A case of curiosities (41 page)

Claude grew irritable. "Enough of your incomprehensible litanies. They confused me in my youth. They confuse me now."

The Abbe, knowing he could say no more, retreated to his lodgings. He sat in a special chair Claude had made that held books, note-rolls, a candlestick, a remedy tray, and a folding gout stool. The chair was connected to a network of wires that controlled a system of specular and funicular communication. In simple terms, the Abbe could pass notes and watch his student work. (Oral links required nothing more than a loud voice directed into the courtyard.) The Abbe observed Claude desperately pore over his copybook. He sent notes of encouragement to the garret, but they were ignored. Agnes was relocated because of her father's distress. The cries bothered him. A new cask, a kilderkin, was hung in the wet nurse's lodging since Agnes had outgrown the original firkin cradle.

Claude was not an attractive sight. He fidgeted for hours at a time, lifting one buttock, then the other, scratching his scalp, twisting his hair, pulling out a few strands and wrapping them around his finger. He rubbed his hand in his sweaty armpit and sniffed the secretions. (He had once tested the effects of suint, the dry perspiration of sheep, on reeds, but that hardly explains the odd behavior.) He suffered eyestrain, a blistered bottom, and an expanding range of nervous tics. He picked his nose, probed his ears, and scraped the film that covered his teeth. He now grimaced and clutched his testicles even when not in bed.

He soon stopped leaving the garret, worried that if he were to go out, he might never return. Proximity to his work, he told himself, was the only way he could hold on to what he had accomplished. He took to dropping a wicker basket from his window. Marguerite would fill it with food from Madame V. He would then crank it up and eat in a state of profound despair. There was one twenty-four-hour period when he did nothing but spin a Granchez top. The deceleration and instability of the toy entranced him.

Marguerite tried to intervene. She polished his smudged loupe with her apron and offered a hundred other kindnesses. He rebuffed her, suppressing a hidden attraction.

"Sometimes," she said, "I think I care for two infants, not one."

Claude refused to recognize her concern. It was not lost on the Abbe. "You are a fool to reject her," he told Claude. "She seems to understand the mechanism by which you are driven. I may have taught you how to think, but it is that young woman, that delightfully headstrong wet nurse, who will teach you to feel."

He told the Abbe to leave. Finally, Marguerite rebuked him. Through the dormer of Claude's garret, she tossed a package tied with twine. Inked across the wrapping was a single word: "Regarded

Claude unwrapped the package and found that it contained a pootly leaded pocket mirror. He followed her instruction, and looked at it, taking in the stubble on the sallow face, the lines of dirt, the creases of worry, the fierce glare.

He rubbed his neck compulsively, and as he rubbed he started to cry. Suddenly he stopped. Not the rubbing. The rubbing continued, but the crying ended. He stared at the movement of his fingers on his throat. He stuck out his tongue and wiggled it back and forth. He hummed. His eyes relaxed slightly, and his mouth curved upward. For the first time in many months, Claude smiled.

50

HE studied his features for more than an hour, smiling occasionally while lifting himself out of grief. He inspected his throat, observed the movement of his jaw, and checked the passage of air through his nose and mouth. He opened his copybook and began to separate sounds by working through the alphabet. He noted how his lips hissed the C and spit out the P, how certain parts of his head moved (jaw, tongue, velum), while others remained stationary (the back of the voice box, teeth, hard palate). Residents of the building looked up from the courtyard, perplexed by the odd sound. They had come to expect oddity from the garret but not clicks, kisses, and screams, or raucous solitary laughter.

This was the start of Claude's anatomical investigations. He had Plumeaux find a rare and costly print by Dagoty of a flayed throat in shades of red, blue, yellow, and bister. It accompanied Court de Gebelin's tantalizingly titled but intellectually specious Natural History of Speech. He spent hours looking at the print, at his own throat, and again at the print, all the time vocalizing strangely and scribbling intently. In chart after chart, Claude categorized sounds by those that relied on the lips, those that used the tip of the tongue, those that depended on palatal movements. His daughter's cry, a distraction just one week earlier, now served as overture to a day of directed research.

