A case of curiosities (6 page)

The Abbe had constructed the chair from a confessional booth he had cut down and affixed, through ingenious if mischievous rabbeting, to a fancifully engraved coffin. The carpentry allowed its occupant to sit, legs outstretched, protected on three sides. He justified the impiety by saying it kept away the crosscurrents of the Vengeful Widow. But he had had it built, truth be told, to thumb his nose at the religious representatives who stood before him: the assorted Calvinists, Capuchins, Sisters of Charity, Ursulines, and, of course, Carmelites.

A particularly strong-willed member of the last group, Sister Constance, moved to the coffin-confessional to present her petitions, a richly documented cahier of complaints. The Abbe skimmed it and said, "Have you done nothing in the last three months but itemize your dissatisfactions? You treat the written word as if it were penance." He then appeased her by allocating the tongues of all slaughtered cattle to the parish house.

The Calvinists, though fewer in number, were equally disgruntled by the Abbe, who was forever denying them funds they felt predestined to receive. They stood opposite the Catholics, on the other side of the pass line, near the tennis-court grille. Bourget, the Reform pastor, asked to have the temple's bell clapper repaired. Father Gamot piped in with a request for a relic.

"This is not Geneva," the Abbe told the Calvinist. "And this is not Rome," he told the Catholic. "This is Toumay, and here we must live with the resources we have. Find help from your flock. Which brings me to the part of my authority that interests me most. Where is the cowherd?" He dismissed the complaining church fathers and announced that he would receive obligations, payment of which could be made in coin or kind. The Abbe, as one might expect, was partial to the latter.

"What have you brought?" he asked a cowherd who stood before him.

"The water you requested."

"From?"

"From the pasturage beyond Bretem's wood."

"Ah yes. Bring it here, bring it here. Henri!" The Abbe shouted for his storekeeper. "Henri, bring a cruet." The slow-moving fellow who had delivered the gift to the Page cottage made his way to the table. The Abbe poked his hand out of the coffin-confessional and grabbed the vessel, filled it with the liquid from the cowherd's wineskin, stoppled it, and scribbled a tag.

Old Antoine, the watch-finisher, came next. He offered a variation on a good cylinder escapement. The Abbe, again tremendously pleased, accepted it in lieu of a year's rent. One by one, the locals moved to the table and added their unexpected finds: speckled eggs for the Abbe's vitelline investigations, a pannier filled with cut and bundled ilex wood no thicker than a finger, a boar's head, an unusually shaped bird's nest, the leg of a fallow deer, a female stickleback big with spawn and packed in wet moss. The largest offering was not placed on the table. It brayed in the corner and then urinated prodigiously, to the general amusement of those present. Throughout the procession, the Abbe responded with offerings of his own. He gave away jarred orangemusks, which are neither oranges nor musks but a kind of pear sweeter than most others. He kept a store of them in the bottom of his unique chair.

The Abbe saved the most eagerly awaited encounter for last. He motioned to the woman holding a basket of herbs and accompanied by a youth whose free hand, mangled but exposed, clutched a crimson-ribboned sketch folder. The woman placed the basket on the table, and Claude handed the Abbe the drawing. For a very long time, the Abbe stared intently, moving his spectacles to and from the work. Claude's foot tapped violently. The donkey's release had stimulated his own desire to pass water. He was too distracted to hear the Abbe suggest that the following week he take up a residential position in the mansion house. Madame Page accepted for Claude without hesitation. Claude was ebullient when the session ended, not because destiny had been redirected but because his bladder was granted relief.

Claude returned TO the mansion house as agreed, seven days after the session. Depopulated, the great hall lacked the exuberance of the previous Tuesday. Traces of quarter day were minimal — the tangy smell of donkey urine, and a trail of grease and congealed blood plotting the movement of a boar's head from the Abbe's table to, Claude supposed, the kitchen. The table, now cleared of the various payments in kind, held nothing but note-rolls and books. The Abbe sat in the coffin-confessional reading a treatise, his head and hand emerging on occasion to dip a quill and take down an observation.

Unsure of the proper form of introduction, Claude scraped his boot lightly against the floor to catch the notice of his new employer. There was no response. He cleared his throat. No response again. The Abbe continued to move between note-roll and treatise. The jerky intensity of his gestures suggested he should not be disturbed, so Claude waited in silence. He allowed his mind to wander over the conflicting information he had gathered in the last few days, information on the character of the man who now sat before him.

