A case of curiosities

by Kurzweil, Allen

  Claude tried to make the choiceless choices of the ruined dreamer. He had to decide which objects to pawn and whether he should reserve the right to future redemption, in all that redemption implied. He could dispense with the old traveling wig the Abbe had given him; he had no sentimental attachment to curled and shellacked horsehair. He would keep The Mechanical Christ because its obscurity would stimulate little interest from brokers. The lay figure, too, would be kept. It was much more than a reminder of his first encounter with the coachman. Ageless, sexless, and even timeless, it accepted whatever expectations were directed its way.

  Claude put the rest of his material wealth into his satchel and lugged it to a small street dominated by the ancient and disreputable profession. He went alone. Plumeaux could not be found. Besides, the hack disapproved of the new apprenticeship. Claude entered and left a number of shops, shocked by the sums he was offered. He eventually chose to conduct his business in an ill-lit establishment that had a gambler's silver point counter and, in a dish beside the door, a pile of worthless brothel tokens.

  He looked around with morbid interest. A fat, ugly watch was granted a place of honor near the cashbox. It was missing its hour hand. Behind the cashbox sat a frail and myopic broker, who compensated for his handicaps by surrounding himself with firearms. A thirty-year-old blunderbuss with a breech trigger and short stock, and an even older flintlock with a chicken-necked cock hung above his head. Out of view was a charged horse pistol that could calm even the most unsatisfied of customers.

  Claude brought out his portable holdings and showed them to the broker. He was unimpressed. Out of kindness, if one were to take him at his word, he offered a shockingly low price for the Portrait in Little and the tools. Claude explained the virtue of the latter—the handles of lignum vitae, the hardest of the hardwoods, lathed at an angle that pleased the grip. He described the composition of the tempered steel and the precision with which each implement had been crafted.

  The pawnbroker was still unimpressed. Claude could have produced the Holy Grail, and the fellow would have offered him the same price, allowing that it was a pretty mug but an old one and dented, and claiming that interest in old, dented mugs was minimal. The broker knew his job. He discerned the desperation in Claude's nonchalance. The only thing that prevented him from taking even greater advantage was the missing finger. He assumed it promised future booty, stolen objects that would require quick sale. Like so many before him, the broker attributed an ignominious legacy to the amputation and so added a few sous to the price he was willing to pay. In Claude's estimation, the Portrait was significantly undervalued. He chose to keep it but sold the tools outright, receiving one fifth of their value and what was, surely, one tenth of the price at which they would later be sold. Coins were counted out on a piece of green baize, and Claude left the prison of bankrupt dreams.

  As he walked to the rag-and-cloth market to find an errand frock, he wondered whether he had sold his aspirations along with his tools. He spent the afternoon in front of flimsy stalls piled high with old bone lace, ribbon, and lustrine that had lost its luster long before. He joined some seamen in eyeing torn petticoats and broken corsets and the women who displayed them. Near a stand filled with cabbaged strips of tailor's cloth, Claude bought a sober black frock. He then returned to his lodgings, stopping to talk with Piero. The Venetian had fashioned a gift for Claude, a finger in.flax and twine that could be stuffed into the gloves of his new uniform.

  24

  WITH A few drops of sealing wax, the sale of his tools, and the purchase of the black frock, Claude shifted worlds. He abandoned his mechanical dreams and entered Bibliopola.

  The apprenticeship started on a humid Wednesday morning. Etiennette's feather pen could be seen fluttering behind the terrestrial globe, off the eastern coast of Zanzibar, occasionally landing in a silver-plated inkstand.

  Livre sat at his desk, organizing. Claude smiled at Etiennette, who responded in kind, and then moved toward the demoiselle to put on his vest. Livre shouted, "Get the coarse gloves, black and brown. Today will be dedicated to cleaning. This is not the usual routine, since it is not cleaning day. But 1 have been unassisted of late, and we must fight against this." Livre brought his hand up to the dust motes floating in the air. "The work of the cooper next door. His dust settles in my establishment at a horrible rate."

