The Enchanted Clock Read online

  3. The Parc-aux-Cerfs was a dwelling in Versailles where Louis XV enjoyed gallant encounters.

  5

  EVEN THOUGH TIME DISAPPEARS

  In the world I inhabit with Theo, I remain informed about things going on at PsychMag thanks to my one friend and true, Marianne. The press is undergoing a crisis. I myself have stopped reading Le Monde and Libération. I find it sufficient to glance at the news headlines that come at set times, well before the newspapers are out, on the screens of my Blackberry or my latest-generation iPhone, a loving gift from Stan. The crisis, in the end, is doing quite well, in spite of what is being said by the hoodlums in the public sphere—chroniclers, journalists, and even me on occasion. Readers revel in it and ask for more: the disappearance of a female jogger in the country, suicides at France Télécom, drought in the Charentes, corruption in our ministries and even in the town halls, paparazzi disrobing politicos and their mistresses in their hotel rooms. For lack of growth the disenchantment expands, and pop-psych magazines like mine proliferate in numbers and press runs. The psychmags now have a decisive niche in globalization. “Better,” Marianne amends, always more ambitious than I, “they have a prescriptive role.” Not the most lucrative, but they’re doing well, rivaling churches and all sorts of communities struggling to heal maladies of the soul. Multiplying approaches and currents, not counting charlatans and other crooked gurus, the psych press surfs on crisis and profits from debt.

  “It was something to think about. The worldwide network of pop-psych magazines is our chance, I already told you.” An easy victory for Marianne. “Okay, so it’s about money, naturally. And so what …? American capital or money from the Gulf. The Chinese are pitching in too … You have something against that? The pharmaceutical companies were already in the pot, that’s to be expected, and there will be others … The troubles of the soul are not lacking for sponsors. The vast sector of leisure activities, vacations, cultural productions, shows, art galleries, showbiz … Obviously the Internet: Google, Apple, Orange, Bouygues, Free … You see?”

  “Not really. How does this concern us?”

  “Honey, come down to earth! Well I’m here, anyway … An international press conglomerate has just been created in London that includes the best publications in our area … With the City and the financial networks, their boldness, their freedom, and all the rest. It’s win-win … The editorial boards will have complete latitude, and we will of course retain our independence.”

  Marianne is not really worried. She ought to be: let’s be prudent, she knows we should, but since it’s inevitable my friend launches into mechanisms of denial. She continues, goes with the flow, everything is for the best.

  “Well, we are at the top of PsyNetOne, right? I tell you, the crème de la crème, darling! Within GlobalPsyNet, PsyNetOne covers France, Germany, Italy, and Spain … They acknowledge that we have an advance on the concept—in a word, the leadership. And the chief executive officer is a Swede, Ulf Larson, with an office in Paris.”

  “Ulf Larson? I don’t know of any Swedish shrinks by that name.”

  “Wake up! I’m talking finance, sweetie. The sector has to prosper, secure and profitable. Shrinks don’t have the vaguest idea about that.”

  With this I am in perfect agreement.

  “Ulf Larson, who is only Swedish by birth, comes to us from the City, where he stood out in the Murdoch empire. He will be our president. He will relieve our dear Yves considerably, always overworked, as you know. Okay by you?”

  The director of PsychMag, Yves Thiébault, is certainly not the brightest bulb, but, devoid of scruples and with a mischievous pen, he’s so good at selling new mental illnesses without scaring mothers or business leaders that I cannot imagine a better publication director. Since my job as editorialist doesn’t require me to follow any collective opinion, I am content to write my own papers; I rarely attend meetings of the editorial board. I agree to go only when Yves calls me in to keep himself up to date on research in psychoanalysis, “because I am convinced it exists thanks to you, my dear.” Big smile—he doesn’t believe a word of it.

  “So, fine, our director will now have a boss above him, so it’ll be Ulf. I guarantee this Scandinavian will know how to keep his distance and won’t butt in where it’s not his business.” Marianne is fired up at having learned so much about our new structure.

  “Are you interested in management? A new hobby … Better than contemporary art …” I try to rile her. She should stick to the point. “What’s he like, this Ulf?”

  “Nordic, handsome. They all are.”

  “Married?”

