A case of curiosities

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A case of curiosities Page 16

by Kurzweil, Allen


  The natural elements all mustered their wicked strengths to make the place even more sinister. Earth covered much of the rotted planking. Wind blew through a bedside beam. Water dripped from the roof, noisily filling a canvas bucket, a crude sort of water clock that Claude suspected would require constant attention during heavy rains. Only Fire was missing. The chimney was blocked. Holes in one of the walls near where Claude decided to sleep had been covered over with scraps of advertisements and ordinances filched from the street. By the light of the candle, he scanned the catchpenny prints and song sheets. He took some comfort in the three smudged copies of The Wonderful Pig of Knowledge. The papering, unfortunately, did little to muffle the sound of the milliner and his wife copulating one story below. Clearly the previous tenant had departed unexpectedly. Piles of wood had been left in a corner. Claude gathered up some rags and fashioned a mattress, using his satchel as a pillow. After much fitful tossing, he fell into a shallow, apprehensive sleep.

  21

  A MONTH AFTER reaching Paris, Claude spent an evening working on a letter home. The letter avoided the commonplace supetfluities of the age: no hosts of humble-servants and yours-ever-so-faithfullys, no endings like the one penned by the centuty's most famous matquis: "I have the honor to be, sit, with all possible feeling, yout humble and obedient servant.'' (That is truly sadism.)

  My dear Mother,

  By now the Abbe must have informed you of my disappearance. I wish to allay your fears. I am safe, and all is well. As the postmark will indicate, I write from Paris, the city that Father always said offered much to those who had much to offer, and nothing to those who did not.

  A full explanation for my sudden flight cannot, I am afraid, be provided. You are well aware of the public nature of private correspondence. This much I can say. I was betrayed, my dear Mother, betrayed by the very man who taught me the value of trust. I did not return home because I did not want to involve you. Do you recall what Gamot the preacher said about betrayal? I think he cited St. Matthew, though 1 cannot recall the words.

  All of this to say that while with the Abbe, I discovered what might better have been left concealed. On that, if nothing else, he and I would agree. Rather than live with betrayal, I chose to leave.

  A series of chance events have brought me to Paris. These I feel perfectly comfortable recounting. On the road to Lyon, in a state of great exhaustion, I met a coachman who took up my friendship at a moment when I most needed a friend. He agreed to provide me with passage to Paris in exchange for some minor clock repair. The coachman—his name is Paul—is a clever felloa: some would say a scoundrel, able to avoid what he calls "the stew of royal regulation." The words suggest the pleasure he takes filling his stomach.

  My skills have been much appreciated here in Paris, ami after no fewer than four offers were made to me in the first week, I chose to apprentice in the workshop of Abraham-Louis Breguet. {Two diagonal cuts have been made in the paper to hold a trade card from the well-known watchmaker,}

  The rooms I inhabit, just above the shop, warrant a little sketch and a description. {A sketch appears.) I am now writing in the salon, which I have marked with an S. It is part of a suite of spacious rooms filled with more precious objects than our rafters have botanicals. There are jasper vases, porcelains I am told are rare, a handsome commode with lacquered corners, two porphyry tables. In the corner, there is a big ugly sculpture of Eros launching arrows, and a marble stove decorated in bronze. The stove is topped with a statue of Venus. My rooms are connected to a fine library, finer in matters of watchmaking than the Abbe's, and, as you might expect, better kept as well. My bedroom (marked C) is done in black and gold and blue damask. A white marble chimney (F) warms me on those unexpectly chill nights, of which we already have had two. The rooms are all lighted by massive and ornate chandeliers and pleasantly papered with the finest printed calico.

  My neighbors include Piero Rinaldo Carli-Rubbi, a Venetian who is a famous artist — he has received commissions from the Academy of Science — and a police lieutenant named Antoine-Raimond-Jean-Gaulbert-Gabriel de Sartine. I see both regularly.

  One request must be made, Mother. Do not write. I expect to move soon — a step foxward in the construction of devices under my own name — and will send a permanent address when I can. Also, do not inform the Abbe of my presence here, since there is a matter of some watches that could cause me serious embarrassment. If he inquires, tell him only that the situation will be settled shortly and to his satisfaction. The page ends, and so must I. I send my love to all of you, even Fidelite.

