He is thirty-one. Imagine beneath his wide forehead a round face with blue eyes, a strong nose, thick lower lip; now place this very blond, curly head on a slender, wiry but energetic body; then remove from his pockets two long hands, delicate and ligneous with knuckles that protrude like the knots on a wild cherry tree; dress him in a new black velvet pourpoint and a jabot of sparkling lace, or a smithy’s apron, or a palm-leaf loincloth, enough, leave him be, Nicolas Appert is at thirty-one a small, restless, and efficient man, always on the go, and passionate about preserving perishable goods. He also becomes enamored of his cousin, Marie Bonvallet, and then comes the breakup. His secret affair with the countess of Gandilhon is the talk of the town, and then another breakup. Let’s not dwell on that. In 1796, it’s Napoléon Bonaparte’s Italian campaign, and Appert, preoccupied with the problem of getting food supplies to the troops, gives up his business. He continues his research in Ivry-sur-Seine, where he is appointed municipal officer on 7 Messidor year III and here he meets his future wife, Cécilia Lance, whom he weds when the time comes, but who dies shortly afterward in childbirth. We are now in 1804. He buys four hectares of land, which he uses for growing the peas and beans he needs for his experiments. Built on this same site, his factory employs up to thirty women, who are supervised by the faithful Jacotte, who will also be the discreet mother of his six (or seven?) natural children. Five years later, with his preservation process perfected, Mssrs. Parmentier, Bouriat, and Guyton de Morveau, having tested it, respectfully take their hats off to him. The newspaper Le Courrier de l’Europe, dated February 10, 1809, pays tribute to the event: “Mr. Appert has discovered the art of stopping the seasons: he has managed to bottle spring, summer, and autumn, like those delicate plants the gardener protects against inclement weather and parasitic insects beneath a glass dome.” The following year, he receives an award from the government in the amount of twelve thousand francs and publishes a soon-to-be-famous manual, The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years. But he breaks up with the countess of Herculais — she is capricious, impulsive, the relationship could not last.
In London in 1814, Appert meets the engineer James Watt, who teaches him about the advantages of steam over all other forms of energy. Incidentally, his affair with Susan Price runs out of the same and he returns to France, where a disagreeable surprise awaits him: the Restoration government has superstitiously turned his preserves factory into a hospital. Nicolas moves to Paris and gets back to work, despite growing financial difficulties. His affair with Jeanne Le Guillou dates from this period, as do the success of his research on the extraction of gelatin from bones, his first attempts at replacing too fragile glass jars by metal cans, and his breakup with the aforementioned Jeanne Le Guillou. In 1822 he is finally recognized officially: the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry awards him the title of Benefactor of Humanity, despite the efforts of the countess of Herculais, who tries in vain to have him banished to French Guiana. From that point on, Appert receives a small pension from the State. He diversifies his research and becomes interested in the extraction of oil from ox hooves, as if he hadn’t already done enough for mankind. In 1831, with his bouillon cube concentrate, he modestly puts the finishing touches on his life’s work — who is the man who would not want to bring to a close his persistent, patient, painstaking life by summarizing it in such an obvious and enduringly efficient turn of phrase? And yet he will live another ten years, miserable, abandoned, in the sole company of his old servant Jacotte, who is still blindly devoted to him but has also gone deaf and is almost totally crippled. Appert dies on June 1, 1841; let us transport ourselves to the age of Louis-Philippe. His body is tossed into the communal grave with three other private individuals, and the question must be asked: have I managed to resuscitate the right one? How can we be sure?
IUSE UP my pencils from both ends, which goes to show I’m burning up my life with such impatience, such ardor, such mad generosity, I’m alive, and how the blood boils in my veins! — you, poor larvae, are quite at liberty to wait till the end of time to be born. As for me, I am at every moment moving and fighting, as I have done since my most tender youth, always running through the woods, a real tomboy, or counting the sheep in the fields, a proven method for helping you fall asleep; however, we were talking, on the contrary, about my stupefying energy and indefatigable drive, and it’s true, because I’m using up my pencils from both ends as I write, in the heat of the action, having sucked, nibbled, and chewed on them so much as I stand and gape that I now have at my disposable seven paintbrushes similar to those shafts that were sucked, nibbled, and chewed by the Magdalenian artists, which will do perfectly.
And why, might I ask, is it possible to place whatever you want on a table, everything and anything apart from another table, whereas absolutely nothing seems in a better position to support a table than another table, neither a couch nor a chair, and certainly not a shelf, just try it, a curtain rod even less so, and don’t even mention a street lamp, to the point where I wonder if the second table was not made by the inventor of the first who didn’t know where to put his cumbersome invention, with the sole aim of placing the latter on the former and thereby solving his problem, at least in part, since a third table was then necessary and, for these three stacked tables that he didn’t know where to put, he built a fourth that he placed on a fifth, whence no doubt their rapid and inexorable multiplication and today the incalculable number (thank goodness, for the sum would be frightening) of tables throughout the world — by hoisting myself up on the small kitchen table placed atop the big living room table, I need only stretch my arm to reach the ceiling, because I have decided to begin with the living room ceiling. Why? Because it offers the vastest surfaces in the house on which to paint and I’ve already cleverly solved the problem of scaffolding by setting the big table on the small kitchen table, thanks to which I simply need to stretch my arm to reach it. Besides, what’s the difference, the living room ceiling or another ceiling, you have to start somewhere, here or there, or over there. I could have chosen a wall, but then why one wall and not another rather than a ceiling, why not the living room ceiling, I preferred to put a stop to all that pointless shilly-shallying that accompanies scruples, clumsy justifications, and turns into regrets as soon as it is overcome; in the end the rejected option seems preferable to us, so that the work in progress is botched in the rush to finally tackle the part with which we are obsessed and that we will try to finish even more quickly in order to get back to the previous part that was ruined in our ridiculous haste, leaving us bitter and unsatisfied. It’s best then to do as I do and resolutely stick to the first decision: I’ll start by painting the living room ceiling, then the other ceilings and all the walls, all the nooks and crannies, these crannies with particular care, they are never so narrow that one cannot work on all eights spilling one’s guts, I would not be the first to do so.