  “And how! Three children, but he travels a lot. He has an apartment in Paris. His family is skiing.”

  “Are things moving, at Levallois-Perret?”

  “How long has it been since you’ve set foot in here? Come back down to earth! At least quit this weightlessness, you’re letting life pass you by! You know it, but I’m telling you anyway. Your affair with Theo is a kind of depression. You’re obstinate, maintaining the impossible. You’re going to tell me it’s exhilarating, but it’s a little limited, isn’t it? The world is moving; you have to adapt to demand, that’s all. Precede it, even. And for that, angel, you have to have antennas on this side of Earth, on current events, everywhere: in different milieus, the young, the old, women, sporty types, teens, mosques, churches, synagogues, sects, arts and crafts, artists, inevitably the media, politics …”

  She’s making me drunk. I can’t see her eyes. Does she really believe what she’s telling me? Maybe. For her it’s a reason to adapt. I’m going to tell her I agree. I feel the vibration of my Blackberry. Marianne hears it too, raises an eyebrow. I’m not listening to her any more.

  It’s Theo. “Kennst du?” he writes while listening to Mahler in his ultradeep field. He’s tracking some particle or other to prove the existence of the Higgs boson. Is it possible to be with Nivi, Mahler, and dark energies simultaneously? I will not reply to ILY. “Be silent and hope.” That’s not Mahler; it’s Mozart.

  6

  I DREAM, THEREFORE I AM

  Current literary events force PsychMag to cover the nth attempt to demolish father Freud. “Apparently the time has come to proclaim the twilight of this idol at last. What next! We ought to do an article about the murderer, don’t you think? A philosopher who’s making a splash on France Culture! That’s for you, Nivi!”

  Marianne knows I detest that sort of silliness—kill the father, save the father … Nothing doing, she’s insisting, I’m resisting: “Thanks, sweetie, but you’re not getting me. Now’s the time for you to show your face. Nothing’s better than a profile—it’s your baby, okay?” Normally Marianne just writes little psychiatric chronicles: how not to abuse drugs while still supporting the pharmaceutical industry, etc. She’s thrilled to get this more powerful role; as for me, I’m back with my Astro. Farewell, profile of Freud’s latest assailant!

  I duck into the Café Marly, order a tea. Which? Sweet Shanghai, do you have it? Certainly! I pick out the Owl in animated conversation at the other end of the terrace—in English, yet, with two fascinated young women. Art history students, I presume, foreigners, obviously, passionate about manuscripts and French civilization. The Owl, drunk on her knowledge, doesn’t see me; she doesn’t remember me. No spots of blood left on her blouse; today it’s pearl gray, like the sunset behind Bernini’s statue of Louis XIV. This devotee of art, deep into her seduction, keeps readjusting her glasses on her blushing nose. I leave her, walk toward the Opéra, the Galeries Lafayette, the Chaussée d’Antin, and a passage that leads to that strange church hidden in the heart of the commercial district, Saint-Louis d’Antin, I think. In another life, I had followed Marcel Proust here, who thought that this is where he had had his first communion. No proof, the priest had written me. Hell of a story!

  “I dream, therefore I am.” That’s Stan’s motto. He knows how to deactivate emotions. On this day I make his motto mine. Since Marianne wants to play her part
in current affairs, I let the streets of Paris take over. The light is starting to fade, silhouettes of passersby grow long, but night is distant, and I roam in time regained.

  An absurd time. Exploded, fragmented: each piece plays its part, communicating vases, the puzzle takes shape and is undone. My internal coups d’état tear me apart. I convoke love and phantoms—the king’s engineer and my Astro. Who are they? The pains of these conjoined partners are contagious; as they are confused, so I’m confounded. Friend of junkies, if not of criminals? No, I am a chosen one, rather, visited by no ecstasy. I lean on my books, an astronomical clock accompanies me. My time regained does not elapse; it is erected within me, outside me. Rustling, exhausting, delirious, exciting, it metamorphoses me. I come back to life—a life of expansion, a stranger to myself.

