Life: A User's Manual (2 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Servants’ Quarters, 2

Morellet

MORELLET HAD A room in the eaves, on the eighth floor. On his door could still be seen the number 17, in green paint.

After plying diverse trades which he enjoyed reciting in an accelerating list – bench hand, music hall singer, baggage handler, sailor, riding instructor, variety artist, musical conductor, ham stripper, saint, clown, a soldier for five minutes, verger in a spiritualist church, and even a walk-on in one of the first Laurel and Hardy shorts – Morellet, at the age of twenty-nine, had become a technician in the chemistry lab at the Ecole Polytechnique, and would no doubt have remained so until retirement if, like so many others’, his path had not been crossed one day by Bartlebooth.

When he returned from his travels, in December nineteen fifty-four, Bartlebooth sought a process which would allow him, once he had reassembled his puzzles, to recover the original seascapes; to do that, first the pieces of wood would need to be stuck back together, then a means of eliminating all the traces of the cutting lines would have to be found, as well as a way of restoring the original surface texture of the paper. If the two glued layers were then separated with a razor, the watercolour would be returned intact, just as it had been on the day, twenty years before, when Bartlebooth had painted it. It was a difficult problem, for though there were on the market even in those days various resins and synthetic glazes used by toyshops for puzzles in window displays, they left the cutting lines far too visible.

As was his custom, Bartlebooth wanted the person who would help him in this search to live in the same building, or as near as possible. That is how, through his faithful Smautf, whose room was on the same floor as the lab technician’s, he met Morellet. Morellet had none of the theoretical knowledge required to solve such a problem, but he referred Bartlebooth to his head of department, a chemist of German origin named Kusser, who claimed to be a distant descendant of the composer

KUSSER or COUSSER (Johann Sigismond), German composer of Hungarian extraction (Pozsony, 1660–Dublin, 1727). He collaborated with Lully during his stay in France (1674–1682). Music-master at various princely courts in Germany, conductor in Hamburg, where he wrote and performed several operas:
Erindo (1693), Porus (1694), Pyramus and Thisbe (1694), Scipio Africanus (1695), Jason (1697)
. In 1710 he was appointed master of music at Dublin Cathedral and remained there until his death. He was one of the founders of the Hamburg opera, where he introduced the “French overture”, and was a precursor of Handel in the field of oratorio. Six of his overtures and various other compositions have survived.

After many fruitless trials using all kinds of animal and vegetable glues and various synthetic acrylics, Kusser tackled the problem from a different angle. Grasping that he had to find a substance capable of bonding the fibres of the paper without affecting the coloured pigmentation which it supported, he fortunately recalled a technique he had seen used, in his youth, by certain Italian medal makers: they would coat the inside of the die with a very fine layer of powdered alabaster, which allowed them to strike almost perfectly smooth coins and eliminated virtually all trimming and finishing work. In pursuing this line of research, Kusser discovered a type of gypsum that turned out to be satisfactory. Reduced to an almost impalpably fine powder and mixed with a gelatinous colloid, injected at a given temperature under high pressure through a microsyringe which could be manipulated in such a way as to follow precisely the complex shapes of the cutting lines Winckler had originally made, the gypsum reagglutinated the threads of the paper and restored its prior structure. The fine powder became perfectly translucid as it cooled and had no visible effect on the colour of the painting.

The process was simple and required only patience and care. Appropriate instruments were specially built and installed in Morellet’s room; handsomely remunerated by Bartlebooth, Morellet let his job at the Ecole Polytechnique slip more and more, and he devoted himself to the wealthy amateur.

