Antoine Lavoisier: A Private Life

1794, Luxembourg Prison, Paris

The guard looks at the page as though words themselves were a contraband of the former world, and I permit the look because it belongs to the present arrangement and will not belong long to the next. Stone carries sound too efficiently here: boots in the corridor, a cough in another cell, the keys against iron, each noise too near and yet already receding in the mind, because confinement, if one submits to it properly, is not an end but an interval, a narrowing before re-entry, a withdrawal of motion from the public room into the interior chamber where sequence may be restored before it is resumed. They think they have fixed me by placing me here. They mistake delay for conclusion. The city outside has reduced me to a single administrative name because fury prefers one label to a whole life, tax farmer before chemist, servant of the old order before servant of the balance, yet reductions of that kind are temporary expedients, and expedients are always corrected later by the larger arrangement to which they have only momentarily objected. I know how confiscation works. It begins with papers, apparatus, rooms, titles, and then proceeds toward interpretation. What has been taken can be ordered again if the order is remembered in time, and time, despite appearances, has not yet closed against me.