A case of curiosities (46 page)

He was cut short by the prosecutor. "The charges are too serious for wordplay, Citizen Plumeaux. And as you must know, we have eliminated the preliminary instruction." The hearing was to be a mere formality.

Plumeaux made one more attempt. "Why are we to assume that the king the Talking Turk hails is Louis?"

The prosecutor was prepared. "It matters little whether the exhortation of the mechanical traitor is directed at the French king or the Spanish king, whether it is tribute to Catherine the Great or George of England. All of them are crowned monsters who conspire against the Republic." He calmly quoted Hebert: " 'It is the duty of every free man to kill a king or those who are destined to be kings or those who have shared the crimes of kingship.' " Plumeaux considered holding up Claude's hand and mentioning that he had beheaded the king of France long befote the Committee had, but was advised by those around to stop his tactics.

A sentence of death was inevitable. The prosecutor cited as precedent the case of Jean Julien, wagoner, who having been sentenced to twelve years' labor, called out, "Vive le Roi," the very same phrase as the Turk's. The wagoner had been brought back to the Tribunal, placed on its Lute Generate des Condamnes, and executed.

The case of Claude Page was to have the same outcome. Except that, to everyone's astonishment, it was not Citizen Page but his invention that the jury found guilty of crimes against the Republic. One revolutionary rag, Pere Duchesne, ran an announcement: "The Talking Head will talk no more."

The irony in the method of execution was not lost on the public. In the end, one clever novelty killed another. It was the modern beheading machine of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin that silenced the Talking Turk.

Two hours after the verdict came down, Claude was forced to carry his invention up a scaffold, where it was wrested from his hands, tied to a broad plank, and placed into the lunette. There was no kettledrum convoy, no confessor. A single captain of the national light horse brigade was on hand to oversee the execution—a single captain and a crowd.

Claude said his farewells to the Turk over the shouts of the mob. An eighty-pound blade dulled by overuse traveled its wooden track with Newtonian conviction. It hit the mark. And stopped. There was an awful noise, a moan unlike any Claude had ever heard. That was the last sound uttered by the Talking Turk, and the world was made more monotonous for it. The automat's neck, framed in finely quenched steel, had stopped the blade. The executioner, a young man named Sanson whose birthright was beheading, hoisted the knife up the wooden track a second time. The next release finished the job. The Talking Head, severed from its elegantly dressed torso, dropped into a bran sack—or wicker basket, depending on which catchpenny print you choose to believe.

Claude made efforts to retrieve the head, but it was torn away by an eager revolutionary, who stuffed the Turk's mouth with hay and tossed it high in the air. The head bobbed briefly before falling into a clutch of screaming patriots. It rose and fell again moments later in another part of the square, then rose and fell, farther and farther away.

Claude turned his attention to the totso, which had temained on the scaffold. Anothet member of the mob ditected her assaults with such futy that by the time Claude reached it, the beading on the tobe was smeated with exctement. He salvaged what he could and pushed past hecklets who had probably once paid to see his craft.

60

The Empty Compartment

CLAUDE RETURNED TO the garret, where wife and daughter had waited with dread expectation. Their joy at his release was muted when they learned of the automat's destruction. The trial and execution silenced the family, as it had the Talking Turk. Marguerite held Claude against her shoulder. Agnes grabbed one of his legs and sobbed with the wrenching conviction of an eight-year-old.

"We have no reason to stay," Claude said at last. "We must return to England now, before the authorities revoke our passports." That night, while his wife and daughter slept, Claude bitterly contemplated the tragic end of his brilliant creation. Many memories surfaced, but one did so with greater frequency and intensity than all the others. It was the mansion-house talk in which the Abbe had described the life box seen in Sumis-wald. "An intriguing conceit," the Abbe had said. And, indeed, it was.

Claude looked around the garret. He had hoped to find a dial tray, but they had all been discarded during his absence. He made do with a shallow glass-fronted case that Piero had once used to display a collection of exotic birds. He set the case in a niche and paced, then looked through Agnes's pasteboard doll house. Its domain was so intricately conceived that even the doll house had a doll house, one in which a miniature firkin swung. Claude picked up various items and contemplated how each might chronicle a part of his life and the life of his invention.

Throughout the night, he communed with an inanimate world. He manipulated the disposition of the objects in the case hundreds of times, unable to achieve the desired harmony, the requisite balance, what a painter would call the proper ordonnance.

As the sun broke through the chimney pots, light crenelating the walls of the garret, Claude finally arrived at the dialogue of form he had sought. He positioned a jar in a corner compartment, a painful record of that first amputation. The placement of the other objects followed quickly and confidently: a nautilus shell, morels on a string, a lay figure, a pearl, a linnet, a watch, a bell, a humble button pulled from the robe of the trampled Turk.

One compartment remained empty. Claude toyed with various items. He stepped backward and forward indecisively. He fumbled with some of the mechanisms from the Turk. They did not fit. For more than an hour, he stared at the empty compartment, trying to invest it with meaning. He could not. In the end, he decided that adding another object would ruin the integrity, the organic Tightness of his arrangement.

When Marguerite asked why he chose to leave the cubicle empty, he said only, "How can I fully represent a life unfinished?"

Claude survived the excesses of the Revolution, even if his gteatest invention did not. He fled to London with his family and established a factory that turned out inexpensive clocks and watches. The new venture never occupied Claude with the fervor he displayed during his youthful tinketings; in fact, the sight of the steam-operated assembly line often made him queasy. Still, the success of the enterprise allowed Claude to collect unique timepieces and dioramas, which he did until his death. He even managed to own, however briefly, the Breguet grande complication commissioned for the Queen. His career earned him a thirty-line obituary in the Times, though the newspapet teduced the story I have told here to a single, incidental sentence: "He also gained some fame early in life fot a Talking Tutkish Gentleman, a mechanical device that fell victim to the French Terror."

Fortunately, Claude's achievements were tecotded in Plumeaux's Chronicle, which retained the book-as-watch sttuctute Claude himself had dismissed. Plumeaux adapted his horological metaphots to the case of curiosities after the Talking Tutk had been destroyed.

How did the writer justify ten chapters in place of the twelve that appear on a watch face? It seems that during the Ftench Revolution—the Chronicle was published just months aftet the decapitation—the governing authotities, in an attempt to te-write histoty, changed the system of timekeeping. At least in principle, French time ran ten houts to the day, one hundred minutes to the hour. Hence, ten chapters fot the ten compartments. As an act of ptivate subvetsion, howevet, Plumeaux retained sixty pterevolutionary sections. His hope fot a book that would come full-citcle in exactly 360 pages was rejected at the last minute by a printer who wottied excessively about the cost of paper.

Plumeaux sent a draft of the work to Claude, who teturned it with numerous suggestions and even some notes citing outfight errot. All of these were ultimately rejected by the authot. His teason appeated in the pteface: "Instead of taking hold of the facts, I have allowed the facts to take hold of me. It is a more honest form of self-deception."

I mention this because a few months ago I replicated Plumeaux's gesture and sent my own work to the squat Italian who first inspired my investigation. In a lengthy letter that he sent from a small town near Genoa, he was at turns kind and critical. He wrote that he would have wanted to learn more about the lives of Claude Page and his family after the tragic decapitation. I agreed to gather up those notes at a later date if he were truly interested. The Italian ended his letter to me with a phrase I found quite striking, resonant even beyond the implicit compliment. "It would seem that your story of an invention has resulted in the invention of a story."

With that observation, I shut the pane of bubbled glass and declare the case closed. Let Plumeaux's prefatory remark serve as the coda to my own undertaking. I let the facts take hold of me.