A case of curiosities (13 page)
It was not the mistakes. There were few with which to quibble in the sections Claude perused. (Berthoud had contributed to the entry on watchmaking.) And it was not the crabbed marginalia that the Abbe had applied to the essays of interest. No, something visual upset Claude. What exactly it was came out in an argument with the Abbe on the virtue of the illustrations. Claude said he objected to them because they didn't show the sweat, the pain, the agony of mismeasurement that was the source of so much invention. He brought the Abbe the unfolded image that accompanied the essay on Tapestry to make his point. In the Abbe's estimation, the picture suggested another reason for his pupil's discomfort.
"It's the hands, Claude, that make you ill at ease." The Abbe pointed to the amputated extremities the engraver had placed in the picture to indicate the method of manufacture at the Gobelins factory. "We will remedy your annoyance," the Abbe said, "by challenging your own hands with the Test of the File." He tossed Claude a large lump of impure metal and said, "File it down to a perfect cube."
Claude took measurements and filed, then repeated the process. Each time he had five surfaces smooth and exactly measured, the sixth would be off. New measurements would have to be taken, and the filing would have to recommence. This went on until the large lump was filed down to a block smaller than an ivory gambling die. "The perfectionist will never finish filing, Claude."
The Test of the Hammer followed. "If Reaumur obtained 146V2 square feet of leaf from a single ounce of 23-carat gold, you should be able to get at least 144," the Abbe said. And so, with a tiny ingot, Claude would practice extending the surface area of gold. His arm grew strong hammering the velum: twenty minutes with a seventeen-pounder, two hours with a nine-pounder, and four hours with a seven-pounder. He made leaf so fine it was almost translucent.
As a final exam of metallurgical competence, the Abbe tested Claude's skill in the tedious art of lamination. "Here," he said, flicking a silver rix-dollar on the bench. "Hammer it into a vase four inches tall." Claude was unimpressed by the challenge. Until, that is, the Abbe added one devilish proviso: "The rim of the coin must serve as the rim of the vase. You must keep the coin's milling intact."
When Claude hammered his vase, relying on the reverbera-tive effect of the T-shaped mingle , the Abbe said, ."Be gentler with the metal. It feels the passion and pain of the beater." Claude felt it as well. In passing this test and acquiring all that the Abbe could teach him, Claude entered the world of the watchmaker —knowledgeable, diligent, and, most of all, passionate. Each day brought Claude closer to the ultimate, albeit grandiose, goal of the Abbe: the conquest of man's capacities. He learned to make watch parts for himself. He was not going to be beholden to the manufacturers of a proto-industrialized world. He avoided the army of underpaid men, women, and children enduring piecework manufacture down in Savoy. He cut all his own wheels and pinions, filed down the teeth, painted the dial plates, made his own endless screws, springs, and chains, even though the parts were readily available. What he made, he made quickly and efficiently and with consummate precision.
The accountant, who visited regularly to check on his investment, left the mansion house a contented man. He carried with him the first of Claude's mechanical Hours: the Golay brothers working their pit saw in an obligatorily bawdy manner.
"Miniaturist's metallurgy" is what the Abbe called Claude's craft.
"I know it is what I was meant to do" was the only thing the fourteen-year-old watchmaker could say when queried about his precocity. Demand for his work was instant, prices soared, the accounts grew healthy. Claude was granted even greater freedom to acquire what the Abbe called "the language of touch." The language advanced a great deal when Claude started to fix old and special pieces sent to the mansion house for repair. The watchwork brought Claude into contact with many long-forgotten or unknown elements of the craft, most interestingly the movements of a tableau anime, or animated painting.
Lucien Livre, the bookseller at the Sign of the Globe, sent one such painting for repair. It reached the mansion house wrapped in the kind of brown paper favored by specimen collectors. As the detailed invoice made clear, the mechanism did not work and the enameling was cracked. "Your workmen must fix the insides," Livre wrote, "and modify the design to incorporate the philosophical nature of the Hours."
Originally, the animated painting was of tame aristocratic conception. It showed a castle from which columns of simulated smoke moved skyward. A windmill turned in the background. Two children played with a ball, while a carriage and escott rolled around the semicircular path. A postilion cracked his whip. A stream in the foreground was produced by an infinity of twisted glass.
