The Eleven

I

He was not tall, unobtrusive, but he held your attention with his feverish silence, his dark cheer, his alternately arrogant and oblique manner — grim, as they said. At least that was how he was seen later in life. None of that appears on the Würzburg ceilings, on the south wall of the Kaisersaal to be precise, in the wedding procession of Frederick Barbarossa, in the portrait Tiepolo left of him, when the model was twenty years old: he is there, so they say, and you can go see him, perched among a hundred princes, a hundred constables and ushers, as many slaves and merchants, porters, putti and animals, gods, merchandise, clouds, the four seasons and the four continents, and two incontestable painters, the ones who assembled the world that way in its exhaustive recension and are nevertheless of the world, Giambattista Tiepolo himself and Giandomenico Tiepolo, his son. So he is there as well, tradition has it that he is there, and that he is the page who bears the crown of the Holy Empire on a gold-tasseled cushion; you can see his hand under the cushion, his slightly tilted face is looking down toward the ground; his whole bent torso seems to accompany the weight of the crown: tenderly, suavely he gives way under the Empire.

He is fair.

This identification is most appealing, even if it is only a fantasy: this page is a type, not a portrait. Tiepolo took him from Veronese, not from among his young assistants; it is a page, it is the page, it is no one. Almost as dubious a legend has him appearing forty years later, perched high again in the tall windows visited by the wind, among the witnesses of the Tennis Court Oath in the sketch done of it by David: he is that ageless, hatted, oblique figure who is showing small children the surging fervor of five hundred sixty raised arms. Before this feverish but calm man, whose face does indeed resemble his, I side more with those who utter the name of Marat. Marat, yes — because that Rous-seauesque anecdote, those small children, that pedagogical farce, no, none of that is our man: although he did paint them, because they are objects of this world, he had no children and it is likely that he did not notice them, unless they, too, were his rivals in some way. And I am leaving out, regretfully, the graphite drawing by Georges Gabriel that was long taken for his portrait, where he appears in a hat again, face bulging, fearful, offended, as if caught with his hand in the bag, and which reminds me of a famous engraved self-portrait by Rembrandt; we now know that this is either the cobbler Simon, executioner and buffoon for the young Louis XVII at the Temple, or Léonard Bourdon, a frantic Sans Culotte from year II who switched camps during Thermidor. The handsome indubitable portrait that Vincent did of him after 1760, so in his mature years, and which belonged to Égalité, erstwhile Orléans, was lost during the Terror. There is no known self-portrait. Between the Holy Empire’s page and the raging oblique old man, we possess nothing that resembles him.

A late portrait of him attributed to Vivant Denon is a fake.

And that is all for appearance — for the posterity of appearance. It is little, and it is enough: a young man full of light that old age breaks and debases, a tender face crazed over time to the point that it can be confused with Simon’s, one of the most vile beings of those eras rich in monsters. That is him, that extraordinary aging. And to better enjoy Time’s farce, or to forget it for a moment, we like to recognize him in the young blond Würzburg boy. In that form we happily establish him in our dreams. He was handsome and insolent, loved, hated, he was one of those ambitious young men who have nothing to lose, who risk all, so enamored of the future that they seem to mirror the future of anyone who encounters them: and the men without futures detest him, and the others, no. A thousand novels were written about him, about the men amazed by him, about the women’s taste for him and his taste for them; we know the story of his skirmish with the prince-bishop over a girl, the chase in the great staircase, Tiepolo’s laughter above; we can almost hear that supernatural laugh of the magician; we begin to think it is all for him, the blond boy, all these haughty, easy women thrown onto the ceilings: so much so that in the fresco where the page appears, or legend has him appear, we sometimes have the impression (we want to have the impression) that ten steps in front of him the beautiful Beatrice of Burgundy kneeling beside her master the handsome Barbarossa directly below the cross, the miter, the glove of the prince-bishop who is marrying them, that Beatrice will next turn to him, rise, and with all her fair flesh and blue brocade walk toward him and, overturning the crown, embrace him.

I have that desire, that idea.

I might have many others, on the steps of that monumental stairway deep in the Franconian woods, with its magician on the scaffolding, the magician’s son who is learning the magic, and everywhere his young assistants who are running, laughing, whispering, murmuring, mixing the blue, the pink, the gold, climbing ladders, all spirits of the air. And what ideas I might have, too, with those pale wines they were drinking there. Because of course to evoke him, the boy, nothing would be sweeter to me than his first youth, in the Venice of the 1750s that dreams, dances, and dies, and above all in this aery, sylvan Franconia, peopled with fussy princelings and beautiful blonds, this Germanic land of plenty where Tiepolo in his great Mozartian cloak brought him from Venice. But time is pressing me to rejoin the other, the grim, ageless man who resembles the cobbler Simon — so I will not listen to those Germanic sirens; nor the others, the more tuneful, higher, Venetian ones, the siren Venice herself who in 1750 was like that beautiful young girl our grandmothers spoke of, whom they all had known, who was here below like an apparition of new, insatiable joy, who had danced all night, who danced on, and who in the morning, having drunk in one draft a tall glass of cold water, had fallen dead. No, no Venice, no young women, no romance; because all that, youth, fairness, wine of magic, Mozartian cloak, Giambattista Tiepolo the father with his four continents under the cloak, all those moving, living forms mean nothing more than this, tossed out to end up in a painting that repudiates them, exalts them, bludgeons them, weeps for that devastation and inordinately delights in it, eleven times, through eleven stations of the flesh, eleven stations of wool, silk, felt, eleven forms of men; all that makes sense and is spelled out clearly only in the page of darkness, The Eleven.

