In a High Wind

From Paris' Right Bank last week came two messages of hope. The hope could be felt by those afflicted with anything from climacteric melancholia to a tendency to burp at cocktail parties.

White-bearded Andre Berillon, backed by the 41 textbooks on hypnosis and psychotherapy which he has written in his 87 years, offered a panacea by hypnosis. Known as the Doctor of Fear because of his pervasive pessimism, Berillon sat hunched in his eerie consulting room, a tight, dusty black suit stretched on his bony frame, a black skullcap pulled over his forehead and a purple velvet tie flapping about his scrawny neck. The floor was littered with bric-a-brac and jagged pieces of skulls. Intricate, whirring machines on the table set colored lights blinking. They were calculated to put patients into hypnotic slumber.

Never Again! Yes, Berillon muttered, by hypnotism he could cure "almost anything." Could he cure a drunkard that way? Replied Berillon: "I treated an alcoholic only once. I put him to sleep and in his trance made him hold up his right hand and swear never again to use it to touch a glass containing alcohol.

"The patient returned two days later, saying: 'Doctor, I find I cannot use my right hand to drink with, but my left hand picks up a glass quite freely. Could you do something about it, as anyway I am left-handed.'

"To repair this oversight, I hypnotized the patient and made him repeat the formula for his left hand.

"But next week my sister told me she had seen my patient in a bar, drinking brandy through a straw. Ever since, I have left alcoholics alone."

An ardent disciple of Berillon, Lucie Guillet, offered the second message of hope. The science she--and she alone--practices, she calls poetico-therapy: the cure, by poetry, of nervous disorders, or physical ailments arising from them. Madame Guillet is a short woman in her middle sixties with an extraordinarily girlish figure, peroxide blonde hair, bulging green eyes and a seared, flabby face. During her poetic treatments, her normally rasping voice, punctuated by peals of raucous laughter, slips easily from a piercing falsetto to a husky, melodramatic whisper.

"I bring to nervous therapeutics a new power--the poetic fluid," Madame Guillet announced. Her science is based on Berillon's theory of cerebral balance. This theory contends that, in the perfectly adjusted human, the right half of the brain, containing will power and reason, exactly balances the left half, which encompasses man's sentimental and mystical qualities. When one side greatly outweighs the other, psychological disorders result.

Madame Guillet divides poetry's healing properties into rhythm, sonority and inspiration. Read or heard in the proper prescription and doses, it affects the "poetic fluid" in such a way that the brain recovers its equilibrium and nervous disturbances are cured.

Cast Anchor! At the age of 14, Madame Guillet treated her first patient. It was her mother's seamstress, an anemic, timid and depressed creature. "After three or four readings of vigorous poetry," Madame Guillet said, "she became so cocky I could hardly bear her company."

Since then Madame Guillet, by judicious prescription of iambic hexameters, rondeaus, ballads and lyrics, has cured her patients' ills and purged their souls in a fashion that would have startled Aristotle. Readings of Verlaine's Invectives cured a young man of a chronic cough caused by an Oedipus complex. With Victor Hugo's delicate descriptive poetry, Guillet cured a society matron of belching at cocktail parties. She comforted many mildly frustrated females over 40 with Lamartine's lines: "On the ocean of the ages will we never be able to throw the anchor just one day?"

One of Madame Guillet's most spectacular cures was that of the secretary of a Cabinet minister. Troubled by acute nervous indigestion, he perspired, turned cold and was unable to answer back when the minister bawled him out. "Some violently sonorous lines from Rostand's Cyrano cured him," Madame Guillet exulted, "and I was pleased to learn some weeks later that he had been fired for being insolent to his boss."

A grave problem is where poetry should be read to a patient. Cried Madame Guillet: "In extreme cases I recommend reading poetry in a high wind. Helas, it is a devil of a business to make oneself heard."

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