The Fan-Maker's Inquisition (2 page)

—Have you ever been fucked by Sade?

—Never.

—You have painted scenes of unnatural acts punishable by death.

—I have painted such scenes. And I have also painted the body in dissolution. This does not make me a murderess! For exactitude, I have visited the medical school and the morgue.

—A distasteful practice for a woman! Does nothing disgust you?

—My curiosity overcomes my disgust, citizen. This has always been so. It explains, I believe, Sade’s interest in me. Our lasting friendship.

—How did you come to the attention of the Marquis de Sade?

—The Comtesse Cafaggiolo sent him to the
atelier
. I had painted erotic pictures for her on an Italian cabinet, very finely made. I painted scenes of amorous dalliance on the drawers, the doors, and also the sides and top: sixty-nine scenes in all, some of them very small. The comtesse treasured it and kept it in her most intimate chamber. How citizen Sade came to see it is for you to imagine.

—Describe this chamber.

—It no longer exists, citizen; it has been sacked and burned. But I knew it well, for the painting was done there, under the supervision of the comtesse. It was papered in yellow silk and trimmed in the most tender green. Three large windows opened out onto the gardens, and the walls were decorated with copper engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi, based on the drawings of Giulio Romano. The series was unique.

—These names are not familiar to me.

—Both men were once notorious, persecuted by the Catholic Church for the very pictures once hanging in the yellow room.

From the windows of the bedchamber one could see a fountain. It was the twin of one Giulio Romano had designed for Federigo di Gonzaga. As we speak, and as heads fall beneath Sade’s own window, the fountain plays even now in the Gonzaga gardens. My first real conversation with Sade took place beside it, soon after I had completed the fan. I had become the comtesse ’s confidante, and so it should not be surprising that we met again, as we did, beside the large
ucello
carved at the fountain’s base.

—Ucello? Ucello?

—A winged phallus, citizen. Seeing it, Sade exclaimed:
“Fuckgod!
I like this fountain!”

—Describe your conversation with the Marquis de Sade.

—Citizen Sade called our hostess “a purple brunette,” as she had very white skin with a violet hue. Unlike another woman of his acquaintance—I’ve mentioned her, La Soubise, whom he called “
une dorée”
—“a gold brunette,” and unlike myself, who, because of my olive complexion, he called
“une verte.”
Then he shared with me some of his curious theories. For example, he spoke at great length about an invention of his: “the metaphysical eye.” He likened the eye to a vortex that sinks directly to the soul, a vortex of fire that, paradoxically, is also a whirlpool in which one may drown.

He said that tears are potencies formed by the presence of light within the eye in concert with the heating action of the passions. He told me how the Maya of the Yucatán hurt little children to make them weep and so cause it to rain. The notion that pain could precipitate weather is a fascination of his because it suggests that the functions of the eye are simultaneously pertinent, acute, active, and mysterious, too.

Later, Sade described a machine of his imagination that could measure the distillation of light within the eye and the subsequent production of tears. A similar engine could measure the salinity of the bodily secretions: tears, saliva, sperm, blood, urine, sweat, and so on. According to him, the body is a machine lubricated by these fluids; salt is the fuel. He wondered about the manner in which the spoken word, producing vapor in the air, might influence the humors of others: their moods, dreams, and fantasies, the quality of their vision, sense of taste and touch, sexual desire—and also the weather.

—The weather?

—A droll idea of his: that words could produce wind. Just as the Maya thought tears—

—You have several times made mention of the New World. What has your involvement been in the production of a notorious manuscript that has recently come to the attention of the Comité?

—It is a project with which I am intimate and to which I am indispensable.

—Explain.

