We are getting to the point of his visit. They are trying to find a replacement for me. They no longer listen to me on high. They’ve stopped believing in me. I’ve lost their trust. I’ve abused it. I don’t respect my commitments. I never keep my promises. I am definitely not the man for the job. Glatt has come round to their opinion. This time, he won’t defend me. I protest. I refute the accusations. Lies, loathsome lies. My words and actions have been in perfect accord since the start, in such harmony that you cannot tell one from the other. I would not, for example, be able to lift my little finger — and nothing is lighter than a little finger — if I didn’t say I was lifting my little finger, and no sooner said than done, said and done, said, done, said therefore done, let me prove it: if I say slap, Glatt reels, if I repeat slap, he strokes his cheek, slap, slap, he moans pitifully, slap, and his ear bleeds, slap, slap, slap, his big head bobs, did I happen to mention my silver signet ring, now that’s done, it’s been said, and his lip swells, a tooth pops out, slap, slap, both his eyes close, slap, slap, he begs for mercy, slap, slap, slap, here, let me walk you to your car. That’ll teach him. All it took was one word from me to get rid of him, permanently.
I yank out the doorbell wires as well. We shall no longer be interrupted. Everything starts with a little basic do-it-yourself work, a few very simple gestures on which the rest of the enterprise will depend; this is why I don’t want to neglect a single one (by now my methods are known); first, clean the fragments of moss- or dirt-encrusted rock with a knife, strip them and then I run them briefly under water to remove the remaining impurities, the sand and pollen dust coating them; I dry them on my jacket, then reduce them to a powder, the most friable I pound in the mortar with a flint, the hardest among them are ground on a flat rock, the millstone crushes them. Then, holding my breath, I pour the pigments according to kind and color into coffee bowls that were meant to be sold to the cave’s visitors as souvenirs so they are decorated with an anthropomorphized bison standing in front of an easel holding in its left paw a palette and in its right the tip of its tail with which it is painting — the drawing’s comic effect, nonexistent at first, I grant you, stems in fact from repetition: one morning, several days after you’ve acquired the bowl and have been drinking from it breakfast after breakfast, as you are bringing it to your lips, you will be overcome by an uncontrollable fit of laughter. But Boborikine’s desperate sales pitch fooled no one. In the end he put these ridiculous bowls in the junk room, stacked against the back wall, one nested in the other. I carried a dozen or so down to the cellar for my preparations because the earthenware the Magdalenians used did not reach us, or rather, it did, but in such a state, pulverized, containers reduced to their contents without loss of matter — and this, might I add in passing, is how we recognize perfect forms.
Not so fast. Sometimes the sheen of its outer beauty can compensate for an object’s compositional defect: the primitive pine picket fencepost also exists in Panama rosewood. But the underlying lie achieves the status of truth in the eyes of the naïve with, as a result, serious, long-lasting errors in judgment of which I shall broach only one here, a direct consequence of this disjunction: the titmouse is a female rodent. Whereas the Magdalenians’ simple terra-cotta bowls did not lie about their contents and differed from them only as a result of a circumstantial rigidity always about to fall to pieces, which indeed happened, as I said. My twelve bowls are now filled with powder. I’m talking, talking, but I am not all talk, I’m action too, the more I talk the more active I am. Our best guess is that the Pales painters thickened their colored pigments with animal fat; these same sacrificed animals became the immortal heroes of the wall compositions: reindeer or bison in aspic, seared in their juices, the flow of waters rich in calcium salts a final fixative for the figures. True, I hardly have time to devote to the hunt, but my own body as deep as a well will provide me with everything I need, an abundance of two other proven binders — neither my fat, which I could not, in all practicality, give up, nor my blood, already rare and in fact it can only coagulate itself and cracks as it dries. No, I shall use saliva and urine, the most efficient of binders as everything proves, to quote only the factual statements that come out of my mouth (the more I talk, the more active I am) and the sublime adamantine concretions that form on the slate slabs of those public lavatories in which men on the go have been relieving themselves for generations, relentlessly, each one modestly adding his little precious stone to the edifice that grows and grows and will defy time. In this way, the demands of nature that afflict and humiliate us will at long last contribute to our greatest glory. Case in point: Leonardo da Vinci himself was not loath to mix his urine with his color preparations in order to fix for eternity certain fleeting smiles. That’s the solution. No more hesitating. I’ll pee in the bowls. From century to century, while all the trades overhaul themselves and ditch their old practices for new technologies, the imperturbable artist sticks to the two or three actions that matter.
