theasif.info
plot
page
(Lo-tech
website, text based and intended to bring to mind, by association, the graphic
bleakness of Pasolini’s The Gospel According to
Matthew)
Date:
April 2013 – March 2014.
www.theasif.info:
FEATURING: Introductory TEXT for INVISIBLE CELLS AND VANISHING MASSES
–PHILOSOPHY FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE POST-NIETZSCHE- available KINDLE
BOOKS from May 2013. This is to be published on Kindle alongside a SECOND
EDITION of ART AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE (first published Harvester Press,
1978).
Also featured, and
retained by lack of public demand, the text of TAKING THE PISS, THE
CONFESSIONS OF MADAME ROUSSEAU (Scroll to locate)
Rumpledsilkskin’s
present sojourn in philosophy, which was a return to philosophy, has come to a
conclusion. For the next year Rumpledsilkskin will concentrate on making what
he calls analogues/icons, the main subject matter of which will concern the
paintings of Alf Dubbo. These paintings are fictions
and feature in Patrick White’s RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT. As a consequence
theasif.info will exist in stasis, with the exception of notification about
Kindle editions of BEYOND ART, ROGER TAYLOR’S LOVE POEMS FOR MARLY
and THE UN-HOLY BIBLE ACCORDING TO RUMPLEDSILKSKIN, when ready.
Rumpledsilkskin has
little respect for blurbs or summaries. INVISIBLE CELLS AND VANISHING MASSES is
a difficult 250,000 word text. Its individual cells have the conceit of being
prison sentences during which the prisoner battles with concepts of confinement
and escape. A sense of the clamour of these battles is all
Rumpledsilkskin feels able to offer as introduction to the whole.
Rumpledsilkskin writes,
Part
of my subject matter is to give serious treatment to the notion of “getting out
of it”, another part concerns who is to get out. The inevitabilities of the
poor are the factum, the starting point. What does Bear
the surfboard-maker in Big Wednesday say as the surf heroes ride the
unprecedented? “Oh! I’m just the garbage man.” Generally the poor are addressed
to improve them, educate them, edify them, empower them, sensitise them, quiet
them, control them. These are the stratagems for
creating illusions of change. So it is argued, the rich are going to have to
overcome hell of a hump to get into heaven, whereas queuing garbage men are the
last made first. For this illusory privilege they are exhorted to love those
who trespass against them. My work is firmly set in the notion of
irreconcilable enemies. Being poor is to confront
reality as problematic, something to defend oneself against, something to be
escaped from. “Getting out of it” is defence and escape, and virtuality is one
of the forms of “getting out of it”. Socially developed and controlled forms of
virtuality are generally commodified, but commodified entertainment is
bootlegged like booze and has its non-commodified forms like poteen and alpine
eau de vie. And, of course the objects of art can be appropriated for any
purpose whatsoever, just as art has appropriated the objects of not art as
objects of art.
This
philosophical journey begun a long time ago, whichever moment it was when it
began, is now to be completed in these cells. There was no way for me to have
envisaged this precise ending at the outset, despite a determination to arrive
where I am. The destination is virtuality and class and underclass and escape.
The possibilities of virtuality have multiplied since I started my kind of
life. Those possibilities are part and parcel of the aspirations of
self-consciousness and autonomy, and all these particles including the
aspirations were all interwoven, even if unrecognised, in the embryonic vision.
And so, my kind of life, my sentence, starts by revisiting and reflecting on
various stopping points on the journey, as well as striking out across a vast
territory still uncrossed. Following will not be easy, it will not be an
instant thing, and the subject matter is irreducibly difficult. For escape none
of this is necessary, but for the defence of escape it may well be, certainly
nothing “out there” goes half far enough.
There
is a collectiveness to vanishing, a shared conspiracy. This is a global,
empirical scepticism. The alternative worlds that are turned to and created
take both individual and collective forms. There is nothing solipsistic about
mass disappearance. Moreover, vanishing is always double-edged. Spasmodically
the masses reappear. Suddenly they are in the streets pointing. The excesses of
the existing order do not go unnoticed. Or they reappear as heroes to fulfil
their own fantasies. But the masses will never again sacrifice a generation or
two for a future that never comes. The masses are playing the long game now.
The masses are playing games.
And the clamour
includes this digressive prolegomenon
PROLEGOMENON
The Norwegian would not be a problem if he kept the
world he inhabits to himself, just as his private fantasy.
His actual behaviour is unintelligible if thought
embedded in wholesome Scandinavian society. Instead, there, like everywhere, is
as tight as an asthmatic seizure. Screaming Nordic noir! Pus-filled globules are
expelled from the congested mass as the social body struggles for its breath.
It is asked “Why?” That is why, no longer inexplicable horror.
Murdering someone is thought clearly wrong but
imagining murdering someone is less clear-cut. We might then say the Norwegian
could imagine whatever he liked. This is close to the foundation of the
argument in INVISIBLE CELLS AND THE VANISHING MASSES (ICVM). But nothing is
clear-cut. In Elizabethan political culture (Elizabeth I) treason laws forbade
any subject to “compass” (imagine) the death of a monarch. Today militant Islam
is just as eager to repress deviant daydreams. How though do you police these
prescriptions? Not by means of any regard for the truth. Instead truth gives
way to suspicion and policing suspicion requires a reign of terror, in which
case imagining is left intangible, the threat to it accidental.
The Australian Outback is a
harsh place, and how did the aborigine cope there? By means
of great material ingenuity but also by means of dreamtime. Walkabout is inhabiting a fantasy landscape formed out of stories
about the old woman and the old fella. There is an
element of religious belief about this but it is more comic than zealous, more
fall-about than solemn. Unless seduced by bourgeois élitism Abos
repudiate high seriousness. Dreamtime is for having a good time. It allows you
to eat your babies when you’re starving.
Communism is the utilitarian solution to perennial
exploitation of the masses. It was once popular aspiration, now it sounds like “smoking
is good for you”. ICVM will demonstrate the rationality of communism and will
expose the repression of this truth. However, although communism’s moment could
come again, its use in ICVM is as an exemplar or measure, rather like the
kingdom of heaven is used to measure earthly reality, or like Rousseau’s
general will measures existing power relations. Moreover, one reading of
communism’s end-game is of virtual existence in a virtual universe, and what
ICVM argues is not only is a strand of this always possible but now its
possibility is extensive, yet it only exists by proxy in the form of mutant
virtuality, which is virtual escape nonetheless but, therefore, dismissible by
the media as criminal insanity. Maybe this is where everything is stuck for a
virtual eternity.
If you think that working hard, rolling up your sleeves
and doing the right thing is sick, if you think that all of morality and all of
politics is sick, if you think all religion is sick, if you think the pursuit
of knowledge and progress and economic growth is sick, if you think all of
these are diseases of private property, and if you think virtual existence for
its own sake is freedom or escape, then you must be criminal and insane. Musn’t you?
This is not the prerogative of a starry few, as Nietzsche thought, but the mass
nebulae of the celestial herd. This criminality and insanity is the commonsense
repudiation of received sense, and things are so fixed that what repudiates
received sense is axiomatically criminal and insane. These then are the norms
and whatever challenges them. Hegemony creates this criminal insanity.
People are leaving the social space but media society
does its utmost to prevent this. Every pretext is used. The economic crisis is
used to preach the doctrine of all being in it together. The Olympics presents
an idea of the world coming together. Every trick is used to secure a global,
secure, benign community of consumers. Awaiting the
aftermath of global bonding in the stadia is a giant landscape of corporate selling.
In opposition to received sense what we have is a
dialectical materialist treatment of virtuality, and this generates both a
critique of morality, politics, culture, religion, global capitalism, science,
philosophical logic, theory of mind, celebrity, as well as a defence of the
unnoticed, anonymity and dreamtime.
What is completely wrong with professional psychiatry’s
analysis of mass killers, apart from the spurious idea that it is the first
port of call in order to achieve understanding, is that it supposes everything
is revealed by the set of lonely, angry fantasists. How imprecise is this? It
is from this set also that critical theory emanates. “All the
lonely people where do they all come from?” The antidote to conformist
socialisation is what inflates the set beyond any of the uses of psychiatric
explanation. As though the distinction between fantasy and
reality is self-evident. Was monetarism fantasy or reality? Was Thatcher
essentially lonely? Certainly she was angry. Oh, but she was a mass killer too!
So the theory is correct then! But something has gone wrong. “Of course it has,
don’t you know that everything is measured by received sense?” Well yes
everything is but as every madman complains “You measure with
electro-convulsive shock and how long is an electro-convulsive shock? Oh yes!
However long you say it is.”
The vanishing masses and their invisible cells now have
a startling analogue or image. The Dutch artscientist,
Jailia Essaidi in
collaboration with Dr Abdoel El Ghalbzouri
are progressing a new material. Some are calling it Rumpled Silk Skin. Human
skin and spider silk have been synthesised by way of first adding spider genes
to the genome of goats, then separating from goat’s milk its resulting silky
content, and then spinning and weaving this content into a material on which
human cells are grown. Why should you do this? Jailia
was inspired by a tale about Genghis Khan’s horsemen riding into battle wearing
silk vests as armour against enemy arrows. Jailia
tried firing bullets at her Rumpled Silk Skin to find that although at full
speed the bullets penetrated at reduced speed they did not. She said, moving
the idea even further, “…why bother with a vest: imagine replacing keratin, the
protein responsible for the toughness of human skin, with this spider silk
protein.”
The idea of Rumpledsilkskin (this web-sites avatar and
co-author of the forthcoming ICVM) predates this armour of mass defence by some
40 years. Both ideas point to protection from the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortunes!
Felicitous Reading!
Marlyannova (Rumpledsilkskin’s
web-girl)
·
Plot
·
Tenant:
Rumpledsilkskin (avatar, thinly concealing terrestrial)
·
Crops and Cultivation (composted
content, well-rotted or in earlier stages of decomposition)
The
philosophy of virtuality: a virtual allotment for the cultivation of virtual
escape.
The
Website of the Philosopher Rumpledsilkskin.
Now and then truth (contingent truth): - no
allocation of infertile space happens except within the medium of the commodity
and all resistance to and escape from the commodity is contained within this
medium.
Modus
Operandi
Digging:
all theory and argument will be at least double dug, meaning there will be no
substitute for hard-graft, heart-stimulation, and sound-beds in an old English
style. Means of production will be spade striking the old rocks of logic,
objectivity and truth value and barrowing off-site, all post-modernist,
polystyrene packaging.
Weeding: meticulous hoeing, burrowing out, poisoning,
flame gunning of civilised cultivations in their theoretical forms -
dialectical and apocalyptic weeding!
Rank and gross, tap and fibrous rooted, weed-binding possessors of
nature, include: - Morality, Politics, Culture, Religion, Free- Market
Apologia, State, Law, Education, Family. (Marx identified these weeds but was
an inconsistent or lazy weeder.)
Fertilising: scattering images and fictions in the spirit
of virtuality, dressing virtual soil in readiness for main-crop seemings.
Planting:
intercropping, and irregular planting throughout four seasons, free from global
warming but contributing to same.
Perennial
Harvesting:
Materialist Virtuality, As Ifness, Modernism (hybrid), Invisible Cells,
Optical Density, Simulacra, Subterraneans, Indeterminism, Rational
Schizophrenia, the Unnoticed. (Irregular allotment visitors take home emptier
baskets, but emptier baskets are easier to carry. You pays no money and takes
your choice.)
Composting:
“Art an Enemy of the People”, “Beyond Art”, “Invisible Cells”, “Mme Rousseau”, Historical Materialism, Fact/Value
distinction, Ideological and Commodity theories of Art. Sartre. Marx. Unamuno.
Richard Jefferies. Jean Seberg. Genet. Patrick White. David Mercer. Viviane
Forrester. Michael Heim. (A virtual future’s past.)
Pest
Control:
Dialectical spraying: - determinism (evolutionary, neuro-physiological,
philosophical, A.I. nonsense), non-dialectical conceptual analysis, sluggish
Heideggerian and Post-Modernist abstraction. Plus days of reckoning,
Rumpledsilkskin confronts his critics.
ON
THE VIRTUAL ALLOTMENT:-
Taking the Piss,
the Confessions of Madame Rousseau is a play of the most
original, exciting, chaotic, radical and disgusting imaginings. Not
kitchen-sink, not moonshine, but tragic-historical. Putrefying aristocracy and
a blood-bath at the French Revolution! The time of Mme R, née Thérèse
Levasseur! The play, a belated invitation to join Thérèse at Place de la
Revolution for a headless party, but, also, an invitation to celebrate and
honour Thérèse (before this never celebrated apart from a remote mountain in
Alaska being named Mount Levasseur, only because of its proximity to Rousseau
Peak). Thérèse Levasseur on Wikipedia merits less than twenty lines. Generous compared to her usual neglect.
