(Meditative silence.)
“And suddenly it seemed that day to day was added, as if He who has the power had with another sun the heaven adorned.” (Sylvia recites the unknown lines that have swum into her mind. It’s not Hell any more, nor is it Purgatory, so could this be Paradise? If Teresa hasn’t earned a place in Heaven, who has?) “Transumanar.…To represent transhumanize in words impossible were.” Teresa, transhuman? No, not that chess-playing woman. Transfinite, rather…an infinitesimal human.…“She, who saw me as I saw myself.…Here do the higher creatures see the footprints of the Eternal Power.…Here vigor failed the lofty fantasy: but now was turning my desire and will, even as a wheel that equally is moved, the love which moves the sun and the other stars.”19 (Rubs her eyes, comes back to her roommate.)
The loving heart, Teresa fashion, is hard as diamonds, meaning it cannot be liquefied anymore: it endures the toughest test, it is rock solid. (In a voice of farewell.) But it is no less subtle for that. It distills into scents, penetrates castle walls, traverses the spaces and elements it imbues. And then it takes wing, spinning and fluttering with the Other’s voice, that necessarily loving voice. Pulverizing the rectilinear power of the Lord Himself into cloudy cascades of justice implored, of sublimated desires. (With a final glance at Teresa’s portrait.) A vibrating voice, arpeggios and triplets, mounting and descending, a-flutter, à la volette [Repeated phrase in eponymous traditional French children’s song.—Trans.], again and again, exultant:
F# F#…………….…. ED C#BAG# AF# B#
De—po……………….…. su—it
C# C#…………….…. BA G#F#E#D# E#G#B D
De—po………………….…. su—it
C# A#C#A G#C#G# F#DF# E#C#
po—ten…………….…. tes
C# C#BAC# BAG#B AG#F#A G#F#E#D# C#
de se……………………….…de
G# A F# D# C#BA BAG#B E DC#B
Et ex—al-ta…………….….
C#BAC# F# EDC# DC#BC# DC#DE
……………………….…
F#EF#G# A E D C# B A A .…
…….…vit hu—mi—les
Just like my father’s voice. (In the background, a snatch of Bach’s “Magnificat.”)
Part 8
Postscript
Chapter 34
LETTER TO DENIS DIDEROT ON THE INFINITESIMAL SUBVERSION OF A NUN
God, through whom we discern that certain things we had deemed essential to ourselves are truly foreign to us, while those we had deemed foreign to us are essential.
Saint Augustine, Soliloquies
Divine understanding…the domain of possible realities.
Leibniz to Antoine Arnauld
Dear Mister Philosopher,
You began The Nun as a farce, because there was no question of publishing such a thing in 1760. (You’d have been off to the Bastille—worse than the jail at Vincennes where the Letter on the Blind put you!) And you ended it in tears, or rather not at all, because the text published in 1796, as it has come down to us, is unfinished.
Your Nun has been on my mind throughout my journey with Teresa. Please don’t take this admission for a piece of persiflage. I am incapable of that, and besides, I should never dare to be ironical with you!
Still, I must confess that I first approached Teresa somewhat lightly and unthinkingly. Not to raise a laugh, as you did with your story of the nun from Longchamp, but to challenge a kind of UFO, a baroque relic. I, too, was rapidly swept off my feet by a story that overturned my assumptions and sent me into analysis. “Whatever next?” drawls my friend and colleague Marianne Baruch, but she didn’t come out unscathed herself from this excursion into the heart of belief. Andrew teases me nonstop, rather sullenly, while my learned colleague Jérôme Tristan smirks discreetly: “You have to be ready for anything, with mysticism”—it’s his department, after all.
