The Hatred of Music

Tenth Treatise. ON THE END OF THE LIAISONS

The Vicomte de Valmont looks at the green grass of the meadow at Saint-Mandé. His shirtsleeve has been torn by iron: he was struck in the arm by a sword. Silently, he turns his back on the Chevalier Danceny’s corpse. He steps into his coach.

The Vicomte violently draws back the curtains of the bed to which the Présidente de Tourvel is confined. Her forehead is covered in sweat while her lips let out a death rattle in the silence of the room. He shouts an order, raises her chest, very delicately tears the satin negligee tightened around the Présidente’s neck. Madame de Tourvel’s naked limbs, white and thin in the faint light of the candelabrum, unsettle him. He has her drink a large glass of Colmar pear brandy. She regains consciousness, sees him, grabs hold of him while saying his name, embraces him. As she embraces him, he takes her. Taken, she lives again. They return the following day, in the thick fog of dawn and the piercing cold, to Paris. Valmont becomes a formidable financier. The Présidente de Tourvel organizes his soirées. She relieves his nights.

In the deepest silence, the Chevalier Danceny’s body, picked up by witnesses in the meadow at Saint-Mandé, is placed on a stretcher. They transport him with great caution to a surgeon in Vincennes. The surgeon saves him. Six months later, Danceny is admitted into the Loge des Neuf-Soeurs, where he becomes friends with the Prince de Rohan, the American Benjamin Franklin, the painter Greuze, Doctor Guillotin, Danton, and Hubert Robert. During the Revolution, he votes for the death of the king and persuades the Constituent Assembly to have all the statues of the past destroyed, breaking “all genital parts of every man, despicable vestiges of the Ancien Régime.”

On the right bank of the Seine, at the Opera, Madame de Merteuil greets the Vicomte and the Présidente with a smile and passes by them without breathing a word: the lover of the moment raises the portiere above her. Madame de Merteuil escaped smallpox, and her face remained unscathed. Not only did she win her trial, but the court granted her a sum fixed at eighteen thousand pounds. She remains in Paris despite the impression given by her letters. The Marquise’s reputation, having been tarnished, captivates. In society, at the theater, men surround her, to the point where her daily life becomes nearly impossible. She decides to travel, a solitary voyage, embarks at Le Havre de Grâce, crosses the English Channel, rides through the Hampshire countryside in a berline. Suddenly in the clouds, the hubbub and the jolts, she signals to the driver to stop and acquires there, in the town of Deane, a small, twenty-room house. A long and sinuous, gray gravel drive leads up to it. Behind the house, a large pond in the middle of a meadow, bordered by a small wooded area.

On the horizon, low hills are barely distinguishable through the mist. The air is humid and blue.

Everything is silent.

Every afternoon, Madame de Merteuil visits her paupers. She notices two of them, Cassandra and Jane, who live at the edge of town, in the small rectory of Steventon, and with whom she enjoys singing the melodies of Jackson of Exeter. The Marquise learns the bass viol with a former Royal Company bowman. She invites her young friends over for short Handel or Caix d’Hervelois trios that are interrupted by outbreaks of uncontrollable laughter. Jane offers the Marquise an old piece by Purcell, in a similar genre, wrapped in a pearl gray ribbon, a piece of music that astounds the Marquise in spite of its antiquity. Cassandra is on the flute, Jane on the harpsichord, while the Marquise provides the bass and taps out the measure with her foot: they sight-read the entirety of the old manuscript. After the sight-reading, it is quite late; they drink wine, talk nonsense; the Marquise pushes them to be silly, but the Austen girls are reluctant. Suddenly the cock crows and Jane stands up, pale as a sheet. She takes her sister by the hand and the two of them rush off to the rectory, holding up their skirts. The Marquise buys for Jane, in the hope of corrupting her, for the study room at Steventon, where the pig used to sleep a hundred years earlier, a real piano, for the price of forty guineas. The Marquise does not care for its sound, which is imprecise and therefore unsteady and sentimental, but Jane is madly happy. The Marquise acquires and attempts to play on her viol all the works that remain under the name Henry Purcell and that she has had someone search for in London; she takes up singing in order to sing them, but the two young girls no longer want to help her play a music that seems too pompous to them. No matter: the Marquise takes to cricket. From then on she dresses in riding habits and complains about the discomfort of the frilly skirts coming into fashion. On Jane’s advice, she gushes over Crabbe’s poetry. She goes walking more and more often in the woods that border the property and that is cut through by a stream, whose water is directed to the pond by means of a thin and frail aqueduct that elms hide from view. Among her peasants are three or four cricket players whom she summons when sexual desire suddenly begins to burn under her belly. She has them masked with animal masks to see in them nothing but life, or at least one of its semblances which seems to her the sincerest and most touching. She tires of young people. The young girls’ conversation has become equally tedious, and their intransigent disdain for Purcell’s work disappoints her more and more every day, as it was they who introduced her to it. Despite Jane’s barbs, never for a moment does it seem to the Marquise that she grows old in being moved by these two hundred — year — old sounds. She makes ready to leave Hampshire.

