A case of curiosities (24 page)

"Or, at least, on their diapers," the wet nurse replied.

Claude used the found objects to try his hand at storytelling. "My father," he said, "held that all discoveries hide a tale." (This was a rare and significant recollection of his origins, but a false one. It was the Abbe who had made the statement during one of their hikes.) Combining the objects with the other garret relics—the lay figure becoming a particularly useful prop— Claude would, after a day of heavy cleaning, shout out histories from his dormer window to the residents across and below. The lay figure did battle with Piero's avian monsters in a narration loosely based on the Icarus legend. The Portrait in Little became a keepsake in a tale of unrequited love. These efforts resulted in a kind of puppet saga that Claude embellished with each new discovery. One installment reyolved around a solitary button made of horn. Claude transformed it into a secret brothel token until Plumeaux, an expert in such matters, pointed out what Claude had already discovered and forgotten from his trip to the pawnbroker's shop: brothel tokens were usually made of brass. "Then it will be a button bitten off by a streetwalker's client in a moment of uncontrolled enthusiasm." When Plumeaux suggested taking these oral histories to Livre, Claude declined. "I would not expect him to appreciate anything outside the teachings of his pearls." With the cleaning complete, Claude turned his attentions to architectural construction.

He tended to the worst hazard first, the leak the landlady insisted he repair. It had rotted half the flooring, allowing Claude to observe the life of the milliners who lived just below. This was an interesting peephole but a dangerous one, and so Claude replanked the floor. To stop the leak itself, he scrambled over the roof in search of gaps. When he climbed down, he observed four shafts of light where previously there had been only two. He climbed up again and slipped on a moss-covered pantile. The possibility of death dissuaded him from additional ascents.

The leak defeated him for two wet weeks, until he contrived a way to turn a handicap to advantage. He took an old copper bowl and bolted it inside a drop-leaf cabinet he fashioned from the scrap wood left by the previous tenant. Then he positioned the cabinet, which was backless, so that when the front opened, the bowl would catch the dripping water. He next hammered a lip at the back of the bowl. When the cabinet was closed, the water in the bowl would pour out the back and down a funnel to a wooden drainpipe. The leak thus provided him with a reserve of water.

More ingenuity followed. To liberate what little floor space he had, Claude scoured the junk wharf and cloth market, bargaining for tenterhooks and burlap with which he made storage hammocks. He linked a series of pulleys and sheaves so that he could raise and lower his bed like a drawbridge. He cut more niches, which recalled the roadside altars of pious montagnards. But instead of a Vitgin ot a toughly carved saint, the spaces contained shoes, a small library, candles, the barn owl, and a stuffed rabbit with sooty winter fur (the unsuccessful result of Piero's experimental application of arsenical soap).

More sheaves and pulleys were added to increase the theoretical advantage. In the end, Claude attached a pentaspast, an engine with five pulleys, that allowed all the furniture to be raised and lowered effortlessly. When they were not needed, the chairs locked against a table that closed up and rose off the floor.

The kingdom soon expanded beyond the walls of the garret. Claude had once witnessed, during the summer solstice, a shaft of light bouncing off a polished silver chalice in Notre-Dame. While he did not ascribe any religious significance to the concentrated illumination, he was fascinated by the possibilities of reflection. And so, out of the dormer, he secured a device controlled by wires that directed solar rays and lamplight into his rooms. Next to this he appended a small but sturdy windlass that allowed him to ratchet up metal scraps, baskets of Madame V.'s cooking, and offerings from neighbors who encouraged his manual pursuits. He was the pride of the building, even replacing the copulating milliners as the most common subject of gossip.

His skills were soon in demand. The landlady was his first client. Distressed by the damage the pigeons caused in the spires of the St.-Severin church, she appealed to Claude to find a remedy. She explained that birds disfigured her favorite gargoyle and pointed at a basilisk covered with unwanted coronary markings. Unable to reach the roosts, Claude and Piero installed the barn owl to scare away the birds. The neighbors marveled at the results. The scare-pigeon was the talk of the building for weeks thereafter, until Claude mounted his next invention.

