A case of curiosities (2 page)
"It is to be the mansion house of the Count," Fidelite told her sister.
Claude sniggered. The architecture had taken on pathetically monastic dimensions that suggested none of the mansion house quirkiness. A courtyard, a cloister, and a steeple figured in the plan. Evangeline pestered Fidelite for cards and consequently received a smack. "Your hands are too muddy." A full-blown, whispered quarrel ensued. Worried by the possibility of parental intervention, Fidelite finally quieted her sister by giving over three cards. The girls returned to their handiwork, and Claude returned to his.
There was a rap at the door, but it was faint. The Vengeful Widow did her best to muffle the sound. Claude's mother, overseeing the pinecones, didn't hear a thing. Fidelite heard — how could she not, with those jug-handle ears? — but ignored the summons. It was Claude who announced the arrival of an unexpected guest. Madame Page ordered the door opened. Fidelite, with much reluctance, slithered away the snake and freed the lock of its costly wadding.
Claude watched intently for the collision of the wicked wind and the object of Fidelite's efforts. The frozen hinges groaned in one way, his sister in another. The outbuildings toppled first, then the cardboard courtyard. Only the steeple remained by the time two heavily booted feet entered.
Amid the ruins of the cardhouse stood Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Robert Auget, Abbe, Chevalier of the Royal Order of Elephants, Count of Tournay, purchaser of herbal discoveries, naturalist, mechanician, philosopher, watchmaker, patriarch of the valley, and inhabitant of the very building that served as inspiration for Fidelite's uninspired labor. The Abbe, whose many names and exalted titles will be dropped for the sake of narrator and reader alike, apologized for his inopportune arrival.
"I am sorry we could not come before the Widow struck," he said. "I had to secure the lightning pole."
The Abbe had come in the role of grand seigneur and scientist and was as decent (if muddled) an example of both as could be found in the lore of Tournay. He was a man of stout build, whose eyebrows curved toward each other like the rooftop thatching commonly associated with peasant huts of the region. Under these bushy eaves shone two little blue eyes magnified, once he was warm, by a pair of spectacles, through which he stared admiringly at the floral cuttings that hung from the rafters of the cottage. He had been fascinated by Madame Page's talents and diligence in the botanical arts ever since his arrival in the valley. Even at the end of winter, when most inhabitants longed for little more than the excesses of Carnival, Madame Page dreamed only of her rootings. From spring to fall, while others planted and harvested various grains and tended to livestock, she sought the fungi and flowers that sprouted in the forest and common lands, and the pungent herbs that clung to rocky hills. She dried this valley growth in the rafters of the cottage and dispensed it to all those in need. Her most recent patient had been Philippe Rochat's brown mare, which she treated for vives. (Poor Philippe never had much luck with horses after the disembowelment of his piebald pony.)
The Abbe paid handsomely for the medicines and comestible plants Madame Page picked. These he lovingly transferred to the mansion-house herbarium. Hopeless in systematics and incapable of sustaining the rigors of binomialism, the Abbe renamed the plants to accommodate his version of Linnaeus. He told his hostess that back in his storerooms he had a pot of pagewort "labeled such because both the plant and you, Madame, are tenacious little beauties."
She proved the point, grabbing the Abbe by the arm and pulling him to the fire. She exchanged his boots for aspen sabots and prepared one of her famous tisanes. The Abbe continued his inspection of the plant hangings, noting which wete bundled (savory, sage, tattagon) and which wete not (beatgtape, foxglove, wolfsbane). He was especially imptessed by the mushroom strings.
Fidelite had just rebuilt the cloister when her work was interrupted by a second rap at the door, this one executed with much greater assurance than the rap that had introduced the Abbe. A stranger came into the room. His dress, a long, sober cloak of Geneva cut, declared allegiance to the Reform Church. His manner was cold, though the Vengeful Widow breaking through the cottage's defenses added to the chill atmosphere. He did not smile, nor did he speak.
Madame Page ushered the stranger to the fire, where he reacted to what is surely one of life's more enjoyable circumstances—proximity to warmth on a frigid night — with the thankless silence of a stonecrust. He stamped his boots free of snow, causing the steeple and reconstructed cloister to tumble. This put an end, once and for all, to Fidelite's architectural efforts. Only after much hesitation did the stranger accept the use of borrowed clogs. He removed his boots and lined them alongside the smaller ones, neatening up the entire row. Then, with great care and economy of motion, he pulled off two layers of clothing simultaneously, keeping the sleeves of an inner gown in the sleeves of his sober cloak.