  Claude squeezed in a postscript along the margin:

  I recall the passage from Matthew: "The Son of man shall be betrayed into the hands of men." I can only add, Mother, that Jesus was not alone.

  Claude read through the letter Though wottied that he had wtitten too much of bettayal, he was genetally satisfied. He was unsute of his spelling and consideted smudging the troublesome words. In the end, he decided to leave them as they were. His mother did not read, which is why he supplied the sketches. And though his elder sister did, it was unlikely she would pick out errors of spelling, if indeed they were errors. Splotches, on the other hand, would stimulate instant mockery. Besides, the Abbe had told him often that spelling was a casual and personal affair.

  He made a fair copy, which he sanded and addtessed. He sealed it with an excessive amount of wax and pinned the draft among the many notices that were plastered on the wall above his mattress. He stared at the letter for a long while, then blew out the candle, and everything went dark—unequivocally and terrifyingly dark.

  Even today, there is no written medium more deceptive than the letter. Back in Claude's time, epistolary convention was a triumph of deceit. It was not generally employed to transmit simple truths and complex fears.

  The discrepancy between what Claude was and what he wished to be surfaces often. To give but one example, how can a room that is lighted by ''massive and ornate chandeliers" be thrown into darkness by extinguishing a single candle? Perhaps some light should be shed on the true circumstances of Claude Page one month after his arrival in Paris.

  To be fair, the first half of the letter was an accurate representation of departure from the mansion house. It is only the second half that contains outright falsifications. This, Claude would have argued, was done to protect his mother from learning of the fearful condition to which he had sunk. And what was that fearful condition? It was one devoid of finely printed calico or any of the other luxuries mentioned. Claude had given a description not of his lodgings but of the Baron de Besenval's. (Plumeaux had published an account of the Baron based on information provided by a chambermaid he had seduced.)

  Claude was living in the same attic rooms he had rented the night he arrived. In the month since installing himself, he had surveyed the full extent of the apartment's decrepitude and could not relay the result of that depressing reconnaissance to his mother. Hence the spacious quarters and not the sloping ceiling that would have cramped the afternoon shadow of a dwarf. Hence the white marble chimney and not the blocked fireplace. Hence the precious objects and not the room filled with scraps of wood. There were no porphyry tables anywhere to be found, just parts of a broken spinning wheel. There were no ornate chandeliers; even beeswax illumination eluded him. He had written his letter by the light of a tallow candle that smoked terribly and left long streaks that looked like black poplars against the wall. Papered though they were, his lodgings were not done in printed calico. The draft of the letter was pinned beside a pronouncement signed by Antoine-Raimond-Jean-Gaulbert-Gabriel de Sartine, the police lieutenant Claude claimed to know. He did not. It was just a name at which to stare while he tried to fall asleep.

  Claude did make the acquaintance of the other neighbor mentioned in the letter, Piero Rinaldo Carli-Rubbi, but once again, the truth had been embellished. He had met Piero on his first morning as a resident, after waking to the sounds of shutters slapping open. He rose to see what
Paris had to offer him and promptly hit his head on a beam. Unperturbed, he leaned out the dormer window to take in the view. Across the courtyard, he observed a row of gargoyles glowering and grinning; they reminded him of Adolphe Staemphli. On the other side of the building, Claude noticed laundry, diapers mostly, hanging on a line. He concluded that it was the property of the wet nurse mentioned the night before. This was confirmed when a young woman emerged at the window with both breasts exposed, her nipples covered by the greedy mouths of two swaddled infants. The wet nurse was plain, from what Claude could tell, and smiled pleasantly despite the lacteal attentions of her charges. The smile ended abruptly when she observed her laundry flapping against the mucky edge of a wooden drainpipe. She cursed, grabbed the clothes, and then retreated from the window.

