by Max Byrd
Eighteen
WELL, OF COURSE, I HAD LIED.
In the first place, I told myself, I was a newspaperman and therefore skeptical by nature and training. And therefore still far from convinced that the sad-faced little metal contraption on my bookshelf was in fact Jacques de Vaucanson's own long-lost glorious creation.
By general consensus, after all, the "Shitting Duck" had been Missing in Action since either 1770 or 1912 or 1918, depending on whose scholarly article you believed—Elsie Short herself had told me that the skies of the nineteenth century had been thick with Vaucansonian replicas and faux canards. Who was to say that Elsie, a roving "doll hunter," of all implausible things, wasn't simply another in a long line of tricksters and fortune seekers, aiming to put one over on a gullible public? or a wealthy and gullible collector? or a gullible and senile Thomas Edison?
This seemed like so muddled a piece of reasoning that I stopped in the middle of the Pont Royal and took off my hat and shook my head to clear it.
Because who would go to so much trouble for a bizarre little excreting automaton? Five thousand dollars was a lot of money, but not a duck's ransom.
Too much brandy, I thought. Too little logic.
It was quarter to eight in the morning, Saturday morning, and the snowstorm, our fourth of the month, was just twirling its great white billowing skirts in farewell and rising slowly to dance away to the east. We get snow in Paris about every third year, for a few weeks at a time, rarely sticking to the ground, nothing at all compared to the iron-cold winters I still remembered from the eighth and ninth circles of Hell that were Boston and Cambridge for a New Mexico boy.
Even so, during the night a good half an inch had managed to accumulate on the rooftops and the streets. The familiar hulking black shoulders of the Louvre were still covered with a soft, unlikely crest of white, like epaulets. The trees in the Tuileries Gardens looked like ranks of white-haired soldiers in a row. Over to the east, the dawn sky was low and gray and sunless, and stippled everywhere with silvery bits of down, still falling gently.
I watched a few early buses churn by in the snow. Somewhere off to the left children shouted. I heard dogs bark from one of the pet stores down by the quai du Louvre. Otherwise, Paris was so still and silent you might have thought its heart had stopped.
And in the second place, I thought, starting on again toward the Right Bank, somebody had very definitely taken a fist to the side of my head, in the alley by the Ritz, while I was burdened with duck, and not much later the unfortunate Patrice Bassot had turned up dead in his shop. And though Root had snorted dismissively and quoted Thoreau to the effect that the world was simply a Tissue of Coincidences, there was no point at all in exposing anybody else to possible danger, Elsie Short included.
This was marginally more plausible, and I congratulated myself and crossed over into the Tuileries, whose name didn't come, as most Americans imagined, from the tulips planted in its flower beds every spring, but from the sprawling factory that used to dig up its red clay and make roof tiles (tuiles) back in the days, I thought, of Jacques de Vaucanson.
This morning it was still too early for anybody but a crew shoveling the paths, and a pair of ragged clochards on a bench, sharing a bottle. I exited the gardens by the rue de Rivoli gate and turned left through its long, chilly gallery of arcades.
And finally, I told myself, shifting the weight in my overcoat pocket as I approached the much brighter and breezier place Vendôme and the Hôtel Ritz—finally, in the third and last place, there was some little part of me that thought once I handed over the duck, that might well be the last I would ever see of small, blonde, rather splendid Elsiedale Short.
Unlike the New York Herald, the Trib put out a Sunday edition. But it was a laughably thin affair and consisted mostly of advertisements and an occasional travel supplement, along with various "soft news" features that we either copied shamelessly from the home Chicago edition or wrote ourselves for an extra stipend from the Colonel.
It was almost nine o'clock by the time I reached the rue Lamartine, and the city room was still empty except for B. J. Kospoth and the French copy boy, who were sitting at opposite ends of the long table drinking coffee from paper cups and staring at each other.