The Abbe and the stranger drank Madame Page's special birchwood tea but demurred on the pinecones. The Abbe interrogated his hostess about the stalks overhead, and she pointed out a beargrape diuretic and other efficacious cures. The stony stranger was not one for chitchat, and so he moved without comment to the table, where he heaved a large satchel clangor-ously onto its surface. He swept the cards to the floor with obvious disgust. Evangeline started to retrieve them but was warned away by the stranger's glare.
With a quick clearing of the throat and nod of the head, the stranger called on Madame Page and the Abbe to join him in a quiet corner of the cottage, where they talked in hushed tones. Fidelite's large ears, it must be said, were characteristic of all three Page children, and Claude, high in his perch, was able to pick up bits of the conversation.
''We must end the boy's discomfort," he heard the stranger say.
"He will object," came his mother's reply.
"It's not his place to object," the stranger said. "He must be rid of the Devil's handiwork."
With that, Claude's mouth went dry. The phrase declared the purpose of the visit. The mother's nodding and her gestures in the general direction of the attic intensified the boy's fears. The stranger returned to the table and started to unpack his satchel. He pulled from it a brace-and-bit, a hacksaw, a hammer, and a large wood file.
Evangeline thought the stranger was a carpenter. She was wrong, as subsequent tools proclaimed. The table was soon crowded with cumbersome bonesetter's gear, a vaginal fumigation pump (with letters patent), blood clamps, sealing wax, and a urethral probe, which looks as terrorizing today as it did back then, perhaps more so. The surgeon—for that was the stranger's profession—inspected a box of lancets and scrapes. Sensing that the Page household did not put much stock in table linen, he unrolled a piece of green baize of the kind used by moneylenders, leaders of the Terror, and enthusiasts of the card game ombre. On it he placed dossils, tents and plasters, compresses, bandages, bands, ligatures, and strings, spacing each with obsessive precision. He pondered the shiny cutlery and then draped a hernia belt with its tentacular strapping over the back of a chair.
Madame Page did not have much to say but did not wish to remain silent. Like many valley folk, she was susceptible to that most gnomic form of folk literature, the aphorism. At last she said, "Take care of the plow blade, and the plow blade will take care of you." This bid for conversation was not accepted by the surgeon. Madame Page looked at her son and soon after asked him to come down. Claude indicated resistance to that idea by launching a wild turnip.
Domestic Peace had ended.
Fidelite retrieved the missile and placed it in her mother's hand, ever the helpful child. She joined her mother in urging Claude to descend. He refused with even greater vehemence and augmented the aerial attacks. The Abbe hobbled forward in his oversized clogs and made various promises to the perch dweller. After the bribe was raised to a travel story and some sweets, Claude wrapped his feet around the uprights of the ladder and slid down, copybook clutched awkwardly under one arm.
He focused his attention on the surgeon, and the surgeon focused his attention on him. The surgeon was granted a more pleasant view. Claude was a long-necked ten-year-old whose most notable feature was a pair of large green eyes his mother likened to basil, a plant to which she declared special allegiance. He was a handsome, unmuscular boy, free of the skin diseases that blemished so many faces in the valley. His ears, as mentioned earlier, were large, though not nearly so large as Fidelity's. He was dressed simply and inattentively, and in normal circumstances exuded a contagious sense of wonder.
Not so Adolphe Staemphli, surgeon and citizen of Geneva. Staemphli was a man of impeccable disposition, but impeccable in the sense of Calvinist doctrine, meaning that he was free of sin. He held himself in the highest regard even if those around him did not. He was thoroughly convinced that his talents were unparalleled, and that his competence as a surgeon was proclaimed in the precision of his tools. He was a dour man given to excessive use of the imperative. "We must begin," he said.
