Pierre Michon

The Eleven

It is a great pleasure to take up residence in numbers.

BAUDELAIRE

I

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.

II

I

The painting was commissioned in Nivôse — and not in Ventôse, as was said, as continues to be said, because History arranges dates in its own way; because the afterwards is a great lord and has all the rights, His Lordship the Afterwards; because Ventôse was the darkest month in that winter of year II when the factions fell, when the barren Decrees of Ventôse were drawn up and proclaimed, terrible to the suspects, full of compassionate zeal for the unfortunate, making the first despair, giving the second the phantom hope of food and shelter, setting the tone for the Great Terror; because it was also the coldest month, because lurking in the great cold and feeling it at heart Robespierre brought out the knife to shear off right and left, the moderates and the extremists, the beautiful knife named Saint-Just; because the wind in Ventôse resounds more theatrically than the snow lying softly in Nivôse; because there is no snow in the painting, but something like the effect of great wind, although there is no wind either; above all because, as you know, since the Empire, in a bold, romantic confusion, this definitive painting has sometimes been called Le Décret de Ventôse. No, it was earlier. It was commissioned two months before Ventôse, in Nivôse in year II, on the fifteenth or sixteenth of Nivôse, which is about January 5, 1794, erstwhile the Epiphany, Three Kings Day.

It was the night of the fifteenth. It may have been eleven o’clock. Corentin was sleeping. Someone knocked loudly on the door, on Rue des Haudriettes — he was still living in that small mansion, the main building of which opened to the street and which he had bought with the large commission from the Marquis de Marigny for the Louveciennes château, twenty-five thousand pounds from the king, almost twenty years earlier. The little girl (he no longer had servants living in), the little girl heard them before he did and ran frightened to his bedside. He went over to the window alone, opened it, and saw the three Sans Culottes below, peaceable, respectful in so far as was possible for Sans Culottes, who told him that he was wanted à la section at that very moment. From his extended arm, one of them raised a large square guardroom lantern. Their voices and the raised faces aglow in its full light were familiar to him. He signaled for the little girl to climb very quietly to the safety of the garret. He got dressed and went down.

There was a biting frost, the bright stars glistened in the dark night. Surely it was not the great off-white cloak that he wore, but the one that appears in legend, the greatcoat the color of the smoke of hell, impossible to tell if it is black, red, charcoal gray, or chocolate brown, and which is repeatedly mentioned in memoirs of those times. The Sans Culottes, who were shivering in their rags — they were already walking quickly, all four of them, through the empty streets — told him it was Léonard Bourdon who wanted to see him. He knew Bourdon, who held the neighboring section of Gravilliers since Jacques Roux had been imprisoned. He did not like him very much. They walked a short distance up Rue du Temple, they turned left: they were indeed headed toward the erstwhile Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs church, now the Nicolas church, headquarters of the Gravilliers section.

They had arrived. They were already climbing the little steps.

The doors were wide open.

Under the porch they skirted around the bells, which had been taken down but not yet carried off to the foundry, the monstrous pendants of the eternal Father, silenced. The nave was icy and stripped of all objects of worship — Bourdon, who was very busy with defanaticization and regeneration, had gotten rid of everything that could not be melted down or reused. Quickly they walked the length of the whole darkened building to the apse. Beside the aisle to the left the lantern revealed an improvised stable, with straw bedding and an indistinct rack, where the shadows of two or three horses were stirring. Close to the stable along the left wall, they opened the door of the sacristy, heated and illuminated by a good fire in the hearth: the section had withdrawn there because of the cold. The guardroom lantern was placed, still lit, on a large table. There was another Sans Culotte in the room who had taken off his wooden clogs and was warming his bare feet by the fire. Corentin knew him as well, it was Ducroquet, the clerk for the wine merchant whose store was at the corner of Rue des Haudriettes and Rue des Blancs-Manteaux. On Corentin’s arrival he rose (he seemed good-natured, and he was; a little mad, and he was), he said that Bourdon and the others would not be long; and with a knowing look and a deferential tone of familiarity in which a hint of mockery heightened the deference, he nodded that they were up there. Corentin understood that they were at the Jacobins, in the great sound box of the erstwhile Dominicans’ chapter room between here and the Seine, the great oratory vault filled, for the last four years, with the roar of emotion and opinion, the best and the worst, the stone drum from which the stamping and cheering was heard each night from one end to the other of Rue Saint-Honoré. He looked at Ducroquet’s bare feet on the stone. He was asked to take a seat and wait. The other four sat down to play cards, paying no more attention to him.

Corentin made himself comfortable. He knew the place, he had come here as neighbor, as painter, as citizen as well, since that was the mask one wore then, and which he had been willing to adopt, like everyone else. On the floor near the fire, the other four played their hands. Corentin glanced about. On the large table on either side of the lantern there were four-pound loaves of bread, a plate of bacon, and wine in carafes, all of it untouched; and on the other side, a little cloth bag, half open, that intrigued Corentin. He moved closer and, opening it wider, he saw and felt under his fingers small fragile brownish things that he recognized to be very old human remains, vertebrae and a few broken long bones. He asked what those remains were doing there. Without looking up, one player answered between deals that they were the remains of an erstwhile saint whose reliquary the section members had taken and melted down that very day at the Mint, and that had been left there, who knows why, before being tossed into the fire, since they were not burning them any longer on the Place de Grève (Robespierre, or rather the Robespierrots, had indeed put a stop to those official excesses since the end of the summer, prompted by distaste or politics, for they were already secretly preparing to counter those holocausts to the goddess Reason, the pale queen of hearts exalted by the Factions, by playing the Supreme Being). The men played on; Corentin ran the little bones under his fingers; from the other side of the wall in the nave he heard the horses making their usual horse noises, snorting and breathing, warm and comforting, vaguely frightening. Corentin wondered for a moment what had become of the old bones of the two saints he had martyred, under the earth in Combleux. Then he thought again of the little girl, who must have been terrified at that moment in the garret. It all gradually merged, the bones, the old women, the little girl. He thought of other women, dead, gone off, left behind. Then he no longer thought of women, because the men were there.

It was well past midnight. They hurried into the warmth, all three of them, greatcoats pulled up to their noses, two-cornered hats pulled down over their eyes, cockades, boots; the third man more self-assured than the others. As they entered, they threw their greatcoats and hats next to the bust of Marat on the little table, as Corentin had done with the coat the color of the smoke of hell. Corentin had placed them immediately, as they turned toward him, he fully recognized the features that loomed up in the glow from the fire and the great lantern: the ugly look and flat hair of the first; the thick, light blond Flemish hair, the bulging, astonished but impassive Flemish eyes of the second; the equally flat, straight hair, the small gold earring, the copper complexion and vertiginous self-assurance, despite being rather short, of the third. There they were, in order: Léonard Bourdon, the squealer, the erstwhile schoolmaster, now champion of the goddess Reason, defanaticizer and regenerator, melter of bells and reliquaries — the little runt whose yelping made him a pack all by himself; Proli, the man with the golden touch, the banker of the patriots — Corentin was surprised he was there, he thought there was a warrant out for his arrest, that he had fled; the third man was Collot d’Herbois. He knew all three of them, but Collot he knew differently.

