1. The “beggar’s archers,” or archers de gueux, were the king’s archers charged with rounding up beggars.
31
REVOLUTIONS START LIKE THIS
Ever since the affaire of the Millard boy, Claude-Siméon is indignant. He has let himself be dragged along by the angry mob. Willy-nilly the inventor espouses this plebian rebellion. He hates promiscuity; his upset stomach returns. But he can’t do anything about it: the crowd carries him along, everyone in it for himself; it’s total chaos.
“Listen, at the Saint-Denis gate people are beating passersby whom they confuse with the child thieves. In the Croix Rouge neighborhood, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, a policeman attempts to grab the son of a chauffeur, the throng goes after him, destroys the house where the predator has taken refuge. On the rue Saint-Honoré, the people seize Labbé … yes, yes, you know, the rat who keeps the child thieves informed … He is lapidated … Then, best of all, the insurgents invade the house of Berryer, the lieutenant general in person, oh yes, la Pompadour’s friend!”
Here indignation conquers nausea.
“The pilot-fish of liberalism, that’s what this royal mistress, this Poisson, is!” Passemant in triumph. “She has got her comeuppance, she has, oh yes! Infected by the king, the lovely lady suffers from a bad salpingitis; her bellyaches are of interest to the court … The doctors have forbidden her any commerce with His Majesty … Never mind, we needn’t feel sorry for this woman. She will remain the favorite who directs the Parc-aux-Cerfs, which she created …”
The clockmaker is not an ingrate, far from it. He knows what he owes to la Pompadour since the presentation of the clock to His Majesty, not to mention the woman’s numerous interventions with the king’s ministers to facilitate his work. But with time and his growing proximity to the Beloved king, Claude-Siméon no longer can stand this body who distances the sovereign from his true passions. Does she protect the king, or does she prevent him from rising higher? This philosophical creature sings in tune, so much the better, but does not let her lover pursue his otherwise favorite and nobler occupations—science and study. At bottom Passemant has always hated his learned-lady rival. To spill his rancor, he takes advantage of the deserted chapel where we are.
“The people have forced her to return to Versailles, I swear, I saw her. This person goes to visit her daughter Alexandrine at the convent of the Assumption—why not, a mother like any other … Then goes to dine at the home of her friend the Marquis de Gontaud, rue de Richelieu … Bad luck: the rioters are gathered there.”
Swept away by the tide of humanity, Passemant joins them. They lapidate Berryer’s door; he escapes, takes shelter in the home of the chief judge, then hides in Versailles until the middle of the night before returning to his digs, escorted by two hundred cavalrymen.
“What’s the connection with La Salpêtrière?”
“Oh it’s obvious, Mme Delisle! If the hospital no longer delivers young flesh to fill up the colonies or satisfy the desires of certain depraved persons, all they can do now is round up children in the streets! Well, the royal attempt at reform coincides with the first kidnappings. Therefore they tried to destabilize the king, but he reacted … In vain, as I told you—Parliament sabotages him. Result: everything can only get worse.”
Catastrophe appears to have seized the wanderer. Long silence. Then, with a calm voice, eyes cast on the stone floor: “The royal clock has broken down, madam. I tell it to you as I think it. We are left with the clock of the stars, which is infinite. I will have done what I could so the infinite would be now … And that now would be as long as possible …”
Engrossed in his phantasms as a repressed and anxious perfectionist, the astronomer is delirious. I’ve been familiar with this since my internships at Sainte-Anne, not to mention the few delirious patients that come by my couch. However, the times are troubled, and the historians themselves are still arguing about La Salpêtrière, the king, and the Jesuits.
My phantom is just a more or less artistic intellectual who thinks and invents. He believes only in time, lovingly invests in it. I point out to him that the poor are like him, except that the only astronomical clock they have is their work, their economies, and, most of the time, their children. To rob and rape their children is the worst offense because along with the children, it’s their time that is stolen and violated. Their only recourse is to destroy everything. That is how revolutions begin, without our being able to see them coming: when people are dispossessed of their progeny, the only time that counts for them.
