The Salt Smugglers (9 page)

Such chastity was in the air, — the vogue for Italian poets had ushered a Platonism worthy of Petrarch into fashion, especially in the provinces. The traces of this particular outlook can been observed in the style of the lovely penitent who is the author of these confessions.

The following morning, La Corbinière left the large hall somewhat late. The count, who had gotten up early, noticed him leaving; although he couldn't be sure whether he had just left his daughter's quarters or not, he had his suspicions.

« This is why, the young lady adds, my sweet father fell into such a deep melancholy that day and spent all his time talking with my mother; nothing, however, was said to me. »

Three days later the count had to go attend the funeral of his brother-in-law Manicamp. He asked La Corbinière to come along with him, — joined by one of his sons, a groom, and two lackeys. When they had gotten to the middle of the forest of Compiègne, the count went up to the young lover, disarmed him by pulling his sword out of its hilt and placed his pistol to his throat, saying to one of the lackeys: « Take this traitor's spurs off and frisk him ... »

I don't know whether this simple story of a young lady and a pork butcher's son will prove to be entertaining for my readers. It at least has one thing going for it: it is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, entirely true.
Everything that I have summarized for you today can be verified in the National Archives. — I have in my possession other documents, no less authentic, that will flesh out this tale.

I am at this very moment traveling through the region where all this took place; you can therefore not cast my exactitude into doubt ...

INTERRUPTION. — RESPONSE TO M. AUGUSTE BERNARD, OF THE NATIONAL PRINTING HOUSE, MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY OF FRENCH ANTIQUARIANS. — A FABLE. — COMPIÈGNE SENLIS. — CONTINUATION OF THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT AUNT OF THE ABBÉ DE BUCQUOY

In
La Presse
I come across another well-meaning attack on me to which I am happy to be able to reply
en passant
, — to use one of the phrases of its author.

I have been accused, in an article of mine deemed quite
witty
(not much of consolation, this: here in France, everybody is a wit), accused, I say, of having told some
tall tales
some two months ago, — while discussing the invention of printing. The article is signed by someone whom I must consider my master, — having myself once been, for a while, an apprentice typesetter. But clearly I am still navigating through dangerous waters. — I stand accused of turning vague hearsay into history, of indulging in
fables
or, worse, of perpetrating
novels!
— Well, why not just go all the way! Go ahead, denounce me to the commissioners whose business it is, — faithful to the stipulations of the Riancey amendment, — to read through our
feuilletons
in order to sift the true from the false. This would not be kind on the part of a typographer who is my superior by two hierarchical degrees; — and indeed, perhaps you are unaware of the pickle these sorts of allegations could get me into.

You speak of Gutenberg, Faust, and Schoeffer, making of the first an inventor, of the second a simple capitalist, and of the third the assistant of the second, — who supposedly discovered the idea of movable type all on his own. Let me try to explain to you, historically, that is, what exactly movable type is.

At Upsala there exists a Bible in Latin from the fourth century, entirely printed in movable type. Here is how:

Punches were fabricated to represent all the letters of the alphabet. One would heat them up until they were red-hot and then stamp them one by one in painstaking succession onto sheets of parchment so that they would leave black imprints. It was an abbé from the south of France who, with the help of his monks, managed to carry out this hare-brained scheme. — Except that the idea was not exactly new.

The Romans had long been familiar with this technique of printing names and legends onto the painted frescoes of temple cupolas. The heated punch would mark the letters on the painted surface. Fragments of these inscriptions have been conserved.

While I was recently visiting the museum of Naples, I recognized the bronze punches that had been found in the ruins of Pompeii, — and which contained in relief inscriptions of several lines intended to mark pieces of textile. — And you want to speak about the invention of xylographic printing!

Nobody has ever invented anything: — one simply rediscovers. — If you pass through Harlem, the land of tulips, you will see in its central square a statue of Laurent Coster, before whom I stopped in order to pay my respects and to write a sonnet, which I certainly don't want to inflict on my readers but which contains a line alluding to the three inventors whose medallion portraits grace the title pages of our stereotype editions:

All the Dutch believe that the image-maker and print-seller Laurent Coster is the true inventor of xylographic printing — to the extent that he came up with a technique to carve into relief on wood the names of
Alexander, Caesar, Pallas,
and
Hector
— these blocks of wood in turn being used to print up maps.

But the Dutch are deluding themselves, — and I have no compunctions whatsoever about making this claim, even if they were to attend Techener's auction on November 20th with the express purpose of hiking up to an impossible price the edition of the
History of the escapes from prison of the abbé de Bucquoy
which is scheduled to be put up for sale!

A certain tyrant of Sparta by the name of Agis was in the habit of consulting the entrails of victims before launching into battle. He himself was only half-convinced about the validity of these practices, but one had to go with the spirit of the times.

The auguries had been quite discouraging on a number of occasions, perhaps on account of some hocuspocus on the part of the priests ... The tyrant came up with an idea: he would write the word NIKH (victory) on his left palm with a greasy, black substance. He would even write it backwards. — Here, it seems to me, we have an early conception of typography.

