture and Its Terms

Charcot explains that he is to lecture that evening to a small, fashionable audience, including the Duc de Germantes and several politicians who pose as intellectuals. He expects the lecture to help his research indirectly by winning the attention of people who control public funding. The planned demonstration will involve questioning a female farm servant under hypnosis, whom he describes as religiously hysterical but less interesting than Jeanne d’Arc or Bella. He asks Bella to enliven the event by recounting, under hypnosis and in response to his questions, parts of the story she has just told him.

His proposed topics are pointedly specific. He wants Bella to describe her enjoyment of life before seeing Alexandria, her response to poor children, her feelings toward her male companion, the taste of his blood, and her present view of the human condition. He encourages her to denounce the bourgeoisie, plutocrats, aristocrats, and royalty, and asks whether she knows anything about royalty. The request makes her experience both the substance of the lecture and a means of making Charcot’s research more appealing to influential listeners. The arrangement is not presented as a disinterested consultation: he explains the public and financial purpose of the occasion as well as the role he wants Bella to perform.

Bella anticipates one interpretation of her pity for poor people, suggesting that Charcot may tell the audience it comes from a displaced sense of motherhood. He laughs and recognizes the psychological insight, but tells her not to say so that evening. He insists on the division of roles: “Society is based upon division of labour. I am the lecturer, you are my subject.” In his view, the audience would be disconcerted if anyone other than Charcot offered opinions. At the same time, he guarantees Bella’s anonymity and says she need not identify her friends. He invokes her British reserve and assures her that hypnosis cannot make people act against their will. These assurances qualify the power imbalance without removing it: Charcot sets the format and controls the lecture, while Bella’s consent and choice of what to disclose remain important conditions of her participation.

Relationship and Narrative Significance

The contrast between the two encounters gives Charcot’s role its particular shape. During the first, Bella performs hypnosis for his benefit without receiving anything in return; during the later meeting, he offers money for another performance, now with the terms openly discussed. He recognizes that Bella prefers payment to a gift and presents the transaction as work. Yet his description of her as a subject, and his insistence that the audience should hear opinions from him rather than from her, show that the exchange is also structured by professional authority and public display.

Charcot’s offer helps Bella contemplate returning home, but it does not resolve the questions raised by her experiences. In the letter that frames the account, she says that the woman returning to Godwin Baxter is no longer the pleasure-seeking somnambulist who eloped with Wedderburn. She asks for guidance on how to do good rather than live as a parasite, and says she will perform with Charcot that evening before setting off for home the next day. The episode therefore makes the lecture a threshold between Bella’s recent life and her planned return. Charcot supplies money and a platform; Bella supplies testimony, but she also carries away a sharper awareness of the roles assigned to her and of the choices she must make after the performance.