William Boyd - The New Confessions

Two aspects of The Confessions fatefully coincided in March 1929 to set me on this course of action.

In 1738 Rousseau had come into his inheritance and for the first time in his life was in the possession of a fair sum of money. However, he was not feeling well—“fading away,” as he put it — and had diagnosed himself as suffering from a polyp on the heart. A certain doctor in Montpellier was reputed to have successfully treated such a case and Jean Jacques went there to consult him.

This departure, significantly, coincided with the entry of his rival Witzenreid into Mme. de Warens’s household. The great love affair was nearing its end: things were no longer as they once had been between Rousseau and his beloved Maman .

On his way to Montpellier, Rousseau encountered and fell in with a party of genteel travelers who included one Mme. de Larnage and a Marquis de Taulignon. Mme. de Larnage was attractive, heavily rouged, forty-four years old and mother of ten children, and the appearance of young Jean Jacques on the scene proved much more enticing than her ostensible suitor, the old marquis. For some reason — and this is what drew me to the episode — Rousseau seemed ashamed of his lowly background in this company and, quite astonishingly, claimed to be an Englishman called Dudding. By extreme good fortune no one asked “Mr. Dudding” to speak in his native language — of which he knew not one word. Mme. de Larnage made her feelings evident, and at one of their nightly stops in a coaching inn Jean Jacques surrendered himself to this “sensual and voluptuous” woman. They parted before they reached Montpellier, Jean Jacques — physically exhausted — promising a rendezvous a few weeks hence. This never occurred. Rousseau, having learned a few English phrases in Montpellier to sustain the Mr. Dudding disguise, and having regained some of his health, set off to meet with Mme. de Larnage at Bourg-St.-Andéol. On his way there, however, his guilt at betraying Maman was so intense that he broke off his journey and returned immediately to Chambéry to rejoin her. He was received coolly. Witzenreid was still there. Jean Jacques’s place had been taken.

We filmed the coach journey in the state forest near Spandau and I cast Monika Alt as Mme. de Larnage. I scrutinized the episode in The Confessions , trying to understand Rousseau’s motives in dallying with Mme. de Larnage. Was it a preemptive revenge because he knew Witzenreid would edge him out of the nest? Or was there something in Mme. de Larnage that he could not find in Maman? In the book he goes as far as to contrast the two experiences of sex. With Maman , he says, sex was always accompanied by melancholy, but with Mme. de Larnage, he says, “I was always proud to be a man. I surrendered myself to my senses with joy and with confidence.” What did he mean? What went on?

The Confessions is remarkable in its candor, not least about its author’s sexual nature. From his earliest days Jean Jacques liked to be dominated. When he was a child, the sister of his guardian at Bossey, Mlle. Lambercier, had to stop spanking him for his misdemeanors when she saw how much he was enjoying it. Later, in Nyon, a young girl — Mlle. Goton — was to act out a fantasy of a strict governess and whip him. It was the only moment in his life, he implies, when a member of the opposite sex actually discerned and satisfied his deepest sexual cravings. Had Mme. de Larnage, I wondered, done the same?

I must admit I was happy to see Monika again, We based ourselves up the road from Spandau in Falkenhagen for three or four days while we went out with the coaches and horses filming traveling scenes. Monika knew about Doon and me and was provocatively discreet about our past. “It’s all forgotten, Johnny,” she said on more than one occasion, miming sealed lips, which of course made me remember all the more vividly.

The last evening in the little Gasthaus in Falkenhagen we had a ribald discussion about Rousseau and flagellation. Karl-Heinz said he found it very easy to sympathize with. Günter Koll (he played the marquis) said he thought it was depraved. Monika claimed to understand the feeling — even though she had no inclinations in that direction herself. She said that if a man asked her to beat him and it gave him real pleasure, she would not refuse.

I said, “So if I asked you, ‘Monika, I want you to beat me,’ you wouldn’t be shocked?”

“Not at all.”