Since you ask, Sir, let us linger a moment longer on the great staircase. Let us visit this massive heap of marble that seems to fly in the air. Let us visit like the innocents we are. Let us look up. It was all commissioned, an extravagance of Karl Philipp von Greiffenclau, midget autocrat and megalomaniac of the Germanian heartland, a man of culture and follies, and of wisdom in his fashion; because it seems that despite the extravaganzas on the ceilings, with the few coins left him, Karl Philipp was gentle with his people, his serfs — his children, as they were called. And so, the great staircase. It was Neumann who made it, Balthasar Neumann: it is of the legendary stone, which all comes from Carrara, and the idea of Neumann’s or of someone else for the statues that rise from the banisters every three steps, that comes from Italy as well. The complete mythology of Italy looks down on you every three steps. It is wide as a boulevard rising toward this sky that Tiepolo paints but that he did not invent: the plan, the mental canvas for it, had been whispered into his ear by two Jesuit scholars, two Germans from Rome. The page who mounts those celestial stairs four at a time comes from France, the irresistible page who will become the painter we know. Can you imagine it, Sir, at that time of gentle living, only so because it is no longer, that is true, but how sweet to gather our dreams there, to feed them in that Germanic nest, no, hardly Germanic, simply Venetian from beyond. They rush there at the first trumpet blast, our dreams know the way. They scurry like chicks under their mother. They are sure of finding it there, that gentle way of life — or else they believe in it indefatigably. So we want to believe that for a time it existed, and perhaps it actually did, the time when Giambattista Tiepolo of Venice, that is to say a giant, a man of Frederick Barbarossa’s stature, but more peace-loving, spent three years of his life (three years of Tiepolo’s life, who wouldn’t want to see them rolling out of his little dice cup?), three years in the heart of Germania on a ceiling over a stairway, to show, perhaps to demonstrate, how the four continents, the four seasons, the five universal religions, the Holy Trinity that is one God, the Twelve of Olympus, the four races of men, all the women, all the merchandise, all the species, yes: the world, how the world thus hastened forthwith from the four corners of the earth to pay faithful homage to Karl Philipp von Greiffenclau, its overlord, who is painted in the very center where the four directions meet, as if at the unloading dock for universal cargo, the triumphal image offered us in full upon arriving at the top stair — Karl Philipp, overlord of the four directions, prince-bishop elector, grim countenance, thick waist, narrow shoulders, age uncertain, power even more uncertain, dabbler in Latin verse, moneybags wide open and morals a bit lax because, on the Carrara marble stairs under his effigy, he pursued with his cane a French dauber who procured girls for him. How pleasing. How right. How everything is in its place: comical of course, but no more so than this world. And Tiepolo above was laughing, swearing that God is a dog, Dio cane, as the Venetians swear, which in this case was a figure of speech, of course; because what more can be asked of God than that, contracts and celestial quotes between painters of great stature and dwarf princes, the first all colors and mythology, the second all sequins — which, in the heart of Germania, may have been real coins, thalers, or guineas — but the painters, with the required reverence, paying homage to the others, the Lords: princes do not need to be great, they enjoy and do not exert themselves. Dio cane. Can you imagine that, Sir? The prince-bishop frolicking below with his cane, arguing, rhyming, raging, doubting, glancing at his painted image to reassure himself, the little Frenchman who will grow to the stature of Frederick Barbarossa himself one day, who has not yet, who for the moment plays tricks on the prince, all the young assistants with their pots of pinks and blues, running up and down ladders, among them Domenico Tiepolo who is twenty years old, who is learning the magic, who will earn his fortune and merit in the magic, Lorenzo Tiepolo, his little brother, who is fourteen years old, who is learning the magic, who will never master either its straight or winding paths, who will earn his fortune in boats, and last perhaps the great Mozartian cloak thrown over a statue of Neumann, covering it like a midnight blue hood — and Tiepolo above, not for an instant judging any of that as we have grown used to judging it, not ruling on the inadequacies of men to their roles, on fortune and merit, on chance and truth, whatever, but painting — can you hold all that at once before your mind’s eye? The magician laboring in the service of great magic, do we dare hold that before our mind’s eye? The joy, the ease, the adequacy of the body to itself, of the mind to the mind? Tiepolo painting a fresco, when the moment comes, in the instant when the plaster sets, without regret, straight through without touching up, even-tempered, adequate to himself from head to toe, exalting in the irreversible instant, standing at the highest point of the scaffolding, which is moving, and perhaps even lying face up on the rough planks of what is called a flying scaffold, a light basket suspended by ropes, the maestro’s little boat, pitching and swaying but sure, his nose against the ceiling, cramps in his arms, the blue dripping and running over his mouth as he endlessly makes the same lateral gesture to get rid of this blue that falls drop by drop from his chin onto his neck, can you see that? And the page who is observing and taking note of it all — can you see him? Can you see that Tiepolo has a tender spot for him — well, if Tiepolo had time for such things?

There was much to solicit tenderness.

Because he was hardly out from under his mother’s skirts — if at all. He was still permeated with them, with their softness, their fabric: as if woven from the stitches of her skirts. They gave him coherence, will and certainty, a taste for women and for himself, they made him this fair, dreamy body that we see on the ceiling in the figure of the page, and which certainly is a type derived from Veronese, not a portrait, not his portrait, but which I am sure he resembled just the same. He is at the height of happiness, up there, on the unchanging ceiling: he is in his mother’s skirts. He lowers his head. And of course it is not the ground he is looking at, but tumbling at his feet the three lengths of Beatrice of Burgundy’s skirts, the Tiepolonian torrent, the train of broken, swollen blue, alive like blue flesh, the flesh of ice, a great fish, the passing of an angel, a magic mirror. Yes, he was made of the weave of those skirts; and when it began to unravel, everything followed, beauty, will, and confidence, the taste for women, this world: he became the other, the twin brother of Simon the cobbler.

For men unravel too: and if men were made of cloth that did not unravel, we could not tell stories, could we?

Alright, I can see that despite my impatience to jump to the end, to begin with the ending, to let this story of The Eleven stand solely on the indubitable existence of The Eleven, I can see that before coming to the point, I, too, am going to have to summarize that story so often told — since it concerns the very man of whom I speak.

II

We know he was born in Combleux in 1730.

It is just upriver from Orléans with its visible church towers, and it bathes gently on both branches of the Loire. Overhead of course are those French Poussinian skies, which he rarely painted, and from one steeple to the next following the levee the length of the river, those islands, willows, rushes where as a child, one would have loved to hide, and the sudden flights of birds. The Loire carried boats at that time: and it is because of the boats, and what carried them, that the creator of The Eleven was born on the shores of the Loire. His maternal grandfather, a Huguenot of little faith returned to the Roman fold with the Revocation, newly converted as they said, was one of those excavation and construction contractors who, with nothing up their sleeves but the Limousin battalions whose status and salary about matched those of American slaves, made their fortunes on the great river and canal works, under Colbert and Louvois. From those great works, from those Limousin battalions, from those few men with large appetites and iron fists who pulled the Limousin battalions from their sleeves and tossed them on the muddy Loire earth, among the reeds and flights of herons, grew those towns that hold the bridges, the locks, the dead of the Loire all along the Orléans-to-Montargis canal, and that bear the old names of Faye-aux-Loges, Chécy, Saint-Jean-le-Blanc, Combleux. And that was how the grandfather grew rich on the water, at a time when his fellow believers were on the water as well, but in the king’s galleys, not profiting in any way: he earned the grand title of Engineer of the Dikes and Levees of the Loire, created by Colbert. Thus the engineer, who had made his fortune here and perhaps was sentimental, who in any case was getting too old to control his Limousin crew with an iron hand, the grandfather took a house and wife here, at the end of the canal that he had made, with much straining of Percherons and miserable Limousins, actually that Monsieur de Louvois had made, but to which he had contributed, on the last great lock, here in Combleux.

He was over sixty when he quit, with his moneybags, and there under the French sky married a young girl of old nobility and small fortune, named Juliette. From their union was born Suzanne, in 1710, the mother of the painter — thus born of the dark, swarthy Limousin battalions, ill-formed, fallen from ladders, drowned in mud, dead drunk the day of the Lord slitting each other’s throats, but who from all that mud had, as if magically, made gold for a third party — and born as well of the great sovereign magician’s appetite, which, over those mud bodies, had built the great straight levees, the impeccable locks; born, Sir, as though from both the image of the calm sky over the calm waters of the canal, the single image of the single sky, and of the multiple bodies buried below and unappeased for Eternity, grimacing for Eternity, knives in their hands, patois insults on their lips, the day of the Lord; and born finally of a beautiful but dull, nervous girl of old provincial nobility who had no other destiny than to await, then to receive the pleasure and the seed of a lawless, faithless old man, or rather whose only faith and only law had been to place this seed with most intense pleasure in a blue-blooded white belly. He did not profit by it overmuch: he did not even have time to claim his wife’s name through marriage and be granted a title of nobility by Monsieur de Louvois at the Superintendency of the Rivers, because he died almost immediately. No matter: in the blue-blooded girl there had been irrevocable satisfaction, its exultant trace in the form of a baby daughter.

