A case of curiosities

by Kurzweil, Allen

  A long time, as it turned out. The Doomsday book of nominative coincidence ended only when Livre reached the case of his apprentice, Claude Page.

  "Never has a fellow been better suited to his work," the lecturer said. "I am referring not simply to the significance of his family name. Consider, too, the Fatal Necessity of his given name. This Claude here, with his unfortunate disability"—Livre raised a hand to accentuate the point—"follows in a grand tradition of cripples, from the Emperor Claudius to the famous arch-idiot Claudio. Half of my apprentice is destined to awkwardness, but the other half can rescue him. As I say often, What is a bookstore without Pages?"

  The speech was over. A generous applause followed. The aristocrat, wishing to avoid false praise, sidestepped assessment and noted that the finest mechanician in London was a fellow named Merlin.

  "No doubt, a wizard in his work," Livre said. This would have provided a perfect transition for Claude's talk, but, of course, that transition was not taken up.

  Before leaving, Plumeaux invited Claude to join him in a nightcrawl, but Claude declined, waving his friend away. Madame Hugon waited until the other guests had left, then took Livre aside.

  "Monsieur, you have an apprentice of rare gifts. During his master's absence, he has been most attentive to me. I wish to increase that attention. I require books from the Curtain Collection. Can some arrangement be reached? Can I count on your apprentice to choose my readings? I will pay a premium."

  "Of course, Madame.''

  She left, as she had entered, with her escort and her handbag.

  Livre turned to Claude. "I hope you have understood at last that your destiny is here in the bookstore, not in the pursuit of the mechanical. You are to forget forever whatever lecture you had planned to give." The Phlegmagogue spat. "You have more important matters to which to attend. You have a patroness who wishes to be served."

  Madame hugon rented one work from the Curtain Collection each week. The terms of transaction she set were exacting. It was Claude who was to select the book, and it was Claude who was to bring it to her residence each Friday afternoon. For this service, and the discretion she assumed would accompany it, Livre received three times the normal rental rates of the Globe, already high given the scandalous nature of the material in which he dealt. The patroness never explained her interest in pornographica, but such explanations were not a condition of rental. When Claude asked politely, she responded that the circumstances of her marriage demanded such readings. That was all she would reveal. Claude had to content himself with the prandial remark Livre had made to the Abbe in Tournay: Madame Hugon could not satisfy her conjugal vows.

  Each Thursday, Livre would authorize Claude to select the reading material to be delivered to Madame Hugon the following day. Claude chose cautiously. The pearls were always close at hand. "Never present a work that might be deemed too bold." Accepting Livre's suggestion, Claude wrapped up The Tale of the Milliner's Daughter.

  "You may find this to your liking," Claude told Madame Hugon upon presentation. The book was tedious and more restrained than what she had already rented. It contained a few stolen kisses and one backstairs embrace but little more.

  "It is a pity," the patroness said when she returned the book at the next meeting, "that the expectations of the heroine went unfulfilled." Claude did not know how to interpret the comment. He silently handed over another bland tearjerker. By the third meeting, Madame Hugon expressed impatience with the tales of unrequited love. "Can't you supply more forthright declarations? Can't you do more to satisfy my desires?"

  The double entendres unsettled Claude. He nervously peddled bolder and bawdier tales, moving the patroness from bucolic frolics to peeks at the priest's posterior. He delivered Aretino's Pornodidasculus and the old standby Livre recently had reprinted at the clandestine press of the Freres Jacques, The School of Venus. He brought around the crudest of the Ecclesiastical selections: Mary in the Cloister, The Amorous Abbess, Anatomy of a French Nunnery, as well as two privately printed novels that Livre offered only to his best and most discreet clientele: The Loves of Zeo Kinizal, King of Cofirons, and Mirabeau's Errotika Biblion. Livre, insecure of his own status, pointed out that Mirabeau hadn't written the volume attributed to him but had commissioned one of his hacks to produce it.

