A case of curiosities

by Kurzweil, Allen

  The Abbe saved the most eagerly awaited encounter for last. He motioned to the woman holding a basket of herbs and accompanied by a youth whose free hand, mangled but exposed, clutched a crimson-ribboned sketch folder. The woman placed the basket on the table, and Claude handed the Abbe the drawing. For a very long time, the Abbe stared intently, moving his spectacles to and from the work. Claude's foot tapped violently. The donkey's release had stimulated his own desire to pass water. He was too distracted to hear the Abbe suggest that the following week he take up a residential position in the mansion house. Madame Page accepted for Claude without hesitation. Claude was ebullient when the session ended, not because destiny had been redirected but because his bladder was granted relief.

  4 The Nautilus

  Claude returned TO the mansion house as agreed, seven days after the session. Depopulated, the great hall lacked the exuberance of the previous Tuesday. Traces of quarter day were minimal — the tangy smell of donkey urine, and a trail of grease and congealed blood plotting the movement of a boar's head from the Abbe's table to, Claude supposed, the kitchen. The table, now cleared of the various payments in kind, held nothing but note-rolls and books. The Abbe sat in the coffin-confessional reading a treatise, his head and hand emerging on occasion to dip a quill and take down an observation.

  Unsure of the proper form of introduction, Claude scraped his boot lightly against the floor to catch the notice of his new employer. There was no response. He cleared his throat. No response again. The Abbe continued to move between note-roll and treatise. The jerky intensity of his gestures suggested he should not be disturbed, so Claude waited in silence. He allowed his mind to wander over the conflicting information he had gathered in the last few days, information on the character of the man who now sat before him.

  The charcoal burner said one thing, Rochat the baker something else, while the proprietor of the Red Dog, Gaston, had still a third version of the life of the Count of Tournay. The derelict Catholics in the community were quick to praise, the more devout even quicker to condemn. This much Claude concluded: the Abbe was not, like so many abbes of the period, the degenerate son of a degenerate institution. Or, if he was, the nature of that degeneration was too special to lapse into cliche. He was not susceptible to fine clothes, blandness, sycophancy, or women. At least, not local women. Catherine, the mansion-house scullion, a free and willing participant in sexual liaisons of all descriptions, had not once been approached by her master. Still, she said she had heard noise and once had even seen the Abbe in someone's arms. There was also talk, unsubstantiated to be sure, of the Abbe's violent nature during his secret nocturnal endeavors. Snatches of tavern talk provided little additional intelligence. The postman who delivered the mansion-house mail—apparatus of experimental philosophy, parcels sent from distant ports, and journals published by the better continental academies of science—told Claude what was obvious: "He reads . . . books!" Many of the farmers in outlying parts of the commune cited the Abbe's compensatory reflexes. Countering that reputation of generosity, Father Gamot noted that the church donation tray was no heavier since the Abbe's arrival.

  The only substantive information came from the gamekeeper of the mansion-house property, a limber-legged fellow who could pick off a pigeon hawk or good piece of gossip at a hundred yards. The gamekeeper told Claude, while cradling an ancient musket and making his rounds, that the Abbe was the only son of a family of only sons, and the inheritor of vast merchant wealth. Shipping. He had, in his youth, entered the Society of Jesus, and left years later in scandal. Dismissed. When he came into his inheritance—smallpox, if the gamekeeper remembered correctly, was the cause of premature and profitable primogeniture— the Abbe decided to purchase the small estate of Tournay, possession of which carried the title of Count. Out of spite for the Church, he used the appellation of Abbe. The gamekeeper ended his account to shoot at a low-flying mallard.

  Claude's thoughts were interrupted by what he first took for gunfire but soon realized was the Abbe sneezing. The nasal charge sent a pair of spectacles flying. They would have smashed on the ground had they not been tied to their owner by a leather thong, the attentive contrivance of Marie-Louise, the mansion-house cook. As the Abbe reached down, he knocked over the note-roll he had been filling. It uncurled across the dusty floor. When he brought the distant end under control, the Abbe found it was held by Claude.

  "Your apprentice, sir," Claude said nervously.