The charcoal burner said one thing, Rochat the baker something else, while the proprietor of the Red Dog, Gaston, had still a third version of the life of the Count of Tournay. The derelict Catholics in the community were quick to praise, the more devout even quicker to condemn. This much Claude concluded: the Abbe was not, like so many abbes of the period, the degenerate son of a degenerate institution. Or, if he was, the nature of that degeneration was too special to lapse into cliche. He was not susceptible to fine clothes, blandness, sycophancy, or women. At least, not local women. Catherine, the mansion-house scullion, a free and willing participant in sexual liaisons of all descriptions, had not once been approached by her master. Still, she said she had heard noise and once had even seen the Abbe in someone's arms. There was also talk, unsubstantiated to be sure, of the Abbe's violent nature during his secret nocturnal endeavors. Snatches of tavern talk provided little additional intelligence. The postman who delivered the mansion-house mail—apparatus of experimental philosophy, parcels sent from distant ports, and journals published by the better continental academies of science—told Claude what was obvious: "He reads . . . books!" Many of the farmers in outlying parts of the commune cited the Abbe's compensatory reflexes. Countering that reputation of generosity, Father Gamot noted that the church donation tray was no heavier since the Abbe's arrival.

The only substantive information came from the gamekeeper of the mansion-house property, a limber-legged fellow who could pick off a pigeon hawk or good piece of gossip at a hundred yards. The gamekeeper told Claude, while cradling an ancient musket and making his rounds, that the Abbe was the only son of a family of only sons, and the inheritor of vast merchant wealth. Shipping. He had, in his youth, entered the Society of Jesus, and left years later in scandal. Dismissed. When he came into his inheritance—smallpox, if the gamekeeper remembered correctly, was the cause of premature and profitable primogeniture— the Abbe decided to purchase the small estate of Tournay, possession of which carried the title of Count. Out of spite for the Church, he used the appellation of Abbe. The gamekeeper ended his account to shoot at a low-flying mallard.

Claude's thoughts were interrupted by what he first took for gunfire but soon realized was the Abbe sneezing. The nasal charge sent a pair of spectacles flying. They would have smashed on the ground had they not been tied to their owner by a leather thong, the attentive contrivance of Marie-Louise, the mansion-house cook. As the Abbe reached down, he knocked over the note-roll he had been filling. It uncurled across the dusty floor. When he brought the distant end under control, the Abbe found it was held by Claude.

"Your apprentice, sir," Claude said nervously.

The Abbe shook his head. "No formal titles will separate us, no papers will be signed. You are apprenticed to no one but yourself. That is not to say you will not learn. Or that I will not teach. You will, and I will." The Abbe said he would reject outright anything that reminded him of his own Ignatian training. (The gamekeeper's information was correct.) This meant there would be little of the unquestioning obedience that had plagued the aged cleric early in the century, when he was Claude's age. "Do you understand?"

Claude did not understand. He was perplexed, and that perplexity appeared on his face.

"See yourself, if you wish, as one of those favored first viziers who populate the Oriental anecdotes I know you so enjoy. See yourself as a young man devoted to his Caliph, content to live with secrets both shared and hidden."

The analogy pleased them both. For Claude, it placed him in a world of enchantments and of genii. He saw the gates of Constantinople and the minarets of Baghdad. For the Abbe, the citations of a heretical faith allowed for yet another private victory in his war with the Church.

Claude was emboldened by the kindness. "Would the Caliph grant his vizier a wish?"

The Abbe frowned. "No. The laws of Muhammedan anecdote prohibit granting a single wish. Surely, your father told you."

Claude looked down. He had expected too much.

But then the Abbe said, "You may, however, have three."

They laughed, a register apart, before Claude formulated his first query. He asked the Abbe to explain his decision to settle in Tour nay.