  This face emerging from the shadows, I have seen it somewhere before. This catlike air, the features of a man, or rather a phantom, with large, dilated eyes turning inward. Eyes that don’t see me. They are fixed on the unknown. Like Astro. No resemblance, however. Astro has brown hair going salt-and-pepper, prematurely for his age. The phantom thinks it’s normal; the worry shows through. The steely eyes scrutinizing the heavens are today like a cat’s: green like water. Apart from the ironic gleam, they are not my Astro’s. Scarcely perceptible, I perceive a vigilant detachment, almost amused. “What smile? I’m not smiling, I’m thinking about you.” That’s what Theo replies to reassure me he is thinking of something other than himself. That he’s split in two.

  Had the sea-green eyes already glided by the astronomical clock that Stan absolutely had to see after his attack? I must have carried them off with me while running in the alleys at Versailles during the bomb alert, toward the Bleu du Roi Café, rue Colbert, or the Café de la Place, I don’t remember.

  “Siméon,” I say.

  “You are mistaken,” says the man with the cat’s face coming out of Saint-Louis d’Antin. “My name is Claude-Siméon.”

  That is indeed the name I had heard before smelling the flames that threatened the King’s Cabinet, targeted by al-Qaeda.

  The king’s engineer walks beside me. We leave Havre-Caumartin; I cut across via rue Gluck to escape the crowds. He’s following me like a shadow. Or rather like a dress that sticks to my skin in the rain, diluting me, making me flow with it. I feel naked. I cross the boulevard des Italiens, my steps take me to the rue du 4 Septembre, I cross the rue de Richelieu. For reassurance, to recover, I think about my Astro and concentrate on his messages. My iPhone is showing nothing today. I never get lost in the streets of Paris, I expand in them, their timeless labyrinth is the organ by which I take pleasure in my exile. Have I at last rid myself of the obsessive Claude-Siméon?

  Oh no, now he’s in front of me. There he is turning around and heading toward me, at the place de la Bourse.

  “You were eighteen when Law launched his system of bank credit,” I say to him. “He ruined you, didn’t he?” That man was the inventor of virtual money, the first trader in history, a sort of Goldman Sachs under Louis XV.

  The Cat isn’t troubled. He delves into his memories of the affair that determined his fate.

  It’s the month of May, 1716. John Law creates his bank. A madness, or an event that will change the state of the world. People fear a serious crisis, like the ones hitting Portugal and Greece today. France too, mutters the specter, but actually, I say, it will just be yet another crisis like many others. The Cat doesn’t see it that way; Dr. Law is a redoubtable player. He says: “This banker had understood that gambling is a natural necessity like drinking, eating, and making love.”

  I answer that it’s common to think so—since when, now? The Cat thinks that Law goes much further, that he shakes up the system, the state of the state, everything that exists in and of itself: the solid, the absolute, power, order, the kingdom, cold hard cash.

  “His bank is both a bank and a business, a trust and a public service, a commercial bank and a lending bank. Abandoning precious metals, he launches paper money. What’s the difference? Circulation, of course. Circulation is easier and quicker when the material isn’t weighty. Folding money announces the era of cash.”

  “Soon to be followed by the virtual era and along with it the digital, the hyperconnected …” I’m finishing his reasoning. He’s thinking for me.

  “You can say that again. And money goes worldwide. In 1718, his bank becomes the Royal Bank, while his Company of the West, now called the West Indies Company, absorbs the East India Company, the China Company, and the Africa Company. ‘Money is for the state what blood is for the human body. Circulation is necessary for the one and the other,’ proclaims this Scotsman soon turned Doctor of Good Offices of an ultraspendthrift Regency.”

  With a feline flair, Claude-Siméon senses that everything under the sun ends in crisis. The crisis alone is eternal. Terrestrial time plays out in the stock market with virtual money. Shares at a total loss and colossal gains. The roulette stirs up coups d’état and puts the state in a fragile state. Boring, isn’t it, when you’ve grasped its logic? That’s what he thinks. What remains is to track the only unknown worth thinking about: time in another world. Star time.

  “You know it yourself, Nivi. The public, quickly accustomed to this paper money, prefers not to know that the circulation of banknotes is infinitely preferable to cash reserves. It’s easy, billions in paper nourish a torrent of transactions! Right here in Paris, rue Quincampoix, between Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, the stock market has been set up in the open. People buy and sell on the pavement, in the boutiques, in the cellars, in the attics. From seven in the morning to nine at night, the area teems with crowds that sometimes get rich, sometimes lose their shirts.”

