A case of curiosities (19 page)

She can be kindly and tender, or she can be brawling, turbulent, and mean. She is cheap enough to have been born in Lyon. Her methods are legend. From the butcher, she acquires the unsalable parts of the carcass: the waste scraps discarded in carving. She keeps her eyes trained for'bones that would otherwise be fed to the dogs. She loads her little cart with these bits and moves on to terrify the fruit sellers. They do not bother her with perfectly shaped pears, or costly Corbeil peaches, but if they have wrinkled apples, cabbages that are turning, or an overabundance of turnips, they know she will pounce, buying what she buys at a fraction of the usual cost."

"I hope turnips don't turn up in tonight's meal," Claude interjected. He never liked turnips. Bad associations.

"No, I expect not. Anyway, let me continue. She makes her way to the fishmonger for more economic scraps, heads mostly, and then it's off to the baker in the late afternoon, after the price of bread has dropped. She takes this food, none of which is much esteemed, she takes it to her miserable kitchen, and she whips, beats, stews, coddles, cuddles, and spices it lovingly until it issues forth in dishes of a fine and smooth texture and unparalleled taste. Some of the food is distributed free to the needy. The rest is served in here."

A tugged toggle ended the coachman's little discourse. A door swung open. The diners—a team of five stonecutters with lime under their fingernails, two journalists (one published, one not, both ink-stained), a prostitute, the coachman, and his companion—pushed past a bony arm. "That's ten. I won't take any more," Madame V. cackled. With unexpected force, she shoved the toggle back through the staple of the hasp lock, keeping out as many potential patrons as she allowed to enter.

The interior, despite the dismal nature of the filthy street outside, was clean and warmly lighted. Madame V. said nothing after she closed the door. The routine was familiar to most of the lucky dizaine. They scrambled for plates and spoons and a cup of gros rouge each. They sat themselves down on plankboard seats in front of plankboard tables that ran along two walls of the tiny room. The plates were already filled with the first installment of the evening meal, a small assortment of boiled vegetables, measured out to avoid the aggressions that would have been provoked by a communal serving dish. After brief but nervous inspections of portion sizes, the diners settled down.

The atmosphere was restful. For a while, the only sounds heard were the clatter of cutlery, mouths in motion, and an occasional belch of satisfaction. Some patrons allowed the food to dissolve in their mouths like the host consecrated in the Eucharist, while others chewed more demonstratively. Madame V. toured the tables and swept the coins into her apron before retreating to a bubbling pot from which she ladled out the second course, a kind of lamb stew.

Claude and the coachman sat in the corner, next to the published hack, whose manner showed he clearly knew his way around the printing district of Paris. He was providing a description of the profession's methods to an eager companion who had paid, Claude observed, for both meals. More food arrived, and the coachman, taking a break from eating, wiped his brow, neck, and nose, and asked, "Is this not worthy of a merchant's table?"

In Claude's estimation, the meal was good enough to warrant a parallel with the accomplishments of Marie-Louise. "Better than my first taste of boar's tongue."

"My only criticism is the wine," the coachman said. "It is a sin against the art of the grape. I will keep myself on water." He poured out two glasses and pulled from his belt a flask of vinegar. He squirted a drop in his glass and a drop in Claude's. "To avoid the Parisian purge," he explained. "Now tell me about your first day. What conclusions have you drawn? Or should I say what drawings have you concluded?"

Claude talked about the many things he had seen and heard, but spoke mostly of the clocks that chimed throughout the city. He replicated the clang of the tower bells by tapping and rubbing on the glasses in front of him. He described the timbre in such detail that the journalist turned from his paying companion to take note of his neighbor's observations. When Claude described the motions of the altar clock that had almost caused him to be late—an account that was at once exacting and accessible— the journalist was intrigued enough to introduce himself.

This is how Sebastian Plumeaux entered Claude's life.

Plumeaux was a hack who stitched together a livelihood of sorts by writing works of scandal, Utopian novels, and bits of doggerel. He was forthright in assessing the limits of his virtues.

"I am not a member of the Academy and never will be. My name will never appear on the rolls of their literary pensions. There will be no gratifications or traitements for me," he said without hostility. "No, my name surfaces on a few works, and in the files of the Paris police: 'Plumeaux: lawyer, writer, expelled from the bar. He produces juridical memoires on shady cases, and scurrilous pamphlets.'"

The journalist alternated between writing and tutoring. As a writer, it seemed he was partial to narratives based on contrived structures. He had told tales through the progression of a card game, a round of chess, and other forced conceits. He was currently at work on a Utopian Trialogue in which three portraits argued with one another from the walls of an Arctic palace. Also, he was collecting notes for an unauthorized adaptation of an Englishman's Hieroglyphic Tale. As a tutor, he pursued quick fees and free meals, which accounted for the companionship of the unpublished but not impoverished writer. Introductions were made all around, and the diners talked at length. Plumeaux was wise enough to sit back, listen, and assess Claude's unusual and potentially profitable eccentricity, which he called "a rare gift of aural acuity."

