A case of curiosities (7 page)

Claude now asked the question that was foremost in his mind: "What will / be doing?"

"You? What will you be doing? That's a fourth question. And to have the answer, the favored first vizier must wait."

"Must he?" The desperation and apprehension in Claude's voice were palpable.

"Well, I will tell you this much. You will be joining me in the conquest of man's capacities. You will undertake a voyage every bit as adventurous as the oceanic travel I endured as a missionary. Together we will search out the highest thoughts and aspirations, and in the process I hope to help you find your metaphor, as I have found mine." The Abbe picked up the C-roll and opened to a rough sketch of a nautilus shell. Then, deciding he had said too much too soon, he retreated into a more exacting and mundane description of the tasks.

"I receive a great deal of correspondence, everything from travel reports to the Royal Society's Transactions. I make a habit of testing what I read when time, funds, and patience allow. In this, and a great deal more, you will be required to assist me. Consider yourself to be a copyist and a collector's helper. Also, you will be trained in the painterly arts and the allied world of enamel. That is why my accountant has allowed you to be brought in."

Claude said, "I know little of painting, and nothing at all of enameling."

"But you will soon enough. If you have half the talent with lavender oil and a sable brush that you do with a pencil, you will work out nicely." The Abbe called out, "Henri!" There was no response. "Henri!" He turned to Claude and said, "You will learn quickly. Apply the vision that fills your sketches. That is all I expect."

A steady plodding could be heard in the distance. The slow-moving young man Claude had already twice encountered walked to the net post in the middle of the great hall. He displayed no emotion at receipt of the Abbe's command, which was: "Show our young friend around."

HENRI ROBERT was the son of Antoine Laurent Robert of Robert & Didier, Stationers and Furnishers of Artists' Materials. Antoine Robert, during thirty years of trade, had supplied pens and papers, colors and cases to philosophers, academicians, salon painters, a dauphin's tutor, the captain of a doomed voyage of discovery (the Antilles), and a Paris procuress who stimulated her clients with paint.

The Abbe had established a correspondence with the stationer before beginning his first missionary expedition. He had his family buy him papers and colors with memorable extravagance and set sail for points west. In the Vice-Royalty of New Spain, the Abbe befriended the owner of a nopalery, a cactus farm that yielded the insects from which cochineal, a costly red dye, is made. (This, it should be mentioned, transpired before Nicolas Joseph Thiery de Menonville, Botanist to the King, cut the price of the pigment by smuggling pot after pot of bug-rich plantings to St.-Dominique.) As a kindness, the Abbe negotiated a shipment for Antoine Robert. On a voyage to the East a few years later, touring the district of Monghyr, the Abbe found a seller of Indian yellow at a marketplace in Mirzapur. He wanted to learn how it was made, and so, after much inquiry, tracked the processing to a sect of milkmen known as gwalas. The Abbe was told that the pigment came from dried cow urine. The gwalas raised their sacred beasts on a diet exclusively of mango leaves to intensify the yellow pigment so cherished by Indian illuminators and Islamic miniaturists. A shipment of the foul-smelling substance, packed into balls, was sent to the delighted Paris stationer.

All of this is to say that Antoine Laurent Robert was a man indebted. When he ascertained that the Abbe was settling in Tournay, not ten days' carriage ride from the stationer's thriving business, he insisted his son, Henri, make an extended visit, to serve as the mansion-house storekeeper and to learn what the Abbe had learned in his travels. As such arrangements go, it was not terribly noteworthy. Then, three months after the transfer, something tragic occurred. Antoine Laurent Robert inadvertently allowed some toxic white paint to enter an open sore on a private part — the result of a coquettish game initiated by one of the charges of the body-painting procuress. Two months later he was dead. The nature of his demise was unusual enough to warrant inclusion in the prestigious Journal des Savants, which attributed his death to venereal lead poisoning. The tragedy spurred the second half of the partnership, Didier, to take over the establishment. He sued, successfully, to abolish Henri's legacy, and since there had been no Madame Robert since 1765, when a speeding wine cart refused to yield her the right-of-way, Henri was left an orphan under the care of the Count of Tournay.

