Of course, it might not have happened if he hadn’t
been a philosopher. Or if he hadn’t been French. Or both – because a
philosopher means something different in French. The etymology ought to be
clear: a lover of wisdom, wisdom being, interestingly enough, feminine.
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, therefore. But the French know about women.
Whereas Germans, Scots and English elaborate systems of coherent complexity to
hold reality at arm’s length, the French simply order their perceptions better
(as Sterne says in the first line of A Sentimental Journey) and produce
immortal aphorisms: What kind of truth is it that stops at those mountains?
Or If you aren’t a misanthrope at forty, then you’ve never loved humanity.
Or Man is a reed, but a thinking reed. Or The heart has its reasons,
which reason knows nothing about. Not the kind of stuff you find in the
works of religious thinkers in other cultures.
René Descartes, the mathematician, the geometer, the
inventor of coordinates, also provided a system whereby we could locate
ourselves in spiritual space as well, and formulated (while warming himself
during a campaign in the Thirty Years’ War) that phrase to which Edith Piaf
would later give immortal currency: Regret nothing. It doesn’t mean you
can’t learn from it – but once it’s happened, it’s happened. If you act
properly, and with full reflection on the basis of your knowledge, the first
time round, then regret is a pointless emotion. And René knew about emotions.
He knew very well how art stimulates them, he likened it to tickling (chatouillement)
– not the same stimulus as a real event, but producing the same effect.
René was also very clear about the difference
between mind and body. The natural function which proved our existence was thinking
as far as he was concerned, not anything that the body might get up to; and
therefore he considered animals as machines (I can only assume he never watched
a dog dreaming – or else he had a bad experience with a cat trying to sleep on
his face as a baby, and this was his revenge). But maybe you have to think of
animals as machines if you want to force feed a goose to produce pâté de
foie gras… So it all comes back to being French.
The “he” I began talking about at the beginning of
this story was an adherent of René’s in many important respects, as you will
see. I do not know where he was born. My information starts with the fact that
he was apprenticed to a bookbinder at the age of twelve in 1782, and that he
read the books he bound. Not all of them, of course. But enough. Enough to know
his way round libraries. His employer spotted him as a smart lad, and sent him
to clients to give estimates for re-binding, but also to see whether there were
any really valuable items – the hereditary system being what it was, the
present owners of extraordinary treasures often had not the slightest idea what
wealth (spiritual as well as financial) their ancestors had bequeathed them.
The bookbinder naturally had connections with booksellers and dealers in
antiquities. So, too, did his apprentice, who, with philosophical acumen,
removed what was unnecessary, and negotiated directly between noble seller and
noble purchaser, thereby doing both of them and also himself a considerable
favour.
In time, this arrangement might have become known,
and worked to young Bertrand’s disadvantage, but history intervened in a manner
worthy of Voltaire: the Bastille fell, which opened a new era for France, and
an even wider field of activity for Bertrand, who was constantly occupied in
turning rare tomes into ready cash. Sometimes, he was even able to negotiate
clemency in return for reading matter, at least some of the members of the new
governments being more cultivated than the people they were ousting (not
normally a feature of revolutions, goodness knows – but then, this was
France).
In line with the general liberation, his employer
recognised his erstwhile employee’s independence (rather as Napoleon recognised
Haiti’s – what we English call a fait accompli) and entered into normal
business relations with him, by now as an inferior.
As the armies of the Republic, and then of the
Empire, marched across Europe, Bertrand, or one of his reliable agents, went
with them, to protect objects of culture from sack and pillage by buying them
up wholesale just in advance of the marauding hordes (whichever side they
belonged to). Had the Allies had the wit, they might have predicted Napoleon’s
movements by checking famous book and antique collections, Bertrand having
extended his competence effortlessly to objets de vertu – for
preference, anything that would slip into a pocket, though he was prepared to
make special provision for large assemblages of furniture, utilising empty food
wagons on their return journey from the front.
Indeed, it was the problem of transport, rather than
any political prescience, that kept him out of the Russian disaster, and it was
one of his more gung-ho agents, not himself, who attempted to buy from the
artist personally one of Goya’s grimmer paintings of a French atrocity.
Bertrand was in all things tactful and tasteful, and spent most of his time,
like Madame de Staël, touring the chateaux of the minor German nobility, to see
what flotsam and jetsam had washed up there. When the Empire collapsed, he was
in a friendly German state, and had no difficulty returning to Paris, and
thence to the country house he had purchased early on as a dépôt for his
wares.