The two combatants met at the table of tools. Claude attempted to grab a file, but the surgeon ended his curiosity by rapping him over the knuckles with the mahogany handle of the trepan, the instrument Evangeline had mistaken for a commonplace brace-and-bit. Claude started to cry, meekly at first, then more vigorously. Madame Page tried to comfort her son with another saying: "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb." But Claude was taking no chances. He ran to a dark corner of the room.
The surgeon said, "We must not let him bother us with his whimpering." He called for Fidelite to fetch a bucket of snow. The little weasel, who in normal circumstances wouldn't have lifted a ringer, popped out and in again faster than the cuckoo in a Black Forest wall clock. While the surgeon waited, he looked at the cards he had swept to the floor as one might look at some flyblown dung and said, "They come straight from Hell."
Claude, trying to mask terror in defiance, called out, "No, they come from Besanc,on." (Actually, they were printed in a German canton of Switzerland, but such details would do little more than encumber the story.) Claude emerged to pick up a playing card, the Grim Reaper, and thrust it in the surgeon's face. The surgeon was not pleased by the irreverence and knocked the card to the floor. It fell faceup near the table. The surgeon screwed up his features, which were unappealing even in their relaxed state, and turned to the cottage matriarch. His jaws, moving like forceps, announced, "It must be removed today. It must be removed now."
All that remained was to dissipate Claude's resistance. The surgeon put great store in the properties of the distilled juniper berry, a liquor named after his hometown and known today as gin. Madame Page had ideas of her own. She was not about to miss a chance to test her substantial, if provincial, repertoire. The surgeons grudgingly accepted her involvement, saying, "You may apply your remedy, but I must also apply mine."
Madame Page first considered mixing up a linden tisane, an antidote for insomnia. But on observing her son's excited state, she switched to a valerian brew. She pulled down a stalk and began to bruise it in her apron.
The Abbe observed intently. "An infusion?"
"No, this will need a different process to coax out the goodness." Madame Page mixed unidentified pinches, drams, and sprigs of vegetable matter into a gallon of small ale, which she heated very slowly. After much squirming, Claude drank both liquids, but neither the gin nor his mother's decoction diminished the boy's agitation. The Abbe entered a proposal of his own: opium. This provoked an argument. The surgeon wanted nothing to do with the dark-brownish cake the Abbe took from his pocket. Madame Page was less forthright, but also expressed hesitation. She was suspicious of foreign cures. The Abbe cited the Turks, who used the drug to urge the wounded into battle. Suddenly there was an inquiry from the corner.
"Turks from Constantinople?" Claude called out. He was inexplicably comforted. Soon after taking the bitter narcotic, Claude fell into a gin-valerian-ale-poppy-induced daze. Staemphli told the onlookers — sisters, mother, and even the Abbe— to move away. He then used the hernia belt to secure his pliant patient to the baize-covered table. The operation was at hand.
A bit of medical history. The year Claude went under the knife, the Imperial Court of China added fourteen young eunuchs to the household staff of the Emperor Ch'ien-lung (1711 — 1799). One of the fourteen, a boy named Wang, was taken to an anonymous operator in the ancient trade of eunuch-making. The boy was modified in a room not far from the gates of the Forbidden City. After the excision, the operator applied a paste of peppercorns and covered the wound with paper soaked in cold water. For this service he was paid, if one believes Jamie-son, the equivalent of eight dollars and sixty-four cents. Simultaneously, in Vienna, Herr Doktor Alfred Dreilich, working in his cabinet near the Stock im Eisen, removed the testicles of Heinrich Liitz, a youth who was to become a castrato celebrated for the fioritura in his renditions of Handel's operatic arias. And closer to Tournay, also in that year, a prize goat of the Golay brothers was made a ridgeling with a swift swipe of Matthew Rochat's meat cleaver.
Did Claude suffer similar severance? The answer is an emphatic: No!
The surgeon Staemphli came to remove a very small growth sprouting between the middle and the ring finger of Claude's right hand. It was neither a cyst nor a carbuncle, not a canker or a cancer, though it had been called all these names, and a dozen others besides. What it was was a humble mole. In itself, this would not have attracted Adolphe Staemphli. But when the surgeon learned that the mole bore a resemblance to the face of Louis XVI, that it often turned a royal scarlet (further tribute to the reigning monarch of France), and that it displayed an almost sculptural quality — when Adolphe Staemphli learned all of this, he decided he must investigate.