A case of curiosities (28 page)

The nervous guest spent his time eyeing the room for signs of male habitation—a walking stick, or perhaps a tricorn. But the only indication of a non-female element in the room was the hovering domestic, whose androgyny provided a perfect counterpoint to Madame Hugon's delicate comportment. With a swish of silk and a glowing smile, that delicate comportment arrived. Madame Hugon's enthusiasm ebbed when she observed Claude in his transformed state. "Why do you diminish your country charm by dressing in those ghastly clothes?"

Nervous sweat overpowered the barber's cheap perfume.

She said: "I see you have brought the book back. Did you read it carefully?"

"Yes, I did."

"And what do you think of the conclusions the doctor reaches?"

"It seems I risk ill health if something is not done about my solitary pursuits."

"That is true. If you continue, worse things could arise." Claude did not know whether the ambiguity was intended. "You risk suicide."

"Such a pleasant way to go," Claude said boldly.

"Irreverence will only add to your trouble. You should stop your solitary debaucheries before harm is done. If I can, I will help. Do you wish to be helped?" .

Claude nodded.

Madame Hugon excused the domestic and locked the door. She walked over to a small teak cabinet. "I have long known the author of the work I lent you. I can see by your expression that you wonder how it is I have acquaintance with such a specialist. I may as well tell you that my interest came from an attempt that failed to fulfill the sacrament of marriage. Or perhaps you have heard."

"Only that there was a problem with . . . your husband's wife."

"Delicately put, but wrong, I can assure you. I will assure you. After all, that is why you are here." She gave Claude a languorous look. "I must acknowledge—what is the phrase we read last week? Oh yes: 'certain sinful sentiments.'

Claude fumbled, "Your husband . . ."

"You need not worry about my husband. He does not live here. The status of our marriage is being argued in the courts." Madame Hugon moved closer to the cabinet, opened its tiny doors, and extracted a bottle. "Take off that ridiculous wig and sit down here." Claude sat as Madame Hugon applied a fish cream remedy to the palm of her hand. Claude looked at the other compounds in the cabinet. Milk of the she-ass was the most noteworthy. Madame Hugon expertly stuck her hand into Claude's breeches. As she burrowed deeper, the Portrait in Little fell from his pocket. She laughed and said, "I would have been that close much sooner, had you only asked."

The rest happened in silence. Madame Hugon's hand made a kind of rubbing motion. The eminent doctor's clinical term for what transpired would have been "the stimulation of testicular nectar." Claude, however, likened it to ants crawling down his spine.

The frottage and spine-tingling excitation did not stop then, and it did not stop there. From that Friday onward, Madame Hugon borrowed more than books from the Globe. She borrowed Claude himself. The length and frequency of his visits to the Hotel Hugon increased until he was spending more time out of the Globe than in. This did not distress Livre. What annoyance he might have felt was allayed by Madame Hugon's willingness to pay handsomely for the services of the handsome apprentice. Her compensation provided funds ample enough to hire casual labor at the Place de Greve and to pay for Livre's costly gastric treatments by a quack newly arrived to Paris, an advocate of Brussels sprouts.

Claude was expected to make himself available for "readings" throughout the week. When not thus engaged, he was to work at the bookstore, but because of the profitability of the arrangement, his time was his own. Livre kept the fly whisk out of sight and even allowed his apprentice to read and carry out research started during the month of freedom.

Claude tried to discuss this work with his mistress, but she seemed interested in other expressions of manual talent. When he told her he wanted to fulfill the mansion-house commission and construct something that would proclaim his love, she nestled up to him and said, "You are the only confirmation I need." Watching Claude awkwardly eat his way through a cream pastry, she whispered, "Keep delivering yourself to me, my little peasant boy. Nothing else is required."