Claude-Siméon is sitting in front of the three saints. Head held high, speechless. His eyes are tearing. Poor nauseated genius, who thought the infinite world was within reach. Automatic, like the royal clock. I take him in my arms.
“Give me your hand, come, get up, sir! This Red March by the rioters is only a hors-d’oeuvre, wait for what’s coming! Wipe your tears, come now, here, take this handkerchief. The Apocalypse does not exist, clockmaker. This revolt against real or imaginary pedophiles is just another system of time. An emergence, the prophetic sign of another desire. Go on, dream a little, it’s nothing—nothing but an expansion, passions on their way.”
All his limbs tremble. Eyes wide open but no longer with tears.
“You’re afraid the rogues will break your 9999? No, my friend, the astronomical clock will not be damaged. There will always be enough men of taste to protect works of art: stop worrying yourself sick! You did not put time in a case; you had the genius to construct fleeing time. No one will break your 9999, because the unknown is unbreakable, you know perfectly well! Always to be begun again, always to be reinvented.”
No trace of fear in his eyes now. A mad glimmer of hope, perhaps. Claude-Siméon Passemant comes to the chapel at La Salpêtrière to avoid going crazy, not to pray. He is only looking for how to live while time is escaping.
I’m wanting to tell him that we are afraid because we don’t know how we will die. But that’s not the question. Because we are dying all the time, here and now. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve always known it; I’m not afraid, so I don’t need God or the hereafter. Does one have to be sick to perceive death inhabiting us? That it’s in the process of slicing up the kingdom of the pleasure-seeking king?
“Did you need the Red March of the Parisians to come tell me that death tick-tocks with the elegant ambition of your astronomical clock, you, the poor son of a German immigrant? Not really, you have always known it. Come now, you’re letting politics affect you at this point?”
I have rarely been sick. I’m not often sick as I age. A child at war’s end, I must have sensed that things were cracking everywhere: government, family, education, languages, laws, parents, space and time included.
“Things crack all the time, Mr. Inventor! The Red March is always more or less ongoing. Today, things are cracking more, and Versailles trembles. Damiens the apprentice assassin is dismembered; you witnessed it. Another forty years or so and the aristocrats will be on the chopping block. Then come colonial wars, world wars, atomic wars. Melting glaciers, global warming, endemic crises … Be comforted, Passemant, the times reemerge, return, relink, and relaunch time. Once again there will be 9,999 pulsations of love; it’s Nivi who’s telling you. How I’ve figured that out? Well, partly thanks to you! Thanks to your clock, which scans fleeing time: time that I don’t enclose and that doesn’t enclose me … Go on, let go of my hand at last, leave, go in peace!”
I say nothing else. I press him in my arms—my way of thanking him.
I have so many things to do that the polar solitude of Paris no longer impresses me. It melts with the shaft of light that penetrates the chapel when I open the door to the Mazarin nave.
Stan is waiting for me. He is no longer sick; we have some plans.
32
HYPERCONNECTIVITY
Is the imagination an organ for the enjoyment of beauty? Certainly, but not only. Nivi invents a life for Claude-Siméon and transports it into hers. She invites Ém
ilie and Pompadour to PsychMag, listens to Justine who can no longer read, but drifts in a cosmic time (inexistent, per Astro). She joins Stan in his comas, hears in them the ultrasounds of the salt marshes of Ré. She neither flees herself nor multiplies herself, however it may seem. Nivi makes herself a neobody in a neoreality.
From the outside, this imagination seems pure madness—as a shrink, she doesn’t fail to realize it. But she experiences it in depth, like a metamorphosis. Nivi changes bodies because she changes time and space. Not species—neither parasite nor medium. Nivi reincarnates herself as inventor of a clock, as mathematician at the court of Versailles, as king infatuated with science and his philosopher favorite, as astrophysicist chaser of bosons. Transferred into their lives, she lives again.
Her imagination is her only organ of survival. Fragile equilibrium that, for the time being, does not collapse. Since Stan and Theo support her in their respective survivals.
Thus filtered, the psychic or physical coups d’état deploy as canvas, treatments, encounters, writing, continuous connections of threads. Nivi the spinner, the reliancer, the weaver, virtual cousin of the mercer Passemant, Nivi transmuted into a time traveler.
