A case of curiosities (25 page)

The easiest selection was Plumeaux. Claude positioned one of the journalist's early works—a deist Utopia, The Code of Nature — in the first window. Etiennette, pleased to be represented by a logarithmic table, was a little disappointed to find that the print contained a mistake. (It seems that log 12 does not equal 1.0413927.) The coachman was grandly evoked with a banquet scene weighted down by two large serving spoons. "I can see the steam coming off the page," he said when he rolled in and saw the homage. Claude explained that the effect was caused by an uneven inking job.

Piero presented greater difficulties. After wasting much time, Claude narrowed his choice to the beauty of Buffon and the rigor of Reaumur, two scientists forever at odds. In the end, he selected Reaumur's 1749 treatise on taxidermy, which he held down with four fuzzy sawdust-stuffed chicks that pecked at the edges of the title page.

Filling Livre's window was trickier still; so many options presented themselves. An army of underpaid and abused chapbook engravers would have done up Livre's sputtering face in caricature free of charge. Alternatively, German print shops even then flooded the Paris market with coprophilic images that captured Livre's gastrointestinal obsessions. Both options were rejected. Claude wanted to suggest the paradox of Livre's habits, a paradox of elegance and grime. In the end, he picked a print of a newfangled sewage system that had inspired part of the garret restoration. The print revealed, in cross-section, a house and street displaying an elaborate drainage network that anticipated the flush toilet. Claude labeled it "The True Mysteries of Paris" and held the print down with one of Livre's enema pumps and the horsehair flywhisk.

One window remained empty. Claude dusted it, polished it with the appropriate glove, and washed its bubbled pane. Unfilled, the case haunted him. How would he represent himself?

Grappling with the nature of his own enthusiasms had never been easy. Expressing them was all but impossible. He leafed through the store's craft manuals in search of inspiration. He could find nothing that was quite right. He even returned to the plates of the Encyclopedic. (Livre had a much finer set than the mismatched volumes consulted in Tournay.) They still did nothing to inspire him. After pulling a half-hundred books from the shelves, he found a print that conveyed both mood and metier. He was dizzied by the image, repulsed and attracted simultaneously. It showed, in one corner, the shadow of a man overpowered by gears and pulleys, grilles and joists, bars, spirals, levers, catapults, and wheels. The engines, in isolation, might have recalled the magic of movement, the fluent purity of the flywheel, the confident click of the well-assembled clock. But the context suggested a scene of horror and oppression. The devices, in themselves so beautiful, were employed as instruments of torture. The gears and cables were turned through sweat and struggle, kept in motion by the grease of inhumanity. The print was small, the scale gigantic. The method by which the copperplate had been made, aquafortis, provoked thoughts of abandoned pursuits. The same liquid had served Claude in metalwork, as a menstruum for dissolving silver. He paused to recollect the time the Abbe had shown him how fumes would rise, red as blood, from the potent mixture of niter and calcined vitriol. The print Claude chose was saturated with incompatible thoughts about incompatible worlds.

CLAUDE spent the first week of his new freedom in ceaseless consultation with books he had never before had time to read. The liberties described in Plumeaux's deist Utopia were nothing compared to those he was now granted. Without Livre's interference, the apprentice found he had time both to delve into his own work and to satisfy the obligations of the Globe's customers. The latter were more than satisfied; they were charmed. Passersby bought and rented books and prints in increased numbers. This pleased Claude. Though he did not benefit directly from the profits of the Globe, the fullness of the monogrammed cashbox would defray any ill temper brought back by Livre.

At the end of one particularly profitable day, two weeks into Claude's temporary appointment, the brass doorbell announced the arrival of a new customer. It had been raining throughout the day, and business had been slow. Claude used the time to study the work of Louis XIV's toymaker, Frangois-Joseph de Camus. He put down the treatise and looked out across Livre's desk. He found he was staring at a woman of middle age, granting that such a benchmark was reached earlier in those years of precarious longevity. She was handsome and finely robed. Rain saturated her dress and hinted at the attentions of a cor-setiere. The woman removed a fur hat and said, "Please announce me to your master."