The child was beautiful as the day, as they said in those times, with alabaster skin, rosy cheeks, iris eyes, hair of gold, the lily and the roses — look at the texts of those eras, they all read that way. This girl, who might have stepped from the pages of Casanova or Sade, or from Bernardin or Jean-Jacques, grew up and was raised by the nervous girl who was a young, frightened widow; and the nervous girl who had no other child, no other horizon, no other object, who, despite the old man’s moneybags, was a poor woman with nothing in this world to call her own but a young daughter, the nervous widow raised her as you would imagine: she raised her as if she were truly alabaster, or porcelain rather, as if she were truly as fragile and transitory as roses; but also as if she were the queen of this world, as if her royalty were guaranteed by her caducity, like a princess; and the mother feared beyond measure that a princess, at the age when a bodice fills, must necessarily find a spindle on which to prick her finger and die. And of course, in the beautiful house of minor Combleux nobility, the château as it would now be called, but which at that time was undoubtedly a mediocre house of mediocre nobility behind stone steps and boxwood hedges, where a commoner had been accepted in marriage, the child was a well-behaved, nervous, dreamy princess; only when she ventured outside the château there were the dikes, the levees with their iron knots, all well cemented with Limousin cement, blood and mud, the magical work of the father.

I wonder, Sir, if it is really useful to tell you all this, these family histories and these noble ancestries, so prized by our era; if it is necessary to go back so far, to these pale existences that are only hearsay after all, hypothetical causes, when for two hundred years, before our eyes, we have had the indubitable existence of The Eleven, that definite block of existence, irrefutable, unchanging, the solid effect that does perfectly well without causes and that would do perfectly well, too, without my commentary. They are sirens, still singing in Combleux on that Loire shore in the flights of herons, as they sang in Venice and Würzburg, only more mezza voce, the role of the maestro no longer played by Tiepolo, with his spirits of the air, but by a savage old man with his battalions of Limousin Calibans. They call to us with all their might, mezza voce. They circle over the river, over the dredgers’ pulley, and we stay there, heads raised, listening to their circular song as if it were the inextricable story of the world itself that they were revealing to us. They beat the Loire sands, they tell stories as naturally as washerwomen beat their laundry, they trace signs in the air, let them drop to the water and relaunch them, and that great meaningful gesture they make suddenly with the flight of a gray heron skimming over the reeds, can you read it? These sirens prefer signs in the air to the tangible stretchers and tangible painted surface, four by three meters, called The Eleven. They want to prevent me from speaking of The Eleven, they turn my ear toward the din of their washing, the old clothes of two poor dead girls that they beat in the Loire like washerwomen beat their sheets. Ah Sir, you have to be clever to resist them. Because they tell stories, Sir, and so do we.

Suzanne’s bodice filled and the nervous little queen was almost as frightened by it as her mother; the two of them thought only of their fear, but to distract themselves they kept busy at other things, harmless pastimes women of that era were allowed, tapestry and poetry; and from what was said they hardly went out, despite their relative fortune, that is, the fortune of the faithless Huguenot, not that they were miserly or hoarders in any way, but they had no idea what to do with gold, having simply put it all into boats and vineyards at the death of the old man and left it to be managed, to sail, to flourish, having between them a whole other treasure, of generosity, of love that is shared and happy, but stifling as treasures always are, all their brilliance inviting loss. Because she was porcelain, Suzanne hardly went out, except with her mother on beautiful mornings along the levees, or in poor Orléans circles, a bit dull, a bit devout, a bit literary, with priests lacking panache and gentle provincial Anacreons, but also with merry girlfriends as they exist everywhere, their bursts of laughter truly conjuring the lilies and the roses, throughout the world, whenever there are two young girls together. Because I am sure that despite what I have said, the cramped life, dull circles, doddery priests with their wooden snuffboxes, her mother’s fear and her own fear born of her mother’s and conforming to it as twin to twin, as one growing breast conforms to the other, despite all that, I am sure that she was not in the least bored, that she was good and gay, good because gay, that she loved the small stone steps, the small fortune, the small full life, and the hope weighing heavy as a spring sky; because she was a queen: that is to say, someone who has known since birth an exclusive, unfaltering love, and when one has had that, anything can happen, sky and hope can collapse, one can get lost in a thousand forests, one’s heart can be ripped out and trampled a thousand times, but joy is always there, underneath, leaping up at the least cry, it remains there waiting, invincible, perhaps overshadowed sometimes, but alive, eternal, as they used to say when that word meant something. So there it is, what of the lily and the roses belonged to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Rousseau; as for the rest, what belonged to Sade, that is to say also a kind of hope and joy more distended than a sky, there was the shadow of the old man of whom the mother did not speak but whose indubitable force remained in the form of a navigable canal, the furrow of satisfied desire cut into the earth from Orléans to Montargis.

And so when she and her mother went arm in arm from Combleux to Orléans along the levee to attend some small literary salon, the young girl saw before her the emblem of that desire and its satisfaction, the canal with the whole sky reflected in it; and below, the invisible foundations, that is, two generations of Limousin laborers and masons who had had some kind of life before falling from ladders or getting stuck in the mud of the Loire, some kind of pleasure in the form of demijohns of bad wine and cutthroat knives, some kind of wife whom they saw for two months out of twelve each year in the Limousin, the two dark winter months, whose naked body under dark shapeless clothes they had never seen but only blindly, furtively bedded down, worked over and knocked up in the middle of the night in foul common rooms where the whole family slept, and from their exploits had derived some kind of children destined in turn to be Negro slaves ten months out of twelve (take note, Sir, all this at the time of gentle living, at the very moment when Tiepolo or someone else at the height of the scaffolding, at the height, too, of what used to be called Man, was painting the most beautiful and the lightest things that were ever painted — because one gets nothing for nothing and God is a dog). And it was not that Suzanne really thought about it, about what formed the foundation of her existence, through which she was somehow born; it was not that this arose distinctly in her mind, clearly and directly before her, as did her mother’s love, her growing breasts, or the anacreontic poetry appreciated at that time, which she was going to hear in Orléans. But it existed and she knew it as if from birth.

It existed all the more so because, among the timid provincial Anacreons, there was the son of a Limousin who had miraculously sprung from ten out of twelve months of negritude.

And yet perhaps not so miraculously after all: because it is fairly safe to assume that it happened from time to time since the beginning — since the cardinal-duke had raised the battalions of Limousins, more or less by cudgel, more or less by coin, to build fortifications, dikes, towers of Babel well cemented with Limousin cement, blood and mud, off La Rochelle, which amounts to saying in the open sea, where he, the cardinal-duke Richelieu, standing on the dikes above the Limousins in his iron and crimson, thought that all the Huguenots in the world would come crashing to their deaths forever, exiting History — which would truly happen in a sense; thus, since after this business at La Rochelle, the Limousins had acquired something like a taste for building, in any case, a habit of being Negro slaves somewhere other than in the Limousin ten months out of twelve, since the beginning, it is reasonable to think that in each generation it happened in the ratio of one in a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand — it happened that one Limousin sprang out of the ranks, was noticed by a cardinal-duke, by his mistress or coachman, because of qualities that chance distributes evenly enough among men, even among Limousins, even in the terrible time of gentle living, and that he played his hand well, that is, he did not set foot in the Limousin again and began to live like a man — well, as he imagined men must live.

