A case of curiosities (20 page)

Claude walked around the room. "What is this?"

"An urubu," Piero said. "A South American vulture. After that is done, I must stuff the first sheep to fly in a Montgolfier balloon, and a tableau of one of Buffon's most famous studies."

"Which one?"

"The virgin bitch."

Claude was impressed. He wondered if the water rats he had seen in a covered gallery were Piero's work.

"Dressed in tailored red satin? At the sign of the double scissors? Yes, they are mine. But I can tell you that I didn't have anything to do with the fading of the fur. The proprietor put them in the sun before the rats had properly dried." Piero was an insecure fellow. He spent a few unnecessary minutes explaining a discoloration Claude had not noticed. Then, in an act of reciprocal curiosity, Piero asked to see Claude's rooms. From the moment Piero entered, he could tell there was little to admire in the untended lodgings, grimly furnished as they were. His interest rose, however, when he noticed some objects arranged in a niche below the beams, which seemed to be part shrine, part reliquary. Piero liked the lay figure and the Portrait in Little.

"And who is she?" Piero asked.

Claude lied, transforming the garlanded beauty into a lover he had left far away. After that, he spoke of his other love, of gears and things mechanical.

Perhaps the biggest epistolary deception concerned the circumstances in which Claude obtained the trade card he sent his mother. As might be guessed, he had not found employment in the workshop of Abraham-Louis Breguet, though it was not for want of trying. Back and forth from street to shopfront he had roamed in search of work. He circumnavigated the boat-shaped Cite, peering through the polished windows of goldsmiths, spectacles sellers, and watchmakers. Thirty-six inquiries and thirty-six rejections. The responses included mockery, disdain, contempt, unspoken hostility, spoken hostility, and once, only once, pity. The last reaction came from an assistant at the Breguet workshop on the Quai de l'Horloge. It was he who handed Claude the trade card that was sent to Madame Page. The assistant had shown him Breguet s private workbench, on which there were plans for a grande complication.

"It is for the Queen!" the assistant said. "And it will have sapphire pallets and rollers, bridges and wheels in gold, a platinum winding weight, and every ingenuity known to man." Claude was rendered speechless by the complex purity of the watch. Afterward the assistant said he would be happy to share some wine and advice, but Claude passed up the opportunity, worrying about the cost.

Plumeaux later scolded his friend. "You entered the city with no letters of introduction, and though you may have talent, talent alone means nothing. Your competence in the domain of self-promotion is at present woefully undeveloped. Next time a drink is suggested, you buy the assistant a drink."

So Claude bought round after round, cutting into what little money he had. He found the accompanying talk depressing. Few of the men seemed interested in barometric compensation or gear cutting. They talked instead of guild laws and poor pay. He would turn the conversation to subjects that proved his talents, but the craftsmen laughed at his earnest fascinations, preferring to gossip about some competitor.

These men weren't watchmakers, Claude concluded; they were dial painters and pallet makers and gear cutters. Behind the restrained faces of the Breguets he so admired, behind the Le-pines and Le Roys, hid the handiwork of a pool of underpaid and anonymous craftsmen who cared little about the advancement of their craft. They were piecework professionals, that was all.

In that first month, during the long hours when he had nothing to do and little to dream about, Claude spent his time at the poultry market. There he could breathe in the odors of the countryside and reflect upon his urban exile. The market was filled with cages barely larger than the squawking birds they contained. He appreciated the birds' plight.

On the day he wrote the letter home, Claude had watched as men used their fingers to stuff pigeons and larger birds with vetch. One seller even blew meal down his birds' throats. At the end of the day, the same man squeezed the birds' gizzards to save the undigested grain. The fowl inspector, identified by the feather in his hat, laughed at the spectacle that so upset Claude.

He left the poultry market to rest under the Pont Neuf. While dozing off, he observed a colony of spiders, which, unconvinced of the bridge's stability, slipped down to connect their webs to the spans of the arch. In the middle of his repose, Claude discovered a scabby hand burrowing through his satchel. A fight ensued, and after some scuffling, Claude overpowered his antagonist with a random but effective application of punches. The fight added to his loathing for the city. In the course of the skirmish, he had fallen into a deep puddle that stained his only pair of breeches. He saw in the damp spot all that the city had become for him: a blend of spilled wine, window-tossed refuse and excrement from half a million backsides, worm casings, the evacuations of rats, and the mutings of diseased pigeons, all of it pounded, by the hooves of horses and iron-nailed boots of men, into a thick and acrid paste. It seems unnecessary to note that the stain could not be removed.

