Voltaire's Calligrapher (10 page)

With a wave of his hand, Von Knepper threw me out of his study and his world. He hurried to slide the bolts shut, as if locking me in a prison made of cities and countries and continents.

I left the house wondering just how grave the danger was. It was a restless night, every sound heralding the abbot’s men coming for me. The next morning I set out for Siccard House to collect my pay and thus have the means to leave Paris. I walked hand in hand with fear: I would look from side to side and see a foe in every face. It didn’t have to be a uniform or a cassock to scare me; an old woman’s glance out of the corner of her eye, a hungry dog following on my heels, a boy waving a wooden sword was enough.

Several customers were waiting for their merchandise at Siccard House: an usher, the legal sheets bearing the watermark of blind justice; a priest, a sheaf of parchment; a musician, staff paper tied with blue ribbon. The trafficking of messenger women had served as veiled publicity for the legal, public face of young Siccard’s business. I ran into him on the second floor, always industrious and in a hurry, as if fearing his dead father might suddenly appear and demand to see the balance sheet. He asked me about Dussel, but I had nothing to tell him. Dussel and I never spoke; he rushed home after work every day, though no one was ever waiting for him in his rented room. Before heading into the office at the end of the hall,
where Juliette was waiting for me, I asked Siccard for the last few days’ pay.

“Can’t you wait until next week?”

“No. I have an urgent expense.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“It has to be today. The shop downstairs is full of customers. One of them will pay in cash.”

We were repeating a little scene that dated back to the start of the business itself, long before he was born. Young Siccard always paid, but he felt morally obliged to resist a little. That’s what his father had done for decades. Aristide walked away with his head bowed, as if he’d been hurt by my words. I went into the last office, said hello to the messenger, and was starting to prepare my inks when Juliette interrupted me.

“The message is for you today.”

She undressed with professional leisureliness. I began by looking for the signature and found the initial
V
on a perfect thigh. Tired of my distant exploits and cryptic messages, my employer was calling me back to Ferney. I would finally leave fear behind and fulfill my calligraphic destiny, that blank page.

I never did read the final lines. There was banging on the adjacent door and the sound of splintering wood, then Siccard’s scream, or rather his moan, because he tried to scream but couldn’t. I went out into the hall, and Dussel came charging at me, his shirt stiff with dried blood. I thought he’d been hurt and tried to stop him, but he broke free of my grasp and ran toward the stairs. That was the last time I saw him; as usual, he was rushing nowhere.

I looked into the office, impelled by the curiosity that arrives before fear. Siccard had knelt down in front of Mathilde’s dead body. Her throat had been slit. For a moment it seemed as if she were covered in ants; tiny letters filled every inch of white skin, including her lips and eyelids, even the spiral of her ears. Customers
were coming up the stairs, drawn by the screams and the blood.

Under normal circumstances I would have fallen to my knees, but terror had numbed me to pain or surprise. If I wanted to escape the abbot’s men, I would have to leave before the police arrived to interrogate the employees—those on and off the books. Siccard was still holding the bills he had set aside for me. Wordlessly, I tore them from his grasp. He accepted without protest, as if his hands were no longer his own.

Before I set off running, I covered Mathilde’s body with a blanket. Only the sole of her foot was left bare. Siccard took it in his hands and gently turned it from side to side, as if afraid he might break it. Then, in a quiet voice, for all of us who were there (for the others who had suddenly fallen silent, as well as for me as I made my way out), he read the final lines from the Book of Revelation.

I
had the money in my hands, and I would leave Paris as soon as I gathered my things. Apart from losing my pursuers, I needed distance from Siccard House. As big as Paris may have been, Mathilde’s body lay in the office right next door.

I went to my uncle’s and began to prepare my inks, making sure the tops were secure so as not to stain my clothes or worse. Hearing footsteps on the stairs, I thought it must be maréchal Dalessius, invigorated by the news of my imminent departure. While arrivals make some people happy, my uncle liked only departures. Then I heard the sound of keys, like bells announcing a funeral, and grew uneasy.

The giant figure of Signac filled the doorway. Even when he stood still, his keys continued to jangle, shaken by his breath or the beating of his heart. Behind him was another of the abbot’s men, as tall and thin as the dagger he was now drawing from its sheath.

Neither one bothered to beat me or threaten me. All they did was ask who had sent me. I didn’t say a word: instinct says that if
we can only stay quiet enough, we’ll be forgotten in a corner. But the dagger remembered and timidly approached my neck. I knew silence was much less dangerous than the truth: they would slit my throat the minute I opened my mouth. All they were waiting for was a word, a name, a signature at the bottom of the document spelled out by my actions.

I coughed, pretending to try and find my voice, and signaled that I wanted a quill and ink. They understood my terrified gestures and were calmed, assuming that anyone willing to write would have to forego babbling and lies. I chose a purple bottle that smelled of mandrake. In his book on the power of plants, Paracelsus asserted that touching a word freshly written in this ink would kill you. According to him, some words were more susceptible to the venom than others. Instead of words, I chose punctuation: I plunged my quill into the liquid and full stop into the neck of my nearest foe.

The pain was so fierce that as he brought his hands to the wound, he cut himself with his own dagger; the thirsty metal was finally satiated. Signac lunged at me, brandishing two sharp keys, but missed. The weight of his armor slowed him down, and by this time I was at the door.