And that was what happened to Corentin, the father of the young poet.

The elder Corentin — Corentin la Marche, let us call him, since that was his nickname as a mason, his mark of infamy or nobility, whichever, and besides I do not remember his first name, if he ever had one — coming year after year since he was fifteen from the forests of the Marches, from which the faithless Huguenot had plucked him just as the cardinal-duke who hated Huguenots had plucked his grandfather, Corentin may have had those qualities, beauty, a keen mind, or a noble heart, that coachmen or mistresses notice; and I do not know who noticed him, grabbed him by the skin of his neck, and pulled him from the lot, but we do know that in 1725 at the Orléans gates, near the Tourelles bridge just beyond the Loire, he had a flourishing wine business and a vinegar factory; and gossip has it that it was neither the attentions of a bishop’s mistress or coachman that set him up and helped him flourish in this business, but his own simple merit and labor — and therefore also, of course, his even greater villainy, because the social successes that are attributed to merit and labor alone, in those times as in our own, are infinitely more traceable to villainy than to the ability to catch the eye of mistresses or the whip of coachmen. Oh yes, he owed this small fortune to his merit, that is, to the iron grip of his stranglehold on the unfortunate Limousins, his own compatriots; he owed it to his very great knowledge, to excelling in the discipline that consisted of a marvelous expertise in cutting, sweetening, and supplementing with distilled turnips the contents of those demijohns that served the Limousins as viaticum, eucharist, literature, and naked duchess, and in which the Limousins knew so well how to wet their switchblades to make them flash, the day of the Lord; because God is a dog and the lowly can only rise by treading on the lowlier. And so there beside the Loire he had his gloomy poison dispensary, those makeshift retorts and casks, where he worked at multiplying wine, increasing the local rotgut volumetrically, just as, in the same era and in almost identical retorts, the Messieurs de Saint-Germain and de Cagliostro were working to multiply gold; and in the end it was gold that he was increasing too, as is always the case in those dispensaries, as had the old faithless Huguenot under the sky with water and stones and with the same cement as Corentin’s, the good old eternal Limousin cement, blood and mud kneaded in black wine; as Tiepolo himself may have worked, or would work, to multiply gold with invisible Limousin cement, in this case Bavarian or Slav, or Piedmont, because the Carrara marble had to be moved, hoisted, cut, mortared, coated a fresco for the great magisterial joy, the joyous reversion of gold into azure ceilings — but for Corentin there was no visible effect (because the bloody binges of the Limousins, the day of the Lord, cannot decently be called an effect), no great stones visible beneath iron knots, no captive sky reflected between great stones: it was gloomy, mole-like, behind the casks in a stinking back courtyard.

In this back courtyard he had a wife, of whom we know nothing except that she bore François Corentin, whom we have just seen, or almost seen, reading anacreontic trifles at a literary gathering; because this child had fine qualities as well, like his father. They became apparent very early, with his curiosity and intelligence; and as always happens in those situations, in the century of iron and gentle living as in our own, since nothing has changed a hair in that regard, of which we may be proud, he was very quickly noticed and taken in hand by the appropriate party, that is, by some good Jesuit or Oratorian Father, subjected to strict discipline and good training, read Latin like you or me or His Royal Highness the Dauphin of the House of France, and at fifteen adopted the collar and tonsure — well, the symbolic tonsure of those times of handsome priests.

I ask you, Sir, to focus your attention on this fact: that knowing Latin when you are the Dauphin of the House of France and when you are the son of Corentin la Marche are not one and the same thing; in fact, they are two diametrically opposed things: because while the first, the Dauphin, reads in each page, each inflection, each hemistich, a glorious confirmation of what is and what must be, of which he is part, and moreover, while he looks up between hemistiches through the window of the Tuileries and sees the great fountain in its great ornamental pool and beyond Fame with her trumpet mounted on the horses of Marly, the other, François Corentin, who lifts his head to see casks and the wine-soaked dirt floor of the cellar, sees in those same inflections, those same sentences that flow, trumpeting, all by themselves, both the magisterial triumph of what is and the negation of himself, who is not; there he sees that what is, even if and especially if what is seems beautiful, crushes him as one crushes a mole under the heel.

From that, Sir — and also from the elder Corentin of course not knowing how to read, in fact hardly knowing how to speak and only in patois, excelling only in the skillful blending of purple wines and white alcohols; from his presence, his life, being in and of itself, for one who reads Virgil, an inexpiable shame (which of course is an inexpiable solecism when one reads Virgil, when one truly, deeply reads Virgil and not in the bewildered way of a Limousin schoolboy, but that is another matter); from the father, deprived of language, also being deprived of what is called intelligence; and furthermore had he had intelligence and had he, too, sworn that God was a dog, from the shapeless form it would have taken that could be transcribed something like Diàu ei ùn tchi, a kind of sneeze — from that, everything follows, everything that interests us: the intellectual curiosity, the will, the literary astringency, and finally the impeccable reversion of the patois insult into little anacreontic sonnets; the great Limousin knife completely concealed in versifiable bouquets of flowers; and, with all these talents and the collar of the little novice priest, the visits, at eighteen, to the dull literary salon in Orléans near the Burgundy gates, in that salon when he read his verses all the heads of the good priests with their wooden snuffboxes nodding, self-satisfied, not wanting to see the great knife; finally in that same salon the inevitable encounter with Suzanne who, as you already know, loved anacreontic verse in her absentminded way, who also, you may well suspect, loved desire because of the ten leagues of visible satisfied desire from Orléans to Montargis, and who, you may equally suspect, fell nervously but entirely in love with the Limousin Anacreon. Because curiously, that secret indignity, that power of denial that François Corentin bore within him and hid under the small collar, that impression that one is a mole and must hide it at any cost under any plumage, eagle or peacock, or dove, that burden, that rending renders a man fervent, impassioned, beautiful in the eyes of women.

For him, then — and in a certain way he truly earned them — the lily and the roses.

For him in the same stroke the paternity of François-Élie Corentin, the Tiepolo of the Terror, who came to paint The Eleven.

III

Can you see them, Sir? All eleven of them, from left to right: Billaud, Carnot, Prieur, Prieur, Couthon, Robespierre, Collot, Barère, Lindet, Saint-Just, Saint-André. Unchanging and erect. The Commissioners. The Great Committee of the Great Terror. Four point thirty by three meters, a bit less than three. The Ventôse painting. So improbable, the painting that had every reason not to be, that so well could, should not have been, that standing before it we shudder to think that it might not have been, we appreciate the extraordinary luck of History and of Corentin. We shudder as if we ourselves were in the pocket of luck. The painting — painted by the hand of Providence, as would have been said a hundred years earlier, as indeed Robespierre said again at the home of Mother Duplay as if he had been in Port-Royal. A painting of men at a time when paintings were of Virtues. A very simple painting without the shadow of an abstract complication. A painting that the madmen of the Hôtel de Ville, members of the Commune, ordered on an impulse and perhaps drunk, the fierce children with the great pikes, the Limousin tribunes, a painting — that Robespierre did not want at any price, that the others hardly wanted, that maybe ten out of eleven did not want (Are we tyrants, that our Images be worshipped in the abhorred palace of tyrants?), but which was ordered, paid for, and made. Because even Robespierre feared the Hôtel de Ville; because History has a pocket for luck in its belt, a special purse to pay for impossible things. Can you see them? It is hard to see them all in one glance now, with those reflections from the glass behind which they’ve been placed in the Louvre. Proof against bullets, proof against the breath of ten thousand people from all over the world who look at them each day. But there they are. Unchanging and erect.

