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impure_tale) wrote2011-02-11 04:36 pm
impure_tale) wrote2011-02-11 04:36 pm
Entry tags:
155 - Le Barge, Chapter 3
[Private to Iago]
We will talk, and we will talk civilly. Is that understood?
[Public]
At long last, my lovelies, a new chapter. My book on my early life, and eventual arrival here, finally continues. I invite those that have read the first and the second chapters to grant me their critiques and questions. A much longer sampling, but this part of the manuscript was difficult to divide.
The Life of a Libertine, Part the Second
It was not long before I found myself in another cage. Where once I was considered brother and contemporary to the revolutionaries, my blue blood was not well-concealed, and despite claims of forward thinking, my views of a churchless state and other such reforms did not earn me many friends. There were not many that spoke their minds openly for very long, for Robespierre and his radicals turned their gorelust toward more than just the aristocracy. The merchant class had long sought profit from the disenfranchisement of the upper classes when they weren’t trying to marry into it, able to sell their names to the public simply by claiming not to be us.
But dangerous lunatics see red on gold. Regardless of how you came of your fortune, the angry once given power will seek to use it, and often to avenge themselves on their displeasures and take what it is they have long coveted. How it is, then, that I saw through my own anger long enough to spare my in-laws the guillotine (not days before I fell out of favor myself) I cannot tell you. I had the opportunity and cannot recall what stayed me. Needless to say, both died of natural causes, my wife and children were safe, and I, freshly re-fatted on a return to fresh air, good food, luxury and politic, had some decades left in me yet. I wept the first time I saw barred windows and a locked door again.
My cell overlooked the courtyard in which many victims of the Terror saw their end – some of them I knew, old and new acquaintances alike. It amuses to see that books about the time have said I escaped the guillotine, myself, by clerical error alone, and this may well have been the case. Anguished though I was, I was not so long from my last prison that I knew not how to distract myself from such unpleasant thoughts.
Soon returned the numbers – a language that I had not forgotten, for outside my window the putrescence of my beloved lost 120 Days of Sodom was made flesh, its violence perhaps less varied, but it all ended the same – in grisly calculation, where the carnage is too great to represent itself in anything but numbers. To stave off my madness, I wrote, and stories penned on red ink began to fill pages and pages, and then books and the margins of books. There was no hiding from the spectacle outside – how, really, could you look away from your window, knowing that friends and enemies alike would be marched to their doom down there? Even when somehow – somehow – they always sense your eyes at a distance and look at you, piercing you. Would I join them tomorrow? The day after? I was never truly to know. The words helped – even when you paint a horrific picture it is still only a picture. A page in a book that can be closed.
At the Terror’s end, the executions I witnessed from my windows numbered well into the two thousands. Once, I could have given you the exact number. I remembered it for years afterward. It felt significant. The Eastern nations called it a “mantra”. I have since forgotten the number, but more than once, even since coming to this ship, I have been the victim of many a sleepless night thanks to the executions themselves, the faces that looked up at me before their slayer bent them upon the block.
You don’t die immediately after beheading, you know.
I had some knowledge of this even before the barge, but have read considerably on the subject since – accounts detailing disembodied heads that continue to respond to light and sound some minutes after severing.
Can you imagine such an end, dear reader?
This writer has, even before Charenton. Even before the Barge. The spiritual buffoons are wrong – the spirit is one thing, if it exists. The Marquis that I am and was still goes on to exist in some form, as you can see. But while there is no Hell in the Biblical sense, there is no greater living Hell than to lose one’s own body and to remain physically aware of such a thing. It is something I had often imagined and have come to learn is quite true.
The Terror ended and I walked free, but never truly without the eyes of the authorities on me. Perhaps they knew better than I that the only sort of bull that leaves the slaughter still a bull and not as beef may indeed be alive, but it has also most assuredly gone mad. Now that I am older and wiser, I would not contest them if they made the claim to my face today – not with how I was back then. The very smell of blood, for some five or six years to come, all at once rended my bowels and enflamed me to shameful distraction.
Before Napoleon was even crowned, I was declared insane and sent to Charenton Asylum because my neck had come too close to the blade once. My wife, my Renee – so far estranged from me that I could not look at her for years to come – squeezed from her mother’s putrid, still-breathing carcass what bitter drops of power still remained. Better a hospital than another prison, she had thought. My chateau in Lacoste was lost to pay for my internment – not worth it – a few remnants brought to my quarters in Charenton: a writing desk, a chair, my bed. A few paintings. So many riches and so many memories squandered and sold, I think. But then I could be wrong. The place may very well have been looted in my absence. Perhaps what I received was truly all that remained.
