A case of curiosities (23 page)
The coachman eyed Claude's food. "Eat, my friend. An empty sack cannot stand."
Claude did not respond. Describing the Globe clarified a frustration he had not, until then, been fully willing to recognize.
"I am sorry, but I must go," he said at last.
Plumeaux suggested the distractions of the bawdy house that had inspired The Wandering Whore, ten sous in octavo. Claude declined, as did the coachman.
"I must tend to Lucille's injuries," the coachman said.
"And I," the apprentice mumbled, "must tend to mine."
Claude climbed the stairs to his lodgings with somber determination. Piero, hearing his neighbot teturn, knocked and entered. He carried a barn owl, which he positioned, with the aid of wire, on a beam.
"The order was canceled," Piero said. "You may keep it until I find a buyer, which is unlikely since 1 did such a poor job on the eyes. I must find better eyes." He informed Claude he was making a three-dimensional still life for a client who appreciated Chardin despite the artist's faded popularity. "The rabbit will be easy enough, but the pheasant's plumage—all that turquoise— that's the challenge. I hope I am up to it. I'll save the fruit for the end, since waxing is simple." Piero stopped when he observed Claude looking vacantly over the rounded toes of his boots. "I am interrupting you. I have troubled you in some way. I will go."
"No, you haven't troubled me. I have troubled myself, though perhaps we could talk another time."
Piero left, and Claude turned onto his side. He looked at a print plastered to the wall that purported to be a "Detailed Tree of All Human Knowledge." Categorical in nature, the print taunted Claude with the disciplines he had forsaken. He stretched out a finger and traced the fields of study outlined on the branches of the Tree. Where, he asked himself, did he fit in the grand scheme of professions and perceptions? His finger jumped from limb to limb: ironwork, goldsmithing, printing, orthography, hydrostatics. Where was dusting? Where was spitting? Where was boredom? Claude's finger stopped among the disciplines of juridical astrology and gnomonics, conjecturing and the analysis of chance. What were his chances of rescue from the limitations of the Globe? His finger paused among the Irregularities of Nature: celestial wonders, unexplained meteors, the curiosities of earth and sea. Claude closed his eyes and contemplated watchmaking—an activity omitted from the Tree. The arborescent image provoked a mansion-house memory. It recalled the day the Abbe asked him into the orchard to take a bite from each and every kind of pear. "Consider this an opportunity," the Abbe had explained, "to taste nature's grand and subtle diversity."
Claude was no longer in the orchard. Pears had become pearls, and wonderment had turned into routine.
CLAUDE HAD NO choice but to fall into the patterns of the bookstore. Whipped into shape by relentless taskmaster-ing, he worked through a cycle of dull and demanding chores that were as regulated as the hands of an eight-day clock. (His own hands, thankfully, worked for only six each week.) This was his first brush with drudgery, which the coachman called "drudgery with a brush."
Mondays were dedicated to cleaning. Claude arrived by dawn and, after tending to the Mysteries, wrapped his gloved hands around feather dusters and besoms to attack all that was dirty. He returned home at night sore from stretching to dust and polish the upper and lower reaches of the store. His back stiff, his fingers cramped, his elbows swollen, he would flop into bed, working out ways to convince Livre that his talents were being wasted.
Early on, while still in an inventive mood, Claude had offered to design a castered ladder for the bookstore that would save time and alleviate the awkward Monday motions. He explained that it could be enhanced by adding a pulley and crank fixed to the uprights. He showed Livre a sketch demonstrating how books would be raised and lowered with ease. Livre scoffed. He said it would ruin the harmony of the storefront. ("The ladder is not even of mahogany!") But the real reason for the dismissive response was that Livre was afraid its construction would resurrect Claude's creative passions in a field unconnected to bookselling. Undeterred, Claude made other suggestions to improve the Globe, the most clever being a mechanical duster fitted with plumage plucked from Piero's worktable. Again Livre refused to listen. The final rejection came when Claude asked to make a presentation at the Wednesday-night salon. Livre mocked him. "What interest would your silly diversions have for my friends and associates?"
After that, the only metals Claude touched in the Globe were the brass casing of the windows and the bronze medallion affixed above the door. Mondays finished as they began, with the Mysteries, a task that, like bookends, bracketed each miserable day of work.
