Salpêtrière

The Salpêtrière is the setting for two significant encounters between Bella Baxter and Professor Jean-Martin Charcot. It first appears as the place where Charcot tries to hypnotize Bella before an audience of students; later, she returns seeking help after leaving Parisian employment, and he offers financial assistance in exchange for her participation in a lecture demonstration. Through these encounters, the institution is associated both with the public authority of medical examination and with Bella’s capacity to manage how that authority reads her.

Bella’s Earlier Visit

During an earlier stay in Paris, Bella visited Charcot at the Salpêtrière. He tried to hypnotize her before a large audience of students, but she says she pretended that he had succeeded because she did not want him to look foolish. She believed that he recognized the performance. Rather than treating the failed demonstration as a simple contest between doctor and subject, the episode gives Bella control over its appearance: Charcot conducts the examination, but she chooses what he and his audience will see.

Charcot subsequently called Bella the sanest English woman he had professionally examined. His judgment becomes an important point of recognition when she encounters him again. The contrast is striking: the Salpêtrière had been the site of a public attempt to produce hypnosis, yet the person who appeared to submit to that procedure was, in Bella’s account, deliberately acting.

Bella’s Return and Charcot’s Offer

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 pay for a cab to the Salpêtrière. She gives the balance to an attendant, together with a note identifying herself as Bella Baxter, the niece of Godwin Baxter of Glasgow, and asking to see Charcot. While she waits, she is shown into his office and offered coffee by his secretary.

When Charcot arrives, he greets Bella warmly and asks about Godwin Baxter and the reason for her visit. Bella tells him what has happened; his questions draw out the account, and he grows increasingly solemn as she speaks. He then recognizes her immediate need for money. Bella says that she needs enough to return to Glasgow and that her guardian will repay him, but Charcot initially gives no answer. After she stands to leave, he apologizes for his abstraction and agrees to provide enough for her return to Scotland in comfort, after she has spent a night as his guest.

The Lecture and the Institution’s Narrative Role

Charcot frames the money not as a gift but as payment for Bella’s participation in an evening lecture. He describes a small, fashionable audience that includes the Duc de Germantes and politicians interested in appearing intellectual; the lecture, he explains, may help his research by winning support from people who control public funds. The proposed demonstration is to involve a female farm servant whom Charcot characterizes as religious and hysterical, but less interesting than Jeanne d’Arc or Bella.

He asks Bella to recount part of her recent experience while under hypnosis and in response to his questions. The planned account is to move from her earlier enjoyment of life, through her response to the poor children she saw, to her feelings toward her male companion and her reaction to tasting his blood. Charcot also invites her to speak about the human condition and to denounce the bourgeoisie, plutocrats, aristocrats, and royalty. The episode therefore links the Salpêtrière not only with examination but with the public staging of testimony: Bella’s experiences are to serve Charcot’s scientific and institutional interests, while the views she is invited to express exceed a narrowly clinical account.