"What is it?" neighbors queried.

"A radial clothesline for the wet nurse."

Constructed out of the spinning wheel salvaged during the early stages of renovation, the device was planted, like a whirligig, high above the roof, thus avoiding the muck of the drains and the smoke from the nearby chimney pots. In exchange for the drying wheel, Marguerite provided both Claude and Piero with free laundering, which meant that Claude's frock coat and Piero's viscera-stained smocks soon flapped beside her linen.

News of the cleverness spread, and Plumeaux was even able to sell a little article on "A Garret Grotto" to a local journal. He described the "ratchetings and umbellate contrivement of a bookstore apprentice" but did not mention Claude by name.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the tinkering revived Claude's spirits. Restoration of the attic marked the restoration of Claude himself. There were, of course, setbacks, nights when he would lie awake and stare out the window at the skyline he had reshaped: the mirrors with their guys, the windlass and its pawl, the clothes that hung from the drying wheel. On Sunday nights, he often fell asleep clutching his testicles, carrying the image of the flapping sheets into his dreams, transforming them into the sails of a Turkish galley on which he could escape. But when he awoke, he was faced by yet another transformation. The sheets were now perforated little slips of paper bearing marks of tedium, and they were hanging from the desk string of the Globe.

The COMPOSITION OF the pearl that found its way into the case of curiosities was provoked late one Thursday night after the Globe had closed and its staff had left. Livre sat at his desk, struggling to suppress digestive distress. He poured out a measure of Venice treacle, a remedy pungent with cardamom. He drank it but received little comfort. He still farted. He tried to distract himself by consulting the various foreign and local book lists, as well as the periodicals and announcements stacked neatly at the corner of his desk. There was a Gazette, bought for appearances and left untouched, the slim Mercure de France in its gray-blue cover, and the indispensable Journal de Paris. He scanned the Journal before turning to an underground book list in search of announcements that might threaten his market in illicit works. He excised two or three items with his perforator and filed them away in the appropriate pigeonholes of his desk. He logged two new references into his booklet. It was on the opposite side of the second clipping that he came across an unsigned article under the rubric "A Garret Grotto." The item described a place "in which chairs rise to the ceiling, and a bed closes up like a drawbridge of some ancient land." The writer mentioned "a resourceful bookseller's apprentice who has transformed mean and meager surroundings into a microcosm of inexpensive invention." At first, Livre thought little of it, but the phrase "bookseller's apprentice" lingered. Could it be? Could it not be?

Livre's first impulse was to punish, to prepare the baize-covered bastinade for Claude's arrival the following morning. But after chewing over the implications of the infidelity, and after gaining control of his anger, he forced himself to remember that previous attempts at subjugation, both by whip and by word, had done little to diminish the tinkering of his rogue worker. How many times had Claude been swatted and told, "You must remember you are the apprentice to a bookseller— a Page in the work of Lucien Livre"? No, this outrage, this violation of trust, called for a shift in strategy. A few days later, Livre set his plan in motion.

The unsuspecting apprentice enteted the Globe with his hands uncoveted and his velvet vest misbuttoned — the first buttonhole accommodating the second button, the second buttonhole accommodating the third button, with the pattern repeating itself down to Claude's navel. Livre swallowed and burbled deeply to stifle retributive instincts. Instead of a smack, he dispensed a gentle pat on Claude's back, and through clenched teeth asked how he was. At the noon meal, Livre did not curse the dullness of his knife, nor did he mumble accusatory remarks about the rawness of the overcooked leeks. (Leeks had replaced potatoes.) He took a sip of his beloved Seltzer and feigned an avuncular attitude that put Claude on his guard.

"Claude, how long have you been here, in the world of my Globe?"

A voice from the back called out, "Three hundred and twenty-seven days."

