The Fan-Maker's Inquisition Read Online Free PDF Page A

perpetrated in the Yucatán, I had a nightmare. I dreamed that I was once again taking part in the Broom’s circle of fire. As I and the other boys ran howling like beasts, weeping and foaming, we produced so much heat, so much perpetual heat , that suddenly the Broom’s robes caught fire, the floor and walls caught fire, and then we, too, were burning! We formed a ball of flame that soared up into the sky: yellow and red, the color of pus and blood.
    “Beneath us a crowd had gathered, everyone gazing up with astonishment. ‘A second sun!’ they cried. ‘What will become of us?’ An astronomer was called and arrived riding a broom. I stood among the crowd and saw that the stars on his peaked hat were peeling off. Pointing at the two suns with his wand, he shouted stridently: ‘Let us now speculate upon the inevitable disaster!’
    “I believe,” Sade said to me, “that thanks to this dream I have seen the face of Truth. A hideous face, a monstrous face, eaten away by spite. Truth is a leper banished from the hearts of men and rotting away in exile. All that is left is corruption, a bad smell, some unnameable pieces of what was once a thing lucent and good. All that is left is a stench at the bottom of a tomb.”
    He told me: “I have seen a beauty’s cunt worn like a fur collar, seen the bodies of wags, innocent of every crime but vanity, cut into pieces and these carried aloft like filthy flags up and down the streets of Paris. I have seen carts in the night taking bodies to graves marked only by a stench. And I ask myself again and again: Is this the virtuous violence of which we dreamed? But what else could we expect from the rabble that continues to believe in warlocks and wizards and leper kings who bathe in the blood of babes, and whispers that the nobility stuffs itself on roasted peasant boys—an extravagant piece of nonsense when you consider that the famished peasants don’t have a spoonful of marrow or meat to be found on them anywhere but, perhaps, between their ears.”
    Sade said to me just the other day: “Everything is clear now. The plan has always been to expel me first and eat me after. In other words, like a dog, the Revolution eats its own droppings, and it is only a matter of time before I will be on my knees with my own head between its jaws. Until then I dream the same dreams as Landa, that bastard son of the Inquisition. I share that monster’s fever; I am damned with the same singularity .
    “The devastation ahead is immeasurable. I long for it night and day. Like Landa,” he concluded, “I long for the disappearance of things.”

Three
    —Do you continue to work on the Rue de Grenelle?
    —Several years after my apprenticeship was completed, I found a shop on the Rue du Bout-du-Monde and set up on my own. The place had seen the production of marzipan and still smelled of sugar and almonds. Better still, a swan was carved above the door. The first thing I did was to make a sign of tin in the shape of a fan. This I painted with a picture of a red swan and hung over the street. I hired a girl to build the skeletons (for by then the guild rules had changed) and hired another, a beggar and an orphan whose father had died of beriberi and whose mother of chagrin, and who, once her face was scrubbed, proved dazzling. She was quick as a whip and became a great favorite, for she knew when and to whom to show the fan with double meanings, the fan with two faces or three. She was always smiling, and this is why Sade called her La Fentine—a name she assumes to this day with good humor, as she does all else.
    “It’s a clean living,” La Fentine says of fan-making. “You spend the day flirting without risk, you drink all the tea you want, and you never, ever need to stand about in the wind and rain. All sorts come into the atelier , but barbers never do, nor beggars. So I can forget that once, because of ill fortune, I lived in the gutter like a dog.”
    La Fentine knew how to read the