A case of curiosities (45 page)

Plumeaux accepted the tentative applause before Claude quietly took over. He supplied the audience with ear trumpets, which were necessary to compensate for the acoustic limitations of the room. The spectators, auditors now, looked like straining bulls, their horns all directed at a single spot.

With one hand, Claude turned a large key, which served merely to spur the anticipation of the audience, while with the other hand he worked a panel of brass levers that activated the Turk. He pulled the levers gingerly.

The audience waited.

"A hiss! Nothing but a hiss. We paid our money for a hiss? Fraud! It is a fraud." The outcry came from one of the petty academics who had been hoping that something would go wrong.

Claude scrambled behind the Turk and unbuttoned the robe to make adjustments with a set of thimbled tools that could reach otherwise inaccessible places. Plumeaux, meanwhile, stepped forward to entertain the restless audience.

"A little patience, please. Please, a little patience. Works of precision need constant adjustment. He is a temperamental fellow. But, then, all automats are. The minions of Jaquet-Dtoz and Leschot spend their lives, tools in hand, fixing this and that, and still their famous writer makes spelling mistakes, theit draftsman draws outside the margins, theit musician plays a wrong note every now and then. Like little childten, automats need daily care. In the Turk's case, the problems are even trickier." Plumeaux caught Claude indicating that the adjustment— a barometric compensation for the expansion of a metal tongue— had been made. He ended the impromptu speech. Claude emetged from behind the Turk. Once again, he turned the key and pulled down on the levets that realized his dreams.

First there were chimes, followed by the faintest sound of gearing: bevels, crowns, cams, worms, and differentials turning in their special ways. Birds twitteted delicately, flowers bloomed, the scent from two large perfume burners mixed with the garret air. The Turk began to move. His foot tapped, directing attention to the floor. Then a golden shoulder lifted, forcing the collective gaze upward.

It was atgued, at the time Claude constructed his Turk, that gesture more than speech was essential to communication. Drama teachers were enchanted by the ancient rhetorical notion of actio, a theory of attitude and facial expression. A professor of eloquence had told Claude that a convincing talket, whether human or mechanical, was one who seduced through gestute even before he opened his mouth. Cleatly, the Turk was seductive. His head moved one way and then the other. His eyebrows lifted toward the beams of the garret — indeed, toward Allah himself. His chest heaved slightly, and his breathing could be heard, though faintly.

Still, no distinctly human sound had emerged. Claude ever-so-discreetly pushed a pedal. Air was released and sent up feeders and bellows to a wind trunk. A stop opened, and the ptes-sured air traveled to a mouthpiece. The two silver lips inspired by Vaucanson opened to reveal the metal tongue. Claude depressed a succession of small keys, and then, at a tempo of tantalizing slowness, came the twisted, coddled voice. Through slightly patted lips emetged fout distinct sounds.

Veeeeeee — vuuhhh — luhh — Waaaaaahhhhh !

Vive le Roi.

With those wotds, the fame of Claude Page was secuted, and so, too, was his fate.

THE MIRACULATORIUM ATTRACTED SpeCtatOfS, in the worlds of the coachman, "like ants to gtistle." It proved populat enough to be ttanspotted to mote spacious sutroundings undet a tent not fat from the Louvte. Tickets fot fitst-, second-, and thitd-class seats sold btiskly to holdets of apptoptiate tank. The magisttate of the city was so imptessed by the quitkiness of the invention that he did not even demand a bfibe to have his name attached to the exhibition prospectus. Fot thtee months, the people of Patis lined up to see the object tefetted to in vatious journals as the Talking Head, the Artificial Man, the Mitaculous Mouth, the Talking Tutk (some got it fight), and the Mechanical Petse. (Then as now, Europeans made little distinction among the vatious cultutes of the Otient.) No soonet had the thtee o'clock show been let in than a crowd gatheted fot the five. The wicket batting enttance had to be teinfotced to re-sttain the oveteaget. Claude extended the houts, gtanting "ocu-lat demonsttations"—a phtase teminiscent of his fitst day in Patis—fot thtee livtes a session, a tate that allowed as many as six people into the tent at once.