“Don’t you think that hyperconnectivity and the change from the written to the screen, all that stuff, will completely change the way people think? And sexuality—I mean sexual relations.” Marianne is not smiling. Gravely, my friend takes up philosophizing as a bluff, to justify her pregnancy or make me forget it.
What’s the problem? In this matter as in others, the causes and effects are reciprocal and reversible. There is no problem, the answer precedes the question. I am convinced of it. But that’s not all. If I’m participating in this cosmos as it appears in Theo’s labs, then who am I in this fleeting, provisional time in expansion? What judgment or what morality translates it, translates me? Of what sex? No answers. Communicators and educators hold forth on the digital, the absence of authority, souls and sexes, but without retrospection, without any curiosity for neutrinos, the initial singularity, and cosmic inflation. I fear my new boss at PsychMag may be among them.
“I’ll forgive you for being a moralist when you show me you are a better physicist.”
My friend cannot know that I fished this sentence out of a collection of quotations from Sade; she hasn’t read him. Me neither, actually, except in homeopathic doses as an antidote to the ambient, right-thinking, and unknowingly perverse intoxication—they go together. The philosopher of the boudoir, a libertine as we know, invited the man who moralizes to acquaint himself with the physical: in the first place, the physics of the body climaxing to the death and, definitively, the physics of matter. This little-known reflection agrees so well with my passion for physics of the extreme!
Today, the difference between men and women is getting blurred, for Marianne as for the “People” she feeds me on … I don’t know from “People.” For my part, I persist in thinking that a man and a woman do not have the same body and therefore not the same life. Especially if it’s a life from a barely emergent time.
“Wait, can you explain that?” For once Marianne is listening to me. I plunge on.
“The mother and the child? Two bundles in expansion.”
The new director at PsychMag couldn’t care less about my interstellar flights of fancy, but on this she doesn’t think I’m exaggerating; we understand each other. This is my way of telling her that there are a thousand and one ways to tear oneself away from the anxiety of sleepless nights, from the excitement of the tango, from the invigoration of Pilates. By being doubled: impregnated with the pleasures called physical that are the woman’s in her—and why not the mother’s, which she will be henceforth?
“Can you imagine the maternal languages that remain to be invented … The nameless perspectives to be named … You know, there are astrophysical animals, are you surprised? Stan’s guinea pig, James, functions in nanoseconds. He receives our physical vibrations, which are also mental, but he doesn’t know it. Like babies, children, mothers …”
I stop, annoyed at myself for digressing, stupidly. Marianne stares at the ground, then: “There are also those who can’t stand themselves. They freeze, they drown, they kill … Whom? Themselves … Or because they are incapable of separating … We are incapable.”
My friend is no longer in front of me. Tears slip out. She lets me into the obscurity she finds herself in.
Suddenly she continues, at top speed: “Well, a pregnancy makes people talk, I don’t need to tell you. Our King, for example, do you know what he said to me before … before disappearing?” Her timbre trembles. “ ‘You carry your maternity like Athena.’ You see the type … Actually, he was very cultivated, that boy, it’s a fact … Do you know what it means—you who know everything? Not too good for me, eh? A warrior, this virgin goddess, no connection with the ideal mother, unless I’m mistaken …”
What in the world do I know about this Greek pantheon, labyrinths and mazes … Nobody has done better at losing herself in it, and I am lost. As for guessing what LSG meant, that’s another story, maybe the only one that the new director of PsychMag is interested in.
Athena the Wisdom-Virgin, Athena the mother protective of warriors and citizens—not a bad match for Marianne the militant, the woman of the mind. But Athena coveted by Zeus, escaping from permanent copulation inflicted by her celestial partner by spilling his semen into the entrails of Gaia, the Earth-Mother, thus turned into the first surrogate mother—that other Athena then welcomes and raises the child she did not carry … Alone in the task, she then becomes the adoptive mother … And in any biological maternity the female parent learns to adopt the coming stranger … All in all, it seems there is a little of both Athenas in Marianne … I’m rambling, I suspected as much … I tell her, gosh, I know nothing about it, but antiquity had identified various images of maternity. Ones that our modern cleverness separates and makes possible … One thing is certain: the generating parent becomes a mother when her child hears her speech and fulfills it.
