The Enchanted Clock

by Julia Kristeva

  The worst is this astronomical clock that the king is so taken with. And Jeanne-Antoinette did not fail to praise, to His Majesty, the perfection of the robot and the merits of the artisan. The marquise thinks, like those gentlemen of the Encyclopédie, that it is important to defend the sciences. But what does this obscene sculpture have in common with such elevated ideas? An astronomical marvel, they say? More like a lubricious mannequin, a living insult to the royal mistress displayed as a spectacle for the centuries to come.

  Ladies and gentlemen, you are invited to picture the enormous machine striking its 9,999 years multiplied by twelve months for each year, by thirty or thirty-one days for each month, by twenty-four hours for each day, by sixty minutes, by sixty seconds, then sixty sixtieths of a second! What woman could stand a muscle like that? Decorating that animal with all the gilded marquetry of the kingdom, draping it in scientific, apocalyptic, or astronomical speculations doesn’t change a thing. Nothing can spare the impartial observer the outrage of the exhibition before them: a veritable attack on morality. This machine is the successful illustration—if one can call it that—of the dangerous visions that invade people’s minds today. Some learned men among the most renowned even consider them natural; doesn’t the respectable Buffon, for example, friend of the queen, profess that in love only the physical is good?

  And if that were not enough, now here’s an obscure mechanic who, after having seduced His Majesty with his astral calculations, shamelessly celebrates phallic power by making you think, without saying it but by showing it, that it governs the sun and all the stars. Really? This automaton preaches devotion to priapic desire: it does not celebrate time. Can it claim it’s the same thing? Of course not! Frankly, it murders her love as a woman, which blossoms in words and song, in the theater of Reason and the stratagems of the state.

  The king’s mistress did try to be reconciled with God, to enter into the Capuchin order, to cultivate elevated sentiments and pure sensations … In the end she gave up … She even became the queen’s sixteenth lady in waiting. She lived through the Lisbon earthquake … Today she is wasting away with diseased lungs … But don’t go thinking la Pompadour is finished. Madame still finds the fire needed to organize a musical event at Fontainebleau for the following autumn, with that little Mozart on the harpsichord, the fabulous genius of eight, reserved to the queen alone with her daughters. She is killing herself with pathetic efforts to combine happiness with innocence, ready for anything so as not to leave the king.

  Ready for anything—but this? Not this, no, no, 9,999 times no!

  The haruspex was not expecting so much anger from la Pompadour. Is the insatiable organ, virile and massive, tearing open her vagina? Its infinite beats infect her entrails, make her uterus bleed, crush her lungs, tear apart her throat when she attempts to expulse it by spitting … In vain … Coughing fits and galloping fevers … Nothing can be done … The marquise is as powerless to rein him in as to satisfy him.

  The capuchin monkey struggles under the hand that holds him tight; the fan no longer dissipates the heat that rises from the stomach to the cheeks, red under the tear-filled eyes.

  Claude-Siméon tells her that he has come to rewind the clock, adjust a screw. Just a small detail. Soon there will be no need—the regulation will be done automatically, starting the following month. Mme de Pompadour has been so generous in supporting this work before His Majesty and his servants!

  “You have exerted discernment in doing good because you judged for yourself. Believe me, Madame la Marquise, I have known no unprejudiced person who fails to render justice to your character. And the approval of people who know how to think is something, isn’t it? Superior instruments are required for the progress of astronomy … Organisms that are so rare, so delicate …”

  “Stop there. My poor man, what can you know of people who know how to think? And you call that delicate? That? That? Come now!” With a reproachful tone. “You are a handsome fellow also, I have already said so to Buffon … But worse than he … Worse than Buffon, and more physical yet, if that can be …!”

  Simple coquetry or black fury, the marquise hits the engineer with her fan, which she then aims like a weapon against the naked torso of the clock. She fires into the head, points at the chest and her lover’s pendulum—or her ex-lover’s, still master of his mistress, who won’t let him go, whatever may happen. A fury, a woman possessed.

