Seeing the forest

I’m sorry for not blogging for a week, but I am overwhelmed with work and love at the moment.

However, I want to make a post continuing my forest thematic – or obsession.
In Language and Sensibility in the seventeenth century (1975), Pierre Dumonceaux points out that even as the French government rationalized its operations under Louis XIV, the texts of that rationalization were shot through with irrationality. Take, for instance, Colbert’s radical reconstruction of the system of forest maintenance. His order of 1669 not only contains prescriptions concerning the cutting and use of trees, according to a new categorization that recognized different kinds of timber trees and their biological life cycle, but it also contained this sentence: Défendons à toutes personnes de charmer our brûler les arbres, ni d’en enlever l’écorce, sous peine de punition corporelle.” Dumonceaux remarks: “In this phrase, the three terms charmer, brûler, enlever are situated on the same semantic level; each time, it is a purely natural action, punished in the same fashion, the crime being of the same nature. Besides, a commentary for water and forest masters of the 18th century makes not the least allusion to sorcery or to the memory of sorcery, it declares, simply, that it is a grave crime committed with the intent to make the tree perish, and to be able, subsequently, to appropriate it as dead wood. Basically, that use of “charmer” rejoins those which will be studied further on under the general name of invisible metaphors.”

That the invisible and the charm are linked here with the utmost rational blindness to their subliminal provinence is, well, charming – as though the Derridean demon were unloosed, here, quietly, and all unawares, to wreck the careful linearity that so confidently beckons us to what we will study ‘further on’ – plus loin. As if the charm, or witchcraft, had no economic effect or motive at all. But what if what is happening here is not just the instance of an invisible metaphor, but an instance of invisible metaphorization, a retrospective projection of rationality upon a document that carries a rather damning and to-be-explained term for an offense that, as Dumonceaux himself concedes, might have once occurred in a more superstitious era. A rationality shored up by a lacuna in a commentary from the 18th century, a charm – the charm of bureaucratic rationality – against the charm.

In a footnote, Dumonceaux refers to a certain maitre des eaux et forets, Lafontaine – but in his capacity as a poet. In Le gageur de trois commeres, a story taken from Bocaccio, a valet, who wishes to inspire in the husband the belief that a pear tree in their yard is ‘charmed’ – that is, that certain visions occur under it – in order to make love to the wife under the pear tree at his ease, with the husband looking on, thinking that he is not seeing what he is seeing.

Under the auspices of cuckoldry, the tree is disenchanted. Or, rather, there is a thematic of deceit – as though charms were the tools of scoundrels or, in the Enlightenment critique, of priests to deceive the populace – that shows its face here. With the promise that we do see what we see, every tree and branch, in the forest.

The woods

If I wereeeee kinggg of the foreeeesssst

A post that I will expand later:

The Europeans were amazed that Indians seemed to have no rules to limit the persons who could hunt. They believed that there was no order among the savage nations, and that a sing of this was that all males could hunt regardless of station. In Europe, of course, hunting had long been a militarized zone between the notables and the obscure – the rustic could not, legally, hunt. But such laws were as good as their enforcement, which was often ad hoc, and always corruptible.

My sense of the numerous small, seemingly discrete shifts in attitude and use that made the world, or nature, an object of use for “man” is not backgrounded by a nostalgic attitude attached to medieval common lands or the like. It is backgrounded, mostly, by the dream of Carpenter Shih, and similar moments in which the tears and breaks in the historical picture – in the canvas we think we know – let in unexepected lights, a steady small time dazzle. The knowledge that the intellectual history of the pre-modern is found as much in the thick underbrush of superstition, story and custom, protests to authority, letters, drawings, songs, as in philosophy or the writings of the Great Tradition.

When Marx saw that the forest laws around Koln were changing due to the pressure generated not within the state, but of powerful economic actors, he had the insight that this was a clue – a clue in a forest, a very Maerchen clue – to the changes wrought by the system of capitalism.

A similar change in forest customs swept through France in 1669, when Colbert reformed the laws on Eaux et Forets.