  Livre went through some verbal gymnastics describing the chores that would follow. "We will attack the dusty, snuffy, and rusty, the sooty and smoky, the fetid and foul, the maggoty and flyblown. I have itemized the morning's tasks. Read through my pearls and follow them to the letter." The master showed his apprentice the little slips of paper hanging from the desk string.

  Claude noticed Livre's unbridled appreciation of the possessive pronoun. The bookshop, the stock, the pearls, were invariably referred to as my bookshop, my stock, my pearls.

  "Follow my pearls as you follow me, and you will be rewarded. Overlook them, and ..."

  The doorbell rang.

  ". . . It is one of the Freres Jacques printers, no relation to the bell ringer of nursery-rhyme fame," Livre said. "Peruse my notes while I attend to pressing matters." Livre took the printer behind the serge curtain to discuss the sale of yet another edition of the pornographic classic The School of Venus.

  Claude scanned the paper pearls. He found they were of two kinds. The first, which were numbered, described highly detailed chores, from brushing one's feet on the sisal doormat each morning ("Avoid the monogram") to closing the door at night ("Wear the green glove to provide one last polish"). The edges of all books, those shelved behind the curtain and in front, were to be cleaned every other week ("Move the duster from back to front"). Specific brooms were to be applied to specific parts of the shop—the besom in the courtyard, the Spanish flag brush on the inside tiles. A few of the pearls were incomprehensible. There was one that read: "Empty The Mysteries of Paris." Claude recalled that Livre had been carrying the same work in Tournay.

  The second group of pearls, unnumbered, tended to be more aphoristic, providing general work maxims in French and Latin. These Claude ignored. While Livre talked with the printer, the apprentice scanned the bookshelves. He passed over a popular work on aerostatics and a Utopian novel bound in filigreed leather. He paused at a treatise that was intriguing enough to require inspection. He plucked the work from the shelf. Investigation of the Proper Profile of the Top Beam of a Dock Crane with Moveable Carriage. He unfolded one of the plates and found an error in its description. The beam FD should have run to the angle AJK, and the balance . . .

  "Claude!" Livre slapped his apprentice's shoulder with a horsehair flywhisk. "Savary is hesitant on the matter of corporal punishment. I am not."

  Claude had not heard the bell that marked the exit of the collaborator. Livre pulled an unnumbered pearl from the string: "A successful bookseller does not read his books. He learns only enough to sell them."

  25

  For the rest of the morning, Claude swept and dusted and polished while Livre criticized, lectured, and spat. The cleaning was deemed complete only when a piece of jeweler's cotton removed the final bit of cooper's dust from the glass and the btass case frames were polished with the green gloves. Livre explained that more pearls would follow. These would detail where to put the books, how to put them where they were to be put, what to say about them once they were put where they were to be put in the manner in which they were to be put there. "But," he continued, "you cannot rely on my pearls alone to become a model bookseller's apprentice. There are some things that cannot be written down. I just mentioned my inventory, but in truth I should have said inventories. For, as you know, there are two. Come, it is time I show you my Curtain Collection."

  The curtain in question was a length of coarse, unmonogrammed serge that served as a door to one of the rooms in back. Livre drew the curtain aside and said, "It is made from the habit of a defrocked nun." They entered, and Claude's gaze moved uncontrollably over the titles. He fou
nd it difficult to suppress the urge to pull books from the shelves.

  "The organization of my Curtain Collection is as rigorous as, if more discreet than, the organization of my books out front," Livre said. "I have Instructional, folio and quarto; Ecclesiastical, divided between Jesuitical, folio and quarto, and Calvinist, folio and quarto; Prostitutional, folio and quarto; Matrimonial, folio and quarto; Aristocratical, folio and quarto; Medical, folio and quarto. The elephants are shelved on the bottom. On the fourth shelf: Malicious, Mystical, and Miscellaneous. Foreign on shelf five.

