A case of curiosities (40 page)

Before making introductions, the matron of the bureau clarified the guidelines of employing her women. The cost of lodging, linen, and a daily wage were only the first items on a lengthy list that included "other options and eventualities." The matron could, for a fee, attend to the details of baptism: the priest, godfather, and clerk, as well as the subsequent supper. She overlooked no detail, ending with a description of the contingencies if the child were to "die at the nipple." After the little speech, she took Claude to see the available wet nurses.

The selection was vast. It was a slow month for breast feeding, and the women present were eager to join the working population. One by one, they revealed themselves. Some were bashful in their exhibitions, others less so. Claude was shocked by the unexpected variety. The prints that inspired the Hours of Love always kept the bosom to fruitlike shapes: pears and apples mostly, though some had the globical dimensions of Seville oranges. Here were spheroids of a kind he had never seen, distended and reshaped by the assaults of lactation and age. The scene evoked an image of a fountain goddess in the hydraulic gardens of the Villa d'Este.

Close inspection betrayed the reason for many of the women's unemployment. Claude observed scabs of varying size, suggesting maladies he did not wish to have transmitted to his child. Only one woman seemed promising, but it turned out she was reduced to using a tobacco pipe for a sucking-glass because of sunken nipples. She was tried out but failed to nourish the little girl. Claude turned down each proffered breast in turn and left the establishment in a hail of derision.

As Agnes reached the garret, she again expressed hunger unequivocally. This time, thankfully, there was professional intervention to mitigate the fumblings of the father and his inexperienced friend.

"What's this?" Marguerite asked. She had heard the unfamiliar cry and had to come to investigate. She immediately cradled the child in her arms, explaining that she had been visiting her family, bakers in Gonesse.

Claude described the circuit he had traveled before hearing the little bell that confirmed that Agnes was born out of his liaison with Alexandra. He further told of the miserable demise of his ex-lover and the distressing conditions of the Bureau des Nourrices, trying to provoke in Marguerite as much sympathy as he could muster. It wasn't necessary. She rocked the child and soon after proffered her breast. Perhaps because of the newfound intimacy, Marguerite talked about her husband, something she had never done before. She had married young and happily. But that happiness ended when a carriage accident took the lives of both husband and six-month-old son. Forced to choose between placing herself in the service of mariners seeking dockside frolics or infants in need of milk, she chose* the more youthful and less complicated expression of corporal greed. She spoke without righteousness or rancor, adding that at times she seemed to derive as much nourishment from the infants as the infants derived from her. Claude took.comfort in her casual wisdom.

While Marguerite kept Agnes occupied, Claude made a gesture of fatherly love. He took a small brandy cask, a firkin emptied by the coachman and the Abbe, and removed half the staves. He tried to hoist it by tying a butt sling, but when this failed to do the trick, he resorted to a simpler knot secured to the rims, then hung the firkin from the ceiling.

"That will make a lovely cradle," Marguerite said, enchanted by his efforts. "But how will I know if she cries?" This was the first indication that the wet nurse would take on the child's welfare. Claude thought for a moment and then began to extend a length of copper tubing from the rocker to Marguerite's window. Later, when Marguerite put her ear to the end of the tube, she could discern a gurgling and the tinkle of Agnes's little bell.

Livre's stratagem for the misery of his former apprentice backfired. The arrival of little Agnes gave Claude an even greater sense of satisfaction and brought him closer to his friends. They were all on hand to help: Piero, Plumeaux, the coachman, the Abbe.

The Abbe installed himself on the third floor of Claude's building, in the rooms once occupied by the journeyman joiner. His lodgings were spacious enough to accommodate the coachman when Lucille was stabled in Paris. The landlady, a widow, did not hesitate to rent to the two unmarried men. Thus installed, the Abbe helped Claude with the project, that is, when he wasn't fighting with the others for the affection of a little girl.

The competition was good-natured but fierce. It began after Claude tied a carved ivory ball above the firkin. Piero added a fan of iridescent feathers that had come from Guinea. The Abbe put up a miniature note-roll that Agnes's groping hands could lower and raise like a shade. The coachman attached his favorite drinking cup. The items banged against each other and made the child laugh.

