The Fan-Maker's Inquisition Read online

  —The weather?

  —A droll idea of his: that words could produce wind. Just as the Maya thought tears—

  —You have several times made mention of the New World. What has your involvement been in the production of a notorious manuscript that has recently come to the attention of the Comité?

  —It is a project with which I am intimate and to which I am indispensable.

  —Explain.

  —Early in our friendship, Sade said I had the mind of a man. That was to say that I was fearless, fearless of ideas, which, after all, are mere abstractions until put to use. I told him that I had the mind of a woman, adequately stimulated, adequately served. You see: Under the guidance of an enlightened parent, I became an educated woman transcending the limits of my craft. My father was a scholar who, having lost the little he had, was forced to deal in rags and—as luck would have it—old books, which, after all, are often the best. So even if we ate gruel, we had books to read for the price of a little lamp oil, and that is how we spent our evenings. Father’s books were green with mold; they smelled of cat piss, they smelled of smoke, they were stained with wine, ink, and rain, or spotted with the frass of insects. Many contained copper engravings and even maps of invented or vanished lands. From a very young age, I was swept up and away by a ceaseless and vertiginous curiosity. My curiosity was never thwarted and always indulged—such was my education.

  —Continue.

  —As much as Father loved books, he loved theater. We were too poor to ever frequent the Comédie-Française, but we saw what we could: farces performed in barns by actors more ragged than we! Or the plays took place in the back of canvas booths thick with fleas; we prepared for the evening by rubbing our feet and legs with kerosene. Some of these plays seemed wonderful to me, and perhaps they were.

  Once, after a particularly mysterious performance of Beauty and the Beast in a barn in which the Beast’s roars were made to echo horribly in the hayloft above the stage, we made our way home through streets barely visible beneath the stars and I asked my father which came first: plays or books? He thought the plays came first, the books after. And I asked him: If a thing on the great stage of the Comédie-Française was as real as he said it was, would the play have a life of its own within one’s head ever after? He told me yes: just as a book lives on in the mind, mutable as the weather of one’s moods. And what about the actors? I marveled. What happens to their memories? Are they swept away by the miracles they evoke? Does the painted scenery take on the colors of reality? Do the actors become all the people they have pretended to be? Father said: “Just as you, dear child, are all those beings and people you have read about in your fairy books and yet always yourself and none other, so it is with the actors.”

  —How did you come to the attention of the Comtesse Cafaggiolo?

  —I was a gifted painter, even as a child, and so at the age of fourteen I was apprenticed to Desgrieux on the Rue de Grenelle. There I learned my craft of fan-making and was trusted with the decoration of paper and velum fans, doing drawings in ink and paintings in the Chinese manner. One day the Comtesse Cafaggiolo came into the atelier and fell in love with one of these. It showed a delicious little nude reclining on a divan in a garden filled with curiously convoluted trees and flowering shrubs, snakes and elephants and snails…. Oh! I can’t recall all I’d crowded onto the mount of that fan! Shortly thereafter, she returned to take me to her yellow room, where I executed the paintings earlier described. Charmed by my capacities, she insisted I make use of her excellent library. I read avidly each night as, indeed, I always had, and became an obsessive bibliophile. So that all these years later, it should not come as a surprise that a humble fan-maker assists a notorious writer in the production of his book!

  —Before we get to this book, has Sade’s manner changed during his most recent incarceration?

  —He is often preoccupied with the oddest concerns. For example, for several months his conversation consisted of little more than descriptive lists of ideal kitchens. He described ovens roasting day and night, ovens large enough to hold an ox: “I would have my cooks roast an ox stuffed with a pig, the pig stuffed with a turkey, the turkey with a duck, the duck with a pigeon, the pigeon with an ortolan.” Along with the massive ovens, these fantasy kitchens contained great fireplaces fitted out with spits: “Sixteen spits all revolving night and day above a good, heaping mound of glowing embers, these to be attended by eight young roasting cooks, one for two spits, each naked because of the kitchen’s hellish heat. Each spit will hold three geese, sausages, sides of beef, sides of bacon. In the bakery: boys kneading dough day and night, producing buns by the hour, churning butter when otherwise not in service—”

  —Sade is hungry in prison?

