The Fan-Maker's Inquisition

by Rikki Ducornet

  You see how I have never forgotten Alessandra, who, stunning at nine, must have been a danger to public safety at nineteen! The very thought of that beauty in full flower is enough—even after all these years!—to make me roar. That afternoon in Genzano, I fell in love. And then, upon our return to France and Uncle’s isolated castle, how many nights beneath the blind stars, a captive of those grim stones, did I dream of the flower pictures of Genzano and of the child whose memory, like the memory of a melody, became fainter and fainter with the passing of the years—only to burst into flame for an instant today.

  The dinner in Genzano was unforgettable for another reason: It was the first time I ate Gorgonzola! (A minute of silence as I recall the taste of Gorgonzola with ripe blue figs, a fistful of walnuts, fresh bread…and now a sip of…what shall it be? Yes! Ligurian wine.)

  I am:

  Combustible,

  volcanic,

  excitable,

  fractious,

  perverse;

  a hothead,

  impatient (if patience is the ladder of the philosophers, I

  am forever the slave of this tower),

  convulsive,

  agitated,

  passionate,

  BUT I AM NOT MURDEROUS;

  of savage intelligence,

  of disorderly emotions,

  I DWELL IN THE BELLY OF THE WIND;

  of acute mind,

  animated,

  enamored of the

  OPPOSITE EXTREME IN EVERYTHING;

  easily exhilarated,

  when despondent, profoundly so,

  tempestuous;

  galvanized by a look, an idea, a memory,

  imprudent,

  OF CONTRARY DISPOSITION; grotesque (although once of good features, slight and fair); the eternal friend of a fearless and thoughtful woman:

  GABRIELLE (What is it that I loved best about her?

  The fact that she lived equally in the mind, the body, and the imagination.)

  I am a man who loves cats (have repeatedly asked to keep a cat, have repeatedly been refused).

  A pornographer who has never forgotten the grape-haired Alessandra, his first love.

  A libertine who loves the moon as much as he loves the lantern.

  An atheist WHO WOULD SPIT IN THE FACE OF GOD HAD HE THE CHANCE.

  A MAN WHO THUS FAR HAS NOT BEEN

  REDUCED TO GROVELING LIKE AN ANIMAL.

  Things I have done:

  —Paid some whores with whom to frolic, such frolic to include flagellation and fellatio. The girls said to be both articulate in and sensible to the language of the broom. I fed them Spanish fly, foolishly putting far too much into the manufacture of the little anise-flavored diavolini, causing the creatures—there were four in all—acute distress (this to my chagrin and embarrassment!). All recovered nicely within a few days, but Restif, already my rival, spread the rumor that the whores had been poisoned with arsenic: murdered by my hand! This foolishness—the niaiserie of overheated youth, and the misguided notion that more of a good thing is better—was just one of the many mistakes I made in my green years, and for which I have paid, and plenteously, through the nose.*

  Upon reflection, it seems to me that in a Rational World, whores need to be knowledgeable not only in the handling of brooms, but in the properties of all the aphrodisiacs: Spanish fly, celery, truffles, oysters, and so on; to be versed in both the pharmacy and the kitchen. Thus, in their waning years, they could use this knowledge to acquire a new métier. Imagine the inns and pharmacies of France manned by Sluts in Retirement!

  —Paid a trollop, found in the street, to join me in my rooms for a trussing and a thrashing; soothed her stripes with a Salve of my invention, which, as it turned out, PROVED THE CURE, although she swore I’d poured hot wax into wounds I’d inflicted with a knife! When she was made to show her backside to the court physician, he swore it was as smooth as a baby’s! Yet Restif (Restif again!) wrote that I had beaten the wench senseless, burned her with a red-hot poker, seared her flesh with hot wax, and—in order to impregnate her—hung her by the ankles!