I would remain there another thirteen years before my death and arrival on the Barge. The first years, I fought my keepers with all my being. I gave them the manner of madman I thought they expected to see. Few of the other patients – pinheads and imbeciles, the lot of them – were spared my wrath if I was permitted to wander among them, and it was not long before I was confined entirely to quarters.
One person saw through my antics almost immediately: a clever little laundry girl by name of Madeleine. Though young – too young to be working among madmen – she was brave and assertive, and so sweet. Though I hissed and cursed and whispered all manner of terrible things to her through my door, she did not hesitate to come near again when her duties brought her, ask more questions.
“What sort of madman are you?” she asked me once, unimpressed by my display. I cannot remember what I told her, though her own voice is clear as day in my mind. (This is why we writers are writers. Once the correct words find us, if we do not record them they are gone forever.) I believe I told her that I was a monster – the sort known for spiriting pretty girls away to mountainous fortresses. She called my bluff – a mouse demanding that the lion show its teeth or tuck its snout back behind the bars of its cage. She was impossible to scare away, and always had the most mundane solutions to what I believed were my most lingering problems. Daily she would return to my door and ask me my name, and why I was there. She knew who I was, but in the interim she knew I would lie to her. So every day there was a new name, and a new story – starting with the more fanciful and dying down to something less akin to children’s stories and more like roles in a play, then histories perhaps of some poor souls I saw to the gallows.
And then finally my story.
The Abbe de Coulmier’s appointment did not come until sometime later. Madeleine and I were already friends, and I found my storms calmed by my daily “visits” with her, even if they were often only through a door. But the Abbe brought similar comforts – for a Holy man he was the most merciful and reasonable that I had ever known; he chose to treat the Inmates of the Asylum, rather than simply keep them there. His prescriptions were not injections and medieval tortures, but rather creative outlet. The less dangerous Inmates were encouraged to paint, to weave – some were even permitted to play simple games out in the gardens.
For me – perhaps he saw in me more of what Madeleine had. He never failed to treat me as a person rather than a lunatic. His solution for me was writing, and so I was permitted parchments, quills, ink, and all of my dark dreaming were whetted in prose. Some would say my addiction began then, if not during the Terror. I say it is a little of both. The Abbe gave me freedoms I did not have, though he restricted me from taking visitors, other than him, into my quarters – with the exception of my poor devoted wife, who once monthly could visit and bring gifts to me. I longed for human contact but hated her freedom, and I took sick pleasure from the fact that as our day together would end she clung to me as though those moments would be our last. I do not know why the Abbe permitted those interludes – perhaps because he saw, as I would realize much later, that the more normalcies I could have in my life, the less unstable I tended to be. And a man who is married should have time to share with his wife. I was grumpy, perhaps, but not violent. And though I regarded myself as far above his other patients, I was not unnecessarily cruel to them on a good day. He did not view me as abominable – perhaps strange, perhaps eccentric, but he slowly became like Madeleine in that he could withstand my wicked flirtations with a laugh and not fall to bits at the vulgarity.
For some time I felt like a normal man again, despite my surroundings. I had an occupation – more to come as the Abbe discovered my interest in theatre and decided to open one in the hospital, with the other patients as actors. I had all the comforts of home within the walls of my ‘suite’, as I sometimes jokingly called it – with a few exceptions. I had time for my family – though my children, all grown, would never visit me. I had friends.
Eventually, I took my writings to another level. I mentioned the notion of publishing – this would serve multiple purposes: first I was bored and wanted to see if I could do it, and second my family could use more money and less resentment to continue to pay for my lodgings. Madeleine thought the idea was inspired, and she herself was beginning to learn to read, able to test my virgin manuscripts with her own eyes before dutifully smuggling them out of the asylum for me. Then came the publication of Justine and the beginning of the end.
(ooc: I am so sorry this took so long to write :| It was originally much longer but I decided to cut it in half.)
We will talk, and we will talk civilly. Is that understood?
[Public]
At long last, my lovelies, a new chapter. My book on my early life, and eventual arrival here, finally continues. I invite those that have read the first and the second chapters to grant me their critiques and questions. A much longer sampling, but this part of the manuscript was difficult to divide.
