The Enchanted Clock Read online

  We arrive at the rue Quincampoix, a mere tunnel of a street, narrower and certainly more nauseating than at the time of Law.

  “Do you work in the stock market?”

  Claude-Siméon pretends to take an interest in me. I say, “In a sense.” In the stock market of souls and proper names. He says again that one should not play at that game, even less with that game. Too dangerous. Worse: insane.

  I don’t have the time to make it clear that I basically agree. The king’s engineer disappears in the flood of employees emerging from nearby offices. It’s five o’clock; the downpour catches everyone by surprise, and I take shelter in a doorway to answer Stan’s call on my cell phone.

  7

  AT THE COLLÈGE MAZARIN, DURING THE REGENCY

  I rarely leave my neighborhood: Saint-Jacques, Port-Royal, the Observatory, the Luxembourg, the rue des Écoles, Jussieu on occasion. Since Astro entered my life, Stan says I’ve broken off with the human race. I’ve lost my way. I scarcely stop by the office; I delegate. I browse the scientific journals, I walk, I cross the Seine, the Tuileries, Café Marly, the Louvre, the Palais Royal, the former National Library, the Bourse … I don’t know much about the engineer Passemant; no one seems to know of him, but the man intrigues me. And it seems to me that my Theo is even more mysterious to me than that somber subject of the king to whom he is apparently related.

  No one would think to be called Passemant these days. I’m sure of it. I checked on the Internet. No one. This family name no longer exists. Theo doesn’t want to know whom he is descended from. “That question is without interest,” he proclaims. Denial, defense for some childhood trauma or other (speaking like a shrink). That’s his business: I’m not getting involved in everything. Of course he has encountered the name of the enlightened inventor and his famous clock; of course helpful people didn’t hesitate to tell him what they were able to gather here and there about the character, which is not much. So how important is it? “Madam, it’s of no importance whatever!” my Astro repeats with a Spanish accent, like Picasso replying to the lady who claims to be an art specialist and states nevertheless that she doesn’t understand a thing about his work. “Besides, did your Claude-Siméon, who seems very astute and clever, really invent something, or did he simply copy the English and the Dutch? That’s what I was told, we’d have to check, history of science is not my thing, I don’t know the first thing about it, since I am light years ahead—or behind, depending. You know that,” he concludes, with a paternalistic smile at the corner of his lips.

  Oh yes, I know it!

  My rambles take me to the Tuileries today. Regency teens would not have failed to take in this stylish corner of Paris, which has always attracted youth. There the serious and the surly exchange smiles and kisses, rumors and vices. It’s summer, it’s hot, people huddle in the shade of the nearby cafés, and I can imagine that the king’s clockmaker could have met my Theo there on a day like today …

  “Every evening, the regent hosts a supper at the Palais Royal.” Jacques Germain seems to know all about it: one of his cousins, like him lacking in renown but reputed for his wit and his debauchery, claims to belong to the close circle of the regent. Jacques Germain believes it. Claude-Siméon would like to believe it, but really …

  “They talk, they laugh, they drink. They shout obscenities. They’re as blasphemous as possible.” Alexis d’Hermand acts like he’s one of them.

  “And the regent’s favorite daughter, the Duchesse de Berry, who they said was ‘as wild as the rabble,’ was she there?” Charles Joachim wants the details; the two others don’t know much. “Yes, really, they say she drank like a stable boy, to the point of falling down, and would throw up on the table, splashing the diners. She’s had scores of lovers. The latest, Rion, takes his pleasure in debasing and humiliating her, but he is so ugly, covered in yellow and green pustules and abscesses.” He blushes with shame.

  The Cat listens but adds nothing, just a nervous laugh that momentarily bursts from his larynx, his lungs, his belly. He laughs with all his neurons, a staccato hilarity, glottal expulsions of a convulsive breath, asthma sublimated in reclusive pleasures. Is it the Cat’s laugh or my Astro’s? A torrent of little bells, Papageno ripping off the padlock stuck on his lips, a numberless outpouring in a cascade of puerile joy, child or teen half goth, half crazy, Milos Forman’s Amadeus. Sometimes he tells me about his “Berkeley period,” his crazy years as a student who “learned everything and did everything” on the campuses of the East Coast: science, drugs, and the rest. Few words, always this unbridled baby laugh. Masturbation in hilarity, furtive testament to a body that “did everything” when it could, when it wanted, when it was needed. A body buoyed by a wave of candid laughter to recount it all.