  —Seduced, with my wife’s complicity, my sister-in-law, Anne-Prospère de Launay, a canoness (!), as tall as my wife was short, as pretty as she was not, and as reasonable as one could wish; seduced her, to the intense delight of the two of us, my wife’s amusement, and my mother-in-law’s eternal rage—a rage I can only call cosmical.* Incest and adultery with a canoness was a potion too heady to resist, especially with a woman as intelligent as this. One of my fondest memories of my brief moments of liberty is of a time we spent together in Venice—this was ‘72, 1 believe—and Genzano! There, ennobled by the memory of my first passion, our improbable, impossible, and yet inevitable romance flourished. I recall a delirium of animal pleasure: the kisses shared, the crayfish devoured in quantity, the brilliant conversation; how again and again I brought her to tears and to pleasure, simultaneously, with a crucifix.

  I’ve never had the time or the patience for mild or dry amusements. Hoping to save what was left of his reputation and to contain my ardor—and assure the rent, for he had squandered everything in libertinage—Father set about to marry me off. He unearthed a collection of relics more or less rich, more or less handsome. One was a canoness with the sumptuous name Damas de Fuligny de Rochoir. I heartily embraced the idea of bum-fucking a canoness, but that fell through. There was also a Mademoiselle de Bassompierre. “Old Stony Bottom,” I called her, for although we never did meet it was rumored that her digestion was static, her teeth made of bone, and her hair not her own. My soldier’s reputation had excited her papa—a man with a weakness for grenadiers—but when the rest leaked out—my incessant lubricious ferment, my gambling, and my atheism: yes, above all, my atheism!—le père Bassompierre turned and ran.

  Tant mieux! I wrote Father. France had just lost her slice of India and America to the crumpet-eaters but still held the Antilles. I begged him to find me a glorious mulatta for a bride. I dream of a blue clitoris! said I, and very black eyes! Father scolded me for my frivolity. Such a matter would prove costly and take forever, and he wanted me off his hands aussi vite que possible! At last he found me Renée Pélagie. As plain as pudding, she had a fat nose and the chin of a cavalryman. However, her boyishness did not displease me: Elle avait du chien, her ass was sublime. I was enchanted by her willingness to fool around, to be molinized. In other words, my wife loved to bum-fuck; she was up for anything. Better still, her father housed us in Paris along with a solicitous valet and a wanton chambermaid. Renée s mother found me “lovable” then, even when she got wind of my little escapades.

  “Qu’il est drôle, le petit mari!” she liked to say. “How he amuses me!” Oh! Life was worth living then! Adulterous canoness Anne! Benevolent buggeress Renée! Money to burn, feasting and carousing: What a noodlehead I have been! Had I spent my life making enema nozzles instead of ejaculating and book-writing, why, I’d be asleep in the arms of a loving wife. Yet the ardent water that flows in my veins, if calmed, is not stilled. Only Death—

  “What is below is like what is above, and what is above is like what is below.” Except tighter.

  Back to pharmaceuticals: Because my pleasure has always depended on displeasure—including my own—and in my attempt to mitigate the dégâts, as it were, I investigated various herbs, unguents, and devices. If a scourge made of bent nails has always caused me to spend my fuck liberally and quickly (not that speed is what I am most after), the pain and the damage are a thousand times that of the heather broom or knotted rope that the whores prefer ten to one—and who can blame them? In the case of the trollop previously evoked, I used a cat-o’-nines tied in a bundle and drew blood. Why, you ask, did I not employ the broom?

  Like a riddle, my answer comes in threes. One: because I didn’t think of it. Two: because she was a tough old bird with a bum like pedicle gneiss. And three: because (and here in a nutshell lies the crux of the matter) I had invented a remarkable Salve, which—and this
I knew from previous experiments made upon my own flesh and which, if it amazes you and causes you no end of astonishment—caused the wounds to heal within a day! You see: I was a vicious bastard but no monster. I knew that a bum of satin was essential for a whore’s métier. Further: When I was not laboring those bums, I was buttering the cunts of actresses. My buttocks, too, were manifest in the greater world. Thus the Salve! To demonstrate my good faith in these matters at least, the virtue of these propos, I offer you, estimable reader, my recipe. Here it is:

  Sade’s Salve

  Take a good measure of beeswax of the best quality—that is to say, of a perfect whiteness, without insect parts or particles, of a fair translucence and pleasant odor. This is to be well mixed with almond oil until a soft paste is formed, at which point a jelly made with the seeds of red quinces, translucent and cooled, is to be stirred in little by little, until you have a substance of the consistency of—Ah! I find there is no known consistency that describes it! To this, add several drops of mallow essence, several drops of mauve, a touch of hyssop, a breath of saponaire. (The Salve’s employment is to be preceded by a gentle washing of the irritated tissues in chicory water.)

