A case of curiosities (18 page)

Breaking through the various seals, the coachman offered up a swallow from his belt cup. Claude took the wine nervously. As he drank, he imagined a handbill that announced throughout the kingdom the criminal theft of three watches and a cup of Burgundy. He consumed the illegally acquired wine quickly, but the cup was just as quickly refilled.

That night, Claude and the coachman spoke with the earnest honesty of strangers. Traveling had solidified friendship in ways only travel can. Claude revealed his fears as well as his aspirations. What would he do? Where would he do it? He knew so little about Paris. The coachman tried to reassure him. "The unusual is valued in Paris, and your skills are most unusual."

The talk grew boisterous and would have grown more so had it not drawn the attention of a passerby at a nearby tavern. The passerby knocked on the coach door, which had been left open to facilitate a breeze.

"Sir, you must join us in drink," the coachman insisted to the nose that now poked into Lucille's lamplit interior.

"Your documents, please." It was a petty official.

The coachman produced his papers.

After careful inspection, the petty official noticed the broken seals on the barrel. He looked at the coachman with increased suspicion. "By what authority have you opened that barrel?" He fiddled with the tag. "Do you know the penalty for such violations?"

The coachman deflected the potential accusations. "I had no choice. As you know, Articles 2 and 5 of Title 5 of the Sovereign Decree of June 10th require that all wine be notarized in duplicate. Inspect the barrel, and you will find it lacks the necessary countermark. I certainly did not want to find myself at odds with the laws of the realm."

"No countermark?" The official smiled.

"No. The stuff is untransportable in the eyes of the law."

"Well, then, you must rid yourself of risk." After a moment of feigned protest and a reflex glance at the surrounding carriages, the official accepted the coachman's offer to share a drink.

Claude was impressed. For the second time, the coachman was drinking for free. After the official left, the coachman said, "You see, our awful ragout of regulation can be mastered by those who cook with the right spices. I, my young friend, cook with the right spices." Throughout the night, he regaled Claude with the intricacies of royal law—the reasons for confiscating fish (the Judgments of July 25 and May 29), unspecified merchandise (November 3) and chickens (February 12).

Talk of food dominated the rest of the trip. The coachman spoke of the snail nursery run by the Capuchins—finer than the escargatoires in the north—and the tavern that prepared the best pheasant and whipped syllabub. He talked of pigs' knuckles and mushrooms and his favorite cuts of beef. He spent time describing the gastronomic wonders of a beloved Parisian gargote run by a certain Madame V. And when he sensed Claude was tired of discussing menus, he switched to discourse on wine, for fine wine is as much a constitutional necessity as well-prepared food.

The coachman, with his forthright passions and punning bluntness, provided a soothing antidote to the recent terrors of the mansion house. He insulated Claude from his own fears. In a moment of reckless confession, Claude mentioned the theft of the watches, and the coachman told him not to worry. "Your skills will be rewarded. And when they are, you will send the watches back. Which reminds me: the coach watch, a fine job. A very fine repair. It works like new. I must compensate you. Go look in the back, and see if there's anything that might be dislodged and lost—by accident, mind you. I will find a judgment to justify the object's disappearance." He let out a chuckle.

Claude climbed up and reached through to the netting, inspecting the annotations on the bundles and barrels, all wrapped, hooked, and tied. He found very little of interest until, underneath a bolt of cloth, he came upon a small box. He slid open the notched cover to inspect the contents. An artist's lay figure, some ten inches tall, with limbs of cherry and joints of oak, stared skyward. Claude returned with the little man and said, "He would greatly please me."

The coachman inspected the manikin, a polychrome model of the kind used by art students and genre painters. "He is better dressed than either one of us." That was true. The lay figure came with a calico suit, a little tricorn of felt, two shoes, and a wig.

"It is yours. I will use the old standby, the Judgment of February 12: 'No driver shall be held responsible for damage caused by Acts of God.' I should figure out what that Act of God was by the time we reach Paris."

