Voltaire's Calligrapher (2 page)

Madame de Béza was tried and found guilty. She was taken to the gallows, but the executioner was unable to proceed: the page containing the verdict, covered in writing just a few hours earlier, was now a blank sheet enlivened only by red wax seals. Some understood the disappearance to be a sign from God, attributing it
to the virtue of the accused rather than the folly of the calligrapher, and so Catherine’s noose was exchanged for jail.

They tried to accuse me of conspiracy; I attempted to explain my mistake using arguments of science and fate but was still sent to prison for three months.

I went to my uncle’s as soon as I was released, yearning to sleep night and day in a real bed, free of the stench, the screams, and the rats. My uncle, however, had already gathered my things, and his cold embrace celebrated not my return but my departure.

“I took the liberty of offering your services while you were in prison. I sent some old acquaintances a brief list of your abilities and a long list of your incompetencies, so as not to be called a liar.”

“Did anyone respond?”

“The only reply came from Château Ferney. They read everything backwards there: they understood your vices as virtues and agreed to hire you immediately.”

I
was twenty years old and all I owned was a sewing box full of quills and inks. It would have been impossible to get to Ferney if my uncle, maréchal Dalessius, hadn’t run a company called Night Mail that transported the fallen. Hundreds of bodies arrived in France during wartime that had to be returned to their cities and towns. The post had initially seen to this, but letters and merchandise would arrive in such a deplorable state that people stopped reading their correspondence; as soon as the mail arrived, it was burned. The dead had managed to isolate the outer regions of our kingdom.

The Night Mail was devoted solely to funeral transport. My uncle inherited the business from my grandfather, and operations were run out of a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris that had once been a meat-salting facility. There the bodies were sorted, put into coffins—often filled with salt, as if to maintain the tradition—and sent out on the roadways of France. There were only twenty-five hearses; since routes were uncertain and mistakes common, families could wait months for a body to arrive. At first, in the clamor of war, the fallen were received as heroes, but as time wore on and
the fighting came to an end, the traveler would reach home like a postman bearing bad news, an inopportune visitor who spoke of a conflict everyone had managed to forget.

My uncle had a small shuttered window put in the caskets, so the occupant could be viewed and mistakes prevented. Another of his innovations was to hire a button manufacturer to strike medals so every soldier could be given a set. In this way, everyone went home a hero. We have very strict rules in this profession, maréchal Dalessius would say: Wear black, work at night, keep silent.

Business would fall dramatically whenever there were no wars or epidemics. In order to build up his clientele, my uncle began to disseminate a Benedictine theologian’s theory: he asserted that, to get into heaven, a person must be buried in his birthplace or at a distance of no more than that between Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulchre. This little ruse, plus an agreement with the government to cart corpses from the gallows and prisons, ensured that my uncle was never short of patrons, even in the worst times of peace.

Ferney was far away, on the Swiss border. Banished from Paris by the king, Voltaire had bought the château to be able to escape to his estate in Geneva if his life were ever in danger. By the time we arrived, all of the bodies had been delivered and I was the only remaining passenger. I said good-bye to Servin, the coachman, and stood alone at the door to the castle.

A clerk studied my papers, then told me to take a seat. The sun soon faded from the windows, and I was left in the dark. No one came to light the lamps; I thought I had been forgotten. It had been an exhausting trip. All I wanted was food and a bed; a servant finally appeared and led me to the east wing of the castle. There were clocks in every room and the noise was deafening. This ticktock, I soon learned, was so pervasive it crept into the domestic staff’s dreams, tormenting them with images of gears, hands, and Roman numerals.

Voltaire had seen his share of conflict, prison, and exile; I expected to see a giant of a man, with an enormous head and piercing eyes. Instead, I found an old man who seemed unreal, more like a drawing in a book (a book left in the garden through a night of rain). His teeth had been lost to scurvy, his bald head was covered in a woolen cap, and his tongue, thanks to his habit of licking his quill whenever it ran dry, was as blue as a hanged man’s.