Wikipedia says,“She was a barely literate seamstress who may
have borne him” (Jean Jacques Rousseau) “as many as five children, all of whom
were given away to Enfants Trouves
foundling home...They met in March 1745, at the hotel where he was staying, and
she was employed as a chambermaid, and although they never married, she
remained his companion until his death. They went through a legally invalid
marriage ceremony at Bourgoin on August 29, 1768.
Therese provided Rousseau with support and care, and when he died, she became
the sole heiress of his belongings, including manuscripts and royalties. After Rousseau’s death in 1778, she married
valet Jean-Henri Bally in November 1779. They live together in Le Plessis-Belleville until her death in 1801.”
The Confessions of
Madame Rousseau tells much more.
It dares to imagines how Thérèse’s fury and vengeance drives her to demand and
exact from her “Jean Jacques” a theory of the sovereign people determined by
the tyranny of the suppressed majority –dictatorship of the proletariat-.
Goaded, Rousseau risks all. He writes The Social Contract (it becomes
the little red book of the French Revolution). Thérèse’s endless, shrewish
assaults sweep Rousseau far from his benign, socially acceptable Romanticism
and media-reputation. For his creative pains he is reduced to a cringing,
persecuted, paranoid pariah (Europe’s anti-Christ). And then the play imagines,
as was rumoured, that Thérèse murders Rousseau, with a chamber-pot; ironically
the symbol of all his frustrations.
Later, fêted but incensed, Thérèse, in Paris, joins the pandemonium of
poissardes and sansculottes applauding the retribution of the guillotine. But
as testimony to the dialectic, the play remembers Thérèse’s love of Jean
Jacques: a love that sees through his upper-class pretensions and Enlightenment
celebrity. Thérèse identifies with and revels in Jean Jacques, the one time
servant, who had the courage to pee in his master’s soup and then serve it to
him. The camaraderie of servants!
The play is
pantomime, commedia dell arte. It is intended as vulgar entertainment and
contains scenes of peeing, hand-jobs, sado-masochism, fucking, murder and
decapitation, all in the most light-hearted of tastes and simulations. It is
not bourgeois drama. It desecrates the philosophically illiterate notion of
bringing precious, subjective individuality alive on stage in the pretence that
it will represent universals. It repudiates the development of character, but
extols the development of the masses, a concrete universal. Taking the Piss
The Confessions of Madame Rousseau is also as sad as Punch and Judy, or
even Sweeney Todd, Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
theasif.info continues to publicise the
adventures of Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov. The adventure, “Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov
Meets Iosif Vissarianovich Dzhugashvili On Great
Blasket Island” cements its moment of revisionism and daringly! ventures into a world of wanking and tractor drivers. It
appears now not on this the plot page but at www.invisiblecells.wordpress.com,
and appears there as a blog with a charming pictorial accompaniment. This is a
change initiated by Marlyannova in an attempt to
spread the words far and wide. The long promised Beijing adventure may go
on-line sometime, but Vladimir Ilich is still actively seeking a wedding-guest
and poetic inspiration.
A scan on essays from theasif.info erupted
in Issue 28 of Mute, under
the title “Art is Like Cancer”. A full-length version of this text was
available online at Metamute. The
erupted material then spread to www.tlaxcala.es
and www.rebelion.org (for Spanish
readers).
Very well rotted compost for these essays is
available in Portuguese bags from the Brazilian publisher Conrad. The bags are labelled “Arte
Inimiga Do Povo”, and are presented as a virtual defacement of the
Guggenheim in New York. Still selling in S.America.
WHERE FLOWERS GROW: - Invisible Cells, a parallel
allotment where an attempt is made to grow the same philosophical argument as
here, only there as a work of fiction. Check it out. Follow the links at the
end of each section*. INVISIBLE CELLS is an assault on the dominance of Marduk
over the chaos of Tiamat, where ancient and modern ruins span the history of
the Euphrates. To scan the content of INVISIBLE CELLS follow these links:- *
FAITH,
WAR, PRESSUREGROUPS,
HOWTOGETTHERE,
FAMILY,
WOMENSHEALTH,
XBOX.
(Blackout. Lights.
Alternating forget-me-not blue and primrose-yellow suffusing a bare space,
apart from a central monolith, on which the light intensifies. This monolith
changes colour throughout to reflect the mood and mostly stands for the
guillotine, subject to directorial improvisations/visualisations. Centre stage
Young Thérèse, minimally dressed as pastoral shepherdess, mimes to Gabriela Bürgler’s recording in French of the rage aria “Si des
gallants de la ville” -from Rousseau’s Le Devin du
Village and repeated, 1minute 48 seconds-. Scaramouche, like a coy
stripper, sidles into view from behind the monolith. Instead of frou-frou
feathers he conceals himself with a placard bearing the words in English of the
aria being sung. He points to the words as they are sung, in pantomime fashion.
“If
I had listened to the discourses
Of the fine gentlemen from town
Ah, then I’d easily have formed
Other loving relations!
As a fine lady,
I’d shine everyday;
With ribbons and lace
I’d enhance my natural grace.
For a faithless man’s love
I’ve ruined my happiness.
I preferred to be less beautiful
And to save my heart for him.”
Alas![i]
As the aria ends
Scaramouche comes out from behind the placard to reveal himself. He is dressed
as Harlequin with a long-nosed mask, ginger,
stalk-like hair, and a very over stuffed codpiece. At this revelation Young
Thérèse, angry and abashed, flees the stage.)
SCARAMOUCHE. Anyone would think I was exposing myself (looking to where Young Thérèse exited and reaching for his codpiece
rap-style) but quite the contrary, as you can see I’m masked. Hello
then! You sunny tops, you frosty tops, you chocolate tops, you blackberry tops,
you carrot tops and, not forgetting, the onion tops (confiding, friendly, and standing very proudly out front).
Some girls are fantastic they stretch like black elastic! (Pauses, looking round.) Who
am I you may ask? Sometimes I ask the same question of myself and sometimes I
answer, Scaramouche, the Red, very, very frightening! At other times I say “no I’m not, I’m an actor, and my name is James Leblanche Stewart[ii]! Probably a Tory.” (Pause.)
That’s a little joke, but it leads
you no nearer the truth. Incidentally, my joke is a lot like most of the jokes
in this play. No one gets them, apart from the odd lunatic, and deadhead! So
they’re more of a quiz really. Like QI? And I’m your Stephen Fry? Not
that I’m here to make a name for myself, I’m just here to help and to add
colourful language. I’m on your side, one of you, I will come and sit with you
all, and if you get bored you can fondle me, for the price of a haircut. Not cheap then! But
not as dear as your seat would be if Stephen was our SCARAMOUCHE.
Mind you a bi-polar SCARAMOUCHE would be very near the truth of our
play. Later on I will ask if anyone can answer my quiz question... not
difficult after our play becomes infamous, but whoever volunteers to help me
will get a top prize! Oh! And by the way, any odd idiots who want to out themselves will be more than welcome.
So if I am more than a character in search of an author, if I am
Scaramouche, if my part is written, why is that (appealing to audience speculation)? I will explain. One
character in our play created the theory of DEMOCRACY. No, you have to say
“democracy in the modern form”, that’s what he created, which I visualise as a
sea of lovely orange flags. Now don’t fall asleep, as they say in the ads for
hair shampoo, because democracy is what we are all asked by our governments
to sacrifice our children for, if needs be, unless our government happens
to be Taliban, whereupon the sacrifice of children is not a difference, although
democracy is. Of course once upon a time all governments were the Taliban, so
you can see what trouble our character might have got into. Our character also
created pretty operas and he was pretty democratic about that too. At the time
French opera was very formal, very Glyndebourne, but our character favoured new
Italian forms. You know, unwashed peasants, gut-feelings, rancid salami, rustic
Chianti, wild, wild in the country, that sort of thing. OPERA
BUFFA[iii].
LOW LIFE. COMMEDIA DELL’ ARTE.
All music to my down below. (Then suddenly.) And
firstly that’s where Scaramouche comes in. The red braggart
but yellow coward, straight from Commedia dell’Arte.
Although, did you see me in the film[iv], my
finest moment. When I stripped off, don’t get excited, only my mask dear, I was
no longer Scaramouche, I was a Zorro, a swordsman, and I won the greatest sword
fight in the history of cinema. (Clutches
the codpiece, and then shadow- fencing, circles the space driving his foe back
to the monolith, where magnanimously he spares whoever it might be and throws
away the imaginary sword toward the audience. Then charges
forward.) Oh I am sorry!
Is anyone hurt? (But sardonically and turning away.) Theatre-going
unlike motor racing is not supposed to be a dangerous activity! (Pause.)
And secondly, that peasant pinko at the start,
who was overwhelmed by my proportions, was Colette, a character in our
character’s opera. “The Village Oracle”. [v] And
just as I am based on our character’s love affair with a Neapolitan Punch and
Judy show, so Colette is based on our character’s .........THÉRÉSE. She is the subject of our play. And her song? Phew!
It is a rage aria like Beyoncé’s “Put a Ring on It”!
(Looks to the wings.) The director’s signalling (mimes with his hands the movement of the guillotine). Cheeky
plum! They all say backstage I’m too verbose, and that I too much like hearing
the sound of my own voice. But I’m chatty, gregarious, sanguine.
And how can you have an autistic Scaramouche? It is a contradiction in terms. A
shrinking violet wouldn’t be any help to you would it? Ok, Ok (to the wings, then accelerates.)
I’ve tied up all the loose ends for now, you’re probably all in knots, but
before you get too uncomfortable we head on. I will
disappear and then reappear, only next time with my professional, hyperbolic
voice, trés Scaramouche. So you just sit there. You
don’t have to do anything. (Pause.) Yet! (Threatening.)
SCARAMOUCHE.
Revolutionary
France: Paris 1790s:
more than a decade since the death of Jean Jacques Rousseau - political
philosopher, moralist, essayist, novelist, composer, naturalist, copyist,
secretary, servant, cashier, walker, idler, womaniser, masturbator, citizen of
Geneva, educationalist, absent father, exhibitionist, masochist, hermit,
peasant-lover, noble-ass-licker, reluctant revolutionary, romantic, drop-out, victim
of murder ? (Scaramouche exits to audience. Blackout.) )
(Spot reveals OLD
THÉRÈSE standing, in costume - as in the drawing of her in old age but with
a large leaved hat turned back from the face with a tricolour cockade – at the
front of the space. The main space dimly lit. At centre, high backed chair with
arms: left, a plain table with a few
stools, on the table two pistols and an assortment of bowls, cutlery, glasses
and wine: at the back of the space, right, an unmade Tracey Emin
bed but with chamber pot –polystyrene, papier mâché, NHS style?-
underneath.)
SCARAMOUCHE. (From the
auditorium) The street: no one about
apart from old Thérèse Levasseur - calls herself Mme Rousseau: was companion to
Jean Jacques for 33 depraved years -.
(THÉRÈSE squats, pulling up her skirt and lowering
her drawers: she piddles. She talks to herself.)
OLD
THÉRÈSE. That’s better (pulling up her drawers and
gesturing to the
ground). Free
as pigeons now
(reflecting
on revolutionary rights). Waddling down our
roads.... Platriere.....Grenelle.....(reminiscing) a jingle of hard-earned pension in me purse, ta! publisher Rey, (shakes purse to confirm
content) still a tingle of passion in me poke
(wolf
whistles and touches herself) a
cockade in me ’at,
crapping and pissing
where I likes. Do dicky
birds pee?
(Laughs.)
He would know
something fucking useless like that.
I flutter off to Palais
Royal for a little dindins, before taking my
perch, my honoured perch mind you (with
pride), like a vulture
(taking
herself down a peg or two) in our new place
(French pronunciation) Place de la Revolution. A place for
citizens, poissardes and the taking of nobs!
(Laughs and
gobs.)
(Moves forward and
addresses the audience as though she has just noticed them. Peering
out at them.)
He
pissed like a leaking tap, old cock, ‘til I siphoned him.
(reminiscing)...
And the tall stories he would tell... me
bending and threading bougies. “Zulietta in Venice” was a trusty
tale/tail... “The Origins of a Disequilibrium
of Bilge Water” he called it...... (then to herself)
that fucking harlot made a spurting bean sprout of you.... my once upon a time,
for all my life...
(Lights centre
stage: JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU, in his
Armenian get up, sitting on high backed chair: YOUNG THÉRÈSE, in
belted jeans and white t-shirt, bending over him, trying to attach a catheter -
at that time resembling instruments of torture - beneath the folds of his
garments: OLD THÉRÈSE looks on.)