In his role as sovereign, it was his duty to rip open the skin of the victims in order to reveal the whitish membrane covering their entrails. Carefully placing his greased left palm on this surface, he printed the word NIKH on it. The Spartans, encouraged by this message from the gods, went on to victoriously wage their battle.

This was a very astute tyrant, — and without rereading his history, I imagine that he probably remained on the throne of Sparta for quite a long time, — a city that was republican only in name, a republic governed by kings! ...

As you see, there is nothing new under the sun.

I have deliberately avoided mentioning the Chinese: a nation that locates the antiquity of its race some seventy-two thousand years in the past clearly has no real value for us as historians. I have seen examples of their typography that only predate our era by one thousand years. It is perhaps correct to maintain that they don't seem to have invented
movable type:
— their printing involved strips of wood which were pressed on paper, just as in engraving.

Let's return via an obvious transition to the abbé de Bucquoy, — whose elusive book might well have been produced by a phantom printing press. Nonetheless Techener will be selling it the 20th. — Until then, let's try to fill up this
feuilleton
which is being published under his auspices.

In the neighborhood of Sparta there was another town described by La Fontaine in “The Power of Fables” as a
city fickle
. A certain orator was haranguing its denizens
about the dangers threatening the Republic. No one listened. What did the orator do?

Having depicted the eel swimming and the swallow flying in order to cross a river, he paused for a moment.

The crowd cried out as one:

And the gentleman (a rather false gentleman) then concludes:

This fable, so
true
, reminds me of a scene I once witnessed in a public square.

A snake-oil salesman used to set up shop every day on the square of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois; — I imagine this would be prohibited these days. First he would set up his table on a pair of sawhorses, then he would pull three birds out of a crate, taking great care to caress them gently one after the other with his hands, — pretending to lull them asleep.

When the birds appeared to have reached a state of utter immobility, he would call his audience around him by making little tweeting sounds that he produced by means of a tiny bird whistle hidden in his cheeks: « Now, ladies and gentlemen, as you can all see I have just put these birds to sleep. They have been trained to remain completely motionless for several hours. So that the audience can fully appreciate the serenity they have achieved, I will leave them in this state until I have managed to sell twenty bottles of this patent medicine which will not only destroy all insects but cure all illnesses. »

This
patter
, though familiar to most, nonetheless always impressed a certain number of gawkers.

The sale of twenty vials at fifty centimes a piece was pretty much the maximum the quack could hope for. As a result, after a few vials had been sold, the crowd usually thinned out and all that remained were the usual hangers-on, — curious to see what might happen next, — but worldly enough not to allow themselves to be separated from a half a franc. The salesman, unable to unload a decent number of vials, would snatch up his three sleeping birds in a fit of pique and shut them back into their crate, complaining about how bad business was these days.

The people who had gathered around said: « They're not asleep: they're dead!»

Or: « They're just stuffed birds!»

Or: « He's probably slipped them a potion! ... »

One day, the crowd was finally reduced to a single spectator, — one of those Parisian street urchins who
won't take no for an answer and always wants to get to the bottom of things. — The birds were just being put back into their crate when some out-of-towners chanced by and bought up far more than the requisite twenty vials.

Since they had not heard the first portion of the patter, they left the scene without demanding to see the birds wake up again and go back to work in front of the public.

But the urchin hadn't missed a trick: having carefully counted up the number of bottles that had been sold, he sauntered up to the table and said:

« So what about the birds? »

The salesman looked at him with a mixture of contempt and compassion, proceeded to close up the crate, and addressed the child with a well-known phrase in argot, which I won't quote here out of respect for the ladies, — but which more or less meant: « Get a life! »

Please don't accuse me of regaling you with mere frivolities: this little story can be read as an allegory of the workings of political parties. How often has the gullible public been swindled by dead, — or stuffed, — birds!

I would not want to play a similar role vis-à-vis my readers. I am not even trying to here imitate those story-tellers of Constantinople or Cairo who, falling back on a time-honored stratagem, interrupt their tale just as the suspense is reaching its height so that the crowd will return to the same café the following day. — The history of the abbé de Bucquoy indeed exists; I shall locate it in due course.

Still, I continue to be amazed that in a city such as Paris, a center of learning whose public libraries house some two million volumes, it has proved impossible to lay my hands on a French book I happened to read in Frankfurt, — but alas did not purchase.

Books tend to be vanishing into thin air these days, given the liberal lending policies of libraries, — and also given the gradual extinction of the tribe of art and book collectors ever since the Revolution. Whether by hook or by crook, all the bibliographical rarities are ending up in Holland, Germany, or Russia. — It's too late in the season to set off on a long journey, so I shall simply limit my research to the forty-kilometer radius around Paris.

I have just discovered that it took the Senlis post office seventeen days to deliver you the letter that could have easily made the journey to Paris in three hours. I don't think that this delay can in any way be imputed to the fact that the locals may have viewed me with suspicion (after all, I grew up in the place), but here is a curious detail: