The Fan-Maker's Inquisition (4 page)

My favorite crier was the butcher’s daughter Césarine, who arrived with a basket, a brazier, and a chop impaled on a fork held up for all to see. With a voice as rich as a bowl of tripe she’d sing:

—and she’d grill it for you there and then.

We also evolved our own game of Heaven and Hell. I painted the itinerary on foolscap. The first player to reach Heaven got to embrace the Virgin Mary (Sade’s conceit), Torquemada, Kramer and Sprenger, or the pope of his choice. As you can see, to win was also to lose. Hell was better. You lost the game but got to screw any Jew who piqued your fancy, pantheists and Manichaeans, Ethiopians and Albigensians!

—Would you read this letter, citizen.

—I will. [She takes up the letter.]

Ma belle olive, ma verte,

I’m so gloomy! My breeches are worn through, my stockings in shreds, I’ve no ribbon for what’s left of my hair, and to tell the truth I long for something showy, a new silk coat, green and white, with a canary-yellow lining. To don such a thing in the morning, grab one’s favorite walking stick and be off! But I’d need clean linens, a fine shirt and all the rest, else, even in here, and if only to myself, not to look the fool. Today, to exorcise my demons, I itemized the things I used to wear. How I’d fuss over my buttons! They’d have to be inspired. My favorites were round, fronted with glass; each one contained a spanking green scarab, and all were perfect specimens. I had a silk waistcoat made up to match with an obelisk embroidered on each side, a sphinx at the heart. I called it “My Enigma.”

I had another—this one striped gold and pink with a tender green lining. The buttons were Chinese—pink jade carved to resemble naked ladies. This one I named “the China Peach.” A fellow would be beheaded in a trice if he walked about dressed like that now
.

These days
, ma verte,
I have the imagination of a peasant. If a hag tumbled out of her haystack and onto my chamber pot offering me three wishes, I fear I would be as foolish as the beggar who wished for sausage. You know what happens next:

The fool’s wife, a shrew and a scold, cries: “You pope’s pink arsehole! You knight of the Order of Cretins! What a turd in a piss pot you are, asking for sausage when we could have feasted on roast pig! Or even the king’s own
fesses
smoked like hams! I’ve not had a square meal since I married you, and now, when you get the chance, all you come up with is a stool the consistency of a newborn’s ca-ca to share between the two of us! What a miserable goat’s anal fissure you are!”

As you can imagine, this enrages the poor bonehead. It enrages him so much that he picks the thing up between finger and thumb and cries:

“I wish this sausage were stuck up this slut’s nose!” And at once it is. She, of course, is even angrier than she was—if such a thing can be imagined
.

“You miserable wretch!” she screams, the ignominious piece of tripe wagging like a puppy’s tail and causing her to sneeze—and each time she sneezes, she lets go a triple salute of musketry loud enough and hot enough to cause sunspots and other meteorological disturbances. “You bishop’s bastard with a stool for a brain! I will hound you till you shit pea soup and ham hocks, you dead camel!” And on and on until he cries:

“I wish this shrew were as she was before!” And so she is, and so they are—the two of them as miserable as they were
.

Ah! I, too, have used up all my wishes foolishly! My youth, my passion, my promise. Today, nothing much remains but fever that prodded by unrequited appetite summons a satanic sauerkraut renewing itself as it is eaten, not one sausage crowning the cabbage heap, but forty-four:

and so on and so forth. But these are mere garnishes! For gleaming like smiles, bedded down like houris within the mound of glistening cabbage that rises like the tits of
la Doulce France
in my mind’s eye, are chunks of fat-studded pork loin smoked and fresh, grilled and boiled, and slices of fried bacon as thick as dictionaries, and pork chops broad enough to sail the Seine on, and goose, and meatballs studded with onions, and onions as glazed as the eyes of slaughtered cows, and lastly—and thanks to Science, which has assured us that potatoes may be eaten with impunity, that rather than thin the blood they thicken it, strengthening muscle and bone, soothing the brain yet animating the intellect—a steaming heap of Dutch potatoes, yellow as butter, sausage-shaped, sweet as honey and as firm as my buttocks once were and are no more
.

