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To my sister Eva—with love and with admiration for the work she does and the strength it takes to do it
I
February 23–March 20, 1894
It is snowing. The snow falls on the young girl’s face, on her cheeks, mouth, and nose, and on her eyes. She does not blink it away. She lies very still in her nest of snow, slightly curled up, with a fur coat covering her like a quilt.
Around her the city is living its nightlife, the hansom cabs clatter by in the cobblestone slush on the boulevard, just a few steps away. But here in the passageway where she lies, there is no life.
Her brother is the one who finds her. He has been to the theater with some friends, and then to a dance hall, and he is happy and lighthearted when he returns home, happy and a little bit tipsy. That is why he does not understand what he is seeing, not at first.
“Hello?” he says when he notices that someone or something is lying at the entrance to his family’s home. Then he recognizes the coat, which is unusual: astrakhan with a collar of ocelot. “Cici?” he asks, because that is the girl’s pet name. “Cici, why are you lying there?”
Only then does he discover why she does not blink and makes no move to get up.
“It is unusual,” said the Commissioner to my father. “It is difficult to believe that it is a natural death, considering the circumstances, but there are no external signs of violence.”
The young girl lay on a stretcher in the hospital’s chapel. They had removed the fur coat, which was now hanging across the lid of the waiting coffin. Papa had turned the gas lamps all the way up in order to see as clearly as possible. The hospital had recently had its first electric lights installed, but the chapel had not yet seen such progress. Light for the living was more important than light for the dead, it was thought, and that was probably true. But it made my father’s work even more difficult.
Beneath the cloak, Cecile Montaine was wearing only a light white chemise and white pantalets. Both were filthy and had been worn for a while. Her narrow feet were naked and bloodless, but there was no sign of frostbite. Someone had closed her half-open eyes, but you could still see why she was considered a beauty, with long black eyelashes, sweetly curved lips, a narrow nose, symmetrical features. Her hair was pitch-black like her eyelashes and wet with melted snow.
“Dear Lord,” said the third person present in the chapel. “Oh, dear Lord.” The hand holding the prayer book shook a bit, and it was clear that Father Abigore, the Montaine family priest, was in shock.
“Could the cold have killed her?” asked the Commissioner.
“It’s possible. But right outside her own door?”
“No, that is not logical. Unless she died somewhere else and was later placed where her brother found her?”
“I think she died where she was found,” said my father. “The clinical signs suggest as much.”
They both stole a glance at the priest and refrained from discussing lividity while he was listening.
“Sickness? Poison?” asked the Commissioner.
“It is difficult to say when the family will not agree to an autopsy.” My father bent over the girl and carefully examined the halfway open mouth and the nostrils. Then he straightened up. “Did she suffer from consumption?”
The Commissioner looked over at the priest, passing on the question. Father Abigore stood staring at the dead girl and did not realize at first that he was being addressed.
“Father?”
“What?” With a start, the priest focused on them. “Consumption? No, certainly not. When she left her school a few weeks ago, she was as sound and healthy as one could possibly expect of a young lady of seventeen.”
“And why did she leave school?” asked the Commissioner.
“I must confess that we thought it was because of an unfortunate attachment she had made to a young man who disappeared at the same time. But now . . . Perhaps we have done her an injustice.” His gaze was once again drawn to the young dead girl, as if he were unable to look anywhere else. “Consumptive? Why would you think that?”
“There is dried blood in the nasal and oral cavities,” said my father. Suddenly, he leaned forward with a wordless exclamation.
“What is it?” asked the priest nervously.
But my father had no time to answer. He grabbed a pipette from his bag and quickly bent over the young girl’s face again.
“What are you doing?” asked the priest indignantly and took a step closer. “You promised, nothing unseemly. Nothing undignified for the dead!”
“It is not undignified,” my father cut him off. “But absolutely necessary. Move, you are blocking the light!”
My father later said that it was perhaps just as well that the family had insisted on having a priest present for the examination, because it was a miracle of God that he saw them in the poor light, and even more incredible that he managed to capture two in the glass tube of the pipette.
“What? What?” asked the Commissioner. “What have you found?”
My father shook his head. “I don’t know. I have never seen anything like this before. But they look like some type of mites.”
“Mites?”
“Yes.” He held the pipette toward the Commissioner. “Do you see it? One is still moving.”
The priest swallowed abruptly and held the hand with the prayer book in front of his mouth.
“But I thought you said she had not been dead for very long,” said the Commissioner.
“Nor has she,” said my father slowly, once again holding the glass up toward the light of the gas lamp in order to more clearly observe the pale minute creatures he had caught. “These are not carrion parasites. I think they lived in her while she lived and are leaving her now that she is dead.”
