Little

by Edward Carey

  That night there was a quiet knocking on the door.

  “Hello, Marie.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me. It’s Edmond. May I be with you a little?”

  “Come in, close the door.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Edmond, you were wonderful today with the visitors.”

  “I was?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Marie, I don’t want to be married.”

  “No, you mustn’t be. You must stay here with me.”

  He stayed a whole half hour. He showed me his doll Edmond, quite distressed now in his trauma. I wished he would put it away; it was as if it were another person come between us, stopping our privacy. When at last he did pocket the beloved thing, though, it was only to get up and leave.

  The visit from the cotton wholesaler was only the first of several horrors that Edmond was put through. There was the daughter of a dressmaker who found Edmond “ridiculous,” and the child of a barber-surgeon who wondered if “he was all there.” None found him desirable, but rather strangely absent and unappealing. They were blind and foolish and undeserving people, and I was giddy with gratitude and relief for it. So they left him there. But his mother was not finished upon the hunt yet.

  Edmond and I were an essential part of the great itching house, its engine perhaps. We came together that last summer as if we knew that our time was running out, that we must discover while it was still possible. Nightly there was a creaking on the stairs. The night was ours, and we were to be found in it.

  He would arrive at night, while Jacques was sleeping.

  “Look at you,” I said. “What a sight!”

  “Here I am.”

  We would look, and we would talk.

  “I’m five foot, five inches and an eighth inch,” he said.

  “My head’s about at your heart, isn’t it. Let’s have a listen! There! That’s the sound of Edmond. What noise you make.” We talked, we held hands, then he left again.

  The house itself itched. With the great progress in business, the widow and my master were able to purchase the Monkey House for themselves. And once purchased they set about redecorating it. The walls of the ground floor were covered in crimson paper.

  “Each time I come home,” Curtius said, “I feel I am entering the vast body of some titan, that the red walls are the walls of the chambers of a colossal human trunk.”

  Curtius and the widow bought objects to decorate the hall, purchased from a theatrical prop maker. There was a great clock which was actually only a piece of wood shaped like a clock, with a clock’s face painted upon it, so that it always told the same time. There were matching elaborate chests of drawers made of painted board; these had not one functioning drawer between them, but they looked real enough. There were wooden plinths painted to look like marble. At night, when Jacques was snoring, Edmond and I would go into the hall and drift together from new object to new object, pretending we were wealthy Paris people, that we had come into our own kingdom. In the large room you felt you were in a magnificent palace, though the windows looked out not on elegant gardens, but on the mud of the boulevard, and Doctor Graham’s house across the way.

  “Thomas-Charles Ticre of the printworks,” said the widow to Edmond at breakfast, “has a daughter. Cornélie. We might think about that. What a future that would be. What a solid future.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Our latest great heads.

  We acquired two more doctors. The Place Louis-le-Grand, a place I had never visited, was where Doctor Franz Anton Mesmer, recently fled from Vienna, set up his clinic in February 1778. He soon had many patients. He cured, a leaflet delivered to me from Edmond explained, everything from paralysis to constipation, from impotence to the vapors, from bunions to herpes, from sties to cataracts, from gallstones to gangrene, from epilepsy to dropsy, from hysteria to hiccoughs, from sterility to incontinence. He was a miracle man; he placed his hands on people’s bodies and they felt a strange power coming over them. I came to know Doctor Mesmer, not in person, but in wax. He had a very flat face with almost no profile at all, as if it had been grown facedown in a skillet.

  The second doctor was the Commissioner for the Free America, Doctor Benjamin Franklin. I never saw this man either, not the actual man himself—though my master and the widow were given audience—but even so I have cause to remember him particularly. I am most grateful to Doctor Franklin for his long gray hair, for that is what got me admitted properly back into the workshop—as a worker. There was a great shortage of time in those days, there were so many heads to complete that my master needed more help, and so at last I was remembered. The most tedious and time-consuming job was putting hair into wax heads; usually a wig would simply be placed on a head, as nearly everyone of significance, male or female, wore some other person’s, or some horse’s, hair. But this American doctor wore his own.

