"Let us move on," the Slug intoned. "This is the library." To avoid any misunderstanding, he added, "Where the books are kept." But misunderstanding was impossible. Massive atlases topped by dictionaries, topped in turn by a succession of trade manuals and opuscules of diminishing size, formed stalagmites of knowledge through which Claude found it difficult to maneuver. He was waist-high in words. Though the library alcoves contained delicately paneled bookcases glazed with little lozenges encased in fretwork, the Abbe's investigations had redistributed the volumes to less accommodating surfaces. The emptied shelves had been subsequently filled with laboratory apparatus. Piles of papers were weighted down against the Vengeful Widow by large shells, pestles, and chunks of fossilized stone. Claude stared at the stacks of books.
"The Abbe calls them his temples," the Slug said. "He thinks the shapes resemble the monuments seen during his travels through New Spain."
There was, in the arrangement of books, a clear hierarchy of respect, with central placement revealing central concerns. Claude reached for a pamphlet open to Professor Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein's "Essay on the Birth and Formation of Vowels." The Slug warned him not to disrupt the surface chaos. "The Abbe says the books hide an order only he appreciates."
Claude was amazed that the number of open wotks far exceeded the number that were closed. They often faced one another and seemed, without the aid of readers, to conduct a silent dialogue, their authors—naturalists and mechanicians and philosophers—proclaiming competing or concurring ideas.
Claude paused to register a mental picture of the scene for a sketch. He looked more closely at a few volumes and found that the Abbe clearly demanded a great deal from his books. Endpapers revealed scrawls of criticism. Little slips stuck out between pages, white flags making reference to correlative tomes.
The Slug moved his charge through another series of alcoves and beyond an ancient harpsichord topped with books. He stopped and said, "The taproom. We will now enter the taproom."
"Where the liquids are kept?" Claude hypothesized.
"Yes, precisely. The taproom. This is where you will find that the liquids are kept. And also other stocks."
6
The Slug's mood and movement picked up once they entered. He became, if not garrulous, at least communicative. His eyes opened slightly, and his breathing, which in normal circumstances pumped like the tiny bellows used by enamelists, became more forceful. "I am responsible for the stores." He held up a hand and began to count. "I maintain the paints, the earths, the powders, the mucilages, the plants" — he ran out of fingers on which to itemize and turned to the other hand— "the urines, the salivas, the springwaters." He directed Claude to a set of Eucharist cruets. "The Abbe salvaged them from the chapel." He lifted a ground-glass stopper to reveal "the aqua morta so highly praised by Cellini." He compared it to the amber-hued pisse de chat sauvage, declaring proudly, "We have the finest selection of urines in the valley." It was a claim Claude felt no desire to see proven.
Henri pulled back a heavy black wool curtain weighted at the hem with lead. "The color cove. Where the colors are kept. The Abbe says that if a rainbow ever arched through a window and passed this curtain, it would arch right back in shame." Claude concurred. He had never seen so many pigments. He found it difficult to resist opening the containers.
Again Henri held out his fingers and counted: "Red lead paste in four hues, burnt sienna from five countries, three paddock blues, a capuchin renamed to assuage the Abbe's religious intolerance, one-two-thtee-fout-five sepias ..."
For some time theteaftet, Henri talked about the problems of classifying the stores. "What does one do with the Abbe's famed Indian yellow? Should it be placed among the colors, the urines, or the earths?" Claude commiserated with Henri over this organizational quandary. Henri was annoyed to find a rogue bottle of aquafortis inappropriately shelved. He replaced it and observed, "You know, Santerre notes that the palette requires only five elements: massicot, le brun rouge, chalk white, outremer, and Polish black. Rat's whiskers! Take massicot. There are so many different varieties. Chambers describes three. What about the ochers? What about sepia? The Abbe once tried to send for a barrel of live squid to test supplies. They all died and spoiled in transport. And what about orpiment?"
What about orpiment? Claude was thinking, but he just nodded. The information blurred as Henri went on about enamels kept in varnished pots and varnishes kept in enameled pots. Claude found himself surrounded by oakgalls, Congolese copal, rabbit-skin glue, cashew-nut paint, licorice.
"Here, try a piece of this," Henri said. "It is ideal for sizing paper."
