A case of curiosities (9 page)

Often, in those early months, the two would amble through unknown forests to amplify the Abbe's research on sounds, or visit farms in search of precious oddities nailed to barnyard beams. Teacher and student would also take longer and more formal perambulations during which Claude would fill the Abbe's note-rolls with observations on newly discovered phenomena. Back in the mansion house, they would distill and dissect and analyze and magnify, bottle and behold, contemplate and illustrate, annotate and learn. All this excited Claude, but it also made him nervous. Almost wholly missing from the experimental adventure was the activity he had been brought in to pursue. Namely, enameling. He had expected that the accountant, in communion with his profit tables, would force the Abbe to maintain a rigid schedule based on the principle that investment demands return. This did not happen. The infrequency of the accountant's visits allowed the Abbe to reroute Claude to more exotic, if less lucrative, domains. When the accountant did make an appearance, the Abbe would simply organize his staff into a tableau of earnest productivity. The glow of the tiny furnace and the quiet but determined benchwork of the apprentices of fire made recrimination all but impossible. As soon as the visitor's carriage had rolled beyond the helical gates of the mansion house—the intertwined posts the Abbe had commissioned were inspired by the famous Vatican staircase, and also by the Palladian dictum that the entrance of a house must reflect the dignity of the person who is to live in it—all pretense was abandoned and the true work would recommence.

What was that work, really? The note-rolls reveal an Abbe boundless in both scope and scale. He took as his purview everything from the grandeur of the heavens to the minutiae of the terrestrial world. He and Claude spent hours at the base of the lightning pole conducting, in two senses of the word, experiments. They addressed the often sticky problem of vitelline biology, also known as the doctrine of eggs. They injected a blue liquid into the spiraling stomach of a thresher shark that had been delivered to the Abbe in a watertight crate. (The Abbe was a devoted student of the spiral in all its manifestations.) They spent hours hunched over a costly but inadequate screw-barrel microscope bought from Culpeper's of London, trying to find fault with Hooke's study of the eye of the fly, the thorn of the nettle, and the stinger of the bee. They found none, though they did have some success in modifying, ever so slightly, the illustrations of Jan Swammerdam's eviscerated mayfly larva. Claude was especially keen on the Abbe's sound studies and microscopic investigations. The latter were, in a way, a variation on the peephole illustrations in the copybook.

Of less interest to Claude were the urgent debates the Abbe sustained with a number of French and English philosophers. The debates meant letters had to be written, and they were written, by the dozen, by Claude. He was treated to Cherion's goose quills, the finest pens on the market, so that beauty could be added to the pleasure the Abbe took in "epistolary disputation," the kind of conflict by correspondence no longer employed, except among anachronistic professors and players of postal chess. The letters traveled throughout Europe, and so did Claude's imagination. When the Abbe received a parcel of fossils from the Ashmolean Repository or a tightly argued attack from a botanist of the French Academy of Science, Claude pictured himself in the courtyards of Oxford or the gardens of Paris. Even when confused by reports on The Growth of Plants in Darkness or Dimensions Unperceived by the Eye, or bored by Notes on Perpetual Motion —notes that never seemed to end—Claude was able to take comfort in the postmarks: Augsburg, Parma, Haarlem, Dresden, and that most distant and exotic of destinations, Philadelphia, where the Abbe waged an unsuccessful campaign to receive recognition for the design of a glass harmonica patented by an American colonial. The diversity and determination of these endeavors entranced Claude. He was wholly taken by the way in which the Abbe would move through the mansion like musketshot, with only slightly less scattered results. If ever there was proof of perpetual motion, it was evinced by the Abbe's pace. When Claude asked that they slow down, the Abbe declined. "How else," he said, "are you going to learn?"

The Abbe was, first and foremost, a teacher. His legacy has never found its way into the Dictionary of Scientific Discovery, not a single line among the fifty-two volumes that cite men and women of far less importance. But then again, who remembers the name of the fellow who tested young Newton in geometry? (It was Dr. Isaac Barrow.) Even when he was capping one of Marie-Louise's nightly meals with a glass of Tokay, or taking a break from his scribbling, the Abbe constantly informed, challenged, and queried his student. While sitting in the coffin-confessional, a thought would pop up and the Abbe would ask, "What do you make of it?" Claude would be forced to reply. Discussion would lead to digression, digression to distraction; distraction, in turn, might provoke diversion or lead as far as discovery. The Abbe would then say, "That, my young friend, is the whimsy of the muse."

