GUY DE MAUPASSANT AND FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: A COMPARISON OF TWO CASES OF NINETEENTH CENTURY PARESIS

in Neurological Diseases in Famous Artists (Karger)

Abstract:

Two late-nineteenth-century writers provide parallel cases of syphilis, illustrating the progression of disease from infection to the final dementia of paresis. Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) each left their jobs when their health declined. Each spent a decade traveling in search of relief from the agonies of progressing syphilis, writing under adverse conditions of ill health.  Each was institutionalized with a diagnosis of General Paralysis of the Insane after a sudden breakdown.

PARESIS

            The well-known syphilologist Joseph Earle Moore estimated that, in the days before penicillin, only about five percent of syphilitics progressed to the form of tertiary neurosyphilis known as paresis, General Paralysis of the Insane, or Dementia Paralytica[1]. And yet, how many people today think of syphilis when it was epidemic only as it affected its victims in their demented last years? Two nineteenth century writers afflicted with paresis—Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) — provide us with an illustration of the disease as it progressed from infection in youth, through years of excruciating pain and relapsing illness, to the final dementia. At the same time, we see the exhilaration that often marked an inspired period of creativity before the final break-down.

INFECTION

            Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease that begins with a chancre at the point of infection, usually the genitals, followed a few weeks after by a fever, rash, and severe malaise. It is usually infectious for the first two years, rarely after five. In the nineteenth century, syphilis was a shameful secret, its name rarely spoken in polite society.

Infection— Maupassant

            Guy de Maupassant violated the convention of secrecy with a notorious show of bravado. In a letter to a friend, he revealed that he had been infected with syphilis at age twenty by a ravishing boating companion but did not learn the diagnosis and the reason for his on-going ill health until years later.

“I hadn’t been expecting that, I can tell you; I was very upset, but at length I said ‘What’s the remedy?’ ‘Mercury and potassium iodide,’ he replied. I went to see another Sawbones, who made the same diagnosis, adding that it was an ‘old syphilis, dating back six or seven years.’ . . . In short, for five weeks I have been taking four centigrammes of mercury and thirty-five centigrammes of potassium iodide a day, and I felt very well on it. Soon mercury will be my staple diet. My hair is beginning to grow again . . . the hair on my arse is sprouting. . . . I’ve got the pox! at last! the real thing! not the contemptible clap, not the ecclesiastical crystalline, not the bourgeois coxcombs or the leguminous cauliflowers—no—no, the great pox, the one which Francis I died of. The majestic pox, pure and simple; the elegant syphilis . . .  I’ve got the pox . . . and I am proud of it, by thunder, and to hell with the bourgeoisie. Allelujah, I’ve got the pox, so I don’t have to worry about catching it any more, and I screw the street whores and trollops, and afterwards I say to them ‘I’ve got the pox.’ They are afraid and I just laugh.[2] 

Infection—Nietzsche

            Friedrich Nietzsche’s early infection is not as clearly documented. In the clinical records at the asylum, he said that he had been “twice infected” in 1866, which fits with rumors that he was treated for a syphilitic infection by two Leipzig doctors in 1867.  (The second infection may have been another venereal disease, perhaps gonorrhea, as he told one of his doctors, Otto Eiser.) The examination at the asylum in Jena revealed a scar on his penis, a possible indicator of a prior syphilitic chancre. Nietzsche’s sexual life remains a mystery, and hypotheses that he was infected by a woman in a brothel in Cologne or by a man in a brothel in Genoa are unsubstantiated.

PROGRESSING ILLNESS

            In the years after infection, the syphilitic was often plagued by such a wide variety of illnesses in many parts of the body that the disease was named “The Great Imitator.”  Both Maupassant and Nietzsche had years of relapsing illnesses indicative of a severe progressing syphilis.

Progressing illness—Maupassant

            After eight years as a civil servant with the Ministry of Public Instruction, Maupassant’s poor health forced him to apply for a leave of absence (with pay) to recover in the spas of Switzerland from what he called a nervous malady. Over the next ten years Maupassant agreed to follow carefully the orders of numerous doctors (he referred to them as princes of the medical sciences) despite his profound skepticism regarding their abilities to alleviate his suffering.