  The Abbe shook his head. "No formal titles will separate us, no papers will be signed. You are apprenticed to no one but yourself. That is not to say you will not learn. Or that I will not teach. You will, and I will." The Abbe said he would reject outright anything that reminded him of his own Ignatian training. (The gamekeeper's information was correct.) This meant there would be little of the unquestioning obedience that had plagued the aged cleric early in the century, when he was Claude's age. "Do you understand?"

  Claude did not understand. He was perplexed, and that perplexity appeared on his face.

  "See yourself, if you wish, as one of those favored first viziers who populate the Oriental anecdotes I know you so enjoy. See yourself as a young man devoted to his Caliph, content to live with secrets both shared and hidden."

  The analogy pleased them both. For Claude, it placed him in a world of enchantments and of genii. He saw the gates of Constantinople and the minarets of Baghdad. For the Abbe, the citations of a heretical faith allowed for yet another private victory in his war with the Church.

  Claude was emboldened by the kindness. "Would the Caliph grant his vizier a wish?"

  The Abbe frowned. "No. The laws of Muhammedan anecdote prohibit granting a single wish. Surely, your father told you."

  Claude looked down. He had expected too much.

  But then the Abbe said, "You may, however, have three."

  They laughed, a register apart, before Claude formulated his first query. He asked the Abbe to explain his decision to settle in Tour nay.

  "Why I came here is easy enough to answer. One of my correspondents mentioned many years back the availability of this land, noting its propitious climate—ha!—and its clear and even light—ha! again. I was informed that the previous Count of Tournay was held in great respect by the residents, that he had made his motto 'Born to Serve.' I later learned that though this was indeed his motto, it referred to the service not of his people but of a white cloth tennis ball." The Abbe swung an imaginary racquet. "My correspondent informed me that the property had the advantage of proximity to the Republic's book dealers while still being far enough away to avoid the burden of Consistory law. He described the location, if 1 recall correctly, as a 'rural, sheltered, unobscured retreat.' On reflection, I can say that he was wrong on all counts but rurality. But, then, as optical theory informs us, reflection can distort. 1 moved here because I was tired of traveling. After years of missionary life in the obedience of the Society—not Mr. Calvin's, of course, but the now disbanded Society that beats the name of the eatth-bound membet of the Holy Ttinity—I wanted to ttavel no mote. Hete I found I didn't have to pack my panniets to entet new worlds."

  The Abbe sneezed again, though this time with diminished fotce. He wiped his nose on an alteady stiffened sleeve of lace and said, "Where was I?"

  "New wotlds," Claude said.

  "Ah yes, terra nova, terra incognita." He temoved himself ftom the enclosed chait and took Claude to a latge window cut at the side of the tennis coutt. "Ftom this vantage point, I can commune with othet expetimentets: yout mothet, Old Antoine, and, beyond the valley, investigatots of even gteatet fame, those ex-ttaotdinaty obsetvets who otdeted simply while lesset men simply otdered. Patacelsus. Holbein. Bauhin. Whethet handling alembics ot canvas ot specimen bottles, they changed all that they touched." As the Abbe said this, he pointed a ctooked finger at the ptesumed tesidences of the alchemist, the paintet, and the botanist he held in high tegatd. The ctooked finget moved.

  "Over thete in Bern, Hallet toiled p
iously, adding to the encyclopedias, the tteatise on anatomy, the dozen ot so physiological wotks, the books of botany and bibliogtaphy, the poetry, the historical novels—he wrote only four of those, I think, none too accomplished. And all the while he managed a saltworks and other municipal responsibilities. How did he do it? Maybe it is the snow that imposes a certain patience. Winter demands that Switzerland's inhabitants collect and ctaft and test. What else can they do?"

  The Abbe took Claude to a bookstand and tapped the wotk that tested on it. "Bauhin's Pinax. It took a Switzer to publish a methodical concordance of all known plants. Outdated, but still invaluable. I will have you take a trip to Basel to see the collection. Marvelous amassment of roots. Maybe yout mothet should go, too." He ended his tambling. "Does that answet your first question?"

  It did, so Claude asked his second: "Where do you come from?"