And here is their author.

He is running down the steps of the Combleux house, the château, his blond curls flying, and you can hear the clear voice of his mother inside calling him, already worried about him escaping from under her skirts. My treasure! It is a fine day and he is beautiful as the day, as a girl, he is laughing and is not yet ten years old. My God, it really is him, the one who will resemble Simon the cobbler and whom Diderot will jokingly call that old crocodile François-Élie. Alas, it really is him. There is his mother already on the steps in her enormous skirts, the big basket as it is called in Manon Lescaut, or the flying dress as painted by Watteau: even more beautiful than before, blondness itself, in full golden bloom, hands like golden bread. And three steps behind her, the grandmother, nervous, adoring, fearful, blond, who seems very small now because her pattering heart has worn her down. The child runs toward the Loire, the canal, and they run after him gathering up their big basket skirts, how funny they are, what fun he makes of them. How he loves to tire them out, and how at the same time they exasperate him — and how unhappy it makes him to enjoy their suffering. I do not see the father.

It is well known that most of the time François Corentin was not there. The thousand biographers upon whom I freely draw have a very hard time making him appear in Combleux; and I do not dare draw upon the gentle romancers who show him in wig and white stockings, having released the child for a few hours from the devouring love of the women, holding him by the hand and heading off with him over there under the willows toward Chécy, naming the trees for him, the boats, the authors; naming for him the laws among which the Great Being frolics with his creatures, the mechanics of the flight of celestial bodies, the impassioned fall of earthly bodies, which are inexplicably but admirably the same law; unwinding for him the whole white thread of the thought of his century. I do not dare draw upon those gentle romancers who want to make Corentin a philosopher painter, educated by his father. Because in truth they saw little of one another, and far from the white thread of thought, the child lived between two women who devoured him with love.

This you know: the father, the young poet of the Church, cast off the tutelage of the Church to get married, as frequently happened then; to get married because the girl was beautiful and rich; and not himself being one of those priests with benefices and noble names who were then the masters of the world and consequently of women, but a Limousin lost beneath the little collar, wealthy but no more, to enjoy the girl he had to marry her. So he walked out on the Church to get married; but also to pursue full-time the occupation of being a man, or rather what a man’s occupation was in the byzantine mind of a disguised Limousin. Literature, Sir. Because that was the age when faith in literature was beginning to supplant the other grand old faith, to relegate it to its small historic space and time, the olive groves of the Jordan, the reign of Tiberius, and to claim that it was in its own space, the pages of romances, anacreontic rhymes, that the universal deigned to appear. God was switching nests, as it were. And François Corentin was one of the first to realize it, by which I mean that he was part of the earliest generations of men who realized it, no, not with the intellect or through cunning or calculation, but with the heart that does not believe itself to be calculating, even if in its exaltations it is more calculating than the illiterate horse sense of a thousand villainous old wine merchants. François Corentin numbered among those writers who were beginning to say, and surely to think, that the writer served some purpose, that he was not what he was believed to have been until then; that he was not that exquisite superfluity at the service of the Great, that resonant, gallant, epic frivolity to be drawn from the sleeve of a king and exhibited for scantily dressed young girls in Saint-Cyr or the Parc-aux-Cerfs; not a castrato or a juggler; not a beautiful sparkling object set in the crown of princes; not a procuress, not a chamberlain of the word, not a steward of pleasures; not any of those things but a way of thinking — a powerful mix of sensibility and reason to throw into the universal human dough to make it rise, a multiplier of man, a force for man’s growth like the retorts for gold and the stills for wine, a powerful machine to increase man’s happiness. This ferment is known as the writers of the Enlightenment, as you have said, Sir. And they really were on the side of light, even and especially if they had the painful certainty of emerging mole-like from a gloomy cellar: because whatever the original illusion or imposture, the riggings for putting God into the nest their pages were preparing for him, the Limousin appetite that kept them standing, they were, in their own way, the salt of the earth. They were, in their own way, the leavening they wanted to be: because they had succeeded in transmuting the Limousin appetite within themselves, as if magically but no less authentically, into generosity.

So Corentin was part of all this: the Enlightenment, the salt of the earth, the great appetite become an appetite for giving. And to leave the Church, to possess Suzanne, he professed in good faith what was beginning to be called in lay terms a vocation. The word in this world, and in particular the written word, was crushing him; so he embraced a state in which the power of the word was more efficient, perhaps more absolute, than in that of teacher or priest, to which he was destined — that of a man of letters. And the men of letters were in Paris. Thus, hardly had he enjoyed the girl, hardly had he gratified her with the child, this treasure of blond curls who comes hurtling down the steps, than he went where his state called him, to Paris.

With Suzanne’s money, the money of the faithless Huguenot: because the wine merchant was not dead, and kept a tight hold on his coins. And Suzanne’s money, the vineyards and the boats, he devoured; far from Suzanne he squandered them in anacreontic rhymes; as he did Suzanne’s soul, as he did her neglected body.

With a new name as well. He gave himself a false de, which was then common practice among the literati, which was not really an affectation but a matter of etiquette, like wearing powder or a wig when others did so, a way of removing his hat in greeting, replacing it to speak. So he cobbled together a new name for himself; and for his choice, I cannot help thinking that he modeled it a little on his father-in-law’s, the old apostate who, out of bravado or a taste for jokes, did not renounce his Huguenot given name at the time of his reconversion, and, becoming rich under the Marquis de Louvois while most men called Élie lost their names in the king’s galleys, persisted in calling himself Élie and commanding respect under that name. Perhaps bitterly, perhaps with pride and defiance, Corentin made the nickname of the old mason, his father, into a title of nobility and entered the world of letters under the name of Corentin de la Marche. Alas, we know that this name has fallen into oblivion — the one on the little plaque at the Louvre, that we can hardly make out leaning over to read it, but that shoulders The Eleven, is the other one, the simple little functional mark without flourish, without wig, powder, or white stockings: François-Élie Corentin, simply Corentin.

Yes, all of that, the money, the name, Paris, it was all for nothing; in the hand of time, François Corentin de la Marche was too close to an illiterate old mason: the chain of generations was too tight and strangled him. The world’s heel was raised just above the mole’s snout. And although he had a healthy appreciation of literature, he could not excel in its practice. In this story, literature’s only raison d’être is to aid the vocation of the one who did excel — not in letters but it amounts to the same thing — the son, the painter, and to drive to despair two women in love with love.

