The mill was old. It dated back to the time of Louis XIV, “the high priest of the classic wig,” as I believe Thackeray called him — the man who, when he came to Marly, couldn’t stop leaning out of his sedan to smile at the miller’s wife.
In those days, millers’ wives were known to be the most beautiful and flirtatious women in town.
During the Revolution, the Lord of Bougival asked the miller for asylum. Back then, millers held the keys to the nobility’s storehouses, and thus too served as their greediest customs men. The millers were also thieves, as a rule — stealing from the lords whose goods were in their keeping. But this particular miller surpassed himself: once he’d seen the tyrannical face of the royal house of France consumed in a bonfire on a certain gray autumn afternoon — I direct you to Rivarol’s majestic description of that day — leaving the château in the hands of the sans-culottes, he agreed to save his master and took him down to the mill cellar on the pretext of hiding him there. The miller left the task of opening the sluice gates to his wife. The Lord of Bougival didn’t scream. The waters took him, strangling him against the iron gratings; his body was torn apart, piece by piece, over the course of several months. A period during which nobody was particularly interested in watching the river as it flowed past the mill. The Lord of Bougival’s arm reached out in vain.
JUNE 16, 18—
When my mother died, my father, who was busy dyeing his sideburns, looked me over from head to toe and, finding my hair wasn’t sufficiently serious for the occasion, dyed it black. Then he dyed my eyebrows as well, which had been carrot-red till then. This combined with my mourner’s clothes made me look entirely different — like some newly discovered, hysterically melodramatic cousin. I saw just the type in a Daumier sketch soon after. I was horrified. That very day, I began to undermine my appearance — changing it gradually, quietly. Books played a large part in these transformations. I’d begin to adopt the wardrobe of one of the characters in whatever novel I was reading…and then switch models. Though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this at the time, I wanted to strip myself of every sign that would enable people to identify me with certainty. How I hated the static images of the daguerreotypes that were then so popular in my town — the poor villagers loved the sense of permanence they saw in those pictures, salivating over the shiny copper daguerreotype plates like middle-aged bourgeois types do over gold pocket watches…
And yet, the continual evolution of my appearance in those days did have lasting consequences…such instability jolted my inner self, leaving it forever unstable, easily jangled, always rattling around inside me like the clapper inside a bell.
JULY 18, 18—
I’ve returned from seeing the two white goats. One of them looked at me. She had the eyes of a lovely señorita. The afternoon had gotten quiet, and I felt a billy goat inside me who understood her. Goats are the animals I feel closest to, so I could hardly avoid returning her stare and walking over to get to know the more beautiful of the pair a little better — her pink udder like a woman’s breast.
JULY 20, 18—
Today I threw a handful of hollyhock leaves at my señorita. She looked at me deeply before she gathered up the leaves, as if trying to trying to understand the motives behind such obsequiousness. How similar she is to our provincial girls, pinning their hopes on every man who passes through town! Even the most despicable men — the girls stare at them all equally, and with such earnest longing, the same way prostitutes stare in the city!
That sort of look makes me fall all the more deeply in love. I’ve never felt such a desire to kick down a door or jump over a wall.
JULY 25, 18—
I followed the girl leading the two goats to graze by the river. My goat is named Isolina. She kept turning around; she knew I was watching. She moved her belly and udder most voluptuously. She was so busy watching me she didn’t have a chance to graze. She went over to the daisies, broke off some stems, then abandoned them. When I left, she remained there, sad, at the steep edge of a gully. Her sister, who must care deeply for her, came by and licked her belly and udder.
