The Enchanted Clock

by Julia Kristeva

  The Passemants, it seems, finished after the marriages of the two daughters of the king’s engineer. The Olliviers and the Nicolets—with the name of a brother-in-law and his associate—apparently took over the business, the haberdashery and the clockmaking included … How those two held together, go figure!

  Not so simple, according to Uncle Rilsky. We lose track of the Passemants, alias Ollivier-Nicolet, after the Terror. Probably too assimilated with the royalists, their massively decapitated clientele. The guillotine for them too, after all—why not? Someone might have bought the studio and taken the name Passemant. Was it a distant grandson or a cousin wanting to revive the royal and astronomical memory after the Revolution by taking the inventor’s signature? Or simply a partner of this peerless man? A visionary, a lover of secret memories? Or—pure coincidence—a homonym?

  In the plane returning from Santiago to Paris, Astro doesn’t really think about it. He just has to go see, follow this insane, imperious impulse. The registry abounds in insignificant details—like so many not entirely dead stars. A refuge, also.

  Theo is not looking for a family tree. Not even an origin. According to Nivi, the push to find one’s origins is an antidepressant. He has no need of that, of course. His case has nothing to do with melancholy. He is in search of a story. A narrative. The encounter with Nivi has revealed to him that love can be narrated: it tells the before, the instant, the after, all three crisscrossed in an endless now that holds those who love together. Who say they love each other. A story of attraction and extension. Expansion of luminous energies and dark energies. Theo Passemant has been a point without extension until now, containing all virtual matters and energies. Today and for the rest of his life, he needs to tell himself a story. With Nivi and thanks to her, he has to happen—where his father was, where plausible, possible Passemants were. Become accustomed to them, mix in with them, live their lives. A living planet, an Earth all for him, for Theo.

  The Notarial Registry at the Archives puts a multitude of raw facts at his disposal. They pile up on his table: now he’s an archivist. Letters exchanged between Passemant and Tournehem; the dimensions of the workshop the engineer is going to ask for in the Louvre, which he obtains thanks to the authorization of Louis XV; the inventory of his possessions after his death … No narrative; he, Theo, is the one who will construct the narrative. The necessarily subjective portrait, the documentary of this fellow who preceded him, Theo will have to invent. His fiction. A loyal, and in that sense legal, fiction. “The father is a legal fiction.” “Of the only engenderer or engendered”—someone has already said that …

  Theo scans a document, a revelation: at twenty-five, Claude-Siméon makes the acquaintance of Cassini, the illustrious discoverer of the great red spot on Jupiter and of the speed of rotation of Mars and Venus … In his lab at the Paris-Diderot University, Theo receives a photo of the Earth with the Moon at its right, photographed from Saturn by the Cassini probe. A jewel, this probe, which for the first time precisely measures the distance from the Earth to the Sun … Cassini, the extoller of Passemant, no less …

  Better yet: various anonymous correspondences with the director general of buildings, the omnipresent Marquis de Tournehem, and with the secretary of state Maurepas, from which it emerges that His Majesty frequently orders the construction of telescopes and other magnifying lenses from Passemant, whom he meets with to have them explained to him … His Majesty does not tire of receiving the inventor, just as he converses with Buffon, Cassini (him again), and, as frequently, the geographer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle. Fascinating—Nivi will be jealous, and let’s not even talk about Bill Parker: he’ll be invading all the labs.

  Astro would like to steal this little pile of documents from the spring of 1752, the most novelistic of all. A nice little gift for Nivi. “I had the honor of seeing the Marquise de Pompadour at Belleville, and she told me to go see the Garde des Sceaux on her behalf, M. de Machault d’Arnouville, and that she had given him my proposal …”; “Today I present my clock to the king in the presence of the marquise …”; “I explained my difficulties to Mme la Marquise de Pompadour …”; “I had the honor of seeing Mme la Marquise de Pompadour last Monday at Choisy …” She told me, I present in her presence …, I explained …, I had the honor of seeing … Astro counts: the clockmaker saw the favorite at least three times. Three attested times. Certainly much more, in reality. Why doesn’t history teach us such things, this intimacy of the greats and the nongreats? Around telescopes, automatons, 9999. Of no interest? It is for Astro.

