The Divine Marquise 

Maris Catherine Tiller

She sits by the window in Sainte-Aure while her husband sits in prison writing his philosophies, which will be called pornographies. Because they are, she thinks, having visions of the future, they are. She knows who he is at heart, and there is nothing to his words besides what he himself writes. These allusive future beings say his name but connect it with themselves, with other names that mean nothing to her: Bataille, Nietzsche, Barthes. They increase his multiplicity; she detests him all the more. She watches the courtyard from above, the nuns appearing identical in their black habits. She imagines herself reaching for the branches of the fig tree outside her window, swinging on them, scraping her palms white on the rough bark. She longs to hang there like an ape and pluck a ripe fig from its tendril branch, sink her teeth into its sweet meat, and push remnants of seeds lodged between her teeth with her tongue. That, she thinks, would be something.

It is the ones who call him a deity and dig up his corpse to fuck his brain that stick in the back of her mouth like molecules of food, impossible to reach. It is they who she thinks of while she walks through the convent garden with nothing but silence and prayer to occupy her. She looks at the fig tree from below, the fruit still out of reach. She receives her husband’s letters; she reads them with care.

There are a thousand instances in which one is obligated to tolerate evil in order to destroy vice. For example, you fancied you were sure to work wonders, I’ll wager, by reducing me to an atrocious abstinence in the article of carnal sin. Well, you were wrong: you have produced a ferment in my brain, owing to you phantoms have arisen in me which I shall have to render real.

The voices of scholars are in her ear, their bespectacled eyes leering over her shoulder, when she reads the drafts he sends. Raw, unpolished, and knobby like wood chopped fresh from a tree are these pieces that start and stop their eroticism, their philosophy, as if the moment words occurred to him, they spilled out of his pen. She sits by candlelight at a meagre desk and sands down the lumps and edges.

Second: that the depraved person is a woman, and that most assuredly if I punished that woman, my play would be detestable. But though she goes unpunished, who would like to emulate her?

Feeling the weight of her anger, her humiliation, and the voices that come to her at night caressing her husband with their academic tongues. What is the use of your futile writings? she scribbles in the margins. She sees his grin fade in her mind’s eye; it crawls across her own face. She sends the papers back. He throws a tantrum in his next letter, bemoaning his lot and requesting a new manservant. He also requests more paper and ink; she sends them. His writing lingers in her.

She remembers the days when he proposed his escapades, so bored of everything, how she gave suggestions of disapproval. “I don’t think you should do that, my heart.” Words tossed into the air as she was swatting flies and watching bees vibrate on flowers while he asserted himself as his own force of Nature, never to be advised or deterred.

She wants to wonder what made her love him. Her mother, saying she was plain? Her sister, Anne, providing evidence for that statement? In the quiet of the convent, she thinks she might not have married at all and been content here, but then she chastises herself for lying in a house of God.

For visions of the past come to her as unbidden as those of the future. The things she’s seen him do, what she’s heard expelled from his mouth, teeth bared in an eager grin, waiting for cries of shock and scandal. She feels oddly blessed to have the knowledge for its own sake. A tragedy indeed, to have remained the girl she was on their wedding night, wide-eyed and knowing so little that he did shock her into delight. There is, still, a small twinge of excitement in her when she reads his drafts, despite her feelings of anger and disgrace. The throb of desire to learn something only he could dream up moves through her blood.

The problem she finds is that reading is quite different than doing. Thinking, secret and silent within her own mind, allowing the force of her lust to guide her wandering hands, monitoring the ebb and flow of her feelings. She reads his loopy, florid handwriting on scratchy, cheap parchment, and it is all mere words, imaginings. It lives in her mind, locked away as he himself is. The words move her, take her. No other person, no other body to reckon with. Only her and her ghosts.

Then she returns to herself. She remembers the cadence of his voice. She reads the words again, and his work comes across like an answer to a request she did not make: Tell me, darling, all the dirty words you know. The memory of his pale, thin body on top of her, thrusting and grunting with his hair flying and his cavernous nostrils gazing down. The fire in his eyes when he proposed his orgies, hired his sexual servants. The moving picture of intertwined limbs, the sheen of bodily fluids on flesh, the vibrant red of the lash marks, the screams of terror, the retching and the crying. And it is quite different.

The past and future visions intertwine like snakes engaged in intercourse. At night, she wakes herself up with her sobbing. She runs to the Mother Superior in the garden when they happen to cross paths, both on their daily contemplative walks.

“Mother, I have these visions,” she says, distressed. She explains them, blushing and averting her gaze, her heart racing as she remembers the ecstasy mixed with terror, the shock of waking up and feeling as if she never slept. The Mother Superior beams, for the first time, with hope for this fallen woman’s salvation.

The Mother Superior tells her, “It is God, speaking through you.”