            Biographer Robert Sherard speculated that great quantities of mercury (“barometer syrup”) had left Maupassant anemic and overly sensitive to cold.  He abandoned vapor baths taken for limb pain because he feared an apoplectic stroke. When cold weather made everything worse, he yearned for tropical heat. He went from place to place seeking relief from his agonies, carrying with him a suitcase containing “a cornucopia” of drugs of dubious benefit. Goncourt noted in his journal that Maupassant was haunted by fear of death and moved constantly on land and sea to escape from this fixed idea.

            Maupassant described chronic headache, one of the most debilitating symptoms of progressing syphilis: “The dreadful pain racks in a way no torture could equal, shatters the head, drives one crazy, bewilders the ideas, and scatters the memory like dust before the wind.”[3] 

            By 1880 he was nearly blind in his right eye. An ophthalmologist found paralysis in the accommodation of the right eye and an oculist concluded from a dilated pupil that “the mischief lay behind the eyes,” recalling later: “This disorder, apparently insignificant, caused me nevertheless to foresee . . . the lamentable end which awaited (ten years later) the young writer formerly so vigorous and so valiant.”[4]

            In ten years of freedom from regular employment Maupassant was able to write six novels, three hundred stories, and three plays as well as travel books and poetry. Robert Sherard suggested that his gloomy wretchedness translated into his books as unvarying pessimism. One of his short stories, “Bed Number 29,” confronts syphilis. A dashing captain in the Franco-Prussian War (remarkably like Maupassant) returned home to find his lover Irma wasting away in a syphilis ward. When he leaned to kiss her forehead, “He believed he detected an odor of putrefaction, of contaminated flesh, in this corridor full of girls tainted with this ignoble, terrible malady.”[5] Before she dies, Irma gloats over having infected as many invading Prussians as possible.

Progressing illness — Nietzsche

Like Maupassant, Nietzsche was forced to leave his job as his health declined. A year’s paid sick leave from the University of Basel where he was professor of Classical Philology was extended to a permanent leave of absence. And like Maupassant, he spent the decade before his final breakdown traveling from place to place looking for relief from headaches, nervous complaints, limb pain, and depression. He tried the waters of St. Moritz as a remedy against what he called “a deeply entrenched nervous illness.”

To his friend Franz Overbeck Nietzsche wrote: 

“I am desperate. Pain is vanquishing my life and my will. What months, what a summer I have had! My physical agonies were as many and various as the changes I have seen in the sky. In every cloud there is some form of electric charge which grips me suddenly and reduces me to complete misery. Five times I have called for Doctor Death, and yesterday I hoped it was the end—in vain. Where is there on earth that perpetual serene sky, which is my sky?”[6]

He complained of an unmovable black melancholy and extreme weariness.

Nietzsche’s voluminous correspondence during those years describes recurring attacks that left him shattered and exhausted, often only able to steal minutes or quarters of hours of “brain energy” to write.  “The stomach would no longer be subdued even by the most absurdly rigorous diet,” he complained.  “Recurrent headaches of the most violent sort, lasting for several days. Vomiting that lasted for hours even when I had eaten nothing. In short the machine looked as if it wanted to break down and I will not deny that I have several times wished that this could be the end."[7]

An ophthalmologist found bilateral inflammation of the inner layers of the eyes and diagnosed chorioretinitis, which, after iritis, is the most frequent syphilitic affection of the eye. An examination by another doctor yielded a further pessimistic opinion: Nietzsche must curtail reading and writing for several years, avoid bright light, wear blue sunglasses, avoid spicy foods, coffee, and heavy wine, and not exert himself mentally or physically. He had to place his paper two inches from his eyes in order to write.  His life, he wrote, was a fearful burden:

“I would have long thrown it over if I had not been making the most instructive tests and experiments on mental and moral questions in precisely this condition of suffering and almost complete renunciation. . . . On the whole I am happier than ever before. And yet, continual pain; for many hours of the day a feeling closely akin to sea-sickness, a semi-paralysis which makes it difficult to speak, alternating with furious attacks.”[8]

PARETIC PRODROME

            Syphilologists looked for brief episodes of uncharacteristic behavior, grandiosity, hints of impeding madness, and euphoria alternating with suicidal depression in the years before the final breakdown—a time known as the paretic prodrome, or warning period.  Both Maupassant and Nietzsche experienced intimations of madness while remaining enormously productive.

