Merivel A Man of His Time (32 page)

I drank the Cordial. Louise watched me with fascinated attention. I asked myself whether she had come to my room in the expectation that I would make love to her now, in the Interlude between my walk with the Baron and the midday dinner.

I found her presence near me very sweet and comforting, but I realised once more that, since my contemptible behaviour in the Besançon coach, all sexual desire seemed to have left my body. I had often heard whispers at Court about certain fops who, having prodigiously used themselves in a thousand bedrooms, were now quite unable to perform coitus, unless it might be with the stimulation of obscene and unmentionable Orgies at work all around them. And I prayed that this would not be my case – that the Besançon whore had so slain me with illicit excitation that ordinary tender love was no longer possible for me.

I looked at Louise, remembering our amours in the
Jardin du Roi
, hoping this might make me a little hard. But all that would come to mind was the extreme winter cold that had enveloped us and how this cold, on the bits of our flesh that were naked to the air, had nipped and stung, and I felt this cold again and shivered.

‘Louise …’ I began.

But, as if anticipating the apology I was about to utter for being at the moment so unlike the lover she had known, she placed her fingers gently on my mouth and said: ‘Hush, Merivel. I think you should close your eyes. Try to sleep a little. I will arrange for food to be brought to you later on, for I know that when one has taken exercise one needs fortification.’

I slept the day away and only awoke in late afternoon.

On a table in my room a plate of breaded chicken and pickled cabbage had been placed, and I devoured these with unseemly haste.
At
least, thought I, hunger has returned to me. I am not dying, therefore! And after eating I went to my close-stool, and shat very copiously and felt much relieved by this, telling myself that I was now cleansed of my all my Foulness.

I put on a clean shirt and went downstairs, but I could find neither the Baron nor Louise. Assuming them to be out on some further inspection of the vines and the orchards, both now coming to perfect, yet fleeting ripeness and asking to be gathered, I entered the Baron’s Library.

Gazing at the great quantity of books (far outnumbering the volumes in my Library at Bidnold), smelling them, taking deep draughts of all that they contained, I felt a sudden Great Quiet come upon me. I sat down at the long oak table that ran the length of the room. I did not take any book to read, but only sat and breathed invisible words.

And what came to my mind was Margaret’s exhortation to begin upon what she called ‘some enterprise of Writing’, and I knew now that this was what I longed to do. Indeed, thought I to myself, this is perhaps why I have come here, not merely to be Louise’s lover, but to press my mind to some Proper Work, and in this will lie all my Consolation and some proper template for my Future.

Louise found me, sitting very still, like some Actor in a Tableau, at the Library table. The light at the window was golden, coming towards sunset.

She led me outside, to a charming terrace, where the Baron was taking his ease with a glass of wine, with Constanza at his feet.

A Footman poured wine for us. Just beyond the terrace was a coppice of Hazelnut, where a pair of sparrows were fussing and chirruping, and the sound of these birds in the soft evening sunshine was extraordinarily sweet, as though, for as long as this song lasted, nothing could be amiss in our world.

‘So, what did you choose to read in the Library?’ asked the Baron. ‘Perhaps your tour took you no further than the A Cataloguing: Aesop’s
Fables
? Aristotle’s
Dialectica
? Aubrey’s
Lives
?’

‘No,’ said I, ‘no further than A. Or not even as far. Yet I
felt
the power of the books very forcibly. That seemed to be enough …’

‘Yes? But you know you may treat the Library as though it were your own. Please borrow anything you wish from it.’

‘Thank you, Baron.’

‘Winter is not very far away. There will be great snows here at the Château. If we all have our Work, we shall endure them with fortitude,
n’est-ce pas
, Louise?’

‘Yes. And I meant to tell you, Father, that I am working on a Preparation to keep the flies from pestering you.’

The Baron put his hand on his bald dome, above the ragged daisy petals of his white hair. ‘Scourge of my existence, flies. For I sweat in my head and down they come to sup on this moisture.’

‘I could lend you a wig, Sir …’ said I.