So she attempts to decipher his messages. At night in bed, she has nothing to read and nothing to imagine. He begins to show her things in small flashes: her husband’s previous imprisonments, his subsequent squandered freedoms, every youthful face of his lover-victims as they cried tears that settled into the fibers of her carpets, her tiny nods to her husband’s remarks of, “The girl was hired to—” and becoming angry when the court acted scandalized. Dumb animals, all reacting in the same way, the men shuddering and the women blushing in false modesty. The girls, their eyes soft with terror. Within the shimmering vision, she briefly met their gaze.

࿓

She leaves the convent and remembers what it is like to be singular, to not always be followed by God. She does not meet him because she knows what he will look like: bloated, aged, balding. Sickly grey flesh and sunken eyes from masturbating furiously over his prose in his dark cell. She stands outside the gates of the Bastille, believing she knows which window is his, and turns away before he can shout down, calling her back. This is no time for them to be together.

Because, as they have aged, so has the country. The peasants remember the wealth of better days; she has the countenance of aristocracy. She remembers a few dirty faces and that they once smiled as she passed, as if the sight of her finery blessed their minor existence. She can now imagine those same faces—gaunt with hunger, their eyes fiery with the spirit of vengeance—lowering the blade of the guillotine, cheering as it slices through her thin, white neck like a dull knife through softened butter. It makes her stomach turn; she finds she cannot walk the streets of Paris without the fear of some grubby hand throwing her down on a platform. She flees to the relative safety of her mother in the countryside, letting a lawyer handle their separation.

For a while she is able to maintain the peace of the convent in her heart. Her children rarely miss a father they do not remember. The servants pick up her garments and maintain her appearance. She sleeps through the night.

Her son runs without care through the halls, across the grounds. The slope of his nose begins to form into his father’s. She holds him on her lap and pokes it with her finger, trying to flatten it into some other shape. Her son laughs at her.

And her mother! It seemed Madame de Montreuil heard the word divorce and looked upon her eldest daughter with kindness for the first time. It helps, perhaps, that it is now Anne who suffers from infatuation, defending her sister’s husband with feverish devotion and begging her sister to write letters on her behalf as their mother continues to take away her paper and ink. She refuses to do so and tells her sister, bluntly, to dry up her tears. As Anne goes off, still crying, she must recover herself from the minor shock of being, unthinkably and for the first time, aligned with her mother.

But it is nice, regardless of Anne’s shunning, to be looked upon with Anne’s old favor, though she will never be as pretty as her. Sometimes Madame de Montreuil, stately and grey-haired, will stand beside her eldest daughter, looking out of the window to the empty, sprawling grounds, sigh, and shake her head.

“I would have never expected it,” she says, “of her.”

She feels as if her sister were right behind her, always available as a point of comparison.

She has his letters still, though she has no interest in receiving new ones. She pores over the papers and remembers their codes, their little terms of affection, all so much ink now.

࿓

For ten years, she has too much time. Nothing happens without him, nothing that would not have happened regardless. The children grow old; so does she. Time slips through her. She begins to see that all things are made up of piles of shapely dust, waiting for a breeze to allow it to collapse. She writes letters and lives in places with no particular love for any of them. She cannot walk as she used to.

When she goes blind, the visions find her again. They bleed into her daytime hours. Servants see her trembling and weeping following moments where she had been smiling. They assume she is grieving her own disgrace. They use her lapses of emotion, her blindness, to indulge in leisurely romps—card games and sex—all of which inevitably escape her notice.

She lies in bed, afraid to fall asleep for fear of seeing the final revelation. She seeks solace in views of the distant past, before she was constricted and smashed into the world. She knows: I used to feel my body without thinking. The freedom of childhood. My own phrase or his? He loves Freedom but what did that girl with the tears brimming in her eyes feel but misery? His Freedom. Bludgeoning them with freedom he deems worthy. Whipping and fucking them with his own enlightenment until there is no room for their own. Molding their sweet, depraved brains into a model of his. Tears brimming in her eyes were for what was killed her head when he infected her.

࿓

Only at last when she lies in her bed, the quilt pulled up to her ears but not stopping the cold, embarrassed by the illness of age, does she realize that she died long ago. She feels herself in the shadows, diminished. The servants do not come. The children do not come. Her mother died long ago.

He does not come either, going mad in the asylum. When she has room to think of anything, she thinks it is a fitting end for him. There is no better audience for him, she thinks, than the insane.

But there is bitterness too. She knows that he will outlive her. They won’t be pleasant years, but nevertheless he is afforded time. She has not been permitted to know how he will use it.

On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, she lets herself be still and feel the cold of her oncoming death. She waits in her own darkness for God to welcome her into heaven. She mixes herself up with the women he wrote. Her face is transposed onto Justine, Juliette, Eugenie, how she imagines them. Was she ever someone besides the women he created? She cannot remember. Her mind tries to go far to the edge of everything, find the limit of the world. It is not there; she cannot meet it. There are stars shooting through her darkened sky, sacred glimmers of light in her seven-year void. She wonders if he can see such a sky, in the asylum. She wonders if he will choose to sit among the dank and the dirt, refusing to look out and see the vastness of the world above him and instead bury his head in his pages, so sure of himself.

࿓