The poison had reached his groin when Socrates uncovered his face…and said – and these were his last words – ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius. Pay it and do not neglect it.’ —Plato, Phaedo
Nicolas Poussin sketched the above after reading the vita of Cato Uticensis in Plutarch's Lives. The moment he chose to depict of that life is mere moments from its end, when, Cato, Roman senator, stoic philosopher, stalwart defender of the Republic and its democratic values, upon learning that his allies had fallen to the superior military forces of his adversary, the tyrant-in-the-making Julius Caesar:
… took his sword, and stabbed it into his breast; yet not being able to use his hand so well, on account of the swelling, he did not immediately die of the wound; but struggling, fell off the bed, and throwing down a little mathematical table that stood by, made such a noise that the servants, hearing it, cried out. And immediately his son and all his friends came into the chamber, where, seeing him lie weltering in his blood, great part of his bowels out of his body, but himself still alive and able to look at them, they all stood in horror. The physician went to him, and would have put in his bowels, which were not pierced, and sewed up the wound; but Cato, recovering himself, and understanding the intention, thrust away the physician, plucked out his own bowels, and tearing open the wound, immediately expired.
The passage is from John Dryden’s translation of 1683, the first in English based directly on the original Greek. Poussin however, read, as did most Western Europeans before Dryden, Jacques Amyot’s French translation of 1565:
The two most significant differences between the English and French translations are: i) Dryden's “little mathematical table” is, in the Amyot, a “table Geometrique” of indeterminate size; ii) Cato’s son and friends, when they burst into the bedroom, find him, in Dryden’s words, “weltering in his own blood”; and in Amyot’s souillé de sang — “blood-stained”.
Let us examine the table and its attributes. In the original Greek, it is an abacus— ἀβάκιόν — the “abacus of the geometricians.” Probably not one like this, a 2nd-century, base-10 “counter caster” small enough to fit in a pocket —
— on which jetons on wires were pushed up and down grooved lines indicating units, fives, tens, etc. More likely, it was a clay or wax abacus, as described in Horace’s Satires in the 1st century BC—a slab of wood, bone or marble covered with a thin layer of black wax, sand or dust and written on with a stylus.
None of these writing tabulae have survived, of course; but the one in the bottom right corner of a Poussin’s etching in the Etampes Nationales, La Géométrie, on which the division of a square is represented, gives us an idea of what they might have looked like; or rather, what Poussin might have thought they looked like, based on what such tools looked like in the 17th century.
It is not unlike the one depicting the geometry of a circle in the bottom left corner of Pietro Testa etching of Cato’s death:
Testa’s Cato is compositionally based on Poussin’s Death Of Germanicus, painted for Cardinal Francesco Barberini in 1628. The crowd of horrified mourners and the fallen geometry tablet points to Plutarch’s narrative, but the wording of legend in the bottom right corner is a variation on another classical telling of the tale, Seneca’s 24th letter to Lucilius (“On Despising Death”), which contains the following paragraph:
‘Oh,’ say you, ‘those stories have been droned to death in all the schools; pretty soon, when you reach the topic “On Despising Death”, you will be telling me about Cato.’ But why should I not tell you about Cato, how he read Plato's] book on that last glorious night, with a sword laid at his pillow? He had provided these two requisites for his last moments, – the first, that he might have the will to die, and the second, that he might have the means. So he put his affairs in order, – as well as one could put in order that which was ruined and near its end, – and thought that he ought to see to it that no one should have the power to slay or the good fortune to save Cato. Drawing the sword, – which he had kept unstained from all bloodshed against the final day, – he cried: ‘Fortune, you have accomplished nothing by resisting all my endeavours. I have fought, till now, for my country's freedom, and not for my own, I did not strive so doggedly to be free, but only to live among the free. Now, since the affairs of mankind are beyond hope, let Cato be withdrawn to safety.’ So saying, he inflicted a mortal wound upon his body. After the physicians had bound it up, Cato had less blood and less strength, but no less courage; angered now not only at Caesar but also at himself, he rallied his unarmed hands against his wound, and expelled, rather than dismissed, that noble soul which had been so defiant of all worldly power.
