With such accumulated stresses, the resurgence of de Guerville’s long dormant tuberculosis is not surprising. According to an obscure later publication by de Guerville, in the spring of 1898 he was revisited by the sickness that for so many years during his active, globe-trotting life had remained in check. As a result he gave up the The Illustrated American in March, 1898, when it was sold in public auction for $5,000, and for several months afterward he sought relief from his ailment in North America, from New York’s Finger Lakes to Florida, but all to no avail. By summer his six-foot frame, sturdy and vigorous in a photo from 1894, had withered to a mere 114 pounds. His left lung was completely eaten away, with the disease also making short work of the right one; his life, in his own words, “hung by a thread.”
In August 1898, living under his doctor’s prognosis that he would not survive the year, de Guerville opted to quit America altogether for France, wishing to see his mother and his motherland a final time before dying.31
We must take de Guerville’s own word on these particulars regarding his health, as such intimate details are not found elsewhere. The condition of his lungs aside, that by 1898 his marriage was ailing we can be certain. In late summer of 1898, when de Guerville quit New York City to seek relief from his tuberculosis, he apparently left his young wife behind. Partially as a result of this, in 1900 Laura Spraker de Guerville made a public suit for divorce on the grounds that her husband had abandoned her saddled with his debts. To these accusations she added elliptically and for good measure that she had “learned enough of his life abroad to justify her in bringing suit for an absolute divorce.”32
Final Wanderings and Writings
Like many who are sick, I no doubt repressed my illness a long time before it violently manifested itself. From the age of fifteen my life was very difficult and painful. Numerous exhausting trips to Korea, Cochin China, India, Egypt, Morocco, Cuba and all about the world, in all climates and seasons greatly improved my constitution. But feverish with a desire to see, to know, to sense, to comprehend, I expended immense energy and vitality, increasingly undermining my health as I threw myself into unending adventures.33
One wonders if de Guerville read André Gide. They were both Frenchmen, born the same year. Both were consumptive as well. In 1897, when de Guerville was beginning to struggle with the renewed and vigorous assault on his lungs, Gide published his Les Nourritures Terrestres, a call of affirmation that emerged from Gide’s own battle with the killer disease (“Fevers of bygone days, you consumed my flesh with a mortal consumption . . . O loving beauty of the earth, the flowering of your surface is marvelous! Scenes into which my desire plunges . . . ”).34 Though ostensibly a paean to life on behalf of a young man afflicted, bedridden, and lacking in a life aesthetic, the book came to represent to a whole generation of youth the primacy of lived experience and personal freedom over formal education and the social constrictions of the times. The vocabulary of Gide seems to resonate in de Guerville’s short account of his own struggle with “the white death,” written in 1904, after he too had reclaimed life.
In August 1898 de Guerville boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in Manhattan harbor and bid good-bye to the America that had nurtured and molded him over the previous decade. He would never return. He was going back to a Europe and a France he had never completely left behind. His younger brother had joined the invalid in New York to accompany him on a voyage he might very well not survive. By order of the Kaiser, hanging aboard Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, as with all passenger liners of the Hamburg Amerika Line, was a painting ostensibly designed by the Kaiser himself: Die gelbe Gefahr—“The Yellow Peril.” It depicted the Archangel Michael and an allegorical Germany leading the other European powers against an Asiatic (read Japanese) threat rising in the East represented by a golden Buddha.35
If anything could get the ailing de Guerville across the ocean in speed and comfort it was the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. Launched in 1897, she was the pride of the German commercial fleet, rivaling any ocean liner on the seas. Her massive engines could carry 1,700 passengers across the Atlantic in six days, and to de Guerville in the late summer of 1898 each day was precious. As it was, he was in no condition to enjoy the luxuries the Kaiser Wilhelm offered its coddled passengers. He was delirious from a high fever, unable even to feed himself.
But despite doctors’ gravest predictions, de Guerville did survive the journey, and the year. He even survived the century. However, what followed were nearly three years of hellish recovery, during which de Guerville often wished himself dead. From Paris de Guerville was dragged and pushed across Europe and the Mediterranean on the advice of various physicians. Normandy, Archachon in Burgundy, Mentor, Nice, Ospedaletti near San Remo, Palermo, Pallanza on Lago de Maggiore, Pégli, Abondance in French Savoy, and the list goes on. He tried every known remedy, including the experimental igazola, developed by an Italian physician in Palermo, in which a powder was heated to a gas and inhaled.
It is at Pallanza, however, that de Guerville learned of the remarkable successes being made at a place called Nordach near Baden in the Black Forest by a Dr. Otto Walther. So intense was the demand to get into the limited space of the Nordach Clinic that even for a man who had no trouble obtaining an audience with the Pope, a yearlong wait was required. The personalized treatment of Nordach was also extremely expensive, with the first hundred days having to be paid in advance.36
In September, 1900, de Guerville finally gained his coveted entrée to Dr. Walther’s clinic, and from that time until May of the following year ascribed to the strict regimen that made Nordach so famous, and perhaps so effective: plenty of rest, high caloric intake, open windows, and most importantly, no medicines. This “abode of Spartans” was situated so as to be exposed to every wind. The sanatorium’s Liegehallen received the cool, often as not freezing, blasts day and night and in all seasons in order to dissipate impure air and facilitate the recovery of the lungs. It had a proven track record. By the early twentieth century the clinic’s fame had spread throughout Europe and America, spawning the rise of “little Nordachs” from Wales to Canada.37
It certainly seemed to work wonders for de Guerville, who upon his discharge in May, 1901, felt “totally renewed.” He even climbed Mt. Righi and Mt. Pilate near Lucerne, both well over two thousand meters. But the greatest testament to de Guerville’s newfound health was his pen. He felt well enough to write frankly about his experience with tuberculosis in a small tract entitled La lutte contre la tuberculose, which was later published in English and German editions.38 In 1904 de Guerville was inspired to revisit his experiences in Japan, Korea, and China with the publication of a little volume of reminiscences entitled—‘in Japan.’ Though its publication in 1904, just as another war threatened to erupt in the Far East, smells suspiciously of profit motives, it should also be seen as sign of de Guerville’s return to health. That his mind should turn again to far off Japan is indicative of the place that country continued to hold in his heart and imagination.
Au Japon enjoyed a respectable success, something that seems to have convinced de Guerville to direct his future energies to the writing of travel books. Book writing, rather than the deadline-driven writing demanded by weekly or monthly publications, accommodated de Guerville’s convalescence as well. With tuberculosis in the nineteenth century one doesn’t get that close to death and simply recover. Despite de Guerville’s optimistic accounts of his own “return” to life, his health certainly remained forever fragile.
That de Guerville chose as his next subject after Au Japon the arid lands of North Africa also suggests a still-ailing consumptive. The dry Mediterranean climes of such locales as Algeria and Tunisia were attracting hordes of European consumptives, a reality best illustrated by André Gide’s novel L’Immoralist. Along with an article on the Sudan for a French travel journal, in 1905 de Guerville published a travelogue of Egypt, La Nouvelle Egypt, a journalist-cum-tourist’s account of British Egypt. It enjoyed even greater success than Au Japon, and was soon translated into English and German, two nations that along with France were grabbing up colonial holdings in Africa faster than they knew what to do with them. Cheaper editions continued to