Prehistoric Times (13 page)

T
HE 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.

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?

I
USE 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.

It’s an ambitious project, chimerical perhaps, but I feel a nebulous need to carry it out for myself and my fellow creatures. This new activity will allow us to convey our difference, at last we will dare to assert our specificity among all the living species, we will fight resourcefully against our inferior, humiliating condition, to which our lack of instinct and our constitutional weakness has condemned us. We too will have our exclusive characteristics, our originality, our rites, our mating dances, our pavanes, our reference points in time and space; we will stop defining ourselves by our shortcomings and our infirmities. We will cease to be vague. We will take shape. The human being will be recognized, acknowledged, identifiable, irreducible. Not too fast though, we’re coming from very far. I shall begin by painting those animals whose self-assurance we envy and fear: reindeer, bison, horses, mammoths, all the large mammals that live in the Pales valley and that help us explore it little by little (the bison will lead us to the river, from which we will drink when thirsty). Later, perhaps we might hazard representing gods as well, and the great tradition of animal art will find itself enriched with a new gallery of zoomorphic profiles – how else, in fact, to imagine the venerable gods?

Will man one day use himself as a model and subject for his painting? I doubt he will ever be so presumptuous or have such a high opinion of himself as to deem himself worthy. And besides, for whom would these images be destined? His peers? What would be the point? The portrait of a man would only be of interest to an intelligent, sensitive living being, who would not be a man. Man will only ever address himself to man, in a closed circuit, man finishes in man. Let us add that the permanence of his fictive identity relies on a conscious effort that must not slacken at any cost, nothing objectively establishes it, it will remain fragile and contestable until the end. Accordingly,
a child raised by wolves becomes a wolf, a real wolf, no less wolf than any other wolf, and no better, whereas a wolf raised among men will devour father and mother before being put down by a policeman – and madness destroys one human brain per second: the entire species could experience such a fate and return to the original chaos, from the heart of which, however, after many, many misadventures, the upright and aleatory, but more or less credible, figure painfully emerged, representing us from then on and whose likeness it would certainly be disastrous to multiply to infinity, for it is true that my mere reflection in the water is enough to make me question my existence, and the water’s.

Besides, I’ve cut off the water at the source, I’ve bled the main pipes and turned off the faucets. No point in leaving these pipes in the walls, I’ll yank them out as well. Such a complex installation – with its reservoirs and water tanks, and its many welded and angled pipes that join up and branch off, their meanderings through hot and cold, their lukewarm embraces, their brackish streams of copper and lead, a distribution system precarious despite its apparent rigidity and that tries to accompany the uncontrollable flow of fluids – would be a permanent threat to the frescoes. Not to mention the very real risks of leaks or floods, humidity cannot be walled in, it always oozes a little, we’ve seen it in the cellar, it rots the cement, it dissolves the plaster, my paintings would suffer. And the humidity would also damage them by accelerating the natural processes of the mircromodification of the pigments and ultimately would destroy them: the smudged colors will deform the figures such that they will become incomprehensible at first, then indiscernible, impossible to find, improbable, and, if you look closely, unimaginable.
Why hasten the catastrophe? A few simple precautions will guarantee my paintings an afterlife of forty or fifty thousand years, beyond which I have no ambition. I cut off the electricity. I boarded up all the windows. This way, the germs from the cyanophyceae, moss, and lichen will not receive enough light to thrive. I’ll work by candlelight. Nevertheless, I will have other things to fear. Bats, for example, will certainly be attracted by the cool, dark calm of the place. Taking advantage of my absences, vandals will break in and carve vulgar and anachronistic graffiti on my paintings. I cannot accept this depredation, this malevolence. Believe me when I say I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to close up the house for good, with me in it, block all the exits and bar the door.