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Plot

CROPS & CULTIVATION

MADAME ROUSSEAU

(continued from last quarter)

(drama for stage)

sudden darkness: table moved to front stage, draped in heavily embroidered curtain: church bells: young Thérèse and Rousseau at the table

Jean Jacques

A fresh Spring-like morning Thérèse. I feel a new beginning. We will rise above the commonplace. But no tawdry, priest-bugged wedding for us. It is our own contract, in our own words. In centuries to come others will follow our example. What is a wedding? What is a marriage? What part does a society have in the intimate transactions of two souls? Whose business is it but ours? We make promises, categorical promises to each other. This morning we will be wed. I weep our betrothal has been so long, but today we will be Monsieur and Madame Rousseau. There! I acknowledge you, in the eyes of the world.

young Thérèse

( yawning )

Bliss! To be married in Bourgoin, such a little town, where we only arrived last night, where we know absolutely no one. How did you think of this? You are a man of your word Jean Jacques. What arrangements have you made? (Thérèse’s words delivered as though humouring a child )

Jean Jacques

I wrote all night.

young Thérèse

And?

Jean Jacques

The wedding contract! Our treaty with each other, which we will sign. And I have on my best Armenian costume, see, a little twirl, mademoiselle.

young Thérèse

But my luggage is lost again. If I’m to be a bride, what am I to wear?

Jean Jacques

That is a nuisance, to say nothing of the expense I will be forced to bear, but for now I have taken down one of the curtains. I know it seems not very much but an Indian sari is all in the tucks and it will go very nicely with my outfit.

young Thérèse

Well, I’d better get tucking. Which church is it to be at?

Jean Jacques

We have no need of a church. We will be married here, in our room, at the Fontaine d’Or, what could be more appropriate, confidential?

young Thérèse

You sure this thing will be legal? Who’s to say anything is undertaken if there are no witnesses.

Jean Jacques

You want there to be witnesses?

young Thérèse

Well it would make it a bit more like a real thing, don’t you think?

Jean Jacques

No problem. We’ll utilise the natural justice of the street. Wait there, no! bind yourself in the sari, in readiness.

Rousseau jumps off the stage into the audience, his task to persuade two persons to come on stage, he furnishes them with their few lines of dialogue

young Thérèse

(singing) Autrefois le rat de ville

Invita le rat de champs,

D’une facon fort civile,

A des reliefs d’ortolans.

enter Rousseau with two members of the audience

Jean Jacques

Such luck Thérèse. Downstairs at the bar, these gentlemen. Unbelievable luck, the mayor of Bourgoin and his friend Monsieur ...?

Monsieur

Trésivre, Mademoiselle. Very pleethed to meet with you.

young Thérèse

Very.( with irony )

Jean Jacques

Gentlemen the bride.

The Mayor

You’d better be for real mate. If not you’ll get a good kicking.

Jean Jacques

You see how it is when you involve the law, Thérèse. Let us proceed to the treaty between us, which these good gentlemen will witness. There should be music.( suggestions of foul songs from the cast ) No matter. I will officiate.

On this day 26th August 1768, Jean Jacques Rousseau citizen of Geneva and Thérèse Levasseur of Orleans marry with each other in the town of Bourgoin at the establishment of the Fontaine d’Or, before these witnesses here present, later to be signatories to this treaty. We, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thérèse Levasseur, affirm

the following: there is one chain, a chain which we shall ever wear, of which we may be justly proud and which binds us together: liberty is not to be found in any form of government, she is in the heart of the free man and woman, it is on this ground we chain ourselves: our love is founded on esteem which will last with life itself, on virtues which will not fade with fading beauty, on fitness of character which gives a charm to intercourse and will sustain us into old age: we are united until death do us part: our hearts are bound, and to each other we owe utmost fidelity: in marriage the man is the woman’s head and it is her duty to obey as is the will of nature, but where the woman is with virtue a man will be led by her: a woman controls a man by controlling herself, by making her favours scarce and precious, keeping him in her power by keeping herself at a distance: a happily married man honours his wife’s chastity without having to complain of her coldness: .......

The Mayor

I’m warnin’ im, if he doesn’t get on with it he’s going to get a hammerin. Do you hear me mush? Get finished!