Tuesdays improved Claude's mood, but only slightly. The mornings were devoted to packing local and foreign consignments. Standing wigless, Livre would watch as Claude filled barrels with prayer books interleaved with illicit material. Shipments went to clientele as far away as Leipzig, Vienna, and Petersburg. Never, Claude observed, did a package get sent to the mansion house at Tournay, nor was any package received from there.
Wednesdays were dedicated to inventory and accounting. Livre was forever coming up with new categories of perversion that he was convinced would entice his patrons to buy and rent in larger quantities. One week, the Aristocratical section was subdivided into swiving novels and malicious memoirs. Another week, Claude had to rearrange the books by the gender of their protagonists. The result: galley wenches, royal prostitutes, and window girls (a group Claude found inexplicably enticing) faced rapemasters general, well-endowed Gypsies, and men with a predilection for pain. While Claude shelved, Livre would inspect the other books, the accounting of cousin Etiennette. When all the ledgers were deemed in order, and each page initialed with the ubiquitous double L, Livre would tell Claude to dilute a bottle of brandy and sweep the floor of the reading room in preparation for the Wednesday-night salon. Meanwhile Etiennette would overcook the potatoes that the master and his apprentice ate by contractual agreement. They ate quickly and without ceremony. Livre often took the opportunity, between throat clearings, to test out the offhand comments he planned to make to his guests.
Claude almost never joined the salon proceedings. Occasionally, he was lucky enough to leave early. On those nights, he carried with him a sense of relief that the worst part of the week was over.
Thursdays marked a turning point. Because Livre could not maintain his organizational autocracy beyond the confines of the Globe, he was forced to check on the people with whom he conducted business. Once a week, on Thursday, he left his mahogany domain. While Livre was out negotiating his schemes, protecting his investments, drumming.up business, or, as was most often the case, consulting his apothecary on matters of diet, Claude and Etiennette were left in charge of the store. Since Etiennette's shyness made her incapable of proffering delicate discourse on indelicate histories, Claude handled the requests of the patrons. Livre had taught him how to be receptive to the inquiries without betraying the nature of the inventory in the back, and how, once a patron was secured, to reveal the password that would grant access to the Curtain Collection. This ploy was contrived to make customers believe they had been allowed to join a special club. For the most part, it worked. The password was "naughty habits."
"The phrase," Livre explained repeatedly, "is a play on the ecclesiastical origin of the curtain."
As Livre had foreseen, Claude's charm and attentive manner made him a valuable addition to the Globe. In fact, on those days Livre absented himself, there was a noticeable increase in the number of women who made their way to the shop. This was especially noteworthy since the Globe was filled with pasty-faced men during the rest of the week. Whether these women's visits were made to avoid the proprietor or to pursue his apprentice is unclear. Nevertheless, harmless flirtation filled the store. A certain Madame Duchene, for example, asked Claude on three occasions if her skin was as white as the paper used to print The Wife's Pleasure. And later, the same Madame Duchene, granted access to the stacks of the Curtain Collection, grew more demonstrative—stimulated, perhaps, by proximity to indecent writing.
Claude declined her proposals and lost her patronage. This suited him. He was much happier in an unpopulated Globe, free to pursue private thoughts and to gossip with Etiennette about their shared nemesis.
After Livre returned from his Thursday meetings, he would compose his Friday pearls, read the Paris papers, and conduct a bit of research on the history of names. On Fridays, Livre did not require Claude to take the vest from the demoiselle. This in itself was cause for celebration, since the apprentice was outgrowing the garment, which pulled at his chest and chafed his armpits terribly. The vest stayed where it was because Friday was errand day and thus required the black frock. Claude would be greeted by a string of pearls he had to commit to memory. Then he would watch as Livre traced the route to be taken on a map done from a bird's-eye view. With that, Claude was off, battling peddlers and poster men, scurrying to the corrector's, talking up potential customers, keeping his ears cocked for news. Given the dangers of Livre's undertaking, Claude was often forced to spy on the Globe's most trusted partners and dearest friends. As might be expected, he took as many detours as time would allow, modifying his route so that it passed by spots of personal interest. He scampered through the branch streets of the printing district left to right and then right to left, like so many lines of boustrophedon type. He stopped at Piero's commercial displays and woke up Plumeaux at the College when his errands took him near the journalist's dormitory. And if time permitted, he spent stolen minutes staring at the marvels of the Cafe Mecanique.