Then came tequests fot ptivate viewings. A palatine countess promised one hundted livtes to Claude if his machine would uttet het name. Alas, he knew almost instantly that it was syl-labically impossible to accommodate the egocenttism of the Countess of Zweibtiicken-Bitkenfeld. Anothet noble lady, a Se-tene Highness whose demeanot was anything but setene, bad-geted Claude to bting the Tutk to het bedroom. He tefused. A matquise paid twenty louis d'or fot a single tendezvous with Claude in het gatdens, whete she gave him the title of Ptincipal Scenogtaphet and commissioned him to design a seties of watet otgans throughout het estate. Sieut Cuttius, the waxwotks ownet who had been so dismissive in the past, proposed full partnership; his models were losing ground to newer wonders. And even Livre, swallowing pride for potential profit, proposed a joint venture to publish the plans of the remarkable mechanism. Claude responded with a restraint that infuriated the bookseller. "Words cannot begin to express how I feel."

Lavater had one of his assistants take Claude's physiognomy and from it was able to deduce the following: "An original, well-drawn countenance. We do not expect poetry from the forehead but an inventive, inquiring, mechanical genius; an unaffected, cheerful, pleasant man, unconscious of his superiority; the nose, especially, is characteristic of an able, active, unwearied mind, laboring to good effect. How excellent are the tranquility and cheerfulness of the mouth."

There was even a rumor, unsubstantiated by the royal archives, that the King considered providing a pension. But the greatest honor came when Claude encountered the Turkish vizier who had known his father. The vizier said that the son had lived to honor the memory of his father, adding that if Claude was willing to sell the Talking Turk, he would send along a most invaluable commodity—camels. Claude graciously declined.

All was quite marvelous until a small item appeared in the Journal de Paris. "The Talking Head," wrote an anonymous hack, "heralded throughout Paris, performed as it was supposed to perform at a recent demonstration. 'Long live the King' emerged from its silver lips, just as the prospectus promised. But on a subsequent visit, it was found the tone had changed significantly, as if a new voice had been substituted for the old. Honest mechanics? Perhaps. Trickery? More than likely. Only long and exacting investigation will reveal the possible stratagems of the inventor."

Claude was furious. Plumeaux did his best to brush the attack aside. "This scurrility is aimed at provoking controversy. Do not feel threatened. It is in the hack's interest to sabotage the device. We must find a way to profit from it." Plumeaux composed a response making use of Diderot and the aphorisms of Voltaire. He also announced the opportunity for private inspection of the internal mechanism. The fee was eight livres.

In came the experts, the academics, and other pensioned geniuses of the realm, all unnerved by Claude's design. A report handed down by an academy raised the possibility that the Talking Turk was a ruse. Beleaguered by the efforts to defend himself and still protect the secrets of his invention, Claude decided to flee the sinecured skeptics who made presentation difficult. He accepted an offer to take the Turk on tour. The coachman was given funds to have the best cabinetmaker in Paris modify Lucille so that she could accommodate six passengers in comfort: Claude, Marguerite, Agnes, Piero, Plumeaux, and the coachman. And, of course, a seventh: the Turk, who voyaged in the finest bandboxes and morocco-covered cases, his glass eyes, silver lips, and voice box protected during transport in loosely packed hemp. Missing from the entourage was the Abbe. Too sick to travel, he had to content himself with epistolary reports from distant destinations. This separation pained Claude during the first few months, but success abroad suppressed his pangs of guilt.

There were extended shows at Gallmayr's Mechanical Showcase in Munich and at a famous physical cabinet in Vienna. The entourage curved around the Continent before settling in England, a country that quickly embraced the novelty that the French had started to sniff at. After just one month in London, Claude and his "Talking Turkish Gentleman" received protection under the sanction of His Majesty's royal letters patent. The Turk was put on display at Don Saltero's coffeehouse in Chelsea.

The travelers installed themselves in a nearby suite and fell into the patterns of English domesticity. Agnes, jealous of the automat, once swallowed the Turk's tongue, forcing the postponement of a demonstration until her digestion was complete and the part could be retrieved. But other than that, the English life was a tranquil one, lacking the drama of the historical evenements taking place in France. Claude would have renounced his Paris residence permanently for "the bliss of Albion" if not for the Abbe, whose gout worsened until he could no longer take care of himself. Claude knew he had to return. After ten months of Continental travel and some three years of Britannic contentment, the entourage coached to the coast and took the Calais packet. They carried with them the Turk and massive wealth in four currencies. That is when fame and fate collided.

