The Fan-Maker's Inquisition (12 page)

“It is true—”

“Perhaps the next crop will be less stupid.”

“That’s doubtful!”

“Well, then! We agree! These small abuses are inevitable. What matters is this: blood. The gears of the Revolution must

be well oiled with it!”

“You can’t make a
civet de lièvre
without killing a hare—”

“You can’t make a
pâté de foie gras
without killing a goose—”

“You can’t make wine without bleeding the grapes!”

“And you can’t fuck a whore without unbuttoning your pants!”

It is true that I am envious of Restif’s idle conversations, his suppers with friends, his nightly roaming, the fact that he can, at whim, ogle the merry youths roaring their joy in life like lions, the pretty candle-sellers dressed like fairies in grass green, the valets staggering under the weight of turkeys as they speed to some great table, the rouged bosoms of countesses true and false (Ah! but they are a thing of the past; I am forgetting…). I envy him because he is at liberty to lap up the displays of rarities in St-Germain, admire the delicious figures of wax that gaze upon the living with such affecting mystery one is drawn to them as to a breathing soul.

Once I fell madly in love with one of these: a serene blonde with pale green eyes of glass and hands as small as moths. She was standing among precious articles: Venetian mirrors, rare porcelains…she made me forget that my rooms were already cluttered and could not hold one more thing. I entered the shop and, leaning into the window, touched her hair. It was real! Some milliner or laundress had sold her hair to buy bread, and now it tumbled to the shoulders of a counterfeit girl who so aroused my hunger for beauty that my soul was dazzled!

Gabrielle…How I long to touch something beautiful tonight, if only for a moment. Your face, a new pair of kid gloves the color of fresh snow, a silk fan shot with gold! Now that you are gone, who will bring me the first rose of summer, the little cakes I love? With whom shall I share my dreams? Whose letters perfumed with a maddening mix of varnish, rosewater, and rabbit-skin glue will enable me to overcome my nightly terrors? I fear our book will suffer without your lively touch. I fear that without your sweetness to temper my bile, the book will become too dark, too overwrought, too cruel!

My fire is going out, and before I can continue, I must get it going, else freeze. The stove is difficult to manage, as the authorities fear I might brain a guard with a shovel, or shove a poker down his throat. It is fortunate that I have always kept a warming pan for my bed and my stoneware hot-water bottle. These, too, could be used to brain a public servant. To the fire, then, and I’ll roast an onion. In prison, the plate is never changed after the soup! (And the soup is execrable, although there is nothing simpler than the making of a good soup!) The potato isn’t French but one of those curious vegetables from the New World. Is this why they persist in boiling up weeviled barley? A potato! Something green! A plate of peas with a little pepper, some Normandy butter, a garnish of chopped parsley—and I would be in Paradise, if
mal vêtu
and too ill-equipped to entertain. (I fear they’ll outlaw the potato and finish off Parmentier, just as they did Lavoisier; they’ll outlaw the oyster for being obscene! Haven’t they beheaded the oyster-sellers? And hatters, moralists, actresses, bishops, watch-makers, professors, ice-cream sellers—they will outlaw ice cream! They say du Barry flailed about like a fish—just one of the Revolution’s many miracles:
the multiplication of fish.
)

Sometimes, when I am not at my best, but frankly madder than sane, I do a little jig I call “the Saint Guillotine”; my jig is of the sort hens do in all the barnyards of France come Easter. To be authentic, I’d have to do it headless; however, thus far I appreciate my jig’s
inauthenticity
.

I’ve had my supper, such as it was. Things could be worse: I can still pay for kindling, an onion, an apple (although the apple was as wrinkled and bruised as the clitoris of an old whore). What I would do for the cutlet I doubt I could digest, some chicken soup well-seasoned with saffron! For the truth of the matter follows: If I have alienated the entire universe by imagining fictive banquets during which little girls, roasted to a turn, are brought steaming to table, I am in point of fact
no cannibal
. Nor am I, nor have I ever been, a
coprophage
. Unlike, I must add, certain saints beloved of the Church whose appetites—for shit, for vomit, for pus and menstrues—have inspired my most feared and hated works. The one thing I once had (for these days, to tell the truth, I dream only of tenderness) in common with the saints was a healthy taste for the whip.

