Here they are! Marianne arrives at the house with the bassinet, introduces her baby to me. “La bébée,” to be exact.
“Indira, her name is Indira.”
With a sweet pretty face like a Buddhist statuette, the child sleeps peacefully in vapors of tulle and lace. Perfect features, a matte complexion. Some resemblance with her redhead mom, visibly thinner. Amber-colored skin, the father’s, no doubt. No comment. I rave about Indira’s serene beauty, her entrenched calm, sign of good health. This little girl, Indira Baruch, will be a lively woman, we know it, we hope so. Our chatting wakes her up. Her great black eyes are not yet smiling; they only stare into emptiness. Very quickly she makes it known that it’s time to nurse. Indira too is now. She will always be so in her mother’s eyes, and perhaps in her lover’s. With the history that precedes her and whatever may be her days and nights to come, her loves, her failures, her life. Now she keeps to herself, she keeps us, she links me to the expansion of worlds.
“I love you,” says Stan, who adores babies.
I smile, looking directly at my redheaded Marianne, who cries no more. She learns to cry from the inside; she learns to be a mom.
33
COMMON INTENSITIES, STRANGE INTIMACIES
The few memories of this period, with Passemant, Émilie, the Beloved or detested king, and all those people around them, are always more precise when they return. About these people, however, I know almost nothing. Scattered documents, snatches, fragments of conversations, letters, songs, looks that speak to me. And anxieties that rejoin me, trajectories that I’ve read or written. Common intensities against a backdrop of vacuity.
These encounters resemble those everyone has at various moments of life, chance meetings in train stations, libraries, beaches, lecture rooms, or in the pages of a book. Encounters in airports, for instance, especially abroad, give birth to strange intimacies. I am sure Claude-Siméon and I have always been taking the same airplane at La Guardia or Roissy. Or buses and metros to get to Paris, Versailles, Saint-Eustache.
Chaotic memories in series. They are engraved in my senses more than in my memory, and the present is the time when these shining moments vibrate in me. That’s how it is for my encounter with a person who continues to intrigue her biographers: Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, wife of d’Étiolles, better known under the name Marquise de Pompadour.
In 1750, when Claude-Siméon presents his priapic clock to Louis XV, the marquise has only just left the rooms attributed to the king’s mistress, which she occupied on the third floor at Versailles, and has moved to the ground floor, where the princes of royal blood are housed.
La Pompadour has tuberculosis; she coughs up blood. She is overworked. “Scarcely do I have a minute to myself,” she breathes to the engineer. Does she feel connected to Passemant through the coincidences of destiny? Because both of them, with their families of weavers or artisans, belong to the third estate? Or because her father, Poisson, the agent of the Pâris brothers, accused of fraud and condemned to be hanged, was obliged to seek exile for twenty years in Germany, where Claude-Siméon still has connections? Whatever the case may be, the favorite feels authorized to address the clockmaker.
“Aside from the contentment of being with the king, the rest is just a fabric of cruelty, platitudes, and misery,” she blurts into his ear as she escapes.
Claude-Siméon thinks she looks unhealthy, as if sucked dry. I do too.
La Poisson complains of coughs, fevers, suffocation. Potions, aphrodisiacs, herbs—she’s drugging herself. In vain. She’s exhausted. They whisper that the king is henceforth so cold in the marquise’s bed that he sleeps on the couch. La Pompadour remains the favorite nevertheless, the indestructible friend, the minister of culture. But not of research. Claude-Siméon’s clock has invested the sovereign’s heart, and now it’s 9999 that lies near Louis XV. The man’s penis will, however, always need a no less oiled and automatic clockwork, of which the marquise improvises herself as the irreplaceable engineer—and that will be the Parc-aux-Cerfs with its little mistresses.
There she is getting into her “flying chair.” The king’s technicians have fabricated an elevator that functions by means of a weight, so she can reach the third floor without fatigue. Always overworked, la Belle Jardinière constantly coughs up blood.1
Claude-Siméon seems embarrassed either to meet up with her or to avoid her. And embarrassed when I see him speaking to her. I don’t know what these men and women of all classes can be doing in Versailles. After so many years of documentation, interpretation, revolutions, terrors, restorations, and diverse interests, I have no desire to know.