“They were already shrinks, your Greeks?” Marianne doesn’t trust me—she’s right not to.
“I remember that Chronos calls Gaia ‘mother’ when he becomes capable of putting what she tells him into action: ‘Mother, perhaps I could accomplish what you say—I pledge to do it.’ You see, it’s not enough to carry the child. The woman who makes herself heard, after giving birth or adopting, is a mother. That’s it: our suicidal, parentless King sought the adoptive mother in you, the one who understands him and whom he understands. Okay?” Once more that mist in her eyes. “Wait, it’s not your doing …”
I can see that my improvisations are embarrassing her. I continue.
“It’s this globalization, dear, always, and right from the start! Globalized vulgarization, the pits! Mama welcomes her progeny and by being understood separates herself from it. There may be an adoptive mother—an Athena, if you like—in each of us. In you too!”
“Oh great! I’ve still got a long way to go!”
She pretends to pout, but I know her, my Marianne: inside she’s triumphant.
The pain has not gone away. My skin is no longer twenty years old. My back bends; I feel death making his bed there. Death swells the veins in my hand; accelerates my heartbeats, which wake me during the night; clouds my eyesight, even behind recently adjusted glasses. No longer is death a stranger as in the past, at the time of my arrival in Paris, when I would hear myself speak a painless dialect masking the wound of a maternal tongue soon reduced to a skin of sorrow, dead skin. Like Colette, I don’t like death. The fatal event that transports me is birth. As a consequence of awakening it every day with Stan and, with a bit of luck, with my analysands, birth provides the rhythm of my words, my voice, my senses, my sex organs. The suffering does not cease, but it becomes passage, a cry of delivery that expulses me out of myself and frees me, irrepressible departures.
Solitude here is no longer a threat. I like being inside the enclosure of my overpopulated isola
tion, where one scare remains: Stan’s suffering. And his unacceptable, unimaginable loss at the end. My conditions, my flourishes aim to prevent this terror, this reality that catches up with me in dreams.
Tonight I glimpse a white room—hypermodern kitchen, infirmary, or waiting room in a luxurious clinic. The blinding light slices my pupils. In the abyss, on the other side of my cornea, in a burning spot in my brain, I see Stan as a child, always those comas. Infused, intubated, barely alive. A siren smashes the whiteness, it’s actually Mahler. Howling trombones, the storm bursts with trumpets and muted horns, mass deflagrations, static horror, the hue and cry of the Earth replaces the Rite of Spring. Wild translation into music of a surge foreign to time.
The loudspeaker announces the alarm. We have to evacuate this building very fast. Atomic attack? Chemical attack? I don’t move: it’s only an absurd dream; I am going to stay with Stan until the end of life. Suddenly I jump, nerves and muscles tensed: leave, go out, flee this agony, far away! Neither quaking nor fear. We run away.
The scene changes. I am in my office in Ré: Astro is beside me; he’s holding my hand. He looks like my father as seen on that old photo I showed to Theo yesterday. I was four then. We’ll be all right. Necessarily, with Astro, there is no end, there will be no end. The end has already taken place, it inhabits me, it flares up in my neurons, which accelerate and disintegrate, it smothers my chest, thrills my heart. I join with it; I call it “coma,” “alarm,” “nuclear war,” “death.” I proffer these words to Astro. Then the end dilates in his hand squeezing mine; it dissolves in the billions of milky ways that people his world.
My throat relaxes, the blood flows back into my breasts and perks them up; they are calling for hugs, kisses, they receive them and like it. Poor elementary homunculi, they know only of women with breasts like washcloths or silicone prostheses that they don’t even detect! And they do not understand that cares and curves cohabit, no more than they imagine that I participate in Stan and Theo and they in me. With Astro inside me or without him, whether he satisfies me and I do myself. Time, shortly lost, emerges now, a brilliance of me without me. It’s my body beginning anew, I escape.
The Enchanted Clock Page 17