  "Since you will not find pearls regarding my Curtain Collection, you must commit to memory not only the names of the authors and the complete titles and dimensions of their works, but also the costs of rental, and the costs, too, of the subsidiary services we provide to our better customers. You must also be able to provide a precis so that when a customer comes requiring something in a sodomitic mode, you can mention The Servant's Pleasure, a delightful tale that includes in the very first chapter a fanciful rape committed on the body of a girl, followed by less conventional crimes of venereal commerce. The cost is two livres, six in unbound octavo."

  "I will do my best to learn your methods of presentation," Claude said.

  "Here is one of the Count's favorites," the bookseller said. "The History of Captain Denis Recombourt and His Interludes in the Harem, [Livre took a breath] Including his criminal accounts, prophecies, stories of fires and ghosts, [Livre took another breath] sextuplets, sex, devils, cruelty, uncleanness with a cow and his banishment to the Pompelmoose Atoll. I must say, the title page promises more than the rest of the book delivers."

  Claude was annoyed that the sugar story had not been the Abbe's own invention. Livre explained that the lieutenant of police—a successor to the man whose name appeared on Claude's garret wallpaper—had been dissuaded from prosecuting, because the Globe provided him with a copy of each new work. "The books are for his private files and private use. In fact, one of his assistants will come tonight for the proofs of my new Venus, since it is Wednesday, the day of my salon."

  It should be established quickly that, despite the eloquence of the age, scintillating discourse rarely entered the Globe during Livre's Wednesday-night gatherings. Elegant phrases in elegant settings could be more readily found in the large, drafty galleries of the Louvre and in the intimate cabinets of the Hotel de Rambouillet. If Voltaire ever passed by the Sign of the Globe, he surely walked on unaware. Nevertheless, Livre, with blind vanity, stole the honorific title Galiani had already bestowed on Holbach, and called himself le maitre d'hotel de la philosophie. To an ever-changing crowd of business partners, police informants, patrons, printers, and hacks, he provided watered-down drink and watered-down ideas.

  Livre told Claude that if he were needed, he would be called. And //called, he should enter without uttering a word. Claude waited all night on a stool outside the doors of the reading room, staring at the walking sticks propped in a mahogany stand. He engaged in silent conversation with the ivory ram's head staring out from the top of a Malacca cane.

  "Who is my master?" Claude asked. The ram's head listened as Claude answered his own question. Livre was a man of broad but unemployed learning. Though the bookseller could smile, it was a smile that left the rest of his face unmoved. He was laughless. What was it that the Abbe once said? "Show me the laughless man, and I will show you a fool." Claude was sure that the bookseller could reciprocate with some slight. He was at his most clever when he sensed threat. He had an answer for everything, one that was convincing even when wrong, especially when wrong. The Abbe, on the other hand, was a man of many-questions. The comparison led Claude to the conclusion that Livre did not seem to enjoy his work in the way the Abbe did. But, then, what was the Abbe's work? Livre, at least, promised a recognizable profession. Under his structured supervision, Claude could acquire the skills of the Perfect Merchant. What had the Abbe offered? Complicity in a crime. Thoughts jumped back to the sale of his tools. Claude stared at the ram. It was late when Livre opened the doors and dismissed the apprentice.

  "One last pearl remains," the bookseller said. He handed Claude a little piece of paper and The Mysteries of Paris.

  When Claude and the coachman met again, they engaged in cheers of salutation, primitive back slapping, and the kind of stationary grappling that recalls Gaudin's homoerotic print of The Wrestlers' Art. They were jubilant but exhausted, Paul especially so. Lucille had cracked a hind axle thirteen leagues outside the city, at Chailly, on a part of the post road famous for its thievery. Repairs had to be made in haste, and the coach reached Paris only after much struggle. The coachman took some comfort in the discovery of an unmarked package that yielded "the bottled bounty of Burgundy," which, he informed Claude, would be shared "you know where." The two friends were joined by Sebastian Plumeaux, who, like the coachman, eagerly anticipated an account by Claude of the first few weeks at the Globe.

