Rameau's Niece Read Online Free PDF

wonder at my magnificent simplicity the way her unbearable husband did. Margaret thought she heard Art discussing his SAT scores. He was forty years old. "It was an onerous burden. I cheated to bring them down, of course."
    Till stood beside Margaret now. Her appearance had a biblical quality, flowing in various ways and directions—skirts, hair, scarves, and sleeves. In her deep voice, a hoarse, gravelly melody of slightly Southern intonation, she said "Telephone" to the girl beside Margaret with such resonance and respect that the telephone ceased all at once to be a convenience and returned instead to its early, almost mythic stature—it was again an invention. As the girl beside her silently rose and wafted away, Margaret wondered anew at Till.
    "Margaret," Till said, and she looked at Margaret with such evident interest and approval, such enthusiasm. This, Margaret thought, is a kind of power. To make other people feel they are important to you. "Margaret," Till repeated, as if her very name were a joy to the senses and the intellect both. "What are you working on?"
    "A sequel."
    "Ah. Margaret the scholar. I admire you, Margaret. I mean, your work actually has stature. You don't know that because you're so absurdly self-effacing, but you have an impact on people, on the way people think..."
    Margaret said, "
Marchons
,
marchons.
"
    But her work did march victoriously, and she sometimes watched its odd popularity with alarm.
The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny
had been reviewed on the front page of the
New York Times Book Review
as "an unusually accessible, one might even say readable, work of scholarship that addresses issues as relevant to twentieth-century women as to the women of the Age of Enlightenment," and had crept onto the best-seller list, where it settled in for nineteen weeks.
    "By the end of the eighteenth century," the review said, "the sturdy peasant had replaced the delicate aristocrat as the physical ideal. Breast-feeding, says Nathan, became a national obsession: 'The bosom metamorphosed from decorative bauble to natural wonder. Charlotte de Montigny, a student of anatomy and therefore conscious of these changes in sentiment, recognized them as revolutionary and sought to name them. She did this by renaming the human body in a little-known tract called
Anatomie sans culotte.'
"
    Who cares? Margaret had wondered, reading the review. Only I care. Only I, who have spent so much of my adult life with this woman and her body parts. No one else could possibly care.
    But they did. They cared that the feet were named
lafayettes,
the erector penis the
crescam ut prosim
(words, meaning "Let me grow, in order to benefit mankind," engraved on Lafayette's sword by Benjamin Franklin, while the testicles, the
cur nons,
or "why nots," were named after the other motto on the sword); it intrigued them that the sigmoid notch had become the
vainqueur de la Bastille,
that the mammary glands were dubbed the
citoyens bienfaisant.
    The book was hailed by every publication from
Savvy
to
Dyke: A Quarterly
as a feminist breakthrough. A woman had written it about a woman who had turned the body upside down, literally, beginning her anatomy at the feet and working her way up past
le quatorze juillet
(the heart) to the
voltaires
(the eyes). The feminist theoretical journal
Enclitic
praised it as a seminal work in the study of the politics of the body in an article called "Feet First: Inverting the Anatomical Hierarchy." An HBO TV movie, called simply
Anatomy
and starring Mariel Hemingway, was in production. And in a special issue of
Diacritics,
devoted entirely to Margaret's book, Jacques Maridou had written a highly influential essay revealing Charlotte de Montigny's tract on the anatomy to be a precursor of postmodern
bricolage.
Margaret was a popular pedant.
    "Now, Margaret, listen," Till continued in a somber whisper that conveyed both urgency and special, exclusive trust. "Be especially nice to Dominique. She just got in from