La Fontaine’s father had made his fortune, such as it was, as the superintendent of Eaux et Forets in Château-Thierry. Between the time of Francis I and King Louis XIV, the system of the masters of the forest – which rewarded the masters with a portion of the chopped down timber, as well as other lucrative rights – and regulations that had allowed for clearcutting regardless of the nature of the forest – had brought the forests of France into a sad state. Colbert, Louis’s minister, wanted oaks for the navy and reorganized the system. In this reorganization, communities and peasants lost out – as did the old, Falstaffian core of masters of the waters and woods. La Fontaine was one of them. By this time he was in his father’s post as Master of the waters and woods. In this position, he received a severe letter from Colbert on August 7, 1666, asking for an account of the wood being taken out of the wood for fuel and the ‘infinity of malversations’ happening in the forest. The tone was peremptory, and showed no sense at all that La Fontaine was anything more than a lazy, stupid, wayward servant of the King. And on all accounts, La Fontaine sold wood and took his share without much regard for the forest. Plus, like a good poet, he was perpetually on the run from creditors.
TBC

Travelling through the republic of wolves: Dom Juan and Little Red Riding Hood

Contra Deleuze, I am more interested in the tree than the rhizome, the tree that my ape ancestors climbed, and that my hominid ancestors, in Europe, worshipped, chopped down, feared when there was a mass of them stretching for hundreds of miles across the country, and went across the globe to encounter, Paul Bunyan axe in hand, on the shores of the New World. I myself, as a boy, was an ardent climber of trees. The bark that would come away, the ants you would find, the life of the thing, hiding in the top branches. I like to think that the way I misread the story of Fontenelle in the forested park at Mésangère is a deeper sign of the times: that Fontenelle, in explaining to Madame de la Mésangère the orbits of the planets, carved their figures into her beech trees. Not rhetorical figures.

Of course, the tenuous connection of friendship and family, the linking of one Rouennais to another, doesn’t quite explain or justify my sense that l’esprit geometrique and the Perrault’s tales, or the tale of Beauty and the Beast, form a dialectically joined complex.

And what are those tales? I want to go deeper in the woods with this question. Those who pursue literature, or intellectual history, seem to be going down a different track from those who pursue folklore, or ethnography. I like it when those tracks merge, or when you can’t tell if they have or not.

Jean Perrot makes a case, in his essay, L’appropriation et le jeu avec le conte, ou pourquoi
Le Petit Chaperon Rouge? that Perrault’s tale was overdetermined not only in being a mixture of the servant or peasant’s old tale and the courtly overlay, but, Perrot claims, also as a sort of suggestion that arose from Perrault’s rivalry with, and admiration for, La Fontaine. The latter was Boileau’s friend and thus would have been Perrault’s enemy, theoretically, in the battle between the ancients and the moders. Perrot’s case rests on a reading of the extraordinary travel letters that La Fontaine sent his wife in 1663, when he accompanied her uncle, Jacques Jennart, into internal exile in Limoge.

Perrot points to a parallel – a possible appropriation – between certain features of those letters and Perrault’s tale, which was published in 1697. The letters are Perrot’s third “tableaux”, pictures of situations that are not proofs, but suggestions. For Perrot, like Perrault’s heroine, does go down a trail of suggestions:

“Accompanying the uncle of his wife, exiled in Limousin, La Fontaine exhibits his impressions of the journey to his spouse in letters dated from 25 August to 19 September 1663. Significantly, he is going to cross the landscapes of Nivernais, the same in which Paul Delarue has gathered the popular version of Little Red Riding Hood. His confidences, which are far from being confessions and which participate more in the exchanges between Valmont and Merteuil, allow us to see a pronounced taste for the observation of pretty women. In the first letter he writes: “The tell us, among other marvels, that many of the first rank bourgeois women in Limousin wear capes of a dried rose color with hoods of black velour. If I find someone of those capes which cover a pretty head, I could amuse myself in passing, and solely for the sake of curiosity.”

Before I go further into Perrot’s comparison, let me present my own parti pris: I think the letters Perrot cites are much more likely connected to Moliere’s Dom Juan, which was first put on in 1665. As Perrot makes clear, the letters were written to be circulated among La Fontaine’s friends, which would certainly include Moliere and people in his circle. Perrot’s claim I think is a bit tenuous, hanging on that hood. And yet I like the idea that at the source of both Dom Juan and at least part of Little Red Riding Hood stands perhaps the finest, and surely the slyest, French poet of the 17th century.