Glad for the break, Claude stood up and closed the Camus. He had struggled unsuccessfully to understand the mechanical rationale behind the friction coefficients described in the treatise. "The master is not in the shop at present, Madame."

"Are you his assistant?"

"I am apprenticed to him, yes. He is away investigating the principles of hydrodynamics." Claude took pleasure in the half-truth that obliquely described the enema pump evacuations for which Montserrat was known. (The attendants mixed the spring water with bran, milk, and brown sugar.)

The patroness glanced at the windows. She drummed her fingers above the print of gourmet delicacies that paid tribute to the coachman. There were small tarts, tiered assemblages of perfect fruits, squabs, and ducklings surrounded by a latticework of breads. There were rings of puddings and tiny souffles and a cake shaped like a hussar's hat. With the inclusion of powder horns and bugles, the whole arrangement suggested the pleasures of the hunt and the meal that follows.

"Is this to make your clients hungry?" she asked.

"Hungry enough to purchase the book in which it appears," Claude replied. "Would you like to see the work in its entirety?"

The patroness shook her head.

Claude looked more carefully. There was something . . .

"You did not tell me when your master will return," she said.

Staring intently, Claude replied, "He will be away for the next few weeks. I can, of course, assist you in whatever literary quest you may wish to undertake." These last words came off a pearl.

The patroness placed her hat on the case and reached into her handbag. "The quest, as you call it, is far from literary." She laughed nervously and confessed, "What I want is philosophical in nature." She glanced at the curtain. "I think it can be found back there." She consulted a dainty, gilt-edged pocket book filled with appointments. "Ah yes, here it is." She refused to utter the title. She pointed coyly: The Whore's Rhetoric.

Since she did not provide the password, Claude was forced to claim that he was unaware of the work in question, but that perhaps the proprietor could help upon his return. More awkwardness followed until the customer said, "Oh, I am to say 'vile habits.' Or is it something else?" She again consulted her pocket book. " 'Naughty habits.' There, I have said it. Now please provide me with the work in question."

The phrase jogged Claude's memory. 'He withdrew and quickly reemerged from behind the curtain, holding the book she sought. It was bound in simple cardboard. True to the pearls, Claude went through the various binding possibilities, starting, as Livre always insisted, with the most substantial expenditures. "The gilders have recently renewed their stocks of Armenian bole."

"The gilders and their bole do not concern me."

"And what about the binding? We have a special Spanish goatskin, Cordovan. Perhaps you wish a smooth calf?"

She shook her head.

"Smyrna morocco?"

"No."

"Straight-grain morocco in the English manner?"

"No."

"Oasis goat?" Claude extended the list, hoping to recall where he had seen the woman before. "Basil is nice. It is only slightly less durable than the morocco."

"No."

"Perhaps the pages could be boxed in shagreen from the workshop of the late Monsieur Galuchat?"

"No."

"Turkey leather?"

She raised an archless eyebrow. "The cardboard covers will do."

Claude teased on. "Python, or perhaps zebra? Just in, we have a special stock of penguin. Why not try the penguin?" (Piero was working on a stinking specimen of the flightless bird brought back from a widely publicized expedition to Patagonia.)

"I would like to rent the book, not purchase it outright," she said with finality. "Your master has us on account and provides the service of a lending library."

Etiennette confirmed the household's regular use of the collection, though it was the domestic who had previously picked up and delivered packages. Etiennette handled the rest of the transaction, entering the name of the patroness into the coded rental book. While this was taking place, Claude continued to comb his memory. She had not been in the shop before. He had not encountered net on his Friday founds. He dtew a blank.

Etiennette filled in the various elements of the agreement. The patroness inspected Claude intently, almost shamelessly, as if he were part of the merchandise in the store. She concluded the transaction by saying, "I will return the book next Thursday. I will know by then if it has been of use."

"Noted, Madame," Claude said, adding, "We look forward to your return."

The patroness smiled. It was at that moment that Claude remembered. The eyebrow had given him a hint, but the smile could leave no doubt. He walked her to the door. The bell rang, the door closed, and only the smell of the patroness's perfume lingered. Claude rushed to the back of the bookstore so quickly that he almost knocked over the celestial globe. Etiennette was sanding the ink in the rental book.

