A case of curiosities (29 page)

Claude knelt. Prickly sweat dried down his back. He closed his eyes and listened. He heard the scrape of the young priest removing wax from the stone floor, the mournful mumbling of the competing penitents, the clack of beads, the rhythmic sweep of a thrush broom, the shuffling of cards.

An organ began to breathe, and the occupants of the church were soon enveloped by music for a requiem mass. Alexandra could have provided a hollow critique of the music's virtue, but to Claude it was beautiful—beautiful, and that was all. The others parishioners must have agreed. The wax scrape, the broomstick, the rosaries, the playing cards all ceased moving. When the impromptu concert ended, Claude spiraled up to the organ loft to offer thanks. He reached the box and peered behind the curtain to discover that the somber sounds had been replaced by the high-pitched whine of the organist, who was complaining to the bellows-boy—a man, in point of fact, of advanced age.

"Have the pipes and pedals repaired by tomorrow, do you hear?" the organist yelled.

The old man couldn't help hearing. He bowed deferentially. The organist repeated himself. "It is essential that the adjustments be complete by tomorrow evening. I am preparing an improvisational." The last comment was made without irony. The organist marched out, leaving Claude and the old man alone.

"Will it be difficult to repair?" Claude asked.

"All night," the old man replied, breathing heavily. He was still tired from the pumping. He rubbed his thighs. "At least it wasn't a concert de flutes or fond d'orgue. They require legs like tree trunks," he said.

The two were silent until the old man said, "You are welcome to keep me company if that would suit you." It was more a request than an offer, and one that Claude accepted. He, too, wished not to be alone.

Companionship soon turned into assistance. Claude helped with the tests and adjustments. The old man, pleased to be taken seriously, gave him a tour of the instrument, describing in detail the multifold bellows, the wind trunk, the trackers, the roller board, the pipes of lead, tin, and wood. Claude reciprocated with observations in his own field of expertise.

Organ and watch: Could any two objects be more complex? The two dissatisfied men compared the elegance of their respective passions and agreed, after friendly debate, that the best organs embraced the rigor of the watch, while the best watches provided the sonority of the organ.

The repairs lasted, as the old man had predicted, throughout the night, and throughout the night Claude listened, asked questions, assisted, observed. He invoked Euler, Bernoulli, and the equation of motion, hoping for words of encouragement denied during the lecture.

The old man was unimpressed. "Forget all those fancy men. You'd be better served by a fine set of tools. Don't you see, knowing why steam rises from a hot apple pie does not make you a pastry cook. You need a good recipe, a good touch, a good oven. That is all. In the field of sound, it is the equation not of motion but of emotion that will tap the source of beauty." The challenge disturbed Claude. The old man sounded like the Abbe.

The rest of the time was taken up by talk of organ stops. Claude paused at each one, asking the name and nature of its manufacture. By the time the problems had been tracked down and fixed up, Claude was more determined than ever to construct what those around him said he could never build. He would make something that would intrigue and seduce, that would move him one step further toward the fulfillment of man's capacities.

"This was the problem," the old man said, pointing to one of the stops.

Claude looked at the initials carved into the end. "What does 'V.H.' signify?"

"Vox humana" the old man said.

A gentle smile appeared on Claude's face. He had entered the church with the somber sentiments of the requiem but departed in the higher registers of a thanksgiving psalm, a spirited hallelujah, a celestial hymn of high praise—quite an epiphany for a nonreligious young man.

Time passed, the vagueness of the phrase is especially distasteful to watchmakers, who detest imprecision. But that is precisely what happened among Claude and his companions. Without incident and without event, time passed.

Livre, protective of the Globe's financial ties to Madame Hu-gon, left Claude alone. He checked his ledger, stitched together his little complicities, and worried about his health, which somehow kept him healthy.

The coachman continued to make his way from Lyon to Paris and from Paris to Lyon, all the while taking culinary detours. In so doing, he discovered a recipe for spatchcock that was added to Madame V.'s menu and soon after preserved in The Burgher's Cookbook, printed in Holland in 1788.