To go forward, then, a bit with Perrot’s citation of the letters. The letters are written in a prose that often breaks into rhyme. In the first one, La Fontaine praises the woods of a property near Clamart where they stopped to rest, “with the darkness of a ten centuries old forest”. This wood, though, seems to have been very cultivated, and formed part of a landscape with a garden. Going through the alley in the woods, La Fontaine is filled with rococo visions of fauns, and of Pan – a domesticated savagery. The next letter, however, gives us a contrast – for here La Fontaine describes going through the valley of Tréfou. In the coach was a countess, La Fontaine, Jacques Jennart, another woman, and presumably some servants:

I can’t think about that valley of Trefou without trembling,
It is a dangerous passage too,
A site for thieves, for ambushes and to hide
On the left a woods, a mountain on the right side
Between the two
A path very narrow
The mountain is covered
with boulders like those
of our little Domaine.

Even though we were all humans in the coach, we climbed out, in order to relieve the horses. As long as we were on the road, I only talked about the usefulness of war: in effect, if it produces robbers, it occupies them too, which is of great benefit to the entire world – and particularly for me, who naturally feared to meet them. They say that they swarm in the woods we were passing through – this isn’t good. Really, they should burn it down.

Republic of wolves, asylum of brigands
Do you really have to exist in this world?
You favor the evil
By your thick, deep shadows
They cut the throats of he who Themis, or gain,
Or the sightseeing impulse, makes journey from his soil!”

Later, La Fontaine’s party passes into Estampes, which has been sacked in the wars of the Fronde and is still burnt out, although they find lodging. The next day they go through Beauce, and this happens:

“boring countryside, and which, outside of the inclination that I had to sleep, furnished us with a very pretty subject. In order not to go to sleep, we put an argument on the carpet: our countess was the cause, for she is of the Religion, and showed us a book of du Moulin; M. de Chateauneuf (this was the name of the footman) took it up, and told her that her religion was worthless for several reasons. First, Luther had I don’t know how many bastards, the Hugeuenots never go to mass: at last he advised her to convert, if she didn’t want to go to hell: for purgatory was not made for gentlefolk like her. The woman from Poitiers then began on the scripture, and asked for the passage in which Purgatory is mentioned. While all this was going on, the Notary was singing and Mr. Jannart and I were drowsing.”

Finally, there is this passage, which Perrot cites to find a parallel with the wolf in Perrault, and which I will cite for my own purposes – a passage much further on, in the letter written when they were approaching Limoges. Perrault tells his wife about the inn they enjoyed at Bellac:

‘Nothing pleased me as much as the daughter of the innkeeper, a pretty enough young person. I teased her about her coiffure: it was some kind of hood with ear flaps, the cutest thing with a border of gold ribbon about three inches wide. The poor girl, thinking that she was showing off, when to find immediately her ceremonial hood to show me. Once you pass Cavigny, they speak only quasi-French; however, that girl understood me without trying too hard. … As mean as was our niche, I allowed myself a very sweet night. My sleep was not interrupted by dreams as it usually is: however, if Morpheus had brought me the daughter of the innkeeper, I don’t think that I would have sent her back; but he didn’t do it, and so I passed.”

In my hasty researches, I have found nobody who has remarked upon the many elements here that find themselves in Moliere’s Dom Juan. There is, first, the marvelous girl who speaks quasi-French, much like the peasant speech in the play; there is the entrance into a dark forest, a republic of wolves; there is the dispute between the servant and the master – or in this case mistress – about religion. And there is the curious twist in the play, where Dom Juan and Sganarellle are violating a code even more sacred then marriage by fleeing a duel - this is the motivation for the trip through the woods. And yet, in the woods, when they come upon some robbers, Dom Juan shows extraordinary courage. Similarly, the trembling La Fontaine is, after all, accompanying a man in disgrace and writing letters about it that he knows will be read in the highest circles.

I have the highest regard for that play of Moliere’s – higher than most people. La Fontaine and Moliere both frequented circles in which libertine notions – Gassendi’s philosophy, and Epicurus’ – circulated. It is easy for me to believe that Moliere hid some jokes in this play, jokes that La Fontaine would discern. That, twenty years later, Perrault would recall those red hoods – that is, I think, a little harder to swallow. But it does make sense that the Red Riding Hood, La Fontaine, and Dom Juan would be joined together in traversing the wood of the Republic of Wolves. Which gets me, at last, to the woods.

natural kinds and the seven ages of man

In Jacques’ speech in As you like it, he delivers this well known commentary on the seven ages of man:

Jaq All the world’s a stage And all the men and women merely players
140 They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms
Then the whining school boy with his satchel
And shining morning face creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eye brow. Then a soldier
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard
150 Jealous in honour sudden and quick in quarrel
Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice
In fair round belly with good capon lined
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon.
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side. His youthful hose well saved, a world too wide 160 For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice
Turning again toward childish treble pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth sans eyes sans taste sans every thing.

