{“…But her pallor, her physical weakness, her low voice did not leave me a moment in doubt...”
“You must be awfully cold,” I told her. “How can you brave these pathways?”
“Oh, sir, hope keeps me going. I must finish my evening.” She spoke the words so indifferently, her reply was so unemotional, that I was touched, and moved alongside her.
“You don’t look at all strong. I’m surprised you have not wearied of your trade.”
“Ah, well, sir, I have to do something.”
“That may be, but is there no trade that would be better for your health?”
“No, sir, a person has to live.”}
Napoleon [Bonaparte], manuscrits inedits, 1786-1791(Paris, Albin Michel, 1927), pp 21-23; as referenced in Age of the French Revolution: Blood of the Bastille, 1787-1789, Claude Manceron
~~
“A Person has to live…”
Paris, Hotel Dieu, Ile de la Cite
November 1787
~~
The Dieu was a never-ending gristmill of toiling monotony.
Caroline motioned an orderly over to a corpse, stiffened for at least a day. Intrepid rodents gnawed on bared, scab-bitten toes, scampered off in squeaking protest as the Scottish woman tugged the hole-ridden sheet back over the body.
Foot-ware was a luxury to the poor, shoes often being the first piece of apparel stolen by less incapacitated suppliants sheltering within the hospital complex.
Ashen fleshed, the dead man’s eyelids were partially closed, sunken into their sockets, yellowed crusting of ulcerated blisters forming a moldering, oozing geography of decay across the slack facial skin.
It could take three or four days before a deceased body was noticed. Floor-staff, the attentiveness of nurses, and the compliance of assistants to see the rotting carcasses removed, the varying waves of chaos drowning the Dieu on any given day, all played into this rhythm.
Small blessings, at least November’s chill bleeding past high, narrow sills, gusting through the cavernous wards, carried away the offensive stench of putrefaction.
Whist the dispensary didn’t have the luxury of segregating men and women into their own wings, the Dieu’s staff had been able to impress upon the administrative board, the importance of bed-assignments restricted to patients of the same sex.
Caroline didn’t think the dead man’s counter-parts, sharing the same narrow cot, would be too bothered by the body’s absence.
The somnolent form, stretched next to the stiffened corpse, moaned, weak shift of his head, while the little Scotch doctress removed the desiccated poultice soaking the bandages bound about his skull. The eye ball beneath resembled a smashed grape, stuck into a festering bowl of rubbish. Swollen, edematous beneath her fingers, Caroline probed along the line of the obliterated cheek-bone, disconcerting sound of crackling, crepitus of dried blood, pus, and infected flesh, evident in the angry warmth confining an abscessed bleb of the orbital fracture.
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