The nickname indicated the nature of Madame Hugon's attraction. She wanted Claude to maintain what she perceived to be a rural purity. When she paraded him about at various cultural events, whether it was an opera, a reading, or even a lecture at a lyceum on a subject with which he was familiar, she inevitably cautioned him against high-minded discourse. This was not easy for Claude to accept. Still, he was indebted, and he was in love.

Rejection of his interests was compounded by generosity that often seemed calculated to control. She happily paid for meals and pastries in the cafes of the Palais-Royal but refused to furnish funds that would allow him to build his devices or replace his coarse clothes. She saw in his frayed and roughly fashioned garments the innocence of the countryside, the rustic qualities she associated with small and distant villages so unlike Paris, the city in which she was bom and from which she never had ventured. Her friend Madame de Beauvau had a Negress, Our-ika, freshly shipped from Senegal by the Chevalier de Boufflers, and Madame Helvetius, known by reputation only, played with a litter of exotic Angoras in Auteuil. Alas, short-haired girls and long-haired cats were too expensive for Madame Hugon, given the budget necessitated by court proceedings. Claude would have to do. Besides, the apprentice could provide pleasures she assumed the mistresses of the cats and the Negress were denied.

The patroness and the apprentice quickly exhausted conversation. She refused to listen to his meditations on mechanics, and he tired of her truisms on music or Mesmer. What the pair did share was a large and versatile vocabulary of sex. Behind the locked door of the Hugon residence, the two would reenact the textbook exercises they had studied earlier, with one limitation: Madame Hugon never took off her clothes. Apart from this, she was uninhibited, exploratory, and demanding, screaming out nicknames in the moments before ecstasy. She compensated for her urban idleness by demonstrating a strong commitment to barnyard fantasy. More than once, she insisted on replicating the sexual acts of the hapless Golays. (Claude sometimes told her about the odder aspects of coupling in Tournay.) Afterward she would take Claude on a stroll through the arcades of the Palais-Royal, where she would buy him little gifts. He tried to reciprocate by offering her bouquets of violets, but she refused his kindness. Only after much argument did she accept a tiny brass bell, a keepsake he said would ring with the memory of their first bookstore encounter. She laughed and tied it coyly around her neck. She took to ringing the bell whenever she felt especially amorous.

When they weren't ringing the bell, the couple would take walks past the chess players of the Cafe de Valois and the Germans making pronouncements at the Cafe de Chartres. Then they would, more often than not, settle into the overstuffed chairs of the Cafe de Foy. Madame Hugon displayed a special fondness for the cafe's gilding and taffeta, its marble tables topped with gleaming platters of miniature breads and pastries, its pots of milk and coffee, its arrangements of sweetmeats. The presence of mirrors everywhere permitted her to carry out discreet reconnaissance. Sitting in front of an ornate pier glass, she could observe Claude and his reactions to the other patrons, the other patrons' reactions to Claude, and, most important, her reactions to their reactions. Though Claude did not find the place unpleasant, he was happier in the raucous cellar of the nearby Cafe du Caveau or, better yet, the extraordinary Cafe Mecanique.

Alexandra—it was now simply Alexandra—did not understand Claude's excitement but acquiesced to keep him happy. He made a sketch of the plainly decorated Mecanique. One would sit down and place an order with the limonadiere. Moments later, an iron trapdoor would open in the middle of the table, and a place setting would surface with the drink requested. Peering down the opening, Claude observed that the pillared leg of the table was hollow and connected to a bustling kitchen serviced by mechanical apparatus and sweating workers worthy of the Prison of Imagination .

He offered his mistress the sketch, but, as expected, she declined. He tried afterward to introduce her to his friends in the crafts districts, but she laughed at the suggestion. She wouldn't even venture to his garret grotto. "I prefer events."

And so events it was. They attended concerts, exhibitions, theatrical performances. They saw The Marriage of Figaro —the play, not the opera, which had yet to reach Paris — but Claude was more interested in Beaumarchais's career as a watchmaker working under his real name, Caron. For weeks afterward, back in the bedchamber, Alexandra's little peasant boy became her Cherubino. The pair managed to suppress what discontentment they occasionally felt toward each other until, a few months into the liaison, they attended a recital by a singer named La Florence.

