It is certain that His Majesty is quite seduced by the masculine beauty of the clock. It is true also that his trauma as an orphan found in the sciences a refuge to heal wounds. One also knows that with time heaven transcends the risky charms of the favorites. The astronomers’ heaven as well. But it is the sensitivity of an old child that advances, in Choisy on this autumn evening, toward the visionary servant who prowls around his clock and talks to it. A Louis who knows how to flow with the weather, who cares daily for his “generative parts” like a baby, in the anguish of his death and much taken with survival, riding beasts and mistresses, mixing women with auroras. Who deprives himself of nothing, seeking the “most desirable,” which is found only in “peace” and “the state of nature,” though his people do not really see it. And which only the good work of men of science brings him with certainty.
Father and son, sometimes the one, sometimes the other, both at the same time, neither the one nor the other, difference of age and social rank fused in a primary humanity. At such a game the loser wins, but before losing the affection of the nation, His Majesty writes sentences like these to the son of his daughter Elisabeth de France and Philip II:
“The cold has returned almost as bad as before, and everything is white as if dusted with sugar.”
“Did your surgeon, who they say is good, see the problem with your organ, which could only have come from your prepuce being too long and difficult to pull back?”
“My arm is still very far from its natural state, but since it deprives me of little, I pay it little attention. Nevertheless I have taken a bath and a shower, and I think I will continue to do so for a few days.”
“I am very glad that your generative parts are better, and that you are enjoying yourself as much as you can.”
“What is this disease in your wife’s breast? Does she have much of a bosom, because she is thin, they say, and do you find her pretty; it seems to me this little illness should not prevent the rest.”
“I am delighted that your wife is better. We have also had several auroras [that is what the king calls rainbows], but as they are rather frequent, people no longer pay much attention.”
“Hot weather has arrived here, and it is excessive, which could bring us storms. They are cutting the wheat as fast as they can.”
“I am not pleased that Antoinette is too fat at her age.”
“My indigestion is gone, but in the last few days I had a bit of a stomachache from having drunk, or rather tasted, a cup of white chocolate with cream and ice.”
“You mustn’t despair of anything, my dear little one.”
“On Wednesday we had a phenomenon at ten thirty [the comet of 1771], which frightened everyone.”
“I don’t remember having heard of the rumor [of war] you are talking about. Peace is what is always the most desirable.”
Louis is afraid of death. His parents poisoned—no proof, of course. By the Duc d’Orléans himself? No indication of that either. All he can do now is live life to the fullest: in herbs, passions, rainbows, sex, breasts, births, rebirths, peace, war (to be avoided). To protect himself from attacks! Was Damiens a sign of the Last Judgment? To live on hygiene and pleasure. To live: ten children with the queen, Marie Leszczynska (almost a child a year), of which three dead at an early age, and thirteen adulterous children with his mistresses. We don’t count the others.
Was Louis XV a sensual bioautomaton, a tireless rower in the Tao of procreation? Shattered at the death of his son Louis-Ferdinand, upset when his daughter Louise, called Madame Seventh, enters the Carmelites, he “cries in private and affects tranquility in public.” It’s been attested to. At that time, depression is not French.
After the loss of the dauphin, courageously putting on a good face, Louis lies in his armchair for eight days in a row, heartbroken. The only thing he can bear is the presence of the famous Cassini, much to the displeasure of the courtesans who smother in ridicule the astronomical distractions of their sovereign.
And at this tearful father’s side, the fabulous astronomical clock 9999 and the specter Passemant, his elder by eight years, his good fellow and his double, his son, his brother. This protégé of the same Cassini has surpassed himself; he has surpassed them all, both the court and his king. His only purpose in life was to capture the time of survival, that time of the stars, in a body of bronze and wood in the purest Louis XV style, his own body. A royal engineer whose headache His Majesty humors at hearthside on this day in January 1754.
The lover of la Pompadour, a sinner and hence all the more a man of the faith, finds peace only with men like this one, men of talent and perseverance, whatever their birth. Those qualities he lacks, but he doesn’t complain; he leaves it to them. Such is his religion, his revolution. “If I have committed errors, it is not for lack of volition but for lack of talent and for not having supported as I would have liked, especially in matters of religion,” he insists in his private testament.