  —Famished, citizen! He described maidens, not older than nine, shelling peas and beans, the bowls held between their thighs. White porcelain bowls, the maidens dressed in white, wearing white wimples. And scourers to scour the pans: saucepans—small, medium, and large. To be made of copper. To be scoured with sand. These scourers to wear aprons, citizen, and nothing else. “Whipped to a frenzy,” Sade said, “they will scour like nobody’s business.”

  —All this was intended to evoke your laughter?

  —My friend’s intentions have always been obscure to me. It is true he walks a fine line between comedy and terror.

  —Can you tell more?

  —Female cooks, big Dutch women wielding spoons—great wooden spoons as tall as brooms and good for flogging. Cupboards bursting with chinaware, silver services, pewter tankards for beer, crystal glasses for every sort of wine; a cellar brimming with barrels and bottles; the kitchen rafters groaning under the weight of hams. Dewy-cheeked goatherds too young to have beards wearing brief leathers and trooping into the kitchen by the dozens, each one carrying a young goat slung over his back. Male cooks in droves gutting the corpses of animals still bleating: lambs, wild boar, venison. In every corner, baskets gorged with onions; gravies bubbling in cauldrons; the dining table gleaming beneath spun-sugar palaces crepitating in the light of blazing candelabra; and, everywhere, freshly cut flowers. Servants running to and fro panting with exhaustion, carrying pyramids of sweetmeats on trays of gold: rare Oriental things soaking in honey, stuffed with pistachios. Marzipans in the forms of pagodas and clocks.

  Every six hours, a group of fresh scrubbers arrive to clean the floor of grease and blood and cinders. For thirty minutes on their knees, these, in a lather, purify the place as the cooks, their assistants, the butchers and bakers, the goatherds and postulants, bathe in tubs supplied for this purpose and in full view of the diners, whose feasting is eternal. Sparkling clean, they return to their tasks with renewed purpose and vigor: quartering cows, skewering birds, scaling fish, glazing onions, threading cranberries, boiling jams, stirring tripe, stuffing geese, slicing pies, truffling goose liver, braising brains, tendering soufflés, jellying eggs, shucking oysters, pureeing chestnuts, larding sweetbreads, crumbling fried smelts, grinding coffee, building pyramids of little cheeses, filling puff pastry with cream, steaming artichokes, dressing asparagus, breading cutlets, making anchovy butter and frangipane and little savory croustades, gutting crabs, preparing cuckoos and thrushes in pies and cucumbers in cream, icing pineapples, lining tartlet tins with pastry dough, larding saddle of hare.…He also asked me to draw for him a number of gastronomic maps.

  —[The interrogator looks confused.]

  —The map of Corsica shows the regions for olives, chestnuts, lemons, lobster; for polenta, eels, the best roast partridge, cheese and sautéed kid; the map of Gascony shows the places where one may eat duck liver braised with grapes or a terrific soup of goose giblets.

  —Is that all?

  —Only the beginning! He invented a “Blasphemous Cuisine” superior, said he, to all others until contrary proof, a cuisine that is also a voluntary eccentricity born of legitimate rage.

  —Explain.

  —Sade invented a subterranean kitchen, a somb
er kitchen illumed by lanterns lit with grease, a room as black as the Devil’s arsehole, a chaotic, demonic sanctuary licked by the fires of eternal ovens, ovens belching flames and smoke, a kitchen like a delirium, a blasphemous laboratory animated by nervous irritation, insatiable appetites. In other words, a kitchen in which to prepare a cuisine of righteous anger.

  These are recipes of his invention: A pope, massaged by thirty sturdy choirboys for six months and rubbed down daily with salt, fed on soup made of milk, thyme, honey, and buttered toast, is roasted in the classic manner stuffed with a hachis de cardinal and served with the truffled liver of a Jesuit and a soufflé d’abbesse. The whole generously peppered and garnished with capers.

