A case of curiosities (12 page)

"At what?" Claude asked.

"Well, I will tell you this. They were making the kind of noises that would be put under the Pleasure and Pain section of your sound research—if you had a section called Pleasure and Pain."

Marie-Louise added a new piece of intelligence. "I heard them a week ago, Sunday. The Abbe was. screaming in the chapel. Never heard the Abbe scream so. Poor woman."

"We have all heard it," Kleinhoff said at last.

"But why in the chapel?" Claude queried.

"You know his attitude toward the Church. In there, he is a different man. A violent man. He does it out of spite," Catherine said.

Claude persisted. "But the tools, how will I gain access to them?"

"You never will," Henri said.

"I am going to ask the Abbe again," Claude said. "I must ask him."

"You had better come up with a clever reason for him to change his mind," Kleinhoff advised.

"I will," Claude replied. "I will."

SIR, are YOU in here?" Claude called out. He had been told he was wanted in the color cove, but when he pushed through the heavy wool curtain, he could see nothing. The room was pitch black.

"Come in, come in. It has arrived." The Abbe was standing near the reds.

"What has?" Claude stumbled over some books as he felt his way around.

The Abbe said, "The accountant authorized the expenditure in recognition of workshop productivity. The shipment from Culpeper's arrived yesterday." Culpeper, one of the Abbe's bigger indulgences, was a London precision instrument dealer who did a subsidiary business in electrical apparatuses. The screw-barrel microscope and lightning pole had both come from the Englishman's Moorfields establishment.

"What did you order?"

"You will see momentarily, Claude. You will see." The Abbe sneezed. "Prepare yourself for an afternoon of dioptric spectacle." The Abbe lit a flame that gave his face a devilish glow. Claude's eyes adjusted, and he slowly discerned the outlines of a tin box with a barrel protruding, its aperture covered by a cardboard cap. The Abbe moved the barrel backward and forward. "It has two lenses," he said. "A semiglobular and double convex—both ground in the German way." He fiddled with the wick until he had a clean, bright flame. He removed the cap covering the barrelhead and announced triumphantly, "The appearance of life itself."

The Abbe took a glass slide painted with translucent images and pushed it into the slots behind the lamp. He said, "I think you will like this one." A boat manned by a Barbary corsair suddenly appeared against the wall.

"Now watch this." The Abbe jiggled the slide and the boat was soon buffeted by waves. "There is another method of projection." The Abbe arranged a chafing dish filled with oil-soaked coals. He lit the dish, and the images next appeared on a curtain of heavy smoke. The room filled with the smell of the walnut oil.

"Makes me hungry for one of Marie-Louise's soups," Claude said.

The Abbe inserted a slide that revealed the true reason the purchase had been authorized. A translucent couple copulated against the smoky wall. "The accountant says he's sure you could do a better job painting these scenes." Claude did not know how to stem this unwanted advancement in the art of the Hours of Love, or how to reveal that he wanted to explore very different avenues of research.

The Abbe pushed another slide behind the tunneled light. A mouth appeared. The Abbe again jiggled the slide, and in so doing moved the nebulous jaw. "That has possibilities, doesn't it?"

Claude nodded. He stared at the jaw opening and closing. After a nervous minute, he forced his own mouth to open. He said, "Abbe, may we talk?"

"Certainly. What did you wish to say?"

"Sir, I have nothing but respect for the diversity of your studies."

The nebulous jaw kept moving.

"Our studies," the Abbe corrected. He coordinated the motion of the jaw on the wall of smoke to their dialogue.

"Yes," Claude continued. "Our studies are as gripping and as vast as a Spanish sweepnet. But I need to consolidate my interests. And I need ... I need movement."

Both projectionist and viewer stared at the nebulous jaw, which had taken on the quality of oracle.

The Abbe asked, "Do you wish to travel? I have often told you to take a trip to Basel to see the Bauhin collection. Or Lyon. Many of our packages need delivery there."

"I would like that."

"Then you shall go."

"Thank you, but that is not what I mean by movement."

"Oh?" The Abbe raised one of his substantial eyebrows.

