When she was ten years old, Imogen had learned from a schoolfriend that during the French Revolution the men who worked the guillotines had worn chain-mail gloves, because the severed heads would try to bite their fingers when lifted out of the basket. Years later, she was still having nightmares in which the biting heads appeared. The heads would roll across the wooden platform, mouthing words that they could not make intelligible.
‘Our desire to consume, to annihilate, to make a bonfire of our resources, and the joy we find in the burning, the fire and the ruin are what seem to us divine.’ So wrote Bataille – pornographer, anthropologist, numismatist, archivist at the Bibliothèque Nationale and, some (eg Antoine Vermeiren) would say, philosopher. ‘Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose,’ he wrote.
He is buried in Vézelay, in Burgundy, where he died on July 8th, 1962, at his house in Rue Saint-Étienne, close to the basilica of Saint Mary Magdalene. As a young man, Bataille considered becoming a priest; for a short time he attended a seminary.
Coming out of a slump, Imogen joked: ‘Everybody, at some time, wants to be dead – but just for a week or two.’
Franck Boudet waited at a distance until the family had left, then approached the grave again. He looked into it, frowning deeply, as if he had happened upon a murdered body in a field. His attire was uncompromising: black suit, black shirt, black tie, black shoes. But he had the appearance of a man who had just stepped off a long-haul flight: the clothes were creased and a shave was needed; it looked as if some sleep would be beneficial too. The hair and forehead put me in mind of images of Benjamin Franklin in his later years, though I doubt that Benjamin Franklin dyed his hair as Franck Boudet dyed his – an unnatural tone of charcoal predominated, with lanes of deep chestnut near the scalp. The belt of his trousers dug a groove into his belly, and the shirt buttons were under some strain. He could have been cast as a rock guitarist who hadn’t yet quit, after four decades in the business. At the graveside he put his hands together and murmured inaudibly, for some time. That done, he looked up, into the branches of the trees, steadying himself with the sight of them. He looked at me, and nodded, as though we had been in attendance together by agreement. We had not yet spoken, but I had intended to speak to him. ‘You are David?’ he said, putting out a hand. Through Imogen, there was a kinship. We walked to the cars. In everything Imogen did, he said, she was a very strong woman. In Maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort she was ‘sublime’, he told me. He stopped and turned to look back, in the direction of the place where Imogen lay. She was ‘very true’, he said, as if seeing her image in the air. ‘There are things that are more important than technique. Imogen was not a technical person. She served the truth,’ he said. He looked at me; the look announced that a moment of significance was imminent; a momentous parting. ‘We knew her,’ he said. ‘Lovers are easy to find, but not friends. For Imogen, we were friends. We know this,’ he said, and he shook my hand martially. ‘We remember her,’ he said, making the words sound like the oath of our two-man sect.
Benoît, I see, is now a professor at the university of Grenoble, specialising in environmental economics. The list of publications is impressive, as is the website photo: a strong-jawed man, with closely cropped dark hair and a trim grey-flecked beard. The eyewear – circular lenses, sturdy metallic frame – is distinctive; this boffin has a sense of style. It is not a casual snapshot – it’s a portrait such as one might see in a publisher’s catalogue. The gaze is percipient; here is a man who sees the big picture.
When he learned what had happened with Imogen, he came to Paris at the first opportunity. Benoît had followed her career with interest, he told her. They talked about Maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort but not about the films she had made with Vermeiren. Benoît looked well – a little heavier, and more expensively dressed. Politicians, journalists and company directors now consulted him for his opinion and analysis. He had achieved a certain position in life, a position of some eminence, influence and reward. As Imogen put it: he was not self-satisfied, exactly, but he struck her as a man who was comfortably clothed in success. He had married an Italian woman, a physicist, and they had two children, of whom a photograph was produced; the beautiful children sat in kayaks, on placid blue water, in front of snow-topped mountains. As soon as Imogen was feeling stronger, said Benoît, she would have to come and stay with them; they had an apartment on Lago d’Iseo. When she showed him the bag and the stoma, he was momentarily at a loss. ‘You will get better,’ he declared. She was to take this as praise for her strength of character. He was invited to the funeral, but was unable to attend. I study the face of Benoît; a different Imogen is remembered by this man; only in his mind does that Imogen exist.
After the first operation: I recall a walk along the river, with little conversation. It was not quite fearfulness that I saw in her gaze, as she looked across the water. It was more, I think, an almost desperate avidity. She stopped at a bridge, and seemed to take in the scene as if every object within it were over-charged with meaning. Elsewhere, she frowned as one would frown at something that might prove to be not as solid as it seems.
I stepped off the train into a crowd, but I saw her immediately, at the end of the platform. She looked weary, but no worse than weary. She put a hand on the knot of her scarf, at her throat; a gesture of self-protection, it seemed. And the way she stood back from the surge of departing passengers suggested a new fragility. Yet the embrace she gave me was strong. The first words she spoke were: ‘Behold the cavalry.’ This was not to be a romantic reunion. I had not been summoned to take the place of the disappointing Loïc, and I had no desire to replace him. This had never been said, but it had been understood. We walked for a while, before taking the Métro. She took my arm; as we waited for the traffic to stop, she pressed her cheek to my shoulder. I was reading when she came in to say goodnight. She showed me where her body had been cut. When I touched the scar, she ruffled my hair and laughed, then whispered: ‘I am bound to thee forever.’
Driving out to the maison de maître, what I had felt, above all, was dread – perhaps, intermittently, a dread akin to what I imagine might be felt before a first sky-dive, as the door opens onto the depths of air. A trial was imminent, from which I might emerge changed in some way. As we drove back into Paris, the city was awakening; we were returning to the familiar world. We had emerged from the underworld, into the light. I kissed, in courtly manner, the back of the hand that she held out. My position might have seemed to be one of servitude, but she had confessed everything to me, knowing that the one who receives the confession has power over the one who confesses. An irreducible intimacy had been established; an absolute friendship. I regarded her with something close to wonder; with an admiration in which there was also an element of fear.
Memory: the background noise of the sensory world, sometimes barely audible, but always there. Making sentences of it, we amplify the signal, introducing distortion.
A list of things seen in a single glance: chestnut trees; a slope of grass; other zones of grass, beyond the trees; several human bodies; starlings; a dog; thin formations of water vapour and crystals of ice, known as cirrus clouds; cars. More than this was seen, much more. I could list what is seen of those bodies, in that single glance: the form, the clothes, the movement. The tumult of things, the irresistible visual deluge, of which the brain makes a scene, in the instant of seeing. One seems to see a picture, an arrangement of objects with names attached: starlings; chestnuts; cirrus clouds. Stopping, I looked. I tried to make no sense of it, to give up, to lose myself in the torrent of the visible. Impossible, for me.