The speech has, of course, long ago passed into cliché – and yet if one reads it closely again, it revives in the mind, because it really is brilliantly constructed and creates, in amazingly few words, a panorama reflecting the deep beliefs of the early modern bourgeoisie. It does all this by taking a then common age typology, although not the only one: the ‘seven ages of man.’ One notices that the criteria by which each age is individuated is taken from both nature and the social. In a sense, it is exactly in this form that we classify the negative and positive emotions. The seven ages are not what philosophers would call natural kinds – in that the classificatory scheme that separates and defines one age from another is not generated by ‘natural’ characteristics within the age taxon, but is defined – except in the very beginning and at the end - by characteristics external to the taxon. That externality is what gives the speech its striking and busy visuality – it is as if Jacques were pointing to various tableau vivant. But this externality also insinuates itself into the tableau, reminding us always that it is a tableau of “players”, who are minimally defined by their entrance and exit. This is even true of the infant “Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms”. It is, of course, easier to understand the other theatrical dimension of the other players, because one has the sense that age is represented by the player with an appropriately theatrical consciousness. And that player’s consciousness – which begins at the low level of mewling – ascends, as the tableau succeed one another, to become more and more prominent and frozen, until it returns to the infant’s state of pure play – when the player, an old man, is almost consumed entirely in the thing he plays entirely. It is in this way that the history is strange, or estranging, and eventful without being particularly full of events. The events, too, have their entrances and exits.

The seven ages conception was in competition with other divisions of the life cycle – such as the Three ages – but all responded to the logic of allegory. If there were seven ages, they had to correspond to the seven planets. If there were four, they had to correspond to the four humors. And so on. A conceptual motive articulated itself in this world of allegory: that the world was a unity. It was, every bit of it, created by God.

Yet how much did this unity, this allegorical system, penetrate into the pragmatic age classifications of everyday life? Jacques ‘schoolboy’ was not, of course, recognizable in every household in the Europe of the seventeenth century. The rustic clown, the serf, the lowskilled urban artisan didn’t necessarily go to school at all. To reconfigure the types to represent the clowns would not have been very hard – but did the clowns think in terms of these ages? Shakespeare’s contemporary, Henry Cuffe, in The Differences of The Ages of Mans Life (1607) noted that Aristotle setteth down three ages, each of which is characterized by an endogenous, natural property having to do with our human ‘juices’ – for we are indeed, in this view, trees full of sap, or withered. There’s the green age, man-age, and old-age, in this schema. “For such is the nature and disposition of our body, that by the continual combat and interchangeable dominon of the ever-jarring elements it often changeth its primary constitution.” [Quoted in Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and masculinity, 74) Cuffe was of Bacon’s school, in looking to nature as the root of all things, but nature did include the planets and their evident effects. Thus, he did not finally accept Aristotle’s schema, but came up with one of his own.

I’d contend that the natural kinds of ages do not determine, except at the margins, social age classification – which is indisputable as regards such elements of our natural constitution as, for instance, sex, which is ringed about legally by a tangle of age premises that have little to do with the humors, or planets, or hormones, and much to do with something called consent. It is for this reason that ages have a certain poetry, one which reaches through the entire strange and eventful history of the course of life and shapes such seemingly non-poetic practices as housebuilding and medicine.

Here’s a recommendation from Ficino, writing in the 15th century, in his De Vita:

“Immediately after the age of seventy and sometimes after sixty- three, since the moisture has gradually dried up, the tree of the human body often decays. Then for the first time this human tree must be moistened by a human, youthful liquid in order that it may revive. Therefore choose a young girl who is healthy, beautiful, cheerful, and temperate, and when you are hungry and the Moon is waxing, suck her milk; immediately eat a little powder of sweet fennel properly mixed with sugar. … Careful physicians strive to cure those whom a long bout of hectic fever has consumed, with the liquid of human blood which has distilled at the fire in the practice of sublimation. What then prevents us from sometimes also refreshing by this drink those who have already been in a way consumed by old age? There is a common and ancient opinion that certain prophetic old women who are popularly called "screech-owls" suck the blood of infants as a means, insofar as they can, of growing young again.1 Why shouldn't our old people, Why shouldn't our old people, namely those who have no [other] recourse, likewise suck the blood of a youth? a youth, I say, who is willing, healthy, happy, and temperate, whose blood is of the best but perhaps too abundant. They will suck, therefore, like leeches, an ounce or two from a scarcely-opened vein of the left arm…”