Corentin was the son of a man who chose literature, who sacrificed everything to it and was broken by it. A man to whom letters gave, in turn, hope, spite, and shame. Because if it happens that Limousins choose letters, letters do not choose Limousins.

What are you thinking about, Sir, before the great glass, behind whose reflection there are raised figures who are facing you? You are a reader, Sir, you are part of the Enlightenment, too, in your own way, and consequently you know a little about these men behind the glass, you have heard about them at school and in books; and moreover, just before entering the square hall on the upper floor of the Flore pavilion where The Eleven stands, to the exclusion of all other paintings, you meditated in the small explanatory antechamber with its walls of diagrams, charts, reproductions, enlarged details, historical and biographical notes on the men behind the glass; you read the lengthy spread on François-Élie Corentin, the spread that occupies the entire wall to the right as you enter, and the little inset on his father, François Corentin de la Marche; so perhaps this is what you think: behind the glass there are eleven appearances of Corentin de la Marche. Corentin de la Marche eleven times. The father and his vocation, his alibi, eleven times. Eleven times the hand with the pen, the author — but the uncertain, lost Limousin author. All of them the lost offspring of literature, one and indivisible: for they loved glory, the idea of glory, above all else, their presence behind the glass attests to it; and pure glory, in those times as in others, came through literature, which was the occupation of men. Let us take them one by one, the great raised figures, the figures who would have much preferred to be raised unchanging to the face of History as authors rather than commissioners, figures of Homer rather than the combination of Lycurgus and Alcibiades by which we know them, but who are raised nevertheless, and flagrantly so, by this unexpected detour. And perhaps they are surprised that glory came to them by this route; surprised that the occupation of a man is commissioner — and not author.

Thus from left to right, the eleven authors: Billaud-Varennes, erstwhile de Varennes as Corentin was de la Marche; whom the Sans Culottes called the Roussin d’Arcadie because of his red hair and his taste for Anacreon; Billaud, who wrote the opera Morgan; the opera Polycrate; who is perhaps conscious, under his red wig in the Louvre, of having begun by making his small début at La Rochelle with Une femme comme il n’y en a plus, a comedy; yes, under the fiery wig in the Louvre, it is that light comedy he is thinking about, those light lines he is saying to himself; and once again under his serious countenance he is amazed that those plays never caused the least stir, could have fallen unintercepted from his hand into oblivion. Come, Sir, let us continue: Carnot, who belonged to the poetry society, the Rosati of Arras, with Robespierre, and in that rivalry of young Rosati poets began to love and hate Robespierre; whose eclogues to the little Roman gods, Bacchus, Liber, Pomona, brought him his first fame; whose true vocation was really not to bathe Europe in blood, to blow the northern evergreen forests and the pastoral oak groves to shreds with his canons, to offer the generals of fourteen armies the very simple alternative of victory or the guillotine, but to take strolls in large gardens on summer afternoons under the fresh leaves with his little notebook under his arm, summoning the beings of freshness, Bacchus, Liber, so that in the little notebook in the language of the gods, Bacchus and Liber would confer upon Carnot his immortality; who is known for all the rest, the guillotine, the canons, not Liber. Under the same reflecting glass beside Carnot, Prieur, officer and unread elegiac poet from Mâcon, and the other Prieur, lawyer and unread epic poet from Châlons. And then the brilliant yellow, the chair, that never wrote anything. And right in the middle of the yellow radiance, Couthon, who gave us one tragedy full of sensitivity and tears (you have already forgotten the title, Sir, which you nevertheless read in the little antechamber), tears and sensitivity lavished for nothing on the basalt audiences of the black town of Clermont in the Auvergne: on his lemon yellow chair at the Louvre at the center of the painting, on his citrine, sulfurous, solar, paralytic’s chair, tearfully he repeats to himself the black fall of his tragedy, among the fallen heaps of basalt. Robespierre, who needs no comment. Collot, ah Collot, Sir, on whom we can comment until tomorrow; who was d’Herbois as Corentin was de la Marche; who was a man of the theater, actor, playwright, something of a second Molière; who wrote fifty plays which sold well and played well (but fell directly from his hand into oblivion), among them Nostradamus; who drank enough for four to call forth the word and not to see that his words fell straight from his hand into oblivion; who translated Shakespeare and played him in costume on a cramped stage before playing him in earnest on the stage of the universe, that is, in Lyons in November on the Brotteaux plain where, on his orders, men bound by tens, by hundreds, were led before open pits, and ten meters away from these men were the mouths of loaded canons, nine marine canons brought up from Toulon on the river, nine gunners standing at attention, the fuses lit, in November, and Collot was there not in Elizabethan ruff but wearing the hat à la nation, the sash à la nation, standing, Shakespearean, melancholic, crazed, Limousin, perhaps drunk, with his arm raised and his sword extended like a maestro’s baton to order them to fire, and when Collot lowered his arm the world disappeared leaving in its place the excitement of nine marine cannons: which is stronger, Sir, stronger and more intoxicating and even perhaps more literary than all the lines from Shakespeare, you feel it in your secret heart, because you do have one; so there is Collot, good Shakespearean that he abundantly proved himself to be when he did Macbeth on the Brotteaux plain, and who, in the Louvre in his open collars, his black triple-collared coat, his white double-collared shirt, and over them his impeccable black greatcoat like the cloak of Mozart’s Queen of the Night, is surely thinking for eternity of that great leading role. And, to conclude, the others: Barère — at the time when he was Barère de Vieuzac (as the elder Corentin was de la Marche), he wrote a Eulogy for Louis XII, which was perhaps his masterpiece and which was awarded an ear of wheat at the Floraux de Toulouse competition, that is to say, a consolation prize, a certificate of merit (can you imagine, Sir, a certificate of merit for his masterpiece?); he was in charge of the arts for the Committee, and someone gave him the marvelous name of Anacreon of the guillotine. Lindet — he had a literary correspondence. Saint-Just — he wrote Organt, a poem of a thousand lines. At eighteen years old. A Rimbaud à la nation. And Saint-André, Jean Bon Saint-André, whom I do not recall having any literary ambition, because there must be an exception to confirm the rule.

Yes, all that, Sir — whether it is a matter of authors, that is, men of the Enlightenment, powerful machines for increasing man’s happiness while also increasing their own glory, but authors in the Limousin style, powerful broken-down machines, widowers of literary glory, or whatever — all that belongs to the little antechamber; all that appears in the notes: there is no sign of it in the painting. Because it is a good painting. No goose feathers or muses, no pensive brows, no excessive interiority. But I myself like to think that Corentin put his father into it, eleven times, as he put into it, eleven times, variously and miraculously, all that was his life, his love and his malediction, his pardon. And of course he also put into it, eleven times, the unreal revenge of his father, the real defeat of his father, standing.

It is strange, Sir: he put the figure of his father in the form of the eleven murderers of the king, the Father of the nation — the eleven parricides, as the king’s murderers were then called.

See how the reflections on the glass change when you move a little. How clearly I suddenly see Couthon’s black coat on his acid gold chair. No, not gold, sulfur, gold is for Saint-Just. And if I take two steps, what richness in the Spanish fringes on the three-colored sash of the representative Saint-André, at the other end. Two steps more and everything is dark. What are they looking at from behind the glass there, Sir? What revenge, what defeat?

IV

Combleux, Sir.

