by Edward Carey
The second doctor was the Commissioner for the Free America, Doctor Benjamin Franklin. I never saw this man either, not the actual man himself—though my master and the widow were given audience—but even so I have cause to remember him particularly. I am most grateful to Doctor Franklin for his long gray hair, for that is what got me admitted properly back into the workshop—as a worker. There was a great shortage of time in those days, there were so many heads to complete that my master needed more help, and so at last I was remembered. The most tedious and time-consuming job was putting hair into wax heads; usually a wig would simply be placed on a head, as nearly everyone of significance, male or female, wore some other person’s, or some horse’s, hair. But this American doctor wore his own.
“That instrument,” I said, “is a ring-handled, long-necked needle with polyp tip, sir.”
“Yes it is, Little. How did you know that?”
“You taught me, sir, in Berne.”
“Did I? Indeed, I believe I did. I had forgot. I shan’t again. Do you know what it is for?”
“It is for the propping up of tissues during operations, but you use it for threading hairs, one by one, into wax scalps.”
“Well, yes, yes, that is exactly right.”
“Must she?” asked the widow.
“For the sake of getting things done, Widow Picot. We are so overstretched.”
“But no talking, Little. Sit in silence.”
“Yes, madame.”
“As if you are not really there at all.”
“Yes, madame.”
And so I made my triumphant return. I studied Benjamin Franklin very closely. The head was like some massive tuber, a potato of a man. There was a deal of rather wrinkled double chin at the bottom of the face, great hams of cheeks going upward, a sizable forehead. In the center of the face a bulbous nose grew, flanked by two droopy gray heavy-lidded eyes; his mouth was bracketed by considerable folds.
“This personage,” I said, “has come all the way from America.”
“Yes, Little.” My master nodded.
“It’s as if we’re learning the world, isn’t it?”
“You may say that, indeed.”
“No call for noise!” snapped the widow.
Hair by hair, I made Franklin look like Franklin. I threaded in the long gray hairs, cropped by the widow from an old chestnut seller on the Pont Neuf who needed the money. With the rounded tip of the needle I pushed one end of the hair into the wax; when I took the needle away, the hair remained. This I did several thousand times, and with portraits of the new doctor before me. Cheap images of his face were to be found all over Paris: on prints, on a snuffbox, a matchbox, a fan, even on a chamber pot, over the inscription He wrested lightning from the gods and their scepter from tyrants.
“Perhaps now at last,” I ventured, standing to admire the hair, “you shall pay me.”
“You are to be quiet in here,” said the widow. “You are not to be heard at all.”
“We shall look into it, Marie,” said my master. “We certainly shall. Do be patient.”
I smiled as I worked on the doctor’s remaining hair. Perhaps I was finally becoming a true part of the family. Perhaps, if my work was good enough, I might even be permitted to marry into it.
Many people came to see the wax Mesmer and Franklin. Some even called during the day to visit Curtius and the widow in the workshop upstairs. And so I, now a part of the workshop business, witnessed new people every day. One such man was Jean-Antoine Houdon, a very famous sculptor. If I had not learned that, I should have called him only Another Little Bald Man.
“Your name, of course, is not unfamiliar to me,” said Houdon. “You do thieves and murderers. You rob everyone of grace. There’s no dignity, no elevation of the human form, only degradation. You are a cynic, you have no love for your fellow creature, you are incapable of music.”
“I love the heads,” said my master, softly. “I do love the heads.”
“Your business is good for the streets, perhaps. Your material is cheap and easily gotten, commonplace. There’s nothing subtle about it. No wit. No brilliance.”
“Wax is . . . flesh!” Curtius said.
“Then marble the soul.”
“I’ve made my life of wax.”
“Keep to the murderers,” said Houdon. “They deserve you. But this head”—he pointed at Franklin—“is demeaned by you. You dishonor it.”
In February of 1778, as I became an official part of the workshop, an ailing and toothless eighty-three-year-old man, François-Marie Arouet, known to the world as Voltaire, returned to Paris from exile in Switzerland after nearly thirty years. Paris went wild for him. They hurled honors at his shaky frame. Voltaire, in response, hemorrhaged.