JEAN JACQUES. Let
me tell you again Thérèse, my
Lieutenant
Criminel, (as though it was a pet name, which it was)
of Zulietta (JEAN JACQUES in his prime, effusive).
Gently! Gently! (Remonstrating at the introduction of the
catheter: moments of
discomfort reoccur throughout the
narrative.) Oh! yes, a
dazzling young woman.... coquettishly
dressed, nimble.... A brunette of twenty
years.... (Delivery as
though he is used to addressing a larger
audience, but
distracted by himself.) Her
large, black, Oriental eyes darted
shafts of fire into my heart. I first met
her on Olivet’s ship. Her
gondola drew up alongside and she came on
board like a
whirlwind. She mistook me for one called
Bremond.
ZULIETTA.
(Runs on, ethnic style, nose rings, and circles
ROUSSEAU and the diligent THÉRÈSE,
trailing a hand
across his shoulders:
Italian accent.) My
dear Bremond, oh!
Madonna, ‘ow long it
is since I saw you. Bremond, you do
still
love me, just a
little, don’t you? (Pleading.)
(Walks forward to front stage, standing there
with hands on hips, looking out: audience should admire her figure: OLD
THÉRÈSE still looking on.)
(ZULIETTA
runs to the table takes two pistols and springs towards ROUSSEAU: YOUNG
THÉRÈSE taken aback drops the catheter, picks it up and retreats to the bed,
perching.)
ZULIETTA.
I knows what you
prefer Bremond, I knows you. You’ll
find I knows
you. On your knees! (Whispers, he obeys.)
ZULIETTA. Dare you?! Left or right? Don’t get confused, little hope
less man.... my left, my right. Which shall I fire? You tell me,
Bremond!
JEAN JACQUES. I kept my eyes tightly shut, my
cheeks burning,
bright red. Perhaps five minutes passed, my state was
such I
could tell the time no better than you
Thérèse. I was very
excited, I did not know what I wished...
this was my excitement.
I chose. “Left!” Zulietta
had no hesitation, violently, with a
snarl, she pulled the trigger....
clunk.... nothing.... still alive!
(Lets out a cry of
pain.) She
span round and round, brandishing the pistol of her right hand above her head,
and just as I settled into this new silence of resolution, she fired (pistol
shot, very loud). Chunks of
plaster fell from the ceiling. I stood,
astonished, heart beating like a captive lark.
ZULIETTA.
Now to make you drunk.
JEAN JACQUES. I
was her willing slave. (The two actors mime in
the pauses between
sentences.) She brought red wine and
two goblets. She untwined a rose-coloured bow from her
lace
bodice and tied it, tight, around my
engorged desire. She bound
me to the furniture with chains and
locks. She read to me from
a disgusting book and showed me many
disgraceful pictures.
She poured glass after glass down my
awash gullet.
The wine
was plummy red, staining my chin,
splashing the fine linen of my
shirt front, and in those days I had no
help for my laundry. When I started to
complain... of needing to make
water, she tightened the knot and left
me. I would have peed
straight onto the floor had I been able,
instead my bladder
inflated.
When she returned - hours later? (lights dim) –
she
had me promising her anything! She released my chains, took
me to her bedroom (they move to the bed, YOUNG THÉRÈSE
slides off it and moves to the
guillotine/monolith, resting herself against it, fidgeting with the catheter as
though it was knitting)
and faced me to a chamber-pot, quarter full and
smelly.
She untied the bow, stood behind me, bringing feather-
like hands around my thighs, fanning
me. I gushed, a ruby piss,
endlessly, brimming the pot. These attentions aroused me.
When I came, it resembled
garrotting. Gobbets of semen and
blood dripped from me (sinks
to the bed, sitting, ZULIETTA
moves to left stage, hands on hips again,
looking off,
YOUNG THÉRÈSE
returns to him, putting an arm around
him).
I fainted, collapsing into a cold, vomiting heap.
Regaining consciousness there she
was above and astride me,
even more dishabille than before. I looked up at her and noticed
she had only one nipple! (Spot,
ZULIETTA exposes a
deformed breast.) She
smiled at the horror on my face.
Thérèse, look at the horror on my
face! Oh! thank
you Thérèse
(said as
though some perversion had taken place
between them, she shows him her breasts,
fulsome, wholesome).
ZULIETTA.
(Spins round, accusatory, pointing at ROUSSEAU.)
Females
are disorder. Symmetry is for those who
seek order.
Go and study mathematics and natural
philosophy. Give up the
monstrous. (Storms
off stage like a Scythian warrior. Blackout.
Spot follows SCARAMOUCHE from audience to front stage. He squats.)
SCARAMOUCHE.
(In camp gossip mode.) Did you see the way our Thérèse,
Thérèse Levasseur, touched herself. I must have picked it up from her in
rehearsals. (Claps in front the codpiece.) Do
you like Venice? Used just to stink; now it sinks and stinks
with Saga-louts. Not like it used
to be in the days of Casanova and Byron and grand whores. Mind, mind, I
wouldn’t have liked that cock-breaker, that Zulietta.
I wouldn’t have taken my barge pole into her burnished gondola. Our character,
Jean Jacques, was beavered by her for life. And he was
just starting out when he was in Venice. He’d secured himself a position as
secretary to the French Ambassador. Sort of on the up, after
a vagrant youth. At sixteen, like his brother before him, he’d run away
from his home in Geneva. Then poor lad, crossing the Alps, he was robbed.
Homeless in Turin, he was taken in by a Catholic hospice, where the price of
bed and board was to trade his Protestant faith and convert. His confirmation
was handled by a spurting gay person, whom in his innocence Jean Jacques
thought was an epileptic and not one of the gaiety.
After that things improved! He became the toy boy of a sex-starved matron, the
Madame de Warens! Which is an anagram for raw needs! Where do I get all this
stuff from? (Pause.) Wikipedia!
However,
in the next bit we are going to frighten you. We will threaten to show you what
the mob once loved to watch: the red and the black. In these politically
correct times, no one, not even clients of snuff movies, would admit in public
to such a scarlet love. (Scaramouche stands. He does not gossip, he
announces.)
For your eyes we bring you the smell
of the Terror. All revolutions have this smell. It is the reek of the world,
not evolving, but being changed. Pointedly! (Said
knowingly.) Jean
Jacques Rousseau’s body has been cold a long time, but the body politic has
brought it in triumph from its quiet repose amidst the greenery at Ermenonville to the pandemonium of the Pantheon in Paris.
In the streets of Paris lightning strikes the same place again and again, and a
radiant guillotine sparks, playing god. Thérèse Levasseur, looking like Madame Défarge, is there to witness. She is addressed as Madame
Rousseau, and wrestles with her 15 seconds of celebrity. The masses have taken
off their ragged trousers and sing of the Palaise
Royal, which they have looted and made into a friend of the people, full of bars and brothels and gambling
houses. Politicians and terrorists addicted to the public space stalk this
circus looking for someone to notice them. So in
the battle for hearts and minds one, Jean Paul Marat, comes down from his
high-placed seat in the Senate, known as the Mountain, to see if he can raise a
laugh. He has friends, maybe the people, certainly Danton and Robespierre. He
has enemies, the Girondists, delicate republicans, Whites not Reds, Quakers not
Ranters, who would not make a revolution by breaking a king’s neck. One of
their supporters, incensed, deranged, has travelled all by herself from
Normandy. It is her first time in Paris. She has bought a kitchen knife. She
intends to kill Marat, and her name, remembered alongside his, is Charlotte
Corday.
(SCARAMOUCHE exits
to audience. Guillotine/monolith lit as for action: electronic hum repeats:
fades: sound track, outdoor acoustic, crowd noise - like football crowd - plus
horses, drum rolls, fades in and out intermittently throughout the scene. Lights. OLD THÉRÈSE on
chair, CITIZENS 1 and 2 beside her, wearing long shirts, no trousers,
all looking to the guillotine, similarly the rest of the cast around the table:
ensemble singing- “Le Palaise-Royal”. Attachment.)
CITIZEN
1. Hark my birds[vi]
Madame..... Madame Rousseau are you
not, if I’ve not dropped my bacon[vii],
Dame Guillotine will be the
end of rough justice. What do we want? (to the
audience)
What do we want? Rough Justice!.... Barking glacier[viii]
if you’ll
pardon my bum[ix]
Madame!
GROUP
AT TABLE. (A
chorus of separate expletives) “Justine.”
De Sade’s “Justine”! Knitting needles!
Watercress and gin!
Trousers! Off with their trousers!
CITIZEN
1. Ask them to stink[x]
and what do you expect Madame.
Sans Culottes! But put a ding and dong [xi]on
stage for a last act, if you get my royal clanger, and they’ll strut about as
though they’re balls in deep-fry[xii],
rich nutters[xiii]
loosen your guts. Just
string ‘em up from a lantern. That’s what we did to Baker François, for
sitting on his ’ead[xiv]. Then we hauled him down and, paring your
peelings[xv],
we cut it off, neat as butchers, put it on a pike-staff and paraded it on Pont
Royal. Pontific!
I’d say.
CITIZEN
2. And how about you Madame?
Did I hear my friend here
say Madame Rousseau? (With
deference and
lasciviousness.) Have you pontifuckated?
OLD
THÉRÈSE. We poissardes ponced about
Versailles, Citizen. I was
there for that. Broad daylight and she was still abed. You
should have seen the look on a rich
face. Marie Antoinette, a
slab of Viennese pastry, and fifty
Parisian strumpets rampaging
the royal bedchamber....tugging on
gowns and wigs, braying all
the names of the pig-sty. She snorts out of bed like a fast fart,
in a shift and petticoat, and, for
some notion of hers, with
stockings in her hand (laughs) and scampers off
down the
corridors of Versailles, poissardes, with
fish knives out, in
pursuit.
I couldn’t keep up, not enough puff you understand,
being a pensioner (with some pride).
(A stirring in the
crowd, some clapping, shouts of “Marat”, “poxy Marat”, “friend of the
people”. MARAT,
strikingly ragged, moves from the table, where he has been sitting as one of
the crowd, to stand in front the guillotine, holding a book. The crowd
follows.)
CITIZEN
2. Your hubby’s for it now. In Marat’s hands. I wouldn’t like
to be that ragged
book in those scaly claws[xvi]. Look Madame,
today he’s even
losing leaves of skin from the visage.
Sit on my
lap if you want a
better pew. (Offers to sit beneath her in
the chair, she
agrees.)
CITIZEN
1. Prey (emphasis
for meaning)! Silence! For a maternal
rat[xvii]
(to
the crowd). Must make you proud
though Madame
(to THÉRÈSE).
MARAT. Friends,
Parisians and Citizens I know what you want.
What
do you want? (Rabble rousing, but sounds
reasonable, like Peter Mandelson.)
THE
CROWD. Heads!
MARAT. What do you want?
THE
CROWD. Heads!
MARAT. Well that’s what we’re goin’ to give ya..... And tails! And
tails! You old dames! What are they? Wicked!
I passed three
tumbrels on my way to
see you all. So be patient and we’ll
give
you heads and
tails. But first citizens let’s be just
a shade
serious, just a
whisker. The new
Bible. Don’t forget the new
Bible. I’m holding it in my hand. The Bible of the Revolution
(raising
his voice). THE
DIVINE ROUSSEAU! THE DIVINE
ROUSSEAU!
THE
CROWD. Rousseau!
Rousseau! Rousseau! (mechanical chant)
MARAT. Yes, the divine Rousseau. The “Social Contract”, the new
bible, a new deal, fairness and a nice
change. What’s it about? It’s about the Supreme Being. No, not God!
No, not the King! No, not the
Austrian patisserie! (some laughter from
the crowd). No not Charlotte Corday
(more
laughter from the crowd and then MARAT in a sort of whisper)...... Are you here Charlotte? Somewhere in the crowd?
I said are you here Charlotte?
CHARLOTTE
CORDAY (from the crowd, stands on the
table).
I’m
here, Marat, waiting passionately for
your back to turn. Let everyone see my
blade. (Shouted loudly, brandishing a kitchen knife.) What do you see
in this man? He is a dwarf. A monster with a misshapen body.
He is covered with sores. He wears filthy clothes. Look at his bare legs thrust
into broken boots and the dirty rags around his brow. Perhaps all men are thus.
Never will you have to put Madame on my letters. Never will I renounce my
precious liberty, my independence. And when Marat, the vilest
of scoundrels, whose name is the name of countless crimes, when he falls under
the avenging knife, the Mountain will tremble. Danton and Robespierre
will pale, and all other brigands seated on their bloody thrones will shiver
before the thunder that the gods, avengers of humanity, only suspend, in order
to make their final downfall more awful.
(Disturbance
in the crowd, some laughter.)
