margot and the cosmopolite

Julia Kristeva, in Strangers to Ourselves, explores an interesting notion – that of the “lumpen intelligentsia”. Rameau’s Nephew, a favorite reference here at LI, serves as Kristeva’s reference to talk about this hitherto unnamed tribe. Kristeva focuses on a man who has sometimes been seen as one of Diderot’s models for RN – Fougeret de Monbron.

Now, by coincidence, I’ve been reading Fougeret’s ‘bad’ novel, Margot La Ravadeuse – or Margot the stockingmender. This is a novel of the Fanny Hill type – in fact, Fougeret may have translated Fanny Hill – but it is much less lubricious than realistic – a forerunner of Zola’s researches, a century later, into the depth psychology of the ‘laboring and dangerous classes”. Fanny Hill does seek to arouse, which makes it, inevitably, sentimental. Fougeret, however, seems to have been on a lifelong crusade to offend as many people as possible, starting with his family in Peronne, the place he was born. He once charmingly qualified the inhabitants of Peronne as ‘the excrement of the human race” and as an “assembly of imbeciles”. He of course shook the dust of his natal village from his shoes as soon as he could – in 1726 – and started wandering about Europe and the Meditteranean. One account of his travels – The Cosmopolitan, or the citizen of the world – was apparently read by Byron before he set off for Greece, which is how a sentence from that book became the epigraph of Childe Harolde.

The Cosmopolitan starts off with a passage worthy of Paul Nizan’s Aden, Arabie:

‘The universe is a kind of book of which one has only read the first page when one has only seen one’s native land. I’ve leafed through a number of them, and have found them all equally bad. This examination has not proved fruitless. I hated my country. All the impertinences of the diverse peoples among which I have lived has reconciled me to it.”

As Kristeva says:

“Fougeret’s cosmopolite is shrill, bitter, full of hatred. A character trait or a rhetorical figure – or undoubtedly both at the same time – such malevolence is truly dynamite that destroys borders and shatters the hallowed legitimacy of nations.”

For Kristeva, Fougeret becomes the figure of one kind of intellectual development – what LI has called, in earlier posts, the odd coupling of the buffoon and sage. But he is interesting more than as the person who could have been the model for Rameau’s Nephew. He is actually rather a good writer. For instance, Margot begins with a ‘seduction’ scene. Margot is fourteen years old. She’s seen her parents go at it, and is hot to have sex herself, so much so that she can’t sleep. So, after introducing her beau – a stable boy named Pierrot –this is how Fougeret, through Margot, describes the scene:

‘It should satisfy the reader to know that Pierrot and I were soon in agreement, and that a few days afterwards we sealed our liaison with the great seal of Venus, in a little shabby tavern near Rapee. The place of the sacrifice was garnished with a table laid across two decaying supports, and a half a dozen broken down charis. The walls were covered with a quantity of licentious hieroglyphics, that some amiable gangbangers in a good mood had usually chalked in with coal. Our little celebrations responded to the simplicity of the sanctuary. A pint of eight cent wine, two cents’ worth of cheese, and an equal amount of bread; all of it, added up, mounted to the sum of twelve cents. We officiated nevertheless with as light a heart as if we were doing the louis a plate dinner at Duparc. One shouldn’t be surprised. The most humble meals, seasoned with love, are always delicious.

At last, we came to the conclusion. At first, we had a hard time arranging ourselves. For it wasn’t prudent to trust to the table or the chairs. We thus decided to remain standing. Pierrot glued me against the wall. Oh! all powerful god of the gardens! I was frightedn at the faces that he showed me. What shaking! What assaults! the wall itself shook under his prodigious efforts. However, on my side, I was killing myself, laboring away, not wanting to be reproached by the poor boy for leaving all the fatigue and painful work to him. Whatever, in spite of our patience and mutual courage, we still made very mediocre progress, and I was beginning to despair that we would never crown the work, when Pierrot remembered to moisten with his saliva his thunderous machine. O nature! Nature, whose works are so admirable! The redoubt of pleasure opened; he penetrated; and what more can I say? I was well and totally deflowered. Since that time I slept better.”

It would be hard to read this and get aroused. It is easier to read this and get seduced into thinking this is Margot’s voice, not the voice of a fourteen year old Parisian girl imagined by a forty year old man. The reason for that, the only true seduction here, is that Fougeret seems to have talked to more than a few prostitutes in his time. In that little greasy courtyard, with all that humping and bumping, something really does happen. Margot really has solved her sleep problem. Although she soon gets into others.