“We shall take some brandy in the library now, yes?” our host declared in an authoritative manner.
“Delighted, sir,” said Uncle, who loved his cup after dinner; and myself equally delighted to be included with the two distinguished old lions, we repaired to yet another fabulous chamber of the floating palace.
8
Never, except at Columbia College, had I seen such a collection of books. One could see at a glance that of all the rooms in LeBoeuf’s floating palace this must have been his favorite. To begin with, it was huge, four times the size of the parlor in our apartment. The far wall was a great window of leaded glass panes, slightly bowed out. It afforded a magnificent panoramic view of the lake and LeBoeuf’s lands. Though the storm had abated, lightning still flashed in the distance, illuminating the water, forests, and fields for miles around.
The bookshelves were beautifully figured walnut. Upon them were morocco-bound volumes of every category, from Anthropometry to Zymology. I noted the complete cyclopedia of Diderot, Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, Rohault’s Physics, Corneille’s tragedies, Hakluyt’s Voyages, Shakespeare by the quarto or folio, Voltaire in gilt-edged snakeskin, Racine, Rabelais, Dante, Bentham’s Principles of Morals and Legislation, Madame de Staël’s On Literature Considered in Its Relationship to Social Institutions, Macpherson’s chronicles of Ossian, Malthus, Cesare di Beccaria, even such a recent work as the electrifying Wieland by America’s own Charles Brockden Brown. How I ached to spend a month of rainy afternoons browsing these shelves and lounging on the cushioned window seat lost in literature.
LeBoeuf filled three snifters from a cut-glass decanter and handed them ’round.
“Ah, messieurs,” our host smiled and shook his head. “I am so happy to have you here at Chateau Félicité, words fail me. Though our hands are never idle, though prosperity sheds his sunny beams over us, we are sometimes lonely. I have so many new species to show you, it is a year until sunrise. Perhaps you will do me the honor of permitting me to name a previously unknown Rhododendron after you, Monsieur Walker.”
“Thee makes me blush, sir,” Uncle said, falling under the spell of the consummate charmer, “but might we speak confidentially now?”
“Yes. Please be frank. I implore you.”
“Hath thee a nib, ink, and paper at hand, sir?”
“But of course,” said LeBoeuf and gestured to a magnificent carved basswood desk. Upon its baize surface were the articles in question.
“Sammy, make a sketch of megatherium,” Uncle said, and I set about to do so. Uncle, obviously, had thrown his caution to the wind insofar as the true object of our mission was concerned.
“Megatherium?” LeBoeuf’s eyes glazed over in concentration. “This is not a flower. Hmmm. Mega: the Greek, megas; Français, formidable!; Anglais, great. Therium … therion: also Greek, wild animal! Zut alors! Megatherium: great wild animal, bête formidable!”
While LeBoeuf thus puzzled, I contrived a new portrait of our quarry. It was as nasty and ferocious a version of the brute as ever I drew. Finishing the admittedly quick study, I held it out to our host for his inspection.
“Ah!” he paced across the room, turned to us, and nodded. “Gargantua.”
“Thee has seen this creature?”
“Certainement,” LeBoeuf said. “They are not so common as buffalo, I assure you, but a specimen lumbers into one’s rifle shots every now and again.”
“You have shot a specimen?”
“O, yes.”
Uncle and I turned wide-eyes to each other.
“What … what was it doing when you shot it?” I asked.
“Doing? Why, merely feeding at its leisure.”
“Upon what?”
“Some poor prey. A deer perhaps. Yes, a deer.”
“’Tis a carnivore after all!” Uncle thought out loud. “Thomas was right all along and the Frenchman was wrong!”
“Frenchman?” LeBoeuf said. “What Frenchman?”
“Does the name Cuvier strike a familiar note?”
“Cuvier? I once had a barber named Bouvier. But that was long ago, in France. Otherwise—” LeBoeuf frowned and shrugged his shoulders.
“I shall be plain about our purpose here,” Uncle now declared. “We have come to these wild reaches to secure a specimen of megatherium in order to disprove the slanderous lies of Buffon and prove for once and for all that animal life in the New World is equal to that of the Old.”