The prospect of repair excited Claude. Here was an object that merged movement and image, that captured the motions of work and play, water and wind. For two weeks, when he was not finishing more commonplace orders, Claude picked apart the mechanism of the animated painting and repainted the surface designs to satisfy the bookseller's pornographic imperatives. (Only the whip remained from the original design.) Claude did such a good job that the Abbe looked for some way to reward the accomplishment.
Reward was nothing new, of course. The Abbe was, by nature, a man prone to demonstrations of gratitude. Over the course of Claude's mechanical development, he had given him tools from the chapel room and ordered others from abroad: rough files from a foundry town in Germany, a set of punches from Paris, two exquisite soldering dishes from a toolmaker whose name is no longer legible. The restoration of the animated painting required something more, something special.
The Abbe at last hit upon an idea. "A watchmaker values nothing more than time, Claude, so I would like to give you time for time's sake." He insisted that all the following week Claude spend his days constructing an object of his own design made solely to satisfy his own desires. After much fretting, Claude produced, in a burst of nocturnal manufacture, a writing tool that he could attach to the gap on his right hand. It was far more elegant than its prosthetic precursors. The only one chat approached it was the iron hand of Gotz so praised by Goethe. Yet while the Swabian knight had an iron, flat-spring ringer joint connected to a large ratchet-and-pawl, Claude's cog system reduced the scale and added a suction cup to increase flexibility. Also, he fashioned an ink reservoir that allowed him to write for many hours without refilling.
The first phrase Claude wrote down with the finger pen was an observation repeated often by the Abbe: "Remember what I have said. We must all choose our own metaphors. Mine is the nautilus. Your metaphor is that golden clamshell we call the watch."
When IT CAME to visitors, not much distressed the Abbe. He entertained philosophers and faunists, herbalists and bakers without prejudice, enduring peculiarity for the sake of his work. If, say, one of the Rochats arrived with a snake that released a foul smell, the Abbe would light a perfume burner, hold a handkerchief to his nose, and talk through the night about the virtues of venom. If a woman rumored to be a witch would tell her secrets only in complete darkness, then it was complete darkness the Abbe would provide. And if research required visiting a barn in which a child rubbed its runny nose against the Abbe's freshly washed stockings, he would smile and overlook the unwanted intimacy. It took something altogether different to unsettle Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Robert Auget, Abbe, Chevalier of the Royal Order of Elephants, Count of Tournay.
That something was Lucien Livre.
Livre was probably the most important, if least engaging, of the Abbe's correspondents. He served as the sole Paris agent for the Hours of Love. Though by training a publisher, Livre was, more exactly, a pornographer in all that pornography entailed. He matched wealthy patrons to costly vulgarities: books, watches, and other items of licentious design. He was neither impressively tall nor impressively short, and his clothes, while old-fashioned and topped by an oversized wig, were also unworthy of mention. Livre's character, not his clothing, was what one remembered. He was a nasty but intelligent man who existed in a state of petpetual dissatisfaction. He saw insincerity in all gestures and conspiracy in every act of kindness.
At first, the Abbe attributed Livre's moodiness to the same humoral imbalance that had debilitated Rufus of Ephesus, Alexander of Tralles, and the Persian Avicenna. But he was soon forced to changed his diagnosis from melancholy to meanness. Then, when he heard the bookseller spit, he changed the diagnosis yet again, and called him the Phlegmagogue. The name served to describe both Livre's absolute absence of enthusiasm and the distressing manner in which he was forever clearing his throat.
The two men had first met many years earlier, in Paris, soon after the Abbe left the protection of the Church. They had collaborated on a book the Abbe annotated and Livre printed. It was published discreetly and died an all-too-discreet death. The Abbe never discussed the nature of the work. "In time," he told Claude once, "I will give you a copy. You will find it confusing."
Livre and the Abbe suspended communication for more than twenty years, until the Abbe's trade in pornographic mechanics necessitated the steady flow of erotic materials the bookseller was able to provide. In exchange for the pictures and texts, Livre received a certain number of finished pieces. With these, he insinuated himself into social situations that would otherwise have been closed to him.
