The renowned philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, had an almost unknown brother, François, seven years his senior. François suffered more than Jean-Jacques from the effects of an unstable family life. Their mother died young and his mean and grasping father Isaac abandoned François for a while, allegedly becoming watchmaker to the Sultan in Constantinople.
Jean-Jacques had little time for his brother, dismissing him in a few lines in his most famous work, the Confessions. He states simply that François “took up the life of a libertine, even before he was really old enough to be one”. This seems to be born out by records of a house of correction in Geneva, to which François was sent by his own father at the age of thirteen, whilst bound to an apprentice to a watchmaker, for neglecting his studies in favour of “libertinage”.
François is rescued from obscurity in an ingenious new novel, Fils Unique, by Stéphane Audeguy, who has given him “confessions” of his own. Audeguy takes the reader through the turbulent progress of François’s life and the people who influence it. At Geneva François enters the circle of the Marquis de Saint-Fonds, who teaches that carnal pleasures should be free of all concept of guilt. The teenage François puts this proposition eagerly into practice with two of the Marquis’s acolytes, Denise and Monique. These sexual exploits are however but an appetizer for the main course when François escapes to Paris, where a wonderful, larger-than-life brother keeper, Madame Paris, takes him into her service. Her brothel is a centre of debauchery and freedom of expression. The authorities have introduced fierce censorship laws and François, in the wrong place at the wrong time, is arrested and sent to the Bastille. There he languishes for 17 years, making friends with, who else, the Marquis de Sade, whose deviant sexual practices and intellectual prowess create in Francois’s eyes a compelling combination of subversive thinking. Freed after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, François falls for a young revolutionary, Sophie, who runs the new Chinese baths in Paris. Alas for François’s happiness in old age, Sophie dies violently, fighting for the cause of female emancipation.
Stéphane Audeguy, born in Tours in 1965, studied English and English literature, and is probably more than capable of translating his own novel. After spending several years in the United States, he now lives near Paris, where he teaches cinema and literature history.
He was awarded the Prix Maurice Genevoix de l’Académie française for his first and equally brilliant novel, La Théorie des Nuages, The Theory of Clouds. This tells the story of Akira Kumo, a miraculous survivor of Hiroshima, vaporized by a nuclear mushroom cloud. Akira becomes a fashion designer but throughout his life remains obsessed with clouds, and he tries to buy every work published on the subject. Just one book, called Protocol, has eluded him, but a young librarian, Virginie Latour, hired by Akira to put his collection in order, is sent off to London to find it, with fascinating results.
From our October 2006 e-newsletter
