The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [44]
October 23, 1852
Hotel de Seine
Rue de Seine
Paris
My dear Sister,
This is the first quiet evening I’ve had since I left town and I take occasion of it (as the French might say, if they spoke English) to quiet your apprehensions at home, to satisfy, in a measure, your curiosity.
But before he continues further, a caveat:
Do not anticipate, dear Lily, a detailed account of all I’ve seen and heard, nor yet, a chapter of horrors and oddities: what I write is meant for a succinct narration of facts and observations—so now to begin.
Fortunately, Carter does not stick to this game plan and proceeds with lively detail about his voyage by steamer and rail to Paris. On his first night there, two fellows he had met on the journey took him out on the town—and oh, Lily, what a time! “We supped at a grand café, a la Française, everything in great style such as you have never seen.” Then, in a sentence that does not come up for breath, he tells how the three strolled in the Palais Royal, “a most extensive pile of splendid buildings with a square and fountain and gardens in the middle, and gorgeous shops around, colonnades, and arcades all lit up in the most brilliant manner and crowded with chattering gay French folk—the whole is a tout ensemble, certainly not equaled in London, or the world.” Breath. “We were charmed.”
He seems almost drunk on the details, and it is somewhere between his descriptions of the tree-lined boulevards with their magnificent houses and his sharing his plans to go to the Louvre the next day that I recall why I went to Paris for the first time at his same age: to see Paris. That is reason enough, if not reason alone, to pack one’s bags. But Carter, it turns out, had also come to Paris with letters of introduction and a larger purpose: the man who had just finished his studies was actually continuing them.
As becomes clear in his second letter, he arrived in Paris just in time to get settled and make the opening ceremony for the winter session at the renowned La Charité Hospital medical school. Already, Carter had resumed a familiar routine. “In the morning I go very regularly to one of the great hospitals where the physicians and surgeons usually begin to visit at 8:00 or soon after. Then comes a lecture—a ‘clinique,’ we call it—then a walk to the ‘Laiterie’ (breakfast), where we arrive with a good appetite. In the middle of the day, I’m engaged at the lecture and dissecting rooms.” In addition, he regularly goes on rounds and attends lectures at Paris’s famed Hôpital des Enfants.
Part of me wants to say that making this trip was a very smart move on Carter’s part, a way to gild his résumé (not to mention, improve his French). But I know better. I have glanced ahead. And his daily entries soon leave no doubt that something else is going on here, something he would never share with his sister.
He had forgotten his Bible but brought all his demons with him. Like a storm that’s suddenly changed direction, Carter’s crisis of the soul has shifted from doubts about faith—the impetus for Reflections, a volume that is tellingly silent during this Paris period—to overwhelming anxiety about his professional prospects. Now that he has obtained his diplomas, he must make the transition from student to practitioner, yet Carter sees nothing but difficulties ahead. Rather than face them, he is in Paris, a fugitive from his own future. As he writes on New Year’s Day 1853, “The tolerable success and éclat of student’s progress at St. George’s is over. Then, knowledge was my sole aim; now, I must think of a livelihood.”
His is not an uncommon dilemma for a new graduate, but I suspect