They shared a number of interests, but that is not surprising, given the variety of the Abbe's endeavors. Both men loved books, though differently. Both men investigated the nature of water, though Livre to more specific ends. Both disdained the Church, though with Livre it was just an extension of a disdain for the world at large.
Livre's pessimism, however, was incompatible with the simple joy the Abbe took in asking complex questions. The bookseller scoffed at the Abbe's adage, "Without questions there are no solutions." Other incompatibilities are worth noting. The Abbe pursued things in a fragmentary — he might have called it rhapsodic — fashion, appending thoughts without any dependence of one part upon another. Livre liked his world, and his words, precisely defined and properly arranged. Proof of this precision came in the letter that anticipated a stop at the mansion house. Livre divided his letter into three parts.
The first part bore the title, "Date of Arrival." Livre was to reach the mansion house three weeks after the conclusion of the Frankfurt book fair. The trip could have been done more quickly, but his chronic dyspepsia required a detour. Each year he went to a different spa—including Spa—to fight his gastric demons. This year he would take a rejuvenating cure in the waters of the Lower Seltzer.
The second part began, "Purpose of Stay." Most of the business between the bookstore and mansion house was conducted by Livre's cousin Etiennette and the Abbe's accountant. But with the increased demand for Claude's animated watches, Livre decided to triangulate his return and stop in Tournay. He carried with him a new commission and proposals for more lucrative schemes. The Abbe's indebtedness was so substantial that Livre felt comfortable imposing. He assumed, rightly, that he would receive free and attentive hospitality. The specifics as to what constituted attentive hospitality made up the longest section of Livre's letter.
And the final section of Livre's communication bore the legend, "Requirements during Stay." The particulars filled more than two tightly written foolscap pages and forced the residents of the mansion house to alter their habits dramatically. Meals at Tournay were, in normal circumstances, taken casually and at irregular intervals. When research required extended observation, a supper might be forgotten until Marie-Louise arrived with a cut of cold meat, a hunch of bread, and some wine. For Livre, such irregularity was unacceptable. As the letter instructed, meals were to be ready at two in the afternoon and at eight in the evening. "My stomach," he wrote, "necessitates a routine and menu that will not, I assume, be difficult to arrange."
On the day that Livre's stomach (and the rest of the finicky bookseller) reached the mansion house, the Abbe and all who served him had done their best to prepare. The big test came at the first supper, since most of the bookseller's instructions involved the preparation of food.
Marie-Louise acquitted herself admirably. She covered the brandy-cask table with a fine piece of valley lacework. The books, manuscripts, and shells that littered the room were cleared away, hidden in the depths of the coffin-confessional, behind the color-cove curtain, and anywhere else the bookseller was unlikely to look. Where a cruet filled with Cellini's urinous mixture had rested five hours earlier, a crystal decanter, filled with the Abbe's finest stream water, now glistened. (The Tokay would be poured after the meal.) A flat file that normally served double duty on metal and nutmeg was replaced by a silver grater and other pieces of specialized tableware.
Claude and Henri, Catherine and Kleinhoff joined the Abbe and Livre. The Abbe chose to embrace an English tradition that allowed for the free communion of assistants and their master during meals. The assistants sensed, however, that this visitor would not want such "free communion" to include speech. So they suspended conversation before sitting down to eat. (For Henri, Kleinhoff, and Claude, this was no problem. Catherine had a much harder time keeping quiet.) That left it to the Abbe and Livre to fill the silence. Each retreated into his own concerns. The Abbe talked about his travels as a missionary, the bookseller about the elegance of his Paris shop. The Abbe told a lengthy story about his search for a gum arabic on the Greek island of Lemnos. "Pliny praised it, but I found the stuff was no good."
Livre parried with a quotation from the author himself. "I imagine you banished Pliny to your own little Anticyra."
"Oh yes, Anticyra." The Abbe hadn't the slightest idea as to what the bookseller was referring. The conversation deteriorated until it was more discourse than dialogue. Each one talked to no one but himself. The awkwardness was finally diminished with the arrival of the food. When the mantel clock struck eight, Marie-Louise began the procession of steaming pots and platters. Only after Livre had inspected his timekeeper did he seem satisfied that his schedule was being followed. He magnanimously offered a little smile to the rest of the table. The smile left as quickly as it came. Livre observed Marie-Louise ladle some pea soup from a silver tureen.