‘Ah, wigs. Now there is a vanity I am not fond of, begging your pardon, Merivel, for indeed yours is very nice and clean. But the thought of this ton of mouldering Curls on me … there is something in me which rebels at it.’

At this moment one of the sparrows flew down from the Hazelnut bush onto the grass, where it began to peck about. I watched it for a moment, envying the birds their absence of sartorial choice, and in the next second the bird was gone. A great grey Sparrowhawk had cascaded out of the air and carried it away in its claws.

We three stared at the patch of grass where the little bird had been. Its mate left the Hazelnut and landed among the fallen leaves and looked about, hopping this way and that. We watched in sorrow. It flew back to the topmost twig of the bush and balanced there, trying to see where its lost companion had gone. Then, it began a desperate calling: ‘Sip-sip, sip-sip …’

This call was unlike the merry chirruping we had heard earlier. It was the sound of grief. And we were silent, listening to it, and Constanza began a plaintive whining.

Stroking the dog’s ears to calm her, the Baron said: ‘Who shall any longer say, when they witness this and hear the bird’s lament, that Creatures have no souls? Does not Aristotle say in his
De anima
, that “voice is the sound characteristic of what the soul has in it”? Will you tell me there is no soul to inform that cry?’

‘I shall not tell you so,’ said I.

‘And I shall tell you that we do not know,’ said Louise.

*

We dined and went to bed, and I undressed and washed myself and put on a clean nightshirt. I lay in my linen sheets, listening to the owls in the firs and to the sound of the lake far off.

My head boiled with thoughts. Although I have, over the past year and a half, continued to set down my own Story, and this writing has often calmed and assuaged my melancholy, and sometimes brought me mirth, I do also see that my own life, for all its Singularity, has not sufficient significance to imbue this task with any real merit.

What I would fain discover is some Subject – such as Sir James Prideaux’s
Treatise upon the Poor of England
– which might absorb all my attention and lead to a Work of Proper Distinction, sufficient to get me some marvellous hearing at the Royal Society, whose Fellows incite in me both admiration and envy in equal measure.

These were no banal speculations, but considerations of the most audacious kind, leading to a momentous question. ‘Why,’ said I to myself, ‘should it not be I, Robert Merivel, who brings the full power of his mind to this subject of the Souls of Animals and tries to explore it further?’

Why not, indeed? Why not?

I knew that many men had speculated upon the question, and that I could not proceed in ignorance, without first perusing these speculations. But I also assumed that many of them might be found in Baron de Saint Maurice’s admirable Library, and thus be accessible to me in the coming days and weeks.

My lack of any formulated opinion on the question troubled me a little. I had, as yet, no coherent Hypothesis, let alone a Theory. But I remembered how Pearce had often said to me, on the subject of Anatomy (at which I excelled and he did not), that understanding is, of necessity, a slow journey and that, at the outset of this journey, one should proceed with humility. ‘One cannot,’ he said, with a flourish of complicated Pearcean logic, ‘know in advance the infinite number of things which one does not know.’

What I knew I had – which many other men did not – was a great Affinity with God’s Creatures, from a Starling I had first dissected as a child, to the Badgers I longed to find in the Vauxhall woods, from the great deception attending the gift of my Indian
Nightingale
and my attempts to save its life, to the sweet dog, Minette, who had been my companion through months of adversity. And so onwards unto Clarendon, my poor Bear, who cost me the price of a priceless ring, and whose soul I seemed to hear talking unto mine and asking to be set free.

Might it not be the case, I reasoned, that this Affinity – though I knew myself to be no scholar – would enable me to arrive at perceptions hidden from drier and colder men? And from what did this Affinity arise? Surely, from my own animal nature, to which my entire existence had been such a fearful slave? And thus, would not my attempt at this Treatise teach me not a little more only about birds or bears and their place in the world, but also about my own place and my own soul, thus enabling me to conduct the last years of my life with greater dignity than heretofore?

