The Devil's Details (6 page)

In any case, a reader expects an article on Abel to raise sensitive theological issues, but most readers will be taken aback to find Bayle assuring them (in the text) that he will “not venture into any Conjectures upon the Question, Whether [Abel] died a
Virgin
.”
¹⁵
And no reader, even if not an adolescent film buff, will pass by the footnote inserted at that place—no more than a viewer of Goddard's
Contempt
would go out for popcorn as Brigitte Bardot appears languid and naked on the screen.
*
The footnote [D] uses up a modest three inches of column to talk about just what the reader has been assured Bayle will avoid; the footnote allows him to have his dignity and his audience-grabber too.
¹⁶

A reader for whom footnote [D] has proved attractive and who has any knowledge of medieval theologians will certainly immediately move on to the next article, the one on Abelard. Peter Abelard's life is an opera with a wonderfully rich, singing,
*
intellectual content and the frisson of his doomed love for Heloise. Who can resist a peek at Bayle's almost cinematic treatment of a monk whose careful reasoning got his “On the Divine Unity and Trinity” torched by an ecclesiastical council and whose unrestrained passion for a woman got him castrated by an angry uncle?

But Bayle is a subtle artist. In effect, he turns the camera away during the most gruesome scene; a simple sentence, a few phrases, is sufficient to “unman” Abelard. With the sure, instinctive judgment of a master, Bayle prefers to dwell on the complex motives that pushed Abelard toward his grim fate rather than the gore. The text, like a camera's long shot, quickly establishes the scene: footnote [G], which is immediately inserted, is like an intense, hovering close-up of a deeply troubled face, freezing time, requiring us to meditate on the character and destiny of Abelard: “Vanity was our Hero's distinguishing Foible,” the footnote like a voice-over tells us, “However, being an handsome young Fellow, and in the Flower of his age; and having a knack at Poetry, a great Reputation, and Money in his Pocket; it is not so strange that he Flattered himself with a kind Reception, whenever he should make his Addresses ….”
¹⁷
The long shot is held, and the voice-over continues, “[Abelard] touched the heart of Eloise
[sic]
, and fired her so by his charming Pen, and enchanting Voice that the poor Lady could never overcome her Passion.”
¹⁸
Now a quick shot of Heloise's young face. (Bayle and his camera send us from footnote [H] of the Abelard article to footnote “[F] under [Heloise's] Article ….”)
¹⁹
An interior voice, trembling with passion, tells us: “… his love verses were so pretty, and his songs so agreeable, both as to the words and airs, that every body
*
was charmed with them …; they were as much taken with his person, and loved him passionately ….”
²⁰
Heloise's voice fades; a new analytic voice begins: “As [Heloise] loved Abelard even to distraction, she fancied no women could look upon him, but must fall into the same passion”: a nice, complicating bit of irony that keeps this love story from being simply another Hollywood tear-jerker.

The complications are not finished. Thanks to the versatility of Bayle's footnotes, a darker theme emerges. We are taken back to Abelard, where the text like a short tracking shot observes him “amusing himself in toying and kissing her,”
²¹
then cuts quickly to footnote [H]. “The better to disguise his Design from the Uncle, he pretended sometimes to make use of the Liberty given him of correcting
Eliosa
. He tells us that Love, not the anger of a Teacher, prompted him from time to time to whip his Pupil; but that the Lashes he gave her, were the softest in the World.”
²²
A brilliant stroke is this: the era's subjugation of women revealed, the subtle self-deceits of Abelard sully his character, and the uncle's unmanning violence foreshadowed, perhaps even inadvertently mocked, by a much too cocky Abelard.

“Bayle's footnotes buzz with the salacious twaddle of the Republic of Letters,” it has been said, “with every pornographic interpretation of a biblical passage and every sexual anecdote about a philosopher or a scholar.”
²³
A certain amount of truth obtains, though one hopes it is not unduly cynical to assume that the scholar making the remark is exaggerating a bit in defending the honor of his profession. The anecdotes, if salacious, are usually true and often germane, as in the case with Abelard and Heloise.