You do not know Combleux? In Combleux everything is light. It is childhood. It is well before The Eleven, well before the great painting of darkness in which the light was buried bit by bit, well before the gold and the sulfur, the blue, the white, the red, the three colors of the Republic one and indivisible dance in the dark, rise calmly in the depths of night. In Combleux it is daylight. There is the river, the sky, the summer. Ventôse is still far off. It is to Combleux we must return to really see the child; and to see the two women in great light skirts who are bending passionately toward him.

We know what François-Élie said in his Voltairian fashion, much later when all that was left of them was ashes: They killed me with love, but I paid them back well. Because the stitches were closely woven, Sir: the stitches of their skirts. And it took shears to cut them from within. To cut, to slice, to sever, to make suffer and suffer.

But that was for later — when for example he returned to Combleux for the last time, in the year 1784, when La Pompe de Frimont asked him in a letter if he had remembered to bring “the great off-white cloak and the three-cornered hat of the same color” (and beneath them, what La Pompe does not mention, the Voltairian caricature, the grim features of Simon the cobbler), “because the winter is all ice”; when La Pompe de Frimont also begged him to finish, before spring if he could, the interminable Sibylle de Cumes for which he, La Pompe, was languishing; yes, in the winter of 1784, when he returned here for the last time, as far as we know, and painted for the above-named the great series of Sibylles that is generally considered, before The Eleven, to be his masterpiece. We know that that winter, painting and not painting, doubting as usual, endlessly procrastinating, he often walked along the frozen Loire. And — telling you about him as a little blond child under skirts — I cannot help but see, as in a reflection, superimposed, the old crocodile in the white cloak wandering slowly along the piers under the dirty March sky, muddying his white stockings, pulling down over his eyes that white hat whipped by the March rain. He lifts his head from time to time, once more he questions this sky, this earth: and if I cast my gaze in the direction of the objects he is regarding, I can see rain on the world; I see the icebound barges and among them, higher, feminine, round bellied, that enormous Nantes flatboat stranded since November 1783, on the gunwale of its stern facing Chécy, the exhausted flatboat that, before being reduced to transporting salt on the Loire, had made the slave trade triangle to the Americas twenty times, that in the alembic of its hold had multiplied gold with black flesh, well shaken and compressed, cooked, ebony, Indies coin as slaves were then called, the flesh of misfortune transmuted for some into pure gold, into tables for a hundred guests under the West Indies’ chestnut trees, into balls, into lisping Creole girls in their great basket skirts — I can see that prodigious vessel waterlogged, falling apart into rotten planks under two or three crows. I see the bare March willows and the flights of herons; I can also see the barefoot ones in their battered hats who haunted the locks then, the river’s dead, who waited for days for a barge owner to hire them for a cup of wine, a crust of bread, and who were called the men at the end of the bridge, those at the bottom of the ladder, those who are going to fall — and who for the moment are infuriated by the ice and the ice jams, miserable, staggering; I see them crying with hunger, collapsed on the great levees unchanging and erect, the corset of hard stones, the corset of desire that never varies under the variations of the water; all the picturesque and the pictorial, the universal freight that makes beautiful paintings, I can see it, like Tiepolo, like Fragonard or Robert, like Corentin, like a painter or a passerby. But I cannot see as clearly as Corentin sees them in memory, because I did not know them living, alive, the two blond specters with the great skirts whose thinning shadows Corentin regards in the rain that is falling on the world. And then perhaps the tears of the crocodile flow.

He cries for his lost empire: for the reign in Combleux of a child over two women, that is, over the world. Because two prostrate women on either side of you is the world. As for myself, knowing him a little from my long familiarity with The Eleven, I can hardly believe that he suffered as a child from the absence of his father, as has so often been said; no, the father’s departure, the loss of the father, was not a cause of suffering for him, but an extraordinary relief, an unhoped-for crown; because the father was the rival (and of course, you tell me, there was another older, more diffuse rivalry, more spectral although more visible: the one that, in the beautiful expanses of the enslaved waters under the corset of hard stones, stretched smoothly from Orléans to Montargis; the villainous mark of the one who excelled in the twists and turns of hydraulics, the old Huguenot king, the grand-father; but the grandfather had the great elegance of being a dead rival, of those who transform themselves alchemically into models). The father was the only notable rival, the living one, the one who speaks in your presence and is not of your opinion; and, with this rival overcome, transformed with the wave of a magic wand into a shadow one spoke of with disapproval and regret, he, François-Élie, had entirely at his disposal — well, almost — those two skirts for whom he was the single object.

That is exorbitant, Sir: whoever has not experienced it does not know the pleasure of living. He has not the slightest idea what a reign is, that is, the gift of having at his disposal and under his command not chimeras or specters, or what amounts to the same thing, the bodies of constrained slaves, as we all do, but living souls in living bodies — a gift, truly, obtained without the least violence, without effort or toil, by sole virtue of the Holy Spirit, or by the more mechanical virtue of one of those celestial decrees that were idolized at that time, the Universal Law of Attraction, the Fall of Earthly Bodies. Yes, all that, conforming to a decree especially arranged for his use by the Almighty or the Great Architect, all that, Suzanne, Juliette, their pattering hearts, their hands and their dresses, and all the objects enclosed within their hearts, their hands, their dresses, the entire world therefore — fell toward him, was his.

Françoizélie!

That is what they called him, and that is what they are calling him as they rush down the little steps. They are still rich, all the old man’s money has not yet been sunk into unfortunate literary toil, the poetic dabbling of François Corentin de la Marche, their boats come and go and their vineyards bear fruit; and that must be seen; so they have great basket skirts and perhaps even — the young one at least, Suzanne — one of those fine silk dresses that were called criardes because of the rustling noise they made when a pair of legs was uncrossed beneath them: a criarde the color of gold, that spread out behind him, melted over him, called him its treasure, while through the gladioli, the open roses, he ran full tilt through the garden toward the canal. The heart of summer, happiness: two frightened hearts in silk skirts circling around you in a ballet as regulated as celestial mechanics, imploring you not to go far from them. And perhaps it is there, in July, with the cries of women and the gladioli, that I can arrange the setting for one of those anecdotes that we all know, that are found in all the biographies written on Corentin, the light ones and the serious ones, in the spreads dashed off for the Louvre as well as in scholarly studies, and that could equally be found for that handful of painters who have been selected, who knows why, by the throngs, who have leapt into legend while the others have remained on the sidelines, simply painters — and who are, those few, more than painters, Giotto, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Corentin, Goya, Vincent van Gogh: they appear more than painters, they are more than they were. Thus perhaps it is on that day that the child racing down the garden slope clears the boxwoods, crosses the towpath at full speed, and his momentum carries him to the top of the levee where he stops short, because below is the water — should be the water: but today, with all the lock gates lowered, all the locks unbolted, the canal is dry from Chécy to Saint-Jean. The water is gone, the water is dead. And in the mud of the canal, in the wet Loire sands, horses with carts and Limousin battalions with baskets on their backs transport mud to the shore: because they gradually become choked, the canals, the great expanses of calm water, they must be cleared from time to time. Above, under the July sun, there is the odor of teeming life and ripe carp, which is the odor of death.