It was during a masked ball (was it at Versailles or in the Hôtel de Ville?) that the unforgettable favorite, at the time Mme d’Étiolles, twenty-four, young and pretty, was to win Louis’s heart. The motley crowd—gardeners, florists, ridiculous doctors à la Molière, Chinamen, and Turks—welcomes a strange group: eight yew trees of paper and cloth pruned in the style of Le Nôtre’s gardens, with holes for the eyes, make their entrance. Jeanne-Antoinette is disguised as a shepherdess, while one of the yew trees is none other than the still-Beloved monarch.
Passemant reminds me that la Pompadour frequents Marivaux, Montesquieu, Fontenelle, Crébillon; that she plays Molière but is better at singing. Her voice, full of gaiety, delights le président Hainault, and everyone thinks she’s a great talent. The clockmaker is of the opinion that all this is of no importance because the king is interested only in science. That, in any case, is what my learned gentleman wants to believe.
He is jealous; so is the court—which treats Jeanne-Antoinette like a working girl (a grisette). What a mistake! Louis finds solace with this bourgeois woman because she makes him feel his time: she’s a sort of clock, but in the short term. She reassures him with her intelligence as a woman who knows not passion but the heartbeats of the senses and of words. She senses bodies, men, affairs; calculates the royal interest; adapts and cares. With grace and malice. The marquise is an exquisite composition that inflames her king, excites him as no female has been able to, more clock than the clock, yet he can never satisfy her. A real challenge.
For this male hunter, to love an intelligent woman (though not a genius) is not a pederast’s pleasure, as Baudelaire will claim; it’s quite simply unheard of. And much more useful than the company of the extravagant Émilie, who thinks for herself and believes in happiness. This Marquise du Châtelet is an adventurer, hardly one to solicit a position, a charge at the court—no, it’s really not her thing, in no way. She consumes bodies and ideas for eternity, some rare wits claim. La Pompadour, on the contrary, settled comfortably in passing time, does not dominate. Jeanne-Antoinette disarms. Beginning with the queen herself, her entourage, and the royal children.
In a corner of a nighttime airport, I again meet up with this high society. Here’s Marie Leszczynska: “Since he needs to have one, better it should be this one,” she says about the favorite.
Claude-Siméon is not following my encounters. He persists in calculating the inclination of the mirrors in his telescopes. He is jealous, and he’s right. As for me, I am sure that Louis the child, this eternal orphan sheltering under the sumptuous garments of a libertine sovereign, will always go bury his face in Jeanne-Antoinette’s bosom to recount his uncertainties. Or mourn the death of his son the dauphin. And that he’ll emerge with a smile on his lips after having shed his quantum of tears. Happy like in front of his clock.
I change the subject. “You’re not reading the gazettes, Claude-Siméon? France is no longer recognizable—neither its land nor its seas, neither in verse nor in prose. It was already written during your lifetime. Everything is falling apart. The kingdom is nothing but an old power in decline—since when, though? You had sensed it as early as the Red Marches, the scandal at La Salpêtrière, I remember.”
“And things are going from bad to worse! Every day we are threatened with land taxes, but no one knows how to set them up. They tax the air we breathe thro
ugh increases in tobacco and letter delivery.” Claude-Siméon waxes indignant.
“It seems the ministers are tumbling down one after the other, like the characters in your magic lanterns.”
“Oh, you know of my music boxes? My daughters have a lot of fun with them …”
“Mozart is inspired by them …”
“Don’t know him.”
“Oh yes, his mother will be buried at the church in your parish, Saint-Eustache, like I’m telling you, next to La Pomme d’Or! I went there.”
“How about that … Do you think? During this time, the French were being beaten to a pulp at the four corners of the earth.”
“What difference does all that make to us, for the four days we have left to live?”
“You’re talking like la Pompadour.”
“No, like Madame du Deffand.”
“Don’t know her either.”
“You are only a technician, my friend, in spite of your extollers and all your talent.”
He knows it; he accepts it. Nevertheless he points out that he is not among those who are occupied with killing time, mutilating it, even decapitating it—which happens. Certainly not; he is one who listens to time, he hears it.