The scholar goes on to offer an example, one that turns out to be more problematic than persuasive. “We owe to [Bayle] the preservation of Caspar Scioppius' description of the sparrow he watched from his student lodgings at Ingolstadt,” he writes, “having intercourse twenty times and then dying—as well as Scioppius' reflection, ‘O unfair lot. Is this to be granted to sparrows and denied to men?'”
²⁴
Salacious, well, yes, perhaps. But yet do we not welcome something so teasingly funny, something so remindful of our own youthfully lustful thoughts, something that makes the serious, bookish Scioppius a human we recognize, that summarizes and dramatizes the urgent desires of men and women in a single Latin cry of frustration?

Even this appealing defense does Bayle an injustice. The story of Scioppius and the sparrow is part of Bayle's well-planned intellectual trap. The note [B] stretches along twenty-nine inches of columns across two pages: a substantial footnote though by no means a particularly long one by Bayle's standard of industry and thoroughness.
²⁵
The note does not stand out; it does not call attention to itself. In fact, the reticent text of the Scioppius article hides its connection to the sparrow story with a confusion of reference marks: “… [Scioppius] returned to Altdorf, and published some books of Criticism which made him very proud: he could not see without vanity, his great youth joined to a distinguished merit in print [B]. It is said that one of the early productions of his pen, was commentary upon the Priapeia, which drew a great many reproaches upon him, especially, because therein he envied the condition of sparrows [b]. He made a journey into Italy, and after he had been some time at Verona, he returned into Germany, from whence he went again into Italy ….”
²⁶
The reference mark [B] quite deliberately keeps aloof from even the elliptic mention of the sparrow that follows in the text; indeed, the reader who drops down to the note must make his way along a meandering path of small print for some eleven inches before the first mention of the sparrow occurs, and then another couple of inches over rocky and bramble-infested Latin before the translation of the sparrow story appears. One has to wonder whether Bayle didn't sometimes mimic in his prose some of his strolls along the Auriege: a tiresome, erratic walk to a sudden view of rapids and blue sky.

The reader who starts at the [B] pushes through a thickly detailed discussion of the early works of Scioppius and of their reception; he can have no idea of where he will end up. The sly, little [b] cozying up to the uninformative mention of the sparrows is altogether a different matter. It takes us to a margin note: “[b] See the remark [B].”
²⁷
It invests the sparrow with independent significance, but an elusive, tantalizing significance as if from a scholar's unconscious that ordinarily is repressed by social codes and work habits. The reader who goes from [b] to [B] ends up on the same path but now with a nagging question that hurries him forward: Just what is this about? The sexuality of the young Scioppius requires attention, any fair-minded reader would agree; but Bayle has found a way to distance the theme so that far from being salacious (or arousing), it is exhaustive. One is put in mind again of the 1950s French New Wave; yes, in those films there was sufficient “toying and kissing” (to use Bayle's phrase) to supply material for the come-ons of ads and posters; and, yes, the revelations of breasts and behinds put to shame Hollywood's timid and tepid sex; but most of what happened in front of you as you sat in the darkened theater was talk, long, thorough, analytic, often informative, sometimes entertaining, rarely erotic talk. Talk and subtitles. So too with Bayle. Footnotes upon footnotes, like the abrupt montages of Goddard or the charming voice-overs and discreet camera angles of Truffaut, allow sex to enter academia without becoming salacious—the apple shines in Eden without the wriggling snake.

