The Salt Smugglers (29 page)

We are here merely sketching out the barest outlines of a biography in order to suggest the abbé de Bucquoy as one of the precursors of the French Revolution. The work whose overall tenor we have just summarized is followed by an
Extract from a Treatise on the Existence of God
in which the author seeks to demonstrate, against the philosophers of materialism, that
matter
cannot possesses its own existence and movement by virtue of itself.

« Is each atom of matter, he asks, possessed of an independent existence? If this were the case, there would be as many necessary beings as atoms . . . This would produce gods without end, as in the imaginations of the heathens. » Bodies, according to the abbé, possessed no independent existence or movement . . . Could one possibly claim that « at the center of matter, one atom pushes upon another and from this reciprocal interaction order results? » This the abbé cannot accept without the intervention of a God.

« Bodies can no more account for their own regular movement than for their existence. Would
chance
have to be factored in here? Much depends on this. But does it exist on its own, in violation of everything we have been told? Then it would be God.

Is it neither this nor that? Then it would be nothing! »

The author, as is clear, is here combating certain ideas then in the air which were launched by d'Holbach and La Mettrie. Nor could he restrain himself from concluding with a final swipe at the court of Louis XIV. « O Lord, many a confession is addressed to you by the lips, but how many come deep from the heart? Lord, if you have been granted so much credit here on earth, is it only so that those in power can invoke you as a justification for their injustices? »

The governor of the Low C ountries took a great deal of interest in the projects of the abbé de Bucquoy; but it would have been well-nigh impossible to establish a republic in France at this time: this could only have come about through the victory of the
allies
over the French monarchy.

The abbé's success in Holland was thus primarily restricted to its salons, where he passed for a profound metaphysician. He was listened to with great approbation in certain circles, applauded by
that France
which had been scattered abroad by persecutions of all sorts and which was composed of courageous Catholics as well as Protestants. These two parties were united in their common animosity toward the figure who answered to such epithets as
Viro immortali
or
fit regia divo
.

As for the petition addressed by his aunt to the king, the ladies of The Hague thought she had gone slightly overboard. According to them, it was no longer the fashion in France to speak this loudly or this forthrightly . . . « Look what this cost M. de Cambray, who had nevertheless taken great pains to
bedeck himself with the flowers of his phrasing
. . . »

Shortly after Louis XIV's death, the abbé de Bucquoy wrote the following quatrain entitled:

There was perhaps a grain of exaggeration in the abbé's epigram. « His reign was a true novel », he remarks further on. “I want it, I do it!” was his motto. — What did he do? Nothing.

« How restore to life those thousands he sacrificed to his ambitions? »

It was to the
regent's mother
that the count de Bucquoy addressed this observation from his exile in Hanover on the third of April, 1717.

While in Hanover, the abbé de Bucquoy published a series of reflections on the
untimely death
of the king of Sweden. While commenting on the exalted positions that sovereigns are called to assume, he wrote the following phrase: « What a disgrace and scandal it is that all of those whom Providence has cast into the limelight are not wise enough to hide their brilliance under a bushel. » He added: « The soul of the lowest of commoners puffed up into a king shocks me no end. »

As for His Majesty the king of Sweden, he reproaches him for having read Quintus Curtius at too young an age . . . « Beware, he adds, of a man who has but a single book in his pocket.

« He may well have been a fearless soldier and model renadier, but his readings of Quintus Curtius ruined him. From his victory at Nerva, he was reduced to fleeing
the enemy at Pultava, to hiding out at Bender, and finally to dying needlessly at Fredrichstahl . . . »

Such were the political meditations that the abbé de Bucquoy was engaged in around 1718. But from 1721 on, his attention was completely taken up by women, which inspired various comments on his part concerning « the malignity of the fairer sex ». In one of his late books dealing with this particular subject one finds the following:

« O woman! Product of a rib! Daughter of night and of sleep: Adam was dreaming when God made you . . . Had he been awake, the resultant piece of work would perhaps have been more finely crafted; or perhaps he would have asked the Lord to make the bone of his bones somewhat more pliable, especially in the region of the head.

« Adam might also have said to God: “Leave my rib as is; I prefer solitude to this unfortunate companionship” ... »

The abbé de Bucquoy continued to be well-received at the court of Hanover, where he was provided with living quarters in the palace. But he was unprepared for a certain lady by the name of Martha whom he met there; she was the caretaker's wife and caused him a great deal of consternation on a number of occasions. Being extremely rapacious, she tried to take him for all he was worth.