Plumeaux worked on a dozen projects all at once, completing a few, leaving most unfinished. When finances allowed, he published works of fiction that played cleverly with form. A new Utopian novel situated on the island of Xanas received some attention upon publication. In it, Plumeaux described a community of egalitarian hermaphrodites who were devoid of physical tension because they serviced themselves without shame. A critic provided public support for the work, making it scandalously popular until another scandalously popular book supplanted it a few weeks later. Plumeaux also kept himself busy on a project about which he was uncharacteristically quiet. He told Claude, "You will be the first to know, when it is near completion."

Piero kept stuffing. While doing a pheasant, he improved upon the applications of black pepper, a preserving mixture favored by British ornithologists. (His secret: he used cracked, not whole, corns.)

Tournay endured another rough visit from the Vengeful Widow, worse than the assaults of 41 and '51 but still not comparable to the one of '8o. Through a distant relative, Claude learned that Fidelite had broken off an engagement to a Rochat. Which Rochat was never specified. The relative also informed him that the Count of Tournay was putsued by lawyers, bankers, and merchants, all demanding payment. The aged ex-cleric had ceased his research completely. Claude almost felt sorry for the man he had first loved and then despised.

Another, more obscure piece of information was picked up quite accidentally. Walking through the printing district, Claude came upon a book titled The Art of Cystotomy, a soberly bound folio that had been written by the surgeon Adolphe Staemphli. Quick inspection revealed Claude's King Louis mole on the third plate, next to a plum-sized musket ball extracted from a soldier who had fought on the battlefields of Flanders.

Time passed, too, for Alexandra. After the lecture on the mechanical reproduction of sound, she rarely called on her "little Cherubino." The rendezvous at the Palais-Royal were curtailed. The couple seldom "read" to each other, and their infrequent ministrations were conducted in aggressive silence. Often plans would be made, and the mistress would not even appear. The only consolation was that she paid Livre punctually, so that Claude's time was his own.

Questioned by Claude about why the liaison had changed, Alexandra simply dispensed improbable excuses. Sometimes they were medical. (In this domain, an overactive spleen was the most common complaint.) Sometimes they were legal. She declined to discuss the specifics.

Claude felt it was the lecture that had pushed her away, and said as much.

"That is ridiculous," Alexandra said. "Why would I reject that which I do not understand?"

"Why, indeed?"

To disprove the accusation, she handed Claude a substantial sum and said, "Here. Hammer what it is you wish to hammer, my little mechanical friend. It will give me some time to te-cuperate."

Claude took the money, convinced that by building his devices he would prove his talents as a mechanic and his vittues as a man. At an informal fete with friends, aftet the coachman and Piero had had a raucous dispute over the proper preparation of lake trout—one arguing for flax, pepper, and alum, the other for butter and fennel—Claude announced his plans.

"I will be augmenting my garret," he said. When questioned, he refused to say any more. With part of the funds Alexandra had provided, he paid for the meal. Then he went to the pawnbroker to whom he had sold his tools at the start of his bookstore apprenticeship. The silver point counter was gone, but other objects Claude remembered — the tarnished brothel tokens and the hand-held weaponry—were still on display, in all their dusty desperation. As he entered, he felt his heart pound.

The tools had not been sold. In fact, very little of the pawnbroker's merchandise appeared to have found profitable relocation. Claude gladly paid a sum far greater than had been paid to him, and left in high spirits. Reunion with his tools proved unexpectedly invigorating, as if he had been reunited with old friends. He spent the better part of the next morning silently rubbing his fingers over the vises and pin tongs, calipers, screw plates, bench keys, and hammers with lignum vitae handles. He carved a little stand for each and built a workbench.

Before he started his monument to Alexandra, Claude imagined the pleasure of refuting skepticism and winning back his mistress. Such thoughts were forgotten once work was under way. The project did not progress easily. In the early stages, Claude was tortured by the crudity of his sketches and the limitations of his talents. He received encouragement from his neighbors, who still marveled at the drying wheel.

"These are, at best, simple diversions," he said. 'They do not demonstrate the skill needed to reproduce the delicate call of a nesting songster. I might as well beat a kettle like a mender of old brass."