All of this thinking put me into a state of great optimism and excitation. The sweet sound of the lake, the calling of the owls, the sighing of the wind in the firs, seemed to set up the perfect orchestration to this agitation of my mind. I knew myself to be furiously happy. Almost, I desired to go down to the Library now and begin my search for books. I longed to tell Margaret that at last I had found a subject perfectly suited to me and that I would throw myself into my great Work with all the enthusiasm of which she knew me to be capable.

Though sleep seemed to be far off, as the night advanced and the Moon went down, I felt a beautiful calm steal upon me. I had my Plan and I saw that it was good. I felt like God surveying Creation and congratulating Himself on His excellent work.

And so I fell into a deep and soundless repose, and it was only when I woke with the sunrise that I remembered what I was meant to be doing in the night and had not done. I was meant to be making to love to Louise.

The time was six o’clock. I went quietly along the stone corridor to her room, concealing with my night robe a beautifully erect member. It was as though all my exquisite mental Excitation – compounded by my vision of myself holding forth to the Learned Fellows in the sacred chambers of the Royal Society – had primed me for its physical counterpart.

I went into the room and stole into Louise’s bed. She woke and turned to me and I kissed her. When she felt the hardness that I pressed against her, she laughed with joy.

26

NOW, FOR SOME
long while, as the Autumn colours, shining through the lake mists, slowly browned and faded and the first chill of Winter came to our surprised attention, I can truly say that I was happy and at peace.

My days followed a sweet uniformity. After breakfast I would go with Louise to her Laboratory, so that she could share with me the progress of her experiments. I sat beside her, observing the measuring, mixing, heating, and sifting of herbs and compounds. Six different preparations were being tried as a Repellent for flies, but she could not come to any success here, for those that appeared efficacious burned the skin and those that did not burn it seemed rather to attract insects to land upon the Baron’s pate.

Yet Louise did not give up. One of the many things I came to admire in her was her Quiet in relation to Failure. And when I commented upon this she said: ‘I am merely trying to emulate, in a small way, your sublime Newton. He has demonstrated that on the route to scientific truth, Catastrophe and Error must be continually overcome. What is the purpose of becoming cross?’

After an hour or so, I would leave her to her labours and go to the Baron’s Library. Here, in the scented quiet of this room, I had embarked upon Aristotle’s
De anima
and begun to ponder long upon his conclusions about the soul, which he divides into three Elements. These he describes as follows: the Nutritive Soul, possessed by Man and Vegetables; the Sensitive Soul, possessed by Man and Animals; and the Rational Soul, which is unique to man.

Though it may prove very difficult to question his reasoning that
only
man possesses an intellective Soul, capable of Memory and will, I tried not to let myself and my would-be Treatise stumble upon this early obstacle. I reminded myself that Aristotle might be
in Error
when he assigned souls to potatoes and vegetable marrows. And if this was the case, why then he might also be mistaken in believing that animals could not reason or exert their will when called upon to do so.

Instances of animal behaviour, in which the will appears to be exerted, I already knew to be many. In the work of the naturalist, Henry More, I had read to my amazement of a ‘Parliament of rooks’, which sat upon the high roosts and acted as one to hound from their number those birds that had exhibited ‘delinquent conduct’.

Pliny, I recalled, speaks of a troupe of Elephants who, being taught to dance by a cruel Master, were seen to be ‘practising in secret’, so that they would not be chastised at the next dancing lesson.

And was it not plain to see, thought I, that horses, such as my beloved Danseuse, and dogs, such as Bunting, came very clearly to comprehend the elaborate system of rewards and punishments meted out by their owners, thus arguing for a process of reasoning going on in their heads?

More than this, I had observed in these animals, no less than in Clarendon, a detestation of oppression and a spark of recognition of Justice. For had it not been true that, on the day when I led Clarendon out of his cage, so that his poor limbs, clamped in by the snow and ice, might be freed and exercised, he had followed me very meekly, as though understanding very perfectly my benign intentions towards him?

He could have massacred me for leaving him so long pent up in the cage, but he did not. It was as though he perceived my sorrow at what had happened in that time of the great snows, and understood that I was doing my best to make some amends to him.