This explains perhaps why, in the Testa, Cato, his “second murder” achieved, is dead on the bed, not on the floor. A short time after painting it, having lost a contract to decorate the apse of San Martino ai Monti in Rome (because he was too slow), and a commission for the Piazza Navona fountain design (because he was not Bernini), threw himself in the Tiber. His body was fished out down river. There were no servants or slaves, no family members, no wildly gesticulating disciples. No witnesses other than the fishermen.
Upon my weapons point here shouldst thou fall, And welter in thy goare — Edward II, Christopher Marlowe, 1569
Second, Cato’s blood, and Cato’s guts. In the original, the senator’s son and friends see his “intestines prolapsed from the wound clotted with much blood” (πεφυρμένον αἵματι καὶ τῶν ἐντέρων τὰ πολλὰ προπεπτωκότα). As in the Seneca, there is no mention of a pool in which to welter—to lie soaked in blood, but there is blood, much blood, so weltering would not be out of the question.
Yet, unlike most prior and subsequent depictions of Cato’s s noble death (Seneca:"Jupiter could see nothing more beautiful on earth than the suicide of Cato"), Poussin’s rendition eliminates these disordering elements—fallen table, ripped out intestines, weltering pool of blood—by hitting the pause button between the act and its consequence, suspending young Cato’s body in mid-air—mid-fall—on a triangular bracing of hand, knee, and the sword on which it is self-impaled. If the button were hit again, and the action to resume, we would see gravity drive the blade further through his chest and further out his back, as he slowly slid down it, skewered like a chunk of lamb on a shish kebab.
Young Cato. Montaigne, in his essay on age": ‘What!’ said the younger Cato to those who wanted to prevent him from killing himself: ‘Am I now at an age where I can be reproached for leaving life too soon?’ Yet he was only forty-eight. He reckoned that age to be quite mature and quite advanced, considering how few men reach it. As for those who keep themselves going with the thought that some span of life or other that they call ‘natural’ promises them a few years more: they could pull this off if something officially exempted them from the many accidents that each of us is naturally subject to and that can interrupt this course of life that they promise themselves.”
Montaigne describes what Poussin later depicted as Cato’s “first murder”, unsuccessful fortunately—for the sake of his exemplum virtutis —because the blow he gave himself was weakened by the “pain that destiny caused him to have in his hand. If it had been up to me to represent him in his most superb state, it would have been tearing his entrails all bloody, rather than the sword in his fist as the statuaries of his time did. For this second murder was far more furious than the first.”
Witness the younger Cato: When I see him die, and tearing out his own bowels, I am not satisfied simply to believe that he had then his soul totally exempt from all trouble and horror: I cannot think that he only maintained himself in the steadiness that the Stoical rules prescribed him; temperate, without emotion, and imperturbed. There was, methinks, something in the virtue of this man too sprightly and fresh to stop there; I believe that, without doubt, he felt a pleasure and delight in so noble an action, and was more pleased in it than in any other of his life:
“Sic abiit a vita, ut causam moriendi nactum se esse gauderet.” [“He quitted life rejoicing that a reason for dying had arisen.” —Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 30.]
But Poussin, the great stoic, eschewed Montaigne’s advice, and never gave Cato’s virtue its due. In fact, he never painted Cato’ death, only experimented with it once, in this swift and furious sketch. Why? As for blood, there are but a dribbling down the length of the impaling sword, puddling on the ground below its hilt. Again, why?
Painting is no more than an idea of incorporeal things. — Nicolas Poussin
To answer this, we will have to look at what actually is depicted. The mathematical/geometry table/abacus is not in the frame, but the sketch’s composition adheres to the “divine” geometries of its users, the Ancient Greeks—square, diagonal of the square and golden section.