Henri Robert was no perpetual-motion machine before the death of his parents. Afterward, faced with ruin and isolation, his pace slowed down until it all but stopped. The stationer's son turned stationary, prompting the staff of the mansion house to nickname him the Slug.

The Abbe had hoped Henri would become an enamelist. But after many lessons and exercises, both teacher and student had given up. Grinding enamels was not a problem; painting with them was. As the Abbe concluded, "He will never have the inclination to let a sable brush dance on a disk of copper." Henri, in the end, was left to oversee the stocks.

The tour began slowly. Slugs do not make ideal guides. Slow to acknowledge the directions of the Abbe, slow to take Claude to the more interesting parts of the property, slow, in fact, in all aspects of his being, Henri did only one thing quickly— exasperate those around him. He shuffled out of the great hall and down a stone corridor. Claude followed through an archway, where he caught sight of a pair of feet warming themselves near a fire. The heat and smells, as well as the pattern of blood he had plotted from the Abbe's cask table, suggested he and his guide had just passed the kitchen. Claude hoped that the unidentified feet would accompany them, but the feet stayed where they were. Henri trudged ahead. At the end of the corridor, he took a swallow and said, "Are you prepared to begin the tour? Ready to see what is to be seen?"

"I am," Claude said.

That was not so. Because of the bartenness of the great hall, Claude assumed the rest of the property would have a similarly dungeonlike aspect. It did not. The interior rooms revealed an environment unlike any Claude had ever viewed. He found himself in a series of chambered spaces, laboratory alcoves in which corners came out of nowhere to combat the symmetry of the building's stone shell. Additionally, against a high wall, some dozen perches, interconnected by crude stairs and plankboards, were met by windows that lighted the room at improbable angles. It gave the space the illumination of a Dutch oil, only without the harmony and balance. A cantilevered balcony fashioned from a modified pulpit had been fitted with a large lens that poked through a bullock's eye, the kind of skylight more commonly found in granaries. Claude attempted to climb up and take a closer look, but he was stopped short.

"Let us move on," the Slug intoned. "This is the library." To avoid any misunderstanding, he added, "Where the books are kept." But misunderstanding was impossible. Massive atlases topped by dictionaries, topped in turn by a succession of trade manuals and opuscules of diminishing size, formed stalagmites of knowledge through which Claude found it difficult to maneuver. He was waist-high in words. Though the library alcoves contained delicately paneled bookcases glazed with little lozenges encased in fretwork, the Abbe's investigations had redistributed the volumes to less accommodating surfaces. The emptied shelves had been subsequently filled with laboratory apparatus. Piles of papers were weighted down against the Vengeful Widow by large shells, pestles, and chunks of fossilized stone. Claude stared at the stacks of books.

"The Abbe calls them his temples," the Slug said. "He thinks the shapes resemble the monuments seen during his travels through New Spain."

There was, in the arrangement of books, a clear hierarchy of respect, with central placement revealing central concerns. Claude reached for a pamphlet open to Professor Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein's "Essay on the Birth and Formation of Vowels." The Slug warned him not to disrupt the surface chaos. "The Abbe says the books hide an order only he appreciates."

Claude was amazed that the number of open wotks far exceeded the number that were closed. They often faced one another and seemed, without the aid of readers, to conduct a silent dialogue, their authors—naturalists and mechanicians and philosophers—proclaiming competing or concurring ideas.

Claude paused to register a mental picture of the scene for a sketch. He looked more closely at a few volumes and found that the Abbe clearly demanded a great deal from his books. Endpapers revealed scrawls of criticism. Little slips stuck out between pages, white flags making reference to correlative tomes.

The Slug moved his charge through another series of alcoves and beyond an ancient harpsichord topped with books. He stopped and said, "The taproom. We will now enter the taproom."

"Where the liquids are kept?" Claude hypothesized.

"Yes, precisely. The taproom. This is where you will find that the liquids are kept. And also other stocks."

