A case of curiosities

by Kurzweil, Allen

  His skills were soon in demand. The landlady was his first client. Distressed by the damage the pigeons caused in the spires of the St.-Severin church, she appealed to Claude to find a remedy. She explained that birds disfigured her favorite gargoyle and pointed at a basilisk covered with unwanted coronary markings. Unable to reach the roosts, Claude and Piero installed the barn owl to scare away the birds. The neighbors marveled at the results. The scare-pigeon was the talk of the building for weeks thereafter, until Claude mounted his next invention.

  "What is it?" neighbors queried.

  "A radial clothesline for the wet nurse."

  Constructed out of the spinning wheel salvaged during the early stages of renovation, the device was planted, like a whirligig, high above the roof, thus avoiding the muck of the drains and the smoke from the nearby chimney pots. In exchange for the drying wheel, Marguerite provided both Claude and Piero with free laundering, which meant that Claude's frock coat and Piero's viscera-stained smocks soon flapped beside her linen.

  News of the cleverness spread, and Plumeaux was even able to sell a little article on "A Garret Grotto" to a local journal. He described the "ratchetings and umbellate contrivement of a bookstore apprentice" but did not mention Claude by name.

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the tinkering revived Claude's spirits. Restoration of the attic marked the restoration of Claude himself. There were, of course, setbacks, nights when he would lie awake and stare out the window at the skyline he had reshaped: the mirrors with their guys, the windlass and its pawl, the clothes that hung from the drying wheel. On Sunday nights, he often fell asleep clutching his testicles, carrying the image of the flapping sheets into his dreams, transforming them into the sails of a Turkish galley on which he could escape. But when he awoke, he was faced by yet another transformation. The sheets were now perforated little slips of paper bearing marks of tedium, and they were hanging from the desk string of the Globe.

  28

  The Pearl

  The COMPOSITION OF the pearl that found its way into the case of curiosities was provoked late one Thursday night after the Globe had closed and its staff had left. Livre sat at his desk, struggling to suppress digestive distress. He poured out a measure of Venice treacle, a remedy pungent with cardamom. He drank it but received little comfort. He still farted. He tried to distract himself by consulting the various foreign and local book lists, as well as the periodicals and announcements stacked neatly at the corner of his desk. There was a Gazette, bought for appearances and left untouched, the slim Mercure de France in its gray-blue cover, and the indispensable Journal de Paris. He scanned the Journal before turning to an underground book list in search of announcements that might threaten his market in illicit works. He excised two or three items with his perforator and filed them away in the appropriate pigeonholes of his desk. He logged two new references into his booklet. It was on the opposite side of the second clipping that he came across an unsigned article under the rubric "A Garret Grotto." The item described a place "in which chairs rise to the ceiling, and a bed closes up like a drawbridge of some ancient land." The writer mentioned "a resourceful bookseller's apprentice who has transformed mean and meager surroundings into a microcosm of inexpensive invention." At first, Livre thought little of it, but the phrase "bookseller's apprentice" lingered. Could it be? Could it not be?

  Livre's first impulse was to punish, to prepare the baize-covered bastinade for Claude's arrival the following morning. But after chewing over the implications of the infidelity, and after gaining control of his anger, he forced himself to remember that previous attempts at subjugation, both by whip and by word, had done little to diminish the tinkering of his rogue worker. How many times had Claude been swatted and told, "You must remember you are the apprentice to a bookseller— a Page in the work of Lucien Livre"? No, this outrage, this violation of trust, called for a shift in strategy. A few days later, Livre set his plan in motion.

  The unsuspecting apprentice enteted the Globe with his hands uncoveted and his velvet vest misbuttoned — the first buttonhole accommodating the second button, the second buttonhole accommodating the third button, with the pattern repeating itself down to Claude's navel. Livre swallowed and burbled deeply to stifle retributive instincts. Instead of a smack, he dispensed a gentle pat on Claude's back, and through clenched teeth asked how he was. At the noon meal, Livre did not curse the dullness of his knife, nor did he mumble accusatory remarks about the rawness of the overcooked leeks. (Leeks had replaced potatoes.) He took a sip of his beloved Seltzer and feigned an avuncular attitude that put Claude on his guard.