In his convalescence he was shut up in the house of the Marquis de Villette on the banks of the Seine. A worried crowd lingered outside the house, hoping for a glimpse, but only the most esteemed visitors were allowed in, among them Doctor Franklin. On two occasions, the small and bald sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon was admitted for sittings. Then he rushed back to his studio, where he locked the door and didn’t come out again for a week and a half. Houdon was determined: this would be the greatest work of his life. Day and night he tap-tapped against his marble. Slowly he found the protruding lower jaw, the thin grinning lips. His thoughts took shape in sunken cheekbones, bald ancient heads, wrinkled chicken necks.
At the marquis’ house by the river, there was an old man who daily looked less and less like Voltaire. Now, to see the true Voltaire, you took yourself and your family to Houdon’s studio. That was where he was, keeping regular hours, never disappointing. From eleven in the morning to seven o’clock in the evening, every day, grinning without cease.
My master visited it. “No color! No life,” he said, but he bit his knuckles.
“If we could only have Voltaire,” the widow said, “think who would come.”
“I do want Voltaire’s head,” said Curtius. “I want it so much that I hurt.”
My master and the widow joined the dwindling crowd in front of that house by the river every day. Every day they were not permitted entrance. And every day Edmond and I sat together in the workshop. We chatted as we worked and I began to think that this was how it could be if we were married. Every day they went out, the widow knocking fruitlessly on the door, my master holding his father’s great leather bag filled with stopped bottles of water, pomade, and plaster dust. Not until the thirtieth of May, after the old man had been moved into a servant’s lodge behind the house, and after they had passed money to a servant—an amount my master and the widow referred to only as “the certain sum”—were they invited inside. Because, by then, it was all over. Voltaire had died. My master took his death mask.
The model of Voltaire had to be ready as soon as possible, but the face my master had taken in plaster was collapsed, slumped, lacking in life.
“I know he’s dead,” said Edmond. “That’s a dead face. You’ve been at his grave, Mother!”
“Not his grave,” she said. “Doctor Curtius has made it clear to me, Edmond, it is perfectly reasonable to take a death mask of a great man. Death masks have been taken of kings. It is quite acceptable.”
“The murderers were alive when you saw them! This man was dead. A dead thing!”
“Edmond, Edmond,” she said, wiping a tear from his eye, “you are entirely too sensitive. Do please find a way to bury your nerves.”
My master adjusted the philosopher, stroking and shifting his features, and from the wax death mask he made in clay a plumper face, with open eyes, grinning. My master studied Houdon’s head, studied many prints of the philosopher. I watched him shifting his own face until it took on Voltaire’s expressions. Then he tamed the clay and the wax until it became Voltaire. It was a marvelous thing to behold. Only four exhausting days after his death, Voltaire was resurrected on the Boulevard du Temple.
This Voltaire, so lively that he appeared on the very verge of speaking, br
ought many people. “At Curtius,” they said, “Voltaire still lives.”
“A famous head,” said the widow, “a glowing head.”
People came in such numbers that the Monkey House grew and grew and someone else came to be employed inside its doors. Florence Biblot was a large, shiny-faced woman who already provided meals for several other of the boulevard industries. Sometimes she cooked in the house; more often, she brought the food to us. She was not a great talker, Florence wasn’t. When she was complimented she said nothing, only gave a little laugh that revealed her tongue bouncing north and south and small, ground-down teeth. She did this every time, without fail.
“Thank you, Florence, that was a lovely stew,” said my master.
“Dddddd, ddddd.”
“At long last we remember what food tastes like,” said the widow.
“Dddddd, ddddd.”
I taught her how to make the Swiss dishes that my master so liked. Rosti, grated potatoes cooked in fat, and Fleischkäse, which is made by combining various meats together with onions and baking it in a bread pan.
“Dddddd.” She laughed, putting a liver through the grinder.
More people came, so many that the widow took Edmond on a visit to Monsieur Ticre’s printworks.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
New clothes.
With prosperity came bricks. With bricks came builders, who surrounded our walls with brick atop brick, up and up and up, until the old wooden Monkey House was dressed in a smart brick suit. Four brick buttresses were added to help the wooden crutches. “It’s not in the correct spirit,” said Mercier in the workshop. “No good shall come of it. There shouldn’t be bricks on the boulevard. They’ll hate you for it. One day they’ll take revenge on you for those bricks.”