  If he had been here in the Tuileries with these boys from the Collège Mazarin during the Regency, Theo would have been as dumbfounded as Claude-Siméon by the debauchery at the Palais Royal. The future clockmaker must have been of the Astro type. I can see him as a fan of Watteau, another face of the Regency: pleasures that are graceful, reserved, innocent. His favorite painter dies two years before the regent, and the Embarkation for Cythera has nothing to do with the roundup of loose girls for Mississippi.1 All the same, the entire band from Mazarin is dumbstruck by the drinking sprees and other misbehaviors that the great men of the Regency loved, beginning with the regent himself, so intelligent, so progressive … And depraved, surrounded by the Dubois, the Broglies, the Effiats, et cetera, a lot more war-hardened and desensitized than the supper guests who excite the boys … Frenetic, feverish, sick with pleasure, some of them soberly so as not to harm their health—the height of vice … Others, spendthrifts or misers, greedy, jealous, persecutors, persecuted, always keen to blaspheme … Their disgrace takes the appearance of grievance, remonstrance, revenge, insurrection … A sort of infrapolitics? Or a comical settling of accounts, as meticulous as it is absurd? Claude-Siméon rebels in vain; the world is moving against false rights and for true rights, the unique right to progress, the right of nations that should win out, that will win out … No one’s listening to him.

  “The priests are horrified, the police had to intervene. You know what it was: a profanation, for God’s sake!” Jacques Germain quivers with envy. “It’s true! The body of the lawyer Nigon, in its casket at the cloister of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, was desecrated by the Duc d’Arenberg, who was staying not far from there. He comes in with his friends and his lackeys, carrying bottles and glasses. They jump up on the casket, straddling it, tip up the font and spill holy water on the head of the cadaver. ‘Here, have a drink, my good Nigon, since you died of thirst!’ Death itself is no longer respected … What do you think about that? The example comes from high up … That’s how boars and sows behave …” He hasn’t stopped quivering.

  “And the regent’s minions, you know? Alexis, do you know them?”

  Alexis mimes the antics of the minions with a smirk. The Cat doesn’t intervene: he’s ashamed, he’s thinking about his father. “Stories are told, let’s wait and see … Let’s wait for the memorialists …”

  Claude-Siméon isn’t laughing anymore. The other three don’t know that their dirty stories excite him so much that it disgusts him. Enough to vomit—the minions, the sows, Alexis, Jacques Germain, Charles Joachim, himself. Disgusted enough to flee, to drop them, to throw himself into the gray mirror of the Seine, the Seine that also wallows lasciviously—would it be possible to discipline it, to tame it one day? Something to look into later. Today, the Cat wants to fade into those tense reflections, drown the rise of blood beating in his temples, his lips, his penis. But no, he will control himself, govern himself. He composes his face with an air of superiority, above himself, older than his age. Astro would have done the same, he always does. Claude-Siméon floats above it, no longer laughs.

  Never mind, he continues: “What’s important is to govern the state, that’s what my father’s friends say. Instead of that, each faction has its libelers
who drag the opposing faction through the mud. The regent Philippe d’Orléans, the cardinal Dubois, the royal princes, the dukes, the bastards … And Parliament is chafing: cessation of activity, the height of disorder, a strike, you know! People are getting irritated, my father can’t take it anymore: he paces about saying ‘Order, France, order is going out the window!’ ”

  Papa Theo, new French subject and proud of it, likes to throw out political predictions, but people can’t really tell if he thinks they are optimistic or catastrophist. Claude-Siméon thinks about those English and Dutch visitors, artisans and merchants eager to share the secrets of their trades and of the philosopher’s stone while speculating on the fate of the world. Although Mme du Barry has not yet arrived to taunt the monarch with her bons mots, Papa Passemant isn’t far from coming up with them himself. The revolution might be under way already, he mutters to the future astronomer-clockmaker, upon leaving discussions with his colleagues in the Harmonie Divine. And Claude-Siméon begins to sense its arrival. This event would not burden itself with government by monarchy—that’s what the most audacious members of his father’s lodge predict, as if they were imagining ten thousand years of universal fraternity to come.

  “The regent has brought in financiers of the old school, the Pâris brothers,” says Jacques Germain, clearly better informed about the reality of affairs. The three others envy him.

  “And that’s not all. The regent Philippe d’Orléans preferred the Jansenists because Louis XIV had persecuted them. Now Dubois has brought him back to the Jesuits. They’re negotiating a settlement.” Alexis d’Hermand contributes the latest news of significance, and that’s logical; his family is involved.

  The future engineer is overcome. He thinks his father is a dreamer—a German. The infinite is not dreamed; it is calculated. Newton and Leibniz, they’re what’s serious, some are even talking about them at the Collège Mazarin … On the other hand, his mother tells him over and over, every evening, that he has to get ready for his future—in the judiciary, for example. Not go out with those rather undesirable boys, even if they are students at Mazarin. But these days no one respects anyone: money itself has lost its meaning; anybody can attend that school if they have relations. Such is not the case with her own son, the son that Marie-Madeleine Canaple, wife of Passemant, raised like a real treasure: knowing how to economize, respecting order as concerns things and people.

  Meanwhile, the German tailor labors to support the modest household while frequently escaping for occult discussions with friends whose visionary aspirations are a mystery to no one. But the young man is not really bored. He breathes in his mother’s fresh-smelling skin. He imagines a world above the world. “My son has an organized intelligence,” Marie-Madeleine exults in front of the entire Canaple family, reunited on Easter Sunday. “His fingers are so obedient that there is nothing their skill and their suppleness cannot accomplish.” Unconsoled about never seeing him become a magistrate, she recites her son’s praises the better to persuade herself of them. While the family stands in awe of the sphere Claude-Siméon has constructed. All alone, but not without having read a great many scientific books. It’s a fact: he reads too much, that boy …

  Claude-Siméon, imperturbable, lets them argue, just as he listens to the boasts of his schoolmates with a detached air. Naturally, he takes them into account, but he in turn takes leave, farther and higher than his German father did. Marie-Madeleine’s mouth seeks his cool cheeks, disdains the forehead of her aging husband. The regent’s misbehaviors as detailed by Jacques Germain and Alexis d’Hermand blend with his mom’s perfume, with her breasts that she doesn’t cover, with her thighs that innocently brush against the adolescent’s skin. This woman deserves much better than the status her Theo provides. Her large nut-brown eyes avidly beg the son to make her shine in high society. Marie-Madeleine believes the future is for the Nobles of the Robe; that’s what she wants for Claude-Siméon. Does she sense that a government of judges will one day take root against the authority of the king?

  The young man says nothing. He doesn’t succumb to passion. Neither to the passion of his mother nor that of his wife, when he has one, nor to his male friends, administrators, or ministers. He barricades himself against human passion, and this withdrawal splits his head in two. Painful border, indispensable purity. A sort of celibacy? Not really. But something approaching it, and he is going to study the question. The vices that fascinate Jacques Germain and Alexis he sees today as in a dream, beside the rosy body of Marie-Madeleine.

  He will hide them one day in his automatons. Music boxes like the ones Papa Theo had brought from Clèves, which he will perfect for his daughters (he will have two). He is going to program the automatons with the popular melodies the old tailor used to hum. But to get rid of his migraine, he will need more than music boxes. No remedy beats the supreme effort of calculating the stars, the hours, the seconds, and the sixtieths of seconds.