  —[Shouting above an approving rumpus in the room:] All this is grotesque beyond belief!

  —Recall that Sade has often been in isolation, fed on brown water and black bread. Wildly hungry and enraged, he is the victim of his own fathomless spite. Do not forget, citizen, he was fabulating, only. Such a meal was never prepared, never served, never eaten. But, citizen—it is near midnight. Does the Comité never sleep?

  Two

  Amie—

  Up here in my eyrie I consider the facts, those five days in September when Satan, disguised as a citizen, ruled Paris. And if the bodies of the victims are rotting away in their beds of lime and straw, if the courtyards are washed clean of blood and the gardens weeded of eyes and teeth, if already, the world—always so eager to forget—is forgetting, I, Donatien de Sade, remember.

  I remember how a vinegar-maker named Damiens cut the throat of a general before cutting out his heart, and how he put it to his lips—Ah! The exemplary Mayan gesture! How a flower girl was eviscerated and the wound made into the hearth that roasted her alive; how a child was told to bite the lips of corpses; how one Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was given a glass of human blood to drink; how the face of the king’s valet was burned with torches; how one Monsieur de Maussabre was smoked in his own chimney; how the children incarcerated in Bicêtre were so brutally raped that their corpses were not recognizable; and how the clothes of the victims taken from the corpses were carefully washed, mended, pressed, and put up for sale! The Revolution, ma mie, shall pay for itself, And I remember, hélas, I shall never forget, how my cousin Stanislas, that gentle boy, was thrown from a window the night of August tenth; how his body, broken on the street, was torn apart by the crowd. All night the bells sounded—I hear them even now. The bells of massacre. The bells of rage. “What do you expect?” Danton—all jowl and black bile—said to the Comte de Ségur. “We are dogs, dogs born in the gutter.”

  Already, although blood continues to spill and the trees of Paris are daily watered with tears, there are those who would say all this never happened, that the trials and executions are orderly, silent, and fair; that such stories—the head of Madame de Lamballe exhibited on a pike, of Monsieur de Montmorin impaled and carried to the National Assembly for display—are false, the fables so dear to the “popular imagination.” Well, then, I ask you: If this is so, why am I, whose imagination is clearly as “popular” as the next man’s, why am I still locked away?

  There are days when horror has me feeling fortunate to be secreted in my tower, unseen, an all-seeing eye, remembering yet seemingly forgotten. When I leave my eyrie at last, spring will have come again, perhaps, and the cobbles of the killing yards will have been washed clean by April showers. Sometimes my tomb feels like home! For one thing, I needn’t go to the window if I don’t want to; I need not listen for the blade but can instead plug my ears and loudly hum; I can, like a wasp in his nest high above the world, get myself thoroughly drunk on honey. Which reminds me: I ate all the pastilles. I shall lose my teeth; no matter. Like Danton, “I don’t give a fuck.” What will be left to bite into? Without its kings, France will be as unsavory as America. France, too, is to be run by merchants. Merchants! I have met some—a good number—in jail. Their notion of beauty is forgery; their idea of virtue, counterfeit; their hearts are in deficit; their interests simple; their pricks as dog-eared and limp as old banknotes. Welcome to the New Century! We shall tumble into it as frightened rats tumble into a sewer. And the horrors that will be done in the name of Prosperity will make all the corrupt castles of my mind look like little more than the idle thoughts of a cloistered priest—and the excesses of Landa among the Maya of the Yucatán, a mere drop of oil in a forest on fire.

  Speaking of fire: Today in my idleness I imagined a fan that could be ignited by a tear. Can such a thing be?

  —Sade

  —And what did you answer?

  —I answered that such a thing is surely possible, like the tunica molesta—the shirts earlier described. I could easily imagine a fan treated with volatile poisons.

  —Such as?

  —Sulphur. Pitch. Naphtha and quicklime. One drop of rain and, yes, a tear could transform the fan into a torch. If the one who held the fan wore garments whitened or fixed with lime, why, in no time, he would be blazing like a pillar of fire!

  —And did you make the fan?