MARAT. That’s
man’s talk. Poor noble Charlotte! Citizens she’s much
too romantic for Girondin reform. I
invite her to my bath-tub.
You can rub my back and I’ll show
you a radical constitution. But be careful virtuous Charlotte. We will spin
you. Spin you as a debauchee, a mistress of priests and royalists, whose mouth
is full with obscenities. Look is she already 4 months with child? I think she
blushes! I think she’s smeared.
(Dutiful crowd amusement.)
CITIZEN
1. Would that radical constitution be a body politic or a
psoriatic body, Madame Rousseau, would you
suppurate[xviii]?
OLD
THÉRÈSE. You’re too wordy for me
Monsieur. Living with a
wordsmith you learn
to appreciate the spaces between words.
MARAT. Come now, calm down. Today we are blessed with the
presence of Madame
Rousseau. (General applause.) She was
there at the birth of
Supreme Being.
OLD THÉRÈSE (talking to herself). And many imperfect beings, if
anyone cares to
listen.
MARAT
(in oratorical style). Who is the Supreme Being? In this
book, Jean Jacques
Rousseau declares the General Will is
supreme! Is sovereign!
Not Louis! And what is the
General Will? I read from the bible: - “Each one of us puts into the community his
person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will; and
as a body, we incorporate every member as an indivisible part of the whole.” We are the General Will. Not the king, not the legislative assembly,
but you and I, all of us, indestructible, inalienable, incorrigible! And who dares quarrel with us? I read to you again the words of the divine
Rousseau: “whosoever refuses to obey the
general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means
nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free”. Today we shall see a forcing to be free. (Said with menace.) I spoke to Corday of a radical constitution,
to you I proclaim it. (Rabble rousing.) Universal suffrage, your right to
insurrection, your right to work, your right to maintenance, your right to the
happiness of the greatest number before all else, your right to masturbation,
your right to be on a waiting list. We
abolish all feudal rights, we abolish slavery in the French colonies, we
abolish... (the speech interspersed with cheering, fades,
lights dim, cast melts away to back stage, taking up positions around the
table).
(Spot on THÉRÈSE)
OLD THÉRÈSE (talking
to herself). Did
I ever think you were a
divine being? If so I was very young and simple. You said I was
the Maid D’Orleans, when first we met, Monsieur (speaking
with deference as
though a young girl). I don’t know if I
was there at the
birth of Supreme Being, but, if you were
divine, certainly I
was there at the death of God. That
would be
“deicide”? Or am I saying the opposite of what I mean
again?
Not that anyone suspected unholy crime. And who done it?
Surely not that young girl you saw for the
first time, here in
Paris, waiting on tables at
the Hotel Saint Quentin?
Flustered
and blushin’, innocent of gentlemen’s ways, she was. Up to her
fucking armpits in
soap-suds.
(Spot off. Lights
back space, male cast seated around the table, meal-time at Hotel St Quentin: ROUSSEAU
sitting at table. YOUNG THÉRÈSE waiting on table. Others
with minimal props to indicate role.)
MONSIEUR de BONNEFOND.
Thérèse Levastsewer, is that your
name girl? Levastsewer? (Men’s laughter at the table, not
ROUSSEAU.)
YOUNG THÉRÈSE (waiting on table). Monsieur
Bonnefond?
MONSIEUR de BONNEFOND.
Your name girl,
what is your name?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Thérèse Levasseur, Monsieur.
MONSIEUR de BONNEFOND.
Exactly
as I told you gentlemen. Meet
Mademoiselle Levastsewer.
(Male
guffawing.)
IRISH PRIEST. And
where are you from girl? I doubt’s it’s France.
Bonnefond’s turd
would miss its hole there[xix].
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Orleans, your holiness.
MONSIEUR de BONNEFOND.
You don’t have to
call an Irish priest
“your holiness”,
Thérèse. It’s quite the wrong form of
address.
Irish priests will never be popes, they are
much lesser
immortals, they’re
called “pokes”[xx],
my dear, after where they
come from. (Laughter.)
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. A “poke”, Monsieur?
(Male
guffawing again.)
IRISH PRIEST. Thérèse
from Whoreleon I’d be delighted, but only
after I’ve sampled yer lovely buns and jugs.
He thinks I tell
porkies[xxi].
A
GASCON. She be blushin’,
that girl be blushin’. Give us yer cheeks
luv and warm a Gascon’s gazpacho.
MONSIEUR de BONNEFOND.
And what of our
philosopher, our silent
oracle, has Jean Jacques
Rousseau no words of corruption for
Thérèse Levastsewer
from Whoreleon? Speak monsieur!
OLD
THÉRÈSE. (Still in her chair.) And then he spoke to me for the
first time ever, like
no one had ever spoken to me before.
(Said as though the universe might
contain oracles.)
JEAN JACQUES. Take no notice of them. They are
nondescript, here
today and gone tomorrow, like all hotel
guests. Nothing in their minds apart from listening out for
the indiscretions of strangers. They would not recognise the Maid of
Orleans herself, even if standing before them in all her gleaming armour. I
love quiet ways; I would give half my life to speak with you.
OLD
THÉRÈSE. Gave nearly all my life to live with
him.... And we did
speak in the days
that followed. And like Saint Joan I
heard
voices. He became my voices. All the different people in Jean
Jacques.... my voices ....
until for a long time I had no voice of
me own.
(Cast exit:
electronic hum: then fade: leaving OLD THÉRÈSE who moves to front stage
looking back, and YOUNG THÉRÈSE and
ROUSSEAU occupying the bed.)
JEAN JACQUES. You’re incomparable Thérèse,
absolutely
incomparable.
So innocent, so uncorrupted by the ways of the
world, so modest. So gentle but so lively. Your beauty, not
obvious, not such as to make you a victim
of men’s desires, a
beauty that grows on me daily. With you beside me I could
withdraw from the world. Have nothing to do with its flattery.
Nothing to do with
greatness. Nothing to do with
literature. To
be as I was intended. To have our own little house. Live modestly. I could earn a simple living, copying music
at 10 louis a sheet. To eat peasant suppers at
an open window, where we might sit opposite each other. The window our table. Just breathing the fresh
air, watching the surrounding country, the passers-by. A quarter of a loaf of
fresh bread, a few cherries, a morsel of cheese, a half pint of wine. Remaining ‘til midnight
without suspecting how late. Kiss
me Thérèse! Kiss me!
(Pleading, urgent.)
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. You know I do. (Pause, kissing.) Not that
though. Not that! (Resisting but warm, intimate.)
JEAN JACQUES. You’ll drive me mad. (Whispered, passionately.)
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. So!
You’ll get me with child. (Petulantly.)
JEAN JACQUES. I’d take care of it. If it was mine.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. The answer’s still no. What did you say? Bastard!
JEAN
JACQUES. You have the heart of an angel, how
can you say
“no”. You are twenty Thérèse, it would not be
wicked. It would
be Parisian my sweet.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Well I’m from Orleans, and you’re
from Geneva,
and you’re thirty something. You’re an old goat. And would you marry me?
JEAN JACQUES. You’ve
no dowry.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Wicked sod. Wicked sod!
JEAN JACQUES. I will never desert you, but I will
never marry you.
How about that! We are above the commonplace.
(Lights dim back
stage. OLD THÉRÈSE thinking to herself front
stage.)
OLD
THÉRÈSE. Oh!
Jean Jacques. How I got to know
you. So high-
sounding.
I fell in love with high-sounding. (Addressing the
audience.)
But I soon found my ears deceived me.
You were
ashamed of me (addressing
ROUSSEAU),
that’s why you
didn’t want us to be
married. I was a laughing stock to your
clever friends. Grimm, Klupfel,
Diderot, you all thought I was
stupid. Not a fit subject
for the great Encyclopaedia you were all writing, which, like Eve’s apple, was
supposed to contain all knowledge of everything,
high and low. And what kind of person
could have made a dictionary of my “odd” expressions... I didn’t rightly know
the meaning of the words you used but I was trying to learn.... and then pore
over it with Mme Luxembourg for her to split her smelly corset. I was able to
read what you wrote! So my absurd
mistakes became famous in society did they, and yet you was
the tenderest, most sensitive, most feeling soul ever born, or so you kept
saying. My once upon a time abuser! (With vehemence and disbelief.) For all those years I was your servant, your
nurse, even your “aunt”, I was “Pope Joan”, “Lieutenant Criminel” (all of these quotations in a pseudo Jean
Jacques
voice) not even your mistress and never your wife, not until you
thought I’d fish fagged you, but you even wriggled out of that. Once upon a time deceiver! And ’cause when we first met I wouldn’t let
you act the goat how quickly you let St Joan’s ’alo
slip. I was wet and open, your dewy
angel at last, and you wouldn’t. I
thought your being mad for me had made you mad like a Danish prince you told me
about. But how
insulting! You was worried I’d been a cheap tart and
might give
you pox. And I’d been worried you wouldn’t love me
because
I’d let some clumsy oaf give me one when I was
only thirteen.
(Repetitive
clanking like a pile-driver at work, OLD THÉRÈSE to
her chair. Lights.
Crowd assemble.)
Executions. Happy hour. Here they come. (All to
her neighbours.) Look
at that one there citizen (pointing
out
at the audience) at the back of the first cart, he’s
shat
himself already. Poor bugger, I don’t suppose he thought it
would ever come to this. They couldn’t have imagined this.
(And then to herself again.) I imagine each lady is Mme D’
Houdetot, women of some refinement and
artistry, coming to
their sharp end... very gratifying. My little excess. More than I
bargained for, mind! Couldn’t have predicted the
revolution.
Think of all those who died in the
Bastille before it all came
down.
All of France was the Bastille.
All of Europe was the
Bastille.
All women like me were the Bastille.
The future is the
Bastille.
And the Marquis de Sade, in the Bastille, shouts down the pissing tube[xxii]
to let the world know it stinks. (Wandering.) This is just a moment of madness (with
riveting
sense). Remember our moments of madness Jean
Jacques? (ROUSSEAU and YOUNG THÉRÈSE, wearing a scarf, wander to front stage,
lights dim, spot front stage.) That’s when we were really free, just
you and me. When I got
to know the very best of you, a person unknown to any other. Two-faced buffoon, what else would you expect
of the serving class?
JEAN
JACQUES. I love
walking Paris with you Thérèse. Sharing
everything. Two little nobodies with
nothing important to say.
Just like it should be for
everyone.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Tell
me some more about all the bad things you’ve
done then.
JEAN
JACQUES. Well there
was this girl, what was her name.... ah
yes!
I can just remember her, her name was Thérèse Levasseur.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Bugger! No one will ever remember me. Come on
don’t piss about,
tell all, you know you like to.
JEAN JACQUES. This
isn’t very elevated conversation Thérèse.
I talk
with Diderot and the
finest minds in Paris.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. And
I talk with all the fishwives, so don’t pretend
you know more than
me. Go on tell me some more about what
a bad lad you were.
JEAN JACQUES. Have
you ever peed in the soup? I suppose
not. It
would be difficult
for you to manage.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Well
you can’t pee at all.
JEAN JACQUES. But
when I could... freely.... buckets of it.... I used
to top up the soup
pot in those houses where they made me
servile, and then
watch the family spoon it down. There
was a
M. Ducommun very partial to soup
Rousseau. “Another ladle
Monsieur?” “ Thanks Jean Jacques, you’re most
forthcoming.”
And I
would smile.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Did
you have the soup yourself?
JEAN JACQUES. If
needs be. A servant has to pretend,
unless
they’ve made you wash
out your brain with their dirty laundry,
which happens. It was only out one end and in the other.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. I
pretends all the time serving tables.
JEAN JACQUES. That’s
what we are Thérèse, pretenders. I
always
stole from the big houses where I
worked. I reasoned that if I
was to be beaten as a rogue I was
entitled to behave like one. If I was
caught I was flogged. I used to say to
myself “never
mind!
I am made to be flogged.” And I
like being flogged.
Servants have resources. Unlike priests they turn punishment into
pleasure. No, like priests!
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. I
don’t know about that.
JEAN JACQUES. Mademoiselle
Lambercier was one of the first to flog
me. I was just a young lad but in her sweaty
exertion I
discovered my hard part in life. Pain and the hard-on became
inseparable.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. And
what did you used to steal?
JEAN JACQUES. Never money.
I was never covetous. I stole to
revenge myself. To revenge myself on those who would make
me subservient. I was apprentice to M. Ducommun, he was an
engraver. I stole his tools, his drawings, all those
things which
gave him power. I thought I was robbing him of his power.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
We’ve walked a long
way today. Where are we
now?
JEAN JACQUES. This is called Bois de
Boulogne. Really Thérèse you
never know where you
are.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
I knows where I am well enough, I just don’t know
the names. I can always find me way.