  “That instrument,” I said, “is a ring-handled, long-necked needle with polyp tip, sir.”

  “Yes it is, Little. How did you know that?”

  “You taught me, sir, in Berne.”

  “Did I? Indeed, I believe I did. I had forgot. I shan’t again. Do you know what it is for?”

  “It is for the propping up of tissues during operations, but you use it for threading hairs, one by one, into wax scalps.”

  “Well, yes, yes, that is exactly right.”

  “Must she?” asked the widow.

  “For the sake of getting things done, Widow Picot. We are so overstretched.”

  “But no talking, Little. Sit in silence.”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “As if you are not really there at all.”

  “Yes, madame.”

  And so I made my triumphant return. I studied Benjamin Franklin very closely. The head was like some massive tuber, a potato of a man. There was a deal of rather wrinkled double chin at the bottom of the face, great hams of cheeks going upward, a sizable forehead. In the center of the face a bulbous nose grew, flanked by two droopy gray heavy-lidded eyes; his mouth was bracketed by considerable folds.

  “This personage,” I said, “has come all the way from America.”

  “Yes, Little.” My master nodded.

  “It’s as if we’re learning the world, isn’t it?”

  “You may say that, indeed.”

  “No call for noise!” snapped the widow.

  Hair by hair, I made Franklin look like Franklin. I threaded in the long gray hairs, cropped by the widow from an old chestnut seller on the Pont Neuf who needed the money. With the rounded tip of the needle I pushed one end of the hair into the wax; when I took the needle away, the hair remained. This I did several thousand times, and with portraits of the new doctor before me. Cheap images of his face were to be found all over Paris: on prints, on a snuffbox, a matchbox, a fan, even on a chamber pot, over the inscription He wrested lightning from the gods and their scepter from tyrants.

  “Perhaps now at last,” I ventured, standing to admire the hair, “you shall pay me.”

  “You are to be quiet in here,” said the widow. “You are not to be heard at all.”

  “We shall look into it, Marie,” said my master. “We certainly shall. Do be patient.”

  I smiled as I worked on the doctor’s remaining hair. Perhaps I was finally becoming a true part of the family. Perhaps, if my work was good enough, I might even be permitted to marry into it.

  Many people came to see the wax Mesmer and Franklin. Some even called during the day to visit Curtius and the widow in the workshop upstairs. And so I, now a part of the workshop business, witnessed new people every day. One such man was Jean-Antoine Houdon, a very famous sculptor. If I had not learned that, I should have called him only Another Little Bald Man.

  “Your name, of course, is not unfamiliar to me,” said Houdon. “You
do thieves and murderers. You rob everyone of grace. There’s no dignity, no elevation of the human form, only degradation. You are a cynic, you have no love for your fellow creature, you are incapable of music.”

  “I love the heads,” said my master, softly. “I do love the heads.”

  “Your business is good for the streets, perhaps. Your material is cheap and easily gotten, commonplace. There’s nothing subtle about it. No wit. No brilliance.”

  “Wax is . . . flesh!” Curtius said.

  “Then marble the soul.”

  “I’ve made my life of wax.”

  “Keep to the murderers,” said Houdon. “They deserve you. But this head”—he pointed at Franklin—“is demeaned by you. You dishonor it.”

  In February of 1778, as I became an official part of the workshop, an ailing and toothless eighty-three-year-old man, François-Marie Arouet, known to the world as Voltaire, returned to Paris from exile in Switzerland after nearly thirty years. Paris went wild for him. They hurled honors at his shaky frame. Voltaire, in response, hemorrhaged.

  In his convalescence he was shut up in the house of the Marquis de Villette on the banks of the Seine. A worried crowd lingered outside the house, hoping for a glimpse, but only the most esteemed visitors were allowed in, among them Doctor Franklin. On two occasions, the small and bald sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon was admitted for sittings. Then he rushed back to his studio, where he locked the door and didn’t come out again for a week and a half. Houdon was determined: this would be the greatest work of his life. Day and night he tap-tapped against his marble. Slowly he found the protruding lower jaw, the thin grinning lips. His thoughts took shape in sunken cheekbones, bald ancient heads, wrinkled chicken necks.