It had been a long time since he had seen him. They were friends in a certain respect, since 1784 in Combleux the year of the Sibylles, when Collot was preparing a play for the theater in Orléans where he was director and Corentin had set up the scenery and designed the costumes for him for a Shakespeare production, dulcified as only those times knew how, translated and adapted by Jean-François Ducis or by Collot himself; they had seen each other often because they greatly appreciated one another on points I may relate to you; Collot, with whom, in short, he had done the whole revolution, the good years, who had introduced him everywhere to those newly in power before things took a strange turn, before Collot, in this strange turn, came into his own and took wing, after which they no longer saw one another.

They embraced. As always when they met, there was that similar look in their eyes, as in a mirror, the same dark cheer, and more cheerful still than dark for Corentin, but now for Collot more dark than cheerful. He was a little drunk as usual: the brandy, the shouting at the Jacobins, the self-assurance, the panache, the power, the fear, the compassionate zeal for the unfortunate that was for him a very strong and lasting liquor. But otherwise, he seemed to Corentin a bit changed; he had just returned from his long mission in Lyons, from the vertiginous proconsular heights, from the carnage; he had exercised absolute power unprotected, he had seen the abyss and the God of armies. The copper complexion was redder than usual, and mixed with the dark cheer was a kind of absence. Corentin saw all that very quickly, the three Jacobins were already at the table, breaking the bread and attacking the bacon; Proli had the best seat, in a prince’s or bishop’s richly colored armchair, the other two in chairs on either side; as he ate, Bourdon commented on the meeting at the Jacobins, in short, sibylline sentences that Corentin had trouble following, in which it was a question of Maximilien, of Camille who was done for, of Danton who was done for, of the Cordeliers who would not be pushed around, of the war, of fear, of power, of conflicting powers, of Robespierre again — this last name a little drawn out, as though falling from a cloud or emerging from a crypt; Collot sometimes nodded assent; Proli said nothing. They offered Corentin Clamart wine, which they were drinking from aristocratic glasses set there before their princes by the Sans Culottes. Whom Bourdon moreover soon ordered to be gone and added, as they were leaving, “Have this trash burned,” indicating the small sack of bones. Ducroquet, who had just stoked the fire, threw it into the bright flames, where it blazed and vanished in an instant like kindling. Ducroquet regarded it with a kind of melancholy or regret. “What are you waiting for?” asked Bourdon. The other man stood there foolishly for a moment, then let out a laugh and turned on his heels. Then the four Limousins on duty could be heard noisily seeing to the horses in the nave, then taking off under the vaults, and they were no longer there.

It was not Bourdon, it was Proli who spoke. He silenced Bourdon; he half turned toward Collot and asked him a brief question in a low voice, in which Corentin thought he heard the words confidence and secrecy. Yes, said Collot several times in a loud, firm voice. Proli looked at Corentin with that mixture of repulsion and respect that he often prompted, whether intentionally or not we do not know. He said: “Would you execute a commission, citizen painter?”

The question surprised and amused him. It also rejuvenated him.

He no longer really had private commissions. Not that he was unemployed, very much to the contrary: he was working for the Committee of the Arts, for the Nation, that is, for David, under David; under David’s orders he knocked off statues of liberty, scales of justice, red hats over Spartan skirts, commemorative plaques to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, odds and ends. They formed a team to do this, all of French painting or what remained of it: because David kept a cool head and needed manpower; and although he had ousted, imprisoned, and exiled all his direct rivals, those of his generation, the forty-year-olds, he had retained the old hands of the has-beens, Fragonard, Greuze, Corentin; and of course the lively hands and ambitious hunger of the young ones, Wicar, Gérard, Prud’hon, his assistants, small fry you had to keep an eye on like the plague. David, who feared Corentin because he was a master, also scorned him because he was old, Tiepolonian, obsolete; but he employed him; he knew that Corentin feared David more than David feared Corentin: because David sat on the Committee of General Security, so that he put his signature next to those of the eleven at the bottom of decrees, he had the ear of Robespierre — while his other ear and his sidelong glance somnambulistically lingered in Sparta, where his models, plans, and successive crazes came from, which Corentin executed with great seriousness and with irrepressible inner laughter.

“Would you execute a commission, citizen painter?”

Yes, he would — he might. He said so. He answered Proli without really looking at him, his glance shifting toward the bust of Marat, the two-cornered hats set before it like offerings, the fire, the wine. The fire was dying. Proli, prey to something more powerful than the annoyance and repulsion inspired in him by Corentin, regarded him with a cold intensity; neither Bourdon nor Collot spoke a word but regarded him with the same intense look. Corentin said (not to Proli but to the bust of Marat or to the fire) that his consent depended upon three things: if it was in his line of work, the wages, and the due date. Proli answered, his Flemish eyes losing none of their intense stupor, that so far as the delivery date was concerned, it was yesterday or tomorrow, that is, as soon as possible, days rather than weeks; from nowhere he pulled out a sack, opened it, and emptied it onto the table, a little beyond the empty plates, where the relics had been earlier: out spilled gold coins, piastres from Holland, Portuguese coins, ecus bearing the effigy of Louis, some three hundred judging from the looks of it, at a time when there was no more gold in France. Proli said that this was only the first payment for the painting, he would receive twice this amount upon delivery. Corentin thought to himself that this was nearly as much as for the large Marigny commission for the great hall at Louveciennes in the time of maman-putain, Jeanne Antoinette de Pompadour. His dark cheer increased: the wages were royal, the deadline tight, but at that time when he was painting very quickly, Corentin felt quite capable of knocking off some Fraternité or Égalité shrew in a couple of days. “And what am I to paint?” he asked. This time he looked squarely at Proli, as if Proli were a lackey. Proli looked at him the same way. In a sharp, fluty voice resembling Robespierre’s for a moment, Proli came out with it: “You know how to paint gods and heroes, citizen painter? It is an assembly of heroes that we ask of you. Paint them like gods or monsters, or even like men, if you like. Paint The Great Committee of Year II. The Committee of Public Safety. Do what you want with it: saints, tyrants, thieves, princes. But put them all together, at a real fraternal gathering, like brothers.”

There was a silence. The fire was dead, only the light from the great square lantern fell straight onto the spilled gold in the exact place where the old bones had rested earlier. The faces were in shadow. Suddenly from the other side of the wall in the Saint Nicolas church an invisible horse snorted violently and reared, its hooves could be heard falling back like hammers on the empty paving stones of the empty vessel; then it let out a tremendous trumpet blast. It seemed to be laughing. All four of them laughed as well. Still laughing, Corentin rose and calmly put the gold pieces back into the sack, tied the laces, took it. He said that his answer was yes.