The stakes were raised. Piero stitched Agnes a husk-stuffed doll topped with a wig of human hair, his own. He wanted to steal the lay figure's calico clothes, but Marguerite chastised him. "And let our wooden friend freeze naked in the corner?" A week later, she had sewed the doll a suit from some scraps of checkered cloth.

The Abbe responded by performing the Miracle of the Aerostatic Egg. He blew out a quail egg and dried the shell. He then covered the aperture with a thin coat of sealing wax. He placed the shell on a stand and lit a small flame under it. The wax melted, and the shell floated to the ceiling. The trick amused the adults as much as it did the child. At the end of the demonstration, the coachman asked, "What happened to the egg? I would have liked to drink it down."

Clearly, there was a mood of inventiveness among the residents of the Rue St.-Severin. The mood was spurred by Agnes, and, of course, by the plan.

49

THE copybook, difficult to decode even when Claude was feeling disposed to clarity, is in this period all but impossible to decipher. Ideas take off in many directions. They fork, merge, jump, spiral up and down the page, trail off, stop, and start again. In the most general terms, his work involved strands of mechanical, musical, and anatomical investigation, though Claude himself never made such distinctions.

The first category, mechanics, had been worked on extensively during the winter trip. And, while there was much still to be done, Claude did not consider the obstacles insurmountable. This is why, once resettled in Paris, he devoted himself to musical matters that had been sparked long before by a sour note from an oboe.

Ever since the recital, Claude had pondered the versatility of the humble reed. He discussed the phenomenon with instrument makers — those who were willing to talk — and conducted experiments in his garret. He tried to replicate the bizarre sounds he had heard while pressed against the balustrade. He briefly considered an invitation from the reed grower in Languedoc to visit his fields but turned down the offer because of the cost of travel. Instead, he limited himself to the workshops of Pans. His copybook reveals rendezvous with at least thirty instrument makers.

Claude tested the scrape reed and the free reed and clamped a whole tribe of grasses against various joints. The initial research was encouraging. In just a few weeks, he was able to replicate an ahhh sound by placing a slightly moistened reed between the grips of a modified jeweler's chuck. He had hoped that fjhhhs and ehhhs would follow. They did not. Claude dropped the grass reed and tested substitutes: whalebone, lancewood, and other elastic laminae. Finally, he experimented with metal.

Metal was less finicky. Sound that could be produced once could easily be repeated. And though barometric compensations had to be worked out, it was still easier than moistening strips of stiff grass with saliva and tgg white. He consulted a local organ maker who had apprenticed under Levebre. This research yielded two modified shallots and valves, which in turn produced some less than necessary sounds. The copybook reveals that it was in this period that Claude produced his first mechanico-musical fart.

He studied numerous systems of bellows. He fiddled with acoustic pistons that altered the effective length of the resonating air column. He tested countless horns. He found a Bohemian musician and instrument maker who had extended the compass of brass instruments, but this only lowered the range of sounds already obtained. An entire section of the copybook is crossed out, the same barnyard expletive scrawled over each page. At one point, Claude returned to Kratzenstein's "Essay on the Birth and Formation of Vowels," the first work he had inspected in the mansion-house library. It provided nothing more than a fruitless detour into the study of a Chinese instrument called the cheng.

Claude's path doubled back. Once again, he stared at a table lined with stalks of Arundo donax, the annoyingly fickle reed. He conducted more tests. He split the feeds in new ways, wedged them, hollowed them out, and moistened them with a variety of liquids. He used new chucks that were made of maple, box, pine, and willow. The willow, the copybook reveals, came from a scrap of prosthetic leg a woodcarvet had turned for a victim of gangtene.

Still, Claude's work did not advance. He noted that the feeds were dry when he bought them, and wondered whether freshly cut stalks might aid his work. He discussed the matter with the Abbe, who encouraged him to follow his hopes wherever they led, even if that meant taking a trip "down there," the Abbe's shorthand reference for the marshes of Languedoc. "Fresh stalks might spur fresh ideas. Go. Go.'"