JEAN JACQUES. Louis XIV made this park
public. A gift to
the people.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
That’s what nobs
do. Little rewards one side of
Paris and the Bastille t’other
side.
JEAN JACQUES. You worry about the Bastille don’t
you Thérèse? Do
you think you’ll
finish your days there?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Might.
JEAN JACQUES. They say there are not many
prisoners there these
days. Mainly madmen.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Well
I’m mad. Must be to go
round with you.
JEAN JACQUES. Why’s
it mad to be with me?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. You’re
so little for one thing, and you say dreadful
things.
JEAN JACQUES. Thérèse? (An intonation she recognises
instantly.)
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. What
here?
JEAN JACQUES. There’s nobody about. Make me bigger.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. I
could tie you to this tree with my scarf. (She
points to the
guillotine.)
JEAN JACQUES. And you could break off a sapling.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. (Loosely
ties him to the guillotine and
unbuckles the belt
from her jeans.) Listen to the birds Jean
Jacques and give thanks to his majesty. (She
gets very close
to him, pushing her
chin against his chest and swiping
him)
JEAN JACQUES. Your majesty! Your majesty!
Your subjects are in
chains! (Punctuated by sharp expulsions of air.)
(JEAN JACQUES and
YOUNG THÉRÈSE continue. Blackout. SCARAMOUCHE to side space, front, spot.)
SCARAMOUCHE.
(At pace, with all the fervour of the Left.)
The Bastille? Where inmates were cut off from any knowledge
of
the outside
world. During the arbitrary dictatorship
of Louis XVI
prisoners would
continue to petition Louis XV and the late Duke
de la Vrillière for release.
Prisoners remained in the Bastille, not
because anyone
desired that they should be there, but because
they were there,
forgotten, unrecorded, criminals incriminated
by crimes of
bureaucracy. The prisoner Linguet described his
incarceration. (SCARAMOUCHE
exits to audience.)
(Lights.
OLD THÉRÈSE and crowd still in situ. One of the CAST comes forward as LINGUET to squat at the
front, addressing the audience, lights dim and spot on him.)
LINGUET.
(With
exotic foreign accent and a tinge of seedy
Perversion.) Immediately the den assigned to me
had been
opened, there arose
from the bed not a swarm, not a cloud, but
a wide, thick column
of moths: it expanded, quickly inundated
the place. I drew back horrified. The dens are all fashioned in
the tower walls. Each one has a solitary loophole pierced in
the
masonry and obstructed by three iron
gratings, leaving a two
inch passage for the sight. In winter these vaults are ice-houses and in
summer they are humid stoves where one is suffocated. They open directly on the moat where the
great drain from the Rue Saint-Antoine discharges itself from which a putrid
stench arises. The prisoners’ efforts to
suck a little fresh air through this narrow pea-shooter of an opening often
serves only to thicken the suffocating fetidness about them. There was
something frightful
about the appearance of the walls in my
chamber. One of my predecessors had obtained
permission to
daub his habitation
as he liked. Each wall was encrusted
with a
picture highly
appropriate to the place - details of the Passion.
After the moths had evaporated and when my
glance fell on
these panels - the
tints being yet more sombre in the obscurity,
I could only see the agonised attitudes and
the instruments of
torture. And then
from other cells seeped the unmistakable ecstasy of self-abuse.
(Blackout.)
END OF PART 1.
PART
2.
(Lights.
Return of the pile-driver clanking an infuriating, ceaseless rhythm, fades: YOUNG
THÉRÈSE screaming on the bed, in attendance Mlles GOUIN
and Mme LEVASSEUR. ROUSSEAU
storms in. SCARAMOUCHE
with the audience.)
JEAN JACQUES. Why is that? The other times she’s been fine.
Mlles GOUIN. I dunno
Monsieur. This time it’s as though she’s
constipated. She don’t want to
let it go. She could but she
won’t. ‘Ave words with her. ‘Elp
her. ’Er
mum’s ’ere, but I
think she’s just makin’ things worse.
She needs to stop
screamin’
and start pushin’.
JEAN JACQUES. Thanks Mademoiselle Gouin. I’ll go to
her.
Mme LEVASSEUR. Come on Thérèse! Be sensible!
Push love! Thank
God you’re here. Come here and talk to her Monsieur. Tell her
she’s to be rid of
it.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. I am not to be rid of it! Not again! (lets
out high
pitched scream,
crying)
JEAN JACQUES. Thérèse!
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. You told me you’d take care of me babbies. That’s
what you said. I believed you. Why don’t you love our babbies? (Screams
this at him.)
JEAN JACQUES. I do Thérèse. You know I do. I only take them
away because I love them. The State will bring them up far better than
I can. I read to you from Plato, I
explained.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. But our State isn’t ruled by philosophydodas
and I
want my babies. Can’t I keep this one Jean Jacques, just this
one? (Pleading.) It
wouldn’t be any trouble to you, I’d see to
that. Flesh of our flesh, you know.
JEAN JACQUES. Philosophers can’t have
families. I’m not suited.
Infants disturb reflection. They want to play all day and you
know how I like
playing. I have to try to be serious,
very
serious. I can have no distractions. I have to write thousands
upon thousands of
words.... I cannot be a proper father as
well.... and if I
cannot be a proper father I will be none at all.
YOUNG THÉRÈSE. Then I will not be a mother for a fourth time! I will
be me little one’s coffin! (Shouting, screaming.) Explain
this to your society friends. Your maid’s stiff with an unborn,
dead child inside her. They’ll all know it’s yours, if it don’t come out the right way it’ll come out the wrong
way. I do not mean to be obstinate Jean
Jacques, but I will keep this child, or I won’t go on. (Shrieks
with pain.)
Mme LEVASSEUR. In the name of God say something to
satisfy her
Monsieur.
My child will kill herself.
Mlles GOUIN. It’s life or death Monsieur!
JEAN JACQUES. Thérèse push! (Solicitous,
earnest.) No I cannot,
I cannot, I cannot lose
you, you hold my life together! (Announced
as a personal discovery. Begins to cry.)
Your bravery challenges my good sense.... Yes we will have this
child.... flesh of our flesh, you said.
Thérèse you’re right, I am wrong, I do want this child.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Promise! Promise
me! (Crying,
screaming.)
JEAN JACQUES. Please Thérèse! Do this for me! Feel my hand upon
your belly. I am the oracle, the lawgiver, you infect me
with
sublime reason. I will have this miracle so as to educate all
children. If it’s a boy we will call him Emile and I
will dedicate a book to his education, if a girl.... I like Sophie. What do you think?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Promise!
JEAN JACQUES. Yes, I promise.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. On the good book!
JEAN JACQUES. Yes.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Mother fetch the book! On your father’s honour!
JEAN JACQUES. Yes.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. On the life of Mme de Warens,
your beloved
“Maman”!
JEAN JACQUES. Yes!
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. On this book!
JEAN JACQUES. I swear. Live!
Live! Push Thérèse! Push!
(Blackout. Electronic hum, louder than before, shutting
out everything, like a baby in a black bin-liner. Lights. OLD THÉRÈSE
enters, addressing the guillotine, front stage, looking up.)
OLD
THÉRÈSE. “The terror!”
Like God’s soles... rough and
corny
justice... a great weight from on high...
falling free... a sledge
from the summit... us giant people...
revenge for all their sins.
It’s the waiting, the suspense, all
this time, still not begun,
doing practice falls, showing them the
lightning, terrifying them and we get more and more worked up... it’s all over
in a slice... (Turns to the audience.) For a long time after, I didn’t think
I’d get worked up ever again. I went
sullen, numb, into myself. When I had my
fifth, I didn’t make no trouble. After that there were no more. He robbed me of the whole brood. Sucked all the life out of
me. Blew me up
and down so many times until I was just a flabby old bag. Bundled them up, bothered to put a monogram
in for the first one, and he carried them to the door of the Sisters of St
Vincent de Paul. Five times he must have
knocked on that door. “Foundlings!” I must have been deep asleep.... And then
later... on a mission... in the valley of Montmorency,
where the high and mighty had given him a hermitage to think in and me a
kitchen with which to feed him... I
seemed to awaken! (Said as though she had seen a vision, like
Jean d’Arc.)
(Pastoral lights to
centre stage OLD THÉRÈSE looking on,
enter Mme d’EPINAY and YOUNG THÉRÈSE.)
Mme d’EPINAY. Thérèse where are you going girl on
my land. Come
Walk with me! (Matriarchal,
assertive, condescending.)
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. (Out of breath.)
I can’t Madame. I have to
deliver a letter.
Mme d’EPINAY. For your master?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Yes Madame. I’m
on my way to Eaubonne.
Mme d’EPINAY. To Comtesse
d’Houdetot?
YOUNG THÉRÈSE.
It is Madame. The letter is for her.
Mme d’EPINAY. You
are obtuse Thérèse; you have an odd way of
understanding. The Comtesse is my
sister-in-law, did you know
this?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Yes Madame, but she is not very like Monsieur
d’Epinay.
Mme d’EPINAY. You
have met with her then?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. She has visited at the Hermitage, twice.
Mme d’EPINAY. Twice! I will walk with you Thérèse, a little of the
way. What did you think of the Comtesse,
Thérèse?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. I did not know what to think of her Madame. On
her first visit she was all covered
with mud. Her coach got stuck
at Clairvaux
mill, they were taking the short-cut.
She had to get out and walk. We
stripped her altogether and she went home in my clothes. I don’t know what she thought of them. And
the second time she arrived on horseback, dressed like a man. She hasn’t returned me clothes yet, I expect
she thinks they’re rags. (Laughs.) Jean Jacques was not too impressed the second
time. I don’t think he likes that sort
of thing... although he told me his own mother used to dress as a man... to be
allowed to see the players out on the streets in Geneva... otherwise it was not
permitted for women down there. Sorry I
seem to be wandering.
Mme d’EPINAY. You
call your master, Jean Jacques, Thérèse, a little
familiar is it not?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. We are familiar Mme d’Epinay.
Mme d’EPINAY. So
I have heard! Is your master writing
anything at
present in my
Hermitage?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. He’s being a right good, little hermit.
Mme d’EPINAY. So?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. I believe it’s called “Julie” Madame. He reads it to
mother and me in the
evenings.
Mme d’EPINAY. And
do you like it?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Mother doesn’t, but she says if it pays the bills
where’s the harm. As for myself it reminds me of things and
makes me cry. Jean Jacques thinks it must be very tender
and
moving.
It’s about Wolmar and Julie? All they do is write love-letters to each
other. I think it would be better if
they got down to business as they do in the books Monsieur Gauffecourt
shows me[xxiii].
Mme d’EPINAY. And is it a love letter you carry to Comtesse
d’Houdetot?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. I should hardly think so. Her face is pitted with
small pox. Her complexion is coarse. She’s short-sighted and
her eyes are like
saucers without tea cups.
Mme d’EPINAY. You
underestimate her Thérèse. She’s very
accomplished and she
attracts men. I would say her figure is
very neat, and her
hair.... is a torrent of black curls flowing to
her knees you know.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. I did see Madame, when she was stripped, but I
thought she was more
like a black, shaggy sheep than a
waterfall, if you
will not take offence, seeing she’s flock.
Mme d’EPINAY. I
will remember that Thérèse (Laughs.) And
it’s her
wit that draws gentlemen, and her
dancing, and her piano playing to say nothing of the pretty verses that she
writes. And Monsieur Rousseau has not noticed? I’m pleased. The two of us will
share him, you for basics and me for a meeting of minds! (Laughs.) Anyway the Comtesse already has a lover, Saint-Lambert, a very
physical and jealous young man, but I wouldn’t put it past her to try out the
latest mind-teaser, just for amusement, just to prove she is clever enough.
(Lights dim on
centre stage and return to OLD THÉRÈSE:
musing)
OLD
THÉRÈSE. (sits down and talks to the audience) After she
gave up keeping up, I parked my bum on
her grass and had a
little think. Eventually my suspicions got the better of me
and I
decided to open the bloody letter, which I
was carrying so
dutifully and not for the first time... I
struggled with the words,
but I was able to make it out. Some words stuck, glued to my
brain like sawdust. (All
the quotes in JEAN JACQUES’ manner, highly impassioned.) “Beloved
Sophie!” as if I would have had any of my children called by her name! “You
intoxicate my sight. When I’m near you
I’m seized with delightful shiverings. O
contagious power of love.” Well that
was just Jean Jacques being a soft shit.
