A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  “The marquis?” Professor Couturat repeated with a blank face.

  “The marquis?” Professor Leau repeated as well.

  “De Beaufront,” Dr. Zamenhof elaborated helpfully.

  A series of complicated expressions crossed Professor Couturat’s face.

  “That would be impossible, I’m afraid,” Professor Leau said, translating Professor Couturat’s grimaces.

  “You can’t expect us to throw an unknown individual — ”

  “One without professional or academic standing — ”

  “ — in among the august specialists whose participation in the Delegation Committee we foresee.”

  Dr. Zamenhof conceded the point. “I’ll speak to Rector Boirac.”

  “Do.”

  “And urge him to agree. The rector is the necessary link between Esperanto and the delegation, the living symbol of our alliance.”

  “With him …” Professor Leau said.

  “Everything will succeed; without him …” Professor Couturat made a small clicking sound with his mouth.

  “Nothing is certain.”

  Dr. Zamenhof frowned. “Yes, but I’m only wondering …”

  “Wondering?” Professor Couturat smiled impatiently.

  “… is it fair?” Dr. Zamenhof said.

  “Fair?” Professor Couturat repeated.

  “To the creators and proponents of the other artificial languages to so stack the deck in favor of our cause?”

  “The other languages?” Professor Couturat scoffed. “As you yourself have said, none of these are more than theoretical schemes.”

  “Not living languages at all!” Professor Leau said.

  “What hope do they have of succeeding?”

  “None,” Dr. Zamenhof said, “with the cards so stacked against them.”

  “None, in fact,” Professor Couturat stated emphatically, “even if they weren’t.”

  STILL, IT WASN’T easy convincing Rector Boirac to join the Delegation Committee. To begin with, as a government official, he lacked the freedom to leave his academic post in Dijon and come to Paris for indefinite periods of time. Unable to partake in the committee’s decisions fully, he would nevertheless seem to have sanctioned them with his own name. And secondly, he didn’t trust Professor Couturat.

  “Let me ask you only this, kara sinjoro,” Rector Boirac said to Dr. Zamenhof, as the two sat in the hotel bar over a late afternoon glass of kvass, smoking their interminable cigarettes. “Why would he want me, of all people, the president of the Esperantiso Language Committee, to sit on his committee when he’s promised a lack of partisanship to the competing schemes?”

  “Why indeed?” Dr. Zamenhof sighed. “I brought the matter up with him myself.”

  “Yes? And?”

  “He assured me it has nothing to do with partisanship. It’s a foregone conclusion that Esperanto will prevail.”

  “But …”

  “I know, I know.”

  “He’s a strange little man.”

  Dr. Zamenhof shrugged. How could he not? How many times had he himself been called a strange little man? He made a clicking noise with his tongue. “He appears sincere, if a bit unworldly. Certainly he won’t be able to deliver everything he hopes, and yet, if we can’t stop him — and I suggest we can’t — we might as well profit from all he wants to give us.”

  Rector Boirac threw back his head and forced the last drops of his drink down his throat before signaling to the bartender for two more. “And on the days when I can’t be present at the meetings?” he asked.

  Dr. Zamenhof blew out a cloud of cigarette smoke before nodding towards me. “We’ll send Dr. Sammelsohn here as your second.”

  Loë and I were sitting at the next table over, listening in to their conversation, a fact that must have been obvious to Dr. Zamenhof, otherwise he would never have addressed me so directly. Embarrassed to have been caught out eavesdropping, I pretended not to have heard him at first.

  “Dr. Sammelsohn,” he said, ignoring my silly pretense, “Rector Boirac and I are discussing the possibility of sending you to Paris to sit upon the Delegation Committee as his second.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, deciding not to ask them to fill me in on all the details I’d already heard. “Anything I can do for the movement. And as you know, I have the time.”

  “Good.” Dr. Zamenhof lowered his voice. “I thought it might not hurt for you and the sinjorino to get away from Vienna for a while.”

  “Ho, Kaĉjo,” Loë whispered, gripping my hand, clearly pleased that her husband should be so honored with such an important position. But how important was it, really? I was to be a mere second to Rector Boirac. As far as honors went, surely this was a minor one.