II

This commission, Sir, there have been two centuries of exhaustive efforts to understand the reason for it. It is a political commission, that goes without saying: so let us lower ourselves for a moment and talk politics. Let us get that old theater of shadows moving once more.

This period, which is a kind of climax of History and which, consequently, is justly called the Terror, one late winter, one spring, and one early summer, from the snows of Nivôse to the hot hand of Thermidor, is made of tight knots impossible to untangle, short-lived enthusiasms, reversals, wild fluctuations more uncontrollable than a seismograph needle when a volcano erupts; or if you prefer animal life to geology, it is like a rabbit hole when the ferret is released, except that here, all are both ferret and rabbit for all the others. The brothers, accomplices in the killing of Capet le Père, the orphans who no longer slept after the father’s death, were killing one another through the increasing force of momentum, mechanically and machinelike — and that is why the great cutting machine located on the Place de la Révolution, the guillotine, is such a perfect emblem of that time, in our dreams as in reality. With the Royalists fallen, the Feuillants fallen, the Girondists fallen, there were no more truly divergent opinions within the triumphant Montagne; as Michelet said so clearly, as you read in the antechamber, the brothers, the killers, who were still trying to distinguish themselves from one another since distinction is in man’s nature, all the brothers could find to put between them was the distinction of death. These men have excuses, Sir, and deserve our admiration on more than one account: they slept three hours a night for four years, like sleepwalkers they worked for the happiness of humankind, they throbbed in the hands of the living God. All that, the single distinction of death, the terrible hand of the living God, the ferrets in the hole, you have read between the lines in the notes in the little antechamber, even if it is not written there in black and white; in black and white it is written that there were, broadly speaking, three clear-cut partis, the orthodox under Robespierre, the moderates under Danton, the extremists under Hébert, and it is written that Robespierre thought this, Danton thought that, Hébert thought something else again; but you, Sir, who will not be taken in, who can read between the lines, you have read and read clearly that, with only the slightest nuances, Robespierre, the good Danton, and the bad Hébert wanted the same thing, that is, a more or less just Republic and within that Republic, power, but that death in them (exhaustion and death, the living God and death) wanted the big knife of distinction.

Thus the three partis, the trinity, you could say, a split trinity with its three great roles: Robespierre who was, in person, the Rights of Man; Danton who no longer disputed that title, who was the most weary, who put on a show of slowing the momentum but whose heavy bulk was sliding faster and faster toward the blade; Hébert and his masses, extremists, populists, or Bolsheviks, I do not know or want to know which, whom rightly or wrongly we have come to consider the dregs of the earth, and who still hoped to challenge Robespierre. This trinity is the cliché: there were multitudes of other parties, just as real but less spectacular, that grafted themselves to this trinity by playing this or that hypostasis against the other two, to save their own power or skin, which was, at that time, the same thing. Among these more diffuse clans there were clubs, the Jacobins who belonged to Robespierre, the Cordeliers who belonged to Hébert one day, to Danton the next; the newspapers, from which Hébert drew most of his power, as Marat in his lifetime had done before him. The social classes were also parties, you could say: what remained of the aristocrats, in hiding or active; the greater and lesser bourgeoisie, and the proletariat, that is, the Limousins, all these blew with the wind from one party to another; and on top of all that, pulling in every direction and disorienting everyone, the other Limousin contingent, the mother of monsters, the packs of misfortune, the shrews of both sexes, the oil on the fire, the salt in the wound — the complaining, murdering packs of the eternal, barking plebeians: and through all that barking, no one heard anything anymore.

Finally, there were the great institutions of year II, which were then parties as well, but definable ones and very localized, limited in number, that gesticulated and prophesied under the narrow vaults of consecrated places. Those venerable vaults under which the erstwhile writers switched register and stage, appeared on the political scene without even having to change costume, were the Hôtel de Ville, the Tuileries, and at the end of the Louvre adjoining the Tuileries, the Flore pavilion.

In the Hôtel de Ville on the Place de Grève, the Commune de Paris, which had been carried there by the district sections, the Limousins with their great pikes, the People, you could say, vociferated, which had had a great audience but now had hardly any, which was hungry and weary and whose wings were being clipped by the bureaucrats of the committees; deliberating and decreeing in the Salle des Machines of the Tuileries was the Convention, the true nominal power, the elected and all-powerful assembly, all-powerful and terrorized, which had no power other than to obey the Committee, which nevertheless issued from it and could theoretically be dismissed by it, but which it renewed each month without Robespierre even needing to raise a finger — the Convention, for which the only way out appeared to be the hand of Providence, a kind of miracle, a deus ex machina of the fifth act, which it had not yet learned to call Thermidor. In two lower halls and communicating by the Queen’s Stairway to the Flore pavilion, then called the pavillon de l’Égalité, in that Flore pavilion at the very end of the Bord-de-l’Eau gallery in the Louvre, under our feet, under The Eleven, the two committees made up another party, the Committee of General Security, shadow and executant, standard-bearer for the other, the true one, the Committee of Public Safety, which had to retain absolute power or die — the tightrope-walking party, which subjugated the people through the Convention and the Convention through the people. And please note, Sir, that this power was a phantom power, that, in fact, did not exist, because the executive position that it held at the top of the pyramid of power no longer existed, had been abolished as something left over from the execrable position of the tyrant — this power did not exist, but nevertheless with its phantom voice it demanded, obtained, and severed forty heads a day. Within the Committee itself there were parties, perhaps eleven parties, which history and the little notes have reduced to three, because three is a good number that works for all occasions: first, Robespierre and the Robespierrots, two of them, Saint-Just and Couthon, so three with Robespierre; second, the scientists, engineers and lawyers, captains, excelling in the liberal as well as mechanical arts, who constructed canons out of the ruins of bells and fashioned decrees in the fine rhetoric of year II out of the ruins of the fine rhetoric of theology, empty rhetoric that, to render to Caesar what was his, had actually been invented by Robespierre’s Saint-Just: these good scholars with dirty hands were Carnot, Barère, the Prieurs, Jean Bon, Lindet, six men of science. And finally, two independents, Billaud and Collot, impassioned and unpredictable. The one principal point all these men had in common, these eleven writers, as I have told you, was affixing their eleven signatures to the bottom of various decrees where it was a question of canons, of grain, of requisition, of execution, of the guillotine.

What has this to do with the painting? First of all: these “parties,” Sir, what I have called parties, in this period of theatrical crescendo, of the ultimate round when each player only raised his voice to outbid his rival, to drown him out and finally toss the talking head into the basket, these parties were only roles now. It was no longer a matter of opinions, but of theater; this often happens in politics; and it always happens in painting when politics are represented in the very simple form of men: because opinions cannot be painted, but roles can be.