A woman in her birth fever goes over the top, and I’d come to think
perhaps it was right a philosopher
should feel free and not have to bother with family, after all really we was
only employees and he was providing some sort of living for us, but to write
about me, to her! And those hoity toities didn’t like Thérèse. “You
ask about Thérèse and our
relationship.” This I remember! “From the first moment when I saw her up to
this day, I never felt the least spark of love for her. The sensual needs, which I satisfy in her
person, are only for me those of sexual impulse, without being in any way connected with the individual.” He was lying, of course, habitually, the way
servants do. “As you may well imagine we do not have sufficient ideas in common to
make a great stock in conversation.” Well that was a soup I would have relieved
myself in. “Our conversation is just gossip, scandal and
feeble jokes, as operatic as washerwomen.
When living as a hermit one feels the advantage of living with someone
who knows how to think, as do you, my angel Sophie.”.... It was a pretty
day... about a league from the Hermitage to Eaubonne...
the name alone was enough to draw him there... and I was a strong walker, still
am, that’s one thing kept us together, not that he knew.... thick about the down to earth, Jean
Jacques. Mme d’Epinay
said, “the little Levasseur is jealous” and that I was
“the sly peasant type”. (Looking back to Mme d’Epinay.)
So! I became a Jacobin, before my time, probably because I could never
learn to tell it. At Eubonne,
when I strolled in, I bumped into Saint Lambert, breasts first. I pretended to be sobbing and showed him the
letter. He so much couldn’t bear to
think of the Comtesse with Jean Jacques that he was
compelled to comfort me, very eloquently.
Gave me his shoulder to weep on, made me look up into his eyes and let
me sigh my healthy breath, all fresh from the walk and
the Montmorency air, into his flaring nostrils. That put an end to the Comtesse
and the hermit. When push came to shove
Jean Jacques was no match for Saint Lambert.
And I should know! Mme d’Houdetot preferred a poke to a pen. I, on the other hand, preferred having
someone to torment, someone to go round the bend with... all my life.
(Lights backstage,
the bed, ROUSSEAU on all fours at the foot
of the bed, YOUNG THÉRÈSE bending over him, belt in hand, cries
of anguish from ROUSSEAU, intermittent dog barking: OLD THÉRÈSE
looks on)
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. And when we were in Paris and newly together did
you, with Klüpfel and Grimm, used to go to the room of a twelve
year old girl and
take turns with her, one after the other?
JEAN JACQUES. Yes, I did. (Lash.)
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Baby-bonker! And you shagged with Mme de
Luxembourg and Mme de Chenonceaux
and Mme d’Epinay and
Mme de Boufflers,
to say nothing of the yak d’Houdetot?
JEAN JACQUES. Yes, Lieutenant Criminel!
(Trance- like.)
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. So, by your own admission, that’s five more
lashes. (Lashes
and screams.) And then you
confess to
shagging Mamam, Mme de Warens, the tender
heart who took
you in a waif and
homeless, and whom you clung to as the
dearest mother a boy
could wish for.
JEAN JACQUES. It is true aunt. It is true.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Another four for a mother-bonker.
(Lashes.)
JEAN JACQUES. Do with me as you think fit nurse.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Don’t think you get off that easily. Don’t be silly
enough to believe in justice and symmetry
and fancy dress.
You made that mistake once
before. I will have much more than is
fit, I will have you howling mad. How
many for all the others whose names you cannot remember? Enough to make your back rise up like your
Swiss Alps? What will you spit on for
me?
JEAN JACQUES. Anything.
Demand any penance. I do not deserve
any mercy.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Spit on the King of France, spit on his name.
JEAN JACQUES. I do Thérèse. (Spits.)
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Spit on the Arts, all that painting and music and
literature.
Never did the likes of me any good.
Spit on all I have had to suffer for living with a fartist.
JEAN JACQUES. I spit.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Not that it’s been living. Spit on the Sciences and
Diderot’s Encyclopaedia.... for all I have had
to suffer in the
name of progress.
JEAN JACQUES. Look at me, I do.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. Spit on civilisation!
Spit on all aristocrats who
have ever lived! Spit on all the swanky, furry muff you’ve
ever
fingered! And when you cum, cum on all your tumblings,
your
operas, your music,
your romances. When you play willing
court jester to the
high and mighty you betray us. You
betray
the unnoticed. I want all this spit and cum in your writings
from
now on.... otherwise
I’ll brain you.... with the chamber-pot! (Said with menace, as
though she has one to hand.)
(Electronic hum and
clanking together, lights out back space, front space lit, acoustic fades: OLD
THÉRÈSE turns to audience.)
OLD
THÉRÈSE. The first skinny soul gets pushed onto the
deck.
(Looking at
guillotine.) The endings are to begin. The priest
approaches like a
black quill. The blindfold is proffered
and the
silk hose is torn,
some twitching, some white bum showing.
(Changing the subject, or seeming to.) And I made
something of Jean
Jacques. I pushed him further and
further.
I got on his back day and night and drove him,
further than the
donkey would have
ever dared go. Closer and closer to the
unspeakable, nearer
and nearer to breaking a leg, each time
risking just a little
bit more, so that all we could talk about were the miseries of his life.
JEAN
JACQUES. (Comes to
front stage, talking as though to Hamlet’s ghost. Seeking approval and
justification.) They will not understand that my
enterprise is descriptive, explanatory, not
prescriptive. I do not advocate
revolution. I merely grope towards a
science of society, an enterprise of the new Enlightenment. When I speak of the general will I speak of a
social dynamic, a force within society, something as omnipresent as the force
of gravity, something that will make a difference no matter what. Of course only that society which is fully
under the dictates of the general will can be fully free and happy, but I am
not saying this is a realisable utopia.
No social order can hope to be permanent. The general will is latent, exerting an
effect. It should be understood this is
what I am saying. I am a social
scientist, neutral, like Hobbes, only with a different analysis.
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
(To the
audience.) I became much more than a
bedroom game. I was not to be denied revolution just
because
half of Jean Jacques
would doff his Armenian turban to the
perfumed persecutors
of the hoi polloi. So I encouraged him
to
be the little
piss-taker he really was. I would say to
him, “I
don’t know what
you’re going on about most of the time.
If it’s
not clear, no one’s
going to listen to you! What you should
say,
is: - if us servants
and peasants and artisans ruled the world it
would be a different
place and that’s what we want, not a better
place... just a bit
of a change. The king and his cronies are
all
nobs and impostors
and they’ve imposed on us long enough, we
want everything at
our level. How do you write that down
in a
book? Come on you’re
the professional.” (She turns to ROUSSEAU.)
JEAN JACQUES. I
suppose you would say “Might is not right” and “the
general will is
sovereign”.
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
That says
what I’ve just said?
JEAN JACQUES. It
does. More or less.
(YOUNG
THÉRÈSE enters from back and walks forward
to address ROUSSEAU.)
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Then in book
form that is the most scandalous,
unthinkable thing
anyone could publish right now! What do you
want to be Jean
Jacques, a hack or the most original
revolutionary of your
time? A boy who could piss in the soup
is
a man who could drop
shit on the throne. (Addresses the
audience.)
And after he published all the things I wanted, like
saying art was
tossing for nobs, and kings had no God-given
rights, and the
rabble knew best, and even if they didn’t who
cares, and that
wealth was always theft somehow or other, and
that children,
wherever they are, should be brought up as
peasants, well! they went and threw his books at him! (Laughs.)
That’s what fancy knickers do when you’re really messing with their privates.
(Blackout.
Crowd noise, clanking, hum, drums, horses: lights: OLD
THÉRÈSE takes to her chair flanked by the citizens: a tumbrel of guys -Guy Fawkes, in lewd poses, balloons for heads- and a large
basket are brought by the cast to the guillotine, centre space.)
CITIZEN
2.
Hold my hand
Madame, the first head is about to fall.
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
Citizen, I need both my hands to cover my eyes.
CITIZEN
2.
Can’t you
bear to watch Madame?
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
Oh! I watch Monsieur, through the bars. (She
jumps to her feet, addresses the cast and
the audience,
she has a demented presence.) We
came to know what it
was to be prisoners, never free less on
the run. At Neufchatel,
after his books was burnt in Paris and Parlement issued a
warrant for his arrest, we was cornered,
just like those
shivering bodies waiting there in the death carts. But we had some protection. From Frederick
the Great! A king! King of
Prussia. Just what Jean Jacques was all about. But it didn’t
last. King’s are fickle. And the authorities had stirred up a mob
against us.
Mobs are fickle. They used to come
to the little
house in the middle of the night. I don’t think Madame Boy de
la Tour was best pleased when they
bricked all her windows.
Nice little house she lent us. She fancied some literary fondant.
I was beside myself when they were baying for blood
and
bunging
missiles. I wanted Jean Jacques on his
knees but by
then we was the same
thing, like ivy’s part of the tree it
strangles. They wanted both our brains bashed out. (She
rushes forward.)
CITIZEN
1.
Madame! (In consternation.)
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
Let go of me Jean Jacques. I will give them a taste
of my foul tongue.
(Voices in the
crowd, but ghostly, like voices from long ago.)
Foul
mouthed slut!
Seen ‘em
through the window... at it like Satanists!
Bleedin’ writers never do a stroke of work!
Spongers! Traitors!
The
Antichrist! The Antichrist!
(One of the guys is
guillotined, the crowd untying the balloon head and solemnly placing it in the
basket: the sound of breaking glass in a remembered space, breakage after
breakage, dog barking.)
SCARAMOUCHE. (From the audience and to
the audience, pointing.) Headlines! The tops are coming off! The
tops are coming off! See all about it!. We are showing
you, showing you now. Some girls are delish they bend like sticks of liquorice!
OLD THÉRÈSE. (Screaming,
directly at audience.) Poxy
peasants! You need your souls inquisited! Your heads lopped! Do you really think his majesty cares whether
you live or die?
CITIZEN
1.
Madame,
Madame Rousseau, are you alright? Come sit
down, these sights
can churn the jelly.
CITIZEN
2.
I’ll put an
arm around her.
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
I thought I heard something.
CITIZEN
1.
You did, the roar for a header, a bucketed, red ball.
Jack-in-the -Bins
1, Aristhrottleds 0.
It’ll be a bit of a red wash
today.
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
I thought I saw something Citizen.
CITIZEN
1.
Well you’ve
only to open his flies Madame.
OLD THÉRÈSE. Will you brush the glass from my
hair citizen?
CITIZEN
2.
My
pleasure Madame.
CITIZEN
1.
(Whispering.) Is she all bare, Citizen?
CITIZEN
2.
Here or
there, it’s all the same to me.
OLD THÉRÈSE. Nice, your hand is nice, mn!
keep it there. (To
herself.)
Any hand
will do to stoke the fire. My poke
caught fire when they was to excommunicate us. Hell fire!
Perhaps it was my age though, or one more thing to bait Jean Jacques
with.
(Pause.)
What a to-do with men. Only John Bally was really up to it, he’s
still with me, here in Paris, only he
gets pissed most nights: that’s another story.
And what about Boswell? What did he say about me, (Pause)
SCARAMOUCHE?
(SCARAMOUCHE leaps, startled, from his seat with the audience to side
space, front.)
SCARAMOUCHE.
(Stuttering.) I did not nod off, ever vigilant
like Microsoft’s Office Assistant. I have to pretend that I’m shocked. To be
addressed by the cast! The director yes! But the star of our
show? Well! What am I to tell you? (To
the audience.) You
will have your revenge won’t you? (To OLD THÉRÈSE.) Our play might be called The Making of
a Shrew.
OLD
THÉRÈSE. What did Boswell say about me? (With
impatience.)
SCARAMOUCHE.
He sang your praises dear. You see (To
the audience.) what happened was, our Jean Jacques, in fright and madness,
fled as fast as he could to the asylum for the insane, well England, leaving
her behind, but sending for her, because by then he couldn’t wipe his whatever
without her giving a hand. And David, David Hume, you know the famous
philosophical sceptic, who’d had a nervous breakdown himself by the way, and
who had arranged Jean Jacques’ English asylum, secured her a chaperone for the
journey, by the name of James Boswell. That’s right, that Boswell, Johnson’s
acolyte, but, as they say, a man worth remembering in his own right. David was
a bit sceptical about him though. He thought James a very good humoured and
agreeable young gentleman but also very mad and with a rage for literature,
which David equated, and quite rightly, with being a bit of a letch. David said
he dreaded some event that would be fatal to Mademoiselle’s honour. Mmn! And after the event this James Boswell turned out to
be less of a letch and more of a miserable and vindictive would-be libertine,
saying about our Thérèse that she seduced him 13 times between Paris and
London, and that he poor man had to drink to sustain his fading virility, and
that he couldn’t understand how Jean Jacques could be so besotted with her to
think her many children his. But the truth is, as Thérèse keeps telling me,
James Boswell was not up to the normal passion of a healthy woman, nor are most
men she says, and so these men, of course I’m one of the exceptions, put it
about that women who are their natural selves are just whores. Whatever that means!