Claude wrote the property owner to whom he had written before. Again the reply was encouraging. The letter ended with a felicitous phrase. "Come, Monsieur. We have fields of tongue wood [presumably, the correspondent's term for the reed]. We have flagstones, and we have shaded walks that are damp with inspiration." (Or perhaps the word was Aspiration: the paper was cockled, the writing illegible.) After much hesitation and some sobering calculation of cost, Claude traveled to the south of France in pursuit of a slender strip of vegetable matter that he hoped would allow him to produce a very special kind of sound.

There were no flagstones; there were no shaded walks. Claude was a victim of a host's hyperbole and a region's inhospitable heat. The moisture could be seen rising from the field, which was really a formless bog into which the untended property had sunk. "Property," too, is a misnomer. It was, in truth, a cottage owned by a man indisposed with a bout ot marsh rever. All Claude heard from his host was the chatter of teeth through a bedroom door. The servant entrusted to remove a pot of yellow excreta each morning did not explain the discrepancy between epistolary promise and pestilential fact.

Claude was shown a sparsely furnished, room — a bed crudely demonstrating mortise-and-tenon joinery, a bench of similar quality, a cracked ewer, and a drinking cup coated with green film—for which the servant suggested, with conviction, a substantial sum should be paid. Claude accepted the arrangement. He had no choice but to accept. The following day, he set out for the bog, hoping to turn sweat into acoustic sweetness.

He waded valiantly through the fetid water. For days, he lacerated his hands on the reeds, until he fashioned a kind of gauntlet with blades affixed to the ends. But there were other problems to overcome. Leeches attached their suckers to his body, forcing him to spend long afternoons applying salt and tallow to his legs and arms.

When the various reeds were harvested, Claude arranged them along the windowsill, on the bench in his room, and against the tiles near the cottage's overgrown garden. He submerged some, dried others, and then performed his tests. On a muggy afternoon, while waist-deep in marsh water, his legs swollen by bloodsuckers, his pocket emptied by the servant (a leech of a human kind), Claude realized that the secrets of Arundo donax would not reveal themselves. He threw down a stalk of grass and watched it float away. "Like my hopes," he wrote in a letter to the Abbe that announced his return home. "Not a single usable sound has emerged down here."

He reached Paris nine melancholic days later, having taken a slow coach to reduce cost. Though he had pulled himself from the bog, he found he was in a spiritual mire by the time he joined his friends and daughter. The cost of the trip—and cost must be understood in its various meanings — had dispirited him. He avoided his workbench and took to sitting at the back of the nearby church for hours at a time, comforted by its coolness. The visits ended, however, whenever the bellows of an organ started to heave. The sound recalled the pneumatic inadequacies of his plan. Back in the garret he wrote: "It has been popularly held that music is an efficacious cure for melancholia. Sadly, this is not the case. I must look elsewhere for a remedy." He spent whole days wandering the collections of the Maurist Benedictines of St. Germain des Pres. He found comfort, like Boucher, in observing bottled butterflies and brightly colored stones, though he agreed with Piero that most of the reptiles on display looked like bolsters with legs. "And that ray over there reminds me of a pancake with a tail."

Claude mercilessly reviewed his copybook, hoping that buried in the annotated birdcalls and ruminations on the effects of spittle, the secrets of sound would reveal themselves. They did not. At one time, the jottings had provided no small satisfaction, but such sentiments were no longer with him. Thoughts that had jumped across the pages, around the margins, and onto the backs of loose bits of scrap refused to conjoin. They were notes and nothing more.

Plumeaux sympathized. "I suffer the same problem in my writing."

Claude was in no mood to pursue the parallel. He asked to be left alone. "I cannot gain control of my thoughts. They spin wildly," he said.

"Do not try," the Abbe replied. 'The revelations you seek aren't born like flies from butcher's scraps. They arise from the violent copulation of opposing thoughts, the mix of contrary materials and moods."

Claude sighed.

The Abbe continued. "A dram of anxiety, a pinch of wonderment, and a keg of determination is the recipe for invention."

"But I have deceived myself."

"So? Belief, even if it is wrongheaded, will propel you closer to the act of creation. Creation demands such self-deception. Without it, you will construct nothing of consequence. The paradox is this: Truth must emerge from sustained self-deception. Or, to put it another way: Distance destroys intensity, and without intensity you cannot approach truth."