In truth, Morellet didn’t have much to do. Every fortnight Smautf brought him up the puzzle which, despite its difficulty, Bartlebooth had, once again, succeeded in reassembling. Morellet inserted it into a metal frame and put it under a special press which gave an imprint of the cutting lines. With this imprint he used an electrolytic process to make an open-work stencil, a piece of rigid, fantastical metal lace which faithfully reproduced all the delineations of the puzzle on which this matrix was then delicately and accurately overlaid. After preparing his gypsum suspension and heating it to the required temperature, Morellet filled his microsyringe and fixed it on an articulated arm so that the needle-point, no more than a few microns thick, was located precisely above the open lines of the stencil. The remainder of the operation was automatic, since the ejection of the gypsum and the movement of the syringe were controlled by an electronic device using an X-Y table, giving a slow but even deposit of the substance.

The last part of the operation did not concern the lab technician: the puzzle, rebonded into a watercolour stuck to a thin sheet of poplar, was taken to the restorer Guyomard, who detached the sheet of Whatman paper by means of a blade and disposed of all traces of glue on the reverse side, two tricky but routine operations for this expert who had made his name famous by lifting frescoes covered by several layers of plaster and paint, and by cutting in half, through its thickness, a sheet of paper on which Hans Bellmer had drawn on recto and verso sides.

All in all, what Morellet had to do, once a fortnight, was simply to make ready and supervise a series of manipulations which, including cleaning and tidying away, took a little less than a day.

This enforced idleness had unhappy consequences. Relieved of all financial cares, but bitten by the research bug, Morellet took advantage of his free time to devote himself, in his flat, to the sort of physical and chemical experiments of which his long years as a technician seemed to have left him particularly frustrated.

In all the local cafés he gave out his visiting card, which described him as “Head of Practical Services at the Ecole Pyrotechnique”, and he offered his services generously; he obtained innumerable orders for superactive hair and carpet shampoos, stain-removers, energy-saving devices, cigarette filters, martingales for 421, cough potions, and other miracle products.

One evening in February 1960, whilst he was heating a pressure cooker full of a mixture of rosin and diterpene carbide destined to produce a lemon-flavoured toothpaste, the apparatus exploded. Morellet’s left hand was torn to shreds, and he lost three fingers.

This accident cost him his job – preparing the metal grid required some minimal dexterity – and all he had to live on was a part-pension meanly paid by the Ecole Polytechnique, and a small pension from Bartlebooth. But his vocation for research did not abate; on the contrary, it grew sharper. Though severely lectured by Smautf, by Winckler, and by Valène, he persevered with experiments which turned out for the most part to be ineffective, but harmless, save for a certain Madame Schwann who lost all her hair after washing it in the special dye Morellet had made for her exclusive use; two or three times, though, these manipulations ended in explosions, more spectacular than dangerous, and in minor fires which were quickly brought under control.

These incidents filled two people with glee: his neighbours on the right, the Plassaert couple, young traders in printed cotton goods, who had ingeniously converted three maids’ rooms into a pied-à-terre (in so far as a dwelling situated right under the eaves may be referred to as a foot on the ground), and who were reckoning on Morellet’s room for further expansion. After each explosion they made a complaint, and took a petition around the building demanding the eviction of the former technician. The room belonged to the building manager, who, when the property had gone into co-ownership, had bought up almost all of the two top floors in his own name. For several years, the manager held back from putting the old man out on the street, for he had many friends in the building – to begin with, Madame Nochère herself, who regarded Monsieur Morellet as a true scientist, a brain, a possessor of secrets, and who had a personal stake in the little disasters which now and again struck the top floor of the building, not so much because of the tips she sometimes got on these occasions as for the epical, sentimental, and mysterious accounts she could give of them to the whole
quartier
.

Then, a few months ago, there were two accidents in the same week. The first cut off the lights in the building for a few minutes; the second broke six windowpanes. But the Plassaerts won their case this time, and Morellet was locked away.

In the painting the room is as it is today; the printed-cotton trader has bought it from the manager and has started to have work done on it. On the walls there is a dull, old-fashioned light-chestnut paint, and on the floor a coconut-fibre carpet worn down almost everywhere to the backing. The neighbour has already put two pieces of furniture in place: a low table, made of a pane of smoked glass set on a polyhedron of hexagonal cross-section, and a Renaissance chest. Placed on the table is a box of Münster, the lid of which depicts a unicorn, an almost empty sachet of caraway seeds, and a knife.