He started once more to leave the garret. He traveled to the slaughterhouses of the Faubourg St.-Martin and spoke with a master gut spinner. The French had cut down on tennis and war, so racquet strings and surgical .sutures—the two principal uses of gut, outside the concert hall—were not much in demand. The spinner answered questions on how the ordure was pressed from the casing, how the gutstring was washed and dried, scraped and spliced and stretched. Carrying large supplies of the prepared substance wrapped around his neck, Claude returned to his lodgings, where he conducted further tests.

Inspiration came in unexpected moments and places. At a show of pasteboard marionettes, part of the Count of Beaujo-lais's Petits Comediens, Claude devised an arm joint—a bead stop connected to a ball-and-socket—while his daughter laughed at brutal simplicities performed inside a closet-sized stage. Of course, there were still setbacks. When Claude removed the hyena's trachea from a jar, he was forced to toss it away immediately. Even Piero, normally immune to malodorousness, was sickened by the stench it produced. In fact, all of the jarred material gathered from the devastated collections of the Genevan surgeon proved worthless. (The confirmation of larval infestation was gleefully announced by the Abbe, who read aloud from an article in the journal of the Geneva Academy.)

The garret soon took on the quality of a butcher shop of the bizarre. Gizzards, intestines, the flexible gullet of the crane used to distend sound, inflated fish bladders that anticipated the rubber balloon—all were tested for their aural potential.

Until, that is, Claude turned to human anatomy. Sitting unobtrusively in the highest reaches of a dissecting theater at the Academy of Surgery, he squinted through a monocular as a surgeon unrolled an auditory nerve and pinned it to a piece of cork. The surgeon quoted Meckel Junior's De Labyrinthi Auris and described the holes and blebs that serve the receptive end of sound. Claude also endured a tedious cycle of lectures on the formation of speech. A head lecturer—reference to both the object of his attention and his status within the Academy— likened the whole of the human body to a chronometer. The metaphor was derivative of Descartes, Newton, Voltaire, and La Mettrie, all of whom had used the language of clockwork more elegantly. "Let us," the head lecturer said, "direct our attention to the chimes, the mechanism of the human voice."

Claude's hands, like those of certain clocks, temained motionless until a casual remark provoked a scribble in the copybook. Sparked by a recollection of some earlier research, Claude wrote just two words before rushing from the dissecting theater, oblivious to the stares of those around him. To use another watchmaker's term — and one that would soon be embraced by a new constituency — Claude's thinking underwent a revolution. This refers to more than his refinement of rotary motion, Greek trochilicks, and the marvels of the cam. Metaphor and method converged, and in that convergence the young engineer envisioned the sounds of his mighty invention.

What caused that convergence? How did he advance the reproduction of sound? As Plumeaux would later observe, "Claude Page succeeded where others had failed by making a synchronic discovery, by combining disparate skills and coordinating previously unconnected observations. In more practical terms, what allowed him to produce his special sounds was gearwork connected to a set of bellows, a half-dozen reeds, some metal, and a mouthpiece."

And all of it was sparked by two words. What were they?

Vaucansoris lips.

A clarification. THE lips were not, in point of fact, Vaucanson's. His do not merit mention, since they were, if one accepts the rendering by Budelot, so small as to lack conviction. Furthermore, by the time Claude found inspiration in the dissecting theater, Vaucanson's lips had been buried with the rest of him in a trompe I'oeil chapel called the Souls of Put-gatory. No, the lips that inspired, the lips that all but spoke to Claude Page, appeared on one of the dead man's inventions.

After a few brilliant years of tinkering, Vaucanson had — in Claude's estimation, anyway—squandered his talents on agricultural and industrial contraptions: chaff cutters, horseless plows, silk-winding machines. To be sure, these won the attention of an international audience of engineers (Watt was particularly effusive), and Vaucanson was provided with teams of woodturners and locksmiths who came up with fine productive mechanisms that no one now remembers. But for Claude, Vaucanson's genius—a word that surfaces rarely in the copybook— was present only in the design of three automats he made as a young man in the 1730s, soon after moving to Paris. Claude predicted, "Vaucanson's defecating duck will live in the memory of the mechanically minded long after his patented pieces of agricultural machinery rust away to nothing in the depot of the Hotel de Mortagne."