  None of this literary lechery satisfied Madame Hugon. Claude fantasized about the source of her dissatisfaction but refused to act. No amount of folio flagellation would bring him closer to the woman who so enticed him. He was petrified by the unbreachable difference in rank. Three months into the lending pattern, Madame Hugon decided to proclaim her intentions. She employed the arts of venery in two senses; that is, she pursued the sport of the hunt and the indulgence of sexual desire. She began by requesting that Claude read aloud from the books she rented, hoping that the vocal interaction would provoke his lust. When Claude recited the well-known dialogue between Tullia and Octavia and passages from A Case of Seduction, or The Late Proceedings in Paris Against the Rev. Abbe des Rues for Committing Rapes upon One Hundred and Thirty-Three Virgins, Written by Himself, his voice quavered.

  Still, Claude lacked the courage to take the bait. This forced Madame Hugon to redouble her efforts. At the next meeting, she returned an illustrated volume with an engraving cut from its pages. After receiving a bastinade from the bookseller, Claude was told to run to the residence of Madame Hugon and extract full cost.

  "Madame, I have found a plate missing from the most recent rental."

  "And which one is that?" She did not seem surprised but offered no reason for its disappearance.

  "It is the plate in which, if I recall correctly, the princess is engaged in adulterous conversation with a court page."

  "Under her underpetticoat?" Madame Hugon motioned toward her own dress.

  "Yes. Under her underpetticoat." Claude began to perspire. He wasn't sure if he was playing the prude or was one.

  The patroness asked, "How was it done?"

  "What?" Claude stuttered.

  She rephrased the question. "How is it that the plate was found to be missing?"

  Claude pointed to the threads that betrayed excision. "It was cut, Madame. Severed."

  Madame Hugon called out to her domestic, who arrived holding a pot of costly violets, the favorite flower of the patroness. The two women removed themselves to an adjacent room. Claude heard a slap, followed by exaggerated bawling. He could tell that the rebuke was faked. The sound was not of a hand on cheek but of two hands clapped together. Madame Hugon returned to the room and apologized. She asked Claude to wait as she wrote a note to the bookseller authorizing the rental balance to reflect the cost of the damaged volume. She handed Claude the note. Since she was indoors, she had her gloves off, and since Claude was away from the Globe, the gloves Livre insisted he wear were tucked inside his pocket. As the note was passed, the hands of patroness and apprentice touched for the very first time. Claude noticed, he was sure, that Madame Hu-gon's grip lingered. Though tame when compared to the torrid embracements in the works rented and read aloud, the moment confirmed for him what had so long been implied.

  Claude described the exchange to his friends over pig's face smothered with asparagus stalks. He revealed his hopes and also his hesitations. "I fear my desires might endanger her delicate condition."

  "And what condition is that?" the coachman asked.

  "There is talk of her inability to perform her conjugal vows."

  The coachman did not accept the excuse. "That is not what you fear. Mostly, my friend, you are a coward." He belched prodigiously.

  "But how can I know by some light and momentary touch that she wishes me to, to . . . ?" Claude did not have a chance to finish the sentence before his friends mocked him mercilessly.

  "Stuff her?" Piero said.

  "Ride her?" the coachman added. "Remember to hold on tightly to the reins." He cracked an imaginary whip.

  Plumeaux, as a journalist, had a more interrogative reaction. "Do you really t
hink she is a married virgin?"

  "I do not know more than the rumors that attended the commission. And that was long ago."

  "I will look into the matter," the journalist said. "Keep me informed if you hear more."

  Claude carried restless thoughts to his garret and stayed up late to read Diderot — not the Encyclopedie, rejected long before, but the writer's genitally obsessed Indiscreet Jewels. With the book in one hand and something else in the other, Claude stared at the Portrait in Little hanging above the drawbridge bed. He shut his eyes and attached to the miniature face a torso worthy of a Venus. He imagined Madame Hugon moving with the awkward frenzy of the woman in the Abbe's lantern slides. The scenes kept changing. She would sweep down the enfiladed corridors of an unknown palace. She would appear naked except for a mask, encouraging her lover into a cool stream. She would be roped and in a state of near-pleasure, begging for satisfaction. In these imaginary transactions, Claude was unencumbered by daytime fears and hesitations. Yet when the next Friday came, he handed his patroness a new rental awkwardly and in silence. He could not act upon his hopes.

