Substances Simples

Somewhere between my school diarrhea and my adult bipolar doomscrolling there was, of course, chemistry class, that noble enterprise where a bored teacher with halitosis pointed to a laminated blue-and-pink periodic table and told us, with all the gravitas of a government notification on onion prices, that Antoine Lavoisier was the “Father of Modern Chemistry.” What she did not tell us was that this particular father of chemistry was also a father of taxes, a part-owner of a delightful exploitative racket called the Ferme Générale, and that his head eventually parted ways with the rest of his person because the French revolutionaries were not very keen on nuanced performance reviews.

Our textbook had the usual bullet point:

• Lavoisier discovered oxygen.
• Lavoisier disproved phlogiston.
• Lavoisier was guillotined.

As if that last line was a casual HR exit: “Left company in 1794 for personal reasons,” instead of “had neck forcibly uninstalled by nation-state using sharpened steel and gravity.”

What fascinated me, much later—not in that farts-and-fenugreek classroom—was that Lavoisier didn’t work alone. There was Marie-Anne, his wife, who is introduced in most Indian textbooks, when she appears at all, like a side salad: “His wife helped by drawing diagrams.” As if she were some 18th-century Canva plugin. The reality was that she was translating English papers, annotating Priestley’s misadventures with “dephlogisticated air,” drawing meticulous apparatus that, frankly, would put most modern “figures” in Indian journals (those pixelated MS-Paint tragedies) to shame, and cheerfully helping dismantle the great invisible fart of phlogiston that had wafted over European chemistry for a century.

Picture the scene: a Parisian lab, copper kettles and glassware that looked like fragile alien intestines, Lavoisier measuring mass like a tax accountant of atoms, and Marie-Anne quietly sketching and annotating, doing with pen and ink what your brain wishes it could do with reality—track every tube, every flame, every bubble. While outside, the same city was sharpening the very blade that would later separate his careful head from the rest of the experimental apparatus.

Now, the part I really love—the sort of thing that would have made my Bengali schoolboy self sit up in class, instead of counting ceiling fans—is his Table des Substances Simples, the precursor to the periodic table we memorized without understanding. This was Lavoisier’s “basic Lego set” of the universe: an official list of what counted as indivisible building blocks. Except, being human, he got it partly right and partly gloriously wrong.

In the “right” column: familiar characters like oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, iron, silver, carbon. Things that do, in fact, behave like elements, stubbornly refusing to be broken by the chemistry of that time. These were the kids who really existed in the classroom.

In the “wrong-but-charmingly-hopeful” column:

• Caloric – a sort of invisible, imponderable fluid of heat, like a ghost curry that flowed from hot to cold.
• Light – treated as a substance you could, in principle, pour into the universe like mustard oil.
• Various “earths” – lime, magnesia, and other crumbly powders that they hadn’t yet bullied into admitting they were compounds hiding metals.

To my Indian exam-conditioned brain, this was heresy. How could the Father of Modern Anything be wrong? In our system, once you are fathered into something, you are permanently correct, embalmed in multiple-choice questions and photocopied notes with fungus. Yet here was Lavoisier, in his own printed table, solemnly listing heat and light alongside oxygen and sulfur, mixing what we now consider concepts with what we now consider entities—like printing a class roll where half the entries are actual students and the rest are “discipline,” “sunlight,” and “tiffin.”

But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? At any given moment, Homo sapiens’s proud “table of substances simples” is a desk full of mislabeled jars. You think you’ve separated the elements from the fantasies, and it turns out some of the jars are full of mythology, some of the labels are nationalistic bullshit, and one or two are just warm air from a bearded guru on primetime TV.

In my childhood, the Indian equivalent of caloric and light were things like “meritocracy,” “ancient Indian science,” “Vedic aviation,” and the notion that coaching-center ranks are a measure of intelligence. These were our substances simples—not to be challenged, only to be inhaled. Lavoisier, at least, measured masses and wrote equations. We just write slogans and exam questions.

Lavoisier’s head rolled because his second job—tax farming—was more visible to the mob than his first job—mass balance and careful thinking. The revolutionaries basically said, “The Republic has no need of scientists or tax farmers,” then proceeded to invent a century of science they absolutely did need, but using other people’s heads stuck more delicately to their necks. Marie-Anne, widowed, carried on preserving his notebooks, editing his papers, keeping the intellectual corpse warm long after the biological one had cooled. In any sane textbook, she’d be co-author of the whole enterprise; in ours, she is an optional first-line mention, like “also starring…”

This is the part that hooks into my present, sitting in Calcutta with particulate matter wedged in my already enfeebled lungs. I look around and see our updated local table des substances simples:

• “Growth” – regardless of what grows: GDP, tumors, or shopping malls.
• “Development” – defined as concrete per square foot and LED strips per balcony.
• “Heritage” – a grab-bag of unverified myths laminated with saffron or tricolor.
• “Content” – the new caloric, an invisible fluid that flows endlessly from phones and is somehow supposed to nourish us though it mostly causes intellectual rickets.

All of these are treated as basic, indivisible, beyond question. Yet, like caloric, they are probably doomed to be reclassified one day as incredibly elaborate fiction. Some future bipolar kid may scroll through our remains and say, “Wait, they thought this was real?”

I find comfort, perversely, in Lavoisier’s mistakes. The man who carved “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed” into the woodwork of science still filled his own table with ghosts—heat fluids, light stuff, earthy clumps. He got beheaded not for those errors, but for participating in a predatory system that made peasants bleed so the elite could powder their wigs. The chemistry was the honest part; the finance was the phlogiston.

If I ever draw him—and I probably will—it will be with Marie-Anne standing beside him, holding the notebook, both of them looking faintly puzzled, as if trying to decide whether “faith,” “nation,” “merit,” or “market” belong on our modern substances simples list or in the dustbin with caloric. The guillotine will be in the background, a reminder that societies generally prefer to cut off the heads that measure things, while keeping the heads that hallucinate things very much attached and in charge.

In that sense, this blog is my own shabby little table des substances simples—what I think is real, what I only feel is real, what I know is wrong but can’t stop listing because it has shaped me. Some entries are as solid as oxygen; others are caloric-level nonsense stinking of nostalgia and bowel memories. The best I can do is keep rewriting the labels, scratching out the fictions when I catch them, and acknowledging that, historically speaking, human beings have always been very confident and very wrong at the same time, even when they are weighing oxygen in a Paris laboratory—right up until the moment the blade drops.