The singer's voice had been highly praised by a bribed critic, so the hall was already crowded when the couple arrived, their scent a heady mix of jonquils and sweat produced by a hasty preconcert performance back at the Hotel Hugon. The recital began on time and without incident, and the audience, responding positively to the safe, bland singing, fell into deep and ignorant rapture.

Claude was bored and soon sought distraction. He fingered the netting that enclosed the box he shated with his mistress. He looked up at the candles and observed the wax dripping on the head of a dozing patron. Pluffft! He traced the arc that his body would cut if he swung from the third tier to center stage on the cord of the central chandelier. He made up histories about the more notable concertgoers. None of this diminished the tedium. He ignored the fat soprano and listened to the accompaniment instead. The musical instruments reminded him of the distillery pipes in the Abbe's laboratory. He concluded that it would have been much more fun to be jostled in the streets while listening to some harmonie, with its spurious arrangements forcing instruments to compensate for the absence of human voice. In the concert hall, voice was anything but absent. La Florence droned on until a sudden mistake, not from the soprano but from a musician, caused a flurry in the audience. A note—but not quite a note—was pushed from a woodwind in a manner that was as distracting as flatulence at a funeral. Awkward, unforgettable, and very nearly human.

The listeners shook their heads and pulled back as if confronted by a rabid dog or a tax collector. Claude did just the opposite. He craned toward the pit. To extend himself farther over the stage, he gripped the mouth of a gargoyle carved out of a pillar. It was crucial for him to track the source of this new and exciting sound. During the intermission, he watched the musicians tend to their instruments. The French horn tapped out some spittle, the oboe worked a peacock feather, handkerchief, and ramrod, pausing to moisten a reed. The last effort, the reed moistening, produced another sound Claude had never heard before. Two new sounds in one night! For Claude, the recital was a triumph.

The intermission ended, and the musicians, unencumbered by La Florence, played a serenade. It was Mozart's B-flat major. They moved through the piece tentatively, fearful that another false note might emerge. As they reached the final rondo, in allegro molto, Claude searched for a scrap of paper on which to make a notation. Alexandra stopped him by grabbing the pencil from his hand. He lost concentration and failed to register the sounds.

After the concert, the couple had their first fight. Claude tried to explain the importance of encoding the observations, but Alexandra would not listen. "That is not what I expect from my little Cherubino."

"I am not your little Cherubino," he said. He was angered less by the censure of his manners than by the dismissal of his ideas. He had wanted to express his unhappiness for quite some time but was still shocked when he finally did so. "My sound research is all that currently stimulates me. The rest, outside of you," he added, "is worth nothing."

Alexandra acknowledged the addendum. She sensed his disquiet and tried to offer comfort as she pulled him into a Per-reaux. "Come, let us pursue this research of yours in private. I am sure we can produce new and interesting sounds of our own." She retrieved the little bell from between her breasts and rang it twice.

They returned to her bedchamber and enacted—Claude reluctantly, Alexandra greedily — the tale of the amorous abbess. They were faithful to the tale, except that the abbess in the story husked off her habit, and Alexandra did not. They made love three times that night, but it was a mechanical love—and mechanical not in the fluent, elegant sense Claude understood machines, but stiffly, like the pivotal pursuits of the figures in one of the early animated paintings. There was a great deal of tussling, and each time Alexandra approached pleasure, she mumbled the nicknames Claude so disliked: "my little peasant boy, my little Cherubino."

Sexual congress always cleared Claude's thoughts. The moments after embrace granted him a lucidity and a strength to raise subjects he otherwise avoided. So he said, when they were done, "I do not like the little names you call me."

"I am sorry, my little one."

"If you must use a diminutive, I would rather you called me a little mechanician or something that acknowledges my dreams."

