The Fan-Maker's Inquisition (10 page)

“I often wonder: If every living creature on the face of the planet moved to the North Pole, would all that heat melt the polar ice? If so: Would Paris be submerged by water?” And this (it is extraordinary how, once the mind has embraced a task, its gears and wheels are set to spinning!—despite a rotten mood and without a cup of chocolate!):

“It is usual to think that perfect beauty is masculine since the so-called Creator is male—or so some like to think. But the scholars all agree: The origins of everything are
celestial
. And, did you know? The stars are, each and every one of them,
hermaphrodite!”

This is an intriguing idea. More interesting in its way than the old Babylonian quackery that the stars influence life of the planet or that a stellar cataclysm will produce prodigies. (If so, at my conception there should have been a stunning meteor display. There wasn’t.)

“I do not believe in God,” she told Gabrielle that first night, “but in starlight, the stellar wind, the insistent energy of the Heavenly bodies as they converse in Ether. I am certain that if we could navigate Infinity, the closer we’d get to the stars, the more we would feel at home.”

One very long day on the heels of another; one very long night.

The eye is active: It tigers the mind. It feeds on light, is informed by shadow. And if it is so that the eye can “kill with a glance,” a horrendous sight can cause a stalwart man to fall over stone dead. Not stalwart, I stay away from my window.

Solvite corpora et coagulate spiritum
.

If, as some think, Nature needs to coagulate, corrupt, and dissolve in order to renew Herself, then shall I, having rotted away, be born again? Will I, after so much suffering, and with the help of a sound digestion and the philosophical fire, become
perfect?
Or simply
more corrupt?
You see: Suffering makes the spirit mean. It impoverishes the heart.

Many are the days when I become so crusty that I fear I will calcify or, perhaps worse—surely worse—turn to mud. I prefer calcification. To be a kind of aggregate of crystals; to, in other words, achieve an optical quality and, like the Maya shamans, a certain
transparency
.

To be
prismatic
in habit! To be…reticulated. To be studded with bright angles. My girth has imparted an unavoidable
opacity;
I am in a chronic state of eclipse. If I could, I would choose to be formed of rock crystal, to be, there and here: water-clear! Chemically pure: lucent, refractive, prismatic. Ah! To be
prismatic:
splendent, a changeling. To glimmer.

Then again, one might be graphite—a good conductor of heat, if I remember well.
Magnetic!
To be, like amber, electrified by friction! To be of malachite:
always green
. To be a malachite dildo up the ass of a youth handsome in the extreme. To be gold: a gold ring on the finger of an inexhaustible
branleur. Mais oui
…to be anything but mud!

I have pawed her last letter; I have worried it as a dog worries a rib; I have wept over it as though we had been lovers; and I have pondered—all night I have pondered—knowing full well how preposterous it is, a total waste of time: the reasons, the Unreasonable Reasons, for her execution. I know our friendship is in part to blame; the Revolution has embraced sexual prudery with the same passion a necrophiliac embraces corpses. So there’s a reason:
friendship with Sade
. Further: I’ve been told our little story of the Inquisition in the New World has offended the Powers. (The Comité is made up of men who do not read, except the books they burn.) Now that Robespierre has embraced that bum-cleaver Yoweh—this rumor is more a certainty. Lastly:
her affection for women
. Above all, her brief liaison with Olympe de Gouges, who wrote a play to glorify D-before he proved himself a traitor: foolish mistake! A terrible play, I hear, yet people write bad plays all the time. Nothing comes more easily; I, myself, have done it. Surely she wrote the play to prove her patriotism—now, there’s a thing one should never do! What a trap
that
is! What it means to be a patriot changes from one instant to the next, and women have lost their heads for less. An example: a lady of my acquaintance who was seen eating a flan with a
député
out of favor with Robespierre for dressing too smartly and whoring. Both dispatched
sans un mot
. If it is possible to lose your head over
chemises
and
foutre
, well, then, surely a
play…!