AUGUST 30, 18—
Since I no longer had a mother, I didn’t have anyone to help me maintain some level of communication with my elders. As a child, there were very few people I could ask for advice, who would offer me their wisdom and experience. Older people often lose the habit of interacting with children. They don’t know how to talk to them and know even less how to understand them. Being impressionable, children tolerate them, but later come to hate them. Such children get used to living among other children alone. Until, and it happens from time to time, an ambassador from the adult world passes through. It’s nearly always some old bachelor with the heart of a mother. A man who leaves his mark in all our alleyways, gets drunk in all our bars, and, in the end — as one takes home a souvenir to remember Venice — absconds with the mayor’s daughter when he leaves. Thanks to a man like this, a painter, a man from the outside world, I first experienced fear and trembling. Above all, he taught how to understand these sensations. But he didn’t come by night, dressed up like some bogeyman. No. I found myself in front of his house one morning. I had my hands in my pockets, my head was raised; I was whistling:
Ninon a des boucles d’or
The man saw me. Stopped. He stared at me with such interest that I could only feel flattered. Here, at last, was a man with whom one could have a conversation!
“What’s your problem?” he asked. “Lose your hands?”
“Lose my hands?” I repeated to myself, feeling them in my pockets, experiencing a first little tremor of anxiety. The painter went on in that curious tone of his, sympathetic and deferential:
“Maybe they cut yours off?”
My trembling intensified. I started to shake and sweat, to feel cold, imagining myself without hands, both of them cut off by the butcher and hanging from two hooks like giblets. Unsure of myself, of my memory, I took my hands out of my pockets and looked at them.
They were still there at the ends of my arms, to be sure, but I was too startled to trust what I saw and had to look at them a long time.
The painter moved on. He made me realize, at four years old, the drama, the pure voluptuousness of living — the drunken ecstasy of our brief lives.
SEPTEMBER 2, 18—
My neighbor the painter, Truchet was his name, didn’t merely introduce me to terror. His words, his questions — like his gifts — were all quite disquieting for a child. He never gave me a handful of coins for caramels, as men generally give to children. No, Truchet gave me broken watches, which I found far more interesting in their silence than if they’d actually functioned. I’d poke around in them for several days, and when I saw the painter next I’d tell him over and over: “Sir? You know the watch you gave me, sir? I opened it and now it’s ticking.”
Making a watch tick again was, for me, as empowering as being named Grand Inquisitor. I made what little good was left in the machinery work, and then filled the watchcase with oil. In the depths, below the oil, the gears gleamed, more golden now — the balance wheel a ring of fairies, its ruby jewel bearings the eyes of mermaids, mass produced and sold at retail.
SEPTEMBER 3, 18—
Another gift from Truchet that was impossible to forget was several flags on little flagpoles. I learned geography from them. Truchet gave me a yellow one with a black eagle in the middle and told me it was the Japanese flag, since it was yellow…
Later he gave me a red one and told me it was a flag flown by Kaffirs who ate only raw meat. The cross of Saint George was sewn on it in one corner, blue over white. When I wanted to know the significance of this, he responded: “Don’t worry about a little thing like that. Probably they just used an old bit of cloth to patch the thing in Manchester.”
My sense of geography was quite fitting, for a Frenchman. Mr. Truchet was entirely to blame.
SEPTEMBER 10, 18—
I imagined I was entering the Middle Ages whene
ver I entered a pharmacy: the pharmacist like the sages of those bygone days, his jars covered in Latin like the pages of a schoolbook. The Middle Ages were an orphan’s childhood, after the world lost its Greek father and had to strike out on its own. The Middle Ages were our first firm step into Humanity. The pharmacist who has replaced the village healer has all the uncertainty of a transitional state. He’s the sage of the Middle Ages advancing toward the role of the doctor. The Middle Ages meant the loss of Mercury’s staff and with it, the wings of the ancient world. Where are those wings now? Where can you find them? In pharmacies.
The smell of pharmacies…what is it if not the smell of science in the Middle Ages? If not the smell of unguents and lard? And, here and there, the stench of sulfur?
Faust is there behind the rows of glass bottles. Is he compacting powders into tablets, or is he preparing Mesué’s polychrest, which the soldiers under Francis I used to cure Naples virus?
When I ask the pharmacist in my village — who sells leeches, as in the Middle Ages — for a little cyanide, his eyes widen with surprise: a saint forced to contemplate heresy. The substance I’ve requested is dangerous indeed, an alchemical disaster — but really, I only use it to massage my scalp…
SEPTEMBER 26, 18—
This journal I write, almost without wanting to, as dusk falls, doesn’t always paint a true picture of what’s happened to me. Rather, these are evocations of events, the memory of which passes its pen across my brow.
