leaves for Detroit in search of work. He is employed on the assembly line at Ford Motor Company but finds the work exhausting and dehumanising. He falls in love with a prostitute named Molly who wants him to settle down in America with her but he confesses his mania for escaping from whatever situation he is in. He runs into Robinson and is surprised to learn that he has failed to make anything of himself in America. He decides to return to France and finish his medical training. Back in Paris, Bardamu completes his medical studies and starts a practice in the bleak (fictitious) suburb of La Garenne-Rancy. The residents are mostly too poor to pay him and he mainly deals with the consequences of botched abortions and takes on hopeless cases which other doctors won't touch. His patients include Madame Henrouille and her husband whose mother, Grandma Henrouille, lives in a shed behind their house. They want her committed to a mental asylum but Bardamu refuses to help them. They hire Robinson to kill her but the booby trap he prepares for her explodes in his face, blinding him. In an attempt to hush the scandal, the Henrouilles arrange for Robinson and Grandma Henrouille to manage a mummy exhibit in the crypt of a church in Toulouse. The old woman turns the exhibit into a profitable venture. Robinson, whose eyesight is gradually improving, becomes engaged to a woman named Madelon who sells candles at the church and has been caring for him. Robinson and Madelon plan to murder Grandma Henrouille and take over the exhibit. One night Robinson pushes the old woman down the steep staircase to the crypt, killing her. Meanwhile, Bardamu finds a job in a lunatic asylum on the outskirts of Paris. The director of the asylum, Dr. Baryton, starts taking English lessons from Bardamu. Moved by the Elizabethan poets and the tragic history of Monmouth the pretender, Baryton loses all interest in psychiatry and leaves for England, putting Bardamu in charge of the asylum. In Baryton's clinic Bardamu has a new affair with Sophie, a nurse from Slovakia. Robinson meets Bardamu and explains that he has left Madelon and their lucrative job at the crypt because he doesn't want her and her love. Bardamu allows him to stay at the asylum and gives him a menial job. Madelon tracks Robinson down and threatens to turn