Jean Jacques

( accelerating )

...inevitably pleasures are destroyed by possession, and love above all others, but in its place a gentle habit and the charm of confidence prevail: we will live for the charms of home life and if the husband is happy at home his wife will be a happy wife: this treaty is signed with mutual kissing.

young Thérèse

Lovely Jean Jacques. And to think you stayed up all night to write it! Well, we’d better get signing.

Jean Jacques

It is what you wanted?

young Thérèse

Well, its better than no ring.

Jean Jacques

I have a ring. Look.

young Thérèse

Don’t fit.( amused )

Jean Jacques

Try it on your little finger. There you are. Perfect! It will impede you less.

The Mayor

I’ve had enough of this! Beer money or I’ll have you out the window!

Jean Jacques

Monsieur le Mayor, your signature and the purse is yours to share. You can sign? Well, a mark will do.

Monsieur

Can I snog the bride?

young Thérèse

If you call me Madame Rousseau you can. Madame Rousseau is who I am and I’ll ram it down the gizzard of anyone who says otherwise. This is what you intended husband, isn’t it? ( kisses the Monsieur)

total darkness: fog horn drowning out all else then clanking, interspersed with the fall of the guillotine and the crowd’s roar: guillotining restored on front stage old Thérèse still in chair with her citizens

old Thérèse

( in and out of her mind, various voices in her head)

Now their coming, thick and fast, this is what I likes, one after t’other, heads scattering like boule, blood splattered like muck.

Jean Jacques

( comes to stand behind her chair, ghost-like )

My belly adores your soup wife, it worships your boiled beef and veal, it prays for your cabbage, it hymns your turnips, it choirs your carrots, it communes with your pickled trout, it benedicts for your fruit and chestnuts.

old Thérèse

You like some things about me then? (out loud, involuntary, only Thérèse is aware of Rousseau )

Citizen 2

Everything Madame.

Jean Jacques

( leans over talking intimately to her )

More than some things Thérèse! During the years of our union, my dear, I have sought happiness only in yours: I have sought only to make you happy. And I perceive with sorrow that success has not attended my efforts..... My dear friend, not only have you ceased to find pleasure in my company, but it seems to be a great trial for you even to spend a few moments with me, out of regard for me. You are happy with everyone but me; all who surround you know your secrets but me.

old Thérèse

Secrets? Well the valet, John, at Ermenonville, knew how my title tickled. I turned it into one of my “odd expressions” ..mad amorousseau... meaning sex mad ( giggles ). What a mouthful.......that John was! (laughs). Is! Never kept my bud studs secret from Jean Jacques though, especially during manual work.....( the guillotine falls) Oh! my god.

Citizen 1

You can cook cow. Axe man’s severed the threads by which it hung.

Citizen 2

She’s grinning!

the guillotine falls again

old Thérèse

Oh! my god, not another one!

Voices

Down with the nobs!

old Thérèse

Off with their nobs! (shouts to the crowd)

Jean Jacques

( echoes )

And if I were to die Thérèse, promise me to have nothing to do with priests. Priests come to women when their husbands die. Nor have anything to do with great persons, I know too many great persons and they will come to comfort you. Particularly beware of literary men, they have no sincerity and will be intent on enacting what they have imagined. You should retire to the depths of a small province, or some small city like Blois or even Orleans.

old Thérèse

Citizen a word in your ear? After the death of his divinity, all the great persons of the revolution came before me, and for his soul’s peaceful repose I lapped them up.( laughing as though drunk )

Citizen 2

Madame Rousseau, a hand on the gallow’s pole.

old Thérèse

You’re bigger than you look.