This is what Claude was considering when he wrote to his mother. This is why he lied, why he reinvented the circumstances he endured. Contemplating the letter in the darkness of his room, he worried that the postscript quotation from Matthew would distress his mother. After much groping, he lighted the tallow candle and reread what he had written. He decided to leave the postscript. He walked around the attic, as much as the squat space would allow him to walk, and stood in front of his niche of earthly possessions. For a long time, he stared at The Mechanical Christ. The slotted cover was empty. The coins had been spent. He looked at the frontispiece image and mimicked the outstretched arms and downcast eyes. It was at that moment that the world opened up to him. Or, more exactly, the Globe.

BY lowering his eyes as he did, Claude's gaze fell on the name of the printer of the mechanical treatise. "Published by L. Livre at the Sign of the Globe. Paris." Claude's reaction was, Of course, how stupid. In his quest for work, he had overlooked his link with the pornographer.

The next morning, he discussed the matter with Plumeaux, who was just ending a night of whoring and anticipating the pleasures of sleep. Groggily, he told Claude what he knew of Livre. "We populate the same demimonde of printed scandal. I have written for his associates when my finances demanded it."

Claude described his single encounter with the bookseller.

"I would caution against renewing the acquaintance," Plumeaux said. The words "pedant" and "exploiter" figured in the description that followed. "Do not pursue his assistance."

Claude, however, was desperate. "I only want him to direct me to a mechanician's workshop. He has published on such matters in the past."

"That was long ago," Plumeaux said. "As you know, he has since changed his line."

Claude would not be deterred. He wove his way through the streets of the printing district, searching for "L. Livre at the Sign of the Globe." He passed oblivious through lanes teeming with hawkers of jest books and inexpensive merriments until he found the store. The front of the establishment bore an outdated terrestrial map that denied the antipodean discoveries of Captain Cook and La Perouse. Inside, Claude could see elegant shelving and, naturally enough, books. The onetime mansion-house guest was arranging a display dominated by a copperplate picture of a bird. Claude took it as a good omen that he knew the winged creature's story. Piero had told him of the much-discussed Si-murg, a Persian bird said to have the power of speech and reasoning. The explorer who captured it did not speak or understand Simurgian, and, more tragic still for the ornithologists and linguists of the day, the bird had died before reaching Paris. Piero had been invested with the honor of stuffing the unique specimen. Claude had remembered all of this because it provided a link to his father's Oriental anecdotes.

The bookseller emerged from his shop to arrange a stall outside, his meticulously shaved jaws and oversized wig moving independently of each other as he bent down to give order to the books disrupted by passersby. Livre was exempt from even the most minute messiness in his attire. Yet there was something coarse about his neatness and something coarse about the man. Perhaps it was that he paused more than once to spit prodigiously into the street. (He saved his handkerchief for more formal occasions.) Claude reintroduced himself to the man the Abbe called the Phlegmagogue.

Livre sputtered a bit and said, "Ah yes, Page, I remember. Wait here." The bookseller entered the shop and pulled from a cubbyhole in his desk the thin-ruled octavo booklet Claude had seen at the mansion house. He reemerged, saying, "Page, Claude, apprentice to the Count of Tournay. The boy of genius and talent." He sucked his teeth and looked Claude over. The bookseller was sharp enough to conclude that there was a little too much eagerness in his manner to suggest anything but a request. Claude was Need incarnate. Livre withheld the obvious questions or offers of assistance. Claude kept looking at the print of the bird, and Livre, as he had hoped, asked, "What does the genius make of it?"

Following advice Plumeaux had dispensed in another context, Claude tossed humility aside. He praised the display and the quality of the engraving. Then he recited an embellished history of the Simurg—its manner of feeding, a description of its organ of generation, and its nesting habits. "I find it of considerable interest that it mates on the wing." He described the circumstances of the bird's capture and the nature of its near-human call. "Birdcalls are an ancillary interest of mine." Claude squirted out knowledge the way his mother worked the teats of the family milch cow.