  The year 1755: Passemant has several meetings with the king to present him with new instruments of his invention. For example, the rotational watch, “made in such a way that one can see all of the mechanism that formerly was hidden.” Those people wanted to see the mechanics. See everything. The Hall of Mirrors and the other side of the mirror. Once the formerly hidden technique is revealed, no miracle remains, no secret either.

  Soufflot himself takes part in this engineering activity. Soufflot, like the famous street that leads to the Pantheon. Jacques-Germain Soufflot, comptroller of the king’s buildings, asks the superintendent, the Marquis de Marigny, to intervene to facilitate the construction work at Passemant’s lodgings in the Louvre …

  The year 1759: additional meetings with Louis XV to present a new barometer, a telescope, a new magnifying lens.

  Numerous orders. And successes … Astro photographs them with his iPhone—a sort of theft, actually. Could it be forbidden? Probably, probably not, whatever! An agent in the room supervises, but it doesn’t matter …

  The most precious of captures: this signature by the presumed ancestor. Astro captures it too, in all its variants, here, there, at the bottom of all the documents the registry holds. He sets it as the wallpaper on his computer, his tablet, his iPhone: PASSEMANT.

  A breathing impulse, controlled, traced, flying, spiraled, gracious, vibrant. The handwriting of the visionary technician is both sure of itself and dreamy. The hand that held that pen could have been the hand of a tailor or a gardener, a mason or a pastry chef. His hand—Theo imagines it slender but hard, slicing, sculpting, fashioning into meticulous automatons the calculations of an organized brain and the beatings of a burning heart. It grips passing time, the starry sky; it embraces love of the king and the coming apocalypse. Spins the visible and palpates the invisible that inhabits and incarnates it.

  The armless body exhibiting an oversized member between its legs is truly the body of the desired sovereign. Fine, he holds the power! But the hand has nothing to do with it: reserved, secret, the hand thinks.

  To be continued. Astro will return tomorrow.

  In the cold illumination of the reading room, Theo perceives Passemant, who’s a bit bent over as he stands and walks. As a result of living hunched over his automatons, he displays a modest air, but without a trace of hypocrisy. If he hugs the walls and mirrors of Versailles, if he moves with many respectful and almost shameful bows, it’s hardly so as to obtain more space more “loudly,” as the “little duke” said about another royal servant. It’s so the great nobles of the time, led by Le Normand de Tournehem, can ensure the conditions and the sums they owe (the engineer is convinced of it) to his telescopes, to science itself—to the stars, in short. A duty that these gentlemen of the court do not ignore, in their perfect wisdom. It is nevertheless important to remind them of it, according to custom. So that from the very depths of their souls these Excellencies, and His Majesty at their head, may participate in the beauty and the light disseminated by the poor automatons that only transit through his hands. According to the only order that remains and will remain: the universal order of the Great Clockmaker.

  Claude-Siméon approaches, his speech slow, weighty, with a careful pronunciation, as if his impeccable French were a foreign language. His bows are just as slow and deep and his manner always respectful but sparkling with audacity, if not insolence. His sentences string along, composed with care; no pride, scorn, or der
ision, even less humility.

  Never at ease, but always laconic, with a large memory. Split between observation, calculations of the stars, and the assembly of his machines, which is his way of collecting his thoughts, this ancestor prays little, perhaps hardly ever. Neither a philosopher nor an atheist, and though basically quite pleasant, amusing, and good, he can become uncivil to the point of not seeing anyone. He does, however, learn about everything the Château is occupied with, including the gazettes that arrived two or three months earlier, in order to draw benefits for his machines, which he considers capable of bringing the sky to the court and to the entire world here below. By the will of His Majesty, who plays the game with his habitual seriousness, a sort of solemn and sad humor. As for himself, Passemant never thinks about it, and by his own admission he is incapable of governing his own home.