  Claude slept fitfully and went to work exhausted. His eyes were bloodshot, the color, Livre observed, of mottled galuchat with piping of red morocco. He started coming to the bookstore late. Livre accepted this dereliction since it was making him a wealthy man.

  Madame Hugon also noticed the pallor of the apprentice and used it to wage one last assault. She initiated her attack during a visit to the Curtain Collection. The patroness and the apprentice were standing near the Aristocratical section. Claude was reading aloud from the fourth volume of The Pleasures of the Aged Pervert when she interrupted his monologue. ''Perhaps you are trying too strenuously to satisfy me. Your complexion is off. You look tired and sallow."

  Claude did not know how to respond.

  She continued: "I worry about you. I think it is time / recommend a book. Now, let's see." She rubbed her index finger across the spines of the Medical section. "No," she said, "it is not here, but that does not matter. I have brought my own copy." She pulled a book from her handbag. "It has been useful in the past. I have marked the pertinent passages." She winked at Claude. "Read it and return it next week."

  The book Madame Hugon provided took its name from a character in the Bible, a work not fully known to Claude. With the gift propped against the slope of his peaked knees—a position he now regularly assumed—Claude inspected the book's cover and tested the quality of the paper and binding, cursing himself for having acquired the worst habits of his adopted profession. It was a medical treatise extensively, almost obsessively, detailed. The author was an eminent French doctor, a supporter of inoculation and gymnastics, a translator of Haller, a professor at the Sorbonne.

  Onania was a cautionary treatise against masturbation, or, as the subtitle proclaimed, "The heinous sin of willful self-pollution."

  Claude wondered how his patroness knew of the solitary practices she had inspired. He was, furthermore, perplexed by the statement that accompanied the gift. What did she mean when she said the book had been useful in the past?

  The initial question about his private manipulations was answered when Claude reached the first of the marked passages, in the chapter on symptoms. "Early stages of the disease," the author wrote, "can produce a sickly pallor, lethargy, torpor, and somnolence of the mind." That was a fair description, Claude concluded, of his condition. The chapter continued: "Later stages of degeneration are marked by pocks and cankers, hot piss, and accelerated facial growth." Claude always tried to corroborate what he read. If a character in a bawdy novel performed some improbable contortion, Claude would test the action on himself. If a character lisped, he would lisp. It was a holdover from the Abbe's mansion-house empiricism. So, as Claude read, he inspected his body and concluded that although he had reached the first stage, with its pallor and torpor, he suffered none of onania's stage-two symptoms. Further examination revealed, happily, that neither his kidneys nor his liver had overheated— the signs of tertiary degeneration. He was relieved to learn that he did not risk consumption, gangrene, or gonorrhea in its simple form.

  Claude read the second underlined passage halfway through the chapter on causes, in the case study of a Sieur L. D******* — a watchmaker! — who touched himself nightly. The method of "execution" (this was the term used by the author) was followed by an account of the patient's demise. Liquids poured from the watchmaker's ears, nose, and anus. Even his feet released a milky ooze.

  The next chapter addressed cures. The author did not prescribe the use of mechanical apparatus to prohibit the flow of seminal liquor; penile rings and leather-covered cups of metal were the ingenuities of the Victorian mind. Rather, he recommended the application of "calming oils and waters," including Livre's beloved Seltzer, which was known to have a salutary effect on the organ in question. Near the end of the book, Claude came upon the last and most significant of the marginal markings. He read the passage repeatedly, and the words so excited him that he performed the very act of self-abuse that the book cautioned against. When Claude fell asleep, he could be seen clutching his testicles with one hand and his neck with the other. The book rested on his chest, and the browbound Portrait in Little gazed down from the wall.

  What was the underlined phrase that so excited Claude? It was this: "In some cases, the onl> cure for the vice of onania is the attentive warmth of a woman."

  32

  FOR the remainder of the week, Claude fretted over his appearance in ways he had never fretted before. He bathed at a local washhouse and inspected himself for lice. He tossed away his old shirt, its collar as grimy as the milling of an ancient coin, and replaced it with a nearly new chemise that Marguerite the wet nurse had cleaned with Javel water and ironed. He borrowed Etiennette's ink scraper and carved the black crescents of dirt from under his nails. Plumeaux told him, "You are proof that infatuation is a marvelous hygienic."