He taught Claude the necessity of recollection, arguing that the art of memory "is the wise man's curiosity cabinet." And so each Thursday, when he thought of it, the Abbe would test Claude in mnemonics. He would have him study the contents of an alcove in all its cluttered detail, and then make him attribute to each object it contained a story or a fact, thus creating a palace of memories filled with all that the student learned. (This was not the Abbe's technique but one as old as Simonides.)

The novelty and range of Claude's education sparked apprehension in some quarters. Sister Constance, upon hearing that the Page boy was not receiving formal religious training, added his case to her notorious cahier of grievances. The Abbe endured the indignation of the righteous Carmelite sister and agreed that Claude should take catechism. This was no concession. The Abbe had devised the plan even before her protests.

Among the Abbe's books, in a place of no uncertain prominence (high atop the harpsichord), was a dog-eared copy of St. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises. The book had been inscribed: "To Jean-Baptiste. In Christ, Father Mercurian, S.J."

"Who is Father Mercurian?" Claude asked.

"A man, a mentor," the Abbe said sadly. He would not elaborate.

The book was covered with marginalia: scrawled commentaries, queries, cross-references, as well as some unrelated calculations on the Abbe's personal savings during a desperate month of economizing in 1775. The scribbling almost doubled the length of the work. The Abbe told Claude to commit to memory certain selections. (The scribbles could be overlooked.) "These are the most important teachings I can give you. They will aid you as an enameler, as a scientist, as an observer, as a man." The Abbe returned to one lesson in particular with obsessive regularity—the meditation on visual imagination that was given to students on the first day of the second week of the cycle:

1 st Point. The first is to see people, of this and that kind; and first of all those on the face of the earth in all their variety of garments and gestures, some white and others black, some in peace and some at war, some weeping and others laughing, some healthy and others sick, some being born and others dying.

"Never forget it," he told Claude, and Claude never did.

Such was the extent of the Abbe's religious teachings, a few lines from a Jesuit text. In all other matters, he sustained a strident, almost visceral disapproval of the Church. That is why he banned pears named after saints and why he felt so comfortable in the blasphemous coffin-confessional.

Claude asked him about the source of his hatred. "Let us just say Christ died for our sins. And I died for his," the Abbe said before growing agitated. He cursed with sudden vehemence. "If it's dogma you desire, you may go down there" He pointed to the distant spires of the Republic. "I am sure that the surgeon's brethren will find a bench for you at one of the charity schools of the Reform Church, a place that will teach you the virtues of industry and thrift. Whenever you wish, you may go down there and have your Sundays stolen. Do you understand? Until that time, be content that you are free to pursue what you wish on the day ruined by the minions of God." Claude was content to have his Sundays but troubled by the Abbe's inexplicable anger. True to his nature, he made inquiries.

"You want to know what the Abbe does on Sundays? He is in the chapel doing shameful things," said Catherine, a woman who knew more than most about shame. "I have seen them."

"Them?" This was news.

Catherine needed no encouragement. She explained that the Abbe's religious prejudices were linked to secret encounters. "I've seen them together, and so has Marie-Louise. Tell him."

"I did not see them," the cook said. "I only heard them."

"Go on and tell him. Tell him about the noises."

Marie-Louise refused.

"Very well, I will tell him. Chains and things. Screams. The Abbe's, mostly. I have been to Paris, and I know about the bawdy business of the night. That's what it was, I'm sure. Wasn't it, Marie-Louise?"

Marie-Louise once more resisted the chance to enter the gossip. Catherine took up the slack, describing the Abbe's chapel acts. "Probably he is with a nun. Or a priest. Would you be surprised?"

Claude had to admit that he would not. The Abbe had demonstrated, more than once, a less than moral posture. He often sent coded letters to Paris on illicit subjects, and vulgarly described nuns occasionally figured in them.