  “Can the hand of an artisan hold time? The answer is yes.” Astro tweets this sibylline message to Nivi. She wonders what it can possibly mean. She thinks he’s in a dilating universe, at 380,000 years after its creation, unless he’s on Kepler-186f …

  42

  THE KING IS NAKED; OR, THE BEGINNING OF AN END

  Leaving the Notarial Registry, Theo Passemant is no longer quite sure that the documents he has procured about la Pompadour will arouse Nivi’s curiosity. The marquise in no way seems an icon of the second sex, even if she posed for La Tour with the fourth volume of the Encyclopédie standing on her table. As for Nivi, always concerned about women’s rights, she is not a typical feminist. Quite obviously, she prefers the Versailles of the little people with their unrecognized works, like the king’s clockmaker, to the Versailles of the favorites. Neither Pompadour nor du Barry: Theo has never heard her mention these women, who are nevertheless exceptional. The fact is Nivi has eyes only for 9999.

  The improvised archivist avoids the smile of that charming Mlle Aubane, whom Nivi introduced to him. What was her last name? Never mind. He’ll take the rue des Francs-Bourgeois to the place des Vosges. Having escaped the penumbra of the archives and the twinkling of satellite screens, Astro lets himself dissolve in the white sun of August, nestles in it seeking protection, roams about in this past time that he has come to enjoy in a deserted Paris.

  The name of the marquise written by the pen of a Passemant can only be impressive for another Passemant, Theo, who wasn’t “well versed” in Versailles. Or so little—in school, where history was already beginning to disappear from the program. A smidgeon of general culture all the same, buried under the technological excellence of MIT. It happens that the Cassini satellite, managed by NASA with the ESA, sometimes puts itself into “safe mode” because of cosmic radiation; then, while waiting for the electronics experts to start it up again, Professor Passemant’s doctoral students kill time by probing the life and works of the famous extoller of the clockmaker. Among them are two Canadian specimens, Jeffrey and Tom, more ignorant but more curious about the matter than the French.

  This jolly pair has found everything on Google and YouTube: a silent film by Lubitsch, another by Sacha Guitry or Christian-Jaque, up to the most recent TV productions, with the sole intent of transferring their bounty onto the professor’s iPad. A bevy of charming actresses resuscitates the royal mistresses, brilliant in the picture, insignificant and boring in the sound. Louis XIV more like a sovereign; Louis XV frankly pathetic; nothing on Cassini or the other scientists. Astro wastes no time zapping this dinosaurish reconstruction and sends the two apprentice historians to the expo that has just opened in Versailles about the science and the curiosities of the Château. They should obtain serious documentation and establish and maintain a good bib of scientific works about the period (beginning with the catalogue of the abovementioned exposition). And, why not, about the favorites on whom their juvenile attention had focused.

  After a month, the professor receives a voluminous file devoted primarily to Cassini and copiously accompanied by complements on the two Egerias of Louis XV, la Pompadour and la du Barry. Which Theo just flips through, laughing with the Canadian schoolboys, but which he’ll have to read one day, maybe?

  As soon as possible.

  Interminable, this rue des Francs-Bourgeois. Shops, cafes, art galleries, all or almost all closed, smaller crowds than usual, but still and always the tourists.

  When Claude-Siméon wrote to Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, whom was he addressing? A commoner like him, having succeeded nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine billion times better than he? Socially, of course, but had she at least made a success of her life? That’s another matter. A screw, a lens, a nut from the royal machine made woman. She transmits, communicates, governs. She manages, in the modern sense of the term. Estimating the work-value that truly born aristocrats and even certain parvenus hardly appreciate, in those distant times.

  It’s important, even exceptional, honestly, and Passemant will use this woman with gratitude and humility while separating himself from this frivolous world that he otherwise serves. Detesting it, basically, but without knowing it: neither protest nor criticism, even less rebellion. The engineer keeps himself apart from the role-playing and the power he knows to be inexistent. La Pompadour knows it too, devoting herself body and soul to make it exist, this power. She wants to believe in it, and her intelligence suffers to see that it’s only a utopia. Even if it means perpetuating the illusion, desiring it, at best reinforcing it, if possible. As for the astronomer clockmaker, he is annoyed with himself at being taken for a courtesan. In some respects, in fact, his role is not very different, if one thinks only of the spectacle at the court when the king exhibited the clock. And if one forgets that Passemant is not there on that parquet floor, under those ceilings, but rather in the flight of time, in the cosmic expansion of which politicians have no idea when they are courtesans—and without exception they all are. Trapped by the play of powers and masks. Stuck in the social contract, like it or not.