But now having supped, having survived another day, what am I to do to make it through the night? Fortunately, I’ve managed over the years to hold on to the dildo
of palissandre
. I call him La Jeunesse, for like a trusted servant I once had, he is always green. (You see how I am reduced to a curé’s piteous pleasures.) The other dildos: La Merluche and La Terreur were lost the last time my room was searched for “pornography.” (They have stolen more than two dozen manuscripts, including those lost when I was so precipitously removed from the Bastille on the fourteenth of July, 1789; all those my wife destroyed because she feared they would “come into the wrong hands and
compromise me”
[!]; all those I have not been able to hide—for although I keep on my toes, in a manner of speaking, the devils descend like the wind at a moment’s notice to sweep up everything in their path. If anything survives, it will be miraculous.)

So, yes, I have La Jeunesse. Ah!
Mais
—it’s not that simple. Physical needs are one thing, the needs of the spirit, another. (Note that I did not say “soul” but “spirit.”) The spirit must be fed, else it shrivels up too. Well, here is what I do: I reconstruct the city of Paris in my mind. My city opens before me like the buttered ass of an eager hussy, and I am free and I am king. “King?” you say.
“King?” Mais oui!
For here’s the thing: In the mind’s revolution, each man is king. Who in his right mind would choose to imagine himself a vegetable-peeler?

The first thing I do is to give Paris back her ornaments—that is to say, her signs, which were outlawed thirty years ago by that prick Sartines. He resented their size, unbridled paganism, ribaldry, and subversive humor (for there were caricatures of the clergy—wonderfully cruel—and pictures of kings being buggered by bankers). “Paris,” said Sartines, “chokes on obscenity.” It is true that the signs had proliferated to a dizzying degree, and they had succumbed to gigantism; it seemed the domestic articles of Brobdingnag were hanging everywhere. This proliferation was extreme, and yet in those riotous streets I remember so well, streets in which one needed to duck one’s head constantly else be brained by brass roosters, one walked turn by turn entranced, instructed, and amused: intoxicated!

In those days, one read Paris like a book. Imagine Diderot’s Encyclopedia thus: Universally Intelligible! An entire education was there or, closer to the truth, potentially so. In other words, I like to imagine my Paris hung not only with pork hocks and wheels of cheese but—and why not?—with the lost phallus of Osiris! The sacred cats of Egypt! Apis and the gemmed bees of Childeric! Here: Perseus holds the Medusa by her hissing hair! There: Diana, buttocks alert, stands beside the plumed Serpent of the Mexicas! Above: Saint Frances’s tongue, and, farther down the street: the Holy Mother’s Immaculate Cunt!

Speaking of Isis: I give Paris back to her. By hanging her image not only above every corset shop and dairy, but at the place where Gabrielle spent her infancy. In the shadow of St-Germain-des-Prés, I build her a temple, just as it was a few centuries ago, and as it had been since the Devil knows when. Black Isis, Queen of Egypt—I give Paris back to you!

But wait! I am not quite finished hanging signs. If my city is to be instructive, it needs minerals and maps, examples of geological turbulences, body parts, botanical models, bestiaries, and more: throughout the city, accumulations of disparate things wired together and designating the public wonder rooms where a multiplicity of possible orderings of Nature would teach Rational Thought and, thus,
Skepticism
.

Having imagined the signs, the inns (Le Con d’Or, La Bite d’Argent, Le Cul Royal, La Mandragore), the gardens (the Garden of Helpless Love, of Jealous Love, of Illicit Love, of Impossible Pleasures, of Memory, of Ideal Encounters, of Pandemonium, and of Promise), the whores (Séminale, Boulimia, Pomona, Féline, Sucette…), I next imagine a calendar of days:

A day devoted to memory; an entire month devoted to the study of dreams; a festival in honor of the prostate, of seminal fluid, of the orgasm; the opening of an academy devoted to the erogenous zones; a day to honor the Dog Star, the equinoxes and solstices; a month to honor astronomy and all the planetary and stellar phenomena; a surgeon’s day; a day to honor pastry chefs (with prizes given to those most adept in the manufacture of puff pastry); a day devoted to the public mourning of Life’s Errors; an entire year given over to the study of Primary Causes; a day devoted to International Forums on Masturbation; a day taken up with the fabrication of
grimoires
of chocolate; a month to honor Architecture, vanilla, and the coffee bean; a day in which everyone will wear a Persian bonnet and make beer; a day to honor mollusks and polenta; an entire year devoted to roses, another to lilies, another to irises, another to the phallus, the cunt, and gingerbread; an entire century to celebrate the Death of God; an entire century to condemn Bad Faith, the notion of God’s Grace, the Guillotine, the Pillory, the hangman’s noose, and English cookery; a decade devoted to perfume.