His doubts were reinforced by the resistance of skilled craftsmen to revealing the techniques he needed to learn. The masters of the watch and gold trades uniformly rebuffed him. Self-interest, bolstered by the strength of guild regulation, made it difficult to obtain even the most basic assistance. Piero commiserated. "They would not give you a recipe for the plague."

Claude took trips to the Faubourg St.-Antoine and the junk wharf, where he was greeted more generously. He slowly patched together knowledge from more humble sources: ironmongers, pewterers, plumbers, founders, tin-plate workers, and even a wire-drawer's apprentice. Luck also figured in the advancement of the project. A showman of foreign origin, passing through Paris, publicly displayed a mechanical bird that fluttered, blew out a candle, and sang any tune the audience requested. Initial excitement turned to indignation when it was discovered that the great Giuseppe Pinetti de Wildalle was a fraud, and that the sounds his devices emitted were produced by a confederate who hid under the stage, chirping tunes through an onion skin. Yet the deception led Claude to Rossignol's invaluable work on birdcalls.

He was further aided by a man who dealt in exotic birds bred in Germany: goldfinches, ruddocks, thrushes—and linnets. The dealer was forthcoming with behavioral observation and kind enough to sell two of the plainer-looking songsters to Claude at a reduced price.

Obtaining some of the other materials posed a greater risk. He was forced to make off with a few items from his employer— specifically, two tarnished enema pumps that were part of a mountain of discarded gastric apparatus. He also had Marguerite's younger twin brothers, who scavenged for the iron and brass that fell from passing carriages, seek out well-specified scraps before they had fallen in the road.

Claude soon began construction. His hammer pounded with Cellini-like delicacy, and his glue pot bubbled like a miniature Vesuvius. Residents of the building made any excuse for entering his rooms, to stand, or at least stoop, in judgment. After they viewed the work, there was general agreement that Claude had added brilliantly to an already novel design. Alexandra's generosity, whatever its motives, had allowed him to revive his talents. He was like the impoverished illuminator who, receiving new amounts of gold leaf, beautifies a little piece of scripture. He tried to offer thanks and inform his mistress of the progress he was making, but she declined to see him. Her domestic said she was unavailable, at the doctor's, being treated for electrical imbalances.

"He is a man of learning," the domestic said.

Claude and Alexandra remained out of touch, which was troubling since touch had been essential to their association.

Though this might have worried Claude in more tranquil moments, he was now too engrossed in work to register the significance of the separation. Until, that is, Plumeaux brought him an extraordinary piece of news. *

The hack was out of breath and beaming when he reached Claude's room. "I have just come from the trial."

"Trial?"

"The trial of your Alexandra."

"She is not mine"

"She will be soon. She is free."

"Free?"

"Yes, of her husband. She has always made all sorts of obscure hints about her marital situation. Now the substance of that innuendo is clear. I told you I would investigate."

"And what exactly have you discovered?"

"Guess!"

Exasperated, Claude said, "Adultery?" He had, at one time, suspected some form of infidelity.

"No, more interesting. I would never have spent so much time around the court if it had been a case of simple cuck-oldry." Plumeaux paused for dramatic effect. "The ecclesiastical court has found Monsieur Hugon guilty of . . . p'tence."

"Of what?"

He repeated. "Monsieur Hugon has been found guilty of" — the hack paused and then enunciated clearly—"of IMPOTENCE!"

"Monsieur Hugon, impotent?"

Plumeaux smiled.

"Explain. Tell me everything," Claude implored.

"The court has nullified the marriage. The particulars are lengthy. I am not sure you would want an account of the entire deliberation."

"Stop teasing me and tell all."

"Very well, if you insist." Glancing at his notes, the journalist proceeded: "Neither party denied that they had kept separate lodgings for at least four years, not Monsieur, not Madame. With that acknowledgment, the prosecutor called for a full investigation to uncover the cause of this untenable situation, which he said was 'a violation of conjugal obligation and sacramental law.' All married men, he said, must provide the State with citizens and the Church with parishioners. Marriage without consummation is no marriage at all. Not in the eyes of the Country. Not in the eyes of the Church. With relish, and a sense of self-promotion that will one day make him a very powerful man, the prosecutor called for a trial of impotence 'to determine whether it is Madame or Monsieur who is denying France its much-needed offspring.' Shall I continue?"