Calmed by the lovemaking, Alexandra acceded to his request. They talked tenderly after that. Claude tried to describe his aspirations. "It is unfortunate you could not hear my lecture. It would have clarified all that fascinates me."

"Do you still wish to give that little lecture of yours?"

Claude nodded.

"Then you will. I will settle the matter with your master."

A little effort and a lot of money were all that was needed to provide Claude with a forum for the expression of his dreams. The bookseller concluded, rightly, that while the liaison between the patroness and the apprentice was threatening his hold on Claude, to challenge it would jeopardize a lucrative arrangement. Two weeks after Alexandra said she would settle the matter, Claude stood in the Globe adjusting his props. He rolled the wooden demoiselle into the room and perched on her arms a stack of pamphlets, bits of glass and wire, pots of unlabeled liquid, and apparatus of mysterious function. Over her frame, he slung a hurdy-gurdy rented from a street musician.

Plumeaux, as usual, arrived in advance of the other guests, and was able to consume no fewer than three glasses of undiluted brandy before Livre ordered the fortified wine "refortified" with water. The hack told Claude he would gladly ask appropriate questions at the appropriate moments, but Claude declined the offer.

The Count of Corbreuil, the wealthy aristocrat of vaguely scientific inclinations, arrived just after Sieur Curtius, the German waxworks owner. Curtius was complaining. For the third time that month, a customer had smuggled in a hot poker and burned off the genitals of Louis XVI. "There is a fury in the viewing public," he said. "It does not bode well for the kingdom. It was bad enough when they stabbed a model of Jean-Baptiste comte d'Estaing with a fork, but this. This!"

"Politics," Plumeaux said, "is everywhere."

Curtius went on to describe the vulnerability of the Queen. "Her breasts have been attacked twice. I now must hire a guard."

The Count, a royalist out of self-interest, expressed shock and sympathy for the waxwork owner's plight. But he had his own annoyances. On his way to the Globe, he noticed that one of his dogs had chewed through the brim of a favorite hat.

Piero slipped in behind Alexandra, who arrived unaccompanied. With that, Livte called the group to order. He made a halfhearted introduction that ended, "The young man takes a chance in a domain he has not mastered. Please treat him with kindness, if not respect."

Claude stood up and began his long-delayed talk on the mechanical reproduction of sound. "Sound, a perception of the soul, as some of you may know, can be produced in various ways. By percussion"—and here he went over to Alexandra and rang the ribboned bell around her neck—"by the passage of air" — Plumeaux let out a loud, noisome sound unappreciated by the host or lecturer, since a flute would have served to make the point — "and by other means besides." After that opening, Claude outlined a quirky theory of acoustics, invoking Newton and the Switzers Euler and Bernoulli. "I am particularly fond of Bernoulli's work on consonant sound and his meditations on the harpsichord." Claude went through the differential equation of motion, De Motu Vibratorio, and Dissertatio Physica de Sono before he sensed his audience was getting restless. He reined in the research. "All of this work points in a direction I began to investigate long ago."

"Which is?" Livre interrupted.

"Which is that sound, all sound, can be reproduced artificially."

It took a moment for the guests to register the implications.

"All sound?" Livre challenged.

"Yes. I will give you some simple examples. Close your eyes and imagine the yelp of the seals in the royal gardens." Claude then produced the cry by rubbing his moistened finger against a piece of glass he took from the demoiselle. "The squeak of a mouse." He rubbed the glass with a moist wine cork. "Or the sound of a hive of tame bees." He turned the ivory crank of the hurdy-gurdy. "The gurgling of the camel's breath. Close your eyes!" he shouted at Alexandra before duplicating the sound of the desert animal by playing with the bottled liquids.

"Can you imitate a bat?" Piero asked. Claude suppressed a smile. "As a matter of fact, I can." He turned the wooden screws of a modified handpress.

"And a dog's bark?" The Count threw out.

"Not impossible, though I do not have the materials here."