At twelve, I came down with typhus. I think it happened while fishing for corks in the Seine. I collected these and sold them to the junk man when the weekend came. Jug corks were of particular value. Here are the statistics: for every hundred corks, six were from jugs, forty from champagne or wine bottles, the rest from medicine jars. I rescued these corks — having traversed the sewers of Paris and bobbed forty-six kilometers along the Seine — from floating into the ocean.
One of those corks must have given me typhus. My successor, another village boy, got sick as well. The junk man always boiled our corks before he resold them.
After a number of fantastic voyages through the feverish deliriums caused by an impossible temperature of nearly 44 °Celsius — never before seen in a human being, drawing the curiosity of doctors and scholars from universities as far as Paris, Dijon, and Lille — I lost three kilos a day, and then all my hair. All the people I saw during my out-of-body experiences were also bald, for some reason. My hair grew even redder than before, and one of the doctors who thought me an ideal subject took it upon himself to demonstrate that, as I resided in Bougival, and Bougival was next to Le Croisic, a town where they grew prodigious amounts of carrots, the color of my hair had responded, in this new phase of growth, to the colorings inherent in my environment. In a word, the doctor wanted to prove that my reddish hair was a product of local horticulture.
It was this same doctor who acquainted me with the pleasures of scalp massage. I mean concoctions of ammonia, quinine, sulfuric lime, and above all, potassium anhydrite, which left me with green hair for several hours. Doctor Rochefort tried all sorts of chemical solutions on my head, but the results always ended up contradicting his theory. I don’t know what he thought would happen.
Those concoctions made up a good part of the magic of my childhood — those strange formulas spilling over my scalp and tingling through my body. I don’t believe in opium or morphine, and even ether leaves me fairly cold. Those applications of cyanide, however, are what gave me that latent tickle at the base of my neck; sometimes I’d scratch myself so often I’d break out in blisters. Vaseline with camphor did no good. Ethyl chloride, however, thanks to its average temperature of 40 °C below zero, gave me a little relief, at least.
Ammonia massages were the only ones I could get at a moment’s notice, given how easy it was to find a place that offered them. As a child, instead of going to the circus on Sundays, I would go to the barbershop. If my father gave me a franc, it was enough for three treatments, but because the alkali always left a dark greasy trace on the towels, I’d scrub my head with the day’s newspaper before I left one barbershop for another. The fresh ink from the news would stain my hair so not even the towel betrayed me — and the barber wouldn’t suspect anything about my hygiene either.
Only once did I give myself a sulfate of quinine treatment. I went to the hospital dispensary with a neighbor woman who was sleeping with the pharmacist, and got my hands on a jar with some quinine salts left in it. For ten days, my head was entirely numb. I’d go to bed without knowing whether my forehead was against the pillow or exposed to the air. My scalp was drunk.
OCTOBER 4, 18—
The Middle Ages. Still? Yes, everything in that era had an obscure, sinister justification to it. All observation was still interwoven with faith, and faith is nothing more than atavistic fear, the instinctive cowardliness of man. If this fear could conceive of God, it could find a reason for anything — and everything had an explanation in the Middle Ages. The need for effects gave birth to stupendous causes. Children today understand this instinctively; they can only admire those obsolete causes, seeing such beauty in their inscrutability. People have lost the rhythm of the supernatural. Montaigne said:
Myself passing by Vitry-le-François, saw a man the Bishop of Soissons had, in confirmation, called Germain, whom all the inhabitants of the place had known to be a girl till two-and-twenty years of age, called Mary. He was, at the time of my being there, very full of beard, old, and not married. He told us, that by straining himself in a leap his male organs came out; and the girls of that place have, to this day, a song, wherein they advise one another not to take too great strides, for fear of being turned into men, as Mary Germain was.