“And who are you to say such things?” demanded the widow.
“I am Mercier himself.”
“And of what account is that?”
“I am your old friend. Have you forgotten it was I who introduced you to Curtius? Look downstairs: there I am, made by his own fine hands.”
“Yes indeed, I thank you for the remembrance. I am so familiar with our works that sometimes I forget what is before me. I meant to have that one removed months ago. Jacques, do take that head away. Do not worry how you handle it, we shall melt it down.”
“But I am Mercier!”
“Yes, I know, such a shame. Couldn’t you be someone else?”
“I wrote the book Paris in the Year—”
“Yes, yes, but you see it no longer signifies. You’ll have to do something new, won’t you? And let us know when you have? Make sure, this time, that it’s something that will last.”
“Please, dear lady. Don’t take my likeness down.”
“It is done. We are not running a charity.”
“I do so like to see it there,” he said, crestfallen.
“We accept only the very best and very worst heads. And yours, like the great multitude’s, lies somewhere in between. You do understand, don’t you?”
How quietly Mercier left.
He was right, at first, about the bricks. Neighbors would shake their heads and fists as they passed us on the street; some would spit; on occasion, in the dead of night when Jacques was asleep, some would empty their swill buckets on the steps. Of all the buildings upon the boulevard, only three were made of something more solid than wood: Nicolet’s Grandes Danseurs de Corde, Audinot’s Ambigu-Comique, and now the Cabinet de Docteur Curtius.
As it settled now, the Monkey House made new, strange noises, as of a very large mouth grinding its teeth. The attic creaked in agony, louder than ever before. There was a gradual drop of two inches in some of the upstairs rooms. Once, as the widow was walking along the landing, a floorboard un-nailed itself and sprang up, nearly smacking her in the face.
Newly dressed, the Monkey House provoked a revolution in everyone’s clothes. It began, as it must, with the widow. To her customary black she added shades now, some trimmings of purple, a little dark blue to her cuffs; her bonnet was lined with purple silk. She purchased for herself a gentleman’s walking cane of malacca wood with an ornate silver guilloche handle, never again to be seen without it. There seemed to me a fresh outbreak of moles upon her skin, little bumps and dots that had not been there before, and might never have been, but for the bricks. These growths and pimplings were like medals upon a soldier, smart decorations, each a further proof of her enormous progress.
To my master the bricks brought only a stiffness, as if the building were longing to turn him into a caryatid. The widow announced her disapproval of his cotton suit: that suit, she said, was a personality that had no understanding of bricks. Edmond measured him, and a new personality was created, this in black velvet, which gave my master back pains and strange throbbings down his thighs, but caused him to utter more proclamations of how fond he was of the Widow Picot and what she had done for us all.
Some people cannot be contained within clothes, some people are too full of life, some people are all motion and upheaval; such energetic bipeds and quadrupeds are the enemy of thread. Jacques Beauvisage wasn’t made for clothes. He tried very hard, but it was hopeless. Even in finery, he still upset everything around him. One evening, in his clumsiness, he knocked over a murderer, the head shattered. While Curtius sadly sorted through the remains, the widow flew into action. She blew the bugle of her voice: Scissors! Hot water! Razor! She was going to cut the animal out of him. In those days of silk, she proclaimed an end to fur. She, who would keep her own enormous hair hidden beneath her cap, now forbade my poor miserable Jacques his matted topper-most. She chopped off his great mane, then shaved the stubble crop that remained. His hair was dismissed like Curtius’ old suit; it fell onto an old sheet that had been laid on the floor to receive the gentle tumble of Jacques’ wildness and with it a great nation of lice, which I remanded to the fire. If the widow’s intention had been to create a neat gentle-looking person, she failed utterly, for shorn of his hair he looked more terrible than ever. I sat with him as he sadly stroked his stubblehead, a chipped cannonball.
Even I could not escape the wardrobe upheaval, this war of cloth, this famous defeat of new over old. From the widow I received dark dresses, very plain, very workmanlike, three modest sisters, and a new cap. Of good, though not exceptional, material. Still, here I was, part of the family. I thanked her for it, very much. She grimaced.
