The Confession Album

In 1886 a girl named Antoinette Faure received a book with questions printed in it. Her father Félix Faure would be President of France by 1895, so it was a good house for a book to land in. The book was English and it was called An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, &c., which is not a title, it is a job description, and the same printed questionnaire ran on every single page of it. Forty-odd pages got filled in between 1884 and 1887. So what do you do with a book of questions prior to Pablo Neruda's similar El libro de las preguntas published by Losada in 1974. Well Antoinette passed it around to her friends the way you and your pubescent friends gossip about Stacy over Snapchat.

Posthumously, obviously. Neruda died in 1973 and that book was sitting on his desk with seven other unpublished manuscripts. Three hundred and sixteen questions across seventy-four poems and he answers not one of them, which is the exact opposite move from Antoinette's book, where you answer and never once get to ask.

The book asked such questions as: What is your favourite virtue? What is your idea of misery? Where would you like to live? All three of those are on the page Marcel filled in, and the first two are on the sheet Marx got.

That fourteen year-old gay boy... he answered it. It's 1886/87 and gay means happy. Today gay means gay and happy means elated. Nobody thought anything of this remarkably happy 14 year-old's responses to Mrs. Faure, nee Berge (married name). The née runs backwards there. She was born Antoinette Félix-Faure and she married René Berge, a mining engineer, so it is Mme Berge, née Félix-Faure. It was a like a Tuesday sort of activity...mundane Tuesday.

Quotidian, if you will. Marx, the Karl of communist renown, answered the same thirty-five questions. He did not, though. Marx got eighteen, in his daughter Jenny's album, at Zaltbommel, first of April 1865, Jenny and Laura doing the asking. Same genre, some of the same questions. Idea of happiness: to fight. Idea of misery: to submit. Favourite colour: red. Motto: de omnibus dubitandum, doubt everything. Nobody printed it for another forty-eight years. Folks who kept confession albums displayed them in parlours the way folks do air fryers in today's kitchens. Most album titles were unre-fuckin'-markable like Mental Photographs. Full title Mental Photographs: An Album for Confessions of Tastes, Habits, and Convictions, edited by one Robert Saxton, out of Leypoldt & Holt in New York in 1869, forty questions, and by the next year there is a budget edition with seventy-six blanks of twenty-three questions each, because business was good. Doubtless an alright name for a band, kinda shitty title for a book… excuse me, and album. that folks even in 1869.. I mean 1886/7 understood a thing about what an introspective question does to a person's mind! 1869 is Saxton. 1886/7 is Antoinette. Two different books, same disease.

You received a book of questions? So you handed someone who is not me the album (what they called a book!) and SWIM wrote in it. Having responded to all 35, SWIM then handed it back to SWIH, the person who gave it to SWIM to fill in. SWIY, if we are being correct about it. Someone who isn't you. And thirty-five is my number and Vanity Fair's, not 1886's. Saxton printed forty and then twenty-three, Marx got eighteen, and nobody back then agreed on a count. And now, instead of eating your friend's liver or ear nub or something, you had a real piece of SWIM, but in ink, in your house, on a shelf, next to other pieces of other folks that were also not their fleshy parts.

Everyone was collecting each other. It was all the rage like Pokemon and you had to collect 'em all! Without a keyboard, or a cell phone, or a car, or roller blades, or skates... You could ski to the neighbour's place in winter if cross country's your jam. But fr who actually cares for flat skiing?

These printed books though, have history older than bad habit.

Before the printed ones, there were handwritten ones. Pope Leo says the Latin name is album amicorum, the book of friends (not to be mistaken with the Book of the Dead, unless you're a heroin user in USA), and students carried them around Europe. Wittenberg, the 1540s, Protestant students collecting entries off their professors and off Luther and Melanchthon, usually scrawled into the margins of a book they already owned. The Germans call it a Stammbuch. Five hundred and seventy-two of them survive from before 1573 and by 1600 there are two thousand two hundred and ninety-three. Handwritten in the fifteen hundreds collecting responses from anybody who seemed like they might have a big dick or whose bazongas were worth watching as the fine motor movements of the hand lightly jiggled the fatty tissues of then pregnant teens. Fifteen hundreds, folks. Teenagers are mid-life back then. Mid-repressed-af-life Europa. Here, will you fill in my handwritten album that's a book of interrogatives? HONESTLY!

So it was a four hundred year old silly habit already by the time SWIM thought to save everyone the trouble and print the questions. SWIM was Gutenberg here. Three hundred and thirty years, if you count it properly. 1540s to 1869.