His heart saturated with anguish and none the less admiring.
13
AMONG THE CONVULSIONARIES
The spring daylight floods the courtyard on the rue aux Fers, where Claude-Siméon has set up his workshop as a mercer. He’s a mercer only in name. A dreamer, rather, besotted with astronomy and clockmaking, stranded among honest artisans. Surrounded by the richest silk merchants of Paris, this son of the venerable German spends the bulk of his time immersed in scientific books, calculating the paths of the stars, and constructing telescopes, sundials, barometers, and thermometers. Then, seeking reflection, he goes to Saint-Eustache, his parish church, which saw the baptisms of the Beloved king, Richelieu, and Molière. Claude-Siméon is thinking only of filling his soul with the polyphony of Rameau, transcribed for the precious sixteenth-century organ. The stained-glass window of the south transept is a circus of sonorous colors, a divine jewel that diffracts universal clarity to infinity. There is only one retreat—the chapel of the Virgin—that pacifies this solar madness, brings order to the bedazzlement and transmutes it into time for oneself: into quietude.
The faithful clients of the respectable passementier are starting to distrust this heir who scarcely listens and frequently sends them to his father’s colleague Louis-Onophre Ollivier on the rue Mazarine, a member of the famous Ollivier clan, all suit tailors acquainted with high society. Publications of the Academy of Sciences are piling up on top of the astrological treatises Passemant junior prizes. Like his father, he is very skillful with his hands; his work is more than adequate, but everyone can see that his mind is elsewhere. If he’s become a cabbalist—no big deal! It’s what people are talking about a lot these days. Instead of working at cutting cloth with his scissors, he polishes glass, cuts steel and copper, inserts screws and nuts, spheres and dials, goes from one book to the next, and would rather cover his notebooks with microscopic writing, numbers, and sketches than calmly take his clients’ measurements while conversing with them, as he should.
Especially since as night falls—does he take himself for a magus?—this individual trains spyglasses on the moon. He’s visited by secret societies, it’s a fact—the neighbors have seen them. This coterie exchanges writings and calculations and goes about melting metals. They build machines; they aim for the sky.
A great friend and protector of Passemant the father, Niels van Klim, or rather one of his relatives, a clockmaker and coworker of the famous Julien Le Roy, who works for His Majesty at Versailles, crisscrosses Europe and brings him, at the rue aux Fers, the latest inventions of the English, the Dutch, and the Italians. It’s not surprising that the fingers of young Passemant see, that his eyes feel, that his mind knows how to calculate to the millimeter the magnifying glasses, the number of wheels and pinions, the turns of the crank, the teeth of the gears necessary to make the sphere of each planet turn. Earth, Jupiter, Mars: no detail escapes him. This Niels van Klim knows the calculations of Huygens and Newton inside out. “It’s indispensable,” he convinces the already quite knowledgeable youn
g man. “Learn them and apply them, and you will have all Versailles in your corner,” he promises. “You will have God in person, since He is the Great Clockmaker.” Their god is not our god, people whisper. What can you know? They worship Time, or rather the Great Constructor of Times.
Claude-Siméon doesn’t listen to the gossip. He is inspired by the Dutchman’s mechanics, the Englishman’s optics. As if he had written them himself. He re-creates them truly and better, always more precise. Nearer to the time of the stars, which he has spent the entire night doing nothing but recalculating. More and more exact in each millimeter of steel, of copper, of silver, of gold. His lenses are peerless for enlarging celestial bodies, which they capture and lodge in music boxes. Baroque ballets and cosmic precisions, what difference is there? It is possible—better: it is urgent—to reproduce the exactness of the Divine Clockmaker in a childlike, fair-inspired, human merry-go-round. To tame the order of the world.
No one stops time, it’s obvious; so one has to marry it. Claude-Siméon is persuaded that attraction is beautiful, that’s what he feels. Gravitation is not only grave, it is also desirable, gracious. And the effort to think becomes a felicity. The man is happy only at that hour of the afternoon when he has refined the night’s calculations into a finely worked object and the frowns of the forehead yield to the joys of the eyes, the fingers, the entire body.