Voltaire didn’t turn when I walked into the room; perhaps he was deaf as well. He was studying a sheaf of papers with a gold-rimmed magnifying glass.

“Idiot,” he said.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“The man who wrote this is an idiot.”

“One of your enemies?”

“Worse: me. Why this stupid fondness for dictionaries? Can you tell me that? It must have rubbed off when I worked on the
Encyclopédie.”

“As a calligrapher, I’m quite fond of alphabetical order, too.”

I recalled how this had been taken to such an extreme at Vidors’ School that we would use our bodies to form letters in gymnasium class.
G
and
h
were the worst. Out on the bitterly cold patio, our teacher would stand in a tower and recite passages from the
Aeneid
in Latin that we were forced to spell out all morning long.

“Do you know, I once planned to write my autobiography using alphabetical order? If I ever undertake such a venture, remember that any letter can be omitted except
a
and
z
. They give the impression of having come full circle, even if other letters are missing in the middle. Who knows what Christianity might have become if Jesus had said ‘I am Beta and Psi’ instead of ‘I am Alpha and Omega.’”

He handed me a pen and paper.

“Show me a sample of your calligraphy.”

“I’d rather use my own quills, if you don’t mind.”

“It was thanks to them that you lost your last job. Who’s to say you won’t lose the next?”

I refused to be intimidated.

“What should I write?”

“‘My hand trembles like an old man’s.’”

Indeed, my hand did tremble. The result was wretched-looking. This had never happened to me before.

“It’s the pen.”

“Try another.”

I took out a blue goose quill, my favorite, and the result was even worse.

“That goose is still flapping its wings. Still, I’ll hire you. Your hand shakes so badly people will think I’ve written it myself. You’ll report to my secretary, Wagnière.”

“And what will I do?”

“Answer correspondence. Here, in this room. You’ll need to consult me regarding some replies. Others will be at your discretion.”

“But it will be obvious you didn’t write them.”

“Don’t worry. In fact, it’s better that way. People will think: If he’s not drafting his own letters, he must be hard at work on an important play. Absence itself can be an element of style.”

We were suddenly startled by a crashing sound. Voltaire headed into the hallway, and I followed. His strides were long but slow, and I had to stop myself from racing ahead. Though it took us a while to get there, papers were still floating in the air, as if waiting for their owner to arrive.

We entered the archives at the same time as a tall man with a sad air about him, dressed in somber clothing. He began to dig among the piles, and I knelt down to help. Someone was coughing and moaning under the weight of those yellowing letters tied with string.

I pulled out a bundle of moth-eaten pages that nearly disintegrated in my hands. Down below was a face so covered in dust it seemed to form part of the correspondence.

“Let’s get poor Barras out of here. You take one arm and I’ll take the other.”

We pulled out a weedy young man whose head and upper lip were bleeding. He shook us off at the first opportunity, as anxious to leave as if a wild beast were lying in wait for him. He limped down the hallway, shouting:

“I’m going back to the kitchen! To the archives, never again!”

“I think we need a new file clerk,” the tall man said to Voltaire.

“Here he is. Wagnière, let me introduce you to Dalessius. Dalessius, straighten up this mess. In addition to writing letters, from now on you’ll be in charge of the archives.”

“Isn’t it dangerous for an apprentice?” Wagnière asked. “Barras nearly died, and last month that student from Alsace…”

“If M. Dalessius tries, he’ll learn. If not, he’ll be sent home … in the same carriage that brought him here.”

V
oltaire had many enemies, so opening his mail was a dangerous task. There could be poisonous needles concealed between the pages, vials that emitted toxic fumes, venomous spiders.

The packages he received were often hollow books that contained hibernating snakes or sensitive incendiary devices. In a special room, away from the rest so as to limit the number of victims, I would check every envelope and parcel with a paralyzed heart. To assist in the task, Voltaire had bought a series of instruments in Geneva designed to detect tricks and explosives: rock-crystal magnifying glasses, a fine telescope that could be inserted through packaging, a lamp with a blue flame that allowed you to see through paper.

