Le Neveu de Rameau

Whether the weather be fair or foul, around five o'clock in the evening, the philosopher takes his reverie for a stroll in the Palais-Royal. His thoughts roam, libertine, drifting from one to the next like those dissolute youths chasing courtesans down the Allée de Foy. If the weather turns sour, he takes refuge in the Café de la Régence, where Paris plays chess better than anywhere else in the world, and where the most dreadful talk is heard. It is on one of these afternoons that he is accosted by one of the most bizarre characters in a land where God has provided no shortage of them: a compound of haughtiness and baseness, of good sense and folly, who displays his good qualities without ostentation and his bad ones without shame. Nothing is more unlike him than himself. One day gaunt and haggard as a dying man whose teeth could be counted through his cheeks, the next day plump and well-fed as if he had just left a financier's table. Today clad in rags, tomorrow powdered and curled. His first care in the morning is to know where he shall dine; after dinner, he considers where he shall sup. He is the nephew of that famous musician who wrote so much on the theory of music, of which neither he nor anyone else ever understood a thing.

Here he is, then, this Rameau, who sits down and speaks. He speaks of everything and nothing, of genius and mediocrity, of his uncle whom he only catches sight of passing in the street and who does him no good, of those men of genius who ought to be smothered in the cradle, so much do they disrupt the world. He secretly seethes at every praise bestowed upon a great man, for such praise sends him back to his own nullity. He sings the overture of Les Indes galantes, mimes a violin player, throws himself onto a bench to imitate the blissful sleep of the rich man, rises, yawns, and still looks around him for imaginary flatterers. The philosopher, sitting opposite him, defends Racine, Voltaire, the truth that serves in the long run, the man of genius who is a tree whose summit touches the clouds even if it has withered a few plants at its roots. But the nephew will hear nothing of these heights: he would rather Racine had been a good grocer on the Rue Saint-Honoré, for at least he would have enjoyed a good table, good company, and pretty women.

Then the nephew recounts his downfall. He lived in a house where he was celebrated because he was the perfect buffoon: their little Rameau, their pretty Rameau, the ignoramus, the glutton, the big brute. They tossed him morsels at the table, slapped his face, kicked him—and he was happy for it. He lost everything for having possessed, just once in his life, common sense. He was taken by the shoulders, led to the door, and now here he is on the pavement, penniless, sleeping on straw between a nobleman's coachman and a failed poet. He despises himself for not knowing how to grovel like the rest, and yet something within him occasionally rebels, a certain dignity that awakens for no apparent reason, only to fall back asleep as quickly as it came.

He then acts out the scene of the pimp seducing a young shopgirl, with such precision of gesture and voice that the philosopher no longer knows whether to laugh or be indignant. He plays an imaginary violin, sits at an invisible harpsichord, sings, beats time with his foot, his head, his whole body, and passions chase one another across his face—tenderness, anger, pleasure, pain—as if an entire orchestra had taken refuge in this single man. He explains his trade as a music master, how he would arrive at his pupils' homes, chatter about Parisian gossip, fiddle with the harpsichord for a quarter of an hour, and leave with his little fee, without having taught a thing. He expounds his theory of moral idioms: every profession, he says, has its exceptions to the general conscience, just as every language has its exceptions to grammar. Theft is nothing but an idiom of the trade.

The philosopher listens as he describes the menagerie of parasites and obsequious valets who gather at his patron's home: fallen poets, hissed actresses, unread authors, all hungry as wolves and cruel as tigers, tearing to pieces anyone who succeeds. The nephew tells how he had to go and applaud mediocre plays alone in the pit, how he tended to the household dogs and cats, rubbed Criquette's belly when she had colic, endured Mademoiselle's vapors and the boss's black moods—that motionless pagoda whose jaw opened only to articulate a crushing word. He was cast out for having spoken, just once, what he truly thought. But he regrets nothing, or rather he regrets everything, and it amounts to the same thing.

Next comes the story of the renegade of Avignon, which the nephew relates with a connoisseur's admiration: a man who had insinuated himself into the home of a Jew, won his trust, then stripped him of his fortune by feigning terror of the Inquisition, before vanishing with the loot on a vessel he had chartered himself. The philosopher is outraged; the nephew delights in it. For him, a unity of character in evil merits a sort of consideration: one spits on a petty crook, but one cannot suppress a shudder before a great criminal.

The conversation then drifts toward music, and the nephew catches fire. He mimes an entire orchestra, sings every role in an opera, shifts from recitative to aria, from bass to soprano, does the violins, the oboes, the horns, imitates the gestures of the furious singer and those of the swooning diva. He sweats, he exhausts himself, he is at once magnificent and grotesque. The chess players have left their pieces to watch him; passersby gather at the windows of the café. He champions Italian music over French music, proclaims that song must be the notated declamation of passion itself, that the animal cry of man is the true line that melody must follow. Then the intoxication drops away all at once, and he remains there, motionless, eyes closed, like a man drained of his very substance.

The philosopher attempts one last time to bring him back to virtue, to the education of his son, to dignity. The nephew sweeps it all away with a gesture: virtue is a currency no longer in circulation, the world belongs to clever scoundrels, and the only genius he recognizes is that of well-conducted flattery. He invokes the wisdom of Solomon—to drink good wine, gorge oneself on delicate dishes, roll about with pretty women, and all the rest is but vanity. The philosopher counters with the story of a younger son who, returning wealthy from Cartagena, bought back his ruined parents' estate and married off his sisters: that is true happiness, he says, with tears in his eyes. The nephew looks at him as one looks at a being of another species.

They speak further of Molière and La Bruyère, whom the nephew reads assiduously—not to learn virtue, but to learn how to conceal his vices. He draws from Tartuffe the lesson of being a hypocrite without adopting the tone, from The Miser that of being a miser without the appearances. He explains how he has pushed his art of parasitism so far as to invent unprecedented postures of flattery—that admiring attitude of the back, for instance, which he claims as his own creation. He speaks of his dead wife, of his son whom he would gladly raise in the art of gold rather than that of sounds, of the little leather apron it would be better to tie around him than to seat him before a harpsichord.

Night has fallen over the Palais-Royal. The bell of the Opéra is heard in the distance. The nephew rises, for he must not miss the overture—it is there he might find a supper. The philosopher asks him one last thing: whether he has tried to make something of his life, to write, to compose. The nephew shrugs. It is better to write great things than to execute small ones, he says, but he has done neither. He takes his leave, his hat under his arm, humming an Italian air. And the philosopher is left alone, wondering whether beneath all this buffoonery there was not, mingled with the cynicism and baseness, something that bore a terrible resemblance to the truth.