I’d settle for a macaroon. When I was a little boy, I was given a large macaroon stuck with angelica and gilded with gold leaf. The nuns who made it had put in all their misdirected sweetness, and I could tell that as they pounded the almonds and sugar together in the mortar they had dreamed of love. I devoured it quickly and then, because it was eaten, threw a tantrum—a rage as terrible as that initial rage of infancy when I rode poor Louis the way the Devil is said to ride the damned, my teeth at his neck, my fists pounding his ears; had I not been stopped, I might have torn out his eyes! Sometimes, I long to tear out the eyes of those who keep me here, and everyone else into the bargain! To lard my victims with their own eyes!

It is true that I have been savage, I have savaged, I have
“oceloted”
a number of people; it is true I was once an ocelot disguised in a dove-gray coat and carrying a perfumed fan. And that, in my fury, the fury that has hounded me all my life, I dreamed of the extinction of the human race. But I never killed a soul, I never did to anyone more than the Broom did to me. Yet I languish here, and the Broom roams free
.

The libertine acts upon his instincts knowing that the world is without God and that his actions are impelled by his nature. The corrupt ecclesiastic acts in the name of God to justify, as Landa did, the worst crimes. The crimes done in God’s name are always the worst, crimes that the libertine only imagines in his black room lit by fairy lights
.

Fairy lights! The words evoke the lucent years of infancy when the world was a place of constant amazement, like Lilliput. It is true I was a spoiled brat. (I was once given an entire breakfast service made of praline—cups, dishes, spoons, and forks—to coax me to table.) But even such a boy, despite swamped nerves and fits of rage (and what boy would not be frenzied by a mother who spent every waking hour on her knees sucking up to priests while his father was forever falling all over the king?)—even such a boy is eager for astonishment
.

Nothing is known of my birth; that is to say, nothing that is known is true. Because Mother’s oyster was too tightly shut to be seeded, and Father, just like the One in Heaven, no more than an Absence, I was not born in the usual way
.

There are numerous and conflicting stories to explain the stubborn fact of my existence:

But the true story is this one: My buttocking father, warming his balls in a brothel, took it into his head that he needed a son to fortify his line, animate his eye, stimulate his heart, and afford him pocket in his decrepitude. Thus, like Minerva, it was my fatal destiny to have been born of thought, to tumble from my father’s brain into his ear and from there onto the rump of a whore. This prodigy he was able to conceal, for I was no bigger than a grain of pepper. He slipped me into his snuffbox and took me to my mother, who left her Paternosters long enough to cover my nudity with the shell of a pea and to put me to rock on the leaf of a geranium. Then she lulled me with her papist melodies, which, to tell the truth, I tolerated because I had no choice. This one fact explains why I was such a fussy baby, for if other infants are quieted with doggerel suited for the nursery, which makes them laugh and think the world a clever, funny place, my mother’s attempts were so dreary I decided that once I knew how to speak I would tell her to cease her canticles else assure me a lifelong funk
.

But Mother was like the Woman I Married, who, when I asked for Masters Boccaccio, Villon, and Rabelais to entertain my mind in jail, sent me psaltery claptrap as convivial as suet—the point being to keep me from thinking. (Like priests, pious wives are made uncomfortable by the functioning of gray matter—that of others and their own.)

At the age of four, I decided that if God did not want me to think, I’d go to the Devil. And so it came to pass: I was made to spend my life pissing my heart out in prison! If this makes sense, then mankind should be ruled by imbeciles, which any fool will tell you
is not the case.
One of my fiercest enemies says: “Sade fills the heads of the innocent with
ideas.”
I should think so! “And ideas,” this bees’ barber continues, “are contagious.” I should hope so! But I ask you: Since the Church hates pleasure as much as it hates thought, why has God given us brains and, Heaven help us, a pair of
fesses?