We talked on. Karl-Heinz told us about a man he used to sleep with who liked having the juice of citrus fruit squeezed over his body. “For some reason grapefruit was his favorite,” Karl-Heinz said. The tone of the evening’s conversation degenerated further as we called for more drink.

Later, I came out of the Gasthaus’s sole bathroom to find Monika waiting her turn.

“Ah, Monika,” I said stupidly. We were standing rather close together. I was wearing pajamas and dressing gown. She looked at me, smiling.

“You want to try it?” she asked.

“I’ll come along in half an hour.”

She was still dressed when I went into her room. She seemed incapable of removing a knowing smile from her lips.

“Look, Monica …” I began cautiously.

“This is just an experiment. Yes?”

“Yes.” I enjoyed the lie. “Purely in the interests of research.” The pretense made my breathing quicken with excitement.

“What do you want me to use?” she asked. “I’ve got a newspaper. My father used to beat me with a rolled-up newspaper. Or a brush.”

“What about a shoe? A slipper?”

We selected a fine suede slipper and stood and looked at each other.

“Do you think I should be naked?” I asked.

“Oh yes, I think so.”

I took my clothes off.

“See, you’re excited already. Do you want me—”

“No, I think you should be clothed.” I could hear my blood like surf in my ears.

She sat down on the bed. I knelt beside her then bent over her knees. Her hands ran over my back and buttocks.

“Monika, please!”

“Sorry. I forgot. This is simply literary criticism. Shall I start?”

She gave me a good severe spanking. My buttocks reddened, then stung. The erection I had had subsided utterly.

“Harder?”

“No. Stop, stop,” I said weakly. I stood up. “Ouch,” I said rubbing my smarting arse. “That’s bloody agony! ”

“And look, it’s not working.” She got to her feet. “Perhaps I should be naked too.”

I looked at her. She dropped the slipper and began unbuttoning her dress.

“Yes,” I said. “Might be a good idea.”

I took up my journal again after a gap of several years.

Chambéry, May 15, 1929. Filming at our version of Les Charmettes. The house is ideal. Orchard very pretty in bloom. We have planted four hundred mature vines in the field at the back and have terraced the garden in front. Now all we require is a sunny day .

I wrote that entry as we sat in a small tented village to one side of the farmhouse, listening to the rain rumble on the stretched canvas overhead. The Tri-Kamera was set up and ready to roll. The beehives were in position and Georg Pfau had five thousand bees ready to be loosed on the grassy meadows and orchard blossoms whenever the sun broke through the clouds. We had been waiting for sun — which the meteorological office in Grenoble had been assuring us was on its way — for four days. Everyone was numb with boredom. We had one scene left to shoot and The Confessions: Part I would be over.

I did not care what the weather was like for Rousseau’s departure from Les Charmettes, and had already shot it in a dismal drizzle, but it was absolutely essential that when he arrived the gorgeous sunshine should, in the best traditions of the pathetic fallacy, reflect his mood. Remember, he has only recently betrayed Maman with Mme. de Larnage, and conscience has now redirected his steps to Les Charmettes — his arrival unannounced and unexpected. I had changed things somewhat from the book. There, Jean Jacques encounters Mme. de Warens in her dressing room. In the film I wanted him to walk up the country road lined with bulging flowery hedgerows, his face animated with joyous expectation. He knocks at the farmhouse door. No reply. He hears a distant peal of female laughter. Slowly he walks down towards the orchard (we should recall the idyll of the cherry-picking sequence here) and comes across Maman and Witzenreid picnicking, Witzenreid stretched out on the grass, his head in Maman’s lap. (Witzenreid was dismissed by Rousseau as “a hairdresser … tall, pale, with a flat face and dull wits, whose conversation betrayed all the affectation and bad taste of the hairdresser’s trade”!) Jean Jacques approaches them. We go to three screens — the three faces in close-up, all trying to disguise their respective emotions. It is the end of the affair. I wanted it to be a moment of bitter poignancy set in a scene of fragrant summer beauty. But all we had was rain.