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I was thirteen when my relatives adopted me. My uncle thought it was necessary I be given a tutor, and I had a series of three, all chosen from among his and my aunt’s acquaintances. They used to have a good many visitors at their summer home. This or that guest would suddenly be declared responsible for my education; a few months later, sometimes a few weeks later, he would disappear.

It is true enough that Aunt Roberte had aroused a storm of emotions in me. But my uncle, having correctly guessed what the matter was, took perfidious advantage of it in order to contemplate his own perversity at work in me. As with most boys at that age, my passion strove along thoroughly platonic lines. My uncle managed to transform it into a perfect nest of vipers, I don’t know how else to describe the awful tangle of carnal and spiritual desires which the mental torture he inflicted upon me shortly had seething inside my breast. But that part of the story seems to me of only limited interest; on the other hand, since the professor’s behavior demonstrates into what kind of pitfall language can lure even the most lucid intelligence, I have thought it was worthwhile to note certain of his digressions and to reproduce them in the context of this extraordinary experience of my student years.

Difficulties

When my Uncle Octave took my Aunt Roberte in his arms, one must not suppose that in taking her he was alone. An invited guest would enter while Roberte, entirely given over to my uncle’s presence, was not expecting him, and while she was in fear lest the guest arrive—for with irresistible resolution Roberte awaited the arrival of some guest—the guest would already be looming up behind her as my uncle made his entry just in time to surprise my aunt’s satisfied fright as being surprised by the guest. But in my uncle’s mind it was all over and done with in the twinkling of an eye, and once again my uncle would be on the point of taking my aunt in his arms. It would be over in the twinkling of an eye . . . for, after all, one cannot at the same time take and not take, be there and not be there, enter a room when one is already in it. My Uncle Octave would have been asking too much had he wished to prolong the instant of the opened door, he was already doing exceedingly well in getting the guest to appear in the doorway at the precise moment he did, getting the guest to loom up behind Roberte so that he, Octave, might be able to sense that he himself was the guest as, borrowing from the guest his door-opening gesture, he could behold them from the threshold and have the impression it was he, Octave, who was taking my aunt by surprise.

Nothing could give a better idea of my uncle’s mentality than these hand-written pages he had framed under glass and then hung on the wall of the guest room, just above the bed, a spray of fading wildflowers drooping over the old-fashioned frame.




The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes


February, 1954

Here I am, coming back to the dear old habit, contracted in childhood, of keeping a “free inquiry” notebook: those images of ten years ago are as strong as ever. Far from attenuating them, my married life with Octave only seems to be reviving them. He may take refuge in the confessional; but I, I know that I need no intermediary to make myself heard by you, O Master who were even loath to be called Good Master. What were those words of yours, that God alone is good? Were they to teach us to beware of goodness, of justice, and of truth, even if that means living . . . as idol-worshipers? Rather was it not to exhort us to dispense with any god in order to live good, just, and truthful lives? O Thou, disdainful of any idol, even to the point of liberating me from the one they have sought to make of Thee would it be that Thou were putting us on our guard against an immutable goodness and justice and truth, the worst of all idolatries? And seeing as how none of the three can be separated from a god, does it not behoove us ever to search within ourselves for that which is good, just, and true? Thou whose death finally authorizes everyone to say: I am the truth, Thou whose crucifixion served to sanction the holocaust of new victims, Thou whose cross guarantees the easy conscience of all the overfed and the extraordinary patience of the starving—here receive the fruit of Thy teachings. May I put your sublime saying into practice: Let the dead bury the dead—according to the interpretation I am here attempting to draw from it: Let dread for the past bury dread.
Octave’s Journal

In gestu nonmulli putant idem
vitium inesse, quum aliud voce,
aliud nutu vel manu demonstrator.
—Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (I.v.10)

January, 1954


“Some think there is solecism in gesture too, whenever by a nod of the head or a movement of the hand one utters the opposite of what the voice is saying.” This passage from Quintilian, quoted at the head of the descriptive catalogue to my collection of paintings—to what does it allude? To what I presume to be the motif of more than one of the unknown master’s pictures my collection includes.