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
Well at least Boswell tried.... as we
crossed the English drain, in a storm, in a
tub. Jean Jacques
was gone to England, but he wasn’t
going to get away from Thérèse that easily. I hadn’t finished with him then, or
for a long time after.
(Lights
dim. YOUNG THÉRÈSE and JAMES
BOSWELL enter front space, spot. They take from tumbrel a male and female
guy: with these guys they mime the substance of their conversation: sound of a
gale rages. Rest of cast mime, slowly, restocking tumbrel, sombre, repetitive,
slow-motion executions.)
JAMES BOSWELL. Well,
I’m the son of a laird, James Boswell,
offspring of Lord Auchinleck, si I maight have some difficulty
statisfinin
ya. Do ya demand satisfaction, or kin ya
take it oor
leave it?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Oh I take it
and can’t leave it darlin’.
JAMES BOSWELL. Well,
I kin certainly help you find yer man.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Oh! I’ve
found my man. So, show me the nob of
a laird.
JAMES BOSWELL. Ni
laird, I’m the son of a laird, but I kin shew you
the nob of a laird’s son, if you’ll shew me a tail in a tub, and as
swiftly as you ken, please... Well that’s
fine, I’ve ni objection to
that whatsooever.
Would ye like to come and sit the nob and we’ll let pitch and toss of
the mer di the work. (Energetic sexual intercourse between
the guys: all of them on all fours.) And
how meeny
times is that?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
I’m not very
good at counting, especially when
I’m conjugating.
JAMES BOSWELL. I meke it
seven Thérèse. Would you di me the
honour of ain eighth?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
You won’t
expire on me?
JAMES BOSWELL. Weel, will di this
one for Corsica[xxiv]
and Rousseau,
t’will fuel a revolutionary passion. I’m soore that’s
twelve.
And hew was a Scot for you, was I greet?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
James
the Great? Sorry, don’t think so. More
like Robert the
Bruce. I’ll give you marks for blind
pestilence.
JAMES BOSWELL. Ni better than an insect then?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Not even as
good as a fartist.
(She pushes him
to one side, he goes off to the
tumbrel, returning the
guys for execution: YOUNG
THÉRÈSE takes the audience
into her confidence.) And
when he’d finished exertions, he
loaded me with more teasels and brambles
for her once upon a
time...(looking back at OLD THÉRÈSE) us riding out rest of
storm, him reading to me. William Shakespeare? About a
heath and a hovel and a hurricane. So later, with Boswell’s
Sassenachs, I was able to play fool
to the loony lawgiver. We
was in all the
papers, well, in the Lost and Found[xxv].
SCARAMOUCHE. Some girls are a thicket of delight they cast off their knickers every
night!
(Formal voice.) On May the 1st 1767 Jean Jacques and Thérèse
Levasseur fled in haste and fear their asylum at Wooton
Hall in Derbyshire. They left their baggage behind. Unfamiliar with English
geography they took various circuitous conveyances, travelled part of the way
on foot, and for ten days were lost to the world! The newspapers advertised
their disappearance. On May the 11th they turned up at Spalding in
Lincolnshire.
(YOUNG
THÉRÈSE climbs to her feet: cast members hurry to bring her a cloak,
which she pulls around her: cast continue slow-miming the executions: ROUSSEAU
in heavy overcoat enters and clasps her in his arms: the gale continues. They
occupy front space. SCARAMOUCHE remains to the side, looking on.)
JEAN JACQUES. And
you saw Davenport’s man sprinkling my
omelette with
arsenic.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
I told you,
yes! White powder,
yes. I knows
arsenic when I sees
it. My dad used it for vermin.
JEAN JACQUES. Then
it was imperative we left that miserable
house.
Wooton Hall!
I hate the name. Hume said it would be like a chateau. I can only think his knowledge of French is
entirely apriori. It is so wretchedly
wet and windy in this country. Where are
we?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
It’s this
way to the sea.
JEAN JACQUES. What
is it called and what is the name of the place
we seek?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
I don’t know
names.
JEAN JACQUES. We
have come without any luggage Thérèse.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
I have the
money, that’s all we need for now.
JEAN JACQUES. Why
should we go to the sea?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
How do you
think we got here?
JEAN JACQUES. By
getting lost?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Across the
sea!
JEAN JACQUES. But
you need a boat.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
And where do
you find boats?
JEAN JACQUES. Do
you not think we should locate a town?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
There will
be a town. Spalding!
JEAN JACQUES. You
have a name then. And you really think they
were going to poison
me?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Spalding
doesn’t sound like much of a name to
me.
JEAN JACQUES. Sounds
like a verb of torture. They want me to
die
an agonising
death. Hume hates me, Walpole hates me,
Johnson despises me, Davenport spalds me. No one
likes me.
How can one so innocent, so free of any moral
fault be so
disliked? It is envy.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Keep an eye
out for bears. They said in this
country there are
bears on the way to the sea.
JEAN JACQUES. Listen Thérèse. Do I hear one? Something roars.
(In a panic.)
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
It’s just
the wind. It’s a naughty night for
swimming uncle.
(Intimate tone, sustained in ensuing
dialogue, slow
delivery.)
JEAN JACQUES. Why
do you call me uncle?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
You call me
aunt. Aunt or uncle, brother or sister,
husband and wife what
do titles matter, that’s what you say,
what you’ve
written. It’s a brave night to cool a
courtesan. Slip
into this
field..... Standing in mud and water up
to our
ankles.... (Whispering.) Let me make a church tower out of a
knave.... Do you like bloody brambles around your arse?
JEAN JACQUES. Should
we not to our purpose Thérèse?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
What’s
purpose? You long to be as free as a
headless eel.
JEAN JACQUES. Ordinarily,
yes, but, there is a storm in my mind
and I’m wet to the
flesh and this is barbarous terrain and there
are bears and who is
to say the rain is not poisoned.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Can you not
feel the barb scratching yer
parchment, is it not
all adding up?
JEAN JACQUES. Why
you being so cruel to me? What have I
done to
you for you to treat
me so badly? Why do you torment me?
Why must you always increase my size? How can I let you
work me up so? (Rhetorical.) Why do you go with others
Thérèse? (Pointed.) Did you go with Davenport’s man? When I was writing down my “Confessions”, I
thought I heard you with him, somewhere in that empty house, or was it the
natural
breathing of English oak? Say it was just the living boards and not you
being wooed!
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE. In Woo ton Hall. His name was
Daniel.
JEAN JACQUES. You
do not know names.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Place names,
I know the names of persons well
enough. Daniel!
Shall I say it again? There I
knew you’d like
it. Daniel!
Oh! Daniel how
big. Can you not stand this?
JEAN JACQUES. Promise.
Never again Thérèse. No more Daniels.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Oh! it’s promises now is it?
Promises you’re
wanting? Well, maybe, if you beg me to marry. I know it’s
against your
principles, but come on try and I’ll train this
bramble to come up
between your legs. How’s that poor Tom?
JEAN JACQUES. Prickly.
Then marry me Thérèse! And this
will be
the last time with
that Daniel. Was he... fine?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Very
fine. Asinine.
JEAN JACQUES. We
will marry. I will arrange it. Make you mine,
only for me. I can’t bear you with this Daniel. It enrages me.
Look Thérèse!
And I’m full of water.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Then I’ll
lead you round the field like a carrot in a
donkey’s
mouth.... now you’re up for it, like a
sail in a tempest.
He
that has a little tiny dip
With
heigh, ho, the wind and the rain,
Must
make content with his fortune fit,
Though
the rain it raineth every day.
Boswell was a big dipper. Shall I tell?
SCARAMOUCHE. It’s the Punch and Judy Ride.
(Spot off. SCARAMOUCHE rejoins audience. Table moved to
front space, draped in heavily embroidered curtain: church bells: YOUNG
THÉRÈSE and ROUSSEAU at the table,
divested of cloak and overcoat. Spot on them. Dimly lit main
space, cast pause slow- miming of the executions and look on.)
JEAN JACQUES. A fresh Spring-like morning
Thérèse. I feel a new
beginning.
We will rise above the commonplace.
But no tawdry, priest-bugged wedding for us. It is our own contract, in our own
words. In centuries to come others will
follow our example. What is a wedding? What is a marriage? What part does a society have in the intimate
transactions of two souls? Whose business is it but ours? We make promises, categorical promises to
each other. This morning we will be
wed. I weep that our betrothal has been
so long, but today we will be Monsieur and Madame Rousseau. There!
I acknowledge you, in the eyes of the world.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
(Yawning.) Bliss! To be married in Bourgoin,
such a little town,
where we only arrived last night, where we
know absolutely no
one. How did you think of this? You are a
man of your word Jean
Jacques. What arrangements have you
made? (THÉRÈSE’s words delivered as though humouring a
child.)
Jean Jacques. I
wrote all night.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
And?
JEAN JACQUES. The
wedding contract! Our treaty with each
other,
which we will
sign. And I have on my best Armenian
costume,
see, a little twirl,
mademoiselle.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
But my
luggage is lost again. If I’m to be a
bride,
what am I to wear?
JEAN JACQUES. That
is a nuisance, to say nothing of the expense I
will be forced to
bear, but for now I have taken down one of the
curtains. I know it seems not very much but an Indian
sari is all
in the tucks and it
will go very nicely with my outfit.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Well, I’d
better get tucking. (But does’nt
bother.)Which church is it to be at?
JEAN JACQUES. We
have no need of a church. We will be
married
here, in our room, at
the Fontaine d’Or, what could be more
appropriate,
confidential?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
You sure
this thing will be legal? Who’s to say
anything is
undertaken if there are no witnesses.
JEAN JACQUES. You
want there to be witnesses?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Well it
would make it a bit more like something
real don’t you think?
JEAN JACQUES. No
problem. We’ll utilise the natural
justice of the
street. Wait there, no! bind
yourself in the sari, in readiness.
(ROUSSEAU
jumps into the audience, his task to persuade two persons to come on stage, he
furnishes them with their few lines of dialogue. If the audience is too few in
number the cast is press-ganged)
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
(Singing.) Autrefois le rat de ville
Invita le rat de
champs,
D’une facon fort civile,
A des reliefs d’ortolans.
(See
attachments.)
(Enter ROUSSEAU
with two members of the audience or cast.)
JEAN JACQUES. Such luck Thérèse.
Downstairs at the bar, these
gentlemen.
Unbelievable luck, the mayor of Bourgoin and
his
friend Monsieur...?
MONSIEUR. Trésivre,
Mademoiselle. Very pleethed
to meet with
you.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Very. (With
irony.)
JEAN JACQUES. Gentlemen,
the bride! You have’nt dressed, no
matter!
The
MAYOR.
You’d better
be for real mate. If not you’ll get a
good
kicking.
JEAN JACQUES. You
see how it is when you involve the law,
Thérèse. Let us proceed to the treaty between us,
which these
good gentlemen will
witness. There should be music.
(Suggestions of foul
songs from the busy cast.)
No matter.
I will officiate. On this day
26th August 1768, Jean Jacques Rousseau citizen of Geneva and Thérèse Levasseur
of Orleans marry with each other in the town of Bourgoin
at the establishment of the Fontaine d’Or, before these witnesses here present,
later to be signatories to this treaty.
We, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thérèse Levasseur, affirm the following:
there is one chain, a chain which we shall ever wear, of which we may be
justly proud and which binds us
together: liberty is not to be found in any form of government, she is in the
heart of the free man and woman, it is on this ground we chain ourselves: our
love is founded on esteem which will last with life itself, on virtues which will not fade with fading beauty, on
fitness of character which gives a charm
to intercourse and will sustain us into old age: we are united until death do
us part: our hearts are bound, and to
each other we owe utmost fidelity: in marriage the man is the woman’s head and it is her duty to
obey as is the will of nature, but where the woman is with virtue a man will be
led by her: a woman controls a man by controlling herself, by making her
favours scarce and precious, keeping him in her power by keeping herself at a
distance: a happily married man honours his wife’s chastity without having to
complain of her coldness…
The
MAYOR.
I’m warnin’ im, if he doesn’t get on
with it he’s going to
get a hammerin. Do you hear
me mush? Get finished!
JEAN JACQUES. (Accelerating.) ...inevitably pleasures are
destroyed by
possession, and love above all others, but in its
place a gentle habit
and the charm of confidence prevail: we will
live for the charms
of home life and if the husband is happy at
home his wife will be
a happy wife: this treaty is signed with
mutual kissing.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Lovely Jean
Jacques! And to think you stayed up
all night to write it! And just in case I might have misunderstood
what you intend. Well, we’d better get signing.
JEAN JACQUES. It
is what you wanted?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Well, it’s
better than ... no ring!
