146 - Le Barge: Chapter 2
My darlings, have I missed any announcement by the Admiral that there might be some festivities as this month draws to a close? I am not mistaken in thinking we feast every year, or have since I have come here. There is some occasion for the costumes purchased in port, oui? If none have been announced I propose we organize it ourselves. The ship could do with a little levity after so many days of fighting.
And to those faithful readers that have given me such encouraging feedback, I present to you a second chapter to the account I am attempting to transcribe:
Chapter 2 - The Life of a Libertine, Part One
I am under no delusions about the manner of mind I carried inside my skull for the duration of my life on earth. I do know that for portions of it I must have been perfectly sane - the desires which possessed me were not impulses of madness so much as clinical ennui. I will agree, however, having been given time to reflect, that whatever the fluctuations my mind goes through due to circumstance, that at the time of my death I was quite mad. But to explain that, and to properly set the stage for my puzzling resurrection on this fine ship, an account of the life that brought me here is required:
There is an incident of my childhood of which I am certain shaped much of my life, and I shall relate to you what I know, though it is not all simply my own memory; I was far too young to carry much of it myself.
I am told that at three years old, living with my mother (a lady in waiting) in Conde Palace, I was one of several playmates for the Crown Prince, age nine. Telling of my personality, even at that early stage, when human beings simply haven’t the words to express the fullness of their developing minds, when the Prince took a plaything of mine, I responded with fierce indignation. A tot can be perhaps more intelligent than adults have the care to perceive, but not all, and if a child that age knows the meaning of any word with assured tenacity, it is the word “mine” or any variation thereof. This was true for me, I am told, for when the Prince refused to return the toy, I attacked him.
Now, as I said, I do not personally remember this. I’ve only the accounts of my relatives and contemporaries to confirm this. I am told I attacked the crown prince of France, the son of the King, ordained by God to be of infinite greater worth than my small, fleshy form - if not simply six years my senior and therefore of more considerable weight and articulation. However, “beaten to a pulp” is a phrase I have heard more than once.
Naturally, I was no longer a welcome tenant in the Palace. My mother, like all women of breeding, was especially distant from me, and very likely did not twitch a brow when she banished me from its walls. I was sent to live with my Uncle at his chateau in Lacoste - my beautiful Lacoste. While I do not recall the fight that landed me there, I can still somehow vividly recollect my arrival in that fair village. I was welcomed like a tiny King, the common folk crowding the streets as I was paraded up the long and winding channels to my destination at the apex. Flowers were thrown, presented, songs sung, and there are two things that I remember the most: The first was that it was late spring, so it was literally raining flower petals, come perhaps from the orchards on the higher parts of the hill; the second was that I knew, in that moment, that I was being given all of these gifts, all of this love and adoration, because I deserved them. I was born to such a position that I was to be worshipped by those lesser than I. Though I am sure the townspeople meant well, this damaged me perhaps more than it should have. It was a view of the common folk that was never challenged, not by my peers or by the people themselves.
I was not mad, then, and would not be for some time. Spoiled and privileged, certainly.
My birth afforded me a high military commission during the 7 Years’ War, and I managed my command just as you would expect an especially young man of considerable power would: More than once I was complimented for my execution but none would fully approve of my tactics - which more than once ended in numerous casualties on both sides.
I held up my own wedding in a stubborn attempt to protest the spouse my parents had chosen for me, the plain eldest daughter of a wealthy merchant family, sure to infuse our own accounts with much needed succor after years of rapid and wanton depletion on the part of myself and my indignant father. My heart had been set upon another noble lady of unimaginable beauty (or so I viewed her). I had been so assured that our union would be certain - her family was just as immense in prestige and age as my own, and the two of us were clearly taken with one another. While it was ultimately my destiny to take the hand of one Renee Pelagie, and she would in time become my dearest and closest friend in life, I treated my marriage as a gift that I had not wanted, often forsaking her company and home life to pursue courtesans in the city.