What has this to do with the commission, the small commission transacted that night of Nivôse in the Saint-Nicolas church? You ask me who, in that climactic scene in the fifth act, could have wanted the painting? What lead or supporting role wanted to make that phantom committee into a real committee, theatrically real? I am coming to that, Sir. Let me tell you about one more party, one more caste or occupation, and I will be finished.

This last party, this caste, those great leading roles distributed throughout France, sent out by the Convention and the Committees for brief mandates, were the Représentants en Mission; the men of the great missions of 1793, the ad hoc warriors, peacemakers, proconsuls, the amateur generals who had complete power over the generals; the spearheads for the Jacobin plan of action who, forged in the midst of storms, were to have the force of lightning; who had returned from their missions, or their tours as we say of actors, who were returning, in the months of Ventôse and Nivôse, after victories; who, on their missions, had worn the costumes and accessories à la nation, that is, the three colors, the extravagant tricolored silk waistband, silk an inch thick, three or four yards long, wound four times around the waist, sumptuous, clerical; the costume à la nation that Corentin himself had designed, under David, and which I think, even more than the Sibylles, is his true masterpiece, before The Eleven: triple collars high at the nape of the neck, alla paolesca, in the style of Paul, that is, Paolo Veronese, not Paul of Tarsus, although those who wore them had more in common with Paul of Tarsus than with Paolo Veronese — thus in the Veronese style, since it was Veronese, via Tiepolo, who had thought of it in paintings before Corentin thought of it on actual impetuous young necks; woolen cloth in national blue, erstwhile royal blue; white cravat, frothy, high, lavish, phallic; hat à la Henri IV and rosette, plume à la nation. Young men of flesh and iron wore that plume, Sir, which History, luck, fortune, the muse of the theater, perhaps God as well, because God is a dog, remember with tenderness and terror: that plume that did not tremble running up the hill, sword drawn, under fire at Fleurus, at Wattignies, at Wissembourg, because the young man who wore the plume had it on good authority that the canon fire could not touch him, that its rumbling was a sound effect, a zinc plate rattled backstage by the Great Machinist, that the cannonballs falling like hail around him were flies — the great magic, Sir, the pocket of luck. And neither had the plume trembled when its wearer, camped under the torches on the Quai de la Fosse in Nantes at the end of the Loire at midnight, wild, trembling with wine, trembling with joy, with terror, watched, melancholic, as the barges set off on his order, rotten traps that would open in the middle of the Loire and send shrieking to the bottom their cargo of nuns, rustic priests, Jean-Chouans, and beggars from the Vendée, erstwhile hussies with their brats — because all that, Sir, hussies, brats, priests, they were flies, and the Loire was a famous republican torrent; and in Lyons at dawn on the Brotteaux plain the plume in the mist did not tremble either, or only mechanically so in the wind of the grapeshot when the marine canons fired, even though the one who wore it trembled with wine, with joy, with terror; not the least trembling either when from the back of the famous oxblood carriage hurtling full speed through the phantom city of Bordeaux with a company of dragoons at full gallop, the plume’s wearer gave the order to fire randomly in the night at windows, trees, stars; and likewise in Avignon, Marseilles, Toulon, Moulins, Arras, everywhere. Some of them returned with stolen gold filling their pockets and their oxblood carriages, so that indiscriminately Robespierre called them all rogues; while others returned as poor as before, having forgotten in the beauty of the gesture that gold itself possesses a beauty more lasting. Thus the plumes had returned to Paris, were returning or were about to return, the borders and the cities were secured, the Vendée quelled, the mission accomplished, the tour completed; in Paris they had taken off the plume with the uniform and changed back into civilian clothes: Collot of Lyons, Tallien of Bordeaux, Carrier of Nantes, Carnot of Wattignies and Saint-Just of Wissembourg, and Rovère, Fouché, Fréron, the two Prieurs, the two Merlins, called Merlin of Douai and Merlin of Thionville, the almost twins Lequinio and Laignelot, Mallarmé of the Meurthe, the other Bourdon, not Léonard Bourdon but Bourdon of the Oise, and Barras, Jean Bon, Baudot, Lebon, Le Bas, among others. These men, these fine names, all these generals, had even more blood on their hands than the others; better than the others they knew the meaning of the word expeditious; they had the epic halo, the gloria militar, the plume; thus they were extraordinarily popular, celebrated as heroes, larger than life. And the civilians, Danton, Hébert, Robespierre alike, Robespierre above all, feared them, feared that one of them, in the wake of Fleurus or riding the Republican wave of the Loire, might seize power with the support of the masses or the armies. But that would be for later; in its pocket, luck was keeping warm that most professional plume and enchanted sword of the general Bonaparte.

So you can see, Sir, that I am coming back to the painting. The plume appears there three times. So consequently, three times the three colors. And the collars alla paolesca, eleven times.

Let us review them, from left to right: Billaud, Carnot, Prieur, Prieur, Couthon, Robespierre, Collot, Barère, Lindet, Saint-Just, Saint-André. The commissioners. Billaud, civilian clothes and boots; Carnot, the greatcoat, civilian clothes and boots; Prieur of the Côte-d’Or, à la nation, wearing the plume; Prieur of the Marne, à la nation, plume on the table; Couthon, civilian clothes and useless buckled shoes on his paralytic feet, in the sulfur chair; Robespierre, civilian clothes and buckled shoes; Collot, the greatcoat, civilian clothes and boots, no cravat; Barère, civilian clothes and buckled shoes; Lindet, civilian clothes and buckled shoes; Saint-Just, in gold; Jean Bon Saint-André, à la nation, plume in hand.

And all the collars, alla paolesca. It is a Venetian painting, Sir, do not forget that.

III

What has become of the night, Sir?

It has not moved. All four of them are still there in Nivôse in the sacristy lit only by the square lantern since the fire has died. They are under the triple screen of darkness, Nivôse, the Terror, the extinguished fire. The horses can no longer be heard. Corentin is still standing, he has finished closing the sack and is weighing it in his hand, he is not yet facing the sacrosanct canvas of The Eleven, to tell the truth, he is not thinking about that, he is thinking that it is heavy, that it is good; he is thinking of similar sacks passing long ago from Marigny’s hand to his own, he is thinking of the vanished beauty of maman-putain and the more lasting beauty of gold; he is thinking that it is all an excellent and profitable farce. He is wearing the crocodile’s smile. And still sitting in the radiant armchair, Proli is thinking similar thoughts, but from the perspective of the one who is paying and thus risking his head, wearing the crocodile’s smile as well, but more worried and as though already duped; his protruding eyes gleam a bit, Proli is closest to the glow of the lantern, almost visible. The bishop’s armchair bears him. Bourdon is there as well, no doubt wearing a nasty smile in the dark, he does not like the erstwhile manners of this Corentin, he does not like his little old wig, he does not like it that beneath the wig Corentin’s face slightly resembles his own, he would gladly reduce him, too, to the level of equality, as he said of the French church steeples when he wanted to have them all razed to the ground. And Collot is not in Shakespeare, he is here. Nevertheless he is a little in Shakespeare, necessarily, because all of this is nocturnal, Caravaggesque or Shakespearean, villainous. Gold gleams from Collot’s ear. And as always in these scenes where the men’s faces are finessed, shifted into the dark, suspended in shadow, the square light is falling squarely on the symbols, the holy table of the contract, from which the bones and gold have disappeared, and on the holy table what remains of bread and wine; also perhaps the cards and the dice tossed there as they left by the Sans Culottes, the good old extras, whose role is always to leave in place a few obvious symbols before clearing out. Corentin has already taken three steps, he is getting ready to put on his greatcoat before clearing out himself.