  At the marquis’ house by the river, there was an old man who daily looked less and less like Voltaire. Now, to see the true Voltaire, you took yourself and your family to Houdon’s studio. That was where he was, keeping regular hours, never disappointing. From eleven in the morning to seven o’clock in the evening, every day, grinning without cease.

  My master visited it. “No color! No life,” he said, but he bit his knuckles.

  “If we could only have Voltaire,” the widow said, “think who would come.”

  “I do want Voltaire’s head,” said Curtius. “I want it so much that I hurt.”

  My master and the widow joined the dwindling crowd in front of that house by the river every day. Every day they were not permitted entrance. And every day Edmond and I sat together in the workshop. We chatted as we worked and I began to think that this was how it could be if we were married. Every day they went out, the widow knocking fruitlessly on the door, my master holding his father’s great leather bag filled with stopped bottles of water, pomade, and plaster dust. Not until the thirtieth of May, after the old man had been moved into a servant’s lodge behind the house, and after they had passed money to a servant—an amount my master and the widow referred to only as “the certain sum”—were they invited inside. Because, by then, it was all over. Voltaire had died. My master took his death mask.

  The model of Voltaire had to be ready as soon as possible, but the face my master had taken in plaster was collapsed, slumped, lacking in life.

  “I know he’s dead,” said Edmond. “That’s a dead face. You’ve been at his grave, Mother!”

  “Not his grave,” she said. “Doctor Curtius has made it clear to me, Edmond, it is perfectly reasonable to take a death mask of a great man. Death masks have been taken of kings. It is quite acceptable.”

  “The murderers were alive when you saw them! This man was dead. A dead thing!”

  “Edmond, Edmond,” she said, wiping a tear from his eye, “you are entirely too sensitive. Do please find a way to bury your nerves.”

  My master adjusted the philosopher, stroking and shifting his features, and from the wax death mask he made in clay a plumper face, with open eyes, grinning. My master studied Houdon’s head, studied many prints of the philosopher. I watched him shifting his own face until it took on Voltaire’s expressions. Then he tamed the clay and the wax until it became Voltaire. It was a marvelous thing to behold. Only four exhausting days after his death, Voltaire was resurrected on the Boulevard du Temple.

  This Voltaire, so lively that he appeared on the very verge of speaking, brought many people. “At Curtius,” they said, “Voltaire still lives.”

  “A famous head,” said the widow, “a glowing head.”

  People came in such numbers that the Monkey House grew and grew and someone else came to be employed inside its doors. Florence Biblot was a large, shiny-faced woman who already provided meals for several other of the boulevard industries. Sometimes she cooked in the house; more often, she brought the food to us. She was not a great talker, Florence wasn’t. When she was complimented she said nothing, only gave a little laugh that revealed her tongue bouncing north and south and small, ground-down teeth. She did this every time, without fail.

  “Thank you, Florence, that was a lovely stew,” said my master.

  “Dddddd, ddddd.”

  “At long last we remember what food tastes like,” said the widow.

  “Dddddd, ddddd.”

  I taught her how to make the Swiss dishes that my master so liked. Rosti, grated potatoes cooked in fat, and Fleischkäse, which is made by combining various meats together with onions and baking it in a bread pan.

  “Dddddd.” She laughed, putting a liver through the grinder.

  More people came, so many that the widow took Edmond on a visit to Monsieur Ticre’s printworks.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  New clothes.

  With prosperity came bricks. With bricks came builders, who surrounded our walls with brick atop brick, up and up and up, until the old wooden Monkey House was dressed in a smart brick suit. Four brick buttresses were added to help the wooden crutches. “It’s not in the correct spirit,” said Mercier in the workshop. “No good shall come of it. There shouldn’t be bricks on the boulevard. They’ll hate you for it. One day they’ll take revenge on you for those bricks.”