Quick calculation of times and dates, coupled with even the most rudimentary knowledge of French history, is sufficient to reveal that the Paris Claude had left was not the Paris to which he returned. The change was clarified at the gates of the city, where Citizen Page was arrested on the charge of treason against the Republic. The denunciation perplexed him since he had never knowingly expressed any treasonous sentiments. Politics was not so much repugnant as unfamiliar to him. During his absence, he had given little thought to the revolutionary events detailed in the London papers, and he had been born into a class that he assumed would be of little interest to the authorities. This assumption proved false.

Claude was locked away in the Conciergerie, the worst of the Paris prisons. He did not have a chance to see the Abbe or to say good-bye to his family. In the days that followed, he tried to distract himself from thoughts of his former teacher's suffering, but this led him to worry about his wife and daughter and the gravity of his own circumstances. While Plumeaux and the coachman attempted to discover the source of the accusations and negotiate Claude's release, Claude languished in a small cell with a journeyman tailor accused of having sawed down a tree of liberty and a tavernkeeper who had furnished sour wine to patriots. The journeyman tailor sobbed all night, while the tavernkeeper, more stoic but still nervous, fed crumbs to the scampering rats. When Plumeaux at last bribed his way into the prison and managed to pay off two greedy, sympathetic jailers, he had Claude transferred to a room near the prison's mighty tower clock, the oldest in the city. A tiny shaft of light from the Quai de l'Horloge illuminated his new and private cell. He recalled that the workshop of Breguet, who had had to flee to Switzerland, was just down the street.

Claude had left England a rich man, and it was this money that was spent to insulate him from the hottors of incarcetation. Plumeaux smuggled in books and note-rolls, watch tools, and the news that he thought Claude should know. "I have discovered the substance of the accusations. You are to be tried for the utterances of the Turk. Your accuser, Defrange, was the author of the anonymous attack that sent us on our tour of the Continent."

The news worsened a week later. "The Abbe is no better," Plumeaux said. "In point of fact, he will soon be dead. But we must resist the temptation to contact him. Priesthood is a crime, and even a lapsed and bedridden cleric is at risk of condemnation."

"So what am I to do, deprived of him, of my family, of my work?" Claude's voice betrayed desperation.

"We will postpone the trial as long as possible. The judgments are not favoring the accused. Your old cellmates—the tailor and the other one—have been executed by the Revolutionary Tribunal."

More money was paid out to the corrupt turnkeys, enough to allow Claude to while away his time regulating the massive mechanism of the tower clock. It was only through such manual exertions that he could forget, however briefly, the suffering. He was trapped now in a prison of imagination as sinister as the one he had placed in the window of the Globe years earlier.

For some months, Plumeaux was able to protect Citizen Page from the Tribunal's increasingly lethal docket. Disposition of the cases had grown dangerously simple: acquittal or death. It was during this wait that the Abbe succumbed. Plumeaux read the old man's testament to Claude through the prison bars.

"It was his desire to be left in a charnel house to rot, his remains stoppled in an hourglass. The chaos of the moment makes such a request impossible to fulfill. Besides, Piero tells me that the crushed bone would probably be too coarse to keep regular time."

Given the tumult in the cemeteries, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Robert Auget, Abbe, Chevalier of the Royal Order of Elephants, former Count of Tournay, was buried without ceremony in an unmarked grave beyond the limits of the city. Only years later was a headstone erected in Pere-Lachaise, bearing the epitaph Dare to Know. A nautilus shell was carved below his dates.

Claude did not take the Abbe's death well. The silent suffering that had characterized the loss of his mother and sisters was replaced by a grief that made him confused and insomnious. When he was brought before the Tribunal on a balmy June day, Citizen Page was incapable of mounting a defense. He was haggard and weak, sapped by the demons of memory and the more commonplace horrors of jail. He had a large gash that ran across his face, self-inflicted when he had brought his head against the bars of the prison door.

Plumeaux tried to come to the aid of his unhinged friend. "Citizen Page has no interest in playing with the mechanisms of the state," he told the tribunal. "It is the state of mechanisms that concerns him." But this declared suspension of civic responsibility did not impress the jury. Plumeaux changed tactics. "Citizens, you must understand that the notion of revolution for our clever friend means much more than the rotation of gears; it means . . ."