  The stench Claude had picked up when mounting the stairs hit him again. It was wotse than dried-up field mouse. He traced the odot to a toom a half-floot below his. He knocked. The door was open. He peeted in and found he was being stared at by a giant falcon, wings outsttetched, sinking its talons into a ttee btanch. Claude scanned the toom. He saw the skins and pelts of countless creatutes hanging ftom meat hooks, theit mouths and nostrils plugged with cotton wool to ptevent the flow of blood. This was Claude's introduction to Pieto Rinaldo Carli-Rubbi, a pelt stuffet who counted among his clients, howevet indirectly, the Academy of Science and many of the mote daring display makets in the city.

  Pieto's shouldets were btoad and musculat, his body firm. His complexion was sutptisingly flush, given the datkness of the toom. He was not, howevet, handsome. His head was latge and his nose was split, almost bilobated. All of this, and the tancid odots his profession confetted, gave him the appeatance of a latge, if wingless, bat. A Venetian bat. He was the son of Giuseppe Rinaldo Catli-Rubbi, the anatomist and sutgeon to the Doge. Pieto's fathet consideted the sutgical atts to be of singulat intetest and assumed that his only son would catty on the wotk he had so profitably established. Insttuction, thete-fote, began at an eatly age. Pieto accompanied his fathet on the rounds of the sick and had learned, by the age of eight, to let blood. Unfottunately, Pieto did not like sickness. He suffeted the patients' ills.

  Duting a ttip to Milan, Giuseppe Rinaldo Catli-Rubbi showed his son the scene of a flaying on the facade of the Duomo. This image stayed with Pieto. Back home, aftet bleeding the nephew of Venice's chief magisttate, the anatomist took his son to the mattytdom scene of the Maccabees on the walls of a conftatet-nity chapel. A man was having his hait temoved by hand winch. This, too, inttigued him. A yeat latet, he was shown some wax figutes depicting the vatious stages of plague. He tealized that it was the display of anatomy and not anatomy itself that he admited. When he came upon a stuffed puffin in the collection of the Doge, he knew that he wished to testote the dead, tathet than tteat the dying.

  "I decided to be a hay stuffet, a moldet of wax figures, a cte-atot of cteatutes," Pieto said, waving his hands. He compensated for the immobile nature of his art by gesturing wildly. "My father, of course, was appalled, and banished me from the comforts of the family residence on the Grand Canal." Seeking to refine his talents, Piero ended up in* Paris, where his single-mindedness attracted the interest, financial and paternal, of the Verraux brothers whose business in exotic birds made them rich and kept the Venetian artist busy with commissions.

  Claude walked around the room. "What is this?"

  "An urubu," Piero said. "A South American vulture. After that is done, I must stuff the first sheep to fly in a Montgolfier balloon, and a tableau of one of Buffon's most famous studies."

  "Which one?"

  "The virgin bitch."

  Claude was impressed. He wondered if the water rats he had seen in a covered gallery were Piero's work.

  "Dressed in tailored red satin? At the sign of the double scissors? Yes, they are mine. But I can tell you that I didn't have anything to do with the fading of the fur. The proprietor put them in the sun before the rats had properly dried." Piero was an insecure fellow. He spent a few unnecessary minutes explaining a discoloration Claude had not noticed. Then, in an act of reciprocal curiosity, Piero asked to see Claude's rooms. From the moment Piero entered, he could tell there was little to admire in the untended lodgings, grimly furnished as they were. His interest rose, however, when he noticed some objects arranged in a niche below the beams, which seemed to be part shrine, part reliquary. Piero liked the lay figure and the Portrait in Little.

  "And who is she?" Piero asked.

  Claude lied, transforming the garlanded beauty into a lover he had left far away. After that, he spoke of his other love, of gears and things mechanical.

  Perhaps the biggest epistolary deception concerned the circumstances in which Claude obtained the trade card he sent his mother. As might be guessed, he had not found employment in the workshop of Abraham-Louis Breguet, though it was not for want of trying. Back and forth from street to shopfront he had roamed in search of work. He circumnavigated the boat-shaped Cite, peering through the polished windows of goldsmiths, spectacles sellers, and watchmakers. Thirty-six inquiries and thirty-six rejections. The responses included mockery, disdain, contempt, unspoken hostility, spoken hostility, and once, only once, pity. The last reaction came from an assistant at the Breguet workshop on the Quai de l'Horloge. It was he who handed Claude the trade card that was sent to Madame Page. The assistant had shown him Breguet s private workbench, on which there were plans for a grande complication.