Worse, really, is the Other Thing: Illicit Delight. Robespierre—I know his type well—hates a good time. Olympe (that silly name of hers!) and Gabrielle were lovers. Perhaps they flaunted it. Or, simply:
were seen together
. Once by the son who—I’ve a letter referring to this somewhere—came in upon them as they slept, sweet as lambs, in each other’s arms. The boy in boots, back from the wars, famished, blundering in and roaring them awake,
roaring
, wrote Gabrielle, as though
in the throes of a Catastrophe!
.

And they were seen many times by Restif, which was inevitable because
he could not keep his eyes off them!
. The thought of those two lionesses devouring each other, solarized by desire, was a hot magnet that caused his rusty article to wag and to weep. Imagine him for an instant if you will: Crouching at some spy hole or other, his brain in a boil, Restif stares and stares—he cannot help himself! His loathing is a sort of worship, you see. He’s crazy to encunt the two of them! Instead he’s reduced to spying: now manipulating his little faucet, now his little pen, no longer in possession of his wits, scandalized by the two “notorious loudmouths” who go at it with hilarity, tenderness, and ingenuity. Ah! Ah! His fuck is flying!

Now that he’s emptied his balls, the Owl of Paris is replete with scorn. Off he goes to publish another broadside against the two, posts some, hands more over to the booksellers, and then, having supped on fresh peas, finds a little whore to frig him. Damned! Tonight in my loneliness, the certitude that Restif ambles my beloved Paris—Paris! her mysterious doors! behind each door a lass with a beautiful ass, a green footman as fuckable as my beloved La Jeunesse! each door like the cover of a forbidden book to be opened! each lover within a book to be read, a book to be written! Paris!—that
he
, the ignoble Restif, splashes about freely in the filth of his own making, like an infant making merry with his waters and turds, while I am contained like a thing in a box—so wretched a box! so wretched a thing!—throws me into such a temper that I am reduced to trembling with rage and cannot write without breaking the nib of my pen!

Peeping through holes is a singularity of taste I can well understand
when it takes place in a brothel
. Once, long ago…Ah! There it is again: the specter of the Lost Manuscript! I itemized a hundred things, each more outrageous than the next, that one might imagine peeping at through the apothecary keyhole. I included the tale of a libertine, hated for his miserly tips and glacial ejaculations, receiving the gift of a blazing hot fart well peppered with pimento in the eye. A touch of realism: One frolics with whores at one’s own risk. (No one knows that better than I! Whores and a strumpet sister-in-law as beautiful as the day—these are the items at the top of the list of my undoing!) And here, in passing, forthwith, and for the gracious reader’s enlightenment, are listed the

Ah! Ah! Ah! Perish
that
horrid, horrid thought! (And here you have jail’s greatest mortification: the fact that one’s thoughts cannot be aired out, not ever! And so one cannot help but think such things, to stew and pickle in them. Because once they are thought up, there’s no forgetting them! That is, not until an equally disagreeable idea attaches itself to the brain like a tumor.)

Olympe had enraged Restif, and how? I know the facts from Gabrielle:

He had followed her into the Jardin des Plantes. Suddenly, there he was, bowing and beaming in the path’s turning, complimenting her on a pamphlet she had just published but which, it was clear, he had not properly read, and commenting on her attire:

“Carmagnoles! Carmagnoles! Everyone is wearing carmagnoles! But you,
madame
, are the only one to carry it off!”

Restif proposed a cup of coffee at the fashionable M. Pickersgill, which had just opened and was all the rage—with its murals depicting Captain Cook trading in beads in Otahiti; the beauties of the Bay of Matavai, Tropical Scenes including natives riding the waves on flat pieces of wood (a thing, I hear, still causing much animated discussion), and pictures of the Adventure and the Resolution sparkling beneath the tropical sun.

“The coffee is hot, the pastry excellent, the murals
must be seen
, the conversation—as you, dear
madame
, and I will be its principal authors—will be sublime.
Alors!
What do you say?”