  Similar and complicit, or enemies and incompatible, the favorite and the engineer. Like the politics of the spectacle and applied research in our time—Theo knows all about it!

  “A bit of a king”—Theo’s ancestral homonym cannot not know about it, since all Paris talks about it; the gazettes snicker, subjugated. Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson sings, dances, rides, does acid engraving and fine stone engraving, recites poetry as she was taught by Crébillon in person. She produces Tartuffe, plays Dorine, unleashes the devout cabal, who take her for a target.1 Astro doesn’t know it, but Claude-Siméon sees it clearly: the torments of his mind slacken his flesh; his penis is cold.

  And yet la Poisson continues to display the most beautiful skin in the world, which augments the brilliance of her expression. Her eyes, especially, of uncertain colors—neither brown nor blue—give her, it seems, the irresistible charm of a mobile soul, nonetheless mistress of itself, so that all the features of her face express an elusive mischievousness. The lieutenant of the hunt, faithful to the royal escapes, notices this, fascinated by this person who “marks the nuance,” he thinks, “between the ultimate degree of elegance and the initial degree of nobility.” That’s nicely put: between two regimes, la Pompadour is consumed and excels. D’Argenson, on the other hand, finds the marquise “without features,” “ugly”—but those two hardly like each other, and he will be canned. As for Luynes and his dignity, he can’t stand the hard loquacity of the royal mistress when she speaks of a cousin who is a nun as an “agreeable tool,” even an “instrument.”

  Theo has no difficulty imagining Jeanne-Antoinette using the same sort of language about the astronomer clockmaker of the king. He’s quite amused by it, and it’s easy, at a distance, he admits: those people were shamelessly cruel—a lost art.

  All the same, the legend makes of the favorite a skillful politician, a diplomat always respectful toward Marie Leszczynska, even though the queen’s clan does not spare her supreme humiliations. Then la Pompadour strikes back by launching into a song: “At last, he is in my power … He seems to be m
ade for love”—which distresses the royal spouse and children.

  All kinds of stories can be learned in the naphthalene of the National Archives, miserable anecdotes that carry little weight in the face of what Astro retains from the documents gathered by his two Zebulons, Tom and Jeffrey. It was a good thing he shook them up. Definitively, the jealous populace detests la Poisson. They count up her expenditures: seven million? Much worse: “the heaviest burden of France,” the lampoons guffaw.

  Step by step, Professor Passemant comes to the same point. A war of nerves must have played out between the mistress and the astronomer. La Pompadour against 9999? Under the eyes of the king, in the body of the king, head and crotch included, between brain and pendulum? Is it conceivable?

  Expert in pleasure and in judgment, la Poisson-Pompadour does not serve power any more than she does it disservice. She does much better: she exposes its intimate mechanisms, its public dependencies. The king is naked, and Astro understands, at this place des Vosges where he has just arrived, that in spite of what fables and tales recount, nowhere was this better known than at Versailles. Yes, “the king is naked.” The French are in advance of others when they succeed in making a spectacle of this truth. And he, the hunter of gravitational waves, had to go underground to figure that out!

  Does a man grow in majesty when he unveils the hidden mechanisms of his pleasures and his authority, in the image of those rotational watches that Claude-Siméon constructed for his sovereign? Not sure. It’s not because he entrusts his pleasures and his decisions to the favorites that power doesn’t abuse the feminine sex. Theo is in agreement with this. Except that by displaying the political power of eroticism like that, the man at the summit of the state is not only revealing the wellspring of power; he lets it be understood that women can have their part in it. Also. In some situations. On the condition of preparing their pleasures and their knowledge in it.