Of course, I cannot know that this is precisely what occurred. I was not there. My father was reluctant to let me assist when he examined the dead. He said it could only hurt my reputation and my future—by which he meant my chances of marriage. For the most part, my father was a man of progress, absorbed by the newest ideas and the latest technology. But he was incomprehensibly old-fashioned on this particular point.
“It is bad enough that I engage in such activities,” he had said when I tried to convince him. “But if it becomes common knowledge that I let my daughter assist . . . No, Maddie, it is out of the question. Out of the question!”
“I thought one was not supposed to let the limited horizons of others stand in the way of progress,” I said. That was his standard argument when people called him Doctor Death, or accused him of desecrating the dead. Some of his living patients, especially the more well-to-do, had left him because they did not like the fact that his hands had also touched the dead. But every time the Commissioner sent for him, he went.
“The dead can no longer speak for themselves,” he was in the habit of saying. “Someone needs to help them tell their story.”
But this “someone” was not supposed to be me.
“This discussion is over,” he said. And so I just had to wait at home with as much equanimity as I could muster until he and the Commissioner returned from Saint Bernardine in the early hours of the morning.
We lived on Carmelite Street, behind the old monastery and conveniently close to the Hospital of Saint Bernardine, where my father often worked. Ours was not a large house, in fact it was the narrowest on the whole street, but the second floor let out into the small ro
oftop garden my mother had created many years ago above what had then been the kitchen. Because it was so elevated, it received plenty of sun in the summer in spite of the taller buildings surrounding us. Right now all the bushes wore tall, powdered wigs of snow, and the small basin in the middle was frozen so solid that I feared all the goldfish might be dead. My toes were well on their way to joining them; I wriggled them inside my button boots to bring some life to them again, but I did not go inside. If I did, the two men in the salon would cease talking about Cecile Montaine, and I would not get to hear any more of the clinical details that I have just described.
Perhaps I now appear as cold as the snow that covered her body, but do not misunderstand me. I had all the compassion in the world for her family, and when I thought about how prematurely and inexplicably she had departed this life, tears sprang to my eyes. She was three years younger than me, and the realization that often seizes the living when they encounter death—that might have been me—felt more urgent than usual.
But feelings had no place here. In spite of my father’s resistance, it was my plan to one day follow in his footsteps, and that meant I had to learn what I could where I could—including here in the rooftop garden with the door to the salon open just a crack.
“I will have to examine the mites tomorrow, in daylight,” said Papa. “It is hopeless to attempt to determine what species they are now. It is not even certain that they have anything to do with the cause of death, but they did come from her nostrils, and my best guess is that she died from respiratory failure.”
“She stopped breathing, you mean?” growled the Commissioner. “Is that not how we all die?”
“Most of us are lucky enough to die before we stop breathing, Monsieur le Commissaire, not the other way around. As you know perfectly well.”
The Commissioner sighed and stretched his strong, robust legs.
“The family would like to have the funeral over with. And I would like to have a cause of death before they are allowed to bury her.”
“Tomorrow. Perhaps. If only I was allowed to look at her lungs . . .”
“Unfortunately that is out of the question, my dear friend. Her father will not permit it. And I cannot lawfully twist his arm, especially considering that everything until now suggests a natural, if peculiar, death.”
“But that is reactionary and illogical!” my father exclaimed. “Think how much more we could learn, how many illnesses we could cure, and how many lives we could save, if only all corpses were professionally autopsied and examined. Or at least all interesting corpses.”
The Commissioner set down his cognac glass and got up.
“That may be. But how would you feel if it was your own sweet Madeleine lying there?”
My father waved his hand dismissively. “It is not.”
“But if it were?”
My father had risen as well. He was half a head taller than the Commissioner, but rangy and thin in the worn overcoat that he had not yet discarded.
“As long as the autopsy was performed by an experienced and dedicated scientist,” he said with dignity, “I would allow it.”
Upon which they shook hands.
Most young women would probably have run away screaming if they had heard their father declare that he would be willing to let an unknown man disembowel them for closer scientific examination. But I am not like most. I felt a small warm glow of pride out there in the cold.
In the chapel of Saint Bernardine’s, Cecile Montaine lay lifeless and unmoving on her bier, as Father Abigore watched over her. He had dimmed the gaslights and had lit candles instead and was now on his knees praying next to the dead girl. In the weak light he could not see that more of the little pale white mites were crawling from her nostrils and mouth, across the white cloth that covered her, and toward the prayer book that he held in his folded hands.
It was fortunate that it was such a cold night, as the mites could not survive for long in the chill air. Most of them died quickly.
But not all.
“Clearly an arachnid,” my father dictated. “With eight legs that are strongly developed in relation to the body size. The legs are eight jointed and have noticeable claws. The oral aperture is small, again relative to the size of the body and head. The abdomen appears flexible, as with ticks, which suggests a parasitic, possibly blood-sucking existence, but there is no chitin back shell, for which reason I postulate that the specimen can be classified as belonging to the soft mites . . .”