  “And who are you to say such things?” demanded the widow.

  “I am Mercier himself.”

  “And of what account is that?”

  “I am your old friend. Have you forgotten it was I who introduced you to Curtius? Look downstairs: there I am, made by his own fine hands.”

  “Yes indeed, I thank you for the remembrance. I am so familiar with our works that sometimes I forget what is before me. I meant to have that one removed months ago. Jacques, do take that head away. Do not worry how you handle it, we shall melt it down.”

  “But I am Mercier!”

  “Yes, I know, such a shame. Couldn’t you be someone else?”

  “I wrote the book Paris in the Year—”

  “Yes, yes, but you see it no longer signifies. You’ll have to do something new, won’t you? And let us know when you have? Make sure, this time, that it’s something that will last.”

  “Please, dear lady. Don’t take my likeness down.”

  “It is done. We are not running a charity.”

  “I do so like to see it there,” he said, crestfallen.

  “We accept only the very best and very worst heads. And yours, like the great multitude’s, lies somewhere in between. You do understand, don’t you?”

  How quietly Mercier left.

  He was right, at first, about the bricks. Neighbors would shake their heads and fists as they passed us on the street; some would spit; on occasion, in the dead of night when Jacques was asleep, some would empty their swill buckets on the steps. Of all the buildings upon the boulevard, only three were made of something more solid than wood: Nicolet’s Grandes Danseurs de Corde, Audinot’s Ambigu-Comique, and now the Cabinet de Docteur Curtius.

  As it settled now, the Monkey House made new, strange noises, as of a very
large mouth grinding its teeth. The attic creaked in agony, louder than ever before. There was a gradual drop of two inches in some of the upstairs rooms. Once, as the widow was walking along the landing, a floorboard un-nailed itself and sprang up, nearly smacking her in the face.

  Newly dressed, the Monkey House provoked a revolution in everyone’s clothes. It began, as it must, with the widow. To her customary black she added shades now, some trimmings of purple, a little dark blue to her cuffs; her bonnet was lined with purple silk. She purchased for herself a gentleman’s walking cane of malacca wood with an ornate silver guilloche handle, never again to be seen without it. There seemed to me a fresh outbreak of moles upon her skin, little bumps and dots that had not been there before, and might never have been, but for the bricks. These growths and pimplings were like medals upon a soldier, smart decorations, each a further proof of her enormous progress.

  To my master the bricks brought only a stiffness, as if the building were longing to turn him into a caryatid. The widow announced her disapproval of his cotton suit: that suit, she said, was a personality that had no understanding of bricks. Edmond measured him, and a new personality was created, this in black velvet, which gave my master back pains and strange throbbings down his thighs, but caused him to utter more proclamations of how fond he was of the Widow Picot and what she had done for us all.

  Some people cannot be contained within clothes, some people are too full of life, some people are all motion and upheaval; such energetic bipeds and quadrupeds are the enemy of thread. Jacques Beauvisage wasn’t made for clothes. He tried very hard, but it was hopeless. Even in finery, he still upset everything around him. One evening, in his clumsiness, he knocked over a murderer, the head shattered. While Curtius sadly sorted through the remains, the widow flew into action. She blew the bugle of her voice: Scissors! Hot water! Razor! She was going to cut the animal out of him. In those days of silk, she proclaimed an end to fur. She, who would keep her own enormous hair hidden beneath her cap, now forbade my poor miserable Jacques his matted topper-most. She chopped off his great mane, then shaved the stubble crop that remained. His hair was dismissed like Curtius’ old suit; it fell onto an old sheet that had been laid on the floor to receive the gentle tumble of Jacques’ wildness and with it a great nation of lice, which I remanded to the fire. If the widow’s intention had been to create a neat gentle-looking person, she failed utterly, for shorn of his hair he looked more terrible than ever. I sat with him as he sadly stroked his stubblehead, a chipped cannonball.