  On the fateful day, Claude had only one errand to run before his trip to Madame Hugon's. A chapbook seller in a distant faubourg required two dozen copies of The Pleasures of the Aged Pervert. Claude requested and obtained coach fare. On a side street off the Place Maubert, he found an illegal vehicle lacking the double P that marked the Perreaux monopoly. He bargained for a reduced price.

  The business with the chapbook seller was quickly and uneventfully concluded, and Claude was soon free to pursue the patroness. With the saved fare, he stopped at a barber's to add one last gesture to the preparations. He did not need a shave— his face was smooth as a chamois rag — but he went anyway. The shop differed from its Tournay equivalent. There was no sign declaring: "Shave for a Sou, Bleed for Two." Nor did the metropolitan establishment offer the service of hog and goat gelding. After asking about the presence of wens and milk scabs, the barber set upon Claude's face with special soap and a razor he boasted was made of steel forged in the Sheffield manner. The technique, unfortunately, did not match the tools, and Claude left with two or three small nicks around the neck and more lasting proof of the encounter just below the chin. Had the coachman been present, Claude would have withheld payment for the service provided, but he was alone and too preoccupied by the upcoming appointment to protest. He declined the lotions the barber offered, but fell victim to an application of a perfumed oil.

  That, then, was Claude, on the afternoon of his seduction. Ushered into the residence of Madame Hugon, he had an ironed shirt on his back, the scent of lavender on his cheeks, a borrowed wig on his head, and the treatise on onania clutched to his chest. The domestic—Claude noted that she would have benefited from a shave more than he had—took him to a sitting room beyond the library.

  The nervous guest spent his time eyeing the room for signs of male habitation—a walking stick, or perhaps a tricorn. But the only indication of a non-female element in the room was the hovering domestic, whose androgyny provided a perfect counterpoint to Madame Hugon's delicate comportment. With a swish of silk and a glowing smile, that delicate c
omportment arrived. Madame Hugon's enthusiasm ebbed when she observed Claude in his transformed state. "Why do you diminish your country charm by dressing in those ghastly clothes?"

  Nervous sweat overpowered the barber's cheap perfume.

  She said: "I see you have brought the book back. Did you read it carefully?"

  "Yes, I did."

  "And what do you think of the conclusions the doctor reaches?"

  "It seems I risk ill health if something is not done about my solitary pursuits."

  "That is true. If you continue, worse things could arise." Claude did not know whether the ambiguity was intended. "You risk suicide."

  "Such a pleasant way to go," Claude said boldly.

  "Irreverence will only add to your trouble. You should stop your solitary debaucheries before harm is done. If I can, I will help. Do you wish to be helped?" .

  Claude nodded.

  Madame Hugon excused the domestic and locked the door. She walked over to a small teak cabinet. "I have long known the author of the work I lent you. I can see by your expression that you wonder how it is I have acquaintance with such a specialist. I may as well tell you that my interest came from an attempt that failed to fulfill the sacrament of marriage. Or perhaps you have heard."

  "Only that there was a problem with . . . your husband's wife."

  "Delicately put, but wrong, I can assure you. I will assure you. After all, that is why you are here." She gave Claude a languorous look. "I must acknowledge—what is the phrase we read last week? Oh yes: 'certain sinful sentiments.'

  Claude fumbled, "Your husband . . ."

  "You need not worry about my husband. He does not live here. The status of our marriage is being argued in the courts." Madame Hugon moved closer to the cabinet, opened its tiny doors, and extracted a bottle. "Take off that ridiculous wig and sit down here." Claude sat as Madame Hugon applied a fish cream remedy to the palm of her hand. Claude looked at the other compounds in the cabinet. Milk of the she-ass was the most noteworthy. Madame Hugon expertly stuck her hand into Claude's breeches. As she burrowed deeper, the Portrait in Little fell from his pocket. She laughed and said, "I would have been that close much sooner, had you only asked."