The son of Ollivier, Pierre-Antoine, who has left the paternal shop to become a lawyer in Parliament and referendum reporter in the Chancellery in the Palais de la Cité, understands that Claude-Siméon also takes his distance from the quotidian. A little fanciful, all the same, at some distance from ordinary matters, and absorbed as if at the will of a vocation in all his bizarre innovations as astronomical clockmaker. Pierre-Antoine becomes impatient, the dear man; he doesn’t seem to grasp that this new science that engulfs Passemant demands patience, also distraction, a sort of absence, it goes without saying. But the two of them have an understanding: Claude-Siméon will marry the older sister of Pierre-Antoine, Louise, and take the younger brother, aged sixteen, as an apprentice to help him with everything.
A true gift from God, this Louise. She has the skin of Marie-Madeleine, the same large brown eyes, and a flair for business. Better than Mme Passemant, the mother, who is always only aspiring for more. No, Louise is content to be the perfect wife of the mercer, of the master draper, of the passementier. That’s all, that’s good, that’s a sure thing. She will handle the affairs of the two united families, just as they are, no need for stars, what more do you want? It’s exactly what’s required to leave Claude-Siméon free rein with his sky and his automatons.
Today, Pierre-Antoine Ollivier is into the fad that has all Paris in its grip. He lands at the workshop with his two sisters, Louise and Aubine, and absolutely demands that Claude-Siméon go with them. “Everyone in Paris is going to Saint-Médard to see the miracle. Are you coming?”
Not interested, but he complies. Claude-Siméon is only thinking about the quarrel of the Cartesians and the Newtonians and about inserting the mathematical principles of natural philosophy into a music box. He’s not planning to transport the Olliviers into that territory, of course, but he also doesn’t want to disappoint Pierre-Antoine, Louise, and Aubine. The time seeker already senses that he is going to have a very bad headache. Never mind, he’ll go. He won’t stay very long; he has an appointment at the Observatory with his teacher from the Collège Mazarin—you know, Louise, that great man I’ve already told you about, Jacques Cassini. He has been admitted into the Royal Society and the Akademie in Berlin; he’s a friend of Newton and Halley.
Louise raises her eyebrows. She doesn’t understand a single thing about the astral calculations of her fiancé and future husband. What on earth is the meaning of those peculiar prayers that plunge him so far, so deep inside himself, that he is truly lost for her? A sort of witchcraft, for sure. But he returns and is saved again; that’s how it is. Her Claude-Siméon is a genius; Louise will do everything necessary so he can live with and for his stars. It’s perfect. Claude-Siméon will be a great clockmaker, and we will all go see the convulsionnaires!
They cross the Seine, take the Pont Royal, walk along the quai des Grands-Augustins; farther on they will take the rue Saint-Jacques toward the Latin Quarter as far as Saint-Médard. The previous night, his eyes had not left his telescope, and now, with this walk, the incessant chatting of the three Olliviers, Claude-Siméon again feels that bar cutting into his skull. But he continues on.
“You never talk about God. It’s as if you can do without Him.” Pierre-Antoine Ollivier has no intention of provoking him; he just wants to mention what the people and the three Olliviers are excited about these days.
Claude-Siméon takes no notice. How can he make them understand that you can’t talk about it; you think about it, write it, compose it. The Olliviers are used to his silences; besides, Pierre-Antoine is not expecting an answer.
He carries on: “You know, the Jansenists are forbidden. By a declaration of the king. Maneuvered by the implacable Fleury, Monsieur le Cardinal, who was directing His Majesty’s spiritual life. But Parliament is having none of it, nor is our parish. And you, at Saint-Eustache, are you with us? You know about it or not? The police aren’t able to prevent the Ecclesiastical News … Never heard of it? Too bad. The gazette of the clandestine Jansenists, that’s what it is!”1 Breathless with pleasure, Pierre-Antoine knows lots of things, clients are talking, for or against; they pity the king, who is weakening as a result of being contested by Parliament. “It’s over, the Jesuits are back. Don’t you know about it? At Saint-Médard it’s something else again: those people are opposing the anti-Jansenist papal bull, but they also hate the Jesuits, for whom Jansenism is just boiled-over Calvinism.”