Claude spent the rest of the trip inspecting the recent addition to his satchel inventory. He stripped the figure of its clothes, removed the wig, giggled boyishly at the absence of a penis. He invested it with the fears and hopes he was carrying to Paris. When, late at night, Claude returned the figure to its snug wooden house, he recognized his own unprotected condition and blurted out for a second time, "I have no place to live. No place to work."

The coachman offered the only comfort he knew. He said, "Eat something," then proffered a pilfered jar of apricots worthy of Chardin.

ONE week AFTER the voyage had begun, Lucille, pulled by a tired post-horse, rolled in to Paris and stalled underneath a gate. Claude awoke in the back pannier, wedged between the portmanteau from Chagny and the trunk from Macon. He stared up at the pointed tips of a rusty portcullis.

The coachman was quick to provide a weather report to the waking traveler. "Grayer than a pewter platter," he said.

But from Claude's angle of vision, Paris called up an altogether different response. The gate, along with the chimney pots that serrated the sky like crenels and merlons, evoked for Claude the image of a sprawling castle. He said as much. "It is

a fortress."

"If so, it is a fortress under siege," the coachman replied. "Look below." Indeed, on the ground, hundreds of itinerant soldiers were now storming the gates. They were not wielding harquebuses or pikestaffs but carried instead barrows and baskets, scutches, saws, and sacks of every shape and size. Claude, sitting high up on a pile of parcels, was fearful that the briefest blink would deprive him of some novel observation. He swung his head and neck about like a shipyard crane, taking in the street life.

When Lucille reached the deppt, the coachman shouted, "Scotch the wheels!" Claude jumped ftom the coach. His deadened legs buckled. He kicked the wedges of wood under the wheels with recently acquired proficiency and looked around at the mass of lacquered vehicles: whiskeys, berlins, cumbersome mails, a fleet of Perreaux cabs.

The coachman called down, "I must check the manifest, and there will be disputes about missing cargo. I will meet you here this evening, at the stroke of seven. Do not be late." He pointed to the tower clock in the Place de Greve.

The coachman descended laboriously and was immediately assaulted by a merchant hoping he carried a consignment of horsehair from Auvergne. The coachman yelled one last encouragement to Claude before more merchants and middlemen surrounded him, all waving papers in his face. "What was it that you said your Abbe told you? Something about keeping the organs of vision trained on all that swirled around you?"

Claude completed the phrase: "... for the satisfaction of ocular knowledge."

"Right. Well, do so." The coachman was then enveloped by the chaos, leaving Claude to explore the city of Paris on his own.

What did Claude see?

He saw a tasseled ribbon vendor flirting with a nun.

He saw the stony kings of Notre-Dame and marveled at the metal work of the west doors, until, that is, he was pushed away by the bargain-hungry faithful comparing prices of plaster medallions.

He saw a drunk vomiting up a substantial quantity of red wine.

He saw a child play with the unsheathed sword of an amused Swiss guard.

He saw an old man rescue an edible scrap from a pile of refuse, while a young girl entreated the public to taste her aniseed-sprinkled muffins.

He saw a blind beggar eye a legless colleague whose power of locomotion returned unexpectedly when he was accused of unfair and unsanctioned competition.

He saw the "door of death" at the Hotel Dieu and watched as healthy tourists laughed at the ingoing procession of pestilence and disease.

He saw a man in red habit with a saber around his waist, a string of teeth around his neck, and a peacock feather in his hat.

He saw batiste handkerchiefs and torn rags cover faces of pedestrians passing the mephitic stench of a parish burial ground, where leg bones were stacked like firewood.

He saw powdered contradictions in the city's diverse professions. A chimney sweep and a barber's apprentice crossed paths, one blackened by soot, the other whitened by flour.

He saw another nun—the city seemed awash in nuns—spit prodigiously.

He saw large things reduced and small things enlarged. The oversized world included shop signs bearing boots for giants, spectacles the size of paired coach wheels, scissors that could cut through tree branches. But more interesting for Claude were the objects of diminished scale that he observed in the stalls of a covered gallery: a tiny porcelain fair booth imported from Ludwigsburg, a pair of stuffed water rats dressed in miniature finery, gold and silver fish swimming in a glass case with canted corners.