"Where do you live?" Plumeaux inquired toward the end of the meal.

"Nowhere, as yet." Claude described his situation. The hack offered to help. Receiving a sign of approval from the coachman, Claude accepted. He inquired about the value of his foreign currency and watches. After a brief lesson on currency transaction in the city, he was reassured that he would have no trouble paying for lodging.

The coachman rose to leave, pausing to finish a scrap Claude had left on his plate. "Lucille and I are marked down for a two a.m. departure. Your new acquaintance will take over." The coachman passed the reins of friendship over to the journalist. "I will get in touch through Madame V. upon my return."

Good-byes were offered all around. As the coachman exited, he said, "I must go and earn my crust."

"Let us hope it is finely baked," Claude rejoined with a smile.

Claude, Plumeaux, and the unpublished writer left the gargote. They stopped in a street of moneylenders, and after considerable negotiation, Plumeaux was able to obtain an acceptable price for Claude's watches. He took only a very small, not unreasonable commission for himself.

The young unpublished writer, bored first by the exuberance that accompanied the talk of bells and then by the haggling with the moneylenders, felt snubbed by the redirected interests of his paid companion. He walked with Plumeaux and Claude only as far as the river, leaving them to search for accommodations alone.

They first made inquiries at Plumeaux's residence, the Ber-nardine College off the Place Maubert. There were no vacancies, so they moved on. Plumeaux had been optimistic, but then that was, Claude sensed, in his nature. Rejection only slightly eroded the hack's confidence as they went from one house to the next, looking for a room to let. They circled the squares around the printing district and then circled the quarter and went on to perform other geometric and house-hunting impossibilities. They called in at a wineshop, where lamplighters were taking a break from their rounds. Claude received a succession of unhelpful comments on the difficulty of finding a place to sleep. It was well past midnight when lodging was finally obtained.

He had just about given up hope when Plumeaux noticed a woman across from the St.-Severin church sweeping the entrance of a stone-fronted building. Conversation revealed that a journeyman joiner on the third floor had left the day before. His lodgings were available, but the price was too dear. Despair returned, until the sweeper said it came with attic space. "Three little cabinets" is what she called them. Claude took the rooms sight unseen, much to the relief of Plumeaux, who wished his acquaintance good night and good luck before pursuing nocturnal solicitation under the groins of a distant meat market. Chuck paid for four nights. He was tired and had no choice.

To get to the room, the sweeper, who was also the landlady of the building, and Claude had to mount a helix of rotted wood and rusted iron. It was too dark to see the state of the rest of the building. Claude's nose, however, picked up a stench. Behind one door in particular, there was an odor that recalled the putrefaction of the cemetery Claude had passed. The landlady mumbled something about hay stuffing. From another part of the building came a baby's cry. "Wet nurse across the courtyard," the landlady said. They reached the top landing after a long ascent. Claude had lost count at one hundred and three. The landlady huffed and handed him a stump of a candle. "Here you are, good night." Claude moved forward and hit his head squarely on the lintel. "Watch your head," the landlady said.

The attic was under a steeply sloped roof that cut off much of the floor space to people over three feet tall. Claude inspected what he could. The place was wretched, flimsy, misshapen. As a student, he had been tested by the Abbe on planimetry, the part of geometry that concerns the measuring of plane surfaces. The attic was beyond his capabilities. It had been expanded, divided, cut down, and rewalled to multiply the possibilities of habitation and storage. The work had been abandoned before completion, and decay had taken over.

The natural elements all mustered their wicked strengths to make the place even more sinister. Earth covered much of the rotted planking. Wind blew through a bedside beam. Water dripped from the roof, noisily filling a canvas bucket, a crude sort of water clock that Claude suspected would require constant attention during heavy rains. Only Fire was missing. The chimney was blocked. Holes in one of the walls near where Claude decided to sleep had been covered over with scraps of advertisements and ordinances filched from the street. By the light of the candle, he scanned the catchpenny prints and song sheets. He took some comfort in the three smudged copies of The Wonderful Pig of Knowledge. The papering, unfortunately, did little to muffle the sound of the milliner and his wife copulating one story below. Clearly the previous tenant had departed unexpectedly. Piles of wood had been left in a corner. Claude gathered up some rags and fashioned a mattress, using his satchel as a pillow. After much fitful tossing, he fell into a shallow, apprehensive sleep.