  1. To populate the Mississippi region, girls and women without status or means were rounded up and shipped to America.

  8

  NOW

  Marianne is not wrong: I’m refusing to get involved. Not at PsychMag or anywhere else. Nowhere. I avoid going to Levallois-Perret. Those offices in glass cubes, carpeting, movable partitions, and the staff glued to their computer screens give me the chills. Ever since the editorial offices left avenue Bosquet in Paris to settle in the Hauts-de-Seine department, I have been boycotting it. Of course I know that rents are skyrocketing in Paris, that print is hardly selling anymore, but PsychMag in a building for the hedge funds of the digitized globalization causes me more anguish than the empty towers in Shanghai or the freeway-boulevards in Beijing. Machines and smartphones thrown into the void, and what else?

  “You’re exaggerating. In our location it’s cuter. Beauty salons and bakeries à la française,” Marianne corrects. She has adapted perfectly. Not me. Everywhere a calculated transparency is rushing headlong toward some point of PR. But without the childlike naivety, the charm of colors, this unmistakable reminder of carnival that brightens the concrete mastodons of the Chinese metropoles. I don’t have a feel for it, this new PsychMag; I’m obstinately absent. Yet an inexhaustible sense of efficacy inhabits me and leads me to the editorial office in spite of myself. I close my eyes on Levallois and back into it. I sacrifice myself.

  It all began with Stan. I’ve caught fire and I’m holding on. I had to. And it continues even more with my patients, it’s only logical.

  “How do you manage to keep all those balls in the air, from one thing to another, from one second to the next, moving heaven and earth?” When she forgets to be jealous of Theo, Marianne evinces empathy, she tries to encourage me. “You’re living in the present, is that it?”

  Weird present. With my Astro at 300 million years from the Big Bang, with Passemant soaring above Versailles at ten thousand years minus one. Theo, more knowledgeable than Marianne, tells me that my strange present is called now.

  “Yes, now. There is nothing more specifically human, but no one realizes it, nobody gives a shit. You didn’t know it either? Okay, but you’re in it. Science, on the other hand, has no grasp of the now, it’s a shame but it’s inevitable, Einstein said. Is it really? Saint Augustine, who was not a physicist, saw only the present, naturally. That saintly man was concerned about souls; a present relative to the past: memory; a present relative to the present: perception; a present relative to the future: expectation. Can you guess why? Well it’s obvious, since the talking animal knows that he is talking and thinking, or at least can have this consciousness that makes him present to himself and to the world, agreed? I’m not saying there don’t exist patients who, because of physical or even psychic lesions, possess neither this unconscious knowledge nor even the consciousness of themselves. It’s clinical, all that, pathological. That’s another story. I’m talking about the presence to oneself and to the world, before which lies what we call memory of the past and after which we envision the future.
It’s understandable why Einstein was disappointed, because scientific reason has nothing to do with that properly human presence.”

  I don’t see what he’s getting at.

  “Well, today, in astrophysics, instead of commenting on past-present-future, researchers are content just to calculate. They measure before-during-after and put time in parentheses. Not only the now but time itself does not seem fundamental; instead, it’s a human, all-too-human artifice.”

  I’m thinking good riddance—but what’s it good for?

  “You, Nivi, are never in one place for long. Neither in your present, nor in the past, nor in the future. Why? Well, it’s because you’re living on love and fresh water. I’m exaggerating—you’re not averse to champagne. You’re in love but not stationary, you ‘travel yourself,’ as you yourself put it. You espouse the presents of those whom you desire, of those whom you love; you are invested in them; you inhabit them. You are living hic et nunc. All in all, I’m not sure your now is the one I’ve mentioned, that Saint Augustine and Einstein talk about. Your now is not a consciousness, it comes from your love, it is imperious, tyrannical. Porous, definitely. That’s it: you are unique in floating and holding on like that. This is why ILY.”

  Theo always starts out instructing me: “Why? Well, because,” then he flatters me and ends up making fun of me. This is what he wrote me from an observatory someplace in Chile where he is detained by a “fascinating program”—yet another—that prevents him from attending another colloquium, just as fascinating, in Hawaii. So he analyzes me by e-mail, it’s his way of paying attention to me. I read it, I laugh too, and it makes my day.