It is at this moment that Proli, from the depths of his ceremonial armchair, stops him curtly and speaks up again. He adds that the contract has two minor but imperative clauses, to which Corentin is bound.

First of all, he must paint this painting in the greatest secrecy, as a conspirator, without informing anyone at all, and he must keep it concealed until someone comes to collect it from him.

The second clause is that the Robespierrots, Saint-Just, Couthon, Robespierre, must be painted more visibly and centrally, more magisterially than the other members of the Committee, who should appear in it as minor figures.

Corentin agrees. He says that is how it will be.

Finally, Sir, I want to repeat here the reason for the commission, its small necessary and sufficient cause, the design of its sponsors. Who they are. And I know very well that you have read it in the little antechamber, that you are supposed to have read it — but I know you, Sir, you and your kind: in your reading you go immediately to what shines and what you crave, the skirts of maman-putain, the plume, the gold coins; or to what is perfectly matte black, the guillotine, Shakespeare; but the political quibbling you find tiresome, you skim over it. The drab history and theory, the class struggle and the infighting, you tell yourself you will read all that tomorrow. And I know very well that you do not need to hear it, but I need to tell you.

So here it is: no one knew yet in Nivôse if Robespierre was going to be triumphant or perish; and everyone’s fate hung on that knowledge. The roles were assigned, the hands were dealt, but the bets were not yet placed. In the panic, fleeting alliances were forged, those who wanted to compromise with Robespierre, those who wanted his defeat, those who wanted to pull out. Among those alliances, the one that concerns us — that concerns The Eleven — had found its source in one of the desperadoes of the Commune, among the delegates of the sections, vandals and melters of bells, those who had chanted ça ira in 1790, for whom ça was no longer fine at all; that handful of Communards who had put their trust in the most impassioned of the Hébertists, who lived under threat of the guillotine and were beyond worrying about costs. So much for the left wing of the alliance, those who would be toppled in two months’ time, in Germinal, into Hébert’s cart. As for the right wing, which would not be toppled in Germinal and would close the hand of Thermidor, the desperadoes had had the marvelous idea of appealing to Collot d’Herbois, a man whose sentiments were to the left and even beyond, but who had been driven by the reality of the situation to forge alliances on the right: as a representative returning from a mission, he overshadowed Robespierre; although he came back from Lyons penniless, he was grouped by Robespierre together with the most corrupt, Tallien, Fouché, Barras, and had to join forces with these men whom he disliked. Thus Collot joined Tallien and Barras; who then rallied the powers they had brought back from Bordeaux and Toulon, clinging to the slatted sides of oxblood carriages full of the ringing coins — the elite of the right wing, the bankers, the backbone of war. All this fine society had plotted together to save their heads from the basket. And among their devious plots (said to be Collot’s idea, the enigmatic Collot) was this one: to secretly commission a painting of the Committee in which Robespierre and his cronies would be represented in all their glory, a painting giving official existence to the Committee that theoretically did not exist, but by the simple fact of appearing in a painting would be taken for what it was: an executive power seated in the contemptible place of the tyrant, a tyrant with eleven heads, existing and well and truly reigning, and even presenting an image of its reign in the fashion of tyrants — or perhaps, if things took a different turn, if Robespierre affirmed his power without possible recourse, by means of the painting the Committee would appear as a very legally sanctioned executive power, the cream of the Representatives, fraternal, paternal, and legitimate as syndics or a conclave.

It was a joker, do you understand? This painting was a joker to be played at a crucial moment: if Robespierre really took power, the painting could be brought out publicly as spectacular proof of his grandeur and the reverence in which his grandeur had always been held; it would be declared that the painting had been commissioned in secret to pay homage to his grandeur, and to the great role for which he was destined; and it would tell him clearly that these men were with him, that they had even been represented with him, that they had insisted on the honor of appearing at his side. The fraternal alibi would be played. If on the contrary Robespierre faltered, if he was brought down, the painting could also be produced, but as proof of his unbridled ambition for tyranny, and it would shamelessly be claimed that it was Robespierre himself who had commissioned it secretly to have it hung behind the presidential rostrum in the subjugated Assembly, and to be worshipped in the abhorred palace of tyrants. And thus this painting, The Great Committee of Year II Seated in the Pavilion of Equality, as it was originally to be called, suddenly made public, would be evidence of flagrant abuse of power — the scene of the crime, you could say. That is the reason for The Eleven. Ah yes, Sir, we have to accept it, the world’s most famous painting was commissioned by the dregs of the earth with the world’s worst intentions.

I will add this: in either case, Robespierre’s annihilation or apotheosis, it was necessary that the painting be right, that it work; that Robespierre and the others be seen there either as magnanimous Representatives or as bloodthirsty tigers, according to which reading events would require. And that Corentin painted it and succeeded in this way, in both ways, that is undoubtedly one of the reasons why The Eleven is in the last chamber of the Louvre, the holy of holies, under protective glass five inches thick.