For Poussin, “when all the things that entered into the composition were put together proportionally,” the result had “a power to induce various passions in the souls of viewers.” By this he meant that painting, and, presumably, drawing, like music, when proportionally arranged, conveyed not only mood and feeling, but an ethos, a manner of being and behaving.
Poussin: “Nothing is visible without light.” Nothing is visible without a transparent medium such as air or water or this glass of gin. Nothing is visible without boundaries, without color, without distance. Nothing is visible without an instrument, an eye, or a camera and an eye, or a scope, a measuring device. And then, still, it needs to be captured: written down, sketched, painted, photographed, filmed, taped. Recorded. These are principles which every man capable of reasoning may learn.
What is dark in me illumine. What low, raise and support. — John Milton, 1667
Phaedo, too, is in Poussin’s The Death of Cato sketch. Plato’s Theory of Soul and Immortality, open to the page describing Socrates’s death:
… after a little while he moved; the attendant uncovered him; his eyes were fixed. And Crito when he saw it, closed his mouth and eyes.
Unlike in the Cato, those most intimately affected by the suicide, in this case Socrate’s friends and his “two small sons and one big son”, are, in The Death of Socrates sketch, weeping inconsolably, despite Socrates’ words just minutes before: “What conduct is this, you strange men! I have heard that it is best to die in silence. Keep quiet and be brave.”
In the Cato his son and all his friends are behind us, frozen in horror, out of sight.
Poussin never painted Socrates’ death, either. His student and assistant, Charles Le Brun painted his The Death of Cato a few years after Poussin’s sketch. He followed his idol’s lead by eliminating bystanders and mourners and the mathematical table, and even went further: his Cato looks to be peacefully asleep, there is no blood, even the wound is concealed by his hand.
Jacques-Louis David painted Socrate’s death, in Poussin reds, blues and golden yellows, in 1787, two years before the start of the French Revolution. Eugene Delacroix1 and J.M.V. Turner both did versions of Le Brun’s Cato. Alone in the frame. Bloodless.
There are countless others. As has been often pointed out, representations of the death of Cato were based on those of other heroes — Seneca, Germanicus, Socrates, Saint Erasmus and others, and vice versa : “there were two basic options for the representation of such heroic deaths or self-killings in the first half of the Seicento: (1) life-size images with staffage figures or (2) half-length close-ups. The fact that both schemes existed side by side at the same time can be attributed to the taste for variation or simply to the different financial means of patrons and buyers, but such compositional variants must also have been regarded as expressions of different artistic attitudes toward the theme.”2
Furthermore, these two basic variants of Death of Cato, accordingly, are inspired by two different accounts, that of Plutarch, and that Seneca.
The Socrates is probably not Poussin—Stella or Dufresnoy, maybe Von Stockholm. However, though never confirmed as being by his hand, it is classic Poussin. A dashed-off study. Poussin was the greatest artist of his day, but not much of a draftsman. The Cato is one of his few accomplished drawings. He drew for himself, to fix things in his mind, memorise arrangements, remember where things should be positioned. To similar purpose he hand-built wax models to scale, placed them in situ on little wooden box sets. Lit candles to study the shadows these produced.
He struggled with his craft, with every aspect of creation. Nothing came easy for him. Nothing gave him enjoyment.
In his writings, he talks of line and contour, but it is his colours that appeal and seduce. “The colours in paintings are lures that persuade the eyes, like the beauty of verses in a poem.” Blues, reds and yellows in the warm golden blush of the sun. The Roman sun. You can hear in the peals of the city’s church and temple bells. Each is inscribed, in Latin: I call the living, I mourn the dead, I shatter lightning.
And yet there are no colours anywhere.