NOVEMBER 27, 18—
Upon hearing Madame Roland had been executed, her husband, then in hiding on a farm, took off across the fields to commit suicide. A few peasants heard the shot. Another Girondist dead.
They buried him along the roadside, so close to the topsoil that children broke off little tree branches and played at who would have the courage to poke the cadaver first.
For a time, the corpse made the ground above it somewhat pliable. Until one sunny day it caved in. Over the next few months, this hole collected water, which the shepherds’ mastiffs came to lap up with pleasure.
DECEMBER 4, 18—
From birth I’ve felt the desire to improve human nature, which makes us all so fragile and imperfect. I’ve sanctified my life to this sole endeavor. Logic hasn’t aided my efforts. Logic must resist the same imperfections: it’s also human. Logic decrees, for instance, that you pour water over a fire to extinguish it. Myself, I’ve attempted to put out fires by carrying a flask inside a satchel.
I haven’t been successful.
What I have retained despite this failure is the consolation of having rehearsed a personal procedure, and one that isn’t necessarily beholden to the logic of men who, while they may know how to put out a fire, don’t know, conversely, how to be happy. I’ve always wanted to be happy. It was necessary to follow another path.
I didn’t discuss the problem with anyone. The notion of happiness no longer seems to be in fashion. But I’ve asked myself: Do I have a soul? And answered: Yes. Then, what is it? An imperceptible silhouette, following me about — external, seamless, vaporous, etcetera? No, these are simply more assumptions based on our flawed human logic. Spirit cannot be separated from matter; spirit is matter, or else it cannot have a life, color, shape, or anything else. The logic of man is the logic of the children of Macedonia, who are born philosophers — same as the children of Manaus (Brazil).
My mother cut and stitched our clothing but never sewed on our initials or put any more care into our shirts than she would into the hem of a kitchen rag. Despite her being rather uncouth, I grew strong and healthy, same as my poor brother — who later proved useful as a medical experiment.
Our dutiful mother had an artist’s temperament, I think, which was why she kept our clothing simpl
e. I would like to compose these notes in the same straightforward way — with her same sincerity and plainness.
DECEMBER 31, 18—
We had a large carriage depot in Bougival. Come evening, these heretofore idle carriages would depart for Paris. They were our town’s only night owls. In a café, “Au Rendez-vous des chochers,” the drivers would get together for wine. Among those wide, paunchy men with their flushed faces, I met one who was exceptionally wide, paunchy, and flushed: his face was a beet with two little holes that opened to allow his eyes to peer out. On top of that, these eyes hid under a single eyebrow, like the forehead-strap on a muzzle.
The man was a rag torn off some holy cassock. A defrocked priest. He took me along with him until the road to Mont Valérien sometimes, recounting the secrets of his adventurous life as a coachman, enjoying himself immensely, as if he thought of himself as one of the Eugéne Sue characters that appeared weekly in the newspaper serials. On one of these trips, he told me this story, which clarified certain mysteries of his life:
“I was excommunicated by the Bishop of Orléans. A complete bastard. And then, one night at the Gare d’Austerlitz, this same bishop hails me and climbs into my coach and makes me drive him to a house on the outskirts of Paris. When we arrive, he steps out and asks me to wait.”
On the way to the house, the coachman longs to strangle his passenger. He moves along the streets waiting to feel the courage he doesn’t have, and as night falls, vengeance lights up his heart like the red lantern in his rickety carriage. I refer of course to that same heart that had previously been offered up to God upon the modest altar of his village parish. To the Villager God, carved in wood and painted with lime. But fat had made the excommunicated friar into a sweet man in the meantime. In-clemency had ennobled him, like the golden sprig of wheat hidden under a poverty of rotting hay. The coachman is incapable of putting an end to that tyrannical bishop, his enemy sitting comfortably just behind him on the cushions of his cab. When they finally arrive at their destination, the old bishop, in his full priestly attire, descends ceremoniously, perfumed with incense and rustling his silken vestments. He proceeds slowly up the steps of the house that awaits him.
On Elegance While Sleeping Page 2