My exploits became increasingly less conventional - beginning with the amorous courtship of actresses in the local theatres (and expensive and laborious process for any man of financial standing) to the solicitation of whores to obtain a proper flogging and worse from there. Not particularly unusual for aristocratic men, any of these, especially none schooled in the Jesuit Lyceum, but mine seemed particularly distinctive because I chose to act alone and did not lap at the bootheels of the royals (for truly, I cannot abide fops). These distractions, while they financially ruined both my parents and in-laws, became the topic of conversation in court, which I never visited. The King found his scepter increasingly less pleasing for his mistress, the grand and “honorable” Madame de Pompadour, to look upon or pay tribute to, and so as a means to curry her favor and stir her passions, the personal lives of the aristocracy became of particular interest to both of them. As private investigators were sent into the provinces to bring naughty tales of orgies, of greedy Comtes content to mistreat their subjects who relish a good thorough rutting from their stable boys, my name stirred especial wonderment when I spent my first stint in jail for shouting blasphemies whilst in the throes with a common prostitute.
Again and again I found myself in a spotlight I did not desire, not because my behaviors shamed me in the eyes of my peers but because I expended massive wealth to prevent my wife from being disrespected. When she did eventually learn of my behaviors, she heard it from me, not from the courts, not from petty gossip, and as the courts swelled with delegates from higher and lower classes altogether, a growing dissatisfaction with the aristocracy saw me arrested numerous times, and my Renee became the loudest voice crying in favor of my redemption. Truth began to mix with rumors - I hire a prostitute who accepts my money and does as she is bid, and I am accused of kidnapping a widow who had not been soliciting her person, of beating gashes into her and cauterizing the wound with hot wax (until no scars could be found - and then I was the genius who invented the salve that could heal on contact!); I feed a few young whores pastilles laced with Spanish fly (by their knowledge) to stimulate flatulence, and I am accused of attempted murder, luring innocent young virgins to my fortress atop a mountain only to poison them with concoctions made up of angel’s tears and the fat of newborn babes; I make off with the comely and marriageable youngest daughter of my most-hated mother-in-law and soil her prospects - that one, completely true; I lie with my valet, and he and I are accused of communing with the Devil himself. Sodomy! Imagine.
Now, it need be said that this was not uncommon, especially among the aristocracy. You will never meet a man of my birth or higher - be he Marquis, Comte, Vicomte, or Prince - that is not a sodomite. We are educated and fashioned for certain fascinations, you see. But naturally the laws never changed; the church could not be offended in such a manner - and I was the first to have been prosecuted for the act in an age, an example that the lower classes hoped to make, seeing as I had become such an easy target. The point is that the fantasy and the reality had fully merged.
Enter my mother-in-law, a merchant’s wife of considerable ambition, who had been content to flirt and ache after my affections until she decided I was an embarrassment to her. Her weapon of choice to use against me: the lettre-du-cache - a powerful document in my time, a written decree by the King, himself, granting its holder the right to clap any named individual in irons without warrant, involvement of the courts, or censure.
Years of this would follow. Stints of existence trapped within four walls, without human contact, without letters or news of when. This is when I began to write - first histories, then farces, then my short stories, dialogues and pornographies, the longer I went without word from outside, the more bizarre my tastes tended to run. I became increasingly more fascinated with numbers, part and partial to my fixation on how long I had been interred, how afraid I was of losing track. I began to formulate my own language of numbers, and it bled into my stories. Single characters became tens, then hundreds, then thousands. Death became easy to write. My journals and letters became incomprehensible.
I saw the walls of multiple prisons before the revolution. Most notable were Vicennes after I was sentenced to death in absentia and burnt in effigy and eventually, the Bastille, that damnable fortress from which my 120 Days of Sodom was penned and ultimately lost when I was removed from the prison. I am a man who can boast with accuracy to have been among the strokes that provoked the storming of the Bastille by revolutionaries. Amazing how quickly idiots with torches and weapons can be striven to act when a disembodied voice from the ramparts shouts to them “They are killing prisoners, here!”
The doors were thrown open, and where once I was interred a degenerate; I was now carried to safety, called brother. No longer was I a fallen aristocrat, but a brother of liberty. I found myself out of irons, walking in sunshine again, free to explore the fascinating politics of a nation reborn. My opinions were not popular after a point. Never propose the futility of religion in a true republic to men that still cling to their papal rituals and would never permit a Jew to sit at his table. What precarious stability I began to achieve, with the King dead I found myself free from the fear that my beastly mother-in-law might have me jailed again at a moment’s notice.