She begins to have certain whims with age, which, however, in the town of Deane, are not considered shocking: she would have liked to be a kangaroo. She is of the opinion that Greenland does not exist. At the same time, she claims that neither does God. She is completely certain that men can fly. She is convinced that the strongest odors are in the process of disappearing from this world. She affirms that in the spring she would love to be a little midge in front of the flowers. She declares that she loves the energy in the gaze of women, in the gaze of the youngest of her two musician friends, in the gaze of a man she once knew, in the gaze of dogs, in the gaze of barn owls who devour the red squirrels that abound in Hampshire. She prefers to anything else, even pleasure, the shadow, in July, of chestnut trees. She begins to like pulling chaises longues over the grass. She also likes plates of crushed strawberries, the E major scale, the sound of the bass viol when separated from its source by a closed window, the beauty of water, the beauty of the sound of water and the beauty of its reflection of nature, which is broken by a falling leaf, or by throwing a small stone, and which calm and the following instant quietly restore.

In March 1798, the Marquise de Merteuil, abandoning her young friends and cricket players, returned to France. She disembarked at Dieppe and avoided Paris, arriving by carriage at her property in Jargeau, near Orléans, on the banks of the Loire.

She sees the devastated château. For three months, she has it rebuilt. After hesitating a long while, leaving the workers to their stones, their dust, and their noise, she takes her courage in both hands and decides to go to Paris.

In September 1798, the Marquise de Merteuil is in Meudon, where she meets the American Benjamin Franklin, with whom she dines and who seems to her an imbecile. She pushes away his hands venturing onto her knees. She is fascinated by the Industrial Fair organized on the Champ-de-Mars, which the American praises. Benjamin Franklin says to her:

“Those who have never heard a toast made by Jacques Danton in the refectory of the Jacobin convent do not have the slightest idea of the masculine voice.”

The following morning, well before dawn breaks, she has her carriage prepared. She leaves Meudon. She crosses the Pont de Sèvres. She follows the fields and the quays. She arrives in the old city. The Marquise’s first impression is one of stupor. The squares are stripped of their statues. The capital’s appearance has been impoverished by the civil war. Many buildings she once knew are destroyed. The buildings and gardens of the religious communities have been devastated. The houses that remain standing, because their maintenance has been so neglected, are in a state of decrepitude and repulsive filth.

The gardens open to the public on the right bank have been abandoned.

The sky is white and a completely white, silent light rain, almost Norman in nature, veils her gaze. Her carriage follows the paved road running along the Seine. The Marquise suddenly feels like a stranger. It even seems to her that she is a soul discovering the other world. The two banks of the river turn her stomach because of the distress of the men huddled together and the nakedness of the skinny and pallid children playing there.

At the edge of the quay, she sees five words engraved with a knife and highlighted in charcoal: La liberté ou la mort.¹ Suddenly she remembers that she once knew a man who had made this maxim the secret of his life.

Her heart hurts.

She asks her driver to stop.

The Marquise has stepped down from her carriage under the light rain. She holds her hand over her heart. As the quay is slippery under her feet, she approaches the inscription with difficulty. Next to her a merchant silently continues to display, in spite of the rain, his books on his trestle. She has taken a volume in her hands — which she wipes with her glove without thinking. It so happens that the coat of arms that figures on the binding is Danceny’s. She shivers. She picks up another: this one belonged to a man she had met at court and with whom she had shared pleasures. The merchant presses her to name a price. Annoyed by his request, she impatiently leaves the books on the trestle.

She says to herself: “If I continue searching through the stall, I will find a book with Valmont’s coat of arms.”

She does not utter the name but, suddenly, her legs give out from under her.

She grabs onto the stone edge of the quay. A haze covers her eyes.

She slowly begins to breathe again.

She opens her eyes. Below, on the strand, she sees a man fishing who suddenly hooks a fish. She quickly turns away. A tear rolls down her cheek. She involuntarily rubs her soiled glove. She tries to climb into her carriage but cannot do so alone.

The driver gets down from his bench and approaches her. The Marquise is breathless. She whispers to her driver:

“Lend me your arm. Help me. We’re not going to the Industrial Fair. We’re going back to Jargeau … We’re going back to Jargeau …”

She repeats softly: “To Jargeau! To Jargeau!” as if she were begging her own servant.

To the driver, she said softly: “To Jargeau! To Jargeau!”

In Jargeau, it is the end of summer. The weather is gorgeous and heavy. The slowness of the Loire attracts her.

In the evening, on the hot, soft, yellow sand that borders the immense river, she has a folding chair brought to the riverbank, a carafe of cool water, a landing net, a straw hat veiled in yellow Holland gauze. Madame de Merteuil takes pleasure in sitting on her chair and holding between her fingers a cane at the end of which a line is tied. She throws the bait. A hum resurges. She hums Joy. She hums Oh Solitude! She takes from the water small gudgeons as long as a finger.