These imbroglios seem so absurd that Pierre-Antoine is not sure he understands it all. The clientele are also lost, to tell the truth. The budding lawyer strives to ferret things out; he has a talent for complicating everything.
“My dear brother, what are you talking about!” exclaims Aubine. “There are extraordinary healings at Saint-Médard, after … I actually know of a deacon named Pâris, a man of great piety, who sleeps without sheets, eats only vegetables, and distributes his wealth to the poor. At his death, a woman paralyzed for twenty-five years throws herself upon his coffin and suddenly is able to move again.” Aubine is on cloud nine.
“And a fruit seller who had an ulcer on his leg was healed by applying a piece of the wood of that same deacon’s cot on the wounds.” Louise is awestruck, her voice sweeter than ever.
“Now people visit his grave like a saint’s grave. The sick lie down on the stone, and they’re seized by convulsions. They froth, they drool. Sometimes a hundred people convulse together. Others are into self-flagellation, like at Saint-Benoît.” Ollivier warms to his subject, gourmand, intrigued now.
“And then, secret organizations of convulsionnaires, more than five thousand people, meet to pray, sing, make sacrifices, have orgies …” Aubine’s cheeks are aflame.
“Can you imagine, darling? They slit the throats of animals, and with the blood they mark the houses of those whom the Exterminating Angel should spare, even in Versailles.” Louise is in love and docile, but transported.
“And there’s a visionary who draws straws to decide who among them will be sacrificed to expiate the crimes of the others.” Ollivier, slightly disapproving, after all: too much is too much.
“Look! Look! A convulsionnaire.” The crowds make it hard to see, but there must be more than one. “She’s drawn a design on her skin; it looks like a chalice. And she is speaking in tongues!” Aubine is enthralled.
Claude-Siméon’s head hurts more and more. He has read practically all the books from Port-Royal, beginning with those by Nicole. So the Jansenism at Saint-Médard is not the Jansenism he was taught at Mazarin? This affair is madness. The clockmaker is decidedly not of this world.
“Okay, friends, it’s time for me to leave you. Do
n’t wait for me for dinner; I’m not sure I’ll be on time. I will do my best, but there’s a chance I’ll be late … You can tell me what conclusions you draw from this visit to the good Lord … or to the devil! I’m kidding … A bit … I’m leaving your company … Adieu, dear Louise! Ollivier, look after her for me.”
1. In 1713, the papal bull Unigenitus by Clement XI proclaimed the interdiction of the Jansenists at the request of Louis XIV. The Ecclesiastical News was the weekly Jansenist publication.
14
SOMEONE HAS WHISPERED A SENTENCE IN MY SLEEP
You have to let the poor folks sleep, I’ve prevented them from sleeping too often.”
I frequently wake up at night. I read or listen to the radio, news and music; I wait for sleep or for the idea of a new sentence for a book in progress. I know that certain dreamed words are forever lost, inaccessible upon awakening, so I get up and consign them to my red notebook with the graph paper. I dreamed about Passemant—but which one? My Astro or the clockmaker?
I was reading a book: I heard words; they rose before my eyes, unfolded into spaces, tortuous labyrinths at first, then more and more distinct.
Two or three stories of low-ceilinged rooms, staircases, corridors, delightful nooks, libraries, and map storage. Coffee kept warm over embers. A studio with a tower, a distillery, high bay windows with little panes. I am in the private apartments. Pearly light, chandelier pendants, reflections to infinity in facing mirrors. The large Holy Family by Raphael, Holbein’s Erasmus, some Poussins, a Veronese. Bouquets of sculpted flowers and fruits between the gilded foliage on the white woodwork. Trophies of war, hunting, and love.
After the cabinet attached to the bedchamber, where Passemant’s astronomical clock reigns, I go through the hunting cabinet. Only the nobles and the king’s wardrobe keepers are allowed to enter here. Courtesans remain in the staircase or the marble courtyard. The King’s Chamber becomes the Council Chamber. The sovereign uses a little interior corridor where I see there’s a door opening into the Throne Room.
The Enchanted Clock Page 8