Voltaire's Calligrapher Read online

  THE BISHOP’S MESSAGE

  Early in the sixteenth century, the priest Piero De Lucca found volume five of Mechanical Alchemy by Johannes Trassis in the library of his monastery. The other four volumes had been lost a century earlier. When he finished reading the text-which he knew was banned-De Lucca began to build a creature made of metal and wood in the cellar.

  He worked for an entire year in absolute secrecy. He became known among the other priests as a loner. When finished, his creature learned to walk and to stammer a few words in pure Latin, in a monotonous, metallic voice. It could give simple answers, but whenever the question exceeded its ability, it would reply: “I cannot be certain of the answer in that regard.”

  De Lucca was amazed by his work. For months he had thought of nothing but its construction; now that it was done, however, he began to consider his pride and wonder whether the creature might be an instrument of Evil. He decided to ask it, and as on so many other occasions, it replied: “I cannot be certain of the answer in that regard.”

  The priest decided to consult a higher authority. He sent the creature to Milan, with a letter for the archbishop. In it, he asked his superior to carefully study the messenger and reply as to its nature.

  Years went by without any word from the archbishop. The priest would sometimes think fondly of his creature and wonder where it might be: if it was living the life of a common man, was corroding at the bottom of the river, or had been burned as a heretic. He could have taught it so many things, but he needed to know whether he had done right or wrong. And so he was damned to wait for a reply.

  Now old and infirm, Piero De Lucca told his confessor about his dilemma. He told De Lucca to travel to Milan immediately, so as not to risk dying in doubt and in sin.

  The archbishop had by then been succeeded three times (once because of a poisoning), but De Lucca still hoped to find an answer in the underground city of the archives.

  Piero De Lucca made the trip. At over eighty years of age, he was exhausted by the time he arrived. He was given a small room next to the cathedral. When the time came to meet with the new archbishop, De Lucca was so weak he was unable to get out of bed.

  The thought of dying without an answer pained him. Seeing him so fragile and distraught, the other priests interceded with the archbishop, asking him to go to De Lucca.

  Piero De Lucca lay dying when the archbishop came to see him. Full of interruptions, repetitions, and omissions, the priest told the story that had brought him to that dark little room. He begged for an answer to his original question. That answer came at the very moment of death, when he heard the archbishop say: “I cannot be certain of the answer in that regard.”

  “I’d rather the action take place in some Oriental palace, with a caliph or a mandarin instead of an archbishop,” Hesdin said. “The Egyptians, Arabs, and Chinese never come to complain.”

  “It’s fantasy. Automatons. Magic. Nothing real.”

  “I don’t see anything wrong with it, either, but that means very little. In this profession, you get used to reading into things. It’s only when a book erupts in scandal and flames that we printers realize what we’ve published. In any event, leave the text with me. I’ll understand one day. After all, there’s no better way to read a book than by the light of a bonfire.”

  The Human Machine

  I took a room at the Auberge du Poisson, under an alias, and slept for fifteen hours. When I awoke, I began to think about my future. It had been easy to devise plans and make decisions on the trip to Paris; from far away, cities are like toy towns, where everything is easy, close, and possible. It was only when I got to Paris that I remembered that cities are full of obstacles.

  There was only one way to make Von Knepper change the message: I had to take Clarissa. With my face obscured by a cloak and hat, I went to the house to spy on its inhabitants. There were signs of decay on the walls and windows, and the house seemed to age as I watched; a few more minutes and I would witness its collapse. My eyes were tired, and vitiated everything they saw. I waited anxiously for Von Knepper to go out, called by some urgent obligation. But now that his appointments with the bishop had ended, there was no reason to leave home. Everything he required was inside those walls.

  While Von Knepper needed solitude and obsession in order to think, all I needed were long walks and momentary distractions. I found something of interest in every passing conversation; every notice in the street forced me to stop. There were words all around me, and I paid attention to each one, as if the city were an enormous book that could inspire my next steps. And so, in reading the words that came at me with no rhyme or reason, I discovered a poster for a book auction.

  Tramont, whose appetite for books was as voracious as the Duke de la Vallière’s, was putting some up for sale. His collection was so enormous that from time to time Tramont was forced to part with duplicates or books that were no longer of interest, simply to clear a path through his house. At the bottom of the notice was a list of the most important volumes in the lot: number three was a copy of The Human Machine by Granville. This was an extremely rare book. Fabres, Von Knepper’s mentor, always swore there was absolutely no proof that Granville’s dissertation ever existed. I can assure you it did: I saw its pages and its engravings, and I saw how a copy sank in the waters of the Seine.

  I tore the announcement off the wall and left it under Von Knepper’s door. Fate would take care of the rest.

  It was five days until the auction. Von Knepper set out for Tramont’s house at the exact time it was about to start-as if he had only just decided to go. He walked straight past without seeing me: all that mattered to him was in the past or the future, and anything along the way belonged to the vulgar present. I waited a few minutes, in case he changed his mind, and then approached the house.

  I had brought enough money to bribe the maid; as soon as she opened the door, I asked for Clarissa.

  “You should know where she is,” the woman said.