  Passemant staggers and loses his balance. He thinks there is no connection between this icon, who enchants so many people, and this bacchant taking on his masterpiece. She aims at her king, the Great Clockmaker himself, and the course of the stars, which the engineer has calculated all his nights long. With a stroke of her fan, this harpy is going to reduce the masterpiece to a pile of viscera, as thrown to a pack of hounds. This is no longer a marquise; it’s an isolated wolf who dares to confront the antlers of a stag, the fangs of a big boar, the infinite correctness of 9999.

  A fog hides the scene from his eyes; the gilding comes unglued from the ceiling: la Pompadour’s rouge gets mixed in with it. Her convalescent face, thinner but willful, fades; the clock’s lineaments flutter away; the astronomer can’t make anything out. He cannot stand this shadow relentlessly hounding his work over and over. She might break the shot chain with her hunting rifle … Tear out the gold and the marquetry … And now her monkey, like a crazy lion cub, to finish, crumbles the precious installation of time that Passemant devised with all his love for a world that no longer exists.

  But the clockmaker does not die. This martyr of Pompadourian revenge still breathes, though barely. The oxygen has gone to his head. He simply wants to stand between the marquise and 9999, but paralyzed with shame he once again has a terrible headache. And he loses consciousness.

  At nightfall, as the valet of His Majesty opens the chamber, he finds the man prostrate beside his fabulous clock. Mme la Marquise de Pompadour’s monkey is watching over him, crouching on the shoulder of this abandoned body, looking like an orphan as only monkeys can. No one knows what star guided him to escape from the favorite’s arms and take up residence at the foot of the astronomical clock.

  About twenty days later, on Palm Sunday, Mme de Pompadour breathes her last in the Château, where only the princes of the blood have the right to die. “Our anxieties have come to an end, in the cruelest manner.” This wordless thought gangrenes the king’s mind. Consolation and agitation. In a hurricane of rain, elbows on the balcony of his chamber, Louis XV silently weeps for the cortege carrying the coffin of his mistress of twenty years who thought she had found love. Until the carriage turns the corner onto the avenue de Paris toward the crypt in the Capuchin convent. It seems she still lies in the cemetery of the convent, which has disappeared, compressed now under number 3, rue de la Paix.

  Voltaire sincerely mourned her. A dreadful destiny, all the same, of love and hate. A woman’s end is sad. So is the end of feelings.

  Passemant will live another five years.

  No one knows where his grave is.

  Scarcely has he come to than the astronomer gets away from me and indulges his ill humor. He speaks ill to relax. More indignant than ever, the man defends himself, and so much the better: he will no longer have nausea and headaches, or less often. Let him express himself!

  “Ah, there are lots of people at Versailles, Madam, I deplore it. People with ugly names, worse than la Poisson, who has already badly upset the social hierarchy—and how! The daughter of a former lackey who almost got hanged! … Wait, the best is yet to come! … La Bécu, so as not to name her, the apotheosis of disorder, la du Barry, you’ve got it. No, I won’t say anything against her, against anybody at Versailles; I myself do not belong here. Many people think so, very exalted people. Oh yes, I noticed it to my detriment, quite recently; I was almost considered out of my place. They don’t say so, but they think it, they do what’s necessary, and I feel it, you can understand why. I belong to the secret garden, you see: the far side of the moon in the kingdo
m of Apollo. More threatening than libertine luxury, in the eyes of right-thinking people. My time is not theirs; actually it hasn’t come yet, it will never come, it’s an imaginary time, they suspect so, and it bothers them. Nothing to do with the bawdy songs and the insulting pamphlets. I don’t want them, and I don’t know them … Scenes at court, viewed from this angle, granted, do not concern me … Where was I?”