"Watch movements, sir. I know we spoke of this before, and you explained the reasons it was impractical to pursue the mechanical arts. But after much thought, I have discovered a way to coordinate my new interest with the obligations of enameling."

"Explain."

"Though I am a competent enough enameler, I have found much more gratification in restoring my father's watch. That is why I would like to combine the two. That is, I would like to add mechanical movement to the pictures I must paint."

"You mean," the Abbe said, "give the motion to the casework?" He shook his head. "It is very difficult. I have dedicated much of my life to such pursuits."

"That is perhaps why it interests me so. I am sure we would be able to do it, and in so doing oblige the accountant. Such works fetch substantial sums."

This was the right strategy. It made the Abbe a collaborator and allayed financial fears. Still, he expressed a recurring doubt. "The problem exists that I do not wish anyone to enter the chapel. That is where the work would have to take place. I am conducting research I wish no one to see, at least not yet. Thought about your proposition is required. I could perhaps screen off my work behind the reredos."

Work? Claude wondered whether the mysterious Madame Dubois would call it that.

Before the Abbe could decide on a course of action, Kleinhoff shouted through the curtain that Sister Constance, the conscience of the valley, had arrived at the mansion house.

"The nun, she's at the gates," Kleinhoff said gruffly. Just as gruffly the nun, a few moments later, entered the library, her sandals slapping against the stone.

Seeing Sister Constance made Claude blush. He could no longer think of her except as in a state of complete nakedness, attended by a sodomitic prelate wearing nothing but a miter. In point of fact, she was dressed in the standard habit of her order: brown mantle and outrage. She had brought the dread cahier and wasted no time in making her demands.

The Abbe interrupted. "I have no time for this. I am tending to the spiritual well-being of a parishioner. Bring up your complaints at the next session."

"Blasphemer. I know your apprentice receives no religious education at all. When is the last time he was in church?"

"It is curious that you mention that, Sister Constance. We were just discussing the matter of his visits to the chapel."

"You did not answer my question. I know that he has not seen Father Gamot since he came here."

"Perhaps I have been a bit derelict." The Abbe fell silent until he looked up with an expression that suggested he had just witnessed a sign, that he had been affected by a power beyond man and nature. "I can assure you he will be spending the whole of tomorrow in the chapel, bent at the altar. Is that guarantee enough of our commitment to higher authority?"

Sister Constance looked at them both with suspicion.

Claude thought it was an idle promise made to evict the intruder. But when Sister Constance left, the Abbe turned to Claude and said, "Very well. The room will be revealed. You will be given access to the tools. My work can be relocated. I will help you as much as I can help in matters of mechanics, but my skills are not what they once were." He paused. "As you know, I am an apostate. And yet I truly think that Sister Constance's intervention was divine. Prepare for tomorrow, Claude. You will be confronting the burden of your desires and the obligation of your wishes."

The Abbe took Claude past the locked chapel doots that had been the source of such fierce speculation. "Door of Pleasure, Door of Pain," Catherine had been singing since the bean-shelling talk. Claude was disappointed until the Abbe said, "That is not the entrance. The door was bricked off from the back years ago." They moved to a library alcove. The Abbe depressed one of the little lozenges in the bookcase fretwork. A cord revealed itself. "Stand away."

The Abbe pulled the cord, unlatching a set of sprung shelves that rotated just enough to allow passage. "A secret chamber for a secret age," the Abbe said conspiratorially. He ushered Claude forward, and in the darkness Claude repeated the Abbe's phrase under his breath and recalled the chambers of the nautilus.

The Abbe spoke near a side entrance to the room. "You are about to see the chapel. As chapels go, it is a mediocre example of a church style popular in the early part of the last century. I removed most of its contents long ago. The confessional that is now part of the chair that infuriates Sister Constance came from this room, as did the cruets and pulpit in the laboratory. What remains 1 have modified for my purposes."

He postponed revelation. "I should have seen from your earliest designs and drawings, Claude. The windmills and the water-wheels hinted that you were interested in things mechanical. It was even declared in your sound work. How many chimes have you recorded?"

"Including the temple tower clock?" Claude counted. "Thirty-two."

"Thirty-two! And still I failed to see. The way you look at clocks, listen to them, touch them, leaves no doubt that you are your father's son."

The Abbe opened a door hung on well-oiled hinges. "Step inside."

Claude's habit of silent inspection took over. The room was musty but warmly lit through panels of stained glass. Though once a chapel, it had been converted into a watchmaker's workshop. There were lathes and turns, two wheel-cutting engines, one driven by treadle, the other by hand. Next to these was a small bookcase filled with pertinent works. There were also screw plates, hacksaws, pin tongs, calipers, bench keys.

The chapel was filled with a certain amount of whimsy and a large amount of mess. Holes had been bored into the altarpiece to accommodate a set of hammers. Vises hung from the outstretched arms of a plaster Virgin. Saws were arranged on nails hammered into an anonymous saint. An opened book, a disquisition on gear ratios, was resting on a missal stand. A bishop's miter held a fusee adjusting rod, a staking tool, and other hor-ological items of more obscure function. Claude was drawn to the tiny implements of the forge: the anvils so small they could be cupped in hand, crucibles the size of snuff spoons, agate burnishers hanging from racks that at one time held candles of devotion.

Not all the adaptation involved church furniture. Four tennis racquets left by the previous count were affixed to a wall. They jutted out, so that dozens of tiny awls could hang through the stringing of their pear-shaped heads.

"You have a great deal to learn," the Abbe said. "But first and foremost, you must learn that however much the rest of your talents may develop, you must still produce the enamel Hours. Is that understood?"

Claude nodded.

"One more thing. You will not go behind the reredos." He pointed to an ornamental screen of wood he had moved to hide the altar. "It is my last closed-off chamber. You must promise."

And Claude nodded again.

THE CHAPEL, AND more precisely the contents of the chapel, consolidated Claude's evolving passion. Watchmaking allowed him to switch from the still surface of enamel to the substantive movements that hid underneath. Time, in its technical manufacture, was soon of Claude's essence.

Early study was rudimentary. He acquired competence in the functions of the seven mechanical powers: the adhesive virtues of the screw, the dizzying potential of the pulley, the wedge's spatial efficiencies, the gravitational imperatives of the inclined plane, the compensatory dividends of the balance, the exacting motions of the axis-and-wheel. And finally the lever, on which so much ingenuity rested. "Once you have mastered the lever," the Abbe said, "you have mastered the world."

The Abbe again proved to be an admirable teacher. He offered Claude just the right mix of assistance and independence, encouragement and castigation. He demanded far more than he, the Abbe, could ever have accomplished, and slightly more than Claude was able to achieve.

The student took up these challenges and found that his spirit soared. The Abbe tested him on the equations of springs, on the resistance of white ropes and tarred, on the use of unguents in the diminution of friction. He taught Claude to work the lathes. He would toss treatises in the general direction of his pupil, who would retreat to a straw-stuffed cushion under the mighty spiral stairwell and spend long afternoons looking like a youthful version of a Rembrandt philosopher, only without the beard.

Claude read widely. He was introduced to Athanasius Kir-cher's Ars Magna. It was one of the very few books, along with the Spiritual Exercises, that sustained the Abbe's links with his Jesuit past. Claude studied and restudied the curious work. He sweated over the Latin and marveled at the woodcuts, committing to memory the spirit, if not the substance, of the German cleric's writings.

He soon saw clockwork everywhere. The pattern of the nautilus became the coil of a mainspring. The sweep of the farmer's hay knife evoked the motion of a pendulum. The arch bridge that crossed the Tournay reminded him of the circumfluent markings of a watch face. A picture of the Tower of Babel suggested a stackfreed movement on an old watch the Abbe had had him dissect. Claude modified Newton's famous phrase: God was not the clockmaker, it was the clockmaker who was God.

There are those who study and never learn, and there are those who learn and never study, and then there are those who profit both from what they read and what they feel. Claude was a member of that last group, the kind of craftsman Diderot seemed to think did not exist: literate and practical, philosophical and dexterous. But if Diderot put little faith in the intellectual scope of the craftsman, Claude put little faith in Diderot. The publisher of the Encyclopedie was a describer, not a maker. There was something else that bothered Claude as he consulted the Abbe's mismatched set.