During one of his trips to Leipzig, money had been sent to him in his absence. When he returned from his travels, there was no mention of anything, although he found a letter awaiting him that informed him of the sums that had been forwarded his way. After he complained, the caretaker's wife admitted that she had made use of his money while he was away, but she promised to return it to him in the near future. He merely commented in German:
Es ist nicht recht
(This is not right).

Given that he had sought out her husband to express his misgivings about her, she arrived at his lodgings one morning, wearing a white chemise and a very short petticoat over her naked legs . . . « Who knows, said the abbé, perhaps this was some
Phèdre
transported by love and rage . . . » It was at this point that he went for his pistols « to give her a little taste of buckshot. Needless to say, the lady beat a quick retreat . . . »

These persecutions, coming as they did so late in his life, were particularly painful for the abbé de Bucquoy and on several occasions he lodged complaints with His British Majesty, the ruler of Hanover. One can well imagine that, now almost ninety years of age, his mind was betraying him and causing him to exaggerate his plight.

Apart from this, we possess little information about the final years of the abbé comte de Bucquoy's life.

He has struck us as a rather remarkable author, not only because of his prison escapes but because of the quality of his writings. We should nonetheless be careful not to confuse him with a certain Jacques de Bucquoy, author of the book in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale entitled:
Reïse door de Indïen
, door Jacob de Bucquoy, — Harlem,
Jan Bosch
, — 1744.

The count of Bucquoy, after his escape from prison, spent the rest of his life in Holland or in Germany and definitely did not travel to India, although one of his relatives may have done so during this same period.

The author of this historical serial having now reached his final installment, which has been based on a biography he believed might be of some service to the history of his nation, requests that the Bibliothèque Nationale kindly accept the copy of the
History of the abbé de Bucquoy
that is missing from its collection, together with the volume containing the narrative of the military exploits of his uncle, the count of Bucquoy, in Bohemia.

This latter is far less valuable than the former, — whose rarity is, in the end, all that recommends it.

This edition follows the text established and annotated by Jacques Bony in volume two of Nerval's
Oeuvres complètes
(Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1984). The translator and the publisher wish to thank Editions Gallimard and M. Bony for their kind permission to use this material.

The twenty-seven installment breaks are indicated by — in the text.

NOTES

7
Frankfurt:
Nerval traveled through Frankfurt in September 1850. A hotbed of revolutionary fervor in 1848 — the Frankfurt Parliament was the first such freely elected body in the history of Germany — the city was at that point already experiencing the repressive repercussions of the Prussian occupation of Hesse.

7
Hecker the revolutionary:
Karl Franz Hecker, leader of the republican left in Baden.

7
Robert Blum:
German writer and politician involved in Kossuth's Hungarian Revolution of 1848 and later executed by the Austrians. In October 1849, Nerval had contributed to a similar “revolutionary” almanac,
Le Diable rouge
. Entitled “Les Prophètes rouges,” his essay sympathetically surveyed the work of such socialist illuminati as Lamennais, Mickiewicz, Leroux, Proudhon, and Considérant.

8
Riancey amendment:
Voted into law on July 16, 1850, it imposed a stamp tax of one centime per copy on any newspaper featuring a serial novel in its pages. Ostensibly intended to protect the interests of booksellers and to safeguard the morality of the press, the law was in fact more likely aimed at suppressing such phenomenally successful
romans-feuilleton
as Eugène Sue's
Mystères de Paris,
which, in the opinion of the government, had contributed significantly to stirring up the workers' insurrections of 1848.

8
a larger series of studies:
Nerval had already published essays on the eighteenth-century figures Restif de la Bretonne, Jacques Cazotte, and Cagliostro in various newspapers and magazines. He would subsequently collect these (together with his biography of the abbé de Bucquoy) in his 1852 volume
Les Illuminés
[The Illuminati], subtitled
The Precursors of Socialism.

8
Madame Dunoyer:
Anne-Marguerite Dunoyer (1663- 1719). French woman of letters of Calvinist origin who after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes fled to Holland, where she edited an émigré newspaper and published her memoirs. The adventures of the abbé de Bucquoy are recounted in her
Lettres historiques et galantes de deux dames de condition
(Amsterdam, 1720), a volume which would have been readily available to Nerval but which he chose to eschew.

9
Government censorship in Vienna:
Over the course of the winter of 1839-40, Nerval published a number of articles in the Viennese journal
Die Allgemeine Theaterzeitung
. Censorship in Metternich's Austria (known as the China of Europe) was the most draconian on the continent, with a list of some five thousand forbidden books.