  "Claude, how long have you been here, in the world of my Globe?"

  A voice from the back called out, "Three hundred and twenty-seven days."

  Livre scowled at his cousin and redirected attention to Claude. "In that time, you have rarely tarnished the reputation of my shop." Again, the generosity was uncharacteristic. "It has been my contention that only savages rely on wasteful slaughter. The mark of civilized man is his ability to cultivate." Livre chomped through a piece of leek bread and the analogy that accompanied it. "A transition from slaughter to sowing, from killing to tilling, is beneficial in the feeding of a people. This approach is also applicable to the business of the bookseller. My patrons— our patrons, Claude—must be tilled, not slaughtered like beasts. We must nurture them to allow for years of fruitful harvest. Cultivation, Claude, is the key. In our contacts with the authorities and with the patrons, cultivation is the key."

  Claude nodded through the labored comparison, which he knew to be inspired by the misreading of an outdated treatise on geoponics that he dusted every Monday. "I will always venture to harvest attentively," he said.

  "You will have to, Claude, for I am placing my Globe in your care for the next four weeks. You will be the one cultivating our trade." The news left Claude in shock as Livre laid out his plans. "Each year, I attend the Frankfurt book fair and make trips to Geneva and Neuchatel. I do so to check on competition outside the scope of royal law. I will negotiate the delicate arrangements concerning distribution of my books. And there's the matter of the Hours of Love. Your former master will be prosecuted shortly if he does not make good on his commitments." Claude withheld the questions he desperately wanted to blurt out. "Furthermore, my new apothecary advises me that I must treat my 'slow belly.' I must take the cure down at Montserrat. This is why I am putting my Globe in your hands. Everything has been arranged."

  And indeed, it was. The day Livre left, he hung no fewer than sixty pearls from a doubled desk string. (One line for each of his helpers.) In general, the pearls divided the operation of the store between care of the establishment, which was Claude's responsibility, and care of the account books, which was Etiennette's. Shipping, inventory, and the Wednesday-night salons would be suspended until Livre's return.

  On the day of departure, Claude accompanied Livre to the coach stop at the Place Maubert. He loaded a mahogany medicine cabinet and the Mysteries onto the top of the coach. He watched as Livre cautiously belted himself in and tapped his pockets to confirm that he had booklet and billfold, perforator and papers. Then, without so much as a wave, Livre was off and Claude was free.

  Back in the shop, the temporary master settled in. When he finally inspected the pearis that were left for him, he was introduced to Livre's subtle revenge. Rather than limit Claude during his absence, the bookseller had provided an unprecedented range of rights, including the chance to express his creative urge. The bookseller knew that by doing so, either the garret grotto or Bibliopola would suffer. If the new responsibilities ended Claude's mechanical inclinations, then the plan would prove effective. On the other hand, if Claude's tinkering made him careless in his tasks at the Globe, Livre would have ample grounds to take swift and ruthless action. In short, rather than constrain him, Livre encouraged a multiplicity of endeavors. Claude took up the challenge unaware of the anger that had provoked it. Ignoring the scrupulous order of tasks, he plucked
a pearl from the string. It was this little slip, which Claude pinned to his wall of scraps, that later found a place in the three-dimensional register of Claude's life. It read:

  In free moments after the Saturday closing

  Prepare a Wednesday lecture

  Arrange my windows

  Livre was a man constitutionally resentful of choice and blind to any expression of elegance contrary to his own. This was made clear in the display cases that ran down the middle of the Globe. Each Saturday, he would change the books he promoted, filling his windows mostly with works by long-dead writers who neither threatened his sense of self-importance nor provoked envy. He kept handy a small collection of leathers, marbled papers, and fabrics, which he used as backgrounds for his displays. By resting a Dutch folio on a background of Utrecht velvet, Livre could consider himself a stylist of the highest order. Before he departed, he had encircled a translation of Pliny's Natural History with tiny Doric columns.