The subtle permutations wrought on the footnote by Bayle are nowhere better demonstrated, in fact, than in his treatment of Adam and Eve. Though some have questioned Bayle's adherence to Christian theology, he seems to accept the Gospel's account of the first man and first woman without skepticism, and with a sincerity that is palpable. The text is lyrical. “His Body having been formed by the Dust of the Earth [A], God breathed into his Nostrils the Breath of Life; that is to say, he animated him, and made him that Compound Creature, which we call
Man
, comprehending an Organized Body, and a Rational Soul.”
²⁸
The phrases sweep forward from that most simple of substances, dust, toward its destiny and, with a chorus of capital letters and italics, turns it into Compound Creature,
Man
, Organized Body, Rational Soul. When Eve joins Adam and they wake to each other's presence, Bayle, contrary to what some might expect, does not even hint at something salacious; and further, when the apple is eaten and they “perceived that they were naked,” Bayle immediately has them cover themselves with “Aprons” made from “Fig-leaves.”
²⁹
If there remained any chance of an inappropriate response to this delicate passage, the footnote [C] disarms us. “The Scripture says, that
their Eyes were opened
. This Expression made some People believe that
Adam
and
Eve
were
blind
, till
[sic]
they had transgress'd the Commandment of God.”
³⁰
What follows is a completely academic exposure of this foolish interpretation, a discussion that both diverts attention away from the fact of nakedness
and
reminds us of the lengths to which puritanical exegesis must go lest nakedness in God's place be equated with smut.

Something much more interesting is going on with the article on Adam. The reader soon notices that this central character of the religious drama receives little space: only a bit over four pages, whereas the six pages immediately following are devoted to a motley collection of lesser Adams: a near-contemporary of Bayle, an Adam (no first name) who was made the archdeacon of the Patriarchal Chamber, a John Adam, a Jesuit preacher embroiled in many arcane theological disputes, a Melchior Adam about whom Bayle slyly says, “The indefatigable Care he took to collect, frame, and publish, the Lives of a great number of learned Persons, deserves, that somebody should do him the like Office …,”
³¹
and, finally, an Adam (again, no first name), “a Joyner of
Nevers
, and a French Poet …,”
³²
from which entry we are immediately sent to another entry under Billaut (this Adam's real name) for a fuller biography.

The list of lesser Adams subtly diminishes the stature of the first man. That this was deliberate on Bayle's part is confirmed by the initial, teasing footnote that quickly interrupts the respectful and dignified text of the first Adam. The note [A] is cloaked in the robes of scholarship, but its intent is to disrobe religious certainty. “If we may believe Father Garaffe [1],” it begins, introducing immediately a fine skeptical tone, “
Photius
reports, the
Egyptian
Tradition,
That Wisdom laid an Egg in the Terrestrial Paradise, out of which came our first Parents like a couple of Chickens.
” The first man from dust? The first woman from the man's rib? Or both from an egg? Without directly challenging the Christian tradition, Bayle makes us suspicious of any account of our beginnings, though he is not. Bayle then charges Father Garaffe, “that Jesuit,” with “a licentious Paraphrase” of Photius, with having mistaken an Egyptian sailor's name, Oe, with
oon
, the word for “egg.” “Many Enquiries might be made about this Egg …,”
³³
he claims, and for more stories on the egg he sends us scurrying to his article on Arimanius. There he travels from Egypt to Greece where “[s]ome of the ancients said, that a Dove, brooding on an Egg produced Venus ….”
³⁴
And so the wit of Bayle and the flexibility of his footnotes bring the Holy Ghost together with the goddess whom Botticelli made famous as a lithe nude with long hair and ambiguous gaze surfing to shore on a shell. And Bayle does it in the name of responsible scholarship and orthodox theology. We would instinctively cheer this virtuoso performance did not the shadow of a dead brother and Bayle's terrible guilt inhibit us; in the end, we must admit, the quickwitted Bayle is nothing if not darkly serious.

Bayle is the Mozart of the footnote. He first recognized the full potential of the form and explored it as deftly and exhaustively as Mozart explored the piano sonata, the string quintet, and, most important, the opera. Bayle opened its riches like a mother lode to the miners and toilers who came after him. What in lesser hands could be simply interruptions and diversions became in Bayle's part of the drama of his prose. To begin with the sober account of Adam in the upper world of the text and then drop down to the netherworld of footnotes is to be alerted that some great change is taking place. To pick one's way through the brier patch of Jesuit and Egyptian scholarship and then to be sent sailing lightly off to the Arimanius article increases the suspense, the excitement. To then arrive at a conjunction of Venus and the Holy Ghost, a conjunction of two reverberating cultures, is to arrive at a climax not unlike the end of
The Magic Flute
, when music and character and plot at last make sense.