At the outset one is rather hard put to make out the relationship established between gesture and speech; here are certain gestures being made by the various figures represented, and that seems to be all. To what words do these gestures relate? Probably to those the painter supposes said by his personages, no less than to those the viewer may be saying as he contemplates the scene. But if solecism there be, if it is something opposite which the figures utter through this or that gesture, they must say something in order that this opposition be palpable, but painted, they are silent; does the spectator speak in their behalf, in such a way as to sense the opposite of the gesture he sees them performing? There still remains the question of whether, having painted such gestures, the artist wished to avoid our solecism, or whether from painting the kind of scenes he chose, he was, to the contrary, trying to demonstrate the positiveness of the solecism which could be expressed only through means of an image.

The type of woman our artist seems to have a particular affection for is that belonging to the latter half of the last century. Nothing surprising there: he was a little over thirty at the time of the Commune. “Affection” would here designate the feeling in the sole lover of his work, myself —though a man in his sixties—moved at seeing survive, thanks to his indiscreet brush, that race of Second Empire beauties whose prototype was incarnated by our Empress Eugenie (cf. Winterhalter) or represented by the early Monet’s tall “Dame,” or better still by the “Demoiselles de la Seine” or Courber whom Tonnerre had joined in Geneva. Beauties of this species seem today to have been totally supplanted by the industrialized pin-up, the starlet sort, but here and there you see it crop up again, re-emerging from certain levels of society-O the fertile breeding grounds of High Protestant Society!—and it has already begun to exert its attraction upon the younger generation. One has simply to observe what is going on in my own house: Roberte, my young infidel of a wife, ruining our young nephew Antoine’s peace of mind . . . Unless I am much mistaken, they’ll soon have had enough of their ideal, the “exotic” woman—to the devil with those beaches, those palm-tree “island paradises,” hideous Gauguin, a curse on their Fruits of the Earth!—there will again be a sense for more sober, more reserved in a word more classical physiognomies, for in us Westerners, the incurable heirs of Augustinian Manicheism, attractiveness resides in the austere appearance of the face, dissimulating—it’s this that counts—all the more exuberant charms. (Canon V., my cousin, is perfectly right: he refuses communion to these bare-armed ladies, unless they are gloved to the elbow.) And our artist himself, as we shall see, seems to approve this emblem of dissimulation; the sly creature’s trickery nicely agrees with the imposture of art, and with Tonnerre’s art especially. In the motifs represented in the several pictures I have been able to salvage you recognize a propensity for scenes where the violence is due to a cunning unveiling—not to the unveiled, not to the nudity, but to the unveiling, to what is in itself the least pictorial instant. The eye likes to dwell restfully upon a storyless motif, and our artist seems to unsettle this repose of the gaze by suggesting to the mind what the painting hides. But as he is no less a thorough expert upon the space in which the object of his emotion is situated as volume, this suggestive vision comes from his skill at suspended gesture—one is almost prepared to believe he did his paintings after tableaux vivants. Indeed though the tableau vivant. genre is but one manner of rendering the spectacle life offers itself, what does this spectacle show is not life reiterating itself in an attempt to right itself in the midst of its fall, as if holding its breath in a momentary apprehension of its origins; but reiteration of life by life would be hopeless without the simulacrum produced by the artist who, from reproducing this spectacle, manages to rescue himself from reiteration: such was, morally speaking, Flaubert’s effort in his Sentimental Education.

To talk about the living picture in connection with painted pictures—it sounds like tautology. Isn’t there always some preliminary tableau vivant, the basic antecedent to every picture? Yes and no. In the artist’s mind the motif first passes through tableau vivant before getting on canvas. Here, in the case of Tonnerre, I am referring to the fascination exerted upon him by this in itself false genre, very much in fashion during the period. It was this reverse process that took place then; one generally drew one’s inspiration from some well-known painting standing clear in everybody’s mind, to reconstitute it, usually in a salon, with the help of those persons present, improvised actors, and the game consisted in rendering as faithfully as possible the gestures, the poses, the lighting, the effect one supposed produced by the masterpiece of such and such a painter. But this was not simply life imitating art—it was a pretext. The emotion sought after in this make-believe was that of life giving itself as a spectacle to life; of life hanging in suspense . . .