Proli says none of that. He has put his greatcoat back on and has mounted one of the phantom horses, he is galloping toward Passy where he is hiding out, from the warrant for his arrest, from the guillotine. He is already passing through the Saint-Martin gates at a gallop. And neither does Bourdon stay to talk, he has left as well, on foot into the night of wolves to yelp with some other pack or to sleep with his own. All that — the trap in the form of a painting, the political joker — we can suppose it is Collot who explains it to Corentin, accompanying him back to the porch of Saint-Nicolas. Because they remain there a moment, the two of them among the opaque masses of the lowered bells; and we can see them distinctly, the big lantern has followed them that far, it is on the ground and projects the large shadows of the bells upon the three walls of the porch and upon the night, which is the fourth wall: black greatcoat and greatcoat the color of the smoke of hell, two-cornered hat on Collot’s head, three-cornered hat on Corentin’s, even the little theatrical plumes of breath from their mouths, under the porch of Saint-Nicolas, which is like the stage of a theater with its double doors open at the deadest hour of the night of wolves, erstwhile the Night of the Three Kings. They are very cold. Collot does not forget that he is in Shakespeare, a country where it is cold as well, he is leaning theatrically with his back against the mantle of the largest bell. The Elizabethan ruff blossoms at his neck. He is more garrulous than earlier. He has found the appropriate grand gestures again, the appropriate grand sentences. In hushed tones he has explained the trap, the tactic by which the painting is a war machine, and now he raises his voice, he exaggerates a bit: he speaks as the wind blows, in gusts, as if on a rostrum or a stage. He says laughing: “So you are going to represent us. Take care, citizen painter, representing the Representatives is not something to take lightly.” He tells him that he wishes him much pleasure in painting these portraits, because he, Collot, no longer dares to look at himself in a mirror, and in a voice too low to be heard Corentin says that neither does he. Collot remains silent for a moment, then he goes on in an affectionate tone: “We have pulled through, the two of us, since the beginning, and here we are already in ’94.” He speaks with a hesitant tenderness, as one would recall a night of carousing or a murder committed together: Do you remember Macbeth in Orléans in ’84? Yes, Corentin looks at him affectionately too, remembering: Collot’s youthfulness, his self-assurance, his irrepressible laughter in the darkest scenes, his rough and tender soul; and his madness, his constant drunkenness, on words, on wine. And suddenly the mixture of all these things, the bells, Orléans, Macbeth, come together and awaken a very old memory.

He remembers a beautiful morning when, as the two of them were strolling along the great levee toward Combleux, searching for ideas for the play, Collot was moved to pity for a woman collapsed under the Saint-Jean-le-Blanc bridge, famished and hysterical; that he had squatted down beside her and spoken to her for a long time; that during this time he, Corentin, had listened to the chiming bells answering one another along the length of the Loire from Saint-Jean to Combleux, from Combleux to Chécy — perhaps it was noon, or Angelus, or a holiday. He had been drawn from that joyous pealing by shouts: the girl was crying out, she had risen and thrown herself on Collot, baring her claws. There had been a brief semblance of a struggle, Collot was healthy and well fed, the girl was weak; very quickly he had her firmly by the wrists, in his power. He was smiling, in his smile there was always a shadow of compassionate zeal, but otherwise it was the mask of lust and its accompanying cruelty. Eventually he had calmed the poor creature down and taken her away with him. Corentin can still see the girl clearly — she had a red birthmark on her face that she tried to hide with a kind of mechanical coquetry, despite being famished. Collot had taken her in, fed and no doubt bedded her, had comforted her and set her back on her feet; he had found her lively and not without intelligence, and had eventually given her a small, silent part in the play, as one of the monstrous creatures leaping about at the witches’ feet on the moor in Macbeth; and she was ashamed of it, rightly or wrongly convinced that it was her birthmark and not her liveliness or her poverty that had brought her salvation and employment. Looking at Collot now in the night of wolves, Corentin is thinking that it is a strange and marvelous thing, that all that compassionate zeal for the unfortunate should have come to this, to the witches of Macbeth, to the Brotteaux plain, to the pikes and the carts, to the moor from Macbeth reappearing under the great cutting machine on the Place de la Révolution. (He is also thinking that he, Corentin, is completely familiar with such marvels, feats of magic, that he has performed them many times: that is how his mother and grandmother, lovesick creatures, became the terrible Sibylles by his hand, five times as there are five sibyls.) All the while his thoughts are thus wandering, Collot is speaking, with his dark cheer, the little plume of his breath. He is saying: “Yes, we have pulled through for the moment. But now it is in God’s hands. And we are going to need a holy hell of a hand to get us out of this. A hand of iron. Yours, perhaps?”

Collot laughs, as one laughs when shivering with cold. They can both see that crucial hand — for they really cannot believe, Sir, neither Corentin nor Collot, in their possible innocence, in a good future earned by their good innocence, in their good Right, in men free and equal by right, frolicking happily in the great fraternal garden. They were awaiting the hand. They believed more in luck and, yes, you could say, in Salvation, Sir. In the bells.

Corentin does not laugh. Perhaps he is not listening to Collot, but he is looking at him. With a kind of joy he thinks that the compassionate zeal for the unfortunate and the Brotteaux plain, the welcoming table and the Macbeth moor, the helping hand and the murder, Nivôse and April, is all in the same man. It is in Collot, one of those eleven men whom he will paint. That he is destined to paint. He is also thinking that every man is capable of anything. That eleven men are capable of eleven times anything. That that can be painted. No, he is certainly not listening to Collot. His joy is growing. His joy rings out. He is listening to the memory of the bells. He hears them as they begin, as they grow louder, as they ring out fully, as they subside. As they cease. In the dark Collot does not see his tears of joy, or he attributes them to the cold. It is three o’clock in the night. Come, it is time to part, Collot has already gone to saddle the other horse. He leads it under the porch, holding the bridle: the horse, the two men, among the stilled bells. They have extinguished the lantern. They embrace. They will not see each other again.

IV

All that you have read as well, Sir, in the framed notes in the antechamber. You have even paused before the reproduction of the oil sketch by Géricault, which is not here at the Louvre, which is sleeping among the Girodets in the Montargis museum: Corentin in Ventôse receives the order to paint the Eleven. The title assigned after the fact is approximate, the painting is hardly roughed out, there are large areas of white, because Géricault painted it with death looking over his shoulder. But it conforms exactly to what I have said.

It could not be otherwise.

Because, Sir, Géricault’s sketch is only valuable for having inspired Lord After-the-Fact himself, Michelet, Jules Michelet was his complete official name, to write the definitive twelve pages that discuss The Eleven, that assign The Eleven a place and set them before the historiographic tradition for centuries to come.

What really happened on that night when luck loosened its generous purse from its belt and produced the possibility of The Eleven, we do not know, Sir. Are we even sure it was night? All we know, knowledge or legend, are the theatrical effects, the coat the color of the smoke of hell rushing past, the self-assurance of four men in two-cornered hats, the empty nave and the horses in the nave, the lowered bells, the pile of gold and glowing bones of saints; three characters who are types, Collot in the role of Macbeth, Bourdon as Iago, Proli as Shylock; and before these stereotypes Corentin, struck dumb between the spilled gold and the phantom sound of bells, plays the role of Saint Matthew, who is not in Shakespeare. That is how we see it.

That is how it was arranged. Because, I repeat, Sir, all that originated — or rather was given definitive form, for Géricault had already hinted at it before Michelet — was formalized and dramatized in the hazy, hibernal mind of Michelet, under his impeccable hand, in the city of Nantes at the end of the Loire in the winter of 1852, in the Barbin quarter in the house called the Haute Forêt, the erstwhile Barbin quarter now called the Michelet quarter, where he wrote the pages on the Terror; when banished to Nantes by Napoléon III and broaching the subject he rightly considered to be the climax of History, he identified with both Carrier and Carrier’s rotten barges, with Providence and its old enemy Liberty, with the guillotine and the Resurrection of the flesh. When, like us, he entered with his subject into the night and into winter.