I’ll make my end here, with John Banville’s ekphrastic invention of a Poussin painting, and the character, based on Anthony Blunt, who realises, at his most precarious moment, that he cares more for it than “wife and child, of father and brother, death, judgement and resurrection”, for “Things, for me, have always been of more import than people”:
“The subject,” I said, in what I think of as my Expounding Voice, “is the suicide of Seneca the Younger in the year A.D. 65. See his grieving friends and family about him as his life’s blood drips into the golden bowl. There is the officer of the Guard—Gavius Silvanus, according to Tacitus—who has unwillingly conveyed the imperial death sentence. Here is Pompeia Paulina, the philosopher’s young wife, ready to follow her husband into death, baring her breast to the knife. And notice, here in the background, in this farther room, the servant girl filling the bath in which presently the philosopher will breathe his last. Is it not all admirably executed? ”
I was really astonished at the ease with which men accustom themselves to the life of a herd of sheep. And these were the same men who, nourished by ideas of liberty and progress, had vaunted so much and so proudly their nature as individuals. – François Mitterrand
I used to write in the daytime lying down in a daybed, like Proust, whose bed I saw yesterday in the Musée Carnavalet. The daybed was actually my youngest daughter’s Anrik’s bed, which was once the bottom bed of a MYDAL bunkbed, which, after she moved out, I covered with a woven sheep wool blanket that my wife Stella, who had a great eye for fabrics, bought in Lisbon during a “business trip” in 2014, which I suspect was actually a ball-your-eyes-out session with a Frenchman from her office named Gilles. Also on the daybed was a pile of throw pillows, most of which were given to Stella by a Swedish friend, Charlotte, a former actress who, like Jim, my former coach de vie, believed very strongly in the power of breath. And a number of other things.
My knees served as my desk. The throw pillows were slip-covered with coupons – remnants of fabrics that our friend, Charlotte, found in the Marché Saint Pierre district of Paris. Many of the coupons came from the better-known Parisian fashion houses; the small floral pillow that I always put directly behind the nape of my neck, for example, was cased in a piece of leftover plissé fabric from the French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent’s 1998 spring/summer Haute Couture collection, which, coincidentally, I attended. I just verified this on my phone, on vogue.com: the fabric, which is a type of puckered velour, was inspired by a collage by the French painter Henri Matisse, one of the hundreds Matisse did in the 1940s, when he was dying of abdominal cancer and confined to his bed and wheelchair. Saint Laurent used it in a stunning cocktail dress worn by the French actress Catherine Deneuve in that season’s Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) catwalk show, which was held in a maison particulière in the Eighth Arrondissement. I will not include any images of it here as I believe it is protected, and I do not wish to get in trouble. I will, however, include a photo of the designer, taken when he was young and in his prime.
I never met Gilles. Not a ball-your-eyes-out session. A ball-your-brains-out session. I was the one balling my eyes out, back in the meublé apartment on rue Poulet, around the corner from rue Myrha, where the old mosque was. Back then, the entire street would fill five times a day with men praying on small carpets. This was later banned.
At this point, I usually start breathing slowly through my nostrils, so as to slow down my heart rate, which, years later, Jim, my former coach de vie, told me would lower my level of stress, increase the flow of blood to my arteries and nerves, aid my immune system, and support the correct alignment of my jawbones and the vertebrae that reinforce and structure my cervical spine. Jim believed very strongly in the power of breath. He was at least thirty years younger than me, and handsome, and French, and he owned a much more expensive version of my running watch, a Garmin Epix™ Gen 2 in black titanium. He also always had a cotton polo sweater draped and knotted around his neck, just so, and impeccable shoes, leather slip-on moccasins with tassels or spotlessly white baskets; and he was never once late for our appointments, which often took place in cafes; when I arrived, always on time, Jim would always already be at the table with his notebook, headphones and herbal tea. A few times I, too, arrived early, and on these occasions Jim would not acknowledge my presence until the appointed hour. He would not even look up from his notebook. But later, the last year, our sessions together took place by telephone, and then online. And then, to Stella and my surprise, he disappeared. We later learned that he had climbed the Eiffel Tower, and somewhere between the second and third floor, leapt.
