The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Here, Bauby recounts a dream of visiting Paris’s wax museum, the Musée Grévin. In his dream, the museum design remains true-to-life, but the wax figures—“these boys in T-shirts and girls in miniskirts, this housewife frozen with teapot in hand, this crash-helmeted youth”— have been replaced by the nurses and orderlies who attend to him (109).

He recalls that, at first, some of the hospital staff terrified him, as he saw them “only as [his] jailers, as accomplices in some awful plot” (110). He later hated those who lacked gentleness, and those that left him all night with the TV on. He admits that, for a few minutes or a few hours, he would cheerfully have killed them. With time, however, as he got to know them better, he understood that they each carried out their duties as best they could. He even gave them secret nicknames known only to himself and observed each of their individual quirks and foibles.

He admits that his dream did not adequately capture the details of the hospital personnel, “northerners whose ancestors have always lived on this strip of France between the Channel coast and the rich fields of Picardy” (111). He muses that it would take a medieval miniaturist to truly capture them in their fullness, and that he has grown fond of each of these people whom he nonetheless sardonically terms his “torturers.”

Entering a different room in the dream-museum, he finds himself in a perfect reproduction of Room 119—except that the photos, drawings, and posters on its walls have become “a patchwork of ill-defined colors” (112). On the bed, there is “a hollow in the middle of the yellow sheets, bathed in pallid light,” instead of his own body, and the “members of his personal bodyguard that spontaneously sprang up around [him] immediately after the disaster” surround it (112). There is Michel, sitting on a stool and writing in the notebook in which visitor write down all of Bauby’s remarks. Anne-Marie arranges a bouquet of forty roses. There is Bernard, “holding a memoir of diplomatic life in one hand and with the other executing a theatrical barrister’s gesture that [is] pure Daumier” (112). Florence pins children’s drawings on a corkboard, “her black hair framing a sad smile” (112). Patrick leans on a wall, lost in thought. Bauby reflects that this group of loved ones “projected a great tenderness, a shared sorrow, an accumulation of the affectionate gravity” that he feels whenever they visit him (112-113).

Bauby recalls that he tried to explore more of the dream-museum, but a guard flashed a light in his face, and he awakened to a nurse shining a pen-light in his eye, rather ironically asking him whether he wanted his sleeping pill right then, or an hour later.