A case of curiosities (36 page)

"That evening, we tried to make light of the mishap, but the Provincial was in no mood to accept our excuses. Here was his chance to censure Everard, whose intelligence and wit he envied. We received a mighty sermon and were accused of profanity. Everard tried to reason and even apologized, though without much heart. The apology was not accepted. The Provincial's casuistry was worthy of an anticlerical comedy by Voltaire, who was, by the way, also enduring Jesuit education at the time.

"There was to be no resurrection of our invention. The Provincial said, 'I want it destroyed.' That is when Everard exploded. He shouted, 'In the manner of a medieval heretic, I suppose!' The Provincial was so angry that he gestured wildly and knocked Jesus's head off. It rolled under a chalice stand. Everard responded with a long string of curses, mostly in Latin, and stormed out.

"I spent the rest of the week washing the stains out of the cassock, altar cloth, and marble. There was more to my penance. I was not to see my mentor. Two weeks later, Everard was defrocked. My punishment, because of my family wealth and my age, was less severe; but I could not live without my teacher's guidance, and so I chose to leave. Everard lost fervor and faith. He even lost his tools. The Order kept them, a deprivation I am sure you can appreciate."

Claude nodded knowingly.

"Everard's anger was contagious. I quickly learned to despise the Church. After leaving the college, we stayed together. Or, should I say, strayed together. We moved among a loosely formed company of bitter ex-theologians. Our motto: 'Christ died for our sins. Must we die for His?'

"I tried to raise my mentor's morale by editing the notebooks he had rilled while testing his inventions. For nearly two years, we struggled to decipher what he had written, but the calculations never seemed to work out. You see, Everard had acquired Kircher's infuriating habit of not bothering to mention what was obvious to him. Then forgetting. Lucien Livre was the sole publisher willing to handle The Mechanical Christ.

"The book was printed at my expense. Did it create a stir? No, none at all. Occasionally the frontispiece was denounced as irreligious. The mechanical content, however, was wholly ignored. This lack of interest ultimately killed Everatd. Following the example of his greatest cteation, he bled himself to death in a damp cellar near Dijon. I was left with a barrel of unsold Mechanical Christs and a feeling of desperate isolation. Research provided some comfort. I was wealthy enough to avoid pain. Or, at least, to try. I spent huge sums on whatever interested me, until it was no longer possible. The reasons for that curtailment of curiosity are already known to you. So are the reasons I was forced to reestablish my links, out of financial necessity, with Livre.

"The Hours of Love fit perfectly with the Curtain Collection. Mechanically speaking, the work we did was gimcrack compared to my earlier efforts, but I needed the funds. Besides, in you, Claude, I saw a chance to develop talents I never had. I decided I would slowly present to you everything I knew. That is why I worked on Madame Dubois. It was one last attempt to show you the skills that the Church had tried to suppress. My plan failed. I was still the bouget. I still had energy. But that energy was diffused among my indulgent note-roll interests. I was scattered. I had lost the faith needed to produce automats— a faith I suspect you have."

The Abbe ended his story. He had brought Claude through the last chamber of his life, which was an account, in effect, of the first.

Claude could think of only one thing to say. He paused a moment before he said it. "Thermal expansion."

"What?" The Abbe returned the trumpet to his ear.

Claude raised his voice. "I said the problem was thermal expansion. Your Mechanical Christ needed backlash to compensate. He needed a small passage to allow air to get behind the piston. To prevent uncontrollable suction in the capillary path." Claude sketched out what he meant, and as he did, small tears, tears denied the Mechanical Christ, filled the Abbe's clouded eyes.

AFTER THE TEARDROPS, it was words that began to flow. Claude and the Abbe talked long into the night.

Conversation moved from subject to subject, caracoling first one way and then the other. They finished each other's sentences and communicated, more extraordinarily, without speech at all. Like true lovers, they used gestures known only to themselves. There were differences between them, of course. Whereas the Abbe's talk was fragmentary and hesitant, Claude spoke with the confidence of a young visionary. The Abbe recognized this distinction and recognized, too, that he was listening to a disciple whose wizardry now far outstripped his own.