Livre scowled at his cousin and redirected attention to Claude. "In that time, you have rarely tarnished the reputation of my shop." Again, the generosity was uncharacteristic. "It has been my contention that only savages rely on wasteful slaughter. The mark of civilized man is his ability to cultivate." Livre chomped through a piece of leek bread and the analogy that accompanied it. "A transition from slaughter to sowing, from killing to tilling, is beneficial in the feeding of a people. This approach is also applicable to the business of the bookseller. My patrons— our patrons, Claude—must be tilled, not slaughtered like beasts. We must nurture them to allow for years of fruitful harvest. Cultivation, Claude, is the key. In our contacts with the authorities and with the patrons, cultivation is the key."

Claude nodded through the labored comparison, which he knew to be inspired by the misreading of an outdated treatise on geoponics that he dusted every Monday. "I will always venture to harvest attentively," he said.

"You will have to, Claude, for I am placing my Globe in your care for the next four weeks. You will be the one cultivating our trade." The news left Claude in shock as Livre laid out his plans. "Each year, I attend the Frankfurt book fair and make trips to Geneva and Neuchatel. I do so to check on competition outside the scope of royal law. I will negotiate the delicate arrangements concerning distribution of my books. And there's the matter of the Hours of Love. Your former master will be prosecuted shortly if he does not make good on his commitments." Claude withheld the questions he desperately wanted to blurt out. "Furthermore, my new apothecary advises me that I must treat my 'slow belly.' I must take the cure down at Montserrat. This is why I am putting my Globe in your hands. Everything has been arranged."

And indeed, it was. The day Livre left, he hung no fewer than sixty pearls from a doubled desk string. (One line for each of his helpers.) In general, the pearls divided the operation of the store between care of the establishment, which was Claude's responsibility, and care of the account books, which was Etiennette's. Shipping, inventory, and the Wednesday-night salons would be suspended until Livre's return.

On the day of departure, Claude accompanied Livre to the coach stop at the Place Maubert. He loaded a mahogany medicine cabinet and the Mysteries onto the top of the coach. He watched as Livre cautiously belted himself in and tapped his pockets to confirm that he had booklet and billfold, perforator and papers. Then, without so much as a wave, Livre was off and Claude was free.

Back in the shop, the temporary master settled in. When he finally inspected the pearis that were left for him, he was introduced to Livre's subtle revenge. Rather than limit Claude during his absence, the bookseller had provided an unprecedented range of rights, including the chance to express his creative urge. The bookseller knew that by doing so, either the garret grotto or Bibliopola would suffer. If the new responsibilities ended Claude's mechanical inclinations, then the plan would prove effective. On the other hand, if Claude's tinkering made him careless in his tasks at the Globe, Livre would have ample grounds to take swift and ruthless action. In short, rather than constrain him, Livre encouraged a multiplicity of endeavors. Claude took up the challenge unaware of the anger that had provoked it. Ignoring the scrupulous order of tasks, he plucked a pearl from the string. It was this little slip, which Claude pinned to his wall of scraps, that later found a place in the three-dimensional register of Claude's life. It read:

In free moments after the Saturday closing

Prepare a Wednesday lecture

Arrange my windows

Livre was a man constitutionally resentful of choice and blind to any expression of elegance contrary to his own. This was made clear in the display cases that ran down the middle of the Globe. Each Saturday, he would change the books he promoted, filling his windows mostly with works by long-dead writers who neither threatened his sense of self-importance nor provoked envy. He kept handy a small collection of leathers, marbled papers, and fabrics, which he used as backgrounds for his displays. By resting a Dutch folio on a background of Utrecht velvet, Livre could consider himself a stylist of the highest order. Before he departed, he had encircled a translation of Pliny's Natural History with tiny Doric columns.

Claude removed the plaster-of-Paris columns to make way for a more personal expression of his own interests. In an exercise that anticipated other efforts, he decided to recognize the men who had marked his life since he left Tournay. He cleared space for his vinous companion the coachman, for Piero, and for Plumeaux. In the end, even Livre was placed in Claude's glazed pantheon. He would have liked to include a woman but believed no woman he had encountered warranted representation. In this, Claude was narrow-minded, partly because of his youth but mostly because he was who he was. When Etiennette rightfully took offense at her absence from the arrangement, Claude added her to the case configurations. The Abbe was poignantly excluded.