  Claude removed the plaster-of-Paris columns to make way for a more personal expression of his own interests. In an exercise that anticipated other efforts, he decided to recognize the men who had marked his life since he left Tournay. He cleared space for his vinous companion the coachman, for Piero, and for Plumeaux. In the end, even Livre was placed in Claude's glazed pantheon. He would have liked to include a woman but believed no woman he had encountered warranted representation. In this, Claude was narrow-minded, partly because of his youth but mostly because he was who he was. When Etiennette rightfully took offense at her absence from the arrangement, Claude added her to the case configurations. The Abbe was poignantly excluded.

  The easiest selection was Plumeaux. Claude positioned one of the journalist's early works—a deist Utopia, The Code of Nature — in the first window. Etiennette, pleased to be represented by a logarithmic table, was a little disappointed to find that the print contained a mistake. (It seems that log 12 does not equal 1.0413927.) The coachman was grandly evoked with a banquet scene weighted down by two large serving spoons. "I can see the steam coming off the page," he said when he rolled in and saw the homage. Claude explained that the effect was caused by an uneven inking job.

  Piero presented greater difficulties. After wasting much time, Claude narrowed his choice to the beauty of Buffon and the rigor of Reaumur, two scientists forever at odds. In the end, he selected Reaumur's 1749 treatise on taxidermy, which he held down with four fuzzy sawdust-stuffed chicks that pecked at the edges of the title page.

  Filling Livre's window was trickier still; so many options presented themselves. An army of underpaid and abused chapbook engravers would have done up Livre's sputtering face in caricature free of charge. Alternatively, German print shops even then flooded the Paris market with coprophilic images that captured Livre's gastrointestinal obsessions. Both options were rejected. Claude wanted to suggest the paradox of Livre's habits, a paradox of elegance and grime. In the end, he picked a print of a newfangled sewage system that had inspired part of the garret restoration. The print revealed, in cross-section, a house and street displaying an elaborate drainage network that anticipated the flush toilet. Claude labeled it "The True Mysteries of Paris" and held the print down with one of Livre's enema pumps and the horsehair flywhisk.

  One window remained empty. Claude dusted it, polished it with the appropriate glove, and washed its bubbled pane. Unfilled, the case haunted him. How would he represent himself?

  Grappling with the nature of his own enthusiasms had never been easy. Expressing them was all but impossible. He leafed through the store's craft manuals in search of inspiration. He could find nothing that was quite right. He even returned to the plates of the Encyclopedic. (Livre had a much finer set than the mismatched volumes consulted in Tournay.) They still did nothing to inspire him. After pulling a half-hundred books from the shelves, he found a print that conveyed both mood and metier. He was dizzied by the image, repulsed and attracted simultaneously. It showed, in one corner, the shadow of a man overpowered by gears and pulleys, grilles and joists, bars, spirals, levers, catapults, and wheels. The engines, in isolation, might have recalled the magic of movement, the fluent purity of the flywheel, the confident click of the well-assembled clock. But the context suggested a scene of horror and oppression. The devices, in themselves so beautiful, were employed as instruments of torture. The gears and cables were turned through sweat and struggle, kept in motion by the grease of inhumanity. The print was small, the scale gigantic. The method by which the copperplate had been made, aquafortis, provoked thoughts of abandoned pursuits. The same liquid had served Claude in metalwork, as a menstruum for dissolving silver. He paused to recollect the time the Abbe had shown him how fumes would rise, red as blood, from the potent mixture of niter and calcined vitriol. The print Claude chose was saturated with incompatible thoughts about incompatible worlds.

  29

  CLAUDE spent the first week of his new freedom in ceaseless consultation with books he had never before had time to read. The liberties described in Plumeaux's deist Utopia were nothing compared to those he was now granted. Without Livre's interference, the apprentice found he had time both to delve into his own work and to satisfy the obligations of the Globe's customers. The latter were more than satisfied; they were charmed. Passersby bought and rented books and prints in increased numbers. This pleased Claude. Though he did not benefit directly from the profits of the Globe, the fullness of the monogrammed cashbox would defray any ill temper brought back by Livre.