Prodrome—Maupassant

Maupassant’s friend Frank Harris wrote:

“Three or four years before the end, Maupassant knew that the path of self-indulgence for him led directly to madness and untimely death. . . . fits of partial blindness, then acute neuralgic pains and periods of sleeplessness, while his writing showed terrible fears. . . Then came desperate long-continued depression broken by occasional exaltations and excitements. . . .  and always, always, the indescribable mental agony.[9]

Madame de Maupassant thought she saw the first signs of her son’s madness in passages of Sur l’eau, a story written in 1888. Several of Maupassant’s friends reported that he had begun to talk rather wildly. When the editor of La Nouvelle Revue told him he was talking like a madman, he answered: “My brother, you know, is already mad; yes, mad. Didn’t you know that he is no longer at Antibes, but in a private asylum? When will my turn come?”[10]

Maupassant described his optimism while planning L’angélus, which he anticipated would be his best work: “I feel admirably fit to write this book. I have it all perfectly in my head. It was all thought out with an astonishing facility. It will be the crowning of my literary career.”[11] He wrote one story of 14,000 words in four days without a single correction: it “was there, complete, erect within my mind.”[12]  He had the manuscript copied so that he could save the perfect original.

Sherard agreed with a popular idea of the nineteenth century, that syphilis could take genius to new heights, when he reflected that Maupassant’s literary leap to fame in Paris in 1880 might have been the result a tremendous stimulation of the brain cells from this disease. The brains of syphilitics, he wrote, are for a time before the late stage “capable of extraordinary production of far higher merit than they would ever have been capable of without this inoculation.”[13]

Right before his breakdown Maupassant lamented: “There are whole days on which I feel I am done for, finished, blind, my brain used up and yet still alive. . . . . I have not a single idea that is consecutive to the one before it. I forget words, names of everything, and my hallucinations and my pains tear me to pieces.”[14] He imagined that the salt baths he had been giving his nostrils had started a salty fermentation in his brain and that the dissolved brain was flowing back through his nose. In Paris he announced that he had been made a count and insisted on being so addressed. In literary circles it was agreed that Maupassant had lost his mind.

Prodrome — Nietzsche

            Sigmund Freud wrote of Nietzsche’s extraordinary achievement in the period before the breakdown. On 28 October 1908 the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society devoted the evening to Nietzsche’s posthumously published Ecce Homo. According to Freud:

“Nietzsche was a paretic. The euphoria is beautifully developed, and so on, and so on. However, this would oversimplify the problem. It is very doubtful whether paresis can be held responsible for the contents of Ecce Homo. In cases in which paresis struck at men of great genius, extraordinary accomplishments were achieved until a short time before the outbreak of illness (Maupassant). The indication that this work of Nietzsche is fully valid and to be taken seriously is in the preservation of mastery of form.”[15]

            Illness became his fate, Freud said.

“The degree of introspection achieved by Nietzsche had never been achieved by anyone, nor is it likely ever to be reached again. The most essential factor must still be added: the role that paresis played in Nietzsche’s life. It is the loosening process resulting from paresis that gave him the capacity for the quite extraordinary achievement of seeing through all layers and recognizing the instincts at the very base. In that way, he placed his paretic disposition at the service of science.”[16]

Nietzsche described this euphoria and competence — what Thomas Mann called his soaring intellect blasted with ecstasy —to a friend on 18 December 1888, about two weeks before his breakdown:

“Never before have I known anything remotely like these months from the beginning of September until now. The most amazing tasks as easy as a game; my health, like the weather, coming up every day with boundless brilliance and certainty. I cannot tell you how much has been finished—everything. The world will be standing on its head for the next few years: since the old God has abdicated, I shall rule the world from now on.”[17]

BREAKDOWN

            The syphilitic often experiences a sudden breakdown that marks a turning point from sanity to madness. Often periods of apparent sanity alternate with dementia after the collapse.

Breakdown — Maupassant

            Maupassant shot himself, though the wound was not serious, and then slashed his throat. When his servant discovered him, he confessed:  “You see, François, what I have done. I have cut my throat. It’s a case of sheer madness.”[18]  A doctor sewed him up and packed him into a straight jacket. Waking from being unconscious for a day, Maupassant announced that he must go to the frontier: war had been declared. On 6 January he was taken to Paris, still in restraints, and placed in the celebrated asylum of Dr. Blanche in Passy.

