The Fan-Maker's Inquisition

by Rikki Ducornet

  “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.

  Restif was there, and his broadside hit the streets the very next day:

  I have been called a pornographer. It is true that I am. I use the word “lightly”! My pen is clean, straightforward, and brisk. I am no fop, nor am I a libertine. It is one thing to extol a virile sexuality and another to trumpet bum-fucking—as does a certain marquis, or murderer—as does a certain Olympe de Gouges. You see: I do not mince my words!

  To the despair of clean-living citizens, the collapse of morals is everywhere in evidence. I have elsewhere described the brazen effeminates—ten times more provocative than any harlot, their big feet dissimulated by high-heeled slippers—causing commotion in the cafés. Yet such sights could not prepare me for what I have just seen: a play, performed in our own National Theater, calling for the death of French colonials at the hands of their servants, a play written by a woman who would be a man, performed by actors against their own will and better judgment for an audience better suited for harvesting sugarcane!

  There is more: The marriage of a certain fan-maker’s assistant took place in Neuilly last month. I had been told that this beauty—a bastard who had for years lived in the streets—was to marry a Turkish prince! The story amused me; I managed to inform myself as to the particulars and to slip onto the property without being seen. There I saw Olympe de Gouges, also in the bushes, embracing the fan-maker with an empressement to make a Turk blush! I left hurriedly to pen everything down while still fresh, thinking I might have been in Italy!

  On my way home I was nearly knocked silly by a large marrowbone tossed from a window and into the street. I spent the evening in bed with a fresh cabbage leaf dressing the top of my head.

  Restif a pornographer? Bah! He is not worthy of the name. Pornography is Satan’s seat: the place of eternal spontaneous combustion. Pornography is Hell’s capitol, hermetically sealed, impenetrable, and impassable. A place so corrupt that it is in fact an embolus in the body of Nature. A place of such acute congestion and stagnation that within its boundaries, time and space are clotted together and stilled. La lenteur is pornography’s primary characteristic, La lenteur and all the universe’s weight focused on one point. And that point is the conjunction of two bodies: the deliberate body of the pornographer-procrastinator—who is always the violator—and the body of his object, which shorn of will exemplifies the deceleration of the tomb.

  Ah. But how weary am I and how sad. It is your letters, Gabrielle, that keep me sane.

  As you know, dear friend, I matured in poverty. Yet each day unfolded in wonder, and this because of my mother’s gypsy ways—how she could from rags make petticoats to tempt a duchess—and because of my father’s endless supply of books in all shapes and sizes, and in all manner of disrepair. My books of fairy tales and travels to distant lands were riddled by worms
, green with mold, and sometimes blackened and brittle because they had come so close to the fire.…

  Six

  Of those who, like myself, were born beneath the sign of the Tiger, this is what the Indians of the New World said:

  “All bad was his lot; misery befell him. He wallowed in evil and was covered in filth. Nowhere had he good repute. He committed adultery, was an adulterer, adulterous…”

  I have always been combustible.

  A very many years ago, a lifetime ago (I was six), I visited Genzano with that tireless tumble-nun, my uncle the abbé. We traveled by coach and were accompanied by my forlorn but stoic tutor and the strumpet Pélisse (poih-aux-cuisses), who when she was not stuffing her face with seedcake was on her knees sucking Uncle’s rebounding cock—behind doors, trees, trellised nooks, confessionals, cemeteries: in other words, whenever we stopped (which we did often). The trip from Saumane to Genzano took forever. The abbé de Sade was indefatigable and Pelisse infinitely obliging.

  When he was not reading pornography ill-concealed in theological treatises, my uncle was perusing a fantastic book on the Spanish Inquisition in the New World, illustrated with a multitude of copper engravings, a kind of catalogue of sexual terror, licentious extravagance, and murder. As the abbé was so often engaged with Pélisse, and as my tutor was on his own knees after some bug or other, or pressing flowers into a book, or mending his own frayed clothes, and as I was left alone in the coach, I had plenty of time to gloat over those instructive scenes that—as was later proved—assured my life would be ruled by furia amorosa and an unbridled imagination.