A MONTH AFTER reaching Paris, Claude spent an evening working on a letter home. The letter avoided the commonplace supetfluities of the age: no hosts of humble-servants and yours-ever-so-faithfullys, no endings like the one penned by the centuty's most famous matquis: "I have the honor to be, sit, with all possible feeling, yout humble and obedient servant.'' (That is truly sadism.)

My dear Mother,

By now the Abbe must have informed you of my disappearance. I wish to allay your fears. I am safe, and all is well. As the postmark will indicate, I write from Paris, the city that Father always said offered much to those who had much to offer, and nothing to those who did not.

A full explanation for my sudden flight cannot, I am afraid, be provided. You are well aware of the public nature of private correspondence. This much I can say. I was betrayed, my dear Mother, betrayed by the very man who taught me the value of trust. I did not return home because I did not want to involve you. Do you recall what Gamot the preacher said about betrayal? I think he cited St. Matthew, though 1 cannot recall the words.

All of this to say that while with the Abbe, I discovered what might better have been left concealed. On that, if nothing else, he and I would agree. Rather than live with betrayal, I chose to leave.

A series of chance events have brought me to Paris. These I feel perfectly comfortable recounting. On the road to Lyon, in a state of great exhaustion, I met a coachman who took up my friendship at a moment when I most needed a friend. He agreed to provide me with passage to Paris in exchange for some minor clock repair. The coachman—his name is Paul—is a clever felloa: some would say a scoundrel, able to avoid what he calls "the stew of royal regulation." The words suggest the pleasure he takes filling his stomach.

My skills have been much appreciated here in Paris, ami after no fewer than four offers were made to me in the first week, I chose to apprentice in the workshop of Abraham-Louis Breguet. {Two diagonal cuts have been made in the paper to hold a trade card from the well-known watchmaker,}

The rooms I inhabit, just above the shop, warrant a little sketch and a description. {A sketch appears.) I am now writing in the salon, which I have marked with an S. It is part of a suite of spacious rooms filled with more precious objects than our rafters have botanicals. There are jasper vases, porcelains I am told are rare, a handsome commode with lacquered corners, two porphyry tables. In the corner, there is a big ugly sculpture of Eros launching arrows, and a marble stove decorated in bronze. The stove is topped with a statue of Venus. My rooms are connected to a fine library, finer in matters of watchmaking than the Abbe's, and, as you might expect, better kept as well. My bedroom (marked C) is done in black and gold and blue damask. A white marble chimney (F) warms me on those unexpectly chill nights, of which we already have had two. The rooms are all lighted by massive and ornate chandeliers and pleasantly papered with the finest printed calico.

My neighbors include Piero Rinaldo Carli-Rubbi, a Venetian who is a famous artist — he has received commissions from the Academy of Science — and a police lieutenant named Antoine-Raimond-Jean-Gaulbert-Gabriel de Sartine. I see both regularly.

One request must be made, Mother. Do not write. I expect to move soon — a step foxward in the construction of devices under my own name — and will send a permanent address when I can. Also, do not inform the Abbe of my presence here, since there is a matter of some watches that could cause me serious embarrassment. If he inquires, tell him only that the situation will be settled shortly and to his satisfaction. The page ends, and so must I. I send my love to all of you, even Fidelite.

Claude squeezed in a postscript along the margin:

I recall the passage from Matthew: "The Son of man shall be betrayed into the hands of men." I can only add, Mother, that Jesus was not alone.

Claude read through the letter Though wottied that he had wtitten too much of bettayal, he was genetally satisfied. He was unsute of his spelling and consideted smudging the troublesome words. In the end, he decided to leave them as they were. His mother did not read, which is why he supplied the sketches. And though his elder sister did, it was unlikely she would pick out errors of spelling, if indeed they were errors. Splotches, on the other hand, would stimulate instant mockery. Besides, the Abbe had told him often that spelling was a casual and personal affair.

He made a fair copy, which he sanded and addtessed. He sealed it with an excessive amount of wax and pinned the draft among the many notices that were plastered on the wall above his mattress. He stared at the letter for a long while, then blew out the candle, and everything went dark—unequivocally and terrifyingly dark.

Even today, there is no written medium more deceptive than the letter. Back in Claude's time, epistolary convention was a triumph of deceit. It was not generally employed to transmit simple truths and complex fears.

The discrepancy between what Claude was and what he wished to be surfaces often. To give but one example, how can a room that is lighted by ''massive and ornate chandeliers" be thrown into darkness by extinguishing a single candle? Perhaps some light should be shed on the true circumstances of Claude Page one month after his arrival in Paris.

To be fair, the first half of the letter was an accurate representation of departure from the mansion house. It is only the second half that contains outright falsifications. This, Claude would have argued, was done to protect his mother from learning of the fearful condition to which he had sunk. And what was that fearful condition? It was one devoid of finely printed calico or any of the other luxuries mentioned. Claude had given a description not of his lodgings but of the Baron de Besenval's. (Plumeaux had published an account of the Baron based on information provided by a chambermaid he had seduced.)