Saturdays: turned over to the painting and repair of all buildings public and private—everyone in work clothes, damsels with brooms, lots of fucking in municipal rooms; and in the evening: bonfires, pig roasts, carnival comedies.

Sundays: a public scrubbing—all assholes good as new; free dental work and lessons in the morality of Amorous Strategy, the precepts of an Enlightened Atheism, the Erotic Arts, and Philosophical Inquiry. Free theater, bouquets of seasonal flowers, and novels offered all around; cannons melted down into goblets, water pipes, and cowbells; midnight balls and—in the Maya manner—barbecues.

Monday through Friday: days officiated by a
Papa Fatuatum
—a Pope of Fools—to be elected each week. (All this as just another way of spitting in the eye of Saint-Just, who would have everyone a farmer, a soldier, or a worker—no fancies, no delights,
no women!
No fucking, no buggery, no sauces, candy, theater, books: just dull-witted eunuchs all dressed in canvas and horse hair and all made to sleep
like cattle on the floor!
)

In my Paris, everyone has a bed, a big beautiful bed with curtains of calico (summer) and velvet (winter) and sheets as white as cream! These beds to be the sanctuaries of erotic experiment, clarity, and amorous confusion.

In my Paris,
drôles
and
drôlesses
are so disguised as to have abandoned their particular humanity for a unique
transparency
of being. In other words: They are so
visible
in their disguises that they can no longer be seen. They bounce off the eye as a rubber ball bounces off the playing field. Wherever they walk, the city is a stage—a constant parade of true inventions! Fashion as the epitome of chaos! On stilts, in slippers of green glass, in pewter suits, in wigs of lilies…I dress my Paris in the hues not of convention, but of my own invention: fresh pea-porridge green, a deep violet called “Neptune’s balls,” rose the color of the palms of a Nigerian princess, a brassy gold called “Giulio Romano.” There are two rules only, and here they are:

High Priests of Astonishment, Masters and Mistresses of Masturbatory Madness, the Hierophants of the Sexual Heart, the Earls of Ejaculation—all roll into town on Thursdays in shoes fitted out with wheels. They are dressed in the manner of Mozabites; they wear masks of silk and silk veils; only their sex—always prodigious—is visible. Their task is to animate and imagine the Public Peep Shows wherein one may see a naked Perseus sporting a stony phallus and approaching the Gorgon with horror and admiration, or simply watch a maiden sweetly sleeping, a flight of geese (now, there’s a thing of such sumptuous banality it makes me weep just to think of it!), a cat licking her paws, a fishwife fucking an eel, a child eating a waffle, a field of wild lilies, a forest stream, a meadow brook, the sky, the sea…

This is what dreaming my Paris has taught me: that an infinite number of cities are possible; that our Revolution could have moved bloodlessly, with imagination and grace; that instead of burning, my Paris might have blossomed.

Last night I dreamed of my enemy Restif. Because of my girth, I was sleeping on my back, although it is said that this is unhealthy. I had pulled the bed curtains as close as I could to my body because of the intense cold, and the blankets—so threadbare they will have to be replaced sometime soon, but when?…the blankets I had pulled up to my nose.

In my dream, Restif and I were walking toward the Maubée fountain among trollops tricked out in the feathers of pheasants and swans. Each one wore a red ribbon tied to her neck “to keep our heads where they belong!” (This shouted from the street by a strapping redhead who saw how we both stared.) Then all the whores laughed bitterly and
cautiously
together.

We continued on. In the back of my mind I knew that Restif, although he was being companionable, was taking “the long way” to my execution. In the Faubourg-St-Martin, men moved like ghosts in the deserted streets, pushing wheelbarrows filled with human heads shorn of hair—a detail that struck me as particularly ominous as well as queer.…We found ourselves next crossing Rue St-Honoré by way of Les Poulies, where the blood of the slain had puddled. Someone had set down a makeshift bridge of planks, and we stepped across it gingerly. “Some stew of tripe!” Restif exclaimed. “Bah!” (He had soiled his shoes.)