"Why I came here is easy enough to answer. One of my correspondents mentioned many years back the availability of this land, noting its propitious climate—ha!—and its clear and even light—ha! again. I was informed that the previous Count of Tournay was held in great respect by the residents, that he had made his motto 'Born to Serve.' I later learned that though this was indeed his motto, it referred to the service not of his people but of a white cloth tennis ball." The Abbe swung an imaginary racquet. "My correspondent informed me that the property had the advantage of proximity to the Republic's book dealers while still being far enough away to avoid the burden of Consistory law. He described the location, if 1 recall correctly, as a 'rural, sheltered, unobscured retreat.' On reflection, I can say that he was wrong on all counts but rurality. But, then, as optical theory informs us, reflection can distort. 1 moved here because I was tired of traveling. After years of missionary life in the obedience of the Society—not Mr. Calvin's, of course, but the now disbanded Society that beats the name of the eatth-bound membet of the Holy Ttinity—I wanted to ttavel no mote. Hete I found I didn't have to pack my panniets to entet new worlds."

The Abbe sneezed again, though this time with diminished fotce. He wiped his nose on an alteady stiffened sleeve of lace and said, "Where was I?"

"New wotlds," Claude said.

"Ah yes, terra nova, terra incognita." He temoved himself ftom the enclosed chait and took Claude to a latge window cut at the side of the tennis coutt. "Ftom this vantage point, I can commune with othet expetimentets: yout mothet, Old Antoine, and, beyond the valley, investigatots of even gteatet fame, those ex-ttaotdinaty obsetvets who otdeted simply while lesset men simply otdered. Patacelsus. Holbein. Bauhin. Whethet handling alembics ot canvas ot specimen bottles, they changed all that they touched." As the Abbe said this, he pointed a ctooked finger at the ptesumed tesidences of the alchemist, the paintet, and the botanist he held in high tegatd. The ctooked finget moved.

"Over thete in Bern, Hallet toiled piously, adding to the encyclopedias, the tteatise on anatomy, the dozen ot so physiological wotks, the books of botany and bibliogtaphy, the poetry, the historical novels—he wrote only four of those, I think, none too accomplished. And all the while he managed a saltworks and other municipal responsibilities. How did he do it? Maybe it is the snow that imposes a certain patience. Winter demands that Switzerland's inhabitants collect and ctaft and test. What else can they do?"

The Abbe took Claude to a bookstand and tapped the wotk that tested on it. "Bauhin's Pinax. It took a Switzer to publish a methodical concordance of all known plants. Outdated, but still invaluable. I will have you take a trip to Basel to see the collection. Marvelous amassment of roots. Maybe yout mothet should go, too." He ended his tambling. "Does that answet your first question?"

It did, so Claude asked his second: "Where do you come from?"

The Abbe teplied with surptising frankness. "Let's see, that would depend on where we begin. When I was your age, in the predictable manner of time and place, I was put at the mercy of the Church. I studied with the Fathers of the Oratory. They were simple and secular, prone to popular preaching. That is where, I think, I developed an appreciation for laborers and their crafts. Unfortunately, the philosophy of the Fathers did not sit well with the philosophy of my father, who was a merchant and a man who had no interest, or interests, in the sufferings of the poor. He soon sent me to the Jesuits to get down to the serious business of education.

"I was fitted into the course of studies governed by the Ratio Studiorum, and, much to everyone's surprise, I showed real competence. It was decided I would enter the Church. After enduring the constraints of the novitiate, I found my first passion." The Abbe stopped here. Then he said, "That passion being mechanics. I pursued it intently until the Provincial sent me on apostolic endeavors abroad. I wandered the world, moving from one seaport to another. Despite my youth, I carried the missionary banner to the Indies—both East and West—and all through the Orient. At each stop, I collected shells, shellacs, pigments, anything that would keep my mind moving as much as my feet.

"I returned with a few ailments — sneezing being one—and renewed the mechanical work with my teacher. Eventually charges were leveled against us, and, for reasons too complicated to be particularized, I left."

The Abbe grew somber, and Claude quickly asked his final question: "What is it that you do now in Tournay?"

The Abbe put his hand on the boy's shoulder, communicating a silent kindness. "My rolls," he said, as if to introduce his children. Dominating the vast surface of the table were the note-rolls the Abbe used to maintain disparate researches. He had his storekeeper, Henri, stitch together coarse brown paper and attach it to slotted pins. The pins allowed him to scroll backward and forward without delay. A single initial carved in the base of each pin, the Abbe explained, identified the principal domains of his work. He picked up a roll. It was marked by a "C," for Conchology. There were rolls for a half-dozen other fields (including Fields, a register of growth in the greater Tournay region, and an S-roll of sounds). "I would summarize my credo by borrowing from Cicero. I will spare you the Latin. 'Leisure with dignity.'