  "It is for the Queen!" the assistant said. "And it will have sapphire pallets and rollers, bridges and wheels in gold, a platinum winding weight, and every ingenuity known to man." Claude was rendered speechless by the complex purity of the watch. Afterward the assistant said he would be happy to share some wine and advice, but Claude passed up the opportunity, worrying about the cost.

  Plumeaux later scolded his friend. "You entered the city with no letters of introduction, and though you may have talent, talent alone means nothing. Your competence in the domain of self-promotion is at present woefully undeveloped. Next time a drink is suggested, you buy the assistant a drink."

  So Claude bought round after round, cutting into what little money he had. He found the accompanying talk depressing. Few of the men seemed interested in barometric compensation or gear cutting. They talked instead of guild laws and poor pay. He would turn the conversation to subjects that proved his talents, but the craftsmen laughed at his earnest fascinations, preferring to gossip about some competitor.

  These men weren't watchmakers, Claude concluded; they were dial painters and pallet makers and gear cutters. Behind the restrained faces of the Breguets he so admired, behind the Le-pines and Le Roys, hid the handiwork of a pool of underpaid and anonymous craftsmen who cared little about the advancement of their craft. They were piecework professionals, that was all.

  In that first month, during the long hours when he had nothing to do and little to dream about, Claude spent his time at the poultry market. There he could breathe in the odors of the countryside and reflect upon his urban exile. The market was filled with cages barely larger than the squawking birds they contained. He appreciated the birds' plight.

  On the day he wrote the letter home, Claude had watched as men used their fingers to stuff pigeons and larger birds with vetch. One seller even blew meal down his birds' throats. At the end of the day, the same man squeezed the birds' gizzards to save the undigested grain. The fowl inspector, identified by the feather in his hat, laughed at the spectacle that so upset Claude.

  He left the poultry market to rest under the Pont Neuf. While dozing off, he observed a colony of spiders, which, unconvinced of the bridge's stability, slipped down to connect their webs to the spans of the arch. In the middle of his repose, Claude discovered a scabby hand burrowing through his satchel. A fight ensued, and after some scuffling, Claude overpowered his antagonist with a random but effective application of punches. The fight added to his loathing for the city. In the course of the skirmish, he had fallen into a
deep puddle that stained his only pair of breeches. He saw in the damp spot all that the city had become for him: a blend of spilled wine, window-tossed refuse and excrement from half a million backsides, worm casings, the evacuations of rats, and the mutings of diseased pigeons, all of it pounded, by the hooves of horses and iron-nailed boots of men, into a thick and acrid paste. It seems unnecessary to note that the stain could not be removed.

  This is what Claude was considering when he wrote to his mother. This is why he lied, why he reinvented the circumstances he endured. Contemplating the letter in the darkness of his room, he worried that the postscript quotation from Matthew would distress his mother. After much groping, he lighted the tallow candle and reread what he had written. He decided to leave the postscript. He walked around the attic, as much as the squat space would allow him to walk, and stood in front of his niche of earthly possessions. For a long time, he stared at The Mechanical Christ. The slotted cover was empty. The coins had been spent. He looked at the frontispiece image and mimicked the outstretched arms and downcast eyes. It was at that moment that the world opened up to him. Or, more exactly, the Globe.

  22

  BY lowering his eyes as he did, Claude's gaze fell on the name of the printer of the mechanical treatise. "Published by L. Livre at the Sign of the Globe. Paris." Claude's reaction was, Of course, how stupid. In his quest for work, he had overlooked his link with the pornographer.

  The next morning, he discussed the matter with Plumeaux, who was just ending a night of whoring and anticipating the pleasures of sleep. Groggily, he told Claude what he knew of Livre. "We populate the same demimonde of printed scandal. I have written for his associates when my finances demanded it."

  Claude described his single encounter with the bookseller.

 

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