  “Why me?”

  “Monsieur Laghi told me you took her. We haven’t seen her in six days now.”

  I couldn’t believe Clarissa was gone, and I strode to the back of the house. The maid didn’t bother to stop me: there was no one for her to protect.

  “How did she disappear? Was she taken by force?”

  “It was the middle of the night. If you don’t have her, then she left on her own, tired of being overprotected. Monsieur Laghi hasn’t been able to sleep since. I hear him pace the room all night long, repeating the same words: I know everything about machines and nothing about people.”

  The auction was running late and had just started by the time I arrived. Books were piled in great, tottering stacks. Since the nobility had acquired a passion for antique books, it was best if they looked truly old. Everyone knew that a month before an important auction, they were locked in a trunk with Amazonian spiders, to be enveloped in layers of cobwebs. The volumes were never cleaned because the accumulated filth confirmed antiquity. Publication dates simply weren’t enough: collectors liked to feel their treasure had been snatched from oblivion seconds before it came into their hands. Thus, every time the auctioneer presented a book, a cloud of dust would rise up, causing the first few rows to erupt in coughs and sneezes.

  Gathered in the Tramont house were the most notable collectors from Paris, as well as dealers from Antwerp and Brussels who were trying to blend in. A few stood alone, but most were in groups of two or three. Though from the outside they may have looked like one big family, they were in fact eyeing one another suspiciously: each belonged to a rival religion and what one considered gospel was heresy to another. Those who chose books based on their bindings would laugh at those searching for Elzevirian or Roman type; experts in typography couldn’t understand what others saw in vignettes and bronze engravings; academics in search of Latin classics despised a love of a book’s material qualities, aspiring to more ethereal volumes instead.

  The auctioneer had saved The Human M
achine until the end. By this time, half of the buyers had already left. A bookseller from the Pont Neuf opened with a laughable bid. Von Knepper raised his hand, and this was echoed weakly by his competitor. The game continued for no more than three or four amounts, and the book was soon Von Knepper’s for no trouble and little cost. Having been rebound, it was of no antiquarian value. It was only of interest because it was so rare.

  I sat down next to Von Knepper as he held the acquisition limply in his hands. All interest had evaporated now that it was his. The hate I expected to see in his eyes when he saw me was in fact something worse: hope. This was no longer a man to be feared but an old man begging forgiveness without knowing why. The last few days had filled his voice with pleading:

  “Where’s my daughter?”

  “I don’t know. You know very well I had to flee.”

  “If it wasn’t you, then who?”

  “The abbot’s people?”

  “They have me firmly in their grasp; they don’t need my daughter. In any event, she left of her own free will. She could be anywhere in the city now. She doesn’t know a thing about life; she doesn’t know how to work. How will she survive?”

  The auction had ended. All of the collectors were leaving, treasures in hand. I followed Von Knepper out.

  “I’ll look for your daughter.”

  “And what’s your price if you find her?”

  “You’re worried about price? I thought all you’d care about now was Clarissa.”

  “If the cost for finding my daughter is to give her to you, that’s too high a price. I don’t make those kinds of deals. At most, if you’re patient, I can make you a copy.”

  “I’ll look for her first. Then we’ll talk price.”

  We had come to the Seine. Von Knepper flipped through the book by the light of the moon, stopping at the engravings, studying the binding.

  “At least I directed you to a good deal,” I said by way of goodbye.

  “This book? I know it by heart. It doesn’t interest me in the least.”

  “Then why did you buy it?”

  “To destroy it. The last thing a maker of automatons needs is for this sort of information to get out. Secrets must be kept.”

  He threw the book, as far as he could, and it splashed into the river.

  The Halifax Gibbet

  I looked for Kolm at the courts by the usual method of leaving a message in a basket, which disappeared into one of the upper windows. A crumpled piece of paper was sent back down, telling me to meet him the next night in a classroom at L’école de Médecine.

  No one stopped me at the iron gate or among the columns. I walked down a corridor that began in half-light and ended in absolute darkness. Kolm was waiting for me, partway down, at the bottom of some stairs. All around him were large portraits of famous doctors; despite the stains on his overcoat, it was as if posterity had rubbed off on Kolm as well.

  He gestured for me to be quiet, and I followed him, up stairs and down halls, to a room with piles of murky jars, wax sculptures of sections of the brain, and skeletons enveloped in cobwebs.

  Kolm sat down at a long table, covered in dozens of yellowing sheets containing the type of meticulous drawings we had become used to in the Encyclopédie. But these were old, the edges and folds ravaged by time. They were highly detailed designs for machines whose purpose became clear only after careful examination.

  Leaning over, studying the diagrams intently, Kolm was so different he seemed like an impostor.

  “Why are we meeting here and not in the square? What are you doing at the school of medicine, with these old illustrations?”

  “We’re in danger apart, but together we’re dead. Here, in this room, we can talk without fear, without anyone seeing us, away from the machinations of Abbot Mazy. Look at everything around us: old, forgotten things. If a person hides among them, he’ll be forgotten, too.”

  “I’m surprised they let you be here. You’re not a doctor or a student.”

