The Fan-Maker's Inquisition (13 page)

Then we were in St-Germain, and there came upon a throng of masons, carpenters, and the wives of executioners trafficking in the clothes of corpses and other nasty things; and also grooms, gold-beaters, doctors with their needle boxes and medicine bottles hanging from their headless necks; knife-sellers and salt-sellers. All were walking toward the Luxembourg gardens and holding their heads in their hands. In the cafés, the servers stood by looking dazed as their clients streamed past—clients who, had they wanted a glass of wine, could not have ordered it, nor drunk it down. “Business could be better,” a girl sighed as we passed, adjusting the ribbon at her neck with trembling fingers. “I’ve not poured a drink all morning!”

The gardens had been torn apart to make room for the graves; everywhere the earth heaved with the dead or was deeply pitted with holes. The stench was untenable…and the noise! For the place swarmed with criers carrying shovels and shouting out the names of those sentenced:

“Bernadette Fossour!”

“Thomas Clipped”

“Reine Latour!”

“Martin Gueux!”

One by one the dead leapt into the waiting graves, holding their heads and, as though they were playing a game, shouting:

“Et hop!”
And
“Hop-là! Hop! Hop! Hop!”

“You hear that?” I said, turning to Restif. “They’ve not called my name.”

“But they shall!” he beamed. “Without a doubt!”

Then all was submerged by a tide of bleating sheep, driven by shepherds who, above the tumult, shouted:

“The dead, too, must eat!”

“Since when are the needs of the dead of interest to the living?” Restif snorted disdainfully.

The scene changed. We were in an open field. Exhausted, we spied a haystack and thought it a fine place to sleep. Drawing closer, I saw it was made not of hay but of hair; in any case, I did not want to spend the night in such close quarters with Restif. Leaving him there, I continued on alone until I came to a field of blue lupines. Stretching out among them, I awoke from my dream, having torn both blankets and ripped the curtains from their hooks!

I awoke to a terrific hubbub: the sound of hammering and shouting. For one joyous instant I thought:
They are taking down the guillotine at last!

“It is the Festival of Reason!” the dullard who brings me my water each day informed me—having, as usual, spilled most of it before unlocking the door. “They say there’s people screwing on the altar in Notre-Dame! A regular orgy in the sacristy! A cobbler named Clootz pissed into the face of Jesus Christ!”

“And
down there?”
I asked, peering out the window and into the courtyard, where the guillotine still loomed but where a platform was under construction. A crowd had gathered to watch men in britches the color of dung carry a crude statue as ugly as sin: “What the fuck is going on
down there?”

“Reason Herself!” the wine-sop sputtered with excitement. He put down the pitcher with such ill-advised force that it cracked. “She’s to stand beside the chopper—” Indeed, as he spoke the thing was hoisted up and set to stand beside the block.

“The view,” I sighed, “is not much improved.” This
bon mot
caused the scoundrel to kick over my pitcher in a fit of temper. It shattered, and as he refused to bring me another I am forced to spend the day
without water
. To freshen my face I rubbed it with a little brandy I keep for head colds, but the nitwit left the chamber pot and I am forced to breathe that essence of man as I sit here, attempting to gather the shreds of myself about me, and this despite the racket.

Ten will be executed today in Reason’s name: a most unreasonable number.

So! The day dawns under the sign of the Broken Pitcher and the Full Chamber Pot. It is likely that the afternoon will unfold under the sign of Shadow. Already darkness, palpable, thick as treacle, enters into my body’s every orifice. Shadow is the primary sign and lesson of the times and the place;
malgré moi
I am a student of Applied Darkness.

There are those born under the sign of Revolt; others under the sign I call the Maze; others, born under Charybdis, are designated by a vortex of gravel and ice. Good days—those animated by the sun, the ocelot, the water lily—when the mind heats up like a meteor and I, dizzy with the speed of the fall, cling to my pen (the one thing that grounds me)—I write. I write a storm of such power it annihilates everything else. Restif is right: My tower cannot contain it, and already it rages through the world. It sets the world on edge; it tips the balance of things. This storm is called Juliette, when it is not called
Justine
.

Sade—you once said to me: “Living in a cell is like suckling a sword.” So it is for me tonight. If I lift my eyes from this letter for an instant only, I taste blood. But looking down, dipping my quill in this precious ink, the past resurges and I am far from this unforgiving place.…

Thus Gabrielle continued her letter to me that last night. And, a thing marvelous in itself, as I read her letter I, too, travel back in time and space and am far, far away. The next morning, after their first amorous encounter, Gabrielle returned alone to the
atelier
in time to meet a party of Turks,

These lines were supposedly intended for the three of us, yet were clearly inspired by La Fentine. Indeed, later in the day a gown of
framboise
and gold
brocart
arrived for her along with a card signed simply: “A Meanderer.” “This,” I told her, “means he comes from the Meander River valley. I remember my father once pointed to it on an old and brightly colored map.” La Fentine wanted to see the map but
hélas,
it had been lost when Father’s shop was burned. That a man might in his life take a winding course, as does a river, evoked something deep within her. All day La Fentine was silent—a thing wondrous in itself! When a small, beautifully wrought box of brass arrived the next day containing a solitary gem—a black pearl the size of an eye—I knew La Fentine would be leaving soon and did my best to prepare my heart against her absence. Four thousand fan-makers in Paris—but none as gifted as she. (As it turned out, business was slow and I did not replace her. I did not do badly—so many were out of work: the gauze- and lace-makers especially. The Revolution despises frivolity, as you know; more than one lace-maker is forced to fuck if she would eat!)