This kind of recipe opens a vein of speculation in the puzzled reader. What is being restored, here? As the relation between youth and age is one of the great polarities of the happiness culture within whose mad triumph we stumble on the roads from the artificial paradise today, the social fact of age classifications and relations has to be a great part of the story of modernity.

Kant and Hamann

There’s a story related in Manfred Kuehn’s Kant. When Hamann finally moved back to his native town from Riga – breaking off his engagement with the daughter of the man he was working for, the merchant Behrens – he began to express opinions much different from the enlightened ones that he had left Konigsberg with in 1752. At that time, as he wrote in a letter to his father that he was being driven from the narrow society of Konigsberg because it stymied his ‘freedom to think and to act, our highest privilege.” He was, he said, forced into a “kind of life in which I can grow neither morally nor intellectually,” whereas in the wide world, with cities like Berlin, he could prove himself to his father’s satisfaction.

But he came back to take care of his father’s house with a different sense of what growing in morals and insights meant. This disturbed his friend Kant. When Johann Christoph Berens visited Konigsberg in 1759, Kant and he got together and decided to pay a visit – to make a sort of enlightened intervention – on their friend Hamann. On July 12, Hamann wrote his brother that he and his two friends broke peasant bread at a tavern in a suburb of Konigsberg, “Between us,” Hamann wrote, “our commerce doesn’t have its former familiarity, and we impose upon ourselves the compulsion to avoid all allusion to the same.”

I wonder, given Hamann’s new and ferocious interest in the bible, and in particular, in Job, if he mentally classified these enlightened souls as Job’s comforters.

What had happened to Hamann was simple and complex. He’d gone to London on a mysterious mission for the Berens House in 1757-1758, and not only failed in his mission, but had fallen into an old habit of lounging – Mussigang – and had made friends with a man who, he discovered, to his shock, was being kept as the lover of another, more powerful man. The rumors that reached Hamann had tempted him to open a letter that he’d been entrusted with by his friend – for obscure reasons – and Hamann had read for himself a somewhat obscene love letter. Alone, tormented by – as we know from his memoir of his early life – sexual desires (like Rousseau, Hamann makes a special note, in his memoir, of the boy who taught him how to masturbate), and broke, Hamann sank into one of the funks that seemed to overcome him periodically. Like the protagonist in Hunger, he subsisted on barely a meal a day, plus coffee. Then one night - the 31st of March, 1758 – Hamann opened the book of Genesis and read the story of Cain and Abel. He fell into a revery over the words, “The earth has opened its mouth to receive the blood of your brother”

“I felt my heart begin knocking, I heard a voice in the depths sigh and moan, as the voice of blood, as the voice of a slain brother, who wanted vengeance for his blood, when I commenced to stop up my ears against myself and soon did not hear – even as Cain did unsteadily and fleetingly. I felt all at once my heart swell, it poured itself out in tears, and I could no longer – I could no longer conceal from my God that I was the fratricide, the fraticide of his only begotten son. God’s spirit continued to work in spite of my great weakness, in spite of my long resistence, which I had employed up to now against his testimony and contact, revealing more and more to me the secret of divine love and the beneficence of belief in our blessed and only savior.”

That voice from the subterranean depths of London shattered his belief in pre-established harmony, or the advancement of knowledge, and turned him into a resistor, what we would call a reactionary if, in fact, such a call made sense in 1759, with absolutism heralded by enlightenment. Hamann felt himself called to Job’s side – and it is a great historical symbol that he happened to be friends with Kant, and communicated with him even after that failed intervention. He was never going to convince Kant that the world had ever opened up its mouth to him. On the other hand, he was never going to return to any kind of orthodoxy – any church. Hamann, like many disparate figures convinced that they were called to prophecy, fully accepted the consequence of the Enlightenment critique of institutions.