  “ON THE CONTRARY,” Dr. Zamenhof told me the next day at an icecream stand in the Jardin Botanique, “do not for a moment imagine that a second is less essential than the man he supports. No, he is, in every way, the more essential man.”

  “The more essential?”

  Dr. Zamenhof nodded. “Should the principal fall, the second remains. However, if the second falls, there is no one.” He lowered his voice and stood more closely to me. “Also, I must tell you this in strictest confidence: I’m not certain how much we can trust Rector Boirac.”

  “I’m astonished to hear this,” I said.

  Dr. Zamenhof’s eyes narrowed. “What do we know of his true feelings?”

  “Surely you don’t suspect him of reformist tendencies?”

  “Of course not.” Dr. Zamenhof glanced about, as though searching the garden for spies. “However, the other day, he said something quite odd to me concerning the letter H.”

  “The letter H?”

  Dr. Zamenhof pointed with his chin. “We were sitting on a park bench not far from here. And naturally, I was reiterating to him how dangerous even the most innocent attempts at improvement could be for us at this delicate time, and do you know what he told me?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know what he said to me?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “He said: ‘So you’ve given no more thought to reforming the super-signs, then?’ ‘Oh, what an absurdity!’ I cried. ‘Our enemies claim that because of these supersigns, Esperanto can’t be printed universally. And yet, with the H,’ I said, ‘thanks to the letter H,’ I told him, ‘we can be printed in printing houses anywhere in the world!’ ‘Yes,’ the rector said, ‘thanks to the letter H — which is a kind of reform, isn’t it?’ “

  Dr. Zamenhof gave me a significant look.

  “I’m sure he meant nothing by it.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’re quite sure?”

  “Yes!” I protested.

  Dr. Zamenhof scrutinized me with an intensity I found unnerving.

  “Well. Keep your ears and eyes open in Paris,” he said. “That’s all I ask.”

  On one score at least, Dr. Zamenhof had been right. I was only too happy to leave the ill-fitting life that had been forced upon me in Vienna. As soon as we arrived in Paris, both Loë and I seemed to relax. Out from beneath the shadow of her father, we walked the bridges and the narrow streets of the Île St. Louis in the autumn light, feeling more ourselves again. We breakfasted each morning at a café overlooking the Seine, reading the morning newspapers or discussing the artificial language schemes we’d immersed ourselves in the night before. I’d had no lovers during my student days, and so it was with an unidentifiable sense of nostalgia that I woke up every morning with this dear woman in my bed, in whose sweet company I dallied before dashing off, with my notebooks and pamphlets underneath my arm, like a university student, to the Collège de France.

  CHAPTER 14

  Monsieur Couturat was a professor at the collège, and the Delegation Committee convened in a large meeting hall there. I had no idea what I expected to find that first morning, but upon entering its chambers, I was struck by an immediate sense of disappointment. Professor Coutura
t had always spoken of his committee as though it represented the will of mankind: the members of la Délégation pour l’adoption d’une langue internationale included several thousand scientific academies and university faculties and many hundreds of other such organizations — everything from commercial schools to bicycle clubs from across the globe — each with a large membership. From these great numbers, 331 delegates had been chosen, out of which 253 had elected twelve men to sit on the committee, of whom four had shown up in Paris that day. Though other committee members would drift in and out of these sessions, it was these four men, with Professors Couturat and Leau acting as nonvoting secretaries, who had somehow been empowered to choose a universal language on behalf of the entire world.

  Not that these four weren’t imposing: they were, and Rector Boirac among them. I greeted him with a firm handshake. “Any subsequent word from that impish sprite?” I couldn’t help asking. I’d never gotten a chance to speak with him about that night at la Unua Universala Kongreso, and I inquired about it now, hoping to make it all seem as little important to me as possible.

  The rector frowned professionally. “Oh, yes, with the fraŭlino, you mean, at the — ”

  “At the first congress, yes,” I said, nodding.

  “Naturally, upon my return to Dijon, I began researching the event.”

  “Yes? And? Any discoveries?”

  “Well, no. Unfortunately, just as I was on the point of arriving at some definitive conclusions, my lab burned to the ground. All my notes were irretrievably lost.”