Impressed by the “old religious vice,” the sagacious Mallarmé felt that the tendency toward the secular (likened to atheistic “insignificance”) “doesn’t quite have a meaning.”1 While I agree with the poet on this, it doesn’t prevent me from being an atheist, just as you are, my dear Philosopher. You start off as a theologian and a canon, but you won’t even be a deist by the end, unlike your friends-foes Voltaire and Rousseau. Irked by Jean-Jacques’ philosophical moralism, lacking the caustic temper of the Sage of Ferney, you are sensual, violent, something of a “comedian,” passionate about science, curious about women, and smitten by Sophie Volland. You flaunt a brutal, streetwise—cynical?—sort of carefreeness: your thoughts are strumpets, you say, you are regarded as a “materialist,” but I wonder about that. I think of you, and it’s a compliment, as the carnivalesque type.
Your partiality to the fair sex—which was surely one reason to defect from the career in the Church for which you were destined by your father, the worthy cutler Didier Diderot, and by the Jesuits whose brilliant pupil you were—does not stop you from feeling profoundly ambivalent toward women. The lyricism of the writer, the volatile delicacy of the man, these flatter me: “When we write of women, we must needs dip our pen in the rainbow and throw upon the paper the dust of butterflies’ wings.” But I also sympathize with the alarm aroused in you by the unknowable matrix: “The symbol of women in general is that of the Apocalypse, on whose forehead was written MYSTERY,” and with your perplexity in the face of female genius: “When women have genius, I think their brand is more original than our own.”2
Of all those in whose company, during that legendary era of Enlightenment, you wakened humanity from its dream of transcendence to lead it toward the best and the worst, it is you I feel closest to. I feel close to Jacques the Fatalist, The Indiscreet Jewels, Rameau’s Nephew, the Letter on the Blind. I feel close to your atheism, as redoubtable today as ever it was, which deeply and openly guides your liberty. From Paris to St. Petersburg, it was like a bracing wind that blew away the obscurantist miasmas battening like parasites on women’s bodies and the beliefs that exploited the quiverings of desire. It was your atheism that first rumbled the tortured sacristies and the torturing boudoirs, whose victims were unconscious of their sexual slavery. Because your atheism did not bow to any cult; it gaily honored the one sovereignty that means anything, the impudence of speaking out.
A DELUSION WITHOUT SOLUTION
In The Nun, you showed scant consideration for the feelings of the faithful.3 The story of young Marie-Suzanne Simonin, first confined in a convent and then debauched by a hysterical prioress who exploits her innocence, is more than a scathing satire on religious delirium; it also shows how ferocious repression and erotic passage à l’acte are the two inseparable faces of a culture that sets such excessive store by ideals because it is obsessed by the violence of the instincts.
Lambasting the unnatural life of Christian religion, you denounce the hypocrisy that goes on to infiltrate lay culture as well. Marie-Suzanne’s “inflexible” parents, for instance, invoke among others the “knowledge” of the Abbé Blin (a doctor at the Sorbonne) and the authority of the bishop of Aleppo, who receives the poor girl into the Church on a day that is “one of the saddest ever.” Family conformity and spiritual dogma are for you the twin aspects of a social code that forces the young girl to take vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience in order to expiate her mother’s adultery, of which she is the product. To cap it all, her legal father is a lawyer! This “morality tale” would have made for hilarious vaudeville, had it not continued with the punitive enclosure of the girl and then, inside a supposedly liberating convent, with the lewd embraces forced on the novice by a mother superior with a contorted face and a warped, disjointed mind.