Three workmen are now leaving the room. They have already begun the work needed to unite the two dwellings. They have stuck on the bottom wall, by the door, a large tracing-paper plan showing the intended location of the radiator, the routing of the pipework and electrical wires, and the section of partition wall to be knocked down.

One of the workmen is wearing big gloves like those used by electrical cable-layers. The second has an embroidered suede waistcoat with fringes. The third is reading a letter.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Winckler, 1

NOW WE ARE in the room Gaspard Winckler called the lounge. Of the three rooms in his flat, it is the one nearest the stairs, the furthest to the left from where we are standing.

It is a rather small, almost square room whose door gives straight onto the landing. The walls are covered in hessian, once blue, now returned to an almost colourless condition except in the places where the furniture and the pictures have protected it from the light.

There weren’t many pieces of furniture in the lounge. It’s a room which Winckler didn’t live in very much. He worked all day in the third room, the one where he had set up his equipment. He didn’t eat at home anymore; he had never learnt to cook and hated it. Since 1943, he preferred to take even his breakfast at Riri’s, the bar on the corner of Rue Jadin and Rue de Chazelles. It’s only when he had guests whom he didn’t know very well that he entertained them in his lounge. He had a round table with extension flaps that he couldn’t have used very often, six straw-seated chairs, and a chest that he had carved himself with designs illustrating the principal scenes of
The Mysterious Island:
the landing of the balloon that had got away from Richmond, the miraculous finding of Cyrus Smith, the last match rescued from Gedeon Spilett’s waistcoat pocket, the discovery of the trunk, down to Ayrton’s and Nemo’s heartrending confessions, which end these adventures and connect them magnificently to
The Children of Captain Grant and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea
. It took a long time to see this chest, to really see it. From a distance it looked like any old rustic-Breton-Renaissance box. It was only when you got closer, almost fingering the incrustation, that you discovered what these minute scenes showed, and realised how much patience, meticulousness, and even genius had gone into their carving. Valène had known Winckler since 1932, but it was only in the early 1960s that he had noticed that it wasn’t any ordinary sideboard and that it was worth looking at more closely. It was the period when Winckler had begun to make rings and Valène had brought along the girl who ran the cosmetics shop in Rue Logelbach and who wanted to set up a knickknack display in her shop for the Christmas season. All three sat down at the round table on which Winckler had spread his rings, there must have been about thirty at the time, all lined up, on black satin cushions in presentation boxes. Winckler had apologised for the poor light from the ceiling fixture, then opened his chest and got out three small glasses and a decanter of 1938 brandy; he drank very rarely, but every year Bartlebooth sent him several bottles of vintage wines and spirits which Winckler generously redistributed around the building and the
quartier
, keeping only one or two for himself. Valène was sitting next to the chest, and while the cosmetics girl took the rings gingerly one by one, he sipped his brandy and looked at the carvings. What amazed him before he was even clearly aware of it was that where he had expected to find stags’ heads, garlands, foliations, or puffy-cheeked cherubs, he was discovering miniature characters, the sea, the horizon, and the whole island, not yet named Lincoln, in the same way as the spacewrecked travellers, dismayed and challenged at the same time, had first seen it, when they had reached the highest peak. He asked Winckler if it was he who had carved the chest, and Winckler said yes; when he was younger, he added, but gave no further details.

Everything has gone now, of course: the chest, chairs, table, ceiling lamp, the three framed reproductions. Valène can only recall one of them with any accuracy: it portrayed
The Great Parade of the Military Tattoo;
Winckler had come across it in a Christmas issue of
L’Illustration
; years later, in fact only a few months ago, Valène learnt as he flicked through the
Petit Robert
dictionary that it was by Israël Silvestre.