  “Oh dear!”

  “These spirits can be quite destructive, Dr. Sammelsohn. However, as far as that night in Boulogne is concerned, I wouldn’t make too much of it. I can only assume that the highly suggestible mind of the young woman in question — ”

  “A fraŭlino Zinger, if I’m recalling correctly.”

  “ — found itself dominated by the mind of a member of our audience whose neurosis was so overwhelmingly potent, so overwhelmingly powerful, that it spilled the banks of his own mind, so to speak, and flooded everyone else’s in the room.”

  I bared my teeth in as good-natured a smile as I could. “Fascinating,” I said.

  “Isn’t it?”

  I bid him good morning, and as I did, I banished from my mind, as I had a thousand times since my encounters with fraŭlino Zinger, the picture of Ita reborn as a pretty little Parisienne, roller-skating down la rue de Quelque Chose, her cheeks rosy with the cold, her pigtails flying. The last thing I wanted intruding upon this august scene was a communiqué from Ita, scrawled via some unnatural means onto our collective perception like an angry graffito.

  I MOVED ON and was next introduced to Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, a rangy-looking man with a concise grey beard. A professor of linguistics at the University of St. Petersburg, he had dragged the art of philology, it was said, kicking and screaming into our new century, forcing it to behave like a science. Among his many discoveries were the phoneme, the morpheme, the grapheme, the syntagm, and a host of other queer-sounding -agms and -emes. A French Catholic by birth, he considered himself an atheistic Pole, and though he could speak two dozen languages, he greeted me that morning in Yiddish: He lowered his voice. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but the pretentiousness of this occasion is already beginning to nauseate me.”

  The angularly bookish man next to him, peering coolly through his rimless spectacles, was Otto Jespersen. A linguist at the University of Copenhagen, he’d revised the teaching of English worldwide, and the battles he’d fought on behalf of modern learning, he told me, had been severe. “And as a consequence, I have no patience for the cant that passes for high-mindedness nor for junk-thoughts passed down from generation to generation and held dear for no good reason!”

  The robust German bear of a man standing in the center of the room, his rosy-golden beard reaching the topmost button of his vest, his laughter thundering throughout the chamber, was Wilhelm Ostwald. Destined to win the Nobel in two years, he’d made his name as a chemist and, in addition to publishing twenty-two books and 120 scientific papers, he found time to carry on a lively correspondence concerning pigments with painters and to lecture housewives on the chemistry of cooking, all the while agitating on behalf of causes as varied as world peace and the standardization of book sizes (“the hypotenuse oblong” being the preferred dimension). Teaching at Harvard the year before, he’d undertaken a lecture tour of America to promote Esperanto and had done much to advance our cause in the New World.

  “No, no, no, it’s much simpler than that,” he was saying to Professors Jespersen and Leau. “The energetic imperative simply mandates that all things must act so that crude energy, as one might call it, is transformed into its highest form with the least loss to itself.”

  “Now, you’re going to have to give us an example,” Professor Jespersen said jovially.

  “Happiness?” Professor Leau suggested, speaking over him, and the two professors nodded at each other, as though they’d contrived an unbeatable chess move against a formidable opponent.

  “The energetic formula for happiness?” Professor Ostwald bellowed. “Nothing simpler: it’s H = E2 − U2.”

  “H = E2 − U2?” Professor Leau, the mathematician, repeated.

  “H = E2 − U2?” Professor Jespersen puzzled over the strange formula.

  “Happiness equals Energy squared minus Unpleasantness squared,” Professor Couturat supplied the solution as he joined their little group.

  “Indeed,” Professor Ostwald boomed. “One need only take the two extremes: heroic men achieve H by increasing their total expenditure of E, while men of timid temperaments prefer to maintain their contentment by decreasing amounts of U”

  AS SECRETARIES, MESSIEURS Couturat and Leau had prepared the moment well. Croissants and jam were laid out at every seat. Waiters poured piping hot coffee into porcelain cups. The handsome Leau, dashing from chair to chair, served as amanuensis not only to Professor Couturat but to himself, slipping the two volumes of their Histoire de la langue universelle at the place of each committeeman.

