Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

Grand Rear Secretary of the Grand Rear Secretariat

Official charged with embellishing translations

Official charged with showing and observing

Observer of drafts

Subdirector of the multitudes

Superintendent of frogs

Condemned man of noon

Official charged with keeping his eye glued to the cupboard keyholes

Official charged with preserving and clarifying

Official charged with making good the emperor’s oversights

Leader of the blind

Minister of winter

Shaker of hands

Superintendent of leather boots

Regulator of female tones

Participant in deliberations on advantages and disadvantages

Fulminator

Official charged with speeding up delayed dispatches

Musician for secular occasions on a short tour of duty

Grand supervisor of fish

Fisher of rorquals

Friend

DICTIONARIES and catalogs: the natural home of compulsives. The index as a literary genre?

KIRCHER ONLY THINKS through the intermedium of images, which comes down to saying he doesn’t think at all. He’s a meditative type, in the sense in which Walter Benjamin understood the expression: he’s at home among allegories.

THINGS THAT PLEASE the deity: odd numbers, vowels, silence, laughs.

THE PORTUGUESE of Brazil is a language full of soft vocalizations. A language of black magic, of invocation. In his Manual of Harmonics Nicomachus of Gerasa declares that the consonants constitute the material of sound, the vowels its divine nature. The latter are like the notes of the music of the spheres.

HAVING BECOME MASTERS of Egypt, the Arabs called the hieroglyphs the “language of the birds” because of the large number of stylized fowls to be seen among them.

FLAUBERT’S NOTEBOOKS, October 1859: “Father Kircher, the author of the Magic Lantern, of the Œdipus Ægyptiacus , of a system for making an automaton that would speak like a man, of the palingenesis of plants, of two other systems, one for counting, one for expatiating on all subjects, studied China, the Coptic language (the first man in Europe to do so); author of a work that begins with the words: Turris Babel sive Archontologia , born in 1602.” The fact that this summary is there together with the little note on Pierre Jurieu—“Pierre Jurieu, tormented by colics, attributed them to the battles seven knights ceaselessly fought out in his bowels”—which he was to use in the preliminary manuscript of Bouvard et Pécuchet , leaves little doubt as to the high regard in which Flaubert held Athanasius Kircher’s works.

LOREDANA: She gives her advice with all the tenderness and gentleness of a heavy machine gun. Having said that, there’s no doubt she’s right: if you stand still, the beast will eat you, if you run, it’ll catch up with you.

1 Sad the disciple who does not surpass his master.

2 Yet he will always love. (Read phonetically as a French sentence, this gives: Ta main à ma bite, Saint Père —Your hand on my cock, Holy Father. — Translator’s note.)

In which we hear of the unexpected conversion of Queen Christina

THAT SAME YEAR the most incredible news reached the Vatican by devious routes: the daughter of that Gustavus Adolphus who had vowed to exterminate all the papists & Jesuits in creation, the enlightened but libertine sovereign of a kingdom that was a stronghold of the Reformation, Queen Christina of Sweden secretly wanted to convert!

There were important matters at stake: it was a unique opportunity for the Church of Rome to demonstrate its power & its ability to bring one of the most striking figures of the Reformation back to the fold. It was a matter, therefore, of carefully selecting those who would be charged with accelerating proceedings. Kircher’s services were once more called upon and he gave his superiors the benefit of his wise advice; two Jesuits from his immediate entourage were dispatched to Sweden at once, disguised as simple gentlemen.

The indoctrination of Christina of Sweden began right away, though not without difficulty as the Queen, intelligent & more conversant with theological matters than one would have thought, opposed argument after argument from her two instructors. Having said that, the stumbling block to her conversion was purely temporal: if she became Catholic, Christina could not remain head of a Protestant kingdom.

For the next two years my master hardly left his study at all, entirely taken up with the compilation of his Mundus Subterraneus , which grew a little larger with every day, & with the revisions and adjustments essential for the publication of his Egyptian Oedipus . To his delight, on May 2, 1652, the day of his fiftieth birthday, he finally held the first volume of this major work in his hands, the one to which he had devoted every moment of his life, from the time when the hieroglyphs had, as it were, appeared to him. Twenty years of uninterrupted research, more than three hundred authors of antiquity quoted in support of his thesis, two thousand pages divided into four volumes to be published over three years! A very large number of engravings, executed to his orders by such talented painters as Bloemaert & Rosello, provided marvelous illustrations to a text for which my master had many new characters cast. It was a huge enterprise & enjoyed corresponding success.

The Œdipus Ægyptiacus thus created a great stir throughout Europe & from 1652 to 1654 Kircher had to put up with the inconveniences caused by his contemporaries’ enthusiasm. Scholars, sent by the greatest scientific academies in the world, flocked to Rome to meet him. People came from all sides to see the man who had managed to decipher the language of the pharaohs, the hieroglyphs that had remained such a mystery to ordinary mortals for twenty-four hundred years … It was such a success that the books were sold out even before they came off the printer’s presses. The name of Kircher was on everyone’s lips & during those three years we had to reply to more than a thousand laudatory letters.

Meanwhile in Stockholm the Pope’s envoys suddenly saw their efforts rewarded: on February 11, 1654 Queen Christina of Sweden announced to the senate her decision to abdicate in favor of her cousin, Charles. All the protestations of the senators were futile &, in a coincidence to which destiny alone holds the key, it was on May 2, 1654, Kircher’s birthday, that she renounced the throne before all the representatives of the estates. After that, the ceremony of abdication was a mere formality & on June 16, having returned the crown jewels and taken off her crown herself, Christina of Sweden held sway over no one but herself here below.

Scarcely twenty-eight years old, though having reigned for longer than many a king who had gone white in the exercise of power, she immediately set off, anxious to leave as quickly as possible a kingdom from which she had banished herself in an act of great self-denial. Accompanied by a few servants & faithful courtiers, she had her hair cut, dressed like a man so as not to be recognized & left with no regret the country that had shown her such little love.

She headed for Innsbruck, where she was to abjure her heresy officially. One can well imagine how anxiously the ecclesiastical authorities followed her progress step by step. Her abdication, important though it was, meant nothing in itself; at any moment Christina could have renounced the sacrifice of her faith, which was so important for the Church. And my master was not the only person to follow the Queen on her journey by means of the letters the Vatican’s spies sent to the Quirinal.