He broke off his recitation and stood up straight. There was a purposeful frustration to his movements.
“I don’t know enough about parasitology,” he complained. “Maddie, would you draw it? Then we might consult an expert—if we can find one.”
“Of course, Papa.”
I pulled my tall stool over to the microscope. For me it was immeasurably more absorbing to register bacterial life-forms and parasites than to reproduce the flower arrangements and natures mortes that Madame Aubrey’s Academy for Young Ladies had considered appropriate subjects for the daughters of the bourgeoisie. But the lessons in watercolor and art appreciation had given me a certain basic competence with pencil, pen, and brush—one of the few lessons from the academy that I had found useful in real life.
While I sat there in the sunlight streaming through the tall windows and drew mandibles and scaly legs with carefully measured accuracy—on a scale of 1:100 since the creature measured barely 2.4 millimeters—my father and the Commissioner conversed over the cups of coffee Papa had made with the aid of the Bunsen burner. My father had turned the former kitchen into his laboratory more than a decade ago, and we had never built a new one. It simplified our housekeeping quite a bit, for which I was grateful. Madame Vogler came in a few days a week to do laundry and housecleaning, and her daughter Elise did the rest—received guests, when any came, lit the stoves, aired the rooms, ran errands for us, and took care of the modest daily shopping we required. Beyond that we usually ate at Chez Louis, which was right around the corner.
“Mademoiselle Montaine disappeared on the third of February,” said the Commissioner. “And since Emile Oblonski vanished at the same time, it was assumed that the young couple had eloped together. Which might of course be the case, but Cecile’s fate places Oblonski’s absence in a somewhat different light.”
“Are you implying that he in some way is responsible for the death of our young lady?”
“I am implying nothing. Especially not while I still do not have a cause of death.”
My father eyed the Commissioner.
“I have been denied even the permission to examine her unclothed body,” he said. “How am I supposed to venture an opinion on a reasonably scientific basis?”
The Commissioner looked at the ceiling as if he could find an answer to his dilemma by deciphering its various paint flakes and soot marks. Finally he said, “Half an hour. Not a second more. No visible signs of the examination afterward and bring Madeleine with you, so that we may at least be said to have shown the proper respect, should we be discovered.”
Yes! I thought triumphantly. Now he cannot continue to refuse.
My father’s forefinger was tapping the table lightly with a tiny metronome-like sound. It was a sign of indecision, but this time I knew in advance what the result of his deliberations would be.
“Maddie, will you do us that small favor?”
“Of course, Papa.”
The dead body is precisely that—dead. All life processes have ceased, the blood separates into its basic elements, the skin turns bluish and sallow, all secretions dry up. And still the body continues for a time to have an identity. It is a human being, not just a temporary collection of tissue, bones, and organs that have ceased to function. Cecile was still recognizably Cecile, and to undress the dead body was a strange and intimate act that disturbingly interfered with the dispassionate objectivity I was trying to maintain.
The silk of the chemise was soft and smooth except under the arms and at
the back, where the salt of dried sweat had caked and stiffened the material. I folded it and the soiled pantalets carefully and set them aside, because when the examination was over, I would need to dress her again to meet the Commissioner’s second demand—that after the fact there be no visible signs of what had taken place.
We don’t lay the dead naked in their graves. We dress them, even if they are unlikely to need it. We see it as our duty, the last dignity we can give them, even though we know that the clothes will just rot with the body.
Cecile was naked now.
And still she appeared neither exposed nor desecrated in my eyes. Even in death there was a symmetry, a completeness to her that made it seem as if she were missing nothing except life. That absence hit me suddenly, so deeply that a tiny wordless exclamation escaped my lips.
“What is it?” asked my father. He stood together with the Commissioner just outside the half-open door and waited to be called in when I was done with the undressing.
“Nothing,” I said. And then I saw something that did mar the body’s symmetry. “That is . . . she has some marks on her. Some scars.”
“Maddie, you are not supposed to examine her. Just to undress her.”
“Yes, Papa. I have done that now.”
The two men entered. I took my notebook and began to make notes while my father carefully and systematically described Cecile Montaine’s corpse. Age and gender, approximate height and weight, state of nourishment (generally good but with signs of recent weight loss), hair color, eye color, and so on. Only then did he focus on the scars I had observed.
“Half-moon-shaped symmetrically opposed scars and bruises. Some quite faint and of an older date, others fresh and only newly healed. About half a dozen in all, primarily occurring in the region of the breasts, on the stomach, and on the inside of the thighs.”
“They are bite marks, aren’t they?” asked the Commissioner.