Chance? Miracle? Émilie, reconciling Newton with Leibniz, knew that a miracle is not an exception to natural laws but an event in nature itself. No Saint-Médard for her or for me; the supernatural is part of the natural order, which is not the order of the Divine Clockmaker but a perpetual shared engenderment of causes and effects with no other agent than Nature herself.
The Being? An infinite series of unpredictable events in which one derogates one law only to obey another. Mixed in with the law of understanding are the laws of enthusiasm, grace, love—fire, says Mme du Châtelet, Nivi’s cult reference. And the laws of the unconscious, adds the disciple of Freud. Which changes everything. To convince yourself that you dominate the laws, you don’t explain them, and you don’t even reproduce them, as the excellent Passemant did. It is up to us to institute them. Certainly not to use culture to conquer nature, no, why would we?
Planck’s Wall traverses each of us. I am a cone of light. The past infiltrates me and recontacts the future. The more I advance in space, the more I retreat in time. Traveling maintains youth. And my singularity is not an exception. No more than my encounter with Astro at the Phare des Baleines. Because chance is the very nature of the event. Émilie was convinced of it, but Astro proves it with his telescopes. He demonstrates, with the support of his calculations, that the probability of seeing elementary particles follow the Big Bang is infinitesimal. To be exact, it has a value in the 120th position after the decimal. It’s the same probability, incredibly small, that made me meet my A in the waves of the Atlantic after having discovered Passemant’s clock, thanks to Stan.
It was also that probability at work as I embraced Wlad, back in Gagarin’s time. Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, was to crash near Moscow a few years later, having lost control of his craft during a depressurization at altitude. Unless he was asphyxiated because of a badly closed ventilation panel during a training flight? Or had he already succumbed to alcoholism, his mummy continuing to orbit at the end of a failed secret space mission? Some claimed that Gagarin ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Toxic rumors? Or tragic events? They prefigure another miracle: the collapse of the Soviet empire. As for me, Nivi Delisle, I was to settle definitively in Voltaire’s country, and at the Phare des Baleines for vacations.
What does a man want? To be free of his mother by making himself as desirable as she, if not more. To annex the father’s desire. Jesus died on the cross, and in communion after communion, from host to host, Christians never stop tasting the fateful delights of his experience. Has desirance (that is the term for endless desire) truly changed its goals in replacing the father’s place with science, the Big Bang, and the instanton? In my opinion it could not have done better.
A man’s homosexuality and a woman’s phallic aspirations are legal now; they have even become the norm. People want to be normal. Medically equipped rooms supervise coke, MDMA, ecstasy. No S/M ritual upsets the religious coteries anymore. Nauseating pissoirs, Our Lady of the Flowers or The Naked Lunch, neither The Ticket That Exploded nor Burroughs nor Genet. There are no longer any scandals. Madame Bovary and The Flowers of Evil figure in homeopathic doses on school curricula, and what does it matter if no one can read, since no one has anything to say about it either. At the same time, the smartphone, with a click, assures your full enjoyment, on a street corner or at home, if you’d rather. The Web makes everything available for everyone; nothing is surprising, astonishing, or frightening. Where in the world can desirance possibly have got to?
The legislator who decreed “marriage for everyone” must have faced the facts: desirance between a man and a woman is out of style. What becomes of the feminine of the man and the feminine of the woman in equalized-legalized love? The subtle Viennese doctor thought that female sexuality, an insuperable taboo, is never and will never be uncovered.
There remains one chance, a risk to take: meet body to body, outside oneself, in oneself. An interval, so delicate and so finely orchestrated that the ambient universe ceases to be flat. Fragile desirance bursting out like the very first light. So vulnerable that its value is written, Theo claims, with an interminable rosary of zeros: 0, decimal point, then 119 zeros behind it before arriving at the number 1:
0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001
A prodigious adjustment, it inaugurates the beginning of the expansion—from nothing to us, living speakers. “A value so close to one splits off from platitudes, and this infinitesimal split will have created the world inflating and expanding toward you and me.”