“Into the abyss,” said Stella.
Firemen had tried to reason with him: he was wearing a backpack, which they thought might contain a bomb or a political banner, but he just looked at them, smiled, put his headphones back on, and jumped.
You live an athletic lifestyle. You need this premium active smartwatch with a stunning AMOLED display to help you overcome every challenge.” – Garmin®
I never told Jim about the daybed. I’m sure he wouldn’t have approved. Just as he would most definitely not have approved of me keeping this journal. For Jim, all writing had to project only forward. “At this stage, Chris, the only thing you should be writing is a list of goals. Things you want to achieve. And every time you achieve something on the list, take a big congratulatory breath, draw a line through the achieved task, and move on.”
Projecting forward. Which is precisely what Jim achieved. Right off the side of the Eiffel Tower. He died, probably instantly, at the precise moment when he hit the second floor. He was, as I wrote earlier, French. Very French. He wore sunglasses inside. He wore eau de cologne. He never actually wore the polo sweaters – les pulls polo en coton – that he wrapped just so around his neck, as far as I could tell – I had sessions with him once a week for seven months. Stella, who could be very cruel, and who often said I was wasting my money (or rather, hers), said of Jim that he reminded her of a basking shark, a bottom feeder that never sleeps and has one of the biggest mouths and smallest weight-for-weight brain sizes in the animal kingdom. The first time she said this it made me laugh, which appalled my wife, Stella, further, as she hated to see me laugh, unless I covered my mouth, as she hated the sight of my teeth.
Jim, too, disapproved of the aesthetics of my laugh. “You should avoid this type of thing in public, Chris. Ce n'est pas digne.”
François Mitterrand, the late President of France – some would say the last President, though several fine men have held the office since – also had terrible dentition. Crooked, badly spaced, horribly discoloured, and very large, especially his front teeth – his incisors – but even more so his canines. When he smiled, he looked wolfish; and when he laughed, the effect was ghoulish and terrifying. This is why you rarely see photographs of Mitterrand smiling, and why people thought him humourless. In fact, he liked nothing more than a good laugh, whether it was a titrage discret, a quiet titter, or a gros rire, a big belly laugh. Sometimes, he would laugh uncontrollably, especially at things his brother-in-law, the actor, said, or at the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s imitations of the Libyan colonel Mu'ammer Muhammad al- Gaddafi, hiding his mouth behind his hand or a napkin, until tears came to his eyes.
But for his teeth, the trajectory of Mitterrand’s pre-Presidential political career— starting in his early, naïve days as a functionary in the collaborationist Vichy regime, through his transformation into a fearless Resistance fighter on the left, to his term as Justice minister in the cabinet of Mollet (during his mandate he extended martial law and asked for the death sentences forty-five times), and, finally, his failed presidential runs of 1965 and 1974—might have been profoundly different. So concerned was he and his campaign about the state of his teeth that he had his canines filed down by a dental surgeon in 1980, the year before he first finally took power. Power that he held till just seven months before his death, on January 8th, 1996.
“If you don't have your teeth filed down,” Pierre told him, “People will never trust you.”
I have not filed down my canines, nor do I see myself doing this anytime soon. I am sixty-four; ten years younger than Mitterrand was when he had his canines filed down; but unlike him, I have no intention of running for public office. In fact, these last years, since the hum and the end of my marriage and the vanquishing of the Four American Dreams, I have not attended a single public function; whereas, in the years before, for many decades in fact, starting in the early 1990s, Stella and I attended public events—openings, inaugurations, investitures, launches, galas, premieres—almost daily. And nightly! In fact, as I mentioned, I was at the very Yves Saint-Laurent fashion show twenty-five years ago in which Catherine Deneuve, then fifty-three, wore the gown that matches the throw pillow behind my head (it is the only one I have kept). The French writer, model and singer Carla Bruni was there, too, dressed in a white wedding dress inspired by one of the French painter Georges Braque’s bird prints from the 1950s; this was ten years before she married the French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, and became the First Lady of France. At the time of the show, Sarkozy was married to Cécilia Sarkozy, née Ciganer-Albéniz, formerly Martin, now Attias, who, twenty years before, had been a fitting model for clients at many haute couture fashion houses, including Schiaparelli.