Livre asked Claude into the shop. "And brush your feet on my doormat." There was a spotless but frayed rectangle of sisal into which the monogram of the bookseller had been woven.

Claude thought he had wiped enough, but Livre, through a series of wheezes and coughs, expressed a contrary opinion, and so Claude returned to the mat for some supplementary twists and scrapes.

A bell rang as they entered the Globe. Claude looked around and found that the doormat motif was repeated throughout the shop. Double L's appeared on a bowl, a stack of bookplates, a small rug.

Books were arranged by size and subject: quarto with quarto, folio with folio, mechanical opuscule with mechanical opuscule. There were no precarious, pyramid-shaped temples rising from the floor. Books stamped with grotesques and curlicues were arranged so that the gilded spines formed neat patterns against the walls. Even the potentially awkward stacks of unbound material were brought under control. The various decrees, addresses, acts, laws, and letters to the King were all constrained by ribbon. The shelves proclaimed more than the categorical rigor that characterized the century. Here was the apotheosis of Order and Discipline, the product of Homo hierarchicus in his most advanced state. Here was Lucien Livre.

In the middle of the shop, on a floor of white-and-black hexagonal tile, rose an alley of cabinets topped by a set of glazed display cases. "My windows," Livre said. "They give my books a worthy home, though, as you know, most of the special works are held out of view. Behind that curtain." His finger pointed to a length of serge flanked by two massive globes.

The front of the shop was dominated by the bookseller's dovecoted mahogany desk. A piece of twine ran across the top and was hung with little slips of paper that looked like the ensigns of some naval vessel or a Lilliputian's laundry. (A translation of Gulliver's Travels was part of the Globe's permanent collection.)

Livre said, "Since you have brought neither news nor watches from the Count, I assume you no longer are in his employ. Just as well. He has breached his agreements with me and owes a substantial sum. He did not even send back the Portrait in Little, for which I am held responsible. His creditors will catch up with him soon enough." Claude contained his pleasure at learning of the Abbe's misfortune and approaching prosecution, even if for a lesser crime than murder. He briefly considered handing Livre the Portrait, but decided that that would raise too many questions.

Claude tried to emulate the bookseller's stilted speech. "As you note, I am no longer in his employ."

Livre said, "I also assume you have come because you are desirous of a new position. Is that so?"

Claude nodded.

"Just as I thought. I may be able to help."

Was it to be that easy? Would the bookseller direct him immediately to a watchmaker?

Livre justified Plumeaux's accusations of pedantry: "I will not undertake to assess the veracity of your comments regarding the fabled Simurg. The veracity matters little to me. Let me see that hand." Livre winced. "We will have to cover up its horrendous malformation. How tall are you?"

Claude had a hard time following the motives behind the bookseller's inquiry but did not wish to jeopardize the potential patronage. He answered, "Two and a half feet."

"Come again? By what measure?"

"By the measure of the mansion house. We employed the Constantinopolitan foot."

A woman's voice rose from the back of the store: "That would be roughly twice as long as the Paris foot, if I remember my tables."

Claude saw a plume moving behind the terrestrial globe, just off the coast of India.

Livre shouted, "Just tell me how tall he is here, in Paris."

A quill scratched, and after some calculation, the woman's voice announced, "A bit over five feet, by the measure of the city."

"The enumerator in the back," Livre said by way of introduction, "is my cousin Etiennette." He called out, "A cousin who has too much work to intrude upon our proceedings!" He turned to Claude. "She serves as bookkeeper to my Globe and has a few additional chores to justify the huge wages I pay her. So, just over five feet. That is fine. You will fit into the livery."

Claude's confusion ended when Livre stated what had been, until then, implied: "You are pleasing enough, I suspect, to attract the attention of the ladies. Your accent declares your non-Parisian roots, but that can be eradicated. As I said to your former master, a Page belongs in a bookseller's shop. You seem worthy of my attentions. I will petition the guild for your apprenticeship. Since I have no indentured assistant at the moment, I do not think approval will be difficult."