  —Yes.

  —Evidence of your complicity in his murderous operations!

  —[The fan-maker’s brilliant laughter fills the chamber with light.] I once made Sade a fan of horn cut to resemble a turreted fortress—an amusement to lighten his confinement. The fan was ajouré—as are the defense walls of a castle. And I once made him a fan of ladyfingers decorated with icing; the panaches were made of hard candy. The combustible fan was an experiment, you see. For the book. The book about Landa in the Yucatán. I made it only to see if it was possible. Then I informed him the thing had been done: A drop of water had set it to smolder; it quickly caught fire, blazed for an instant, and was gone. And I thought that this combustible fan was like a person, like love itself. These, too, blaze briefly.

  —[Bewildered, as if to himself:] How do you come up with such ideas?

  —It is the nature of thought—is it not?—to come up with ideas, although Sade likes to say “I’ve come down with a terrible idea” the way others say “I’ve come down with a cold.” My father, on the other hand, liked to “catch thoughts,” as if the brain were a deep pool and thinking akin to fishing. But then, he was a fisherman of sorts; he fished for old books and papers, just as my mother angled for rags or, rather, the beautiful things she was able, with a gesture and a word, to reduce to rags in the owner’s eyes.

  —[To himself: Mother was an illusionist. He writes this down.]

  —From her I inherited the capacity to, when necessary, forge ahead thoughtlessly; from my father, the capacity to think. When I was a girl, he had me study nature, the visible and the hidden; he had me study languages, the old and the new, so that I should appreciate the multiple paths thinking takes. I read philosophy; I have a knowledge of numbers; I am able to name not only the birds and the stars, but also the cats—

  —The cats!

  —Cats! Yes! Such as Tom, Tiger, Tortoiseshell, Mouser—

  Lisette! [This shouted from the assembled crowd.] Grisette!

  [The names of cats cut loose from all corners:]

  Écu!

  Choux Gras!

  Minou!

  Chosette!

  Ma Jolie!

  Holopherne!

  Bandouille!

  —Silence! One might as well be among wizards and witches! [The president of the Comité claps his hands until order is restored.] You learned nothing from your mother?

  —In our brief time together…[Her eyes darken, and for a moment, the fan-maker, although standing, appears to grow smaller.] She…taught me to love beautiful forms and to recognize a free spirit when I see one. From her I inherited a tolerance for…difficulty, and learned, above all, how to inhabit time, how not to chew over losses.

  —A thing your friend Sade would do well to master!

  —But hard to master in captivity! Kept in a tower like a toad in ajar! To tell the truth, Sade’s capacity to think is often badly scrambled by the inevitable violence of his
moods.

  “To calm the clatter in my skull,” he said to me not long ago, “to quiet my hissing nerves, to soothe my accursed piles, I become a brainless ticking; I count the seconds passing, the minutes and the hours. To this sum,” he said, “I add the ciphers my own body affords me: ten fingers, toes all pale as candles, the tongue as black as a bad potato, the nose like a bruised pear, two ears like broken umbrellas, one brain reduced to perpetual stupidity, a mood like Job’s, one bunion, a pair of creaky knees, a belly swollen like a wet haystack, a cock as irritable as a caged parrot, balls like last week’s porridge, teeth as untrustworthy as dice, an anus with a mind of its own. I use this number to divide my days spent in this tower, and then, by subtracting the sum of heads fallen since dawn, of letters received, dreams dreamed, of grains of salt scattered from a hard roll to my plate, of shadows leaking down the walls, I come up with the exact time to the minute of my release. Or of your next visit, beloved Comet in the Grim Sky of My Solitude. Also, the moment when Robespierre will be undone. This information I depend upon to reassure myself that I will one day feel the cobbles of the street beneath my feet, feel the rain beat against my joyous, my uplifted face, feel the caress of another human being, know the taste of another’s lips, kiss the nape of a beloved neck, feel the scratch of a cat’s tongue on my palm; I will awaken to the crowing of a cock and fall asleep to the sound of turtledoves cooing, cooing in the trees.