A skeleton crew would drift in later to lay out pages and check the cables, in case the weekend in America produced something important enough to stop the presses. Meanwhile I sat down at my desk by the window and thumbed through my files. The French copy boy came by, smirking around a foul bituminous Gitane, and told me that the snowstorm had knocked out the electricity from Montmartre to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and likewise all the telephone lines in Paris. But the pneumatique, he said with an admiring shake of his head for the genius of France, was immune to all possible weather and functioning just as well as ever.
With which he lifted up a wire basket of fat little copper cylinders and dumped them on my blotter.
The pneumatique seems incredibly quaint now, but in those days it was the last word in urban communication, and in many respects the very practical Parisian response to their moody and unreliable telephones.
An X-ray photo of Paris in 1926 would have revealed the system to an onlooker: an amazingly complex web of two-inch pneumatic tubes and pipes under the city's skin, strung all over the central arrondissements, beneath the sidewalks, over buildings, through the Métro, like two thousand miles of veins and arteries in a gigantic Bleeding Man. You could find the pneumatique in businesses, hôtels, embassies, even in some private residences. The copper cylinders that I was unpacking on my desk were about six inches long, the shape of a stubby candle, and they twisted open at either end to allow a rolled-up paper message to be inserted. Air pressure propelled the cylinders at remarkably high speed, like underground rockets. If your correspondent didn't have the pneumatique, you could pay an extra thirty centimes and fire your letter off to the nearest post office, which promised to deliver it within two hours, and often did.
I knew so much about the system because I had written a feature three months ago for a particularly slow Sunday edition. Kospoth had run it uncut and asked for more, and the following week I had written a piece about the first private bus line in Paris (it was started, since you ask, in 1684, when an entrepreneur named Villiers bought twenty big horse-drawn freight wagons called carrosses, installed backless benches in them, and hired the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal to work out the most efficient and profitable routes).
As if on cue, Kospoth finished his coffee and worried his way down to my desk.
"This is okay," he said, handing me a dummy of tomorrow's page three. "I'm actually bumping the Paul column to Tuesday, so you get an extra inch."
"Give a man an inch," I said, "and he thinks he's a ruler."
Kospoth rubbed the back of his head and grimaced, because putting out a newspaper was the single most serious and important thing in the world and not ever to be joked about. I turned the dummy page around to look.
This week I had written about a uniquely Parisian enterprise I had stumbled on one evening when I was wandering near the Bastille. It was called the "Blanchisserie des Imprévoyants," which translated more or less as "The Laundry for Those Who Don't Plan Ahead," and it consisted of two bare, steamy rooms on a backstreet just beyond the ancient pile of brick and rubble where the French Revolution had begun. In the front room about a dozen men were sitting in chairs around the walls, naked from the waist up. Some of them were reading, some were playing cards. Most were just smoking and staring out the window. In the back room a stooped and wrinkled Corsican, old enough to have been there when the Marquis de Sade lodged in the prison, was slowly and methodically washing and ironing their shirts while they waited. The only shirts, in fact, that most of them owned. He charged thirty centimes an item, same as a pneumatique. Collars cost extra. I thought the name of the place was a bit unfair.
"The Colonel likes this stuff," Kospoth informed me with a sniff. Kospoth had been a brand-new re
porter on the Des Moines Register when a hurricane and fire in 1894 killed five hundred people in Hinckley, Minnesota, and thus he tended to equate news with disaster.
"I was thinking," I said, "of a story next week about French automates."
"What? Like Horn and Hardarts?"
"Little machines, automatons, toys that look like people and wave their arms and roll their eyes just like you."
"Those things give me the creeps," Kospoth said, and picked up the dummy page and took three steps back toward his sanctum. Then he turned around and came back to my desk.
"The Colonel says you got no ambition," he said. "You know that?"
I nodded and opened the last of my cylinders.
"You could get out of this if you wanted to—" Kospoth's arm took in the big, shabby city room, our run-down building, presumably the streets, and the gray and alien city outside. "You're so good," he said, "you write so clean and fast, you could be in New York, Chicago—"
"Paris," I said.
His face went hot and red, as if it had burst inside. "You make a joke out of everything, Keats. But you don't fool me. You're hiding out from the war, off in your miserable little Left Bank apartment and you don't talk to anybody but that nut Root. You want to know who's a goddam automaton?" he said. "You are!"