Only once did Claude get caught. It happened the day he picked up a licentious print from a struggling art instructor who taught at a well-known drawing academy. In his role as messenger, Claude should not have stopped to look around, but he did. From a corner of the vast room, he observed a nude model standing on an arrangement of wooden boxes. The man held out a spear. Ropes suspended from the ceiling eased his fatigued arms and transformed him into a life-size marionette. Up above, a vent attached to a stove kept him from catching cold. The students looked only at the shivering spearman. Claude's gaze was wider. He saw Cupids, in competing states of nakedness, hanging from the walls. He saw casts of famous statuary scattered throughout the room: a Michelangelo arm, a Puget hand, a torso by an anonymous Greek.
The day slipped by, and Livre, bastinade at the ready, erupted when Claude at last returned. "If you have time to waste, you will do so carrying my books." For the next few months Livre saddled Claude with the risky and tiring task of late-night col-portage.
On Saturdays, the day before Livre was legally obliged to suspend his terror, master and apprentice rearranged the bookstore windows. In the hands of Lucien Livre, this was an uninspired exercise. Rarely did the books displayed spark the interest of his lustful clientele. Nevertheless, the bookseller took pains, mostly Claude's, to arrange the cases perfectly. Boring as it was, the task went quickly, perhaps because it prefaced the night and day to come.
That was the bookstore schedule. There were interruptions and surprises, but even these, over time, became routine.
Between the END of one work week and the beginning of the next stood that phenomenon to which The Dictionary of French Folk Culture dedicates no fewer than sixty-seven entries. Claude called it Sunday. It was a chance to compensate for the tedium of the Globe, a chance Claude pursued with a combination of vengeance and apprehension. He spent most Lord's days with Piero, since the coachman was generally on the road and Plumeaux was generally in bed. Claude often chose to explore the craft quarters of the city or roam the passageways of the Palais-Royal. Piero advocated visits to the Royal Zoo, where he happily studied bird life for hours on end, in the hope, dim as he thought it was, that he could transmit movement to his stuffed specimens.
Claude was initially bored by the 200 visits, but he kept those sentiments to himself. He knew Piero would acquiesce in whatever he wished to do. His interest in 200 life was piqued, however, when he heard the call of mating cranes—a shrill, almost clangorous cry he decided to register in his S-roll. This was no easy matter. He had all but abandoned such research. His auditory and annotative skills were now so weakened that, after four hours of struggle, he gave up. That night, Claude cried, though not like the unrecorded cranes. He composed a letter filled with unedited emotions and addressed it to the Abbe.
"I am doing nothing with my hands, nothing with my head," he scrawled in a furious expression of his demonic thoughts.
He never posted the letter. He chose, instead, to tack it to the wall. Yet in making this private declaration, he gathered up the strength to overcome in some small way his feelings of helpless discontent. The next day he announced to Piero that he had a plan, and called on his friend for help. Two Sundays later, Claude showed a sketch of a proposed restoration of his lodgings to the landlady, who endorsed the proposal on condition that he fix her roof.
Work began the following Sunday with a thorough cleaning. At first, Claude worked alone, calling on Piero only when he needed an extra pair of hands. But the Venetian's involvement quickly turned into a kind of limited partnership. After that, only the chimney required outside assistance. Or, rather, inside assistance, since Claude was forced to find a diminutive Savoyard to climb the flue. The black-faced youth rid the chimney of a colony of wasps but charged twice the going rate.
Throughout the early stages of the cleaning, Claude joked about finding a cache of coins behind a rotted beam, a diamond under a squeaky floorboard, the deed to some long-abandoned crown lease plastered to the wall. Alas, their trove was limited to parts of a splintered spinning wheel, a garter, and a packet of pins of the kind commonly sold in the street, four sous the hundred. Piero kept half the pins to hold down the wings of his birds. The rest were given to the wet nurse, Marguerite. "We thought you would find these pins useful on your babies," Claude said.