There was much to solicit tenderness.
Because he was hardly out from under his mother’s skirts — if at all. He was still permeated with them, with their softness, their fabric: as if woven from the stitches of her skirts. They gave him coherence, will and certainty, a taste for women and for himself, they made him this fair, dreamy body that we see on the ceiling in the figure of the page, and which certainly is a type derived from Veronese, not a portrait, not his portrait, but which I am sure he resembled just the same. He is at the height of happiness, up there, on the unchanging ceiling: he is in his mother’s skirts. He lowers his head. And of course it is not the ground he is looking at, but tumbling at his feet the three lengths of Beatrice of Burgundy’s skirts, the Tiepolonian torrent, the train of broken, swollen blue, alive like blue flesh, the flesh of ice, a great fish, the passing of an angel, a magic mirror. Yes, he was made of the weave of those skirts; and when it began to unravel, everything followed, beauty, will, and confidence, the taste for women, this world: he became the other, the twin brother of Simon the cobbler.
For men unravel too: and if men were made of cloth that did not unravel, we could not tell stories, could we?
Alright, I can see that despite my impatience to jump to the end, to begin with the ending, to let this story of The Eleven stand solely on the indubitable existence of The Eleven, I can see that before coming to the point, I, too, am going to have to summarize that story so often told — since it concerns the very man of whom I speak.
II
We know he was born in Combleux in 1730.
It is just upriver from Orléans with its visible church towers, and it bathes gently on both branches of the Loire. Overhead of course are those French Poussinian skies, which he rarely painted, and from one steeple to the next following the levee the length of the river, those islands, willows, rushes where as a child, one would have loved to hide, and the sudden flights of birds. The Loire carried boats at that time: and it is because of the boats, and what carried them, that the creator of The Eleven was born on the shores of the Loire. His maternal grandfather, a Huguenot of little faith returned to the Roman fold with the Revocation, newly converted as they said, was one of those excavation and construction contractors who, with nothing up their sleeves but the Limousin battalions whose status and salary about matched those of American slaves, made their fortunes on the great river and canal works, under Colbert and Louvois. From those great works, from those Limousin battalions, from those few men with large appetites and iron fists who pulled the Limousin battalions from their sleeves and tossed them on the muddy Loire earth, among the reeds and flights of herons, grew those towns that hold the bridges, the locks, the dead of the Loire all along the Orléans-to-Montargis canal, and that bear the old names of Faye-aux-Loges, Chécy, Saint-Jean-le-Blanc, Combleux. And that was how the grandfather grew rich on the water, at a time when his fellow believers were on the water as well, but in the king’s galleys, not profiting in any way: he earned the grand title of Engineer of the Dikes and Levees of the Loire, created by Colbert. Thus the engineer, who had made his fortune here and perhaps was sentimental, who in any case was getting too old to control his Limousin crew with an iron hand, the grandfather took a house and wife here, at the end of the canal that he had made, with much straining of Percherons and miserable Limousins, actually that Monsieur de Louvois had made, but to which he had contributed, on the last great lock, here in Combleux.