"Try?"
"Take a taste."
Claude reluctantly licked the substance. It was rock candy. He could not help thinking of the Pompelmoose Atoll. The sugar mines, he decided, might well have offered relief from the exhausting tour.
They moved on to the spittle bottles and waters. Henri lifted the tops off two barrels. "This is the rainwater we use for Le-mery's ink. And this is the stream water for Geoffroy's formula. That barrel over there contains fresh snow quickly melted. It has a very special texture. Here, have a sip. It is less fine, less limpid, but it lathers well with soap."
They skipped the herbarium, given Claude's upbringing, but, in passing, Henri made a thoughtless reference to a stalk of devil's finger.
"I am sorry," he said in the halting speech that had accompanied the early part of the tour. "I did not wish to remind you of your pain."
Claude was prepared for remarks, inadvertent and otherwise, that invoked his deformity. By the time he came to stay at the mansion house, he had committed the story of the amputation to memory. He told Henri of how, in the early stages, the villagers said the mole would fall off, but how it did not fall off. How it turned odd colors. How Father Gamot had once sermonized on the matter, citing the words of Matthew, not the pig farmer but the tax-gathering apostle from Capernaum. How mockery had become cachet when he noticed the likeness between the mole and the royal face on a freshly minted coin. How, overnight, the deformity was granted a special status. How, a few months later, the Abbe had heard it caused Claude pain, and delivered to the cottage the services of a surgeon. How his mother accepted the surgeon's determination, and how the finger was consequently cut away.
Claude told all of this to Henri and in so doing diminished the distance between them. They would never be close; Henri would not allow it. But after that little explanation, they would never be strangers, either. In Claude's acknowledgment of anguish, an understanding between them was reached—vague, imprecise, unspoken, but an understanding nonetheless.
Henri told Claude that the Abbe, returning from the Page cottage after the surgery, had sent a long denunciation to the authorities in the Republic, but that they had never replied. Staemphli was not censured; in fact, there was even talk of providing municipal support for the display of his collection.
As Henri was speaking, a squat woman entered and asked for some cinnamon.
"To ask me for cinnamon is like asking a butcher simply for meat," Henri said. "What kind of cinnamon? At least tell me if you want dried quills, stoneground powder, or paste."
Flustered by the choices, the woman accepted some Ceylonese quills and departed quickly. "The cook," Henri said by way of explanation, and clearly a cook in a hurry. She was passed at the door by the Abbe.
"Thank you, Henri," the Abbe said, "I will take over from here." Claude was relieved. He had had his fill of store talk, and the combinations of tastings had given his stomach some trouble. The Abbe ditected Claude to a room dominated by heavily bolted doots that wete teinfotced with a tusted padlock. "You have been shown much but not all. The one spot where I do not wish you to venture is behind these ancient chapel doors. It is my inner sanctum, or, to use the language of conchology, my chamber of conception." His finger gyred in ever-widening rings. "Rumor will ascribe all manner of activity to the chapel. Ignore the rumor. Remember only that you are not to enter. Behind it,
I have been known to rage." The Abbe's tone lightened as he took Claude's arm. "I hope that Henri was methodical in his tour."
Claude struggled for the right words. "It was no tour, sir." He was tempted to say "Caliph" but denied himself this excess. "It was a journey."
"No," the Abbe replied. "The vizier's journey has yet to begin."
7
CLAUDE WAS CORRECT about the grease marks and the blood. They did indeed connect the great hall to the kitchen, a room hung with baskets of vegetables, cuts of cured meat, and utensils of copper, tin, and iron. The kitchen was dominated by a large squat stove and the large squat cook who moved around it.
Marie-Louise, the woman who had accepted the Ceylonese cinnamon quills from Henri earlier in the day, did not notice Claude's entrance. She was much too involved in the preparation of three dishes, each of which appeared to require her full attention. She lifted a lid and tasted and shook her head. She moved to and from the spice box. She added salt and ground nutmeg—the Abbe liked nutmeg—and tasted again. She added a pinch more, tasted, and finally nodded approvingly.