On the one hand, Longchamp:
A rope was placed around my neck, and with one hand I was made to hold a flaming torch, with the other a scourge. One of the nuns took hold of the other end of the rope and pulled me along between the two lines, and the procession made its way towards a little inner oratory dedicated to St. Mary. They had
come singing softly; now they walked in silence. When I had reached the oratory, lit by two lamps, I was ordered to ask both God and the community to forgive me for the scandal I had caused. The nun who had led me there said the words I had to repeat, and I repeated them all. Then the rope was removed, I was stripped down to the waist, they took my hair, which was hanging down over my shoulders, and pulled it to one side of my neck, they placed in my right hand the scourge I had been carrying in my left, and they started reciting the Miserere.4
On the other, Arpajon:
At such times, if a nun does the slightest thing wrong, the Mother Superior summons her to her cell, deals with her harshly, and orders her to get undressed and to give herself twenty strokes with her scourge; the nun obeys, gets undressed, picks up her scourge, and mortifies her flesh, but no sooner has she given herself a few strokes than the Mother Superior, overwhelmed with pity, snatches the instrument of penitence from her and starts crying; how dreadful it is for her to have to punish people! She kisses her on the forehead, eyes, mouth, and shoulders, caresses her, and sings her praises…She kisses her again, lifts her up, puts her clothes back on for her, says the sweetest things to her, gives her permission not to attend the services, and sends her back to her cell. It is very difficult being with women like that, as you never know what they are going to like or dislike, what you need to avoid doing or what you need to do.…I went inside with her; she accompanied me with her arm round my waist.…“I utterly adore you, and once these bores have all left, I shall gather together the sisters and you’ll sing a little tune for us, won’t you?”5
Here are the two sides of a single madness, “the folly of the cross,” as you write, which “flies in the face of our natural inclinations” by inciting human beings to “hide away,” even though “God made man sociable”; locking them up into “madhouses” and giving free rein in fine to “animal functions” through the very savagery by which these are supposed to be curbed.
Your indictment, Mister Philosopher, is earnest, detailed, and uncompromising: you are up in arms, a militant.
Are convents so essential to the constitution of a state? Did Jesus Christ institute monks and nuns? Can the Church really not do without them?…Can these vows, which fly in the face of our natural inclinations, ever be properly observed by anyone other than a few abnormal creatures in whom the seeds of passion have withered and whom we should rightly consider as monsters, if the current state of our knowledge allowed us to understand the internal structure of man as easily and as well as we understand his external form?…Where does nature, revolted by a constraint for which it is not intended, smash the obstacles put in its way, become enraged, and throw the whole animal system into incurable disarray?…Where is the dwelling place of coercion, disgust, and hysteria? Where is the home of servitude and despotism? Where is undying hatred? Where are the passions nurtured in silence?…“To make a vow of poverty is to swear to be an idler and a thief. To make a vow of chastity is to swear to God constantly to break the wisest and most important of His laws. To make a vow of obedience is to renounce man’s inalienable prerogative: freedom. If you keep these vows, you are a criminal; if you do not keep them, you are guilty of perjury before God. To live the cloistered life, you have to be either a fanatic or a hypocrite.”6
As you write this—understandable—indictment, you are in tears. Diderot, in tears? It’s hardly posterity’s vision of him. We prefer to picture the philosopher patting Catherine the Great on the thigh, she who would later purchase his library…Are you weeping for your little sister, Marie-Angélique, who died a lunatic at the age of twenty-eight in an Ursuline convent, whom you haven’t forgotten, since you named your beloved daughter after her? Or are they tears of outrage, like the way I feel about fundamentalism, before the religious obscurantism that oppresses “our natural inclinations”? Or are your tears even more a surprise to you because you are so well aware that in the human animal, a speaking being, the capacity to make meaning has long ago “flown in the face” of any “natural inclination,” for there is a specific—hence natural—human capacity to clash with nature by dint of language, of thought?