The brief interruption of normality occasioned by
Napoleon’s departure from Elba for a disastrous rendezvous at Waterloo gave him
a final burst of accelerated profit-making, after which he settled down to
steady business, as the nouveaux-riches consolidated their position by
buying into culture.
That Bertrand should have remained the entrepreneur
de préférence from Ancien Régime to Nouveau Régime should surprise no one
who takes a philosophical view of such matters. After all, Talleyrand served
almost all the governments, in one way or another, throughout the same period,
and if a man who knows a good sauce is indispensable, so is a man who knows a
good book by its binding.
Just as Stendhal suddenly became conscious of his
age, scribbled Je vais avoir la 5 on the inside of his cummerbund, and
went home and wrote his great novels, so Bertrand decided he needed to add a
wife to his collection. Fate, ever kind to him, obliged.
Two sisters, in their early twenties, summoned him
to value the possessions of their recently deceased grandfather, their guardian
after their father’s failure to return from Moscow, and their mother’s
consequent demise from grief.
The elder was a treasure in herself: cultivated and
intelligent (not always qualities that go together), she was completely au
fait with what her grandfather had collected, discoursed upon it wittily,
and with a well-developed taste of her own, being scornful of later French
fripperies and devoted to the purity of Italian Renaissance craftsmanship. He
watched her eyes flash as she spoke the name of Cellini and fell in love.
It was at about this time that he felt the need to
write down what he thought and felt – a nice distinction, which he himself
made, and which was, indeed, the prime reason for his committing to writing
something more than descriptions of what he had bought from whom, what he had
paid for it, and the price he had subsequently obtained from which purchaser.
Such records were obviously vital to his continued success, and the account of
his emotions and reflections which he now began was undertaken in a similar
spirit – with a little input from the example of Montaigne, who had chosen to
study himself because there was no subject closer to him, or about which he
could potentially know more. (Though Montaigne’s ultimate response to the
question of knowledge was a resigned and philosophical Que sais-je? What do
I know?)
A stimulus to the mind usually results from a
problem for the body. The elder sister was not conspicuously attractive. Dumpy
and plain, her face became beautiful when she spoke with animation. Her
younger sister, on the other hand, was beautiful. But stupid and leaden.
The planes of her face, the curves of her body were perfection – perhaps because
they lacked an animating spirit to undermine them with arrière-pensées.
Bertrand married the elder sister. It was the only
sensible thing to do. It put him in possession of the primary reason for which
he had come to the house. It gave him a permanent companion whose presence
stimulated – what? His mind. Would chatouiller be the right word here?
Perhaps. It was something upon which he reflected at length.
What was not tickled was his fancy. For that,
he had the sight of his sister-in-law, at meals and on other occasions. In a
sense, she was a statue, an objet de vertu (in one sense, at least). To
do more than look would have required him to blunt his fastidious sensibilities
and converse about things that did not remotely interest him. No doubt he had
done that in his youth, when negotiating purchases with the more stupid scions
of aristocratic houses, but the object had been temporary and tangible and
external to himself, not involving any deep personal emotion with regard to its
acquisition.
Well, well, he reflected, le soir tous les chats
sont gris; the sexual desire which his sister-in-law aroused in him (a not
unwelcome arousal, given his age) would enable him to be a good husband. The
situation was similar to that described by Goethe in his novel Die
Wahlverwandtschaften or Elective Affinities, which had, indeed,
appeared at the time he was in Germany, though I do not know if he ever read
it. (Indeed, I lack a vital key to his character, because I do not have a
catalogue of his library.) In any case, similar problems produce similar
solutions, though not always with similar consequences. In Goethe’s case, it
all ended very unhappily, whereas here – well, we shall see.
The problem was, in fact, more severe than he had
imagined. Lively as his wife was with her mind, her eyes, her tongue, the
involvement of the rest of her body seemed to lame those capabilities, and this
had a similar effect on his own corporeal capacity. He found himself powerless
to bring about any change in these circumstances, and was reluctantly forced to
recognise the limits of the mind’s control over the body. It was almost, but
not quite, a cause for regret.
However, he let no sign of this be seen by the
outside world. On the contrary, he chose to display his connubial bliss by
inviting – not his provincial neighbours, but his many acquaintances from the
world of art and antiquities to lavish dinners, which concluded with a toast
that must have been unique: Confusion à la reine de Suède! Confusion to the
Queen of Sweden! – the redoubtable Christina, who had summoned René
Descartes to her court and, in complete misunderstanding of his gifts, had
roused him at four in the morning to devise ballets for her, which, in those
Northern climes, had been the death of him whom the Jesuits (the Jesuits!) had
allowed to stay in bed till noon, because otherwise he was incapable of doing
mathematics.