"Lift your hand! Her name! Let me see her name!" Claude was in shock when his feverish expectations were confirmed. He laughed, jumped about, sat for a few moments quietly, then jumped up again and laughed even more. The curious gestures were repeated throughout the afternoon. He danced with the wigless demoiselle, moving two of her wooden arms together and apart as he swept her around the back of the store. And while he danced, opening and closing the wooden extensions, he sang out, to no one in particular, "I have met the Portrait in Little."

Her full name was Alexandra Helene Hugon. Though cited in ecclesiastical documents and the registers of a Paris foundling hospital, she finds fullest representation in the sketches and scrawls of Claude's copybooks. Daughter to one wealthy wigmaker and wife to another, she was, for Claude, a reluctant muse during a turbulent stage of his mechanical and emotional advancement.

If Claude's love was not exactly blind, it suffered, at the very least, a nasty case of cataracts. Twenty seasons of wildflowers had bloomed and withered since the painting of the btowbound Potttait. To be sute, Alexandta Hugon was still atttactive, but thete were many imperfections Claude refused to see. Her complexion was no longer smooth. The pox had left widespread scarring that required the daily application of costly creams. Her eyebrows were not nearly so lush and defiant as the Portrait in Little suggested. Still, she had fire in her gaze and an enigmatic smile. Perhaps to compensate for the loss of youth, she acted and dressed in a manner that could only be called coquettish.

Claude tried to describe the miracle of the encounter to his friends but was incapable of expressing the full force of his rapture. It is unfortunate that they had not been present at the rendezvous. They might well have tempered his delirious glee.

Piero would have observed Madame Hugon's clothing with professional interest, recording the animals that had been killed to maintain her stylishness. The hat of white miniver was taken from the belly of the Siberian squirrel; the tasseled polonaise was produced by a colony of Italian silkworms; the corset was made, in part, from the baleen plates of a Greenland right whale harpooned amid the ice floes of the Arctic; the handbag was covered in skin stripped from an ostrich that had once plodded over the arid scrub of Angola; the buttons were sawed from a roebuck's antlers; the common bits of leather were taken off a cow; the cosmetic grease came from a pig. The musky smell Claude picked up as Madame Hugon left the store had been squeezed from the anal pouch of a civet. Her costume, in short, was a taxidermist's dream.

Plumeaux, in contemplating Madame Hugon's intellectual and domestic ornaments, would have found no less interesting a specimen, one that encapsulated the momentary enthusiasms of late-eighteenth-century France. When the writings by an American inventor—the same inventor, by the way, who so bothered the Abbe with the business of the glass harmonica— proved popular in Paris, Madame Hugon bought all his books and finagled a brief and inconsequential meeting with the aged colonial at a house in Passy. When all of Paris watched the Montgolfier brothers' bag of buttoned-up wallpaper float above the city, Madame Hugon paid a latge sum for a cushioned seat in the Tuileries to witness a launching that laborers throughout the city could see just as well for free. When the battles raged between Gluckists and Piccinnists, Madame Hugon was present, boxed and beautiful, at the most important operatic performances, adding insights on the significance of Iphigenia in Tauris that she had cribbed from a musical almanac. And when it was of the moment to pay big fees for a dubious medical treatment that necessitated bondage in leather strapping and submersion in oaken tubs, Madame Hugon dutifully had herself tied up in leather strapping and submerged in oaken tubs.

Whether it was Benjamin Franklin, ballooning, music, or Mesmer, Alexandra Helene Hugon was a fashionable woman in the old sense of the term; that is, in maintaining rank above the vulgar and below nobility. Her days were filled with lyceum appointments, violin lessons, and trips to the local pornographer.

Madame Hugon brought back the rented book as she had promised, but not the following Thursday, or even Friday, which made Claude more than a little despondent. It was only toward the end of Saturday that she finally reappeared. Claude was working on the upcoming salon lecture Livre had encouraged him to prepare. While running errands the day before, he had tracked down a new sound, that of the burrelfly caught in the matted mane of a cart horse. He was now working on the sound's re-creation, scribbling notes under the heading of Bombylious Buzzes, when Madame Hugon entered and put the rented book down in front of the droning apprentice, who had failed to hear the bell.