  Of all the extraordinary images that book contained, the one that struck me most profoundly, struck me to the core and the marrow, was of a diminutive Indian maiden, hanging naked by her feet, as priests, leering or scowling, held crucifixes to her face, and as a figure in a hood whipped her vulnerable body, which, I could clearly see, was already tigered from bottom to top. Another exemplary image proposed a circle of youths, all neat and tight, buggering one another before an idol upon whose erect phallus burned a little lamp. Wetting my finger with drool and turning the pages with terror and excitement, I came upon another amazing sight: an iron crucifix heated to incandescence in the dungeon fire and used to brand six youths all chained by their ankles, necks, and wrists to the floor. Ah! thought I with a shudder of loathing and dark delight: Ah! So nothing is forbidden by Nature! All is permitted! (“All is permitted,” the abbé de Sade speculated several years later when I broached the subject of his secret library and in particular this one book. “All is permitted in God’s name.” “There is no God,” was my response, “and that is why nothing is forbidden.” Uncle roared with laughter.)

  But back to our Italian voyage. Impervious to the delightful landscapes, the picturesque villages, the sumptuous woodlands, we passed, I, in my sexual impatience and curiosity, could think only of returning to Uncle’s casde on the hill, to idle away my hours in his sumptuous library of incendiary books. No wonder, thought I, Uncle’s nose is always in a book! His fist busy in his breeches! And indeed, marvels in vast numbers awaited me. A precocious reader, by the age of eight I had devoured A History of Flagellants, Saintly Perversions, The Fetish Cults of Africa, Nights in a Turkish Harem, The Mirror of Pleasure, Le Curé et la Drôlesse, Petit Truc, Gros Machin, The Nun Who Ate Her Own Ordure, and so on.

  That night I could not sleep until Pélisse (poib-au-pubis) brought me a little glass of anise-seed water to soothe my mind; better still, she gave me une petite branlette—my first. This was to be a habit with us thereafter: the water, the branlette (not that it amounted to much!).

  Even then my tastes were well defined. “Put your finger up my ass!” I told her. “Or I’ll tell the abbé what a slut you are!

  “Your uncle knows what I am,” Pélisse retorted, her eyes flashing. “And you, monsieur le marquis, are a monster.”

  “If that is so,” I replied, made fearless by what I had seen, “I am in good company.”

  This rebuke so impressed her that she no longer teased me but, instead, looked at me with new interest. She told my uncle that sooner or later I would be “a force to be reckoned with.”

  “And what sort of ‘force’ would that be?” We were all together in the carriage; Genzano just visible in the near distance.

  “Of Nature!“ said I without hesitating. “I wish to be a force of Nature.”

  “Nature! No less!” My uncle the abbé roared with laughter. “He wants to be a force of Nature!” He was still laughing as we entered Genzano.

  The next day was Corpus Christi. Uncle insisted we eat simply—his joke! We ate no meat, it is true, but were served a feast of fish: raviolis stuffed with a hachis of crayfish served in a sauce of curried cream; the white, sweet flesh of eels en croûte; a salmon pâté; and for dessert a hazelnut soufflé, the spécialité of Genzano.…Ensuite, a little walk about the square and then off to bed and the brief ceremony Pelisse had instigated with such generosity.

  “Take ma broquette into your mouth!” I cried, “just as you do to Uncle!”

  “Fa! I dare not!” said she. “Your morsel is so small, I fear I might swallow it!”

  “It is well attached!” I insisted, giving her the demonstration.

  Thus was I indoctrinated in the ways of the world by my uncle’s mistress. Other mistresses awaited at home; the Château de Saumane was in truth a harem and a bordello rolled into one, and my uncle’s fortune and position a veritable Aladdin’s lamp! I was brought up to believe that the privileges of power were boundless—or, rather, that they were bounded only by the imagination.