Even the dummy of Henri Picot was seen shining upon the landing, in a new white lace shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons.
Edmond was robbed of calico, which was his material, and put in silk. What whines from him, of uncharacteristic volume. From his room, from the widow’s, came loud noises of a family in dispute. “Please, Mother, no, I don’t want to.” “I won’t have this, Edmond, I won’t have it!” “It must not happen, I tell you, Mother, a terrible error!” “You tell me? Nonsense! What’s this new boldness? Where’s it from? Put this on now! If I have to strip you myself, you will put this on!”
Edmond in a crisp white silk suit was almost an albino; only his ears were a different color from the rest of him. There’s Edmond, I remember thinking, quick, watch him in that suit of his. Most people did not think much of him, most people did not spend emotion upon him of any sort, and he was left forgotten; I used to think that fitted him well enough and I was very grateful for it. But I saw him in his white suit, exposed as never before; there were blue veins at the sides of his temples. Delicate aquamarine rivers flowing through the Country of Edmond. How to chart such territory? Where could suitable explorers be found? I saw him in that white suit, certainly I saw him, very early one morning, when he would usually be wearing his nightshirt. He came in to me wearing that horrible white suit. He did not say anything. Instead Edmond’s blank face came closer and closer to mine, so very close that my lips touched something that felt like cotton but was in fact the lips of Edmond Picot. And then a deeper kiss than ever before, his mouth opened, there was Edmond beneath the cloth, the with
in of him. But he stopped so soon.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry, Edmond?”
He said, “I find you pretty.”
“Edmond? Edmond? Do you? Do you!”
“I don’t want to go. I’m sorry.”
“Edmond?”
“I’m so sorry.”
But he didn’t say why he was sorry. As I put my fingers to my lips, that white suit went out of sight. The widow had proclaimed the availability of her son. As if she had nailed a bill poster on an external wall of the Monkey House, and the poster had grown very old, had seen every weather, had been doused by rain, which turned to ice, dripped dry, curled and yellowed in the sun, had lost its whiteness and was now almost impossible to read—and yet, incredibly, suddenly, someone had seen it there. Someone read the message carefully, and understood it, and even read the final small words, APPLY WITHIN. And did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Public notice: the nuptials of Cornélie Ticre.
I have been a little dishonest perhaps. I may have mixed bricks with clothing. I forgot to mention that the clothing was for an event, and that the event was the marriage of Edmond Henri Picot to Cornélie Adrienne Françoise Ticre, of the printworks on the Rue Saint-Louis.
The Ticre printworks was responsible for advertisements all across Paris. They printed not only the bills for the Cabinet of Doctor Curtius, ALL THE BEST AND ALL THE WORST PEOPLE OF PARIS—INSIDE!, but also the sheets for the Comédie-Française, for RACINE’S ANDROMAQUE, and they didn’t stop there. The printworks went on through day and night, and all day Sunday too; they never stopped; they were as hot as all the talking heads of Paris. The presses slammed back and forth, churning out thousands upon thousands of words, until it made your head pound: letters on small metal or wood blocks, positioned in order back to front, rolled with ink, then thumped onto the paper, causing the paper a jolt of agony. Oh, those people, they’d print anything. They’d alert Parisians to the latest book, the latest medicine, the most shocking notices of bankruptcy, the grave importance of elastic stockings, the most advanced varnish for teeth. How many walls in all Paris, I wondered, were covered by the outpourings of the Ticre press alone? All those words revealing all those lives, all those businesses, all those hopes, all those futures, all those little pieces of the human mass. It was the Ticre press that printed out broadsheets for the hangings, for church services and puppet shows, for things missing: a poodle, a turtle, a walking stick, a snuffbox. LOST: A MUFF. LOST: SILVER ASPARAGUS TONGS. LOST: AN ELABORATE CANDLESNUFFER. LOST: A SILK UMBRELLA. LOST: A DOUBLE-FACED TIMEPIECE. LOST: A TOUCAN. LOST: A BELOVED DOG. LOST: A CHILD.