I not only opened the correspondence but also replied to it, in Voltaire’s name.

“Look in my books and add some old witticism to your seminarian’s prose,” he ordered.

I was young, and that work—which I would later miss dearly—filled me with impatience. The routine, even the danger, bored me:
I began to open the mail without looking and reply without thinking. To my surprise, Voltaire received from a number of amorous women letters written in their own blood. If they could only have seen the living corpse that was the object of such futile passion, they’d have scraped it all up to put back in their veins. Out of sheer tedium, I began to answer my employer’s correspondence using all of the implements at my disposal. There was nothing I wouldn’t use: albatross quills hardened in the iodine from sea foam; Chinese monkey-hair brushes; inks that shone in the dark; others that disappeared as you read the words, creating the illusion of goodbye. Initially enthused by my own enthusiasm, Voltaire soon grew annoyed that his letters would be blank by the time they reached their destination or would contain jumbled words or a signature that glowed like a ghost in the night.

To limit my experiments, Wagnière reminded me I still had to organize the archives. There were so many bundles of letters that if you took all the yellow and red ribbons that held them together, you could tie a bow around the world. Correspondence from royalty, like Catherine the Great or the King of Prussia, was to be kept in an iron chest, under lock and key. Insulting letters were burned, like the ones from the Bishop of Annecy, who every fortnight would accuse Voltaire of unconfessed sins. The ridiculous ones were burned as well, like those from a society of alchemists in Geneva who swore they possessed Paracelsus himself.
We keep him hidden in the cellar, in a house on the lakeshore. He awakes every three months, mumbles something that sounds like Voltaire, and returns to his centuries-long sleep
.

I had never had any trouble with the little iron stove until one day (I was distracted, reading some licentious notes from Mme. F.) a spark set fire to a pile of correspondence from the marquis d’Argenson, a dear friend of Voltaire’s. I always carried a bag of
sand for making quills and sometimes to use as a blotting agent, and threw it on the fire before it burned the archives to the ground.

I couldn’t sleep that night, knowing Voltaire would be deciding my fate: expulsion or servitude.

I went to his study at dawn. Through the window, a stand of dark trees mirrored my sadness, the wind bending them into question marks. Voltaire was examining a parasite he had found on one of his plants.

“We must get rid of everything that consumes us, everything that lives at the expense of others,” Voltaire said by way of greeting. “I want you to pack your bags.”

“Can’t you give me some other job, instead of sending me away? Don’t you need a gardener?”

“What do you know about plants? Whenever you go into the garden, the roses impale themselves on their own thorns and the tulips commit mass suicide.”

“What about the kitchen?”

“They would cook you, and I’m not sure I’d like that dish.”

I liked life at Ferney. I didn’t want to go back to climbing stairs at the courts, knocking on magistrates’ doors, waiting in paper-filled offices where the air was always stale. All the strength drained out of me as I thought about leaving, and while Voltaire stood tall in front of me, I grew old and stooped.

“I’ll go pack now and never return,” I said, feigning dignity and hoping for compassion.

“What did you think I meant? I’m not firing you. I need you to get ready to leave, but to go to Toulouse.”

“Why Toulouse?”

“A traveler arrived last night and told me of a distressing case. He said the court of Languedoc is preparing to execute a Protestant named Jean Calas, and perhaps all of his family as well.”

“What is he accused of?”

“Of killing his son.”

“Then I hope the sentence is carried out.”

“And I hope you’ll find out why they’re determined to kill this man at all costs. I’ve prepared some briefs; you can read them on the way.”

“But I’m a calligrapher. I care about the clarity of line, not the truth behind words. That’s for others to do—philosophers, for example.”

“I’m too old to go. Besides, my reputation there guarantees a shortcut to death. I’m in no hurry to die, much less in Toulouse. You, on the other hand, won’t be in any danger, as long as you never mention my name. I’ve already asked your uncle to send a coach for you.”

“I thought I’d stay here, to write for you and for history, not travel with the dead.”