A journey into sheer dread

The novelist Alphonse Daudet contracted syphilis in 1857, when he was 17, but the disease lay dormant for more than 20 years and it was only in the 1880s that its terrible symptoms really took hold of him with spasms, haemorrhaging, paralysis and chronic pain. By 1885 he was pronounced "lost" by his doctor, the eminent neurologist Charcot (Freud's teacher) but lasted another 12 years, with the help of absinthe, chloral and generous amounts of morphine.

Astonishingly, Daudet continued to write through the horrific terminal phase of the disease and produced several novels and the notes for a book about pain. The latter was problematic: he didn't want to turn his experience of dying into fiction, neither did he want to write an autobiography, for fear of upsetting his family. The material he gathered remained fragmentary at his death and was published in French in 1930 as part of his Complete Works.

In the Land of Pain, the English title given to the unfinished book, is all the more powerful for its rough, unglossed state; as Julian Barnes says in his introduction, "notes seem an appropriate form in which to deal with one's dying".

Vivid and impressionistic, it reads at times like a list of symptoms, at times like a sort of macabre prose poem: "Hot coals, stabs of pain as sharp as needles. Then chloral, the tin-tin of my spoon in the glass, and peace at last". Daudet was not given to self-pity: "Suffering is nothing," he once told his secretary. "It's all a matter of preventing those you love from suffering." But the notebook shows how his disease isolated him, socially and artistically: "Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him. Everyone will get used to it but me. ...There are days, long days, when the only part of me that's alive is my pain".

"Disease of the marrow", the euphemism for syphilis, reached epidemic proportions in the pre-penicillin era and was big business. Daudet tried all the cures; mud baths, diet, guinea-pig serum, suspension by the jaw and long visits to spas. The community of syphilitics at Lamalou provided him with many examples of pathos and grotesquerie. "No one remembers anyone's name; brains are racked all the time; there are great holes in the conversation. It took 10 of us to come up with the word 'industrial'," Daudet records, while a paralytic in the bath was overheard asking his neighbour "Excuse me, Sir, but is this leg yours or mine?" Julian Barnes's introduction and notes are more than just a fascinating commentary on this grim literary curiosity, they knit the story together, fill out the medical and social context of the disease and provide elegant brief biographies of Daudet and his circle in fin de si?cle Paris, many of whom, such as the Goncourt brothers, were fellow syphilitics. It looks like a slight book, but Daudet's eloquence is dynamite: "Very strange, the fear that pain inspires nowadays - or rather, this pain of mine. It's bearable, and yet I cannot bear it. It's sheer dread" - and you might be glad that the journey with him into the land of pain is a short one.