  The Abbe teplied with surptising frankness. "Let's see, that would depend on where we begin. When I was your age, in the predictable manner of time and place, I was put at the mercy of the Church. I studied with the Fathers of the Oratory. They were simple and secular, prone to popular preaching. That is where, I think, I developed an appreciation for laborers and their crafts. Unfortunately, the philosophy of the Fathers did not sit well with the philosophy of my father, who was a merchant and a man who had no interest, or interests, in the sufferings of the poor. He soon sent me to the Jesuits to get down to the serious business of education.

  "I was fitted into the course of studies governed by the Ratio Studiorum, and, much to everyone's surprise, I showed real competence. It was decided I would enter the Church. After enduring the constraints of the novitiate, I found my first passion." The Abbe stopped here. Then he said, "That passion being mechanics. I pursued it intently until the Provincial sent me on apostolic endeavors abroad. I wandered the world, moving from one seaport to another. Despite my youth, I carried the missionary banner to the Indies—both East and West—and all through the Orient. At each stop, I collected shells, shellacs, pigments, anything that would keep my mind moving as much as my feet.

  "I returned with a few ailments — sneezing being one—and renewed the mechanical work with my teacher. Eventually charges were leveled against us, and, for reasons too complicated to be particularized, I left."

  The Abbe grew somber, and Claude quickly asked his final question: "What is it that you do now in Tournay?"

  The Abbe put his hand on the boy's shoulder, communicating a silent kindness. "My rolls," he said, as if to introduce his children. Dominating the vast surface of the table were the note-rolls the Abbe used to maintain disparate researches. He had his storekeeper, Henri, stitch together coarse brown paper and attach it to slotted pins. The pins allowed him to scroll backward and forward without delay. A single initial carved in the base of each pin, the Abbe explained, identified the principal domains of his work. He picked up a roll. It was marked by a "C," for Conchology. There were rolls for a half-dozen other fields (including Fields, a register of growth in the greater Tournay region, and an S-roll of sounds). "I would summarize my credo by borrowing from Cicero. I will spare you the Latin. 'Leisure with dignity.'

  Claude now asked the question that was foremost in his mind: "What will / be doing?"

  "You? What will you be doing? That's a fourth question. And to have the answer, the favored first vizier must wait."

  "Must he?" The desperation and apprehension in Claude's voice were palpable.

  "Well, I will tell you this much. You will be joining me in the conquest of man's capacities. You will undertake a voyage every bit as adventurous as the oceanic travel I endured as a missionary. Together we will search out the highest thoughts and aspirations, and in the process I hope to help you find your metaphor, as I have found mine." The Abbe picked up the C-roll and opened to a rough sketch of a nautilus shell. Then, deciding he had said too much too soon, he retreated into a more exacting and mundane description of the tasks.

  "I receive a great deal of correspondence, everything from travel reports to the Royal Society's Transactions. I make a habit of testing what I read when time, funds, and patience allow. In this, and a great deal more, you will be required to assist me. Consider yourself to be a copyist and a collector's helper. Also, you will be trained in the painterly arts and the allied world of enamel. That is why my accountant has allowed you to be brought in."

  Claude said, "I know little of painting, and nothing at all of enameling."

  "But you will soon enough. If you have half the talent with lavender oil and a sable brush that you do with a pencil, you will work out nicely." The Abbe called out, "Henri!" There was no response. "Henri!" He turned to Claude and said, "You will learn quickly. Apply the vision that fills your sketches. That is all I expect."

  A steady plodding could be heard in the distance. The slow-moving young man Claude had already twice encountered walked to the net post in the middle of the great hall. He displayed no emotion at receipt of the Abbe's command, which was: "Show our young friend around."

  5

  HENRI ROBERT was the son of Antoine Laurent Robert of Robert & Didier, Stationers and Furnishers of Artists' Materials. Antoine Robert, during thirty years of trade, had supplied pens and papers, colors and cases to philosophers, academicians, salon painters, a dauphin's tutor, the captain of a doomed voyage of discovery (the Antilles), and a Paris procuress who stimulated her clients with paint.