  Madame V. was at her best that night. She had reached the fowl market just before it closed, and snared a vendor after he had squeezed the undigested grain from the gizzards of his birds. Back in her kitchen, she mixed together a pretty sauce of claret, wild garlic, mace, and whole pepper, which communicated a delicate, tangy sweetness to the flesh of the woodcocks she now served.

  There was, in short, good food, good wine, and the comfortable fraternity of friends. After much prodding, and not a few cups of Burgundy, Claude started to entertain his companions with a description of apprenticeship to the master of the Globe.

  Though he spoke of the work and the clientele, he spent most of his time on the chatactet of the master himself, detailing the curious manner in which he grunted and rumbled, ate and cleared his bowels. Neighboring diners laughed at the vulgarity, which spurred Claude on to bolder revelations.

  "The scene I cannot forget," Claude said, "was when I first saw him hunched over the four-volume set of The Mysteries of Paris. Not hunched, exactly. He had his breeches unbuttoned and down at his ankles. He was squatting on the books. I could not imagine why until I looked more carefully. The books were not books at all. They were covers that had been glued together and hollowed out to serve as a closestool! And what's more, he wipes himself with smudged and torn proof sheets."

  More laughter erupted in the cramped quarters of the gargote.

  "I think the image you have just presented," Plumeaux reflected, "characterizes the respect Livre holds for literature."

  Claude went on: "My neighbor Piero, who mounts animals for the Verraux brothers, has eviscerated many herbivores. He tells me that vegetable eaters produce the most noxious gas. Livre, with his diet limited exclusively to potatoes, provides independent confirmation of this phenomenon."

  "Nothing but vegetables?" the coachman said. "It is a crime of missed opportunities to limit one's diet so." He stabbed a wing of woodcock with his fork.

  Plumeaux added, "His work stinks as well, like a barnyard on a hot and humid day." The hack liked that turn of phrase and noted it down on a scrap of paper. He looked up at his friends and tested an additional observation that displayed recent research, a Utopia narrated through the symbols on a heraldic shield: "Livre's bookplate should be an achievement of arms bearing a pair of crossed enema pumps and besoms ardent. Perhaps on a tincture of monogrammed L's."

  Claude resumed his description. "Livre is often in that squatting position when he dispenses the daily chores and admonitions he calls his pearls." Claude choked a bit on the last word. "And do you know what the first and last pearl of each day is? Well, I will tell you. It is to clean The Mysteries of Paris. Livre is kind enough to provide me with a special brush.

  "The pearls dictate every movement of every moment of the day. There are pearls on how to handle books (one must open the back and front covers simultaneously to avoid cracking the spine), how to turn pages (one must never lick one's ringers), even how to pronounce certain words."

  "And what happens," the coachman asked, "if one of these pearls is overlooked?
"

  "Occasionally, in my enthusiasm, I pull a book off the shelf by the top of the spine instead of easing the surrounding books back to grab the covers from the side. The master's response to my dereliction is painful and exacting, part of a schedule of punishments he has arranged for the advancement of my skills. He disciplines improper book handling with a flywhisk to the shoulder. Other mistakes demand less forgiving implements. In particular, he has equipped himself with a slender block of mahogany wrapped in green baize. And I know from experience that baize does nothing to diminish the pain."

  "You deserve better than a bastinade," the coachman raged. "You deserve better than a bookstore. You are a master of metal work, are you not?"

  "I do not know what I am. I no longer even own my tools."

  "I tried to warn him away," Plumeaux said to the coachman.

  The mood at the table changed. Claude could no longer entertain his friends with stories of Livre's habits. They were too unsettling. He could not reveal that the cost of breakage was systematically deducted from his wages, or, more precisely, added to the debts arising from the apprenticeship fees. Nor could he reveal the depth of his unhappiness.

  The coachman eyed Claude's food. "Eat, my friend. An empty sack cannot stand."

  Claude did not respond. Describing the Globe clarified a frustration he had not, until then, been fully willing to recognize.