THE SUN is a giant spider that squeezes a lemon then swallows an airplane. The sea is a wall that the fish swim along or hug, some flaunt themselves, a boat drifts by. Elsewhere a sail is a pyramid wearing a palm tree for a hat, a palm tree that would be the schoolmarm in her smock. The chimney on the roof of the house would not fit through the door, black smoke belches from it, someone must be burning a tire in the hearth. The path winding through the patch of garden places the house it leads to a three-day walk from the street. A cow gnaws a ski in front of its nest box. The next-door neighbor mows his lawn with a baby stroller. Every tree bears its fruit, each color produces its plum, the apples would have an adorable little smile and would not cost more — and here the soft lead slips and breaks, pierces the paper, I’m pushing too hard, squeezing the pencil in my fist like a fork, but that’s not how one holds one’s fork either they tell me; I used to draw a lot back then and I painted on large sheets of paper with water of every color. Then again, at such a young age, coloring books already bored me to death, and I soon went over the edge: filling in the empty shapes, reddening the squirrel along with the leaves, spending my days under Snow White’s skirts like the least of her dwarves, no way, I had better things to do, more ambitious projects that I began to carry out immediately.
My entire oeuvre has vanished. And the child I was has already been swallowed by oblivion, total oblivion, without the least hope of a triumphant future rehabilitation, and even its tender shattered skeleton, decomposed, will never be reconstituted. Perhaps my old fractured femur will be exhumed. Posterity does surprising things. But what remains of a man whose work has come down to us? What living memory? What margin of freedom to advance or retreat, what capacity to react to or resist the official biographical fiction that slowly replaces the simple truth of the facts? We’ll soon see. Let’s go back to 1749. Louis XV has been reigning in his own right for six years when Marie Appert, née Huet, gives birth to her fourth and last son, Nicolas, on November 17 in Châlons-sur-Marne, as we can see on the baptismal certificate lovingly preserved by the Archives of the Department of the Marne: “In the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred forty nine, on the seventeenth of November, I, priest of this parish, baptized a son, born this day of the legitimate marriage of Claude Appert, innkeeper of the White Horse, and Marie Huet, to whom was given the name of Nicolas.” The child is lively, joyful, and his inventive mind can already be seen in the innocent games of youth: exposed to a temperature of 327 degrees centigrade, his friends’ lead soldiers are reduced to mush, victory! — eliciting the apprehensive admiration of his parents and teachers. Claude’s strictness, in effect, does not keep him from acknowledging his son’s merits, and Marie’s preference for her little last born is so obvious that his three brothers need no longer appear here. Nicolas’s love for this adoring and gentle mother would never flag. At the White Horse Inn at first, and then in the twenty-room Hôtel du Palais Royal, life is comfortable and there young Nicolas successively learns the trade of distiller and confectioner, in Châlons in 1770, then in Paris in 1780, after eight years spent in the service of the taste buds of the Duc des Deux-Ponts, Christian IV, then the Princess of Forbach, who it is supposed was not entirely insensitive to the hopeless love of this sweet, clumsy, and attentive boy because she became his mistress, and even almost axed to death Jacotte, a twenty-year-old fresh-faced, plump scullery maid whom she came upon in her lover’s arms. He was fired forthwith, after which he opened his confectioner’s business in Paris on the rue des Lombards.