  The Salve will be valueless if the plants are not collected during very hot, very dry weather, and in the early morning. If the plants are damp, or collected in the heat of midday, or in the chill of the evening, the entire experience will waste the preparator’s time. The Salve will be dead, cloying, sticky, and without translucence. June is the best time for chicory, July for mallow, et cetera, late August the only moment to gather quinces and so on—but this, everybody knows.

  Again: The trollop’s bum, as I have said, was as good as it had ever been—such is the exquisite efficacy of the Salve—better, in fact: For when I nearly stumbled over her in the street, she was, it must be said, the worse for wear. My ministrations included dinner—the best, she swore, she’d ever eaten—and a bath. It is true, as she claimed, that I whipped her, not in the name of the Virgin Mary, as the good friars do in the salty privacy of their holy fisheries, but in the name of goddess Ejacula. As to the use of knives—I am no butcher, nor am I feebleminded. Even an excellent Salve will not heal a puncture in a day—what would? But a rope burn? Mais oui! In the treatment of those tiger’s stripes, I will vouch on my (threadbare) honor for my Salve’s serviceability.

  To return to the little whores of Marseille: I have always loved a fart. Not the ill-advised fart of a peasant born and bred on beans, but the judicious wind of a worldly strumpet fed on pasta and pomegranates, a zephyr seasoned with anise seed, sage, fennel, melissa, lavender, and coriander. My expertise in such matters enables me to tell you this: If at night a young lady is fed artichokes and chicory (Divine Chicory! I salute you!), a roasted onion bristling with cloves, a salad of dandelion, and an infusion of mint sweetened with honey, she will void generously and fragrantly the following morning a turd of such fragrance that Sainte Marguerite-Marie would have run from it weeping (delectating as she did only in the runny, stinking frass of diseased nuns). Then, if the wench breakfasts upon a nicely baked seedcake made of anise, fennel, and coriander, studded with candied angelica, by early afternoon her farts will provoke the envy of angels. And, in those susceptible to such tender pleasures, an erection to compete with a bull elephant’s.

  But wait! There is more! For if I do not say it, who will? Should you prefer to lap up the bile of toads, the cud of dying cows, the venom of Restif de La Bretonne, so be it! Poison yourself, for all I care! Impoverish your understanding. But I am not the devil that failed pornographer takes such pleasure in slandering! And if I am—or was, for now my soul yearns only for the smell of soup—partial to a perfumed fart now and then, barbarity I imagined only; foolishness, viciousness—to speak plainly—I indulged. I made a slave of no one; I never thrashed a whore I did not pay to thrash me; my closest accomplice was my wife. My antics were often ludicrous, rarely inspired—but I never hung a trollop by her feet, as Restif would have it (how appallingly vulgar is that imagination!).

  Here, forthwith, the purpose of my miserable life: To banish imprécisions and banalities. To embrace the immense disorder of voluptuousness. To dare dwell in the marvelous territory of seduction. To articulate my active distrust of God and refuse His filthy impositions. To, in the limited time I have, with energy, vengefully and ragefully, dare uncover what God has hidden, dare illumine what man is forbidden to see.

  * In fact, it was not the so-called “poisoning” that condemned me, but the fact that I fucked my valet in the ass before the assembled manieuses!

  * Her rage; Restif’s envy, his lies and exaggerations; and the bile of that genderless Robespierre, who carries a poker up his ass at all times, are responsible more than my acts, more than my imaginings, for my eternal imprisonment.

  Seven

  Sade, mon ami,

  How curious are mental forms! How they surge forth! Born of the mind, horn of the heart, engendered by longing, by potent absences…My memory is not only a lens and a dream fan, it is also an aphrodisiac. Sade: I understand you better and better!