  At the end of one particularly profitable day, two weeks into Claude's temporary appointment, the brass doorbell announced the arrival of a new customer. It had been raining throughout the day, and business had been slow. Claude used the time to study the work of Louis XIV's toymaker, Frangois-Joseph de Camus. He put down the treatise and looked out across Livre's desk. He found he was staring at a woman of middle age, granting that such a benchmark was reached earlier in those years of precarious longevity. She was handsome and finely robed. Rain saturated her dress and hinted at the attentions of a cor-setiere. The woman removed a fur hat and said, "Please announce me to your master."

  Glad for the break, Claude stood up and closed the Camus. He had struggled unsuccessfully to understand the mechanical rationale behind the friction coefficients described in the treatise. "The master is not in the shop at present, Madame."

  "Are you his assistant?"

  "I am apprenticed to him, yes. He is away investigating the principles of hydrodynamics." Claude took pleasure in the half-truth that obliquely described the enema pump evacuations for which Montserrat was known. (The attendants mixed the spring water with bran, milk, and brown sugar.)

  The patroness glanced at the windows. She drummed her fingers above the print of gourmet delicacies that paid tribute to the coachman. There were small tarts, tiered assemblages of perfect fruits, squabs, and ducklings surrounded by a latticework of breads. There were rings of puddings and tiny souffles and a cake shaped like a hussar's hat. With the inclusion of powder horns and bugles, the whole arrangement suggested the pleasures of the hunt and the meal that follows.

  "Is this to make your clients hungry?" she asked.

  "Hungry enough to purchase the book in which it appears," Claude replied. "Would you like to see the work in its entirety?"

  The patroness shook her head.

  Claude looked more carefully. There was something . . .

  "You did not tell me when your master will return," she said.

  Staring intently, Claude replied, "He will be away for the next few weeks. I can, of course, assist you in whatever literary quest you may wish to undertake." These last words came off a pearl.

  The patroness placed her hat on the case and reached into her handbag. "The quest, as you call it, is far from literary." She laughed nervously and confessed, "What I want is philosophical in nature." She glanced at the curtain. "I think it can be found back there." She consulted a dainty, gilt-edged pocket book filled with appointments. "Ah yes, here it i
s." She refused to utter the title. She pointed coyly: The Whore's Rhetoric.

  Since she did not provide the password, Claude was forced to claim that he was unaware of the work in question, but that perhaps the proprietor could help upon his return. More awkwardness followed until the customer said, "Oh, I am to say 'vile habits.' Or is it something else?" She again consulted her pocket book. " 'Naughty habits.' There, I have said it. Now please provide me with the work in question."

  The phrase jogged Claude's memory. 'He withdrew and quickly reemerged from behind the curtain, holding the book she sought. It was bound in simple cardboard. True to the pearls, Claude went through the various binding possibilities, starting, as Livre always insisted, with the most substantial expenditures. "The gilders have recently renewed their stocks of Armenian bole."

  "The gilders and their bole do not concern me."

  "And what about the binding? We have a special Spanish goatskin, Cordovan. Perhaps you wish a smooth calf?"

  She shook her head.

  "Smyrna morocco?"

  "No."

  "Straight-grain morocco in the English manner?"

  "No."

  "Oasis goat?" Claude extended the list, hoping to recall where he had seen the woman before. "Basil is nice. It is only slightly less durable than the morocco."

  "No."

  "Perhaps the pages could be boxed in shagreen from the workshop of the late Monsieur Galuchat?"

  "No."

  "Turkey leather?"

  She raised an archless eyebrow. "The cardboard covers will do."

  Claude teased on. "Python, or perhaps zebra? Just in, we have a special stock of penguin. Why not try the penguin?" (Piero was working on a stinking specimen of the flightless bird brought back from a widely publicized expedition to Patagonia.)