My lunatic Theo doesn’t renounce the mythology of love, and that’s fine by me. Especially since he keeps his mythology sober, and it relays our fragile miracles.
30
A RAY OF ICY LIGHT
A ray of icy light penetrates the stained-glass windows of the chapel, a rosy arrow piercing the polar cold. Solitude. There’s a freeze in Paris this winter, at La Salpêtrière more than anywhere else. At least the heating works; the country still has the means. Sterile drapes are in short supply, the staff is overworked, people have to bring their own medications because the central pharmacy no longer has any, nosocomial infections and errors proliferate, people are talking about two young men who were dropped from such a height that the necks of their femurs broke. “With the thirty-five-hour week and budget cuts, the hospital has become a powder keg again—explosive saltpeter, more precisely!” Professor de Latour, looking after Stan, tries to make me smile by trotting out this rather worn-out play on words that nobody finds funny.
Suffering with exhaustion, I don’t comment. I take refuge under the towering occiput of the Saint-Louis chapel in La Salpêtrière; I pass by the stone phantoms of saints Thomas, Philip, and Mark. There’s no chance of encountering any of the faithful in this now deserted refuge, the glacial vestige of a statue-incarnated faith. Frozen, I advance in the chiaroscuro that filters from the ceiling, a sleepwalker pierced by the ray of red light. I let myself be guided toward a mirage. And what do I see? My clockmaker! Him again!
“It’s not possible, you here, Passemant? An obsession, I have to say … I thought you were at the court, in the King’s Cabinet, Mr. Engineer … Weren’t you supposed to present your clock this very evening, the clock that will see 9999, as you say?”
Claude-Siméon is having one of his bad days: feverish eyes, seems out of breath—did he run? His skin is not so much pale as colorless, oily. His long, golden-brown hair is dusty, matted down; he must have lost his hat. In the half shadows, the scarlet ray of light contours a rounded forehead, a straight nose, a receding chin, thin, clenched lips. I infer the skull; I imagine the brain that conceived and calculated the clock, then wedged it in the Beloved king’s crotch. It’s hard to get used to the idea that this is the same man. The shameless insolence of the inventor in love with his sovereign has pulled back today, has perhaps even disappeared, enclosed in this hunted specter. Nauseous grimaces have survived, but his sense of humor has disappeared. Fear remains, unless it’s the hope that everything will crumble.
It’s enough to make him feel like vomiting, he says, and he wants to see with his own eyes. Me too, that’s convenient. I remind him that abjection is not at all pathological; it’s common, always around. He is aware of it. But in this month of May 1750, it’s gone beyond understanding. People are saying that a leprous prince needs to bathe in human blood to be cured.
“And since there is no purer blood than the blood of children, they are being seized in the streets and bled from their four veins and sacrificed.”
“Are you sure? Who? Where?” I can’t believe my ears.
“You think I’m delirious? Not at all. Listen: The minister of Paris, the Marquis d’Argenson himself, is worried about it, and he has said they’re false rumors spread by people above the lower classes. Parliament is looking into the affair, with the ma
gistrate Severt … Rumors like this have been common since the last century, but it’s not by chance that all this mud is rising to the surface again. Children are being grabbed in the streets, right in Paris and elsewhere too, as I said … Traffic in fresh flesh headed to the colonies. Some is needed to populate the Mississippi, that’s what they’re saying … Or better yet, it’s to offer young flesh, both boys and girls, to those amateurs you call pedophiles … Even the king himself is being accused, it’s awful, you see … How far will people go?”
“Wait, who are we talking about? Yet another plot … Who are they, these people?”
The specter doesn’t hear me, consumed with his nausea.
“People say Louis XV is a kind of Herod. But who can believe that? His Majesty is furious, you can imagine … ‘I am going to show myself to this lowly populace,’ that’s what he says, and he should! What else can he do, there’s no dealing with such cruel people, their criminal leaders … This whole business is unbelievable. You think it’s unbelievable like I do, don’t you?”