The pearl had been set in silver. That afternoon, I put aside my paints and brushes to make for her a choker of braided ribbon the colors of silver old and new, with one solitary
framboise
thread running through. When La Fentine’s Meanderer reappeared with an invitation to dinner, she was ready. Tall and dark, slender as a reed, her breasts no bigger than plums, there was nothing “Flemish” about her! And yet…Her suitor had seen that she was a treasure house of tender pleasures. The night he came for her, La Fentine shimmered!

Not long after, they married in Neuilly—in Monsieur de Saint-James’s eccentric garden. It was November. Well bundled up against the cold, the party drank to the couple’s health under trees hung with balls of yellow glass. We supped in an artificial grotto made into a fanciful arbor with the bones of fish, and heated with brass braziers as in Roman times. Monsieur de Saint-James, a collector of everything from fountains to the skins of snakes, was a feverish soul, harmless yet clearly mad. He pointed out the various species offish whose skeletons had provided the canopy: the ribs of whales, the spines of eels…the entire ceiling was constellated with starfish. (I have heard that these marvels were destroyed last summer, rather than saved for everyone’s delight. Yet it is foolish to mourn the passing of a fancy—no matter how charming—in times such as these.)

“I very much hope that Turkish wives are better treated than French ones,” Olympe sighed once La Fentine had been swept away by her Meanderer. “After all, in France marriage is said to be menaced by
lasciveté
and not enhanced! The wife who makes her marriage a place of pleasure acquires in the public eye the attributes of the courtesan. Her husband distrusts her. The better a wife in bed, the greater a husband’s jealousy.” It is true! That very week, a fan-maker of my acquaintance had lost an eye to her husband’s anger!

We were exploring the garden alone; Monsieur de Saint-James had made us a map of his marvels—among them, cascades of warm water covered with glass
.

“How frivolous this is!” Olympe suddenly declared. “There is a fine line between the frivolous and the marvelous, and here our host has crossed it!”

“It is true,” I said, taking her hand, “that since the Greeks, pleasure has always taken place outside of marriage.”

“A tradition to uphold,” she laughed, nibbling my fingers one by one
.

“The Greek wife labored in the garden growing domesticated plants. These exemplified her husband’s seed,” said I, “and her own fecundity.”

“How dull! And the whore? Tell me about the whores of Greece! What were their gardens like?”

“They had no time to garden! But exemplified wildness and the heady perfumes of savage things. Rosemary growing in crags, and thyme and sage beside the mountain paths. Brushing against these plants, the clothes are perfumed—as is the lover who embraces them. ‘Hour after hour,’ one poet said, ‘you are haunted by the smell of their wildness!’”

“As when I first saw you,” she said. “I left the
atelier
and took your fragrance home with me. Waiting for you, I was so agitated by the persistence of your perfume my hands shook! You smell of rosemary,” she said. “Fan-maker, you smell of illicit delight.” Then she put her arms about me and I could feel her heart leaping beneath her cloak. “I don’t give a fig if Restif calls me a
débauchée impudique
and puts me on his short list of current whores!” she whispered in my ear
.

I laughed: “Let us counter his list of whores with a list of bores.”

“It will be a long one!” said she
.

Two things, dear Sade, you must know: In September, when Olympe applied to her section’s Comité de Surveillance for a “good-citizenship certificate,” she was refused. Or rather, the scoundrel in charge, a pig named Bouhélier, cited Restif’s list of whores
.

“Show me your cunt,” he said. “Then, perhaps, if I find it to my liking, I’ll give you a certificate
, madame,
and
mes hommages!”
(I should say that I never applied for one myself. It seems an indignity and an absurdity. Besides—the things are bought and sold like salty rolls! And furthermore: If women cannot vote, nor meet together, they cannot be called citizens!)

The month after La Fentine’s wedding, Olympe’s play
L’Esclavage des Noirs
was performed by the Comédie-Française—and this despite the ominous “weather.”

In the first place, the actresses had quarreled over the part of the slave, Mirza, until they realized that she was to be played
black.
Then no one wanted the part. Next, the
colons,
many in retirement in Paris, having pressured the
maréchal
to postpone the play for three years, were enraged to discover it had been scheduled. Further: When the actors who were to play slaves realized that Olympe expected them all to be black, they got a
lettre de cachet
against her. Fortunately the judge called the affair ridiculous, or she might have landed in jail
.

“The theater is a lesson in Virtue and Tolerance,” Olympe told the actors at the first rehearsal. “No wonder Voltaire called the Comédie-Française a ‘puppet theater’! You are all puppets of the
colons.
’” Taking great strides across the stage as the actors cringed, she raged:

“All my life I have been harried by those who would intimidate me. Penniless, without education, I have paid for my current freedom with humiliations beyond number. But I am a writer
, mes amis,
not a criminal, nor an hysteric to be muzzled and leashed! My play is not a wall to be whitewashed at will!

“All my life,” she hissed, surrounded by the actors, who, silenced, seemed to be listening, “I have turned a deaf ear to interdictions and decrees. The words ‘compulsory’ and ‘required’ disgust me, as do words of so-called advice, good counsel from fools, fleas in the ear!”

Hélas—
she had not shamed or inspired them, but enraged them. “We will not be Negroes!” they cried
.

Here is how it turned out. The actors played their parts as “savages” from an imaginary continent, in grass skirts, turbans, and nose rings—and all were heavily rouged. But it was impossible to know if the play was as bad as people have said, for the
colons
came each and every one to pound the floor with their canes and, without pause, shout violences and obscenities. The madman Hébert screamed “Kill them all!” at the top of his lungs, although it was unclear whom he wanted dead. Robespierre left as soon as the shouting began; Danton, looking nauseous, attempted to still the crowd to no avail; the great actress Montansier was busy kissing a young officer named Bonaparte; and a group of mulattoes from San Domingo, who had come to Paris to assert their rights before the National Assembly, sat as still as faience
.