“Aha!” LeBoeuf exclaimed and squinted knowingly. “You are absolutely right: this idea of New World infériorité—pah! Even the great Voltaire espoused it to his discredit. ‘The American lions are small and timorous,’ he writes in the Philosophy of History. Ha! Espèce d’idiot!”
“Have you run across any mastodon in this area?” I next inquired, adding that we had seen the heaps of their bones at Mammoth Lick.
“But of course,” LeBoeuf said, though somehow I sensed this was not so.
“Have you ever shot one of them?”
“Oh yes. Naturellement.” He must have perceived incredulity on my face, for he hastened to add, “I have a nice set of tusks. I will show them to you tomorrow—along with a pelt of la bête formidable.”
“You have a pelt!”
“Yes.” LeBoeuf shrugged his shoulders as if it were nothing. “Did I forget to mention it?”
Uncle and I exchanged an excited glance.
Our host now stepped lightly to the bookshelves, removed a slim but tall folio, and brought it over to the desk.
“This should amuse you,” he told us with a wink. The title, printed in gold, was Les Dragons Americain, the author one Honoré Bubot. Inside was a series of beautifully engraved plates depicting the most frightful beasts that ever I saw: gigantic lizards with spiked backbones, some with sails like the Atlantic marlin-fish, others armed with gaping jaws of dagger-sharp teeth, several with heads like unto a snake’s attached to bodies of hippopotami, and most alarming of all, a flying lizard with a skull like a peening hammer—all shown frisking in the bosky glades of a forest. The text was in French, and what little I was able to parse out indicated that these monsters were supposed to be as big as an house. For a minute, I thought LeBoeuf was going to tell us that these fantastical creatures roamed about in his neck of the woods.
“Frappant, oui?” he asked.
I stole a glance from Uncle, himself evincing incredulity.
“This fellow, Bubot, is a dreamer,” LeBoeuf then declared to my relief. “There is nothing of the kind here in America. Crocodiles? Yes. Especially to the south of here. Dragons? No. It is—how you say?—pousser trop loin la plaisanterie.”
I agreed that it was carrying a joke too far. Uncle remained in thrall to the book, though, leafing absorbedly its splendid if absurd pages. LeBoeuf retired to a wing chair, his frail frame so small against the large chrysanthemums of the chintz upholstery.
“You know, for all the turmoils and terrors of the last twenty years, mankind yet marches forward toward the light of reason and further away from the darkness of ignorance,” he discoursed philosophically from his seat. “Every century will add new enlightenment to that of the century preceding it, and this advance, which nothing can stop or suspend, shall know no limits but that of the duration of the universe. It is my privilege to play host to those who seek to enlarge the boundaries of human knowledge. That our nephews”—LeBoeuf winked at me—“will know more than we do, and be wiser than we are, is no longer an illusion.”
“Nobly put, sir,” Uncle said, though I think it was asking a lot for him to believe that I might ever be wiser than he, or even wise at all.
“You are eloquent, monsieur,” I complimented LeBoeuf, unable to suppress a yawn that had been welling in me since we left the conservatory. My eyelids felt as though they were made of iron. “Pardon me,” I said.
“No, no! What a sententious bore I am,” the Frenchman mocked himself. “You have lived three days in one, no? Let me show you back to your quarters.”
“Monsieur LeBoeuf,” Uncle said. “Thine hospitality is more than gracious.”
“I am delighted merely to share my humble roof with you, Monsieur Walker.”
“Call me William,” Uncle said warmly.
“And call me Fernand,” LeBoeuf replied with equal solicitude. Were they both not gentlemen of age and attainment, one might have thought he were witnessing a courtship ’twixt two dewy-eyed lovebirds.
“Might I borrow a book for the night?” I asked, starved for literature in this roomful of it. LeBoeuf assented without hesitation. A minute’s browsing rewarded me with an exquisite quarto edition of Shakespeare.
“You enjoy the theater?” LeBoeuf asked.
“I adore it,” I replied.
“Then you shall enjoy your stay at Chateau Félicité,” he said mysteriously as we left the stupendous library.
“By heaven, this LeBoeuf is a splendid fellow!” Uncle declared when we were back in our magnificent apartment. “Dost thee agree, Sammy?”
