UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY by Umberto Eco Read Free Book Online Page B

to grow up. There was a time when I was full of ambition and desperate to learn, and day after day I felt discouraged by the fact that Mother Nature had not, in one of her moments of compassion, stamped me with that mark of genius which she grants to people every now and then."
    All of a sudden he stopped, with the air of one who realizes he has laid bare his soul. Whining little Jew, I thought. And I decided to embarrass him.
    "Is cocaine not said to be an aphrodisiac as well?" I asked.
    Froïde blushed. "It also has that virtue, so I understand . . . But I have no experience in that respect. As a man, I am not inclined to such itches. And as a doctor, sex is not a matter that much interests me. Although sex is beginning to be much discussed at the Salpêtrière. Charcot discovered that one of his patients, a certain Augustine, during an advanced phase of her hysterical manifestations, revealed that her earliest trauma had been sexual violence inflicted in early childhood. Naturally I don't deny that among the traumas provoking hysteria there may also be phenomena linked to sex, that is quite clear. But I think it is simply too much to reduce everything to sex. Perhaps, though, it is my bourgeois prudery that distances me from these problems."
    No, I thought, it isn't your prudery; it's because like all the circumcised men of your race you're obsessed by sex but try to forget it. I'd just like to see, when you put your smutty hands on that Martha of yours, if you don't produce a long line of little Jews and don't make her consumptive from the exertion.
    Froïde meanwhile continued: "My problem, unfortunately, is another. I have finished my supply of cocaine and am plunging into melancholy. Doctors in ancient times would have said that I have an excess of black bile. I used to be able to find the compound at Merck & Gehe, but they have had to stop making it, as they can find only poorquality raw material now. The fresh leaves can be processed only in America, and the best producer is Parke & Davis of Detroit, a more soluble variety, pure white in color and with an aromatic odor. I had a modest supply, but here in Paris I don't know whom to ask."
    Music to the ears of one who is well informed on all the secrets of place Maubert and its neighborhood. I knew certain people to whom it was enough to mention not just cocaine, but a diamond, a stuffed lion or a carboy of vitriol, and the following day they would deliver it to you, so long as you didn't ask where they'd found it. For me cocaine is a poison, and I thought, I don't mind contributing to the poisoning of a Jew. So I told Doctor Froïde that within a few days I would obtain a good supply of his alkaloid. Froïde, of course, didn't imagine my ways were anything less than irreproachable. "You know," I told him, "we antiquarians get to meet all kinds of people."

 
----
    "In cases of serious tooth decay, insert a wad of
cotton soaked in a four percent solution into the
cavity and the pain subsides immediately."
----

All of this has nothing to do with my problem, but helps to explain how, in the end, we became acquainted and spoke about all manner of things. Froïde was eloquent and witty. Perhaps I'd been mistaken — maybe he wasn't Jewish. It was easier to talk to him than to Bourru and Burot, and our conversation turned to the experiments of those two, and from there I mentioned Du Maurier's patient.
    "Do you believe," I asked him, "a woman that sick could be cured with Bourru and Burot's magnets?"
    "My dear friend," replied Froïde, "in many of the cases we examine, too much importance is placed upon physical aspects, forgetting that if sickness develops, its origin is most probably psychic. And if the origin is psychic, it is the mind that has to be treated, not the body. In a traumatic neurosis, the true cause of the illness is not the lesion, which in itself is generally modest, but the original psychic trauma. Do people not faint when they experience a powerful