—Early in our friendship, Sade said I had the mind of a man. That was to say that I was fearless, fearless of ideas, which, after all, are mere abstractions until put to use. I told him that I had the mind of a woman, adequately stimulated, adequately served. You see: Under the guidance of an enlightened parent, I became an educated woman transcending the limits of my craft. My father was a scholar who, having lost the little he had, was forced to deal in rags and—as luck would have it—old books, which, after all, are often the best. So even if we ate gruel, we had books to read for the price of a little lamp oil, and that is how we spent our evenings. Father’s books were green with mold; they smelled of cat piss, they smelled of smoke, they were stained with wine, ink, and rain, or spotted with the frass of insects. Many contained copper engravings and even maps of invented or vanished lands. From a very young age, I was swept up and away by a ceaseless and vertiginous curiosity. My curiosity was never thwarted and always indulged—such was my education.

—Continue.

—As much as Father loved books, he loved theater. We were too poor to ever frequent the Comédie-Française, but we saw what we could: farces performed in barns by actors more ragged than we! Or the plays took place in the back of canvas booths thick with fleas; we prepared for the evening by rubbing our feet and legs with kerosene. Some of these plays seemed wonderful to me, and perhaps they were.

Once, after a particularly mysterious performance of
Beauty and the Beast
in a barn in which the Beast’s roars were made to echo horribly in the hayloft above the stage, we made our way home through streets barely visible beneath the stars and I asked my father which came first: plays or books? He thought the plays came first, the books after. And I asked him: If a thing on the great stage of the Comédie-Française was as real as he said it was, would the play have a life of its own within one’s head ever after? He told me yes: just as a book lives on in the mind, mutable as the weather of one’s moods. And what about the
actors?
I marveled. What happens to
their
memories? Are they swept away by the miracles they evoke? Does the painted scenery take on the colors of reality? Do the actors become all the people they have pretended to be? Father said: “Just as you, dear child, are all those beings and people you have read about in your fairy books and yet always yourself and none other, so it is with the actors.”

—How did you come to the attention of the Comtesse Cafaggiolo?

—I was a gifted painter, even as a child, and so at the age of fourteen I was apprenticed to Desgrieux on the Rue de Grenelle. There I learned my craft of fan-making and was trusted with the decoration of paper and velum fans, doing drawings in ink and paintings in the Chinese manner. One day the Comtesse Cafaggiolo came into the
atelier
and fell in love with one of these. It showed a delicious little nude reclining on a divan in a garden filled with curiously convoluted trees and flowering shrubs, snakes and elephants and snails…. Oh! I can’t recall all I’d crowded onto the mount of that fan! Shortly thereafter, she returned to take me to her yellow room, where I executed the paintings earlier described. Charmed by my capacities, she insisted I make use of her excellent library. I read avidly each night as, indeed, I always had, and became an obsessive bibliophile. So that all these years later, it should not come as a surprise that a humble fan-maker assists a notorious writer in the production of his book!

—Before we get to this book, has Sade’s manner changed during his most recent incarceration?

—He is often preoccupied with the oddest concerns. For example, for several months his conversation consisted of little more than descriptive lists of ideal kitchens. He described ovens roasting day and night, ovens large enough to hold an ox: “I would have my cooks roast an ox stuffed with a pig, the pig stuffed with a turkey, the turkey with a duck, the duck with a pigeon, the pigeon with an ortolan.” Along with the massive ovens, these fantasy kitchens contained great fireplaces fitted out with spits: “Sixteen spits all revolving night and day above a good, heaping mound of glowing embers, these to be attended by eight young roasting cooks, one for two spits, each naked because of the kitchen’s hellish heat. Each spit will hold three geese, sausages, sides of beef, sides of bacon. In the bakery: boys kneading dough day and night, producing buns by the hour, churning butter when otherwise not in service—”

—Sade is hungry in prison?

—Famished, citizen! He described maidens, not older than nine, shelling peas and beans, the bowls held between their thighs. White porcelain bowls, the maidens dressed in white, wearing white wimples. And scourers to scour the pans: saucepans—small, medium, and large. To be made of copper. To be scoured with sand. These scourers to wear aprons, citizen, and nothing else. “Whipped to a frenzy,” Sade said, “they will scour like nobody’s business.”