Brains and
fesses
…I venerate both. To my way of thinking, the one leads inevitably back to the other. They circle each other like amorous butterflies. Brains and
fesses!
These are our most precious possessions
.

The Bible is a pile of dung. I ask you: Is it coherent? The
words
are recognizable: Nouns, adjectives, and verbs parade across the page like ants on their way to a moldering cracker. But the
ideas
are so incongruous, they might as well be written down in frass. The one thoughtful moment is Eve’s. Eve, the mother of Juliette. Eve, who never asks “Why have you forsaken me?” but who walks out of Eden and climbs into bed. Eve, who, in full knowledge, fucks and engenders a world. When as a child I read about that instance in Eden when tyranny was subverted, that exemplary moment, I cried out, “Eve was right!” and I hurled the book across the room. For this I was whipped and so it was revealed:
Les fesses
are endangered by the functioning brain
.

My earliest memories are not of hired buffoons or of riding pig-a-back upon a poor wretch hired for that service, but of Madame de Roussillon dressed in spangles and telling stories in a hushed voice; in one, Gargantua eats a salad of pilgrims, and in another, Gulliver dances a jig for a queen the size of Cheops. Later, after I nearly ripped the prince to shreds (he refused to play horsie unless I played the horse’s part), I was sent packing to my uncle’s castle keep, where I often slipped away to rustle up some village brats all rough and merry. I was as enchanted as they when, in the cobbler’s back room lit only by a candle, finger shadow-figures were made to dance upon the wall: Guignol and highwaymen; a witch on her way to Sabbath; La Fontaine’s raven, the cheese tumbling from its beak round as a fist; Jonah swallowed by the whale. Thumbkin! Puss in Boots!

Or when Folle Blanche took us into her dark kitchen to feed us apples and omelettes and told us her “True Tales of the Infant Jesus,” in which the Son of God shared the womb with kings and comets and camels, and who, while still in the cradle, shat all the way to Rome and into the pope’s face
.

Here’s how Folle Blanche made an omelette:

She takes a sip of wine and sprinkles the eggs with salt. (The poor know nothing of pepper.) And if we eat with our fingers, we feast like kings of Spain
.

The Romans made their omelettes with honey. If a savory omelette stuffed with lobster or ham—or both! or both!—is what I’d sell my soul for this minute if I had one, don’t think I’d scorn the Roman sort, or the jam omelettes of my youth, as delicate as the thoughts of an angel, amply dusted with confectioner’s sugar and disgorging strawberry jam
.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, they’d serve eggs in prison—a wholesome, inexpensive food and, if your sense is in your cranium and not in your navel, easy to prepare (although perhaps beyond the skill of prison cooks, who cannot boil noodles to save their lives). If I had a say in this, I’d assure each prison a poultry yard and, come to think of it, a trout pond, a vegetable garden, an orchard, a milk cow. Better still, I’d supply each prisoner with his own hen. She would afford companionship, keep the cell free of vermin, and provide those precious eggs, which, as every country bumpkin knows, are at their best within the hour of being laid—especially if they are to be soft-boiled
.

When the tedium of confinement proved too much to bear, the prisoner might
blow out
his eggs—just as the Russians do—and decorate them. The more I think about it, the more I like this idea. And a truly well behaved prisoner, although he might persist in thinking the sorts of thoughts that got him into trouble in the first place, might be rewarded for his manners at least with the gift of a goose. If he was given a potted fruit tree, the fowl could perch there. Its dung, falling as gravity dictates, would fertilize the tree, producing fruit of great quality. But for all this to be possible, a certain demand must be met: a large window, facing south, allowing the sun to enter and invigorate the living things inside the cell: bird, tree, and man
.