He saw a butcher shop display of a flayed calf. The proprietor had dressed the meat to proclaim the full measure of his skills. One side of the creature was gentle-eyed, adorable, and intact. The other side was skinned, its skull sawed away to reveal the spongy contents of the brainpan. The delicate, inviolate half met up with one exposed lung, one kidney, half of a stomach, and a length of intestine that had fallen to the ground. Blowflies swarmed over the dissection and paid special attention to the fallen viscera. Claude saw what he saw with the selective vision that children and artists often share. But sight was not the only sense stimulated. He also heard the novelty of the city.

He heard the clop of iron hooves against the paving stones, a clop unlike the dirt-muffled clop of Tournay.

He heard the imprecations of the deformed and the destitute.

He heard an ambulatory concert performed by a street musician carrying a flute, a drum, cymbals, and a tambourine, while pushing a cello rigged with a tiny wheel on its spike.

He heard the jingle of silver, the whinny of horses, the gurgle of the water pumps off the banks of the Seine.

Late that afternoon, the sun emerged—like an egg yolk on a pewter platter, Claude imagined the coachman would say. And with the sun came unbearable heat. The young tourist took refuge in a dark side street near a quay that was populated by goldsmiths, jewlers, gilders—and watchmakers. At first, he was disappointed by what he saw, though willing to allow that he saw very little. Disappointed, that is, until he caught sight of the subject of his first Parisian sketch. It stood behind glass, at the end of a courtyard. A beam of sunlight bounced off it as if it were some highly polished burning lens. The object forced him to reconsider everything he had seen and heard in the city, or knew from the books he had read. It played further havoc with his appreciation of scale and capped a day overflowing with the satisfactions of ocular (and auditory) knowledge.

What was it he now saw and heard? A five-foot-tall altar clock. He knew it was of religious conception. The biblical motif was everywhere: in the tablets of silvered brass bearing the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and the Creed; in the statues of the saints placed at the sides of the clock dial; in the pavilion adorned with angels and cherubim. Though Claude's religious education was limited, he could pick out some of the more famous figures turning around the clock. There was Pontius Pilate washing his hands, Christ on his way to crucifixion, and someone else bearing a cross. (It was Simon the Cyrenian.) The three figures made one complete revolution each minute.

Claude could tell that the mechanism was spring-driven and that the lunarwork complication demanded a simple but exactingly filed gear. But other aspects of the design remained a mystery. With the push of a lever, the clock was able to plink out five tunes. Five. He tried to engage the shopkeeper in a discussion but was met with an icy and suspicious silence, so he squatted in front of the altar clock and sketched.

If there was anything that could make Claude forget time, it was the beauty of a clock in motion. The cherub struck the hour, and Claude sketched. The cherub struck the hour again, and Claude continued sketching. It was only when more mighty tower clocks clanged that he realized it was seven and he would have to rush to meet his only friend.

THE COACHMAN HAD demanded promptness not because he was a punctual fellow—the anguish of punctuality was not common in late-eighteenth-century Paris—but because of the strategies necessary to obtain a table at Madame V.'s. He hurried Claude through an unlit web of narrow streets until they reached his favorite restaurant.

"Restaurant" is not quite apt. Technically, it was a gargote, a meagerly furnished place where wine and food could be cheaply had. The door, the coachman was relieved to see, was still locked. He counted the heads of the patrons standing in front. "We're fine. We will just make it. Down those steps, Claude, a feast awaits us. Once we have eaten, we can assess your life and chart your plans." Since Madame V. usually opened her door at a quarter to eight, the coachman passed the time amplifying the description he had started on the road.

"For twenty-two sous you are treated to a rare performance, a meal from the hands of Madame V." Claude could not fully appreciate the economizing but he knew enough to be impressed. He nodded.

"Madame V. is one of the few Catholics who truly subscribes to the charitable tenets of her religion. She could charge more than she does for the meals she serves, but doesn't. How can she keep the price so low? When it comes to buying food, Madame V. is a ruthless bargainer in a city known for ruthless bargainers. She uses her age to advantage, pretending frailty if it will lower a price. Anyone who gets in her way, however, will quickly feel the bony protuberance of Madame V.'s elbow.