The Count was disappointed.

"What about a bird?" It was Curtius's turn to offer a challenge.

"Which one?"

"I am not fussy."

"Very well. If I may borrow your watch." Curtius handed over his repeater. "Imagine you are in the presence of a swallow foraging for insects. What you are about to hear is a flight that culminates in the closing of the mandible just as a fly is taken." Claude vibrated a thin strip of metal and then snapped shut the watchcase, imitating the feeding sound precisely.

The waxworks owner nodded grudgingly.

Claude returned to his talk. "Let me reiterate. If one has the ear, the patience, and the funds, one can orchestrate the call of a hunting owl, the quaver of a doe hare in heat, the thump of a rabbit's foot, the belling of the herd of deer. But this is only rudimentary. Aided by mechanical apparatus, more complex sounds can be produced."

Livre coughed with great force, as Claude knew he would.

"I can even produce that sound."

"What? A cough?" Livre snickered.

"Yes. More than one. I have registered no fewer than sixteen distinct coughs, of which I have reproduced nine. The classic version can be done easily with a bastard file rubbed against a damp piece of pine. Other coughs are trickier. The dry cough of the cooper, the arsenical cough of my friend Signor Carli-Rubbi"—Claude nodded to Piero—"and my master's noteworthy hack, a wheeze emanating from the upper regions of the chest but also containing a certain amount of glottal gasping— all these need more intricate devices." Claude returned his attention to the liquids and tubing. A few moments later, he had produced enough pressure in his handmade cough-maker to release a well-rounded burble, a high throated gurgle, a click, a gasping choke, and Livre's famous rumble.

"The point of this exercise is that a mechanician with a trained ear can build up a vast repertoire of nonmusical sounds. There are craftsmen in Geneva who have faithfully reproduced the linnet's song with nothing more than modified watch movements. Like them, I would prefer to come up with proof rather than theory and speculation. This is why I hope that these crude props will inspire a subscription for more elegant constructions."

Except for Piero and Plumeaux, there were chuckles all around the salon. Sieur Curtius might have been interested if he could have devised a way to take advantage of the inventor; he could not. Nor was the Count clever enough to comprehend the possibilities; convincing him would take time. Livre, of course, was constitutionally negative. That left Alexandra. Her response was perhaps the most disappointing.

"I do not understand all that you said, but I do have a question. Why would you wish to reproduce sounds that are already found in nature? Isn't the call of the linnet itself enough?"

Claude could not offer an answer to the question, for it directly undermined the very framework of his fascination.

The lecture ended. No offers of support were made. Alexandra left, as she had come, alone. She had mocked him, or, at the very least, failed to believe. His muse lacked faith. Claude might well have given up completely had it not been for the subsequent encounter with an anonymous old man.

After cleaning the Mysteries, a humiliation Livre thoroughly enjoyed adding to the failure of the lecture, Claude left the Globe in a state of all-consuming anguish. He retreated to the garret, where he spread his copybooks on the floor. For many hours, he tormented himself with designs drawn in happier moments, pastel and pencil evocations of his sister's auricular anomalies, the mansion house, the roadside scarecrow, the miraculous altar clock. His sketches evinced a vitality that had left him. A bead of sweat dripped from Claude's brow and smudged a self-portrait.

The garret heat oppressed him. He sought escape in the streets below. He wandered by a baker carrying a basket of rolls and a lamplighter dragging his pole on the cobbles. With nowhere to turn, Claude stepped into the St.-Severin church. He did so not out of spiritual need but because he hoped to cool down inside the building's thick walls. At least, that is what he told himself. He hesitated to make the sign of the cross. He was unable to engage in rituals he had been taught to mock. He pushed past a young priest lining up a row of five-sou tapers. Two old women, kneeling in an alcove, were clutching rosaries and humming paternosters. A small groulp of tradesmen had, like Claude, taken sanctuary from the heat. They played a surreptitious game of cards in one of the distant alcoves.