From this point forward, Debussy would stagnate in the “factories of nothingness”—a phrase borrowed from “our Jules” Laforgue—and would lead an “existence that was circumscribed by a rubber ring.” Although he was given morphine over a period of four months, he noted that “the drugs have no lasting effect.” Since he was not able to leave the house, Emma told his most trusted friends about his condition and invited them to visit. Dukas came to see him on 12 January and tried to cheer him up; the next day, the Laloys came for lunch. And on the 14th, radium treatment began. Knowing that he would be incapacitated for a certain length of time, he chose some classic reading matter, asking his bookseller for Blaise Pascal's Pensées and his Lettres provinciales. “He is better,” Emma was able to report to Pasteur Vallery-Radot; but two weeks later the composer reported that he had been ill for seventy-three days! Even so, he met with Raphaël Martenot on 7 February to double-check the harp part in the (Deuxième) Sonate en trio.

Debussy was probably not up-to-date on what was happening with his works outside of France. It seems that on 4 March, at the Aeolian Hall in London, his Sonate pour violoncelle was premiered by Mr. C. Warwick Evans, with Mrs. Alfred Hobday as accompanist; a second performance, by Léonce Allard and Marie Panthès, followed on 9 March at the Saint-Pierre casino in Geneva. England had clearly passed the torch to Switzerland, for in the same concert at the Saint-Pierre casino, Mme Rollan-Mauger sang the “Noël des enfants qui n'ont plus de maison” for the first time.

Debussy was inundated more than ever with money problems, compounded by medicinal and pharmaceutical costs, as evidenced in some letters to Durand and to his regular “financiers.” To one of them, Gaston Courty, he went so far as to claim that he had an engagement in 1917—in Buenos Aires, no less. Segalen went to visit him on 3 May, and the next day he wrote to his wife, giving his personal medical opinion that the composer was “in remission from an extended and serious illness that, it must be understood, is incurable.”