But then came Robespierre, and the Terror, and soon the Madness followed with it.
And to those faithful readers that have given me such encouraging feedback, I present to you a second chapter to the account I am attempting to transcribe:
Chapter 2 - The Life of a Libertine, Part One
I am under no delusions about the manner of mind I carried inside my skull for the duration of my life on earth. I do know that for portions of it I must have been perfectly sane - the desires which possessed me were not impulses of madness so much as clinical ennui. I will agree, however, having been given time to reflect, that whatever the fluctuations my mind goes through due to circumstance, that at the time of my death I was quite mad. But to explain that, and to properly set the stage for my puzzling resurrection on this fine ship, an account of the life that brought me here is required:
There is an incident of my childhood of which I am certain shaped much of my life, and I shall relate to you what I know, though it is not all simply my own memory; I was far too young to carry much of it myself.
I am told that at three years old, living with my mother (a lady in waiting) in Conde Palace, I was one of several playmates for the Crown Prince, age nine. Telling of my personality, even at that early stage, when human beings simply haven’t the words to express the fullness of their developing minds, when the Prince took a plaything of mine, I responded with fierce indignation. A tot can be perhaps more intelligent than adults have the care to perceive, but not all, and if a child that age knows the meaning of any word with assured tenacity, it is the word “mine” or any variation thereof. This was true for me, I am told, for when the Prince refused to return the toy, I attacked him.
Now, as I said, I do not personally remember this. I’ve only the accounts of my relatives and contemporaries to confirm this. I am told I attacked the crown prince of France, the son of the King, ordained by God to be of infinite greater worth than my small, fleshy form - if not simply six years my senior and therefore of more considerable weight and articulation. However, “beaten to a pulp” is a phrase I have heard more than once.
Naturally, I was no longer a welcome tenant in the Palace. My mother, like all women of breeding, was especially distant from me, and very likely did not twitch a brow when she banished me from its walls. I was sent to live with my Uncle at his chateau in Lacoste - my beautiful Lacoste. While I do not recall the fight that landed me there, I can still somehow vividly recollect my arrival in that fair village. I was welcomed like a tiny King, the common folk crowding the streets as I was paraded up the long and winding channels to my destination at the apex. Flowers were thrown, presented, songs sung, and there are two things that I remember the most: The first was that it was late spring, so it was literally raining flower petals, come perhaps from the orchards on the higher parts of the hill; the second was that I knew, in that moment, that I was being given all of these gifts, all of this love and adoration, because I deserved them. I was born to such a position that I was to be worshipped by those lesser than I. Though I am sure the townspeople meant well, this damaged me perhaps more than it should have. It was a view of the common folk that was never challenged, not by my peers or by the people themselves.
I was not mad, then, and would not be for some time. Spoiled and privileged, certainly.
My birth afforded me a high military commission during the 7 Years’ War, and I managed my command just as you would expect an especially young man of considerable power would: More than once I was complimented for my execution but none would fully approve of my tactics - which more than once ended in numerous casualties on both sides.
I held up my own wedding in a stubborn attempt to protest the spouse my parents had chosen for me, the plain eldest daughter of a wealthy merchant family, sure to infuse our own accounts with much needed succor after years of rapid and wanton depletion on the part of myself and my indignant father. My heart had been set upon another noble lady of unimaginable beauty (or so I viewed her). I had been so assured that our union would be certain - her family was just as immense in prestige and age as my own, and the two of us were clearly taken with one another. While it was ultimately my destiny to take the hand of one Renee Pelagie, and she would in time become my dearest and closest friend in life, I treated my marriage as a gift that I had not wanted, often forsaking her company and home life to pursue courtesans in the city.