Breakdown— Nietzsche

            In January 1889 Nietzsche broke down in the town square of Turin. After his landlord rescued him, Nietzsche stayed up late into the night banging on the piano and shouting. He composed a number of mad postcards to his friends, one of which summoned Franz Overbeck on a rescue mission. Nietzsche broke into tears and embraced his friend. Then he began to rant, uttering “bits and pieces from the world of ideas in which he has been living, and also in short sentences, in an indescribably muffled tone, sublime, wonderfully clairvoyant. Unspeakably horrible things would be audible, about himself as the successor of the dead God, the whole thing punctuated, as it were, on the piano, whereupon more convulsions and outbursts would follow.”[19] Overbeck wondered if it would have been kinder to take his friend’s life. Instead he tricked him into a train ride that ended at the nerve clinic of Dr. Wille, an expert on General Paralysis of the Insane. The sign-in sheet recorded: Friedrich Nietzsche, Professor at Basel at age of 23. 1866. Syphilit. Infect.

ASYLUM

             Death usually follows within a few months or years (stationary paresis), although in slowly deteriorative types (galloping paresis), the patient may live thirty years or more.

Asylum—Maupassant

            Although at times Maupassant seemed rational in the asylum, delighting his visitors with amusing stories, he also sometimes hallucinated and had to be restrained. A daily record kept by his doctor documents a rapid decline. Maupassant began to write of his huge fortunes of gold nuggets and buried treasure. He bragged of being the wealthy younger son of the Virgin Mary, expected twigs to sprout into baby Maupassants, and kept his urine because it contained diamonds and jewels. He howled and licked the walls of his cell. “You haven’t seen my thoughts anywhere, have you?” he worried when they seemed to flee from his brain, but then he was cheery again when they showed up in the form of butterflies colored by mood—black for sadness, pink for good cheer.

            At the end the powerful Maupassant had to be kept in restraints. His last words were reported to be “des ténèbres, des ténèbres”—darkness, darkness.

Asylum — Nietzsche

 When Nietzsche’s friends first visited him at the asylum, he seemed so sane that they thought he must be faking dementia. At other times, he was agitated and incoherent, screaming, drinking his urine, and smearing feces on the wall. He experienced delusions and auditory hallucinations.  By 1895 he was showing signs of physical paralysis.

Nietzsche was eventually released into the care of his mother, who watched over him until she died in 1897; from then until his death, his sister, Elisabeth took charge.

Nietzsche died of a stroke on 25 August 1900. Elisabeth did not permit an autopsy; at that time what she called the “disgusting suspicion” of syphilis had not yet been divulged.

[1] Moore, JE: The Modern Treatment of Syphilis. Baltimore, Maryland, Charles C. Thomas, 1943, p. 357.

[2] Letter 2 March 1877. Cited in Quétel, C: The History of Syphilis, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. pp 128-129.

[3] Williams, RL: The Horror of Life. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 258.

[4] Sherard, R: The Life, Work and Evil Fate of Guy de Maupassant. New York, Brentano’s, n.d. p. 208.

[5] Maupassant, G: “Bed # 29” in The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant. Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1955, p. 574.

[6]To Franz Overbeck, 18 September 1881.  Cited in Middleton C (ed): Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969, p. 179.

[7] To Carl von Gersdorff, June 1875, cited in Hayman, p. 179.

[8] To Dr. Otto Eiser, January 1880, cited in Hayman p. 219.

[9] Critchley, M: The Divine Banquet of the Brain. New York, Raven, 1979 p., 213.

[10] Sherard, Evil Fate, 353.

[11] Sherard, Evil Fate, 375.

[12] Sherard, Evil Fate, 360.

[13] Sherard, Evil Fate, 235.

[14] Sherard, Evil Fate, 378.

[15] Nunberg H and Federn E  (eds): Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, Vol. II. 1908-1910. New York, International Universities Press, 1967, p. 30.

[16] Minutes, II, pp. 31-32.

[17] To Carl Fuchs, 18 December 1888. Cited in Middleton, p. 335.

[18] Sherard, Evil Fate, p. 382.

[19] Letter to Peter Gast, 15 January 1889. Cited in Middleton, p. 353.