The train transporting me from the Montparnasse station to Versailles is not very full. Two black women with a happy baby. Another, veiled, with her husband beside her. And ten or so female cashiers preparing to take up their positions. Men whose professions I guess at: agents, tired, looking bored and boring. With Claude-Siméon, here we are now on the grand avenue leading to the Château.
Jeanne-Antoinette is walking toward us. Slim, easy, supple, elegant, taller than average. Impeccable oval face, light chestnut hair, fairly large eyes, perfect nose, charming mouth, the most beautiful skin in the world.
“Where does this charm come from?” I’m seduced.
“What charm?” The clockmaker’s grumpy.
I talk to him about the marquise’s eyes, their uncertain color. The infinitely varied but never clashing play of her features. Quite the mistress of her soul. I’ve read that, so it did exist. La Poisson was for a long time the canonic incarnation of beauty in the French manner. Revolution or no revolution, and still in our time. Well, before trash and antiglobalization … From now on, she is just a name, at best; do you think it still means anything to anyone here?
We are against the light, in shadow. Claude-Siméon appears to be calculating the distance between the source of the light blinding us and our eyes, struck by the sun. Suddenly: “They taught la Poisson everything. Except morality.”
I knew it: he won’t disarm in his rivalry with the favorite.
1. The Marquise de Pompadour was called “la Belle Jardinière” by allusion to a 1754–1755 painting by Charles André Van Loo depicting her with a basket full of flowers; it is on view in the small dining room in the Petit Trianon, at the Palace of Versailles.
34
SCENES FROM LIFE AT COURT
This time it’s Passemant who insists on meeting with me. He wants to entrust me with the memory of a few scenes of life at Versailles as he lived them. Why me? You shall see, he answers. Here is what remains from his final confidences. They begin with la Pompadour, the one he prefers; I can’t help it.
Tuberose, cherry, hellebore embalm the Le Nôtre gardens, making one almost faint. The time is spring 1764, after a strangely harsh winter. The rumor has spread: the Clock is dead; time has stopped. Passemant is urgently called to the Clock Cabinet.
That sonorous pendulum had always bothered him, but today its silence is anguish. A brutal cessation of the metallic movement has suspended time. Could the homunculus be fatigued, prey to a mysterious lethargy? Or did it disobey the absolute fingers of the Great Clockmaker and give up the ghost as a sign of revolt?
After twenty years devoted to his eternal automaton, Claude-Siméon knows that’s impossible, yet he is shaken by what some are characterizing as the “suicide of the Clock.” Absurd scenario … Only ignorant courtesans would let themselves be duped … The engineer’s heart is pounding as he opens the crystal door of the pagoda where the soul of Time lies. He puts his head into the belly of the robot.
Today Passemant is a haruspex—one of those Etruscan priests of ancient Italy who read the future in the viscera of sacrificed, disemboweled animals. Certain organs, generally the liver, gave them surer indices than the predictions of augury. Into the entrails of the machine the haruspex slips his soul, which is at the tips of his fingers; he unhooks the troublesome pendulum. Not to provide predictions of any sort but just to make the gearwork conform to science.
He begins with the routine gesture: using the key that hangs on the base, Claude-Siméon begins to wind the spring. It takes only three turns to convince the technician that although wound up, the spring is no longer functioning.
Then the clockmaker takes from his pocket a little tortoiseshell scraper with a steel blade and presses where it’s needed. The gearwork makes a screech but stops dead. Alexandre Dumas will one day envision this kind of damage in the same location. So the breakdown is more serious. With the point of his scraper, Claude-Siméon goes digging in all the corners of the disemboweled prey’s entrails, taking them apart piece by piece, spreading the screws and nuts out on the console.
Still the mystery of the damage escapes him; his anxiety increases, when all of a sudden his searching eyes light up. He has just discovered a set screw acting on a hairspring that has let go of the spring and stopped the driving wheel. It just needs tightening. The movement of time can resume. It resumes immediately.
With a smile on his lips, the astronomer contemplates the gear wheels with their fine points, sharp teeth that bite into even finer springs: the spring-loaded system of the chimes, fusee, and chains, the motion system with double weight blocks. The gears return to their ponderous rotations, the axles turn in their ruby-lined holes, the music is heard once again—the fragile harmony of the mechanical shocks, the swinging of the pendulum, the shuddering of timbres, the movement of hands and wheels.