The Life of a Libertine, Part the Second
It was not long before I found myself in another cage. Where once I was considered brother and contemporary to the revolutionaries, my blue blood was not well-concealed, and despite claims of forward thinking, my views of a churchless state and other such reforms did not earn me many friends. There were not many that spoke their minds openly for very long, for Robespierre and his radicals turned their gorelust toward more than just the aristocracy. The merchant class had long sought profit from the disenfranchisement of the upper classes when they weren’t trying to marry into it, able to sell their names to the public simply by claiming not to be us.
But dangerous lunatics see red on gold. Regardless of how you came of your fortune, the angry once given power will seek to use it, and often to avenge themselves on their displeasures and take what it is they have long coveted. How it is, then, that I saw through my own anger long enough to spare my in-laws the guillotine (not days before I fell out of favor myself) I cannot tell you. I had the opportunity and cannot recall what stayed me. Needless to say, both died of natural causes, my wife and children were safe, and I, freshly re-fatted on a return to fresh air, good food, luxury and politic, had some decades left in me yet. I wept the first time I saw barred windows and a locked door again.
My cell overlooked the courtyard in which many victims of the Terror saw their end – some of them I knew, old and new acquaintances alike. It amuses to see that books about the time have said I escaped the guillotine, myself, by clerical error alone, and this may well have been the case. Anguished though I was, I was not so long from my last prison that I knew not how to distract myself from such unpleasant thoughts.
Soon returned the numbers – a language that I had not forgotten, for outside my window the putrescence of my beloved lost 120 Days of Sodom was made flesh, its violence perhaps less varied, but it all ended the same – in grisly calculation, where the carnage is too great to represent itself in anything but numbers. To stave off my madness, I wrote, and stories penned on red ink began to fill pages and pages, and then books and the margins of books. There was no hiding from the spectacle outside – how, really, could you look away from your window, knowing that friends and enemies alike would be marched to their doom down there? Even when somehow – somehow – they always sense your eyes at a distance and look at you, piercing you. Would I join them tomorrow? The day after? I was never truly to know. The words helped – even when you paint a horrific picture it is still only a picture. A page in a book that can be closed.
At the Terror’s end, the executions I witnessed from my windows numbered well into the two thousands. Once, I could have given you the exact number. I remembered it for years afterward. It felt significant. The Eastern nations called it a “mantra”. I have since forgotten the number, but more than once, even since coming to this ship, I have been the victim of many a sleepless night thanks to the executions themselves, the faces that looked up at me before their slayer bent them upon the block.
You don’t die immediately after beheading, you know.
I had some knowledge of this even before the barge, but have read considerably on the subject since – accounts detailing disembodied heads that continue to respond to light and sound some minutes after severing.
Can you imagine such an end, dear reader?
This writer has, even before Charenton. Even before the Barge. The spiritual buffoons are wrong – the spirit is one thing, if it exists. The Marquis that I am and was still goes on to exist in some form, as you can see. But while there is no Hell in the Biblical sense, there is no greater living Hell than to lose one’s own body and to remain physically aware of such a thing. It is something I had often imagined and have come to learn is quite true.
The Terror ended and I walked free, but never truly without the eyes of the authorities on me. Perhaps they knew better than I that the only sort of bull that leaves the slaughter still a bull and not as beef may indeed be alive, but it has also most assuredly gone mad. Now that I am older and wiser, I would not contest them if they made the claim to my face today – not with how I was back then. The very smell of blood, for some five or six years to come, all at once rended my bowels and enflamed me to shameful distraction.
Before Napoleon was even crowned, I was declared insane and sent to Charenton Asylum because my neck had come too close to the blade once. My wife, my Renee – so far estranged from me that I could not look at her for years to come – squeezed from her mother’s putrid, still-breathing carcass what bitter drops of power still remained. Better a hospital than another prison, she had thought. My chateau in Lacoste was lost to pay for my internment – not worth it – a few remnants brought to my quarters in Charenton: a writing desk, a chair, my bed. A few paintings. So many riches and so many memories squandered and sold, I think. But then I could be wrong. The place may very well have been looted in my absence. Perhaps what I received was truly all that remained.