  Upon seeing me, Professor Couturat let his gaze go slack, as though he hadn’t seen me at all, and then apparently remembering who I was, he moved through the small crowd and greeted me with a moist kiss on each cheek.

  Lightly clapping his hands, Professor Leau cried, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, it’s ten of the clock, and time we were called to order. Professor Couturat,” he called to his friend, “will the esteemed professor address our illustrious committee and remind us of the sacred task that we are here to perform in these chambers for the good of all mankind?” Gesturing towards Professor Couturat with an open palm, Professor Leau stimulated the chamber to applause with his own brisk clapping.

  Nodding his head humbly, applauding silently in return, Professor Couturat stepped to the table in order to address his committee. This was, there was no doubt about it, his shining hour, the culmination of his seven long years of selfless labor. One could almost see his eyes growing misty behind his pince-nez as he took in the five or six eminent gentlemen who, at his request, were seated now before him. The sun breached the clouds and shone through the tall windows behind him, draping a mantle of light upon his narrow shoulders.

  With a raised knuckle, he lightly brushed aside the wings of his mustache.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, clearing his throat, “may I begin by reminding each man here of how we all felt in 1900 when the Paris Exposition demonstrated that the world had been made anew? No longer would borders and nationalities divide us! No longer would scientists of one nation be unable to speak with scientists from another!” He shook his head, as though in wonderment. “May I say that there was only one other time when I felt like this; and that was upon that rare and grace-filled morning when I stood poised to enter the royal archives of the Hanover Library, armed with nothing but a bibliographic catalog prepared by Herr Bodemann, the chief librarian of that royal institution.”

  I shift
ed in my seat. Though I’d meet Professor Couturat only once before, at the Second Universal Congress, I’d already heard him tell this story twice.

  “That catalog,” his voice trembled with emotion, “with its classification of the archive’s great stores — principally the unedited and unpublished manuscripts of Gottfried Leibniz — guided my researches. Better yet, let us say it rendered them possible. Days passed, weeks, months, gentlemen, during which I neither saw daylight nor heard a word spoken in my native tongue. And yet, on that final morning, when I left the depths of that archive to return to Paris, to my apartments on la rue Nicole, I was no longer the same man who had departed them half a year before. Neither the world nor I would ever be the same. No,” he said, “I knew then, as the world would soon know, that Leibniz’s metaphysic proceeds from his logic and not” — he looked every man at the table in the eye — “his logic from his metaphysic!”

  He was silent for a moment, allowing the weight of his great discovery to impress itself upon us. I nearly laughed. Surely, I thought, he’s joking. The statement seemed absurd. But when I glanced about and saw that no one else was laughing, I quickly stifled my own laughter.

  “Be that as it may,” he said, “the world needs a universal language. Just as Leibniz once dreamt. To that end, Professor Leau and I, as you know, founded our delegation.” He removed his glasses and twirled them on their ribbon. “Many people, including Mesdames Couturat et Leau — isn’t that right, Professor Leau?” — amid warm laughter, Professor Leau nodded his head ruefully — “warned us that our hopes were foolish, that our work would produce nothing but gossamer dreams. And yet, in the few intervening years,” Professor Couturat nodded towards Rector Boirac, “I’m happy to say that Dr. Zamenhof’s Esperanto has proven to the world that a universal language is no dream at all. Why, I myself attended the congress in Boulogne two years ago, where for more than eight days — for more than eight days, gentlemen! — nearly a thousand people from twenty different lands communicated with each other via the only language they held in common: Esperanto. In a word, this was the most sensational refutation of every pseudoscientific objection by all those know-nothings who would presume to judge an international language without knowing it and who, without penalty, are free nevertheless to assert the opposite of the truth. Although” — he raised an eyebrow — “when one sees how, thanks to the great success of Esperanto, the whole question of a universal language has fallen into the hands of utopianists, fanatics, and enthusiasts, one can hardly blame the cynics.” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “No, of course, despite its proven brilliance, Esperanto is not the only international language. And over the next two weeks, we shall be looking into more than two hundred such schemes. The question remains: which language is best? which the most perfect? which the most useful to the greatest number of persons?”