Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

You began The Nun as a farce, because there was no question of publishing such a thing in 1760. (You’d have been off to the Bastille — worse than the jail at Vincennes where the Letter on the Blind put you!) And you ended it in tears, or rather not at all, because the text published in 1796, as it has come down to us, is unfinished.

Your Nun has been on my mind throughout my journey with Teresa. Please don’t take this admission for a piece of persiflage. I am incapable of that, and besides, I should never dare to be ironical with you!

Still, I must confess that I first approached Teresa somewhat lightly and unthinkingly. Not to raise a laugh, as you did with your story of the nun from Longchamp, but to challenge a kind of UFO, a baroque relic. I, too, was rapidly swept off my feet by a story that overturned my assumptions and sent me into analysis. “Whatever next?” drawls my friend and colleague Marianne Baruch, but she didn’t come out unscathed herself from this excursion into the heart of belief. Andrew teases me nonstop, rather sullenly, while my learned colleague Jérôme Tristan smirks discreetly: “You have to be ready for anything, with mysticism”—it’s his department, after all.

Impressed by the “old religious vice,” the sagacious Mallarmé felt that the tendency toward the secular (likened to atheistic “insignificance”) “doesn’t quite have a meaning.”¹ While I agree with the poet on this, it doesn’t prevent me from being an atheist, just as you are, my dear Philosopher. You start off as a theologian and a canon, but you won’t even be a deist by the end, unlike your friends-foes Voltaire and Rousseau. Irked by Jean-Jacques’ philosophical moralism, lacking the caustic temper of the Sage of Ferney, you are sensual, violent, something of a “comedian,” passionate about science, curious about women, and smitten by Sophie Volland. You flaunt a brutal, streetwise — cynical? — sort of carefreeness: your thoughts are strumpets, you say, you are regarded as a “materialist,” but I wonder about that. I think of you, and it’s a compliment, as the carnivalesque type.

Your partiality to the fair sex — which was surely one reason to defect from the career in the Church for which you were destined by your father, the worthy cutler Didier Diderot, and by the Jesuits whose brilliant pupil you were — does not stop you from feeling profoundly ambivalent toward women. The lyricism of the writer, the volatile delicacy of the man, these flatter me: “When we write of women, we must needs dip our pen in the rainbow and throw upon the paper the dust of butterflies’ wings.” But I also sympathize with the alarm aroused in you by the unknowable matrix: “The symbol of women in general is that of the Apocalypse, on whose forehead was written MYSTERY,” and with your perplexity in the face of female genius: “When women have genius, I think their brand is more original than our own.”²

Of all those in whose company, during that legendary era of Enlightenment, you wakened humanity from its dream of transcendence to lead it toward the best and the worst, it is you I feel closest to. I feel close to Jacques the Fatalist, The Indiscreet Jewels, Rameau’s Nephew, the Letter on the Blind. I feel close to your atheism, as redoubtable today as ever it was, which deeply and openly guides your liberty. From Paris to St. Petersburg, it was like a bracing wind that blew away the obscurantist miasmas battening like parasites on women’s bodies and the beliefs that exploited the quiverings of desire. It was your atheism that first rumbled the tortured sacristies and the torturing boudoirs, whose victims were unconscious of their sexual slavery. Because your atheism did not bow to any cult; it gaily honored the one sovereignty that means anything, the impudence of speaking out.

A DELUSION WITHOUT SOLUTION

In The Nun, you showed scant consideration for the feelings of the faithful.³ The story of young Marie-Suzanne Simonin, first confined in a convent and then debauched by a hysterical prioress who exploits her innocence, is more than a scathing satire on religious delirium; it also shows how ferocious repression and erotic passage à l’acte are the two inseparable faces of a culture that sets such excessive store by ideals because it is obsessed by the violence of the instincts.