In the estuary, the river no longer exhibits any of the delicacy of the source. Saving the source, this is my obsession. Saving the source of the river itself, which the source engenders, and which the river swallows by making it grow. We excavate Troy and peel an infinite onion. The great cities of ancient times have not returned to the forests that they cleared away. They will not return to this state. Civilizations, at best, give way to ruins. At worst, to irreversible deserts. I am part of what I have lost.
Sixth Treatise. LOUIS XI AND THE MUSICAL PIGS
The Abbé de Baigné was a musician. King Louis XI enjoyed his cantatas. So he would often have him come to his castle at Plessis. It was during the time of Gaguin’s ministry. The king would hold out his glass. He would ask Robert Gaguin to add to his wine a few drops of blood taken from his youngest subjects. One day, with Gaguin present, as the Abbé de Baigné spoke to the king about the sweetness that he thought unique to music, the sovereign asked him if he would be capable of creating a harmony with pigs.
The Abbé de Baigné thought it over. Then he said:
“Sire, I think that it’s within my power to accomplish what you ask. However, three conditions would have to be met.”
The king haughtily asked what these conditions might be.
“First,” the Abbé responded, “Your Highness must provide me with all the money I might require. Second, I must be given at least one month’s time. Finally, on the appointed day, I must be allowed to conduct the singing.”
The king took the Abbé’s hand and, slapping it, assured him that, if such were the case, he would bet him the sum required to create this harmony of pigs.
The Abbé de Baigné in his turn slapped the open hand that King Louis XI held out before him.
No sooner had he done this than the king of France, who did not want to leave the abbé any time to go back on his word, signaled to his treasurer to count out, without delay, all the gold coins he might want.
The whole court exulted and laughed.
The following day, the whole court, having modified their opinion, whispered that the Abbé de Baigné was mad to have accepted such a risky challenge, that he would bring ruin to his house and ridicule to his name.
As the courtiers’ remarks were reported to him, the Abbé de Baigné shrugged, saying that they lacked imagination, judging that they were wrong to conclude, having considered all the things they did not know how to do, that simply because they did not know how to do them, they were impossible.
The Abbé de Baigné bought thirty-two pigs and fattened them. He selected eight for the tenor voice that were sows; eight boars for the bass voice, which he immediately placed with the tenors so that they would cover them night and day; eight hogs for the alto, eight young boars for the soprano voice, whose genitals he cut himself, with a stone knife, over a small basin.
Then the Abbé de Baigné constructed an instrument that resembled an organ and that had three keyboards. At the end of long copper wires, the Abbé de Baigné attached very sharp iron spikes that, depending on the key that was pressed, would jab the pigs he had chosen, thus creating a veritable polyphony. He tied up the piglets, the sows, the hogs, and the castrated young boars under a tent in the order he desired, in cages made of thick canes, so that they would not have room to move, and in a way that made it impossible not to jab them more or less deeply when pressing the keys.
He performed five or six trials and then, when he considered the harmony to be perfect, he wrote to the king and invited him to hear, in Marmoutier, a concert of porcine music.
The harmony would be played outside, in the courtyard of the abbey founded by Saint Martin.
It was four days before the deadline that had been set by the king.
At that moment, King Louis XI was at Plessis-lès-Tours with his ministers and his court. As he was very eager to hear such a choir of pigs, they all went to the Abbey of Marmoutier, where the Abbé de Baigné had prepared his instrument.
At the sight of the large tent decorated in the royal colors and displayed in the middle of the courtyard, and considering the strange organ with pedals and, adjoining it, a double keyboard for the hands, everyone was astonished, since they were not able to figure out the instrument’s design, how it might work, nor where the pigs were.
The court stopped a few meters away, where the Abbé de Baigné had built tiers of seats, in front of which had been placed a golden chair for the king.
Suddenly the sovereign told the abbé to begin. The abbé then stood in front of the keyboard and started pressing the keys with his feet and his fingers, as one does when playing a water organ, and one after another, the pigs started squealing in the order they were jabbed, and sometimes even all together, whenever the abbé pressed all the keys simultaneously. The result was an unknown, truly harmonious, that is polyphonic, music, which was very pleasant and varied to the ear, for the Abbé de Baigné, who was an excellent musician, having begun with a canon, continued with two quite beautiful ricercars, and finished with three motets that he had magnificently composed himself and that His Majesty enjoyed very much.
Not satisfied with hearing this music once, King Louis XI wanted the Abbé de Baigné to perform the entire thing a second time.
Following this reprise, whose harmonies were completely identical to the first performance, the lords and all the other members of the court turned toward the king, believing that the Abbé de Baigné had fulfilled his promise, and began to shower the abbé with praise. A Scottish nobleman staying at the court of the French king murmured: “Cauld Airn!” and grabbed the hilt of his sword as he pronounced these words. Before coming to a decision, King Louis XI, who was by nature mistrustful, wanted to verify that he had not been tricked and that the pigs were in fact pigs. He asked for one side of the tent to be lifted in order to see. And when he saw how the gray pigs and the boars had been tied up, how the copper wires had been arranged, with their iron spikes as sharp as a cobbler’s needles, he declared that the Abbé de Baigné was a remarkable and very inventive man, beyond merely a formidable champion in the challenges he accepted.
The king said that he would leave him, as promised, the sum that had been spent by the royal treasury to buy the pigs and erect the tent, the organ, and the seats. The Abbé de Baigné first knelt and thanked him then, lifting his head, murmured:
“Sire, I taught pigs to say A.B. in twenty-four days. In thirty-four years I have not succeeded in teaching it to kings.”
King Louis XI, understanding that he wanted to be abbé not only in name, but also by effectively possessing his own abbey, offered him a convent that happened to be vacant at the time, with all the benefits attached to it. The sovereign liked this answer so much that he would sometimes quote it, not because of its boldness, for this was evidenced by the invention of a pig organ, but because it was apropos.
Before leaving the Abbey of Marmoutier, King Louis XI received the town. The king was seated in the chair covered in gold leaf that the Abbé de Baigné had prepared for him. He declared before all the nobility, all the different bodies of the town and the people:
“Long ago, Queen Pasiphaë asked Daedalus the engineer to build a large hollow cow out of wood and to cover it in hides. She undressed and climbed inside the cow in order to lure the bull’s desire and to receive his seed. The Trojans also had a big wooden horse. The Jews had both a scapegoat for the desert sands and molten calves for the tents of their camp. On the shores of the sea, in the city of Carthage, the god Baal’s bronze hands, tilted toward the blaze, were the slide of up to two hundred children. King Phalaris, for his part, had a bull made of bronze, equipped with quite ingenious trumpets: when he placed young men to burn in its bronze belly, through the intermediary of the trumpets, their cries of pain would be transformed into harmony. The bull would little by little cease its lowing when the adolescents the tyrant had put to roast turned to ashes. The bull suddenly fell silent when they had faded into memories. I have received my organ, in which wild boars sing like memories of children. What Daedalus was to King Minos, Monsieur l’Abbé de Baigné has been to me. In the land of the Gerasenes, Our Lord Jesus forced the impure name of the demons into pigs. I have brought music out of them.”