I was completely out of breath by the time I reached the Night Mail offices. Behind a dirty pane of glass, a lone man was writing names and dates and destinations in a book. I pounded on the window until he opened it. He must have noticed some resemblance to my uncle because he didn’t ask me to prove my identity, at least not right away. Glancing left and right, startling at anything that sounded like metal, I explained my emergency.

As we walked toward the back of the former salting house, the old employee told me his name was Vidt and said he had known me when I was a boy. He asked, as if in passing, what ship my parents
had died on. When I gave the right answer, he quickened his pace, convinced that I was telling the truth and that he needn’t fear a reprimand from my uncle.

We crossed a warehouse filled with coffins and came to where the hearses were parked. One was just leaving, and he shouted for it to stop, ordering that another coffin be loaded.

“Who’s it for?” the coachman asked with a touch of impatience, as if there were some event in his miserable life that simply could not be delayed.

“Me,” I said.

“You look healthy enough.”

“Not for long if you don’t hurry.”

I put a coin in his hand and let money answer any questions he might have.

Vidt insisted I must look like a passenger and so powdered my face. It was a much thicker substance than the one favored by nobility and the bourgeois. I looked at my reflection in the hearse window: anyone who saw me would be certain that life had left me.

We put the coffin in the back and, not without some difficulty, I crawled inside. The coachman was kind enough to put a blanket under my head. I settled in, shut my eyes, and the coffin lid was closed.

I
t was the worst trip of my life, in a life of nothing but I terrible trips. Every stone on the road was a punch to my back, every corner absolute torture. Whenever the carriage stopped because of an obstacle or a checkpoint, I wondered if the price on my head might be high enough for the coachman to turn me in. But as soon as Paris was far behind, my coffin was opened to the cold morning, and the driver handed me the reins so he could get some sleep.

We came to an abandoned farm in the middle of a rainstorm. The coach was heading straight on, to the north; I was to continue to Ferney on foot. I walked beneath gray trees and crossed a stone bridge over a stream. With every step I grew weaker; I was exhausted and running a fever. The birdsong was dirgelike, making the trees and the sky even darker, pushing my destination farther away. By the time I reached the castle, I was unable to even say my own name.

I was given a bed and dry clothing, but my request to see Voltaire was ignored. That section of the castle was undergoing renovations, so I was moved, bed and all, from one place to another
all night long. I went to the kitchens, the foul-smelling cellars, the halls where the clocks were tested (and where there was no way to tell the time because each one was different). Sometimes I was left with other servants who were recuperating from an illness. There was no way to obtain any information: the sick speak an incomprehensible language that no one has any interest in answering. The domestic staff who moved me were terribly somber—I wondered if it was because they didn’t know how to treat me (a little less than a gentleman, a little more than a servant) or because they knew my prognosis was uncertain—and carried my bed with funereal solemnity.

The trip wore on, the trip never ended, all through a night that stretched out through rooms and parlors, up and down stairs. Nothing stays still while a fever lasts. My travels ended at the entrance to Ferney theater, whether on orders from my employer, by chance, or by mistake I never knew. Unsteady on my feet, pale but no longer feverish, I crossed a dark room, like a sleepwalker, amid Sicilian and Japanese puppets, stuffed crows, and the copper frame for a Chinese dragon.

I pulled back the curtain and appeared on stage, like an actor who had arrived late to a performance and forgotten his lines. There was Voltaire—although at first I thought it was an actor portraying him: his decrepitude was so pronounced it suggested theatrical trickery. Others were there as well, spectators and performers, who looked at me in surprise. Once the astonishment had passed, I heard Voltaire say: “It’s my calligrapher, back from his mission.” He said it as if those words brought a long comedy to an end. I heard the applause and felt I was back, at last.

L
ight shines in through the dirty window, falling on the page, and I watch my hand tremble on the coarse paper. I have learned to turn uncertainty into flourishes. You have to let the ink flow, the hand run toward the next word and the next, never stopping to consider an error. Once doubt begins, it takes over: like the Vatican calligrapher who hesitated over whether to write Pope Clement VI or Clement VII, and then whether it was Clement at all, and finally distrusted every word and never wrote another in his life.

The shaking in my right hand isn’t simply a matter of age; it’s a symptom of Veck’s syndrome (named after Karl Veck, calligrapher to the Habsburgs). Those of us in the profession for decades find our hands acquire a certain independence, and often, when we want to write one word, something completely different comes out. They say that even in sleep, when Veck was handed a quill, he would quickly write a word or sometimes a whole phrase; the meaning was always obscure, and later, when awake, he would try in vain to interpret it.

Sometimes my hand writes an involuntary word; that’s why
these pages are filled with corrections. I used to hate imperfection, but I’ve learned to recognize blots and rewrites as one of the many forms our signature takes. Nothing they taught me at Vidors’ School is true. The best calligrapher isn’t the one who never makes a mistake but the one who can draw some meaning and trace of beauty from the splotches.

An abundance of work forced me to interrupt this recollection, but I’ll leave this frozen room now, cross the ocean and time, and once again appear on that stage at Château Ferney. Around Voltaire, apart from the usual visiting sycophants, were two women—one older, one younger—who I guessed were mother and daughter. Voltaire was telling them how to portray the Calas drama with passion and rigor.

“It’s easy to move the people—they weep at anything—but it’s much more complicated to move a court. Don’t cry openly. Hold back your tears. Let them spill out against your will.”

The women meekly accepted Voltaire’s directions, and I was amazed there were still obedient actresses anywhere. Surely they must be Swiss. Taking advantage of the distraction I had created, they stepped aside to rest for a moment. I asked Voltaire what play they were rehearsing.