“I think …” I began to reply, but a silver tray containing decanters of various liqueurs caught my eye on the cherrywood lowboy.
“I know thee thinkest,” Uncle said, wanting me to agree with him. “’Tis a question of what dost thee think.”
“I think our M. LeBoeuf is an accomplished and cultivated gentleman,” said I.
“I should say so,” Uncle quickly concurred, loosening his jabot. He took off his blue frock coat and laid it carefully over the arm of a chair. “Why, look what he has carved out of the wilderness. Plus, he is a man of science, a botanizer!”
“And certainly holds you in lofty esteem,” I inserted, not as though Uncle were unworthy of high admiration, but only pointing out that our host had spared no flattery.
“They are an emotional race, the French, not like us Anglo-Saxons,” Uncle dismissed my less-than-unbridled worship of our new acquaintance. He rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Good gracious, but I am weary.”
“I think I shall stay up and read awhile,” I told him, pouring myself a glass of some deliciously aromatic sweet brandy, redolent of oranges and spice.
“As thee please,” he shrugged and headed for his bedchamber, then stopped and turned at the door. “Did thee notice LeBoeuf’s ward, that chubby boy?”
“Notice? Uncle, had a buffalo thundered around the room would I have noticed?”
“Appears to be rather a half-wit.”
“Sad.”
“The Indian seems almost an adopted son.”
“A shifty rascal, in my opinion.”
“He is an Indian, after all, and a Frenchified one at that. ’Tis like teaching an alligator to live amongst the foxes. Did’st perceive what an handsome specimen of female is LeBoeuf’s wife?”
I wanted to say that I had perceived every mole on her neck, every square inch of her diaphanous gown and veiled curve of flesh beneath it, every minuscule gesture—yea, I had perceived her, all right, nigh unto a priapism!
“A very charming lady,” I observed.
“A fitting helpmate,” Uncle summed it up. “Well then, good night, nephew. Don’t stay up too late. Tomorrow shall abound with yet more wonders and marvels, eh? Ho ho!”
And with that, Uncle withdrew to his bedchamber, leaving me alone in the parlor with my dram and my Shakespeare.
Not ten minutes later, I was enjoying that scene of ineffable raillery ’twixt Ajax and Thersites in the bitter comedy Troilus and Cressida when the door to our apartment opened and, with the baldest audacity, in stepped one of the Indian factotums, upon what true errand I wish I had known. He stopped in his tracks, however, when he spied me lounging upon the sofa.
“What are you doing in here?” I asked him, but he replied timidly only in his savage gibberish. He then appeared to collect himself, went over to where Uncle had draped the frock coat over the back of a chair, picked a loose thread off the sleeve, and hung the garment in a closet. That was all. Whether this petty task had been his real object, I was inclined to doubt. He made to leave.
“Uh, valet …” I said, and he stopped at the door. “Next time you come by, please be so kind as to knock first, eh?” I said. He put on a befuddled face. I flung down my book and went over to him.
“Knock on the door,” I repeated and demonstrated with my knuckle. “Rap, rap. Understand?”
He indicated that he grasped my meaning and withdrew unctuously. I returned to the sofa, to my book and my sweet brandy. Not five minutes had elapsed when what should I hear but a knock on the door.
“By Godalmighty damnation,” I muttered to myself in the frontier fashion, “what now…? Am I to be servanted unto a dither?” I tossed aside my book and hobbled over to the door, yanking it open angrily. “Well…?”
Imagine my surprise to see the hulking Lou-Lou standing in the hall in his nightclothes.
“I hope I did not wake you up?” he said in a voice strangely squeaky coming from one so large, like an elephant with the voice of a mouse. He nibbled the inside of his lip anxiously and darted his eyes from my face to the carpet and back again.
“No, no … I was reading,” I told him, regaining my own composure.
“Your uncle shall be a great friend of my uncle,” he said, brightening like a little boy. “Perhaps you will be my friend too, no?” His face looked at once so pained and hopeful that it would have been the sheerest cruelty not to agree—like spurning the affections of a puppy.