Like a prophet, too, Hamann had a disability – he had some kind of speech impediment. A stammer of some sort. He went to a quack in London to have it healed, but the quack was too ludicrous and too expensive for Hamann’s taste and pocketbook. Instead, Hamann threw that speech disability into his writing, and began a campaign of deliberate obscurity against the lightfilled flow of 18th century writing. In order to redeem prophecy in his time, he thought, he needed to reawaken the prophet’s old weapon of a rhetoric that shook with private, apocalyptic meanings – as though the blood of Abel were being gargled in the mouth of the earth.

Travelers

Travel? One need only exist to travel. I go from day to day, as from station to station, in the train of my body or my destiny, leaning over the streets and squares, over people’s faces and gesture, always the same and always different, just like scenery.
…
‘Any road, this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end the World.’ But the end of the world, when we go around it full circle, is the same Entepfuhl from which we started. The end of the world, like the beginning, is in fact our concept of the world.” – Pessoa

It is well know that Kant couldn’t be budged. He never saw a city bigger than his Königsberg. His friend, Johann Hamann, did – as did Herder, and Lichtenberg. The philosophe was, usually, a traveler. But in a sense, Kant was one of the great clerks. I admit that it would distort the metaphysics of the Critique of Pure Reason to make it the equivalent of Bartleby’s, I prefer not to – an almost perfect definition of the noumenon! – but there is something definitely going on, here, in the cultural underbrush.

Königsberg was an important city, historically and symbolically, for Prussia. Kant, who like Kafka, later on, loved his travel books, was able, without budging, to experience Russia when the city was occupied for five years during the Seven Years war – a time when Cossacks camped in the countryside and a low intensity struggle broke out in the East Prussian marshes. It was Kurt Stavenhagen who pointed out, in the 40s, the liberation that accompanied Czarin Elizabeth’s troops – in ironic contrast to Friedrich’s enlightened tyranny. Although Kant did not get his wish during this time to be promoted to professor, he apparently enjoyed the company of the Russian officers, along with other townsfolk – Königsberg had a very nice occupation. When it was re-taken, Friedrich refused to step foot in the town.

I don’t have time, today, for more than a quotation. One is Kant’s description of Königsberg from a footnote in the preface to the Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. The preface concerns worldly knowledge. Kant could be accused of not having any, never having gotten out into the world. This is his reply.

“A great city, the middle point of a kingdom, in which the landscollegia [offices] of the Government itself are found, which has a university (for the cultivation of sciences) and is as well a port for maritime trade, which flourishes on a river that rises out of the interior of the country as well as with bordering various countries of different languages and custom – such a city, as for example Königsberg on the Pregel, may well be taken as a proper place for the expansion of the knowledge of men as even that of the world; where this, even without traveling, can be gained.”

a Begriffsroman

Begriffsgeschichte begins in genius and ends in banality. Although there are times, sweet, rare times, when that order is reversed.

I’ve been pondering two things, lately. One is Kosellek’s Future’s past, which is a history of how the future was conceived in the past – how the horizon of expectation is construed - as well as a meditation on the whole enterprise of a "history of ideas". I’ve been thinking of how it is possible to elaborate a history of the third life, and how to avoid the mistake into which all fall of conceiving history as a series of heads reading a series of books. This, of course, misconceives both head and book. We are talking about the inspired sensorium, and we end up talking about 'influence'. Improvements on this improbable picture often consist of rather vague references to class, by Marxists - who will happily go back to the heads reading books picture when talking about Hegel's 'influence' on Marx, etc.

And by these stages, by this blindness, the angel of Detail is driven from the City of the Mind.

I want the Angel back.

But this is a desire easier to express than to realize. Which brings me to my other topic: a nest of gentlefolk in Rouen: Pierre Corneille, who lived on Rue de la Pie; the family of his sister, the Fontenelles, headed by a solid bourgeois lawyer, who lived nearby, on Rue de Cordier; the Pascals, who lived on Rue des Murs-Saint-Ouen. The Pascals evacuate for Paris in 1639 – why? Because, apparently, Etienne has been frightened by the violence in the countryside. For one must remember the countryside – and Rouen’s dependence on it, and its fear of it. And one must remember the weather. According to the Histoire Sommaire et Chronologique de la Ville de Rouen, there were some extraordinarily cold seasons from 1630 to 1650 in France. Repeatedly, in the spring, icebergs would be spotted, floating down the Seine. Sometimes they were big enough to break bridges. The crops, of course, suffered under the excessive cold, the flooding, and the wars – the continual wars of the Court, for which money had to be pressed out of somebody’s hide.