“I hear you have already etched your name into one of those famous murals,” Olympe replied in her driest tones. “It seems no place is secure from that maddening habit of yours. Indeed, you brand the streets and sights of Paris with the impunity of a gaucho branding cattle! I was sitting in a pretty little
cabriolet
the other day, its doors nicely painted, and there saw carved into the wood beside me your initials, the date, and the cryptic message:
The Wheel Has Turned
. ‘The Wheel of megalomania,
^*
for certain!’ I said to my companion, who informed me that her favorite bridge flourishes no less than six of your portentous graffiti! You have, sir, in a silent medium, begun to create a certain cacophony that I, for one, resent.”

Restif trotted off as fast as he could. Later, when Olympe left the gardens, she saw a gentleman standing before a large oak tree freshly carved with the pest’s initials and the date, and a phrase she could not decipher.
^*
She asked that it be read aloud; the gentleman obliged:

“L’eau des marais n’est ni saine, ni claire, ni agréable à boire.”

“Little does the scurvy creature know how sweet it is to drink from your cup,” Gabrielle would tell Olympe when she heard the tale. “But I shall fear for you, knowing how Restif hurt my friend Sade, who, at this moment, languishes in a tower, and this in great part because of Restif’s fabulations. He is as much a chronic
mouchard
as he is a slanderer, and a defacer of public property.”

“It is true,” Olympe sighed, “that before he scrambled off, he looked at me with such rage that I am certain he would have—if he could have—had me sent to Salpêtrière at once to be chained inside a kennel.”

“It has happened to women as spirited as yourself,” Gabrielle replied knowingly.

Having told Gabrielle her story, Olympe de Gouges was eager to hear mine.

“It’s an old story,” Gabrielle told her, “most recently revived by a fiction of Sade’s that reveals to the utmost degree the horrors of incest, and although as yet unpublished, a manuscript is in circulation. Everyone knows of Restif’s incestuous behavior—”

“Not I!”

“One night, Restif awoke his eldest daughter lustily with kisses. In his excitement, he forgot the candle he held in his hand and set fire to his wig! His wife came running, and the Owl of Paris spent the night in the street in his singed wig and
chemise.”

“Well done!”

“Restif—whose nose, like a street dog’s, is everywhere at once, and whose entire
oeuvre
is an act of self-justification—”

“When it is not
glorification!.”

“—is convinced that Sade is pointing his finger—”

“The manuscript’s title?”

“Eugénie de Franval
. Restif blames Sade, as do so many others—and I cannot stress this enough: as do so many others enfevered by Restif’s lies—for what he calls Sade’s ‘aberrant and violently disordered imagination.’”

“And Sade?”

“Sade says: ‘My imagination is aberrant,
perhaps:
but it is
mine.’”
(Exactly so!)” ‘A man—especially one denied access to the world and its diversity, its infinite pleasures and even its pain’ “—(for yes! here in my tower, steeped in despair and humiliation, the pain of Real Life evokes wistful longing)—” ‘a man, I say, has the intrinsic right
to imagine!
. If they wanted to keep me from dreaming nightmares, they should not have locked me up! The less one acts, the more one imagines, and that is the truth. And so, here I am, instead of wenching, writing books fit to plague Mephistopheles Himself and all his troop of lesser demons!’” (How well she quotes me! How carefully has she read my letters! Ah! My exemplary fan-maker!)

“And you, lovely Gabrielle,” Olympe says, pressing;—or so I imagine—her lips to Gabrielle’s wrist: “What do you think of this fiction that so maddens Restif?”

“Sade worships ambiguity. In other words, the story never settles down, but teases the mind incessantly. The end is weak”—(she’s right!)—“but I suppose he bent to the demands of propriety”—(a hateful thing for a writer as inventive as I am and as angry!)—“in order to publish the thing.”

“Already I like him less!” (For this, Olympe, I like you more!)

“Yes. Well, but listen. Within the tame frame of the tale’s beginning and end, the writing is outrageous and stunning.”

“Fit to plague Satan?”

“Fit to plague Satan, my dear Olympe. And this, in part, because it is so, so…ambiguous.”

“You have me curious. Go on!”