It was a visitor to one of these dinners who offered
him something unusual that the great Champollion had brought back from Egypt
after the débâcle there. When all the other guests had left, he showed
him in strictest secrecy, in one of those rooms filled with curios from the
whole world, which may have inspired the opening pages of Balzac’s La Peau
de Chagrin (for he, too, could well have been one of the guests), a small
box containing two vessels of ancient glass, so thick as to be almost opaque,
with stoppers of the same material, for all the world like bottles of smelling
salts.
Bertrand’s attentive silence forced his guest to
point to the hieroglyphics engraved, barely visibly, on the objects and, still
without spoken words, to produce a slip of paper on which Champollion himself,
the discoverer of the Rosetta stone, had copied the inscription and added a
translation: psychophori.
Bertrand raised his eyes. “The vessels of the soul,”
said his visitor. Bertrand lowered his eyes, pulled out a wallet, removed some
notes and placed them on the table between them. When his visitor did not take
them, he pulled out a few more and added them to the pile, closing the wallet
and putting it away. His visitor took the hint, and also his leave.
With gentleness, Betrand woke his wife. She had been
fast asleep, and in her confusion did not protest as her husband held the small
bottle to her nose and removed the stopper. In the semi-darkness of the
bedroom, Bertrand could not be positive what he had seen, but the bottle itself
felt different, felt warm and heavy, and he hastily replaced the stopper and
put it in his pocket, letting his wife’s head fall back limply on to the pillow.
It is hard to say whether his sister-in-law had been
waiting for a knock on her door… after all, I only know what Bertrand was
prepared to write down, and people are not always entirely honest with
themselves. In any case, he entered her room and explained that his visitor had
sold him a most rare and expensive perfume, and that he wished her opinion on
it without delay. (Perfumes, he knew, were one of the few objects of her
thought.) As before, the vessel grew heavy and warm, and he re-stoppered it and
placed it on the bedside table. Then he went round the room, covering the
mirrors. Satisfied that there was no chance of a reflection, he took out the
first bottle and let its contents rush upwards into the nose of the motionless
body on the bed.
To see his wife’s spirit look out through his
sister-in-law’s eyes inflamed his passion as never before, and for once it met
with an equally passionate response. They made love, with alternate wildness
and gentleness, all night. As greyness showed above the drawn blinds, he held
the bottle beneath her drowsy nose, fearful that she might perceive in whose
body she had been while she enjoyed his caresses. But all was well. Her arms –
whose arms? – were still around him, so he could not place the bottle in his
pocket, but he put it on the bedside table, and disentangled himself from what
was now an unwanted embrace. However, as he laid the body on the bed, its loose
left arm fell against the bedside table, and swept the bottles to the floor,
where one of them broke.
He saw nothing. He smelt nothing. But there was a
sense of warmth dissipating and a sound like a sigh. He picked up the other
bottle carefully, checked that its stopper was still firmly in place and that
it was not cracked, and went back to his wife’s room. He held it beneath the
nose of the body on the bed, and watched while the eyes filled with
consciousness. “Where am I?” said the voice that came out of the body. “This
isn’t my room!”
In the drawer of the bedside cabinet there was a
bottle of laudanum for – emergencies. He pulled it out, uncorked it, and poured
it into the protesting mouth until all protests stopped and the slow breathing
of drugged sleep began.
As he packed, he reflected: the younger sister would
take her elder sister’s place, the possessions she thus acquired being some
compensation for her loss. If she spoke the truth, it would be put down to
brain fever and grief at her husband’s betrayal of her and his flight with her
younger sister.
Rapidly, he gathered all his smallest and most valuable
objects. He was determined to take nothing that had belonged to his wife. He
rang for his personal servant, a most loyal young man, and told him they would
be leaving at once, and that the coach would contain a most rare antiquity
besides himself – the sarcophagus of an Egyptian mummy, rather heavy, he would
need help.
So, that grey morning, leaving instructions that his
wife should not be disturbed, illness, perhaps too much laudanum, he set off on
a quest: to find a spirit to match that matchless body.
And after that, I know no more. A man travelling
around with a beautiful, almost mechanical woman in a case – a tale out of
Hoffmann!
That I know as much as I do is due to a small
handwritten volume I found at a bouquiniste on the left bank some years
ago, entitled Le journal d’un philosophe. And why did I buy it? Oh, for
its binding, of course!
31st August 7pm –
1st September 11am 2003