By way of counterpoint to the culinary frenzy of Marie-Louise sat Catherine Kinderklapper. She was the mansion-house scullion and general chambriere. This last word can be clumsily defined as "maid-of-all-work." But "maid-of-»0-work" would be closer to the mark. She was a person of the poorer classes, from outside Zurich, whose head was so curiously shaped that it was included in Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy. (The seventeenth English edition, illustrated with upward of four hundred profiles.) For Claude, however, who was ignorant of the facial sciences, Catherine was the woman with the feet. (Marie-Louise had feet, too, but Claude hadn't noticed them.)
Catherine and Marie-Louise toiled in tandem. In tandem, but not equally. The cook moved around ceaselessly. She kept busy throughout the day, baking and tasting, stewing and tasting, roasting and tasting, basting and tasting, slicing and dicing. And tasting. Hence her squatness. The scullion was, to use a culinary metaphor that brings together the tasks of the two women, a different kettle of fish. The pot scrubber picked up and distributed bits of gossip, pursued amorous engagements where she could find them, and left cauldrons and marmites to rust. Were it not for the cook's insistence that the larger cook-ware remain "seasoned," that is to say unwashed, Catherine would never have been able to maintain her indolence. The accountant suggested repeatedly that the Abbe replace her, but the cook's energetic protests made such expulsion impossible. Marie-Louise was a natif; Catherine, a Catholic. Marie-Louise was plumped up by an unyielding commitment to her art; Catherine was distinctly slender. The two kitchen servants loved each other dearly. The cook, in rushing around as she did, made the scullion thankful for the work she did not have to perform. And the scullion, in pursuing her warm-footed sloth, allowed the cook to imagine she ran the entire mansion house, which, in fact, she did. The one defined the other.
When Marie-Louise finally came down from high boil, she had a chance to welcome Claude, which she did by hugging him tightly, transferring a bit of perspiration from her cheek to his. Catherine did not add her own embracements. She kept such shared gestures, frequent as they were, private. This was probably just as well. She was wearing a printed apron so tightly wrapped around her ample chest that the cotton's tensile strength was sorely tested. Claude marveled at the design. "The Abbe chose it," she said. "Brought it from Geneva."
Despite the differences in the way the two women greeted Claude, they were in agreement that his arrival was a good thing. The nine-fingered Pencil Boy, while not producing the excitement that had attended the installation of the lightning pole or the pleasure that came with a shipment of island sugar, would undoubtedly add a certain electrifying sweetness to the mansion house. He would release the Abbe from bouts of melancholy, nights when the rest of the servants heard their master, through the chapel doors, shout and play mournful music with a companion he did not admit to having. The boy's arrival, in more practical terms, meant that Marie-Louise could fill a new mouth and Catherine could fill a new ear. The pot scrubber did just that moments after he came into the kitchen.
"Let me tell you," Catherine said, "that you should not go bringing up the Church in front of the Abbe." She didn't wait for a why-is-that. "He will not tolerate any religious reference. Ask Henri." Henri, present but silent in the corner, said nothing. "Ask Kleinhoff. Tell him, Kleinhoff. Tell him about the pears!" Like Henri, Kleinhoff the gardener preferred to let Catherine explain.
"Well," she said, "if they will not tell you, I guess I must. The Abbe won't allow Henri to keep colors with religious names. Same with Kleinhoff. He can't grow magdalenes, though bastard musks are fine. So are the great blankets and the orangemusks he gives out on session day. But absolutely no church pears. Why? No one knows the real reasons for the hate. The Abbe is a man of secrets, that much he will tell you himself. He's not to blame completely for the problems on the property. The accountant controls the purse. No appreciation for the work we do here." Marie-Louise ran between the pots and the table. Catherine continued her banter. "Can you believe how much is expected by that accountant? Never lets us have a moment's rest. Look at Marie-Louise. The poor thing. Shocking. If the accountant allowed a new apprentice to move in, he must have extracted all sorts of promises from the master. You know why you are here, of course. It is the Hours of Love."
"Quiet yourself," Kleinhoff finally said, protectively. "The boy will find out about that when he is supposed to find out. And from the Abbe, not you." The gardener turned to Claude. "Perhaps I should tell you what the Abbe says about these two women. He says that Marie-Louise provides the ragout, while the other one provides the ragot, the gossip of the mansion house." There was a general round of laughter as Marie-Louise arranged the common pewter and announced the evening meal.