I would remain there another thirteen years before my death and arrival on the Barge. The first years, I fought my keepers with all my being. I gave them the manner of madman I thought they expected to see. Few of the other patients – pinheads and imbeciles, the lot of them – were spared my wrath if I was permitted to wander among them, and it was not long before I was confined entirely to quarters.
One person saw through my antics almost immediately: a clever little laundry girl by name of Madeleine. Though young – too young to be working among madmen – she was brave and assertive, and so sweet. Though I hissed and cursed and whispered all manner of terrible things to her through my door, she did not hesitate to come near again when her duties brought her, ask more questions.
“What sort of madman are you?” she asked me once, unimpressed by my display. I cannot remember what I told her, though her own voice is clear as day in my mind. (This is why we writers are writers. Once the correct words find us, if we do not record them they are gone forever.) I believe I told her that I was a monster – the sort known for spiriting pretty girls away to mountainous fortresses. She called my bluff – a mouse demanding that the lion show its teeth or tuck its snout back behind the bars of its cage. She was impossible to scare away, and always had the most mundane solutions to what I believed were my most lingering problems. Daily she would return to my door and ask me my name, and why I was there. She knew who I was, but in the interim she knew I would lie to her. So every day there was a new name, and a new story – starting with the more fanciful and dying down to something less akin to children’s stories and more like roles in a play, then histories perhaps of some poor souls I saw to the gallows.
And then finally my story.
The Abbe de Coulmier’s appointment did not come until sometime later. Madeleine and I were already friends, and I found my storms calmed by my daily “visits” with her, even if they were often only through a door. But the Abbe brought similar comforts – for a Holy man he was the most merciful and reasonable that I had ever known; he chose to treat the Inmates of the Asylum, rather than simply keep them there. His prescriptions were not injections and medieval tortures, but rather creative outlet. The less dangerous Inmates were encouraged to paint, to weave – some were even permitted to play simple games out in the gardens.
For me – perhaps he saw in me more of what Madeleine had. He never failed to treat me as a person rather than a lunatic. His solution for me was writing, and so I was permitted parchments, quills, ink, and all of my dark dreaming were whetted in prose. Some would say my addiction began then, if not during the Terror. I say it is a little of both. The Abbe gave me freedoms I did not have, though he restricted me from taking visitors, other than him, into my quarters – with the exception of my poor devoted wife, who once monthly could visit and bring gifts to me. I longed for human contact but hated her freedom, and I took sick pleasure from the fact that as our day together would end she clung to me as though those moments would be our last. I do not know why the Abbe permitted those interludes – perhaps because he saw, as I would realize much later, that the more normalcies I could have in my life, the less unstable I tended to be. And a man who is married should have time to share with his wife. I was grumpy, perhaps, but not violent. And though I regarded myself as far above his other patients, I was not unnecessarily cruel to them on a good day. He did not view me as abominable – perhaps strange, perhaps eccentric, but he slowly became like Madeleine in that he could withstand my wicked flirtations with a laugh and not fall to bits at the vulgarity.
For some time I felt like a normal man again, despite my surroundings. I had an occupation – more to come as the Abbe discovered my interest in theatre and decided to open one in the hospital, with the other patients as actors. I had all the comforts of home within the walls of my ‘suite’, as I sometimes jokingly called it – with a few exceptions. I had time for my family – though my children, all grown, would never visit me. I had friends.
Eventually, I took my writings to another level. I mentioned the notion of publishing – this would serve multiple purposes: first I was bored and wanted to see if I could do it, and second my family could use more money and less resentment to continue to pay for my lodgings. Madeleine thought the idea was inspired, and she herself was beginning to learn to read, able to test my virgin manuscripts with her own eyes before dutifully smuggling them out of the asylum for me. Then came the publication of Justine and the beginning of the end.
(ooc: I am so sorry this took so long to write :| It was originally much longer but I decided to cut it in half.)
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Betrayed.
Do those answers suit you better?
Private
I was troubled to see him leave, as well.
Private
Tell me all about how troubled you were. And then I can relate how troubled I was and we can sit around and have tea and it will make it all better again.
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
He was with you -- after I died, wasn't he? He helped you.
Private
You know what I have done and will do to my friends. I would not have done that to him, so I don't know what he was.
Private
All the same you needn't talk of it as though it were not your choice to do what you do.
Private
Private
Private
Is that not a friend?
Private
Private
no subject
Well, it's too late for either of them now.]
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
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no subject
no subject
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