  “There is no place for God in all my calculations,” Olympe once said to me. But then her lovely face grew pale and her eyes took on the crazed look of a trapped mammal. “I am attempting to perfect a machine to assure that I cannot be buried alive. Or, rather, that if it should it happen, despite all precautions taken, help will come within minutes and I shall be saved. For I cannot imagine—or, rather, I can only too well imagine—what it would be like to awaken in a coffin, parched and terrified, cloaked in utter silence and pitch-darkness, barely able to move, and, what’s worse, the earth in all directions pushing in, earth truffled with cadavers in all directions! And in every conceivable state of dissolution!

  “I beg you to understand, “she was quick to add, “I am not afraid of dying. Death is another thing entirely. I would die for the Revolution, if it would further the cause of Freedom.”

  But for the fact that I am no longer ready to die for the Revolution, but only for mine, the description fits my mood exactly: parched and terrified. But here! I’ll sing a little drinking song to remind myself that things could be worse. I’m not dead yet, after all, and there’s not a corpse in sight. Although the asses complain and the grave digger’s cart groans beneath the weight of the day’s accumulation of crimes, heads and bodies both are trundled off, and the cobbles—I see them now, shining in the moon—are washed with water.

  Pleasure is a delicate wine,

  Inebriate yourself one sip at a time.

  In Montmartre, there used to be a little inn called Les Mystères. Its walls were made of polished cherry. My favorite table was beneath the stairway, where I was served those simple but toothsome Parisian suppers with civility and grace by the owner himself. His name? Monsieur Mirebalais. His mustaches bristled, his dish towel flapped with each gesture of his hand like a sail in the wind. I recall platters of oysters—the best in Paris—and an onion soup scalding hot beneath its weeping crust of cheese. I recall a door opening on the landing above me, the sound of an irresistible laugh, and a girl named Lélise stepping lightly down the stairs in a scarlet jacket.

  “Lélise, you are the Queen of Sheba!” I tell her as she passes. She gives me a kiss. Then, her guitar balanced on her opulent bosom, she sings with a dizzying effrontery (and the words belong to Voltaire):

  He who fears the night

  Is not worthy of delight.

  But wait! Here is Madame Mirebalais with a dish of her celebrated medallions of eel served on croutons of bread fried in Isigny butter! And here is Lélise again, standing there before me, as beautiful as if she had surged forth from the sea of my most tempestuous dreams! She sings a poem of the abbé Courtin’s that she has herself put to music:

  To so much grace!

  To these, her tempting arts!

  To the beauty

  That strikes my heart!

  Lélise! Olympe! Gabrielle, my dearest: I raise my glass to you and say: “T
o so much grace!”

  Now Madame s dinner continues; I am served duckling as shiny as a new copper pot and nesting in savory peas.

  An exile

  In the gardens of bliss,

  I recognize Venus

  By her kiss!

  We have been exiled, dear creatures, hélas. And not in the gardens of love, twice hélas, hélas! But in the prisons of the Revolution, Our Revolution, and in Death.

  Lélise has a prodigious répertoire; she sings the ancient ballads of Provence and the songs of old Paris, marvelous songs that one day no one will sing. As midnight approaches, she sings the songs of the Revolution:

  We are the women of St-Denis;

  of La Hallen, of St-Antoine;

  We are ten thousand insurgents—

  Long live Liberty!

  And everyone in the room joins in the refrain:

  Vive la Liberté!

  What Lélise sings is the truth: Ten thousand women had confronted the king and, in so doing, changed the face of France. Ten thousand strong, and Olympe and Gabrielle were among them.

  The day of her arrest, Gabrielle had just completed a new series of fans. Freshly glued and open, they were laid out on the table to dry: the Games of Children—hoops and kites and skipping ropes, castles in the sand, kisses in the ring, knucklebones.…

  How I should love to wander the streets of Paris with a new fan and a dove-gray dress; to wander in the light of full spring, without the fear of treading in blood! Once the blood of cattle puddled the streets of the Rue des Boucheries; now every street in Paris deserves to be so named. Butchers’ street: Marat lived there in hiding for a while. Marat, who was himself a butcher, stabbed in the heart by a new butcher’s knife!