Françoizélie!
How I would love to really see him and silently absorb myself in what I see, rather than droning on to you with my vague theories. I myself am more boring than all those notes in the antechamber at the Louvre. How I would love to see him there — to see all three of them (as at this moment we are seeing The Eleven), him and the women stopped on the levee, from a little below, as if I were a Limousin below, under a basket of mud, in the mud of the Loire up to my thighs, toiling darkly under the July sun; as a Limousin would look at a painting, assuming Limousins and paintings ever came into contact. And it may be that we are that Limousin, you or me; it may be that a Limousin lifts his head and with his forearm wipes that mixture of sweat and the Loire running into his eyes; that between the foreman’s shouts he takes the time to look up to the blond apparition, the blond hair and blond skirts, the two women leaning over that child powerful as a cardinal-duke; and the little cardinal-duke points at this Limousin who is looking at him. Perhaps the Limousin takes note of that, he is used to it (this simple pointing, as at an animal in a zoo), but his eyes do not rest on François-Élie; this is a Limousin, after all; this is a man who has at his disposal no other duchess than the demijohns of doctored wine, no other vector for his strong will than the switchblades that spring miraculously from the demijohns into his hand, the day of the Lord: he has eyes only for the skirts. And perhaps he swears between his teeth that God is a dog, Diàu ei ùn tchi.
In your mind go down into the mud, Sir. Can you feel it spurt between your toes? Because you do not have your wooden clogs for this work, you left them with the others in a heap on the canal bank, to shoe the herons, in case the herons should need shoes. If we assume that you even have clogs, which is an improbable conjecture, since where you are even clogs are a luxury, a possession. Imagine with all your heart the hope harbored by a life that consists of gathering mud into a basket, emptying that basket into a cart, and beginning over again day after day until dusk that same kind of work, and if you are lucky the prospect of black bread, leaden bread, and then leaden sleep to make it pass; and on Sunday, leaden drunkenness. Also the prospect of working over, in the dark months in the Limousin, something called a wife out of politeness, but that only evokes a woman after a complicated metaphorical procedure. Are you there? Are you up to your neck in ripe carp? Get to work. Collect the dead earth with the dead fish in it. Eat one if you like, they are for you, for the gulls and the crows. Eat it. Now, lift your head. See two steps above you the gold dress, and above the dress a gaze resting upon you. And under the gold dress, even more dazzling, see the naked body of the beautiful lady. Do you feel it in your breeches, that immediate emotion, divine, intense, unique? Imagine this, too: although a Limousin, you are twenty years old and beautiful as a god, and in your arms is the vigor that day after day lets you breathe in the ripe carp through clouds of mosquitoes and not die of it, as half of your kind have died, falling from ladders, suffocating in the mud, shaking with fever, any more than you died as a three-year-old child in the well, eight years old under the cart, fifteen years old by the knife, as your ten brothers and sisters died. Feel your vigor, your beauty, your luck you might say. Because this is what is happening: the beautiful lady long without a man is looking at you, in her look the avowal that she feels in her skirts the emotion you feel in your breeches. But suddenly she is looking elsewhere and will not look at you again, because the law is iron and the universal Father is watching, and because God is a dog. And if God is a dog, perhaps you have license to be a dog yourself in his image, to climb up the bank, to toss to the ground and take by force and mate without fuss as dogs do. And the child who is observing you (but you do not have time to notice that), the child who has seen everything, in short, wishes passionately that you would climb up the bank and take advantage of his mother right there under his eyes. And that is what he fears most in the world.
Are you there? Can you really feel the too much of desire and the too little of justice? Are you wearing next to your skin the double mask of love? Are you Sade and Jean-Jacques Rousseau? Good, we can come back to the painting. We can turn once again to The Eleven.
Eleven Limousins, are they not? Eleven Limousins, thickset. Eleven thickset barons risen and watching your mother, young and naked, enter the low hall of the Marquis de Sade’s castle. Eleven little blond boys severing heads, that is, under their mothers’ skirts, slicing away.
II
I
The painting was commissioned in Nivôse — and not in Ventôse, as was said, as continues to be said, because History arranges dates in its own way; because the afterwards is a great lord and has all the rights, His Lordship the Afterwards; because Ventôse was the darkest month in that winter of year II when the factions fell, when the barren Decrees of Ventôse were drawn up and proclaimed, terrible to the suspects, full of compassionate zeal for the unfortunate, making the first despair, giving the second the phantom hope of food and shelter, setting the tone for the Great Terror; because it was also the coldest month, because lurking in the great cold and feeling it at heart Robespierre brought out the knife to shear off right and left, the moderates and the extremists, the beautiful knife named Saint-Just; because the wind in Ventôse resounds more theatrically than the snow lying softly in Nivôse; because there is no snow in the painting, but something like the effect of great wind, although there is no wind either; above all because, as you know, since the Empire, in a bold, romantic confusion, this definitive painting has sometimes been called Le Décret de Ventôse. No, it was earlier. It was commissioned two months before Ventôse, in Nivôse in year II, on the fifteenth or sixteenth of Nivôse, which is about January 5, 1794, erstwhile the Epiphany, Three Kings Day.