"Claude," he said in one of many confessional moments, "I long ago confronted my limitations. I will never do anything more with my life than gather up the ingenuity of others. I am perfectly capable of observation, of training my eye on whatever it is that should be observed by the light of a clear and steady flame. But that is where my abilities end. I know how to seek but not how to find. In that, we are different. I am immobilized by possibility; you, my dearest friend, are liberated by it. You, Claude, are a discoverer — like your mother, you have intensity. She read the valley like a book and knew its plants with the intimacy of the botanical scholar. She snipped and pruned in a way that proved that the movements of the eye and hand constitute a language as rich as that of the tongue. I remember how she would venture out at night and dig up roots under the light of a waxing moon." The Abbe paused. "Or was it when the moon was waning?"

"Waxing. The roots are most potent then."

"Oh, yes. And your father — he was also a discoverer, though you were not old enough to know. He made advancements for his craft and for his family. You would do well to appreciate that watch, the one that was sent back from the East."

"I was so distraught at the moment of my departure that I left it behind," Claude said.

"I know you did." The Abbe ran two fingers along the simple thong of leather that was attached to his vest. He gave the thong a tug. "Here." The Abbe handed the watch to Claude, who fiddled to undo the knot. The two men were briefly tied to each other.

"I was forced to sell my better repeaters and took to using your father's clever timepiece," the Abbe said. "It was a link to you, I suppose. You know, I thought of you often." He patted Claude on the shoulder as he had so many times in the past.

Claude asked him what he was thinking, in the manner of a nervous lover.

"Nothing of consequence, really. But if you must know, observing you holding your father's watch reconfirms my own deficiencies. It evokes memories of a stop I once made at a tavern near Sumiswald. In that tavern, there was a simple bureau drawer nailed to the wall. Its compartments were filled with objects of no great worth. I asked the proprietor what it was. He looked at me as if at a fool and said, 'Why, it's a life box. My daughter made it.' And seeing that the explanation had not enlightened me, he said, 'It's the story of her life.' The box, known more formally as a memento hominem, contained a tiny and mysterious world — mysterious, at least, to everyone but the tavernkeeper's daughter. I can remember the objects precisely. There was a silk ribbon, a wooden lamb, a mug for ale — representing her father the tavernkeeper, one supposes — a key, a barrel, a broom, and a doll. Each little object in its own little compartment.

"It was an intriguing conceit, one that occupied my thoughts all the way back to Tournay. I determined soon after settling into the rhythms of the mansion house to make a life box of my own. For a week, I strolled around the grounds, through the laboratory, in and out of the library, gathering up objects charged with personal significance. But when I looked at the items, I recognized a bitter truth about the life of Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Robert Auget, Abbe, Chevalier of the Royal Order of Elephants, Count of Tournay. There were so many competing ideas, formulas, images, and objects that I would have needed a dozen drawers to accommodate my superficial predilections."

Claude interrupted. "You overlook the virtues of that encyclopedic lust. I have always found the plurality of your passions exhilarating."

"Lust, as you know, is a sin."

"An odd declaration for a man who renounced the notion of sin and fled the Church in disgust."

"Touche."

"My point," Claude said, "is not to win an argument but to force you to recognize a quality you are unwilling to see."

"My eyesight has failed in recent years." The Abbe tapped his Nurembergs.

"You have always been blind to your talents as a teacher. You have the gift of instruction."

"But what of obstruction?" the Abbe replied. "I could not even assemble a life box by myself. All that I have ever done has been done in conjunction with others. Never alone."

"So? You have told me often that even ingenuity in isolation is a collaborative act."

"Have I said that?"

Claude could not remember if the Abbe had made the remark, but he had certainly implied as much. "Yes, I am sure of it."

"Well, I was wrong."

"You were not wrong."

"I was. Age has allowed reflection. I have found that I am no better than the Staemphlis with their precious bottles, or the Livres with their precious books."

"I had a teacher once who taught me that reflection can distort," Claude said.