That night, when Claude's head touched the pillow—a stuffed onion sack that was substantially softer than what he had known at home—he sketched through the events of the day: the Abbe's talk, the tour of the stores, the printed calico dragons with tongues of flame that ran across Catherine's substantial chest. He called up the supper, spoonful by spoonful. He had accepted two servings of a cinnamon-laced boar's head soup, accompanied by less exotic helpings of haricots and peas. He had been amazed to learn from the Abbe that the bristles of the boar were kept for brushes, its teeth for grinding polish. The tongue was tougher than beef, but Claude ate it happily. Having grown up on mountain spinach, pinecones, and potages made from primrose and nettles, he found the mansion-house supper was wonderfully bourgeois. Claude kept quiet during that first meal, until he asked innocently, "How can you tell if you are tasting the tongue or the tongue is tasting you?" The Abbe responded with a diluted Aristotelian inquiry on the senses. The Abbe's exotic answer brought Claude closer to his teacher. Now, as he closed his eyes and tried to sleep, he recognized a newfound feeling, or, at least, one that had long been suppressed. He felt a deep attachment to the Abbe that recalled the distant memories of his father. He wondered about the nature of his ties to the Abbe. As Claude drifted into sleep, other, more practical questions lingered. What would the Abbe have him do? And what were the Hours of Love?
The logic went as follows: Henri's knowledge of the pigments and Claude's imagination, individually, could not produce much of value. But if brought together, the capacities of the colorist and the draftsman could provide the mansion house with much-needed income. It would be a convergence of technical competence and a very keen eye.
Enamel had a long history of such partnerships, the Abbe had pointed out to the accountant to justify the expense of btinging Claude in. The teams of Hance and de Gueniet, and — closet to Toumay — Petitot and Botdier, had gteatly advanced the aft of glass painting. (Zink was a singulat exception, but he was a Swede, and you can't compate a Swede to his Continental countetpatts.) Claude and Henti would follow the part-neted ttadition and in time would work profitably on the Hours of Love.
This teasoning, appatently, convinced the accoun
tant. As the financial ovetseet of the mansion house, he authorized the Abbe's scheme. What did this mean fot Claude? Ptincipally, that access to attists' supplies was augmented. To the crimson-tibboned sketch foldet the Abbe added what he called "the necessaries." A shop tecotd from Cherion, a competitot to Didiet & Sons (fotmetly Robett & Didiet), tegistets the Abbe's unique notion of necessity: 2 sets of Conte ctayons in walnut boxes; 2 teams each of the following papets: post, white wove, yellow, blue, brown, glazed, and ttacing; 3 tablets each of fine catmine, minetal blue, bladdet gteen, and gamboge; 2 bottles of san-datac; 2 magnifying glasses; 1 etasing knife; 1 fully stocked writing desk; 12 red chalks; 24 black-lead pencils "that write like velvet"; 1 set square; 2 whetstones; 1 clasp knife; 1 pumice stone.
The staff at Cherion must indeed have been pleased when, not two months later, anothet order came, this one for: 5 Lyon brushes; 10 wash brushes (with handles in five woods); 2 badger-hair brushes; 2 palettes (one in walnut, the othet in ivory); 2 horn knives; 3 bottles India rubber; 1 handrest; 1 copying mirror; 2 sunshades; 1 pair French curves; 1 bottle poppyseed oil; 1 box cardboards; 1 folding easel; a selection of sable brushes in all available sizes, four to be mounted in tinplate holders.
Accompanying the shipment was a handbook titled The Art of the Miniature World. From it Claude had hoped to acquire principles of symmetry and perspective. He did not. Still, he liked the title and adapted it for a selection of drawings done during his first days with the Abbe. Mansion House Miniatures,he called them. In the space of three weeks, he worked up some comic portraits of Catherine, her breasts aflame, Marie-Louise competing with the rotundity of the cauldrons she stirred, Kleinhoff tending his pears. He drew the alcoves and the coffin-confessional and many, many sketches of the Abbe, imbuing each with an adoration he did not fully recognize. He had plenty of time to draw, since he was dependent on the Slug to prepare materials before enameling could begin. And the Slug, of course, was slow. What he lacked in zest, however, he supplied in perseverance.
A case of curiosities Page 6