—All this was intended to evoke your laughter?

—My friend’s
intentions
have always been obscure to me. It is true he walks a fine line between comedy and terror.

—Can you tell more?

—Female cooks, big Dutch women wielding spoons—great wooden spoons as tall as brooms and good for flogging. Cupboards bursting with chinaware, silver services, pewter tankards for beer, crystal glasses for every sort of wine; a cellar brimming with barrels and bottles; the kitchen rafters groaning under the weight of hams. Dewy-cheeked goatherds too young to have beards wearing brief leathers and trooping into the kitchen by the dozens, each one carrying a young goat slung over his back. Male cooks in droves gutting the corpses of animals still bleating: lambs, wild boar, venison. In every corner, baskets gorged with onions; gravies bubbling in cauldrons; the dining table gleaming beneath spun-sugar palaces crepitating in the light of blazing candelabra; and, everywhere, freshly cut flowers. Servants running to and fro panting with exhaustion, carrying pyramids of sweetmeats on trays of gold: rare Oriental things soaking in honey, stuffed with pistachios. Marzipans in the forms of pagodas and clocks.

Every six hours, a group of fresh scrubbers arrive to clean the floor of grease and blood and cinders. For thirty minutes on their knees, these, in a lather, purify the place as the cooks, their assistants, the butchers and bakers, the goatherds and postulants, bathe in tubs supplied for this purpose and in full view of the diners, whose feasting is eternal. Sparkling clean, they return to their tasks with renewed purpose and vigor: quartering cows, skewering birds, scaling fish, glazing onions, threading cranberries, boiling jams, stirring tripe, stuffing geese, slicing pies, truffling goose liver, braising brains, tendering soufflés, jellying eggs, shucking oysters, pureeing chestnuts, larding sweetbreads, crumbling fried smelts, grinding coffee, building pyramids of little cheeses, filling puff pastry with cream, steaming artichokes, dressing asparagus, breading cutlets, making anchovy butter and frangipane and little savory croustades, gutting crabs, preparing cuckoos and thrushes in pies and cucumbers in cream, icing pineapples, lining tartlet tins with pastry dough, larding saddle of hare.…He also asked me to draw for him a number of gastronomic maps.

—[The interrogator looks confused.]

—The map of Corsica shows the regions for olives, chestnuts, lemons, lobster; for polenta, eels, the best roast partridge, cheese and sautéed kid; the map of Gascony shows the places where one may eat duck liver braised with grapes or a terrific soup of goose giblets.

—Is that all?

—Only the beginning! He invented a “Blasphemous Cuisine” superior, said he, to all others until contrary proof, a cuisine that is also a voluntary eccentricity born of legitimate rage.

—Explain.

—Sade invented a subterranean kitchen, a somber kitchen illumed by lanterns lit with grease, a room as black as the Devil’s arsehole, a chaotic, demonic sanctuary licked by the fires of eternal ovens, ovens belching flames and smoke, a kitchen like a delirium, a blasphemous laboratory animated by nervous irritation, insatiable appetites. In other words, a kitchen in which to prepare a cuisine of righteous anger.

These are recipes of his invention: A pope, massaged by thirty sturdy choirboys for six months and rubbed down daily with salt, fed on soup made of milk, thyme, honey, and buttered toast, is roasted in the classic manner stuffed with a
hachis de cardinal
and served with the truffled liver of a Jesuit and a
soufflé d’abbesse
. The whole generously peppered and garnished with capers.

—[Shouting above an approving rumpus in the room:] All this is grotesque beyond belief!

—Recall that Sade has often been in isolation, fed on brown water and black bread. Wildly hungry and enraged, he is the victim of his own fathomless spite. Do not forget, citizen, he was fabulating, only. Such a meal was never prepared, never served, never eaten. But, citizen—it is near midnight. Does the Comité never sleep?

Amie—