You are discovering that this clash breeds delusions, in which wonders rub shoulders with follies; an inextricable jumble, a merry-go-round of bodies and souls whose perils and charms you brilliantly expose in the character of He, Rameau’s nephew, for example (to the delight of the gloomy Hegel), ten years after The Nun. Here follies cohabit with thought, sure enough; they make this noncharacter live, create, and decline, this literally polyphonous third person, He, the spasmodic artist, the Nephew. But they don’t spare his interlocutor either, I, which is to say you, the philosopher. The humans who lived before you or the Enlightenment ascribed such inconceivable oddities to either the devil or God: “God, through whom we discern that certain things we had deemed essential to ourselves are truly foreign to us, while those we had deemed foreign to us are essential,” wrote Saint Augustine.7 But what if the demonic and the divine were the same thing? What if your “tale” of The Nun led you to locate them, not in the Beyond but in “human nature” itself, which has become so dreadfully foreign? These possibilities are hinted at in your dialogue with that Nephew into whom you poured so much of yourself…
In the tragic story of Mademoiselle Simonin, the impulse that will lead you to the Nephew is still incipient; libertarian revolt prevails throughout. While following the martyrdom of your heroine the reader cannot help distinguishing the bright light of thought, championed by free spirits, from the cringing delirium propagated by fanatics, and the goodness of nature from the evil loosed against it—even though your artful love of masks can’t resist confusing the issue. Matters will be harder and often impossible to sort out when you venture into the subtler crannies of culture, where flesh overlaps with word, and vice versa, as they do in the character of Rameau’s nephew.
And yet, my dear Denis Diderot, I think you already came up against that overlapping at the time of The Nun, and that’s why your story made you cry. One of your cherished “strumpet thoughts” must have come over you: that the deadly excesses of religion, like its deliciously sensual enslavements, don’t come out of nowhere, and they don’t come from the people who use them to justify their liberticidal power. Their egregiousness amplifies and exploits the “clash” inherent in the “natural inclinations” of the human beast, in whom nature chafes with culture—because those two, nature and culture, are always yoked together, however awkwardly, in the speaking animal.
Such is my hypothesis, justified to my mind by the Nephew. Now, if you’ll permit me, I will carry it forward.
Was the end of your novel really lost, as some witnesses allege? Or did you condense the end of the story into a sketchy outline because, overcome by emotion on the heels of a mocking laugh, you found yourself simply unable to finish? “What ails you? What a state you are in!” exclaimed Monsieur d’Alainville, a friend of Grimm’s and yours, when he found you plunged in grief, your face wet with tears. “What ails me?” you replied. “I am undone by a tale I’m telling myself.”8 This “tale” you were “telling yourself” would have no conclusion. The end of the Enlightenment went awry with the Terror. Today’s ending seems interminable, and no less problematic.
PERSIFLAGE: FAITH OR WRITING?
And yet it all started off as a farce. That year, 1758, the charming marquis of Croismare was sorely missed by his friends. You had met the gentleman at the salon of Madame d’Épinay. He was a paragon of lively good humor, “devoted to numberless pleasures in succession,” as your friend Grimm described him. One day he decides to move for a time to his Normandy estate, where his affairs require attention. But he fails to return, having caught a serious case of religion! It was then that you, Denis Diderot, hatched the idea (with the help of some co-conspirators, including Grimm) of an amusing prank, otherwise known as a wicked, perfidious piece of jiggery-pokery: to write to the marquis of Croismare some letters purporting to be from a genuine nun of Longchamp,
Marguerite Delamarre. This lady had gone to court to have her vows annulled, claiming she had been forced into the nunnery by her parents. The marquis, although he did not know the plaintiff personally, had tried in vain to intercede for her with the councillors of the great chamber of the Paris parlement.
According to the fake letters, the nun had now run away from the convent and was begging for help from the marquis, who fell straight into the trap. The hoaxers split their sides. Eager to succor a nun in distress, the newly reverent Croismare offered her a chambermaid post in his household. This forced you to contrive the death of the supposed heroine of the correspondence, so as to relieve your friend without letting the deception be known. Soon afterward you decided to assemble the letters into a narrative, revised in 1780, but still unpublished: private copies circulated from hand to hand. The joke came to light, and Monsieur de Croismare took it with great good humor. The text did not appear as a novel until 1796, twelve years after your death. There was a general consensus to forget about the persiflage of its origins, but this stratagem nonetheless forms the backdrop to the drama (“a tale I’m telling myself”) and confers an elusive dash of unreality and indeterminacy to the tragedy it recounts. A very French way, isn’t it, of tackling the secrets of religion, not to say the mystery of God, at the same time as attacking head-on the evils of superstition!
Teresa, My Love Page 68