  The Abbe had established a correspondence with the stationer before beginning his first missionary expedition. He had his family buy him papers and colors with memorable extravagance and set sail for points west. In the Vice-Royalty of New Spain, the Abbe befriended the owner of a nopalery, a cactus farm that yielded the insects from which cochineal, a costly red dye, is made. (This, it should be mentioned, transpired before Nicolas Joseph Thiery de Menonville, Botanist to the King, cut the price of the pigment by smuggling pot after pot of bug-rich plantings to St.-Dominique.) As a kindness, the Abbe negotiated a shipment for Antoine Robert. On a voyage to the East a few years later, touring the district of Monghyr, the Abbe found a seller of Indian yellow at a marketplace in Mirzapur. He wanted to learn how it was made, and so, after much inquiry, tracked the processing to a sect of milkmen known as gwalas. The Abbe was told that the pigment came from dried cow urine. The gwalas raised their sacred beasts on a diet exclusively of mango leaves to intensify the yellow pigment so cherished by Indian illuminators and Islamic miniaturists. A shipment of the foul-smelling substance, packed into balls, was sent to the delighted Paris stationer.

  All of this is to say that Antoine Laurent Robert was a man indebted. When he ascertained that the Abbe was settling in Tournay, not ten days' carriage ride from the stationer's thriving business, he insisted his son, Henri, make an extended visit, to serve as the mansion-house storekeeper and to learn what the Abbe had learned in his travels. As such arrangements go, it was not terribly noteworthy. Then, three months after the transfer, something tragic occurred. Antoine Laurent Robert inadvertently allowed some toxic white paint to enter an open sore on a private part — the result of a coquettish game initiated by one of the charges of the body-painting procuress. Two months later he was dead. The nature of his demise was unusual enough to warrant inclusion in the prestigious Journal des Savants, which attributed his death to venereal lead poisoning. The tragedy spurred the second half of the partnership, Didier, to take over the establishment. He sued, successfully, to abolish Henri's legacy, and since there had been no Madame Robert since 1765, when a speeding wine cart refused to yield her the right-of-way, Henri was left an orphan under the care of the Count of Tournay.

  Henri Robert was no perpetual-motion machine before the death of his parents. Afterward, faced with ruin and isolation, his pace slowed down until it all but stopped. The stationer's son turned stationary, prompting the staff of the mansion house to nickname him the Slug.

  The Abbe had hoped Henri would become an enamelist. But after many lessons and exercises, both
teacher and student had given up. Grinding enamels was not a problem; painting with them was. As the Abbe concluded, "He will never have the inclination to let a sable brush dance on a disk of copper." Henri, in the end, was left to oversee the stocks.

  The tour began slowly. Slugs do not make ideal guides. Slow to acknowledge the directions of the Abbe, slow to take Claude to the more interesting parts of the property, slow, in fact, in all aspects of his being, Henri did only one thing quickly— exasperate those around him. He shuffled out of the great hall and down a stone corridor. Claude followed through an archway, where he caught sight of a pair of feet warming themselves near a fire. The heat and smells, as well as the pattern of blood he had plotted from the Abbe's cask table, suggested he and his guide had just passed the kitchen. Claude hoped that the unidentified feet would accompany them, but the feet stayed where they were. Henri trudged ahead. At the end of the corridor, he took a swallow and said, "Are you prepared to begin the tour? Ready to see what is to be seen?"

  "I am," Claude said.

  That was not so. Because of the bartenness of the great hall, Claude assumed the rest of the property would have a similarly dungeonlike aspect. It did not. The interior rooms revealed an environment unlike any Claude had ever viewed. He found himself in a series of chambered spaces, laboratory alcoves in which corners came out of nowhere to combat the symmetry of the building's stone shell. Additionally, against a high wall, some dozen perches, interconnected by crude stairs and plankboards, were met by windows that lighted the room at improbable angles. It gave the space the illumination of a Dutch oil, only without the harmony and balance. A cantilevered balcony fashioned from a modified pulpit had been fitted with a large lens that poked through a bullock's eye, the kind of skylight more commonly found in granaries. Claude attempted to climb up and take a closer look, but he was stopped short.