Calm now, the magician removes his head from the cage and stares at the escapement of the second hand. It fascinates him at each auscultation of 9999, sliding as it does on the seconds decomposed into sixtieths of seconds. It’s like the quiver of photons in quantic states, leaving only a few tiny wrinkles on the beam of time.
The marquise detests this installation. An automaton with the body of a man, which will strike the hour until the year 9999? Who will hear it inaugurate the eleventh millennium at the twelve strokes of midnight? The idea does not scare her; what’s the use of asking such questions? No, it’s the man who causes her anguish because she loves him, the one whom this clock of more than two meters—two meters, twenty-six centimeters, exactly—embodies.
Enclosed in glass, the head is the moving sphere that dominates the assembly. Turning around the Sun and one another are the planets of the Copernican system: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and, of course, the Earth with the Moon. Each location on Earth sees the seasons pass—solstices, equinoxes, eclipses, the rising and the setting of the central star. Better than being at the head of a kingdom, this man is at the head of the universe.
The clockface is his heart, housed in a sensual chest all in ormolu. A crescent moon decorates his belly; his navel is darkened as night approaches and melancholy overtakes it.
But the omnipotence of this cosmic being, whose taste for power Jeanne-Antoinette shares, swings with the pendulum framed by the royal legs, perfectly rocaille, in the purest Louis XV style. While a lenticular pendant attached to the rod of assembled steel and copper captures the rays of the sun.
Today the marquise is alone in the laboratory known as the Petits Cabinets. Louis is engaged in his favorite occupation: riding to hounds, horns, and hollers. He adores venery, which fires up his blood—the pack of dogs chasing the stag, the fox, the roe deer, the hare. He rides a thoroughbred horse, gallops, ruses, jumps streams, is wild about the kill. Dagger or spear, flin
tlock shotgun if necessary, followed by cutting up the animal. And also the intoxication of the quarry. Then returning home and throwing himself upon her. Along with astronomy, venery is the only passion of the predator: the marquise knows it better than anyone.
She doesn’t like the hunt; it’s him she loves, his stature and his governance. She is involved in it, she governs with him, she almost governs him—not altogether, and yet …
Today, out of breath, shaken by coughs, tottering with anger and fear, she is going to hunt another beast: Passemant’s astronomical clock. Her venery, her kill and her quarry, shotgun blast if necessary. With her left hand she holds her capuchin monkey, a companion more faithful than a dog, gentler than a baby. In her right she holds her fan. One suffocates at Versailles, the unbreathable court of plotters and poisoners. All’s fair in war? Pompadour knows what to do. Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Mme Normand d’Étiolles, now Marquise de Pompadour and the favorite: she is a woman of wit. With a stroke of the fan she smashes the torpor; the little wing restores her breath: Madame adores winged creatures. She opens the door to the hidden staircase that leads to her lover’s cabinet, where the mechanical monster reigns.
“You here, clockmaker? Well, you are certainly making yourself at home!”
The pallor of her face gives way to sudden anger. Being marquise and the favorite of His Majesty doesn’t protect you from an internal coup d’état. The king cannot do without her, yet he is becoming detached, and the rounded charms of her bosom are now more attractive to Voltaire’s pen. And as if that were not enough, certain people are still trying to poison la Poisson. She carries an antidote on her person and accepts drinks only from her devoted Nicole du Hausset, who keeps an eye on the cooking.1 This M. de Voltaire, her favorite author, is an enchanter who thinks while laughing and laughs while thinking, he always pleases, and he persuades. A true sentinel of the state, whose tolerance, sparkling wit, and charity for the unfortunate Calas family correspond so well to the marquise’s sentiments. Moreover, she does not hesitate to say so and to write it to all the people who count in the kingdom. However, the philosopher has the gall to call her “grassouillette caillette pompadourette,” that is, “pudgy quaily pompadourette,” on the pretext that he had seen her eat a good quail while forgetting the delicious Tokay wine she had served him on that occasion! So much for the “divine Cleopatra,” “sincere and tender Pompadour,” and “Pompadour, you beautify the court”! Nothing but poison everywhere, no sincerity.
The Enchanted Clock Page 18