The stopped child regards all that with much interest, the dark Limousins, the mud, the dark odor; he is hardly thinking anymore of alarming the two women he has at his disposal. The two women are joining him now, catching their breath, laughing and scolding a little, touching him; their silk rustles against him. If he looked at them, he would see that his mother, too, regards all that with much interest, eyes wide, nostrils flared to the dark odor: tall, beautiful, good and devoted, but without a man since the departure of the poet, her nostrils passionately open to the dark odor. Without looking at her, François-Élie asks what those men there are doing. “They are remaking what your grandfather made the first time,” says his mother. “They are making the canal.” Then the child, with great seriousness and annoyed at having to state the obvious:

“They are not making anything: they are working.”

You smile, Sir? You do not believe it? Yes, it is too beautiful to be true: the artist, yes, the creator — the one who wants to believe with all his might, and who comes to believe, that the act by which one has a hold over the world, the act worthy of this name, has as its foundation and principle pure intellection, magic in short, the magical will of one man, and is only incidentally mechanical, magically mechanical one might say, as in the act of Love. He believed in some way that his grandfather had made the canal as God makes the world or the king makes a decree, that is, that the old apostate had put the Mozartian cloak over his shoulders and ordered the canal from the Powers of the Night, without further effort or toil, with only the intoxication of his powerful will; under that cloak only the powerful will to make the canal, that is, a mirror ten leagues long, ten leagues of shimmering water where the boats and the clouds come and go; and that one fine morning the docile Powers of the Night, withdrawing from the east into the west as is their custom, had presented him with ten impeccable leagues of mirror, of satisfaction, of visible will visibly satisfied on the surface of the earth, from Montargis in the east to Orléans in the west. And maybe too, under cover of night, the Powers of the Night had dispatched for this task the spirits of the air, whom François-Élie might have imagined as those surveyor angels you see in paintings, mechanics clearly, with their great compasses, their levels, their T squares, and nevertheless magical, nocturnal, emerging in a rustling of wings; but whom he never imagined in daytime taking this bizarre form of Limousins bent under their baskets. In daytime he discovered the Limousin substrata of the calm waters; that the calm waters are made with Limousins; he discovered them with no great pleasure — or displeasure either, because hardly had he discovered them before he decreed that they did not exist, that in any case they were such contingent beings it was as if they did not exist: as muscles no longer exist, their efforts, their tension, their torsion, their acrobatics, and their Gehenna in the great magic of the act of Love. “They are making nothing, because they are working”: one could not more passionately believe oneself to be unique and the world magic, magically the plaything of a single will, no? One could not believe more strongly that to act and to take one’s pleasure are one and the same thing. One could not be more of an artist, you could say, as the visitors say, attentively reading this childhood remark in the biographical note in the antechamber at the Louvre. Nor could one better illustrate that the individual man is a monster, as Sade and Robespierre said in their different ways. With great simplicity François-Élie was that monster: his monstrous belief gave him pleasure at being in the world and vigor in that world; with that belief and to maintain it, to nurture it, so that it continue to exist (and by the same stroke, that Corentin himself exist), he made the work that we know. The belief became doubt along the way, but it persisted: it is what kept him standing all his life, what both held him back and pushed him on in his smallest acts, and what finally he pulverized in The Eleven — unless once more he had tricked it, had cajoled it while renouncing it, or had renounced it in order to restore it, and had secretly reinstated it, unrecognizable.

Françoizélie!

How I would love to really see him and silently absorb myself in what I see, rather than droning on to you with my vague theories. I myself am more boring than all those notes in the antechamber at the Louvre. How I would love to see him there — to see all three of them (as at this moment we are seeing The Eleven), him and the women stopped on the levee, from a little below, as if I were a Limousin below, under a basket of mud, in the mud of the Loire up to my thighs, toiling darkly under the July sun; as a Limousin would look at a painting, assuming Limousins and paintings ever came into contact. And it may be that we are that Limousin, you or me; it may be that a Limousin lifts his head and with his forearm wipes that mixture of sweat and the Loire running into his eyes; that between the foreman’s shouts he takes the time to look up to the blond apparition, the blond hair and blond skirts, the two women leaning over that child powerful as a cardinal-duke; and the little cardinal-duke points at this Limousin who is looking at him. Perhaps the Limousin takes note of that, he is used to it (this simple pointing, as at an animal in a zoo), but his eyes do not rest on François-Élie; this is a Limousin, after all; this is a man who has at his disposal no other duchess than the demijohns of doctored wine, no other vector for his strong will than the switchblades that spring miraculously from the demijohns into his hand, the day of the Lord: he has eyes only for the skirts. And perhaps he swears between his teeth that God is a dog, Diàu ei ùn tchi.

In your mind go down into the mud, Sir. Can you feel it spurt between your toes? Because you do not have your wooden clogs for this work, you left them with the others in a heap on the canal bank, to shoe the herons, in case the herons should need shoes. If we assume that you even have clogs, which is an improbable conjecture, since where you are even clogs are a luxury, a possession. Imagine with all your heart the hope harbored by a life that consists of gathering mud into a basket, emptying that basket into a cart, and beginning over again day after day until dusk that same kind of work, and if you are lucky the prospect of black bread, leaden bread, and then leaden sleep to make it pass; and on Sunday, leaden drunkenness. Also the prospect of working over, in the dark months in the Limousin, something called a wife out of politeness, but that only evokes a woman after a complicated metaphorical procedure. Are you there? Are you up to your neck in ripe carp? Get to work. Collect the dead earth with the dead fish in it. Eat one if you like, they are for you, for the gulls and the crows. Eat it. Now, lift your head. See two steps above you the gold dress, and above the dress a gaze resting upon you. And under the gold dress, even more dazzling, see the naked body of the beautiful lady. Do you feel it in your breeches, that immediate emotion, divine, intense, unique? Imagine this, too: although a Limousin, you are twenty years old and beautiful as a god, and in your arms is the vigor that day after day lets you breathe in the ripe carp through clouds of mosquitoes and not die of it, as half of your kind have died, falling from ladders, suffocating in the mud, shaking with fever, any more than you died as a three-year-old child in the well, eight years old under the cart, fifteen years old by the knife, as your ten brothers and sisters died. Feel your vigor, your beauty, your luck you might say. Because this is what is happening: the beautiful lady long without a man is looking at you, in her look the avowal that she feels in her skirts the emotion you feel in your breeches. But suddenly she is looking elsewhere and will not look at you again, because the law is iron and the universal Father is watching, and because God is a dog. And if God is a dog, perhaps you have license to be a dog yourself in his image, to climb up the bank, to toss to the ground and take by force and mate without fuss as dogs do. And the child who is observing you (but you do not have time to notice that), the child who has seen everything, in short, wishes passionately that you would climb up the bank and take advantage of his mother right there under his eyes. And that is what he fears most in the world.

Are you there? Can you really feel the too much of desire and the too little of justice? Are you wearing next to your skin the double mask of love? Are you Sade and Jean-Jacques Rousseau? Good, we can come back to the painting. We can turn once again to The Eleven.

Eleven Limousins, are they not? Eleven Limousins, thickset. Eleven thickset barons risen and watching your mother, young and naked, enter the low hall of the Marquis de Sade’s castle. Eleven little blond boys severing heads, that is, under their mothers’ skirts, slicing away.