Somewhere a telephone rang, and we both looked around, startled. Then Kospoth leaned over and rapped the side of my desk with the edge of the dummy. "Bulletin just in," he said, "the fucking war is over!"
I watched the door of the sanctum slam shut, then swiveled my chair around. People were starting to wander in now. One of the financial reporters was at the oval table, typing. Herol Egan was standing in a corner, reading Le Monde. I swiveled back and sat quietly, looking at nothing. Slowly my hands stopped trembling. I lifted them carefully from my lap and placed them flat on my desk. I heard myself inhale and exhale gently, the way Buddhists do when they learn to meditate.
There were seven pneumatiques on the blotter, five of them press releases from the various fashion houses along the avenue Montaigne, which, since snow was still falling all over Paris, were naturally getting ready to announce their spring lineups.
The sixth copper cylinder, however, had clearly materialized straight from the great universal Tissue of Coincidences. In it was an envelope addressed to Mrs. Millicent Cubbins, Society Editor, not of the lowly Chicago Tribune but the exclusive and fashionable New York Herald. Her name, however, had been partially crossed out and over it a familiar hand had printed in loud caps, "TO THE POET KEATS."
I opened the envelope and took out an expensive-looking creamy bond note card that fell just short of being a press release. It was a personal invitation to Mrs. Cubbins and it read: "Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Armus will be receiving guests Sunday, December 14 at their spacious home on the rue Jean Carriès, from 8 P.M. to midnight. Light refreshments will be served. And as a special treat of the season, Mr. Armus will be displaying the latest addition to his colorful collection of French automates—the celebrated nineteenth-century creation 'Bird Bush and Clock,' by Bontems."
Across the bottom of which Eric the Minor Billings had scrawled in rude blue pencil, "Curiosity killed the Cat—E."
The seventh cylinder held a single folded sheet of paper that simply said in French, "Perhaps I do know a little about Jacques de Vaucanson's Duck. I'm at home anytime. Henri Saulnay."
Nineteen
IN THOSE DAYS THE AMERICAN LIBRARY was on the Right Bank, on a side street by the French president's residence, and it was open on Saturday afternoons if you had a membership key.
I skipped lunch and at a little past two o'clock sat down in one of the library's second-floor alcoves, looking out on the shops of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where the morning snow flurries had turned to rain and it was already dark enough for the cars and buses to turn their headlights on.
In front of me, on a carrel desk, I arranged my copies of the two scholarly journals and alongside them every book and encyclopedia volume I had been able to find with information about Jacques de Vaucanson—it was a little like a treasure hunt, I thought as I started to wander up and down strange scholarly alleys, in and out of footnoted byways and pedantic dead ends. I was no Bill Shirer as far as memory went, but I read fast, the old-fashioned eighteenth-century French was brittle and clear, and bit by bit as the afternoon wore on, the city below me faded into the shadows and an earlier, grimmer Paris came into focus.
Jacques de Vaucanson, everybody agreed, had been a tall man, gangly, thin, with a classic beaklike nose and a large black mole under his left eye, which he was in the habit of picking at and scratching when he was angry, which was often. He had a lifelong stammer, frequent diarrhea and asthma, possibly the pox. He suffered from constant sore throats and may have been deaf in one ear, and one night in Lyon the rioting laborers chased him through the streets till he fell and wrenched his leg so badly that he walked with a crutch for the rest of his life. Not much later he had fled Lyon disguised as a monk, and when he got back to his Paris workshop he designed a silk weaving loom that could be operated by a donkey, proving, he said, that an ass can make more beautiful cloth than a man.
"The reverse of the duck," I wrote in my notes, "not excrement from the end of an animal, but silk."
Then I leaned back and stared at the yellow headlights prowling up and down the street like cats' eyes in the dark. After a time, I took out Henri Saulnay's pneumatique and read it again. The truth was, I thought, it wasn't the duck that interested me now.