Claude-Siméon is looking for reassurance. The king’s engineer is depressed because he is a perfectionist—given that he wants to calculate time down to the sixtieth of the second, how could he not be? At this very instant, on the 4th of February 1750, his astronomical clock is showing 12 hours, 32 minutes, 26 seconds, and 13 sixtieths of a second.
“Have you already seen my clock? Of course you’ve seen it. We are not yet in …”
He looks up, stares at me without looking at me, talks to himself. He is possessed.
No, he does not want to know what the world will look like on the 31st of December 9999 at 23:59:59:59, when his astronomical clock, given to His Majesty, will have chimed the last stroke of the year 9999. He’s not interested in others; he finds them horrible, at least that’s what he thinks. What’s the point of knowing what they will have become in the year 10,000? He just wants to possess the flow of time—right this minute, in his mind, because such is the programming of the clock. The engineer, his king, and all Versailles are and will be there, present at that instant, as they are now at royal ceremonies; 9999 will have displaced them to that ultimate instant that opens the eleventh millennium. By the same token, the probable or improbable humanity from that distant epoch will at every moment be present at Versailles, at this clock that counts time and contains it for them, for this humanity united with Louis XV, la Poisson, Voltaire, Émilie, and Passemant himself, it goes without saying. All together!
“Stopping time is out of the question, it will continue its course to five digits, six, etc. 100,000, 1,000,000, who knows? Someone could redo this clock to infinity, if possible. Other electronic clockmakers will perpetuate the project. It doesn’t matter …”
His frozen lips are drawn back in a crazy smile, his eyes widen, but he’s not looking at me; he’s picturing the clocks of the future. Such a perspective doesn’t bother him at all. What he is interested in is to coincide with the passing of time, to live in an infinite now. Only then does he succeed in ridding himself of his nausea and his headache. The engineer of the king, the rival to la Pompadour, the incredible one.
One has to be scrupulous, and if Claude-Siméon is, it’s because he is anguished. He is afraid that everything will collapse. He can see that nothing runs smoothly anymore; the kingdom is no longer what it was. The proof: these unbelievable stories, these circulating rumors claiming that Versailles will be burned. His Majesty installs troops on the Pont de Sèvres and the narrow passage at Meudon. He has a new route opened that skirts Paris on the west, running through Saint-Ouen. It’s the “Highway of the Revolt,” the mockers guffaw.
The astronomer looks for his hat, doesn’t find it, affirms that those stories about the leprous prince are just gobbledygook. The revolt, however, is very real. Children disappear by the dozens, by the hundreds, from the streets of Paris and the General Hospital: La Salpêtrière, Bicêtre, La Pitié. Odd that Mme Nivi Delisle doesn’t know this.
Claude-Siméon detests politics; the panics his contemporaries feed on don’t concern him. But the revolt is building quite close to him. Young Millard, son of his clockmaker friend, was playing with two apprentice shoemakers on the rue Royale when he was kidnapped by the “beggars’ archers” and unceremoniously pushed into the police inspector’s carriage.1 Claude-Siméon heard it from the boy’s parents.
“Apparently an invalid witnessing the scene intervenes to defend those innocent boys. Mistreated in turn, he is arrested. The police chief, who knows the Millard family, is about to liberate these harmless youngsters when he notices that the order to round them up came from the lieutenant general of the police, Berryer in person. A friend of la Pompadour, Nivi—did you not know that, perhaps?”
I did not know that d’Argenson himself was in on the plan; maybe he was even the director of this dragnet. Young libertarian vagabonds and crooks, fine … But now they’re arresting little kids. Why them?
Claude-Siméon feels he’s going to be sick to his stomach just by thinking about it again here with me, under the frigid statue of St. Philip.
“To populate the Mississippi, Madam, those people were already helping themselves at the General Hospital. But why scoop them up right in the streets at present? Could it be because the hospital is no longer playing along and giving up their children?”