Claude was living in the same attic rooms he had rented the night he arrived. In the month since installing himself, he had surveyed the full extent of the apartment's decrepitude and could not relay the result of that depressing reconnaissance to his mother. Hence the spacious quarters and not the sloping ceiling that would have cramped the afternoon shadow of a dwarf. Hence the white marble chimney and not the blocked fireplace. Hence the precious objects and not the room filled with scraps of wood. There were no porphyry tables anywhere to be found, just parts of a broken spinning wheel. There were no ornate chandeliers; even beeswax illumination eluded him. He had written his letter by the light of a tallow candle that smoked terribly and left long streaks that looked like black poplars against the wall. Papered though they were, his lodgings were not done in printed calico. The draft of the letter was pinned beside a pronouncement signed by Antoine-Raimond-Jean-Gaulbert-Gabriel de Sartine, the police lieutenant Claude claimed to know. He did not. It was just a name at which to stare while he tried to fall asleep.

Claude did make the acquaintance of the other neighbor mentioned in the letter, Piero Rinaldo Carli-Rubbi, but once again, the truth had been embellished. He had met Piero on his first morning as a resident, after waking to the sounds of shutters slapping open. He rose to see what Paris had to offer him and promptly hit his head on a beam. Unperturbed, he leaned out the dormer window to take in the view. Across the courtyard, he observed a row of gargoyles glowering and grinning; they reminded him of Adolphe Staemphli. On the other side of the building, Claude noticed laundry, diapers mostly, hanging on a line. He concluded that it was the property of the wet nurse mentioned the night before. This was confirmed when a young woman emerged at the window with both breasts exposed, her nipples covered by the greedy mouths of two swaddled infants. The wet nurse was plain, from what Claude could tell, and smiled pleasantly despite the lacteal attentions of her charges. The smile ended abruptly when she observed her laundry flapping against the mucky edge of a wooden drainpipe. She cursed, grabbed the clothes, and then retreated from the window.

The stench Claude had picked up when mounting the stairs hit him again. It was wotse than dried-up field mouse. He traced the odot to a toom a half-floot below his. He knocked. The door was open. He peeted in and found he was being stared at by a giant falcon, wings outsttetched, sinking its talons into a ttee btanch. Claude scanned the toom. He saw the skins and pelts of countless creatutes hanging ftom meat hooks, theit mouths and nostrils plugged with cotton wool to ptevent the flow of blood. This was Claude's introduction to Pieto Rinaldo Carli-Rubbi, a pelt stuffet who counted among his clients, howevet indirectly, the Academy of Science and many of the mote daring display makets in the city.

Pieto's shouldets were btoad and musculat, his body firm. His complexion was sutptisingly flush, given the datkness of the toom. He was not, howevet, handsome. His head was latge and his nose was split, almost bilobated. All of this, and the tancid odots his profession confetted, gave him the appeatance of a latge, if wingless, bat. A Venetian bat. He was the son of Giuseppe Rinaldo Catli-Rubbi, the anatomist and sutgeon to the Doge. Pieto's fathet consideted the sutgical atts to be of singulat intetest and assumed that his only son would catty on the wotk he had so profitably established. Insttuction, thete-fote, began at an eatly age. Pieto accompanied his fathet on the rounds of the sick and had learned, by the age of eight, to let blood. Unfottunately, Pieto did not like sickness. He suffeted the patients' ills.

Duting a ttip to Milan, Giuseppe Rinaldo Catli-Rubbi showed his son the scene of a flaying on the facade of the Duomo. This image stayed with Pieto. Back home, aftet bleeding the nephew of Venice's chief magisttate, the anatomist took his son to the mattytdom scene of the Maccabees on the walls of a conftatet-nity chapel. A man was having his hait temoved by hand winch. This, too, inttigued him. A yeat latet, he was shown some wax figutes depicting the vatious stages of plague. He tealized that it was the display of anatomy and not anatomy itself that he admited. When he came upon a stuffed puffin in the collection of the Doge, he knew that he wished to testote the dead, tathet than tteat the dying.

"I decided to be a hay stuffet, a moldet of wax figures, a cte-atot of cteatutes," Pieto said, waving his hands. He compensated for the immobile nature of his art by gesturing wildly. "My father, of course, was appalled, and banished me from the comforts of the family residence on the Grand Canal." Seeking to refine his talents, Piero ended up in* Paris, where his single-mindedness attracted the interest, financial and paternal, of the Verraux brothers whose business in exotic birds made them rich and kept the Venetian artist busy with commissions.