If his body was soft and fragile, given to collapse, Vaucanson's personality was hard and cruel. He desperately wanted to be a gentleman. He wore a sword from the time he was twenty. He was greedy for money. In his private hôtel and workshop on the rue de Charonne—something like Thomas Edison's famous Invention Factory in New Jersey—he kept an entourage of several dozen workers, but he paid them badly and worked them too hard. Except for a man named Hervé Foucault, his employees usually left quickly, in disgust. "All his genius," wrote Foucault to Henri Jacquet-Droz in Switzerland, "is in his fingers. His soul is closed off in a locked box. When he leaves off work, he's more a machine than the machines he makes."
There was more like that, much more. Vaucanson was known to dabble in secret codes, according to some scholars. He briefly interested himself in mechanical languages. There was a spooky, almost occult quality to what he did—the fingertips of his Flute Player were probably lined with human skin, his Talking Head had a dog's tongue. His spoiled daughter was flighty and had an affair with Hervé Foucault, whose grandson would inherit the family talents and devise the famous Foucault Pendulum. He would also invent the children's toy gyroscope.
Once, and once only, Vaucanson made a joke about his most famous creation: "If I had devised a shitting man," he wrote Foucault, "instead of a duck, what a grand Prometheus I would be!"
Not much of a joke.
There were two more descriptions of the proposed Bleeding Man, which I tracked down from footnotes in Elsie Short's article. Both descriptions were the same—a full-sized human body with a glass or wax torso through which you could see its organs and intestines, rubber veins through which real human blood could flow, a heart that would pump it, legs that would lift the body and move it about. Everybody thought the king had promised him a fortune to build it. Nobody thought it had ever been built.
It was six o'clock by then, and the library attendants were coming through the stacks with their carts. I shuffled my notes together, piled up the books for them to collect, and made my way out into the twentieth century.
Halfway down the rue Royale, I went into a nearly empty café and ordered a marc. On the other side of the zinc bar, in a big floral mirror, I watched myself drink. On the second glass I turned around and watched the cars and trucks on the street drive up and down through my ghostly reflection on the window.
What none of the academics got, I thought, was why Vaucanson built automatons.
Why, Toby? Do tell us.
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Well, all of his automates, it seemed clear to me, even the shitting duck, were mirrors of his own diseases, reversals of his own weaknesses. Why else build an animal with bowels of steel and digestion like clockwork? Why else build a Talking Head that doesn't stammer and have sore throats, a statue that stands up straight and walks without a limp and plays the flute and doesn't choke and strangle with asthma? When you're flawed and damaged, you make yourself over, if you can, if you know how. You make yourself whole. You fix what's broken. You try to create yourself the way you were before . . . before you broke down.
In the wavering light of the cafe window I could see my own body, but not my face.
Across the way, in front of a toy store, a street mime in a top hat and red velvet cape stood on a little wooden box, arms akimbo. His face was weirdly white with makeup, his head cocked at an unnatural angle, clicking slowly from left to right as if on a ratchet. He was a person pretending to be a machine.
If you want to write a good story, Root likes to say, it's very simple—you give somebody an obsession, then wind him up and turn him loose.
Sunday was much better. The weather was cleaner, warmer. I went for a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens and watched the boys play with their sailboats in the fountain. In the afternoon I sat in the Café Edmond Rostand and listened to two students from the Sorbonne perform scenes from "Cyrano." An old couple from Lille bought me tea and talked about General Pershing. At six o'clock I started to walk.
People sometimes ask me, frustrated Americans thumbing their pocket dictionaries, how long do you have to study before you really start to understand French? And speak it so they don't wrinkle their noses and walk away?
In my case it happened in the spring of 1917, when I worked six tempestuous weeks as the liaison between Norton-Taylor's 23rd Tunnelers Group and General René Lanrezac's 222nd Field Artillery. Get it straight, Norton-Taylor had instructed me grimly, because any mistake or mistranslation could turn the big French guns the wrong way and point them toward our tunnels instead of the Germans. And in those days a fifteen-inch howitzer shell weighed 1200 pounds and would drive six or seven feet into the ground before it exploded. Every tunnel below or beside it would simply collapse into a long, dark coffin.