And that happy 14 year-old boy grew up, but in a way not really (mommy issues) and he wrote a book in the 20th c. so long that hardly anybody ever reads it. In Search of Lost Time is about remembering things. Seven volumes, 1913 to 1927, four of them out while he was alive and three after. Marcel Proust died in 1922, 41 years-old. 14...41... and in 1926 Antoinette Faure's son was rummaging his mother's belongings the way we do for crack money in the 21st c., and there it was. Mental Photographs

Except no. Fifty-one, not forty-one. Born the tenth of July 1871, dead the eighteenth of November 1922, and fifty-one mirrors nothing, which is its own kind of point. And it was 1924, not 1926. The son was André Berge, 1902 to 1995, and he grew up to be a psychoanalyst, which is the joke writing itself: the questionnaire comes out of an attic in the hands of a man who went into the introspection business. He printed Marcel's pages that same year in a review called Les Cahiers du Mois. His own son was Claude Berge, the graph theorist. And the album was not Mental Photographs. It was An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, &c.

The album (remember, album's a book and gay means happy). Tuesday also occurred, back then, on Wednesday. The day an exceptional fourteen-year-old responded the first time to a 35 interrogatives questionnaire that would eventually become eponymously named for him. Fourteen is what the auction catalogue says, dating the album's entries 1884 to 1887. The French have him at sixteen in September 1887. The English have him at thirteen or fourteen in 1885 or 1886. Nobody agrees and everybody is certain. Do you think he thought that that Wednesday/Tuesday?

In 2003 a rich person paid a hundred and two thousand euros for a piece of paper with that teenager's handwriting on it. Twenty-seventh of May, at Drouot in Paris, Beaussant-Lefèvre swinging the hammer, and a hundred and twenty thousand two hundred and thirty of them once the house took its cut, roughly four times what anyone expected. Both numbers are true, which is why you will find people arguing about it.

He had answered the questions the way a fourteen-year-old answers anything handed to him at somebody else's house: invited into Antoinette's "parlour," served cake by her older brother, and writing with one eye on the door. Dutifully. Which is not the same as carefully, and not the same as honestly, and the album cannot tell you which of the three you are reading.

what the album was doing--not playing music.

Gay people weren't eating Antoinette's older bro's cake yet either. We were just happy back then. We/us gays.

Here is a thing about the printed question: It doesn't know you.

It was set in type in a printing press and bound into a thousand or so like books. Those books then shipped in carriage drawn by horses wearing them blinders whatwithal the rise of the rich driving their devil motor engines to a thousand parlours, and folks who visited said parlours the text in the book asks every single one among them the same question with the same words, in the same order, and it does not give a flying fuck who's holding the pen. That one's out of ink, btw. HA! Not! The ink is in the well where you found it. Duh!

That sounds like a limitation. It is. Exploiting this limitation is/was the whole trick.

Because a question written for nobody in particular is a question written for everyone. A question you can't flatter. It has no face to read, only an ass to make out of yourself like when you fart loudly as you shit in the horse-blinder like stalls supposedly providing sufficient separation between you and the next John. You can't tell a question asked of no particular person what it wants to hear. Because it doesn't want anything. It's a form. It just sits there being a form, in a book, nee album, in a parlour, waiting to be filled -- the same blank lines, in the same order, for whoever next picks up the pen.

And into that indifference people wrote the truth, more or less, on a Tuesday, for fun. Not realizing it was actually Wednesday.

Nobody called it the Proust Questionnaire then like we do today. It was just the album, a book of questions well before Neruda's. Marcel, all of fourteen, didn't come up with the questions. Nobody knows who did. The questions have no author on record. Neither have I! Marcel only dutifully filled one out--all 35 questions--twice between 14 and 21 the way you'd fill out anything handed to you at a party...NOT! Three times, as of 2018. A Paris bookseller turned up a six-page booklet dated the twenty-fifth of June 1887 and wanted a quarter of a million euros for it. Then Antoinette's album. Then Marcel Proust par lui-même, around 1890, while he was doing his volunteer year with the 76th Infantry at Orléans. And the Querstionnaire outlived the party and the century and because of how masterfully his book on remembering, introspecting is/was, Marcel Proust got his name on it. Television did that, not the novel. Bernard Pivot closed every episode of Apostrophes with a version of it from 1975 to 1990, James Lipton lifted it off Pivot for Inside the Actors Studio, and Vanity Fair put it on the back page in 1993. That's how we got to use the word eponymous in a sentence with topics both Proust and Questionnaire. That's how we speak about names of works that bear a single person's name and that person's relationship to it. It's like posthumous ego-inflation.

The questions are still the same questions. Only not a single one among you cunts who answer will receive them in the same order. Two of them reach everybody the same. The other thirty-three shuffle, which is thirty-three factorial, which is 8,683,317,618,811,886,495,518,194,401,280,000,000 different ways of being asked. Not from here until the Doomsday clock strikes 2:24 A.M. and we're all still here, just as horrified as we are today at 11:58:20. It is 11:58:35 now. Eighty-five seconds, set on the twenty-seventh of January 2026, the closest it has ever been. 11:58:20 was 2020 through 2022, back when a hundred seconds felt like room to move. So just enter your email and answer the questions.

There is a page here (/about) explaining what the creator of this website thinks the questionnaire does with them, and another (/about/respondents) about who has answered since. Maybe read that respondents one after you read the compelling piece I have penned for y'all to be able to read after the 35th question.