  The cat-faced clockmaker is proving to me that you can’t save the system, that it’s been sick from birth.

  “You knew that already,” I say to Claude-Siméon.

  “God does not pull men from the abyss any faster,” he observes. “The nouveaux riches marry daughters of the nobility, and everyone disappears the next day. The duchesses attack Law the magician: ‘Come now, hurry, we want money, paper money. Where are you off to? To do your business? What rot! What business do you have doing your business elsewhere? Take your piss right here and listen to us!’ Nobility lets itself go; it no longer exists, under pressure to have the money that no longer insures the state, you see … Then everything collapses, confidence is destroyed. Speculators want to exchange their banknotes for cash, and they discover the fault in the system—so quickly! The insufficiency of metal reserves. The teeming crowd that fought to buy now fights to sell.”

  I must have displayed a questioning look.

  No, says the steely-eyed specter, he is not a prophet. He’s just spooling the film of the crisis as his father, Theo Passemant, my Astro’s homonym, told it to him. Lackeys-turned-millionaires strut about in the carriages of their former masters: abbots here, waiters there, beggars, chimney sweeps, haberdashers. They gain or they lose—10, 30, 40, 70, 100 million. Plebes on top, plebes on the bottom, all greedy, all the players in a heap and all swindled.

  “When the bank was transferred to the rue de Richelieu, my father was nearly crushed to death in the garden by a stampede to the teller windows, barely contained by soldiers.”

  Claude-Siméon emerges from his memories, somewhat surprised to have shared them with a passerby, and his gaze is now direct, as if he is finally seeing me there in front of him. Light skin, a blond quality, high cheekbones, an Eastern air. “German?”

  The cat-man doesn’t answer. He is thinking about his father, the mercer, master tailor at Clèves. Klive in German.

  “He was called Theodore, known as ‘Lallemand,’ the German. I’m not making this up; that was his real name. Mistrust of the Germans only came later. In Law’s time, they were considered nothing much. So Theodore was naturalized as French in 1704.”

  He changes his name to Passemant, as in passementerie, embroidery. He is a mercer and a tailor. Claude-Siméo
n’s father transmits to him the insecurity of the immigrant. The son will be afraid. Afraid of society, of those who live near the Saint-Michel bridge at the corner of the Marché Neuf, and of the other students at the Collège Mazarin. Afraid with his father’s fear, who fears he will be unable to leave anything solvent and durable to his only child.

  So Theodore Lallemand-Passemant, to obtain as much money as possible and bequeath it to Claude-Siméon, nearly suffocates in the crowd assailing the banks on the rue de Richelieu. How much money? He would have liked at least ten million. After Law’s bankruptcy, all he has left is ten thousand. Virtual capital is born. But the son of that Theodore, Claude-Siméon, already has his head elsewhere: in the clouds. He speculates on the heavens—always higher, always farther, always more alone.

  I ask him if Theodore Lallemand-Passemant really was called Theo. The Cat stares at me with fixed eyeballs. What a question—since he has already said and repeated everything.

  Suffocating and depressed after the stampede, Theo the tailor doesn’t ever really catch his breath. The disastrous spring of 1723 begins. The ruined speculators in Paris envy the fate of the plague victims in Marseille.

  “They thought you were dying too. At your father’s death, after the Law affair, you were like twins, father and son.”

  The revenant’s smile relaxes in contempt. Because the son of the master embroiderer had decided to have a look elsewhere, well before that sinister Law bankruptcy. Descartes, Newton, and the revolution of the planets. So much for Voltaire, who dreams of the revolution of the kingdom. Claude-Siméon will go seek his treasure elsewhere. In something the naked eye can’t see. Something invisible, that treasury of Love with a capital L, which can be measured in stellar time. Much more reliable than the excessive distension of fiduciary circulation. The astronomical clockmaker is going to try. To make people’s dreams last longer, go further than the desires of men and the will of God. But what blasphemy such a pretention is! An apocalypse! Shh! Do not pronounce that word! Instead, keep in mind the figure 9999.