  “You astonish me, clockmaker. Mme du Barry didn’t come to Versailles until after the death of la Pompadour, when the Maréchal de Richelieu forced her acceptance against the wishes of the marquise’s friend Choiseul. That was the very year of the queen’s death, something you can’t know about—you are going to give up the ghost the next year. But you’re picking your words out of the gazettes! And from the mouth of Marie-Antoinette herself, who is obliged to welcome the new mistress of her father-in-law … You live in 9999, fine, but still … You’re inventing history, Claude-Siméon! How is that possible?”

  “Let’s be serious, Nivi. In certain situations, asking the question is better than answering it. I’m telling you. Sticking to what the rumors are saying, it is true that while the royal mistresses were not vestal virgins, the fault is with the gods who made them so beautiful. What can I say, I don’t like protectors as I ought to; I distrust them, and Mme de Pompadour first of all … She was too … too much in everything … too much between His Majesty and me … I have already told you what happened to me—her fan, her monkey … shortly before her death … As for Jeanne du Barry, who surpasses her in patronizing the arts, who gives commissions to Greuze, to Fragonard … she’s something else again, a pure scandal! But the devout party defends her to annoy Choiseul, who hates them … I have to face the facts: I am not of their world. How can you expect me to think highly of this new beauty, who claims to be a Vaubernier, from the name of her mother’s lover? Vaubernier was a very special monk: Brother Angel, what an antonym! Mistress of the debauched Dubarry, known as “the Roué,” this creature marries the monk, can you imagine, with the simple goal of being received at the court, thereby becoming the sister-in-law of her lover … That said, the lady is overly gifted with talents and charms; she has the gall to send two kisses to Voltaire—him again—who replies teasingly: ‘Two is too many by one, adorable Egeria, I would be dead from pleasure with the first.’ I hate this farce, which is going to turn out badly, but what to do? If I start talking like that, I objectively pass into the camp of Marie-Antoinette, my king’s daughter-in-law, who is going to be decapitated …”

  Brief silence. He continues, meditative. Nivi is all ears: she senses that the phantom is going away. Could this be his testament?

  “I thank the Great Clockmaker for having spared me the continuation of this story by making me meet my death two decades before the Revolution … I am dead, in fact; I’m not keeping it from you, whereas 9999 will survive … Adieu, Madame.”

  1. Nicole du Hausset was a faithful chambermaid and companion to Mme de Pompadour.

  35

  THEO HAS JUST LANDED

  On the waters of the Fier in front of my veranda at Martray, the vessel Nordé (from the name of the wind Astro likes better than all the others), when it deigns to berth on my island, makes the white swan, my constant friend, flee.

  For years, this strange being (“Furthermore, is it really the same one?” says my falsely indifferent A) has regularly alighted in front of my computer on the other side of the low wall that separates me from the water. From dawn until Venus rises, and sometimes even at night, he is there, blended into the grasses that border the arm of the sea and faithful sentinel to my insomnia. It happens that he changes hue, going from white to black, but I know it is the same one, I know he is mine. He flies away only when Theo arrives. “Nivi and her lover,” jokes Stan, gently possessive.

  Today Theo does not take me out to sea in his Nordé. Moored we are, and moored we remain. To sleep, to love, to talk, to say nothing. Curfew, silence. Listening to the melodies for lute by Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Renaissance lute with ten courses, to be eclipsed afterward by the French baroque. Chords picked as with the guitar, arpeggios and tremolos, sarabandes. The plucked strings vibrate dry, incisive sounds, then quiver and fold inward. Tender coolness, restrained panic, concerted assonances and dissonances. Intoxication, white like my swan.

  Astro browses my books and notebooks, peers at my computer screen over my shoulder. I don’t like that. I say nothing. He guesses, knows everything.

  “You imagine a lot about this good fellow Passemant.”

  “I have the right, no? He’s my character, after all! Besides, he read a lot, it’s been proved. Fine library in his Louvre apartment, which he left after his death according to documents Aubane found in the Notarial Registry.”