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. – Archilochus of Paros
I covered the YSL show, and a dozen others that season, for an online magazine, replacing my wife Stella, who was on maternity leave, and using a pseudonym, Mercutio Wordsworth, chosen for reasons I no longer remember. This was a strange period of our lives. I knew nothing about fashion. I was allowed to replace my wife Stella, who knew everything about fashion, because I was already on the payroll for the same media group, writing stories about food, wine, World Cup Football and the Tour de France. I knew nothing about these subjects, either; most of my material was cribbed from other sources; I have always been good at dissembling. Today, I consider myself something of a food-and-wine expert, especially French food and French wine, no doubt because I invested so much money and time into French food and wine. Back then, however, I was thick-headed and skinny. I ate most meals over the sink, so as to minimize mess. And unlike every single person in the fashion world, I was not good looking, nor eccentrically opinionated or attired, nor endowed with anything even remotely resembling élan or panache. I pretended to be knowledgeable about French philosophy and literature. I smoked Gitanes. I got drunk. Today, I still smoke, I still get drunk. In fact, I just did, and I am. And I weigh 300 pounds. And my liver accounts for at least one third of that weight.
We learned of Jim’s death by sheer coincidence, as French media never mentions suicides, unless it is someone like Pierre Bérégovoy or Virginia Woolf. This was not always the case. During the very first year of the Eiffel tower’s existence, when even its then-to-be-“only”-temporary existence – it was supposed to be dismantled after 20 years (it has survived its date de démantèlement because of the radio transmitter) – stood for everything baleful and banal to Maupassant and many others Parisian intellectuals, a young man, an unemployed mechanic, climbed up the north pillar on a hot August night, guided by a lantern, and humming a song by Yvette Guilbert. At a height of about twenty metres, he settled down comfortably on the metal crosspieces, lit three candles, took a letter and a length of rope out of his pockets, put the letter under the lantern next to him, took off his clothes and placed them neatly next to the lantern, climbed up on the railing, looped one end of the rope around an iron beam above his head and the other end around his neck, and, according to a fait divers in L’Impartial of August 26, 1891, “sauté dans l'abîme.”
In the letter, the young man requested that his head be given to the major of his former regiment, his body to the School of Medicine, and his effects, by which he meant the trousers, socks, shoes, underpants, shirt and coat he had left in a neat pile beneath him hanging corpse, to Monsieur Eiffel.
It was the first recorded suicide at the Eiffel Tower.
That evening five drunken Germans were arrested on the Quai Voltaire in Paris, shouting at the top of their lungs: “Down with France! Down with Russia”.
“The crowd would have given them a hard time if the police had not intervened,” the newspaper reported.
The night before, a Saturday evening, between eight and nine o'clock, a railcar loaded with barrels of alcohol, in storage at the Plaine-Saint-Denis station, suddenly caught fire, and in the blink of an eye, turned into a “prodigious bowl of punch.”
Delacroix’s is a copy of a painting by François-André Vincent François-André Vincent. It is often attributed to Pierre Andrieu.
Eckhard Leuschner, “Catonem Narrare: Charles Le Brun as reader and painter of a stoic’s suicide”, in: Damm, Hei; Thimann, Michael; Zittel, Claus (Hrsgg.): The artist
as reader: on education and non-education of early modern artists, Leiden [u.a.] 2013, S. 305-326