My exploits became increasingly less conventional - beginning with the amorous courtship of actresses in the local theatres (and expensive and laborious process for any man of financial standing) to the solicitation of whores to obtain a proper flogging and worse from there. Not particularly unusual for aristocratic men, any of these, especially none schooled in the Jesuit Lyceum, but mine seemed particularly distinctive because I chose to act alone and did not lap at the bootheels of the royals (for truly, I cannot abide fops). These distractions, while they financially ruined both my parents and in-laws, became the topic of conversation in court, which I never visited. The King found his scepter increasingly less pleasing for his mistress, the grand and “honorable” Madame de Pompadour, to look upon or pay tribute to, and so as a means to curry her favor and stir her passions, the personal lives of the aristocracy became of particular interest to both of them. As private investigators were sent into the provinces to bring naughty tales of orgies, of greedy Comtes content to mistreat their subjects who relish a good thorough rutting from their stable boys, my name stirred especial wonderment when I spent my first stint in jail for shouting blasphemies whilst in the throes with a common prostitute.
Again and again I found myself in a spotlight I did not desire, not because my behaviors shamed me in the eyes of my peers but because I expended massive wealth to prevent my wife from being disrespected. When she did eventually learn of my behaviors, she heard it from me, not from the courts, not from petty gossip, and as the courts swelled with delegates from higher and lower classes altogether, a growing dissatisfaction with the aristocracy saw me arrested numerous times, and my Renee became the loudest voice crying in favor of my redemption. Truth began to mix with rumors - I hire a prostitute who accepts my money and does as she is bid, and I am accused of kidnapping a widow who had not been soliciting her person, of beating gashes into her and cauterizing the wound with hot wax (until no scars could be found - and then I was the genius who invented the salve that could heal on contact!); I feed a few young whores pastilles laced with Spanish fly (by their knowledge) to stimulate flatulence, and I am accused of attempted murder, luring innocent young virgins to my fortress atop a mountain only to poison them with concoctions made up of angel’s tears and the fat of newborn babes; I make off with the comely and marriageable youngest daughter of my most-hated mother-in-law and soil her prospects - that one, completely true; I lie with my valet, and he and I are accused of communing with the Devil himself. Sodomy! Imagine.
Now, it need be said that this was not uncommon, especially among the aristocracy. You will never meet a man of my birth or higher - be he Marquis, Comte, Vicomte, or Prince - that is not a sodomite. We are educated and fashioned for certain fascinations, you see. But naturally the laws never changed; the church could not be offended in such a manner - and I was the first to have been prosecuted for the act in an age, an example that the lower classes hoped to make, seeing as I had become such an easy target. The point is that the fantasy and the reality had fully merged.
Enter my mother-in-law, a merchant’s wife of considerable ambition, who had been content to flirt and ache after my affections until she decided I was an embarrassment to her. Her weapon of choice to use against me: the lettre-du-cache - a powerful document in my time, a written decree by the King, himself, granting its holder the right to clap any named individual in irons without warrant, involvement of the courts, or censure.
Years of this would follow. Stints of existence trapped within four walls, without human contact, without letters or news of when. This is when I began to write - first histories, then farces, then my short stories, dialogues and pornographies, the longer I went without word from outside, the more bizarre my tastes tended to run. I became increasingly more fascinated with numbers, part and partial to my fixation on how long I had been interred, how afraid I was of losing track. I began to formulate my own language of numbers, and it bled into my stories. Single characters became tens, then hundreds, then thousands. Death became easy to write. My journals and letters became incomprehensible.
I saw the walls of multiple prisons before the revolution. Most notable were Vicennes after I was sentenced to death in absentia and burnt in effigy and eventually, the Bastille, that damnable fortress from which my 120 Days of Sodom was penned and ultimately lost when I was removed from the prison. I am a man who can boast with accuracy to have been among the strokes that provoked the storming of the Bastille by revolutionaries. Amazing how quickly idiots with torches and weapons can be striven to act when a disembodied voice from the ramparts shouts to them “They are killing prisoners, here!”
The doors were thrown open, and where once I was interred a degenerate; I was now carried to safety, called brother. No longer was I a fallen aristocrat, but a brother of liberty. I found myself out of irons, walking in sunshine again, free to explore the fascinating politics of a nation reborn. My opinions were not popular after a point. Never propose the futility of religion in a true republic to men that still cling to their papal rituals and would never permit a Jew to sit at his table. What precarious stability I began to achieve, with the King dead I found myself free from the fear that my beastly mother-in-law might have me jailed again at a moment’s notice.
But then came Robespierre, and the Terror, and soon the Madness followed with it.