Michelet’s twelve pages on The Eleven in the third chapter of the sixteenth volume of the History of the French Revolution, those twelve pages extrapolated, that novel was taken at face value by the whole historiographical tradition: it comes up everywhere and is treated in various ways by all the schools that have commented upon, vilified, or celebrated the Terror. And, whether they vilify or celebrate it, all those historians, followed by the educated who read them, and then the uneducated who hear vague talk of them, and I myself, Sir, in my rambling, all of us, despite our various opinions that vary only slightly, all of us see at the physical origin of the great painting in the Louvre the night of Nivôse or Ventôse in Saint-Nicolas; from the corner of our eye, we all take in the gold and the bones; we are, of course, under the spell of the square lantern, the lantern of horn; we hear the horses; and, if we are romantic, we hear the bells as well. But it originated with Michelet. And as it comes to us from Michelet, it is the soul of Michelet that speaks in us: that thus seems to emerge from a painting by Caravaggio and not by Tiepolo.

Of those twelve pages, an entire page and a half are devoted to the commission: to the occasion, to the small extraordinary moment that the Greeks called the kairos — that is the moment, Sir, when luck unhooks from its belt the special little purse, the one that is no longer expected, that, moreover, is never expected. And in that page and a half Michelet tells how, in February 1846, he went to Saint-Nicolas, not to pray, given that the death of God was something understood once and for all, but to visit the sacristy where The Eleven was commissioned — he had seen Géricault’s painting once ten years earlier, during one of his little memorial tours through France. He went to see it, to verify it, and we in turn can see Michelet at nightfall, the pale, trembling, prematurely white-haired man with his greatcoat entering the sacristy that, as you see, we cannot escape. He saw it. He saw it, he writes in italics, although we do not know if that vision applies to the sacristy still enduring as a sacristy, or to the inspired place where The Eleven was decreed, that is, the brief headquarters of the Gravilliers section. He saw the chasubles on the little table upon entering where one evening in year II the coat the color of the smoke of hell coexisted with the bust of Marat; he saw the fire dying on the hearth; only the square lantern set there on the holy table was still flickering in the remains of daylight; reflections on small gold or copper objects; and perhaps even on the holy table the remains of a snack left by the sextons and guards. Above all he saw the armchair in which he says Proli had sat, the sulfur armchair, the yellow volcanic armchair in which, quietly, Couthon is sitting at the center of The Eleven. He saw the yellow armchair; he says that it is there that Corentin got the idea; I do not think I agree with Michelet: because I, too, Sir, have seen the yellow armchair, but it was not the same, not in the same place, because each real thing exists many times, as many times perhaps as there are individuals on this earth. I saw the armchair of The Eleven and it was not the same armchair as Michelet’s; I saw it in the Carnavalet museum where it is on display every day of the year, except Mondays and holidays because it is a public museum, the seat of impotence and glory — the chair of the paralytic Couthon, mounted on three wheels with a large wheel on either side and a small wheel behind, his wheelchair as we now say, his wheelbarrow as they said mockingly after Thermidor, the wheelchair that no longer has the slightest color, faded with time, or rather only the color of time, but which the little plaque at the Carnavalet museum describes as having once been yellow, because it is yellow in the painting of The Eleven.

Michelet saw those objects that were so many symbols in the sacristy in February, that den of the priests’ party into which he entered in his greatcoat under cover of darkness to verify The Eleven. And we will go along with him, despite all reservations regarding the yellow armchair; we will also go along with him when he speaks with terror of the nocturnal faces looming up, piercing, issuing from the night, and when he speaks tenderly of the oak table with the broken bread, the Clamart wine — the remains of the beadles’ afternoon snack. We might just possibly believe that he saw in 1846 the horses in the nave of 1793, the medieval relics thrown in the fire, the lowered, humiliated bells, his great bronze friend as he said, one of the only baubles of the priests’ party that he accepted because it rang not only to glorify God but also to announce uprisings, don Tocsinos as they said in 1793, that great friend who in February 1846 he heard plainly above his head sounding the hour of seven or eight in the evening: all that conforms to what we might think, might reconstruct of year II, and Michelet with greater reason than ours, who every day heard men of year II speaking of year II. It also conforms to what we know of Michelet. But when he transposes this scene of the commission, as is, onto the painting of The Eleven, then we can no longer go along with him.

For this confusion, this transposition, we can hazard a few hypotheses.

Perhaps Michelet had not revisited the great painting in the Louvre for a long time: we know that the painting frightened him, he remembered the excessive shock his first view of it had caused him, he avoided it because it possessed him, he praised it, detested it, idolized it, from a distance. Moreover in 1852 when he wrote of his vision and his visit to Saint-Nicolas in 1846, he was in Nantes at the end of the Loire, not on the banks of the Seine that bears The Eleven. So in the scene of the sacristy, lived in 1846, recounted in 1852, he redraws it from memory and falsifies it, in good faith perhaps or with the perversity of priest against priests, for which he is known. And in that falsification, that reconstruction from memory, in the famous twelve pages, he thus applies to the great painting what he saw, imagined, and cobbled together that day (in the sacristy and regarding the sacristy): he says that in The Eleven itself we see the great oak table and the horn lantern on the table; above all he says that we see the horses there, the horses in their stalls of sulfur, of gold, of basalt, their stalls à la nation, the horses of hell and the adoration. To be fair to Michelet, we can imagine that, among the prodigious and prodigiously cluttered bric-à-brac that served as memory for him, he had other paintings for guides and markers, Géricault’s Charging Chasseur, a battle by Rubens, the illustrations that Fuseli did for Macbeth, or the emblematic mare in The Nightmare by that same painter — or again, perhaps, that Michelet at his writing table, having just invented and articulated his own fable of a horse laughing in the night behind the partition, in the scene in which the three sorcerers commission the painting of The Eleven from the enchanter, Michelet is no longer the master of his fiction, that this perfect fable that just sprang from his mind intoxicates him, transports him, and he mounts it without a second thought. I myself do not see the square lantern there before us in the painting at the Louvre; I am afraid that it may come directly from Madrid, from Goya’s Tres de mayo, the Third of May, where it lights the scene of a slaughter, a mass murder, not from The Eleven — although something like a lantern does light The Eleven, but what? Nor do I see the holy table, although no doubt there must be something like a table to hold Prieur de la Marne’s hat at that level, since it cannot stay there by itself, cannot float at waist height by the sole virtue of the Holy Spirit. And above all I cannot see the horses. And you, Sir, can you see them?