JEAN JACQUES. I
have a ring. Look.
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
Don’t
fit. (Amused.)
JEAN JACQUES. Try
it on your little finger. There you are. Perfect!
It will impede you less.
The
MAYOR.
I’ve had
enough of this! Beer money or I’ll have
you
out the window!
JEAN JACQUES. Monsieur
le Mayor, your signature and the purse is
yours to share. You can sign?
Well, a mark will do.
MONSIEUR. Can I snog the bride?
YOUNG
THÉRÈSE.
If you call
me Madame Rousseau you can.
Madame Rousseau is who I am and I’ll
ram it down the gizzard
of anyone who says otherwise. This is what you intended husband, isn’t it? (Kisses the MONSIEUR.)
(Blackout: fog horn
drowning out all else then clanking, interspersed with the fall of the
guillotine and the crowd’s roar: guillotining restored to full lighting OLD
THÉRÈSE still in chair with her CITIZENS.)
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
(In and out of her mind, various
voices in her
head.) Now
they’re coming, thick and fast, this is what I likes,
one after t’other, heads scattering like boule, blood splattered
muck.
JEAN JACQUES. (Comes to stand behind her chair,
ghost-like,
desperate.) My
belly adores your soup wife, it worships your
boiled beef and veal,
it prays for your cabbage, it hymns your
turnips, it choirs
your carrots, it communes with your pickled
trout, it benedict’s
for your fruit and chestnuts.
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
You like some things about me then? (Out
loud,
involuntary, only OLD
THÉRÈSE is aware
of ROUSSEAU.)
CITIZEN
2.
Everything
Madame.
JEAN JACQUES. (Leans over talking
intimately to her.) More
than some things
Thérèse! During the years of our union,
my
dear, I have sought
happiness only in yours: I have sought
only to make you
happy. And I perceive with sorrow that
success has not
attended my efforts..... My dear friend, not
only have you ceased
to find pleasure in my company, but it
seems to be a great
trial for you even to spend a few moments
with me, out of
regard for me. You are happy with
everyone
but me; all who
surround you know your secrets but me.
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
Secrets? Well the valet, John, at Ermenonville,
knew
how my title
tickled. I turned it into one of my “odd
expressions” ...mad amorousseau...
sex mad (Giggles.) What a mouthful.... that John was! (Laughs.) Is!
Never kept my taste-studs secret from Jean Jacques though, especially
during manual work... (The guillotine falls.) Oh! my god.
CITIZEN
1.
You can cook
cow. Axe-man’s severed the threads by
which it hung.
CITIZEN
2.
She’s
grinning!
(The guillotine
falls again.)
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
Oh! my god, not
another one!
VOICES. Down
with the nobs!
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
Off with their nobs! (Shouts to the crowd.)
JEAN JACQUES. (More desperate.) And
if I were to die Thérèse,
promise me to have
nothing to do with priests. Priests come
to
women when their
husbands die. Nor have anything to do
with
great persons, I know
too many great persons and they will
come to comfort
you. Particularly beware of literary
men, they
have no sincerity and
will be intent on enacting what they have
imagined. You should retire to the depths of a small
province,
or some small city
like Blois or even Orleans.
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
Citizen a word in your ear? After the death of his
divinity, all the great persons of the
revolution came before me,
and for his soul’s peaceful repose I
lapped them up. (Laughing
as though drunk.)
CITIZEN
2.
Madame
Rousseau, a hand on the gallows’ pole.
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
You’re
bigger than you look.
CITIZEN
2.
And a little
manual work!
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
Work you up then, you vile little sod, up, get
up,
there! (As
though speaking to a dog, looking back over
her shoulder at ROUSSEAU, but working
furiously on
CITIZEN 2.) A bougie
in the front, a bougie in the back, a
bougie
biting flesh... and I lie back and let
John see the bush,
in full view,
stretched on the rack, and anything he wanted to
do with me. Traitor
to your class, traitor to your children,
traitor to me, and
John dips me like fondue: I’ll bring you to
see... snivelling
strings of snot! Come on! How much more
can you stand? How many times must I do this to you before
you die? Why don’t you die? Drink!
Drink! As I pull and pull,
you drink and
drink! Arsenic? Strychnine? Have I? (The
hum,
the clanking, the
rush of the guillotine increases in
intensity.) How
about your heart bursting? Your brain
seized
with apoplexy? Me handiwork sounds like a roll on the drum.
(Narrative building
with process at guillotine.) Up! Up!
Higher! Into the mountains! Harder! Longer! Longer than a
horse, climbing your
Mount Pilat. You may never return once upon a time, for all the hurt you’ve
done me. You may never return, for all the hurt my sex endures, once upon a
time. Shall I? This time? The last
time? Shall I make it the last time? Shall you choose and do I do this
just because I hate, or because I love, as I always have, as you don’t
deserve? Will I have? Had the courage? Or just imagined on the day it
coincides? Or are we mad? Driven each other mad, so we can’t tell tails
from nobs?
CITIZEN
2.
Oh that is
very good Madame. You are some kind of
expert in arte amoris. For
perfection, as the blade descends,
manic vigour on the
drum!
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
There are too many voices in me head Monsieur.
They all come back to crazy me.
(ROUSSEAU
and YOUNG THÉRÈSE make their way back to the bed and settle into
sex. Executions end. Crowd exits, pulling tumbrel to one
side.)
(As
voices in head, pre-recorded.)
BONNEFOND.
Thérèse
Levastsewer.
JEAN JACQUES. I choose it Thérèse.
Not left, right!
Push
Thérèse. Live. Right!
MARAT. At the birth of supreme being.
JEAN JACQUES. I never felt the least
spark of love for her.
VOICES
IN UNISON. Thérèse
Levastsewer.
JEAN JACQUES. I promise. I promise.
OLD
THÉRÈSE.
So I hit ‘im
Citizen. (Mimed by ROUSSEAU and
YOUNG THÉRÈSE.)
We was at Ermenonville thanks to
Monsieur de Girardin. Always borrowing somewhere
to live.
Jean Jacques was sixty six years old. He was bent over and I
was holding him, like
I’m holding you now, and I brought it
down upon his
head. It seemed the only way. I must have
done it, I’d thought
about it, so many times, just that way.
And the chamber pot was all broken over the
floor, like mosaic,
and a pool of blood
beside his bonks. “I arose and pierced
the
silence with me
screams,” that’s what they wrote.
Feathers
ruffled, scratching
at the floor like an enraged hen.
Monsieur
de Girardin came, we had locked the door, but he had a key....
he found me covered
with blood from my husband’s wound.
He
was my husband....
the most famous man in Europe.... to
whom I’d given everything and in the end
took it all back.
There was
lots of rumours. Some said he committed
suicide because he’d found out about me and John. Some said it was at the order of the
king. What was accepted, in the end, was
he’d
had a stroke and in the fall cracked
his head on the floor, on stone tiles. I
lay down beside him and put me arms around him. I
remember he was as cold as the floor in next to no time. Then
I cried and cried for the love of
women.... for the little nobody in Jean Jacques.... for all my babbies whether they live or not. But
how can a woman get sentimental in the
head when it’s her lot to always have her hands in goo and her ass on the nest?
CITIZEN
2.
Sorry
there’s so much of it Madame.
CITIZEN
1.
It was the
last slice of bread Madame. It’s a waste
of
young girls to take
off the head when their titties hang like
firkins.
CITIZEN
2.
And I’ve
been abstaining Madame. I will wipe it
clean for
you…. with my
neckerchief.
(Blackout: foghorn
blotting out everything that’s gone
before, fades.)
SCARAMOUCHE.
(From The audience.)
The remains of the
great
have a varied fate. On the 4th July 1778 Rousseau was buried, as
befits an artist, on the Ile des Peupliers, a tiny
island in the lake of the Parc Ermenonville. On the 9th October 1794 Rousseau’s remains
were removed from Ile des Peupliers and taken in
triumph, as befits a hero, to the Pantheon in Paris. In 1814, with the return of the Bourbons, his
remains were removed from the Pantheon and scattered as befits the unnoticed. Thérèse Levasseur, always largely unnoticed,
dropped off the world murmuring in her final sleep, with some regret, for some
reason or other...
OLD THÉRÈSE. (Spot: front stage. Behind her a basket
full of balloons, the heads of the guillotined.) Because
Rousseau did a poor girl
who did not know how to read or write the honour of having her wash his linen and cook his soup and at times share his bed – must this poor girl be
turned into a heroine? ... The widow
of Jean Jacques for all my life.... The
remains of doormats retain an
imprint of all the traffic of the world, and with the unnoticed everything is
noticed.
(Music: ROUSSEAU’S
“Chanson de Negre” [sound recording available from
Rousseau Association website,
http://www.rousseauassociation.org/music/ChansondeNegre.aiff: duration 1min 50secs
approx., fade up behind THÉRÈSE, she exits slowly.)
SCARAMOUCHE.
(Walks slowly to the spot vacated by
THÉRÈSE. He takes off the mask and unstuffs the
codpiece.) That’s
worse, reality! The moment of truth!
I’m not SCARAMOUCHE. I’m just an
actor. These words are not mine, they have been written, and I’ve done my best
with them. Did THÉRÈSE murder JJR,
as a matter of historical fact? There is some doubt about the cause of death
and it was rumoured. We on the other hand have made a point. It is the moral of
our story but our story is not moral. We say she killed him. And
why? This is a play that tells you what to think, and so, deeply
unfashionable, deeply and politically incorrect. We show and tell. Pictures
without titles are like are like fruit without seed. Of course,we should leave it up to you, not take sides, be
even handed, pluralist, bourgeois, democratic, fair. But we take sides and we
lecture. Without our play THÉRÈSE is
a barely discernible footnote to history. Her obscurity is not unique. Our play
could have been called CAMILLE DONCIEUX,
or HORTENSE FIQUET, or ROSE BEURAT[xxvi],
ad infinitum. Victims of Culture. Victims
of Class. Victims of Sexism. THÉRÈSE celebrates the identity of
indiscernibles, the mass of the unnoticed. This identity and this mass, like JEAN JACQUES’ General Will, is an
unseen, continuous, seismic pressure and then the Earth moves. It is a
principle to displace the Darwinian survival of the fittest, it is the survival
of what survives and the unnoticed survive by not being
noticed. THÉRÈSE LEVASSEUR, MADAME
ROUSSEAU, made the French Revolution, with others, the people, surrounded
by the fittest, their exploiters, their abusers, their dope dealers, surrounded
by the enemies of the people. If she killed, she killed as do the criminally
insane. To wipe out the moral order. To wipe out the pretence that we are not enemies. To wipe out the denial of reality’s impossibility. To liberate the nonsense of her love.
(About to walk off, then turns realising something has been forgotten.)
One
girl is a shrew she scolds like spurts of devil’s spew. Ours is a new form
Polonius... porno-tragical- comical. And, as I ask every night, had I been James Lablanche Stewart who would I have been?
Or.
Someone
(Or Someone else) should get a top prize (Or too). (Looks round the audience.) In
keeping with our play, a top prize then for the
person in the audience I have least noticed. (Takes a balloon and gives it to someone.) Sweet dreams all of you,
and choirs of incubi and succubi sing you to your rest! (Blackout.)
END
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[i] Not in recording. Requires
emphasised pointing.
[ii] Not explained until end of play and only then if
explained by audience.
[iii] Rousseau supports Opera Buffa
in the Querelle des Bouffons.
This dispute symbolic of fundamental discord in French
society. Rousseau himself thinking this dispute might lead to revolution!
[iv] Scaramouche with Stewart Granger.
[v] Le Devin du Village.
[vi] Words.
[vii] Mistaken.
[viii] Barking for ruff ruff,
glacier for just ice.
[ix] Pun.
[x] Think.
[xi] King and Queen.
[xii] Doughnuts.
[xiii] Rich for dough, nutters for nuts.
[xiv] Bread.
[xv] Sparing your feelings.
[xvi] Skin conditions, psoriasis.
[xvii] Play on Ma Rat
[xviii] Suppose.
[xix] Levastsewer not being a pun in French for Levasseur.
[xx] Play on pig in a poke (bag) and fucks.
[xxi] Being a pig.
[xxii] The Marquis de Sade was in the Bastille at the time of
the Revolution and used the sewage system, pipes from the cells to the moat
below, to address revolutionary mob.
[xxiii] Thérèse’s introduction to
pornography.
[xxiv] Rousseau wrote a constitution for Corsica which
impressed Boswell.
[xxv] For Strat.
This refers not to their loss of Sultan but to their getting lost in
Lincolnshire. Scaramouche clarifies.
[xxvi] Doncieaux, Fiquet, Beurat unnoticed, servant
wives of Monet, Cézanne, Rodin.