Citizen 2

And a little manual work!

old Thérèse

Work you up then, you vile little sod, up, get up there! ( suggestion of a whisper as though speaking to a dog, looking back over her sholder at Rousseau ) a bougie in the front, a bougie in the back, a bougie biting flesh... and I lie back and let John see the bush, in full view, stretched on the rack, and anything he wanted to do with me: traitor to your class, traitor to your children, traitor to me, and John dips me like fondue: I’ll bring you to see... you snivelling string of snot! Come on! How much more can you stand? How many times must I do this to you before you die? Why don’t you die? Drink! Drink! As I pull and pull, you drink and drink! Arsenic? Strychnine? Have I?

the hum, the clanking, the rush of the guillotine increases in intensity

How about your heart bursting? Your brain seized with apoplexy? Me handiwork sounds like a roll on the drum ( narrative building with process at guillotine ), up! up! higher! into the mountains, harder! longer! longer than a horse, climbing Mount Pilat, you may never return once upon a time, for all the hurt you’ve done me, you may never return, for all the hurt my sex endures, once upon a time, shall I? this time? the last time? shall I make it the last time? shall you choose and do I do this just because I hate, or because I love, as I always have, as you don’t deserve? Will I have? Had the courage? Or just imagined on the day it coincides? Or are we mad? Driven each other mad, so we can’t tell tails from heads?

Citizen 2

Oh that is very good Madame. You are some kind of expert in arte amoris. For perfection, as the blade descends, manic vigour on the drum!

old Thérèse

There are too many voices in me head Monsieur. They all come back to crazy me.

Rousseau and young Thérèse make their way back to the bed and settle into sex

Thérèse Levastsewer. ( Bonnefond )

I choose it Thérèse. Not left, right! ( Jean Jacques )

Push Thérèse. Live. ..

Right! ..

At the birth of supreme being. ( Marat )

I never felt the least spark of love for her. ( Jean Jacques )

Thérèse Levastsewer. ( voices in unison )

I promise. ( Jean Jacques )

I promise. ..

old Thérèse

So I hit ‘im Citizen. ( mimed by Rousseau and young Thérèse ) We was at Ermenonville thanks to Monsieur de Girardin. Always borrowing somewhere to live. Jean Jacques was sixty six years old. He was bent over and I was holding him, like I’m holding you now, and I brought it down upon his head. It seemed the only way. I must have done it, I’d thought about it, so many times, just that way. And the chamber pot was all broken over the floor, like mosaic, and a pool of blood beside his bonks. “ I arose and pierced the silence with me screams,” that’s what they wrote. Feathers ruffled, scratching at the floor like an enraged hen. Monsieur de Girardin came, we had locked the door, but he had a key.....he found me covered with blood from my husband’s wound. He was my husband.... the most famous man in Europe..... to whom I’d given everything and in the end took it all back.

There was lot’s of rumours. Some said he committed suicide because he’d found out about me and John. Some said it was at the order of the king. What was accepted, in the end, was he’d had a stroke and in the fall cracked his head on the floor, on stone tiles. I lay down beside him and put me arms around him. I remember he was as cold as the floor in next to no time. Then I cried and cried for the love of women... for the little nobody in Jean Jacques.... for all my babbies whether they live or not. But how can a woman get sentimental in the head when it’s her lot to always have her hands in goo and her ass on the nest.

Citizen 2

Sorry there’s so much of it Madame.

Citizen 1

It was the last slice of bread Madame. It’s a waste of young girls to take off the head when their titties hang like firkins.

Citizen 2

And I’ve been abstaining Madame. I will wipe it clean for you..... With my neckerchief.

sudden darkness: foghorn blotting out everything that’s gone before, fades

Announcement

The remains of the great have a varied fate. On the 4th July 1778 Rousseau was buried, as befits an artist, on the Ile des Peupliers, a tiny island in the lake of the Parc Ermenonville. On the 9th October 1794 Rousseau’s remains were removed from Ile des Peupliers and taken in triumph, as befits a hero, to the Pantheon in Paris. In 1814, with the return of the Bourbons his remains were removed from the Pantheon and scattered as befits the unnoticed. Thérèse Levasseur, always largely unnoticed, dropped off the world murmuring in her final sleep, with some regret , for some reason or other...

old Thérèse

spot: front stage

Because Rousseau did a poor girl who did not know how to read or write the honour of having her wash his linen and cook his soup and at times share his bed - must this poor girl be turned into a heroine? ... The widow of Jean Jacques for all my life....

The remains of doormats retain an imprint of all the traffic of the world, and with the unnoticed everything is noticed.

music: Rousseau’s “Chanson de Negre” (sound recording available from Rousseau Association website: duration 1min 50secs approx) fade up behind Thérèse.

END