Kleinhoff ended the rumormongering. "Stop all this now. At least in pursuing his Sunday secrets-he lets us have our own." Claude was not sure he wanted them. Sundays were, for him, days filled with apprehension. It was on Sundays that he often questioned the value of his education in the service of the Abbe's scattered attentions, and questioned, more generally, the direction his life was taking. The ceaseless stimulation during the rest of the week worried Claude when he was finally alone. He would try to flee from troubling thoughts by retreating into drawing or reading. There was one book on the lives of the classical gods to which Claude was especially committed. In it, he had come upon the story of Hephaestus, the irascible god of fire and metal work, who suffered a pronounced limp. The author of the tale considered the deformity to be a supreme irony, arguing that the versatility of the celestial artist was marred by a crippling defect. Claude rejected this interpretation. Hephaestus was all that he was—architect, smith, armorer, chariot-builder— because he had been cast from Olympus. His deformity clarified an ambition to craft objects of perfection. The tale reawakened a malaise. Claude was bothered not by what the god was, but by what he, Claude, was not. Where were his own achievements in illustration and in enameling? Recent work lacked the exuberance of his early sketches.

He expressed his frustrations to his mother on a Sunday trip to the cottage. She said, "Do not worry so. This is a stage in your life that requires many fields to be planted and plowed under. It is a seed-time." This offered little comfort. Claude worried that what he was learning was incoherent and diffuse, as insubstantial as the motes that floated through the mansion-house alcoves. And yet he could not deny a contradictory and surprising sensation: one of desperate love for his teacher. He and the Abbe had grown closer than the plates of a handpress. How, then, to gain a little distance?

He gave his mother a detailed list of the Abbe's diverse enthusiasms. Madame Page tried to allay her son's fears. "True, there is more profit in the masterful cultivation of a single crop than in the slovenly conduct of many, but give the Abbe time to reveal his plans. He may be planting a small patchwork garden of extraordinary things."

"I wish to limit myself to one domain," Claude said. "I find it difficult to grasp hold of all that we do."

"You will learn. You must be patient," the Abbe replied.

"If I could concentrate on a single ..."

"No need, Claude. Absolutely no need. Besides, today we will be pursuing one of your favorite avenues of research. Go and get the S-spindle. Today we work on sound."

Claude liked S work. It demanded a keen ear (a Page legacy) to record all the sounds in the valley, and a clear head to posit them in a system of phonics. Though it was the Abbe's project at the start, it soon became his. The note-roll was passed like the torch of an Olympic runner.

Claude took up the challenge. With a rigor that would serve him years later, he divided sounds among the vegetal, the animal, and the physical, with each category containing more specialized groupings. In the animal section, to give but one example, he employed a Linnaean system, with a twist. Among the human noises, he added a register of cougrj6, sneezes, tooth-sucking, and variations on ventral disquiet. The residents of the mansion house contributed in moments of rude relief to a complex taxonomy of the auditory world. All of this was added to the expected barnyard whinnies, barks, and baas. The Abbe was impressed. "You have recorded everything from the timbal shrillness of the cicada to the din of the crickets in the heat of a summer night."

And the birds! This was, unquestionably, the biggest section of the register. Claude captured many calls that had previously eluded the Abbe, and did so with nothing more than an ear trumpet and fierce concentration. The sibilant call of the grasshopper-lark, the shivering exhortations of the willow wren, the impatient announcements of the stone curlews, and the wild pipe of the blackcap were all exactingly taken down. Claude collected the songs of the linnet, the chaffinch, and the ringdove. For each, he charted the mellowness of tone, the number of sprightly and plaintive notes, the compass and execution of the song.

He had a section that grouped sou/id by season. The tightly penned pages of autumn were his favorite, but it was summer that filled the most space, in part because of the raucous birds of passage that paused in the valley. All of these "hearings," as the Abbe called them, presented a singular problem for Claude. It was often next to impossible to register subtle distinctions. At first, he embraced the Abbe's methods, using a mishmash of notations. In the section on chimes, for example, he employed the conventional campanology of the bell ringer, which then he modified to accommodate the mansion-house clocks. This, however, proved worthless when recording the blast of the hunting horn or the resonances of the three dozen distinct cave drips he discovered on a descent into the Golay Cave. Plooop, plipp, plippp was no better. Birdcalls also troubled Claude. How could he write them down accurately? He read through Brisson and familiarized himself with Scopoli's monograph on the winged creatures of the Tyrol and Carniola. He worked through Kramer and even consulted Ray. All proved inadequate for his purposes.