“Would you care to come in for a brandy?” I asked him.
He shook his head.
“No, it is forbidden,” he said sadly.
“Brandy?”
“I am not to come in here.”
“Certainly you are,” I corrected him. “I have just invited you to do so.”
“No-o-o-o.” He shook his head and bit his lip again.
“Who forbids it?”
“Uncle Fernand. But you could come down to my room.”
“Very well. May I bring this brandy with me?”
“I-i-if you must. But don’t leave it there!” he added emphatically.
“Never fear,” I said. “Lead the way.”
And so I followed this lonely dullard of a boy as he waddled heavily down the hall in his nightclothes and slippers. Twenty paces down he slowed, turned, raised his index finger to his lips, and said, “Sssshhhh,” pointing to a door.
“What…?”
“Tante Marie!” he whispered and pointed to the door, then tiptoed further down the hall to another door. He opened it gingerly, glanced down both ends of the corridor, and motioned me inside.
Lou-Lou’s room was on an even grander scale than the bedchambers of our suite. To the right stood a magnificent cherrywood canopied bed large enough to accommodate an entire frontier family. The light blue walls were adorned with Indian curios, bows, spears, masks, carved paddles—things that would appeal to a boy. On the wall opposite the bed hung a stuffed boar’s head, the snarling snout bristling with twisted tusks. Beneath it, tacked to the wall, was a series of crudely painted pictures of Indians and Negroes, done in the style one associates with schoolchildren, the figures all sticks. At the far end of the room, before the window, stood a broad desk or play-table upon which were dozens of locks, of all sizes, shapes, and metals, along with many iron key rings, a vise, and an assortment of files. The vast Chinese rug was littered with playthings—tin soldiers, carved wooden alligators, stuffed lizards. Altogether, the room looked as though it belonged to a solitary ten-year-old princeling.
Lou-Lou pulled the chair out from under the desk, dusted off the seat with the sleeve of his nightshirt, and bid me sit down. I did, though I felt awkward because Lou-Lou remained looming, hulking over me, the grin of a true imbecile on his face. I crossed my legs, He crossed his arms and nodded his head.
“So…” he said.
“So…” I replied.
“You will be my friend?”
“Yes. I will.”
“I am so happy.”
“I am happy that you are happy,�
�� I said sincerely.
For an awkward interval, the two of us looked blankly at each other.
“You’re fond of locks, I see,” I eventually remarked.
“I love them,” he declared. “They are my friends. Here, I’ll show you.” He picked up a brass padlock. “This one is Jacques. He was old and broken when he came to me. See how he is well now.” Lou-Lou took a brass key from one of the rings, opened the lock, held it close to his ear, and closed the shackle again, savoring the solid metallic click of its works. “Ah … this is little François!” he continued, showing me a small silver one, the sort a gentleman might secure his trunk with. “Here is my newest friend: Big Bertrand!” He held up a rusted iron behemoth. “It will be a long time to make him well again. Perhaps you would help me.”
“Perhaps,” I replied, trying to show some enthusiasm. “Tell me, Lou-Lou—may I call you Lou-Lou?”
“Please, monsieur.”
“And please call me Sammy,” I said hard upon his monsieur. “You refer to Monsieur LeBoeuf as your uncle.”
“Yes…?”
“Yet he refers to you as his ward? Uh …” I struggled for the right phrase. “Are you his nephew?”
“No, he is my uncle,” Lou-Lou explained.
“Very well. But if he is your uncle, then you must be his nephew, no?”
“No, I am his ward.”
“Then he is not your uncle.”
“He must be my uncle, for that is what I call him.”
“I see,” said I, yet quite in the dark.
“I am an orphan, you know,” Lou-Lou said and waddled to the bed. He sat on the edge of it in a manner rather prim for such an unwieldy individual.
“It must be a very sad thing to be an orphan,” I sympathized.
“I think so,” Lou-Lou agreed, and a tear ran down his cheek.
“When did you come here?” I redirected the interview.
“Many years ago. I remember the long sea voyage. I remember a great city between two rivers, sails everywhere, like clouds. They kept me in a house there. I was forbidden to go outside and play.”
An Embarrassment of Riches Page 15