The Slug's mood and movement picked up once they entered. He became, if not garrulous, at least communicative. His eyes opened slightly, and his breathing, which in normal circumstances pumped like the tiny bellows used by enamelists, became more forceful. "I am responsible for the stores." He held up a hand and began to count. "I maintain the paints, the earths, the powders, the mucilages, the plants" — he ran out of fingers on which to itemize and turned to the other hand— "the urines, the salivas, the springwaters." He directed Claude to a set of Eucharist cruets. "The Abbe salvaged them from the chapel." He lifted a ground-glass stopper to reveal "the aqua morta so highly praised by Cellini." He compared it to the amber-hued pisse de chat sauvage, declaring proudly, "We have the finest selection of urines in the valley." It was a claim Claude felt no desire to see proven.

Henri pulled back a heavy black wool curtain weighted at the hem with lead. "The color cove. Where the colors are kept. The Abbe says that if a rainbow ever arched through a window and passed this curtain, it would arch right back in shame." Claude concurred. He had never seen so many pigments. He found it difficult to resist opening the containers.

Again Henri held out his fingers and counted: "Red lead paste in four hues, burnt sienna from five countries, three paddock blues, a capuchin renamed to assuage the Abbe's religious intolerance, one-two-thtee-fout-five sepias ..."

For some time theteaftet, Henri talked about the problems of classifying the stores. "What does one do with the Abbe's famed Indian yellow? Should it be placed among the colors, the urines, or the earths?" Claude commiserated with Henri over this organizational quandary. Henri was annoyed to find a rogue bottle of aquafortis inappropriately shelved. He replaced it and observed, "You know, Santerre notes that the palette requires only five elements: massicot, le brun rouge, chalk white, outremer, and Polish black. Rat's whiskers! Take massicot. There are so many different varieties. Chambers describes three. What about the ochers? What about sepia? The Abbe once tried to send for a barrel of live squid to test supplies. They all died and spoiled in transport. And what about orpiment?"

What about orpiment? Claude was thinking, but he just nodded. The information blurred as Henri went on about enamels kept in varnished pots and varnishes kept in enameled pots. Claude found himself surrounded by oakgalls, Congolese copal, rabbit-skin glue, cashew-nut paint, licorice.

"Here, try a piece of this," Henri said. "It is ideal for sizing paper."

"Try?"

"Take a taste."

Claude reluctantly licked the substance. It was rock candy. He could not help thinking of the Pompelmoose Atoll. The sugar mines, he decided, might well have offered relief from the exhausting tour.

They moved on to the spittle bottles and waters. Henri lifted the tops off two barrels. "This is the rainwater we use for Le-mery's ink. And this is the stream water for Geoffroy's formula. That barrel over there contains fresh snow quickly melted. It has a very special texture. Here, have a sip. It is less fine, less limpid, but it lathers well with soap."

They skipped the herbarium, given Claude's upbringing, but, in passing, Henri made a thoughtless reference to a stalk of devil's finger.

"I am sorry," he said in the halting speech that had accompanied the early part of the tour. "I did not wish to remind you of your pain."

Claude was prepared for remarks, inadvertent and otherwise, that invoked his deformity. By the time he came to stay at the mansion house, he had committed the story of the amputation to memory. He told Henri of how, in the early stages, the villagers said the mole would fall off, but how it did not fall off. How it turned odd colors. How Father Gamot had once sermonized on the matter, citing the words of Matthew, not the pig farmer but the tax-gathering apostle from Capernaum. How mockery had become cachet when he noticed the likeness between the mole and the royal face on a freshly minted coin. How, overnight, the deformity was granted a special status. How, a few months later, the Abbe had heard it caused Claude pain, and delivered to the cottage the services of a surgeon. How his mother accepted the surgeon's determination, and how the finger was consequently cut away.

Claude told all of this to Henri and in so doing diminished the distance between them. They would never be close; Henri would not allow it. But after that little explanation, they would never be strangers, either. In Claude's acknowledgment of anguish, an understanding between them was reached—vague, imprecise, unspoken, but an understanding nonetheless.

Henri told Claude that the Abbe, returning from the Page cottage after the surgery, had sent a long denunciation to the authorities in the Republic, but that they had never replied. Staemphli was not censured; in fact, there was even talk of providing municipal support for the display of his collection.

As Henri was speaking, a squat woman entered and asked for some cinnamon.