However, this is a tale for later. Let us leave it that the Pascals fled a Jacquerie led by a mythological Jean Nuds-Pieds, whose name appeared on a poster that appeared on April 11, 1639, in the town of Saint Lo, proclaiming a new order – or, actually, in peasant style, a return to the old order.

But this nest of gentlefolks extends over time. Taking Fontenelle as my central figure, I can also trace other connections all the way up to Leprince Beaumont, in the 1730s. For instance, the brothers Jacques and Guillaume Scott, who at some point arrive in Rouen (from Scotland? They are, at least, protestant) and start some kind of business. Exactly what that business is remains a mystery – M. Bouquet, who wrote about them in the Journal de Rouen in the 1860s, at first described them as makers and sellers of vinegar. Vinegar was sold by peddlers on foot, in Paris, and presumably in Rouen. The descendents of the family must have found that description not to their taste, so M. Bouquet retracted his statement in a later article. For us, the important thing is that Guillaume grew wealthy enough to buy himself into the nobility. His son married a woman with a famous name: Rambouillet. Marguerite was the daughter of Mme de la Sabliere, whose Hotel Rambouillet hosted a famous literary set in Paris that included, most famously, La Fontaine. She was also interested in philosophy, and a friend made her a book to guide her through the philosophy of Gassendi. We are, we are in the heart of the heart of it all. But the heart is distributed, the heart is here, and then it is here. To the confusion of literary historians since, Mme de la Sabliere was also named Marguerite, which has led to many errors – the Lamartines of history – in accounts about La Fontaine and about Fontenelle. Guillaume, by that time, had bought a property in a small village outside of Rouen, Mésangère, and Marguerite Scott went by the more grandiloquent name of Madame de la Mésangère. Guillaume had the discretion to die when his widow was still young, twenty four, in 1682.

And this happened – we know from a future biography of Fontenelle by Thomas Le Cat, a Rouen doctor who happened to write for a magazine edited by another Rouennaise, Marie LePrince de Beaumont, in the eighteenth century.

Apparently Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle returned to Rouen in the 1680s, after having spent some time trying to make it as a writer in Paris, and lived in his father’s house at the Rue de Cordier – although he could have spent time, as well, in his father’s two houses in the country, in the forest of La Feuillie.

While contemplating his options, the Fontenelle apparently made himself at home in Marguerite de la Mésangère’s house on Rue de Gros-Horloge, which was quite famous in its day. And it is here that he read her the book he was working on – a dialogue concerning astronomy entitled Entretien sur la pluralité des mondes. Her servant happened to be in the room, and at the description of the woman in this dialogue, she smiled. Which disconcerted Marguerite de la Mésangère – she was a widow with a reputation, and did not want to be gossiped about because of Fontenelle’s book. So he changed certain cues in the text – for instance, the color of the female character’s hair. As well as making certain changes to disguise the garden in which the discussion takes place, which was the Parc at Mésangère.

So – in what Begriffsgeschichte is the smile of that chamber maid captured?

There’s more to the story for me. Fontenelle was not a huge fan of the country, and in his essay on the eclogue, he made cutting remarks about the baseness of peasant life. Yet he wrote a few – for Marguerite de la Mésangère – and carved them in her beech trees in the great Parc.

I’ve been thinking of how this must go into my book, and how the only way to include a discourse on astronomy and the smile of a chamber maid and the verses carved into the beech trees of a Normandy estate and the posters of the mysterious Jean Nuds-Pieds and the horrible winters, which were not so horrible, perhaps, to a boy in Rouen, imagine his hand helf firmly in the gloved hand of his father as they both watch repairs being made on the bridge, and the ice skaters on the river, and the warning issued by the Jesuits that school boys were appearing with mysterious sorcery tracts and the rumors of discontent and Fontenelle’s father’s stories of the violence of the Fronde (his brother in law, Pierre Corneille, had taken the King’s side, and been rewarded) is to give myself up to the capacious embrace of a fiction that truly enters the banal and the heavenly, that forges for itself keys, that becomes a Begriffsroman, that feels the looming presence of the forest at the birth of l’esprit geometrique and the long retreat of the woods – not the retreat of the gods, so much as their revolution – during Fontenelle’s long, long life.