The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The summer is now nearly over, and the nights have grown cold. Each day brings the familiar faces of the linen maid, the dentist, the mailman, the nurse who has just had a grandson, and the man who broke his finger on a bed rail last June. The start of his first autumn season at the hospital makes one fact very plain: Bauby has begun a new life, confined within the hospital walls to both his bed and his wheelchair.

September brings the end of summer vacations in the greater world, and also a new season to the hospital. Bauby inaugurates this new season with a new accomplishment of his own: his newfound ability to grunt a song about a kangaroo which has been taught to him as a form of speech therapy. He laments, however, that he has only heard faint rumblings of the outside world’s return to work and responsibility. He will hear more once his friends start journeying back to visit him. Théophile has new sneakers which light up every time he takes a step.

Claude reads back to him the pages that they have so “patiently extracted from the void every afternoon for the past two months” (131). He admits that he is pleased with some pages and disappointed with others. He wonders if they will add up to a book. He takes in Claude—her dark hair, pale cheeks, the long bluish veins on her hands, the big blue notebook that she fills with her neat handwriting, her pencil case full of spare pens—and thinks that he will put these details in the scrapbook of his mind as mementos of the summer’s hard work.

He observes a hotel room key in her half-open purse, as well as a metro ticket, and a hundred-franc note folded in four. This sight leaves him thoughtful and confused. “Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my diving bell?” he asks (131-132). “A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? We must keep looking. I’ll be off now” (132).