"Enough counterpointing. Please, let me finish what I wish to say. All my life I tried to keep moving from one chamber to the next and couldn't. My metaphor was poorly chosen but apt. I have learned, in corresponding with a Dutch malacologist, that the chambers of the nautilus do not connect to one another. My false assumption is significant, given the supreme importance I granted to that creature of helical perfection. So much for the guiding metaphor of my life."

"Stop this self-pity," Claude said. "The fact is, I need you, and I need your learning. I need your singular opinions, and I need your scattered pursuits. Perhaps it is true you have not accomplished all that you hoped. Neither have I. Who that you respect has? We still have time."

"Time to do what?" the Abbe asked.

"To do what?" Claude held his breath and gathered his thoughts. He exhaled significantly. "I will tell you what we have time to do."

At last, the btoad outline of a plan long kept secret was tevealed. It was stunning, ambitious, philosophical, whimsical— Claude incarnate. The Abbe's glaucous eyes twinkled as they had not twinkled for quite some time. He contemplated the young man's dreams. He moistened his prunish lips with another sip of Tokay and said, "You will do it!"

"No," Claude cottected. "We will do it."

The Abbe wiped his nose on his cuff. "In any case, I will put you in touch with the gteatest minds and hands of Europe. They will assist you, I am sure." The Abbe lowered his glass and snatched up a dusty note-roll that registered his correspondents. The teacher in him was reborn."We must go through the roll and make up a list.

He paused. "I must emend an observation I once made. Long ago, I told you that we must all choose our metaphors. I was wrong. We do not choose our metaphors." He stopped to give the reworked epigram a little bit of drama. "Our metaphors choose us."

IT WAS CATHERINE the scullion who informed Claude that the mansion house was impoverished. "The accountant," she explained, her feet propped against the chimney of the kitchen, "forced the Abbe to sell off his possessions, at least the ones that could be sold."

At first, dispersals were quite painless. The Abbe rid himself of six panels of stained glass — an Adoration scene — and the carved church furniture that had not been modified for his chapel workshop. These were acquired by a merchant who had purchased a castle, land, and title forty leagues away. But other sales caused greater distress. Gone was the marvelous new planetarium from London, the one that included Herschel's recent discovery of Uranus, known as Georgium Sidus in honor of King George III. Gone were the pneumatic pump and the harpsichord and the better pieces from the shell collection. The accountant had even tried to sell the lightning pole for scrap, but no one wanted it. The most valuable books from the library, at least those the Abbe had not scrawled over, sat in a Geneva storehouse awaiting sale on -consignment. And the colors! All packed off in ironbound casks. The dispersal of the stocks had turned Henri into even more of a slug. (The Abbe said at one point, "Poor Henri. He is destined to become living proof of the law of inertia.")

The changes were felt beyond the spiral gates of the mansion house. The good-natured, if quirky, approach to session-day payments ended. The Abbe no longer could barter against the curiosities found by the local population. The accountant controlled the rent books and calibrated his demands to the figures in his profit tables.

"The only thing that has remained the same is right here in the kitchen," Catherine said. She pointed to herself and Marie-Louise, who was minding a solitary pot that bubbled, like everything else in the mansion house, equivocally.

"Things are not the same here, either," the cook said. "No visitors. No real meals to prepare. Look at this!" She was doleful as she lifted a lid to reveal some boiled beef broth. "That gout of his doesn't make any of us happy."

Later in the day, while Piero padded about the library, the Abbe confirmed all that Claude had been told. Sitting by a fire, his feet wrapped in boots of oiled silk and padded wool, the old man bemoaned the inflammation of his joints, which he denied had anything at all to do with the Tokay. He then revealed his plans. "You have given me just the incentive I need to counteract dissipation," he told Claude. "If you will have me, I would like to come to Paris. I will make arrangements for the sale of Tournay, and your family cottage as well if you wish. With the proceeds from the properties we will find lodging for me and use the rest of the funds to support your work."

Claude resisted at first but ultimately embraced the offer and the Abbe himself. "You are a generous man," he said.

"Nonsense."

"You are even too generous to admit it."