And certainly Michelet, in that first shock caused by the painting (he had thought he would faint, he writes, and we can well believe it), immediately had the revelation from which he would later draw the famous exegesis that is contained in twelve pages. There he saw a secular last supper, perhaps the first secular last supper, he notes, the one in which bread and wine are still resolutely sacrificed but in the absence of Christ, despite that absence, above and beyond that absence, man having become stronger than that absence; he saw and saw clearly that it was a true last supper, that is, in eleven individual men a collective soul, not just a collection of men. And in that he is not wrong; at most one can object that if God is a dog, the absence of God is a bitch. And since it was a last supper, there must certainly have been a table, and on it the four-pound loaves and Clamart wine; so he extrapolated them, the table, the bread, and the wine. It did not bother him that the eleven men were standing, and not dreamily seated as in classic scenes of the last supper; on the contrary he writes that his republican last supper renews the tradition of the original evangelical meal that was to be taken standing, staff in hand, loins girded, girded for marching, or girded à la nation, ready for action. And the presence of Collot in the painting, playing both sides, did not bother him either; on the contrary, it confirmed his view, because among the guests at this type of meal, it is hard to do without Judas even if we can do without Christ, as The Eleven proves.

Of course, but this is another story, Michelet detested this painting as much as he admired it, because it is a last supper that is rigged, not by the absence of Christ, which he cared little about and which even pleased him — no, rigged because the collective soul visible there is not the People, the ineffable soul of 1789, it is the return of the universal tyrant who presents himself as the people. Not eleven apostles, eleven popes.

No matter. In the great wind of light that so shook Michelet at the Louvre in 1820, the pale and trembling young man, his hair still black though not for long, there is also this: Michelet, who always said and thought that the true painting of History was only true when it did not try to represent History, Michelet found himself refuted here. And he acknowledged it openly. The Eleven is not a painting of History, it is History. Perhaps what Michelet saw at the end of the Flore pavilion was History in person, in eleven persons — in terror, because History is pure terror. And that terror attracts us like a magnet. Because we are men, Sir; and because men high and low, scholars and beggars, passionately love History, that is, the terrors and the massacres; they hasten from afar to contemplate them, the terrors and the massacres, under pretext of deploring them, even of rectifying them, so they claim, the good creatures — and that is why we are here, Sir, with the crowds from all over the world before the ever enigmatic wall of eleven men upon which History is perched. That is why the crowds from all over the world shoot past the Mona Lisa without seeing it, since it is only a woman dreaming, past Uccello’s Battle of San Romano although it is, in its way, History in person and one of the indubitable precedents for The Eleven, past the red specter of the cardinal-duke painted by Champaigne, past thirty-six times Louis the Great under his monster wig, and plant themselves here, before the bulletproof glass.

Michelet, as he noted, understood here at age eighteen why David’s Death of Marat is only a small Caravaggesque canvas, inconsequential, exiled to the peripheral museum at Versailles, while the great Venetian canvas, The Eleven, enthroned at the end of the Louvre, is the Louvre’s final raison d’être; its ultimate aim; he understood why the whole colossal arrow of the Louvre, the colonnade where you enter, the Cour Carré you cross like the wind, the Apollon gallery that you cover in three steps, the four hundred and forty-seven meters of the Bord-de-l’Eau gallery that you race through, why perhaps all that in the final analysis was only conceived by the Great Architect to carry us to the heart of that target into which the Louvre plunges straight as an arrow. He understood why David is in the purgatory of minor painters, those who are nothing but painters, while Corentin, haloed, sits enthroned at the zenith: because David’s Marat is only a dead man, a remnant of History, perhaps its corpse. And the eleven living men are History in action, at the height of the act of terror and of glory that is the basis of History — the real presence of History.

We are here before it.

See how they change when you move to the left. I can almost see the holy table, under Prieur’s resting hand. And is that the glass of wine in front of Couthon? No, it must be the red and blue plume of Prieur’s hat. But neither bells nor horses.

No, undoubtedly, no horses. And yet: see the eleven pale heads one after the other, aligned, detached, springing naked from the mass of silk, felt, woolen cloth; the eleven masks: — Billaud, pale and long, from the black clothes under the fiery mane, pale Carnot from the black greatcoat, the two Prieurs emerging from the fitted jackets à la nation, lower down, the sunken head of the seated Couthon borne by the double robe of sulfur and basalt, and higher up once again, the pale face of Robespierre offered in worn clothes blacker than black — and the mask named Collot suspended above his pyramid of inverted collars, and all the others likewise to Jean Bon springing from the redundant tricolored jacket. These perched forsaken heads make you think of something, something older and less conjectural than severed heads on the ends of pikes, as has too often been said. And again, if you do as I advise you and move back from the painting, if you resolutely turn away from it, if you carefully retrace your steps, if you leave the room and take a few steps into the Bord-de-l’Eau gallery, turn around once again, once again, deliberately, enter the great hall where to the exclusion of all other paintings The Eleven stands; then if you stop on the threshold and look at the eleven as if you were seeing them for the first time — then, yes, you almost know what they make you think of. And if moreover when you are not at the Louvre you happen to go riding, to practice for memory’s sake that very old and obsolete occupation of men, or if you simply happen to frequent places where riding horses stand in fearful repose; and if perhaps you remember a day when, coming from the other end of the field and approaching at your own pace the wide angle of the stable where the horses lined up in their stalls are facing you, but all you can see of them are their heads, cut off and accentuated by the small lower door that hides their bodies, so that they appear to be suspended above by virtue of the Holy Spirit, spectral, alive, fixed in the dread and the slow expectancy of beasts — then perhaps you think that Michelet is not altogether wrong in his dreaming and that there in the Louvre are eleven forms similar to horses, eleven creatures of terror and temper: as sculpted by the Assyrians of Nineveh in the royal equestrian lion hunts; as they gallop toward the damned that are us, seven times and under seven forms of horses, in the Apocalypse of Saint John; as rearing under Niccolò da Tolentino, the condottiere of the night in Uccello; as rearing too under the Philippes of France and the Louis of France as well, the thirty-two Capets, later under Bonaparte; as Géricault painted them in the uproar of artillery lines exploding one after another, terrified by the smell of powder and the smell of death, but charging as if unafraid. And since this is what it has come to, you and I are suddenly standing before any divine beast whatsoever, not only horses but all of them, horned beasts, barking beasts, other roaring beasts that turning around suddenly leap on the king in the Nineveh hunts, the great frontal threats that resemble us and are not us. The ones that were painted at the very beginning, before Assyria and Saint John, before the invention of carts and cavalry, well before Corentin and poor Géricault, in the times of the great hunts, in the times when game was worshipped and dreaded, divine and tyrannical, on the deep walls of caves.

This is Lascaux, Sir. The forces. The powers. The Commissioners.

And the powers, in the language of Michelet, are called History.

Content

Pierre Michon
The Eleven

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