  “One of the professors has a job only I can do. He wants to put an end to executions that become torture because of incompetent executioners. He’s searching for a machine as perfect as the best executioner, who takes life without evoking tears or screams.”

  I looked at the plans more closely and began to understand. A sword, made heavier by an oversized hilt, slid down two vertical rails…

  “… until it severs the medulla,” Kolm explained in a pedantic tone I’d never heard him use. “It was invented by a Hungarian engineer, who tried it on his wife. He said it was an accident, but no one believed him, and they executed him with it. It was never used again.”

  Kolm rummaged for a sheet that was underneath the others.

  “Look at this one. The offender is dressed in metal armor. He looks like a warrior ready for combat-only his enemy is the sky: an electric current travels down from a kite flown through a lightning storm. Death is certain and quick, but the weather isn’t.”

  In another illustration was a huge ax that hung like a pendulum over the victim, in this case a woman whose black hair seemed to have a life of its own. A second drawing showed her headless.

  “A Spanish invention used by the Inquisition in the sixteenth century. No matter how heavy the ax is, because it cuts on a diagonal, it rarely detaches the head completely. Now I’ll show you my favorite.”

  This wasn’t a plan but an old engraving; it showed a simple structure, just two rails that a blade traveled down.

  “The Halifax gibbet, used in England in the sixteenth century, apparently with excellent results. I’ve almost decided on this model. It won’t be hard to build: all you need is wood and a blade, and enough lead to make sure it drops fast and hard. If it works, there’ll be no need for executioners; anyone will be able to kill. It’s a shame: us old executioners, with our knowledge and our customs, will disappear forever, replaced by clerks who simply have to pull a rope. We’ll be forgotten, like calligraphers.”

  Kolm was already reaching for more diagrams to show me; I had to interrupt his explanations.

  “I didn’t come looking for deadly inventions but, rather, advice. Clarissa Von Knepper has disappeared. I told her father I’d find her.”

  “And why did you promise him that?”

  “There’s something I have to do, and he’s the only one who can help me.”

  “Not the bishop again? I hope you don’t find her then.”

  Kolm looked behind a statue of Hippocrates, in among anatomical specimens, for a bottle of liquor that he set down in front of me. It was sweet but strong.

  “Drink and forget. The work you do is unsavory, and I need an assistant. I promised the doctor he’d have his machine in a few days.”

  “How will you test it?”

  “There’s never any shortage of volunteers here.”

  “I can’t help you, Kolm. I’ve come a long way to finish a job.”

  “A job that will finish you. Well, if that’s what you want… But bear in mind, this doctor pays well, and he doesn’t have any significant enemies, yet. Your employer, this Voltaire, on the other hand…”

  With a look of disappointment, Kolm turned back to his plans and pulled out a map.

  “That’s not a machine; it’s Paris,” I said.

  The city was so vast, so full of streets and names, it seemed I’d never find something as small as a woman in it.

  “A brotherhood of heretics with ties to smuggling-they called themselves the Syracusans-would use the city in their executions. Whenever they suspected a brother was going to leave the sect, he was sentenced to death, but they believed the city always had the last word. One of them would take the role of executioner and wait in a room until midnight. The offender, who didn’t know his fate, was told to cross the city and get to the appointed room. If there were no problems along the way, he’d arrive thinking he’d completed his task and would be pardoned, when, in fact, the moment he opened the door he’d be executed with a Norman sword. However, if traffic or o
ther obstacles stopped the offender, forcing him to detour and delaying him, he’d be saved.”

  Palaces, bridges, churches, cemeteries. It took my finger just as long to trace a quiet street as another where I’d have been killed for merely setting foot.

  “Where in this city could a young woman hide?”

  “So you’re really going to look for her? You’ve already had to escape once. Maybe, like the Syracusans’ victims, an executioner is waiting for you in a darkened room.”

  The liquor seemed to boost my spirits after a while. It simplified the city map, erasing entire streets and neighborhoods. All I had to do was turn a corner to find Clarissa, to save her and myself.

  “Check the convents,” Kolm suggested.

  “I know she wouldn’t go there. She’s had enough of being cloistered.”

  “What does Von Knepper’s daughter know how to do?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” I thought for a moment and corrected myself. “She knows how to do one thing: stay still.”

  With the nearly empty bottle in his hand, Kolm pointed to Hippocrates:

  “Then ask the statues. They know the secret.”

  The Life of Statues

  Every Tuesday morning models would gather in the basement of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in search of work. Three big iron stoves tried in vain to heat the room, where the cold seemed to come not from outside but from the statues forgotten in the dark. Those sculptures, once proud exhibits and then inconvenient obstacles, were pushed by the whims of art down into the underground world. Every now and then an expedition would arrive: critics or sculptors would decide to bring back a former style or a forgotten artist, and archangels, Madonnas, or Greek gods would rise up to the surface again.

  The youngest women came from the countryside or abroad; rather than showing any conviction in their new line of work, they seemed to curl their bodies into question marks as they undressed near the glow of the great stoves. There was a Chinese folding screen, red lacquer with silk panels, but no one bothered to use it; the drawings made it seem much more indecent than nudity itself.