  My glance leaves the screen of the Sony and rests on my swan, faithful to his post on the water across the way. He too is one of my characters, just like Passemant. I can certainly make them say and think what I want, at least what seems plausible to me.

  Today I’ve found a name for this winged visitor, my courtly lover: Leibniz. The crook of his neck, the envelope of his arched wings incurve the train of the white cloud, hook it onto the light that deploys upon the shivers of the water. In this instant, my permanent migrant is an arabesque of reflections.

  Does he have a body? At the intersection of the elements, his whiteness is a Japanese origami that, from fold to fold, decomposes and recomposes sky, earth, and water. A presence? An act, rather, all in movements and contours, feathers, wings, leaves, cloth, and draping. His reason is external to him, in the wind that brings him to me and takes him away. In the rays of the sun and the halo of the moon that bring him closer to me or distance him from me. Or else in the odors of the algae and the santolinas that announce the coming storm so he can fly off in time. In the slippery movements of the eel that tempts him and coils his gluttonous neck, then plunges him into the water. Plastic, elastic, my swan sketches an affinity between the elements and the bodies; he reveals the gradation in everything. Like Émilie’s Leibniz.

  “If you want my opinion, Émilie is the one who is the heroine of that period.” Astro intentionally teases me about my passion for the erotic clock: he knows that in fact I tend toward Émilie’s fire; I go to it. “Her dissertation on happiness, okay … Did she even know happiness? On the other hand, her effort to reconcile Newton and Leibniz, hats off! I’ve already told you that quite a lot of people around me are really into that.”

  Émilie seduces him too, but Theo is modest, or rather serious. No one speculates in an astrophysics lab; they do scientific theory, nothing else. All the same, like Voltaire’s Egeria, he thinks one should not banish the hypotheses of physics, but mechanics does not contain the true causes of phenomena, so physics cannot do without metaphysics. And when his science is upsetting the standard model my A is surprised to find echoes in Mme du Châtelet’s pages because she considers time to be an imaginary notion, a useful fiction. To which only so-called successive and existent beings adhere. That’s all, but it’s not nothing.

  “In fact, she read Leibniz’s Theodicy and wondered if we wouldn’t one day arrive at the prime elements that compose bodies.” I’m simplifying.

  “She imagines beings without extension, without matter, yet constituted by elements. By elementary particles, we say. Unless they are not particular objects but vibrating cords moving at velocities that can attain the speed of light. Just as a violin string can engender several harmonics, the modes of vibration of the superstring would correspond to the different possible particles. It’s as if she were wondering about what preceded the Big Bang! We find a condensation of info in her work. She speaks of divine impulsion. Your Émilie says it with Leibniz’s words: the sufficient cause of the succession of existants is outside their contingency. That would be the proof of God, equivalent to what for us is the time-out-of-time. ‘He’ is, but ‘He’ is outside of us, who exist only in time and space.” Astro is translating Émilie’s flights of fancy i
nto his cosmological dialect: how to reconcile quantum physics with general relativity.

  I’m listening. With Theo I pass from our iridescent senses to a now calming, now blinding clarity. And I look at my troubadour swan folding sky and earth onto the water.

  “We are illusions, like time and space. But also points impacted by an infinite expansion. For Émilie, this force is divine, of a superior rationality, but not in contradiction to our reason. That’s what she thinks, I believe.” Astro does insist on pointing out what separates him from this fascinating precursor.

  “The surpassing of reason authorized by reason. The unconscious?” I try to fit in my vocabulary.

  “This woman wants to think what she cannot know.” Astro prefers his basic philosophy to my Freud.

  “And do you know why? I bet it’s her passion for freedom that makes her choose this Leibnizian metaphysics rather than Voltaire’s deism. Fair enough, don’t you think, with respect to the former pleasure seeker who dropped her?” I make myself into the infinitesimal disciple of the divine Émilie.