  Now I would turn from this conviction with horror, but until the abuses of power were made so palpable, beneath my very nose, you might say, I lived by the Laws of Vanity and Excess. Laws written in tears, fuck, and blood. Nothing at this time would give me greater solace than an affectionate tumble with a compassionate soul!

  But I am forgetting: We are still in Genzano.…Sometime before dawn I heard subtle noises from the street below and awakened for an instant. Smells of flowers and freshly chopped heather filled the air and wafted into the room. I fell back into slumber again, only to awaken, perhaps an hour later, when the streets echoed with cries and the sounds of cart wheels on the cobbles. The air rang with voices: A girl was singing, a boy joined in; I heard laughter, shouts, a joyous clatter. In a dim corner of the room, my tutor slept fitfully, his hands clutching at his own throat as though he might strangle himself in his dreams.

  I leapt from bed and, opening the shutters, peered down into the street, where elaborate and exquisite tableaux of multicolored flowers were forming with a swift and inspired sorcery before my eyes. These tableaux were of the armorial bearings of the local lords, the bishop, and the Holy See; griffins were rampant and lions couchant or passant; a sidelong-looking leopard was made entirely of purple pansies bedded down in the damp grass. Flittermice, a marigold tiger in a field of red roses, eight crocodiles, eleven lizards, twelve serpents—but no rabbits to be seen anywhere. Sheaves of wheat; chains of gold; one very white ass. I roused my tutor, and soon we were both delighting in the spectacle. Our room gave us a splendid view, and we took breakfast at the window, only later descending with Uncle and Pelisse (poils au calice) to join the admirably tricked out crowds and look on as monks, singing their insipid inanities, walked toward the church, trampling the gorgeous blossoms beneath their filthy feet. I was enraged to see the sumptuous images scattered and ruined and, with all the energy I could muster, shouted: “Miserable crows! Stop where you stand! Not a step farther!”

  The abbé de Sade grabbed my ear and ordered me to remain silent, but such was my rage that it could not be contained.

  It was then that the extraordinary happened: A little Italian dressed in a white frock, her head garlanded with white roses, summoning the fairy forces of a small tempest, began to cry out, too: “You are being very bad!“ she shouted at the monks. “Surely Jesus hates to see you trampling His flowers!” The
child imitated my rage exactly. “Miserable crows!” For the briefest instant we shared a burning look of jubilant defiance and complicity. “Boors!” she cried. “Brigands!”

  This little scene so amused the abbé that he let go my ear and began to laugh. Pelisse joined in, and even my tutor—always so melancholy—smiled. Better still, the little Italian was laughing, as was her blushing and, it must be said, superbe mama.

  “The children are of the same mind, signora,” said the abbé de Sade to the lady, acknowledging with an admiring look her uniquely seductive qualities. He bowed; she gave him her hand to kiss.

  “My little Alessandra is a wild one.” She smiled. “I shall need to marry her quickly!”

  “I will never marry!” cried the sublime Alessandra, shaking her black curls and tossing me another of her fiery glances. As it turned out, she was nine, a gifted student of the harp and as naughty as she was beautiful. To our delight, her mama’s own faith in the Catholic Church had been made both porous and malleable by the full radiance of her charms and a heretical interest in the pagan mysteries. As she and her daughter were to my uncle’s taste, we all ended up together in church—a service made palatable by the artifices of music, candles, and a profusion of flowers. Mass over, my uncle suggested dinner. His behavior, as always in the world, was cheerful and courteous beyond reproach; tactfully submerged in a jealous rage, Pélisse was silent and my tutor unusually entertaining. As the adults chatted about the Templars and the Cathars, the best way to stuff a turkey, and the escapades and intrigues that, Alessandra’s mama explained, “animated Genzano year-round,” I held Alessandra’s hand, concealed as it was beneath a voluminous linen napkin.

  I recall that we sat on a ruined but glorious balcony with a view of lazy gardens, woodlands, and towers; and that we dined at an emerald-green table.

  “The harp is like the heart,” Alessandra lisped. Her eyes were the bluest I have ever seen. “Its strings must be handled with delicacy.”