The following morning, well before dawn breaks, she has her carriage prepared. She leaves Meudon. She crosses the Pont de Sèvres. She follows the fields and the quays. She arrives in the old city. The Marquise’s first impression is one of stupor. The squares are stripped of their statues. The capital’s appearance has been impoverished by the civil war. Many buildings she once knew are destroyed. The buildings and gardens of the religious communities have been devastated. The houses that remain standing, because their maintenance has been so neglected, are in a state of decrepitude and repulsive filth.
The gardens open to the public on the right bank have been abandoned.
The sky is white and a completely white, silent light rain, almost Norman in nature, veils her gaze. Her carriage follows the paved road running along the Seine. The Marquise suddenly feels like a stranger. It even seems to her that she is a soul discovering the other world. The two banks of the river turn her stomach because of the distress of the men huddled together and the nakedness of the skinny and pallid children playing there.
At the edge of the quay, she sees five words engraved with a knife and highlighted in charcoaclass="underline" La liberté ou la mort.1 Suddenly she remembers that she once knew a man who had made this maxim the secret of his life.
Her heart hurts.
She asks her driver to stop.
The Marquise has stepped down from her carriage under the light rain. She holds her hand over her heart. As the quay is slippery under her feet, she approaches the inscription with difficulty. Next to her a merchant silently continues to display, in spite of the rain, his books on his trestle. She has taken a volume in her hands — which she wipes with her glove without thinking. It so happens that the coat of arms that figures on the binding is Danceny’s. She shivers. She picks up another: this one belonged to a man she had met at court and with whom she had shared pleasures. The merchant presses her to name a price. Annoyed by his request, she impatiently leaves the books on the trestle.
She says to herself: “If I continue searching through the stall, I will find a book with Valmont’s coat of arms.”
She does not utter the name but, suddenly, her legs give out from under her.
She grabs onto the stone edge of the quay. A haze covers her eyes.
She slowly begins to breathe again.
She opens her eyes. Below, on the strand, she sees a man fishing who suddenly hooks a fish. She quickly turns away. A tear rolls down her cheek. She involuntarily rubs her soiled glove. She tries to climb into her carriage but cannot do so alone.
The driver gets down from his bench and approaches her. The Marquise is breathless. She whispers to her driver:
“Lend me your arm. Help me. We’re not going to the Industrial Fair. We’re going back to Jargeau … We’re going back to Jargeau …”
She repeats softly: “To Jargeau! To Jargeau!” as if she were begging her own servant.
To the driver, she said softly: “To Jargeau! To Jargeau!”
In Jargeau, it is the end of summer. The weather is gorgeous and heavy. The slowness of the Loire attracts her.
In the evening, on the hot, soft, yellow sand that borders the immense river, she has a folding chair brought to the riverbank, a carafe of cool water, a landing net, a straw hat veiled in yellow Holland gauze. Madame de Merteuil takes pleasure in sitting on her chair and holding between her fingers a cane at the end of which a line is tied. She throws the bait. A hum resurges. She hums Joy. She hums Oh Solitude! She takes from the water small gudgeons as long as a finger.
TRANSLATORS’ AFTERWORD
In 1994, Pascal Quignard, who had just begun to enjoy considerable popular success as a novelist after having previously published numerous quite esoteric essays and fragmentary texts, abruptly decided to renounce all of his professional activities: he stepped down as secretary general of literature at the illustrious Gallimard publishing house; he canceled the annual International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theater at Versailles that he had founded only four years earlier under the aegis of François Mitterrand; he completely distanced himself from the Concert des nations, which he had directed with Jordi Savall since 1990. He would no longer decide which authors to publish; he would no longer choose which songs to play, which forgotten masterpieces to unearth. He would do nothing but write. The Hatred of Music, published two years later, is a book that resulted from this rupture, but the title must not be misinterpreted. Quignard hints at the genealogy of the project in the following succinct formulation: “The expression Hatred of Music is meant to convey to what point music can become an object of hatred to someone who once adored it beyond measure.”1 The ten treatises that make up the book do not add up to an outright rejection of music. Instead, through an impressive wealth of references, the author presents an indictment of its inherent dangers that is all the more relevant given the fact that never before in history has music enjoyed such a ubiquitous presence in daily life. “Suddenly infinitely amplified by the invention of electricity and the multiplication of its technology,” he writes, “it has become incessant, aggressing night and day, in the commercial streets of city centers, in shopping centers, in arcades, in department stores, in bookstores, in lobbies of foreign banks where one goes to withdraw money, even in swimming pools, even at the beach, in private apartments, in restaurants, in taxis, in the metro, in airports.”2 Yet the omnipresence of music might not have troubled our existence to the extent that it does had it not also been for its latent powers of mesmerization and domestication. Music, so Quignard argues, unconsciously binds us to the social group, makes us dependent upon it, and thus embodies the same forces of which he had just sought to make himself independent. It represents the greatest threat to the successful continuation of his new anachoretic existence, dedicated exclusively to the solitude of writing.
In a text contemporaneous with The Hatred of Music, Quignard situates his work in a tradition he labels speculative rhetoric. “I call speculative rhetoric,” Quignard writes in the opening of this text, “the scholarly antiphilosophical tradition that traverses all of Western history since the invention of philosophy.”3 To state things somewhat too simply, this tradition attempts neither to resolve language’s violent oppositions into any sort of ideal, as speculative idealism had sought to do, nor to go toward things themselves, through the phenomenological process known as epoché, but declares rather that before the ideal can be speculated, before things themselves exist, they are already caught up in a linguistic mesh. Every statement that seeks to go beyond language is itself principally nothing but language. Instead of trying to undo the bonds of logos—archaically meaning “gathering, collection”—instead of analyzing, or “unloosening,” in the manner of philosophers, speculative rhetoric seeks to play with these bonds, to shift them around, and even to create new ones. Rhetoric, for Quignard, is not primarily a stylistic or argumentative art. It is rather the exploration of our inherent linguistic condition. “Language is in itself the investigation.”4 This does not mean, however, that Quignard’s interest lies in language alone. Time and again in his writings he returns to what might be called paralinguistic states, in which the mouth opens to produce nothing but silence, or to emit sounds with no immediately apparent meaning or whose meaning has been replaced by rapture. Music is one of these states.