Of the three automats, the duck was clearly the most engaging, a triumph of mechanical whimsy. It paddled, quacked, ate, digested, and shat. According to the craftsman Claude had met in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the biggest rounds of applause came when six little crottes dropped from a copper-rimmed anus just below the duck's erect gilded tail. "The feathers lifted, and the crowd cheered," the craftsman had said while explaining the designs.

For purposes of Claude's invention, however, it was the orifice of another automat that provided inspiration: the mouth of the player of the German flute and, more specifically, the lips.

The player was able to perform a small but diverse repertoire of music, using fingers of silver plate and a tongue and lips of gold. The pneumatics included a leathern valve that stopped the hissing and fluttering of the nine pairs of bellows that kept the player playing. Claude pored over sketches and notes he had taken and bolstered them with a few eyewitness accounts. The lips yielded the last piece of his plan. They allowed him to end his research and contemplate construction of his mechanical talking head.

CONTEMPLATE CONSTRUCTION—NOT begin it. That required ample funds. The Abbe went to his bankers to secure a loan, but after cursory deliberation, they refused to assist. Claude considered halting the project for a few months to make some toys for Granchez, but his friends prohibited distraction. Besides, he needed more substantial sums than his tinkering would have provided. That was clear enough after he drew up a list of materials and costs.

And what a list! It ran to more than eight narrow-ruled foolscap pages. Claude grouped the items into those which could be made from scratch with available materials (e.g., the joints, the frame, the voice box), those which could be purchased and modified (e.g., the wig and material for the costume), and those which had to be made to order (e.g., porcelain head, glass eyes). Next to the items in the last two groups, he wrote down the estimated costs.

He contacted the foreign craftsmen whose work he needed, knowing he could expect delays. The family of glassblowers in Bohemia and the porcelain factory in Dresden would take at least three months after payment was received to send back the glass eyes and bisque head. The head would be done in bisque to save cost, and so that Claude could oversee the final glazing himself. After the money orders were sent, the partnership was left without a sou.

A friendly conspiracy of assistance soon arose among those close to Claude. Piero was the first to act. He handed over half his earnings from the sale of a pair of toucans, telling Claude, "Use it for the gold leaf." Marguerite was next. She provided her breast, without charge, to Agnes. Other neighbors started appearing at the garret door carrying small offerings, and even Etiennette, hearing of Claude's financial needs, sent along her only item of value, an inkstand of silver plate. She asked for nothing in return, which touched Claude deeply. He was sorry that her presence in his life was so limited, like some minor character in a historical narrative who pops up and leaves without displaying the depth that is clearly there. Madame V. supplied free meals, which, in this period of economizing, were enjoyed that much more. The coachman inspected his merchandise carefully and confiscated from the panniers any bag or crate that did not meet the rigors of French transportation law. Even Claude's landlady, who regularly played the royal lottery, invested a couple of coins in "that work upstairs" on the day she came back from the Rue de Richelieu with a tidy sum. (Her winning combination was inspired by the unsold contents of a vegetable cart: 6 string beans, 4 turnips, 7 carrots, and 1 head of lettuce.) Het receipt for the loan to Claude was a series of cuts on a wooden tally.

Plumeaux proved to be the most innovative solicitor of funds. He gave tours of the garret grottd while Claude was off on tinkering trips. "Why shouldn't we follow the example of the French Ambassador in Rome, who makes his house available for a fee? After all, I will grant the Farnese Palace some marvelous fenestration, but does the Farnese Palace have a linnet that sings a song?"

The hack also augmented resources by composing a pamphlet, The Bells of Paris, which he based on some of Claude's early campanological observations. The pamphlet, which sold briskly, gave the distinguishing characteristics of the church and chapel bells of the city, employing a simplified method of annotation culled from the S-roll. For a few months, the reading public diverted itself by closing its eyes and identifying the sonority of various metropolitan clangs.

All of this help, alas, was not sufficient to allow Claude to start to build. The Abbe tried to tap purse-proud connoisseurs of the mechanical arts, but his wizened, gouty, crusty-cuffed appearance did little to inspire confidence. Week after week, he went to the apartments of the rich and asked for funds, and week after week he was politely refused. Often he would be barred from entering by servants skilled at sending the uninvited on their way. Doors were never slammed, but they were closed with a depressing definitiveness.