Now I understand. The Salpêtrière, at the time, is the dumping ground for everything in France that counts as superfluous bodies and souls. Women of dubious virtue—prostitutes and mendicants—are parked at the General Hospital, along with people without means, without names and addresses, without papers, without a home. Children are taken along with their mothers, from whom they are immediately separated, thus swelling the ranks of the “exposed” ones, as they call abandoned babies. Can you imagine? What can be done with these hordes of little boys and indocile, recalcitrant, gambling, blaspheming, and quarrelsome preadolescents? Passemant thinks they are entrusted to the Jansenist fathers charged with giving them an education. Those holy men begin by putting an end to dirtiness, drunkenness, and brigandage before teaching them reading, arithmetic, and, of course, prayer. Whereupon the engineer learns from the gazettes that a fake confraternity of devout men, composed of magistrates, noblemen, financiers, lawyers, bourgeois, formerly members of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, now Jansenists, has gained total power over the hospital, its children, and the convulsionnaires shut up there as well! Catechism and writing do not prevent abuses. On the contrary. Everyone knows this, not you?
Skin piercings using pointed triangles, blows with sharpened spades, shooting pitons, logs, hammers, and swords, collective tramplings. Could the king’s engineer be reading too much S/M literature? He recounts these tortures in detail; it seems he cares. Then calms down to tell me that the king himself wanted to reform the hospital because irrefutable evidence of dissipation and corruption had been reported to him. To eliminate Jansenism from La Salpêtrière, His Majesty names a new archbishop, Monsignor de Beaumont, who has the good idea of dismissing the former mother superior and naming another, Louise Urbine Robin, widow of de Moysan, his beautiful friend of thirty-eight who is nevertheless quite serious. Beaumont and the widow Moysan listen to the Jesuits, which does not displease the king. It’s the beginning of the end. The hospital affair will have lasted nine years.
The specter is out of breath. Coughing fit. Long silence.
Oh yes: a scandal hidden from everyone in the sands of history.
“Didn’t Voltaire himself talk about this affair? Without getting overly concerned about it, actually: ‘Never has a smaller affair caused greater emotion.’ Don’t you agree? You are exaggerating, clockmaker; it’s not worth going to pieces over.”
Claude-Siméon finds me quite offhand about it. He is no more interested in politics than in people. This hospital affair is only the straw that breaks the camel’s back of his disgust, nothing else. What disgust? “Are you asking me? But everything’s falling apart, Nivi, can’t you feel it? His Ma
jesty first gets Parliament to capitulate for a short time. The judges rebel and refuse to apply the royal reforms, they disobey and censure the king … Like I’m telling you … Then they end up legislating in his place! Louis XV does not tolerate these remonstrances. It’s an impasse.”
Passemant asks me if we’re not heading toward an overthrow of the monarchy. Already?
Parliament goes on strike. Sabotage of justice. But the people wait, and the country suffers from this manacled governance. All that remains for the monarch are his parliamentary sessions: Louis XV tells the strikers that their positions are now eliminated.
“As if by chance, it is precisely in 1757 that Damiens attempts to assassinate the beloved king. The same year I present a new ‘parallelic machine’—on an axis parallel to the axis of the world—to observe the passage of Venus. Damiens will be drawn and quartered, did you know?”
Again this odor of terror … Did Louis XV understand the message?
“At first demoralized, finally soothed by la Pompadour, who governs him.”
The king is suffering; it’s public knowledge, my visitor confirms. And rethinks his decisions. One can no more reform the hospital than the financial markets. His Majesty capitulates. Parliament triumphs.
“Passemant, do you think the revolution is under way?”
“We haven’t reached that point yet. Today Parliament is against the all-powerful church, run by the Jesuits and supported by the monarchy. Unless it’s the church that humanizes the hospital by resisting the offensive, vocal, and ambitious magistracy, which is ready to cover over all sorts of corruption and fraud. Or perhaps the church participates in them?
His Majesty’s astronomer doesn’t quite know: he’s not excluding any hypothesis; in his view everything’s imaginable. But he does know that something is already broken.
The Enchanted Clock Page 16