скачать книгу бесплатно
Voltaire’s Calligrapher
Pablo de Santis
An elegant and atmospheric literary thriller that will delight fans of The Interpretation of Murder and The Shadow of the WindEighteenth century France: the Age of Enlightenment.Dalessius is 20 when he takes a job as the philosopher Voltaire's messenger and spy. Soon he's entangled in a web of secrets and intrigue, leading from the courts and scaffolds of Toulouse to Paris, and a mysterious fortified monastery where Abbot Mazy guards a horrific secret.Assisted by an executioner and the beautiful, marble-like daughter of an automaton maker, Dalessius faces sinister clergymen, inventive henchmen and poisonous fish in his quest to uncover the truth behind the Abbot's machinations. It will take amazing courage on Dalessius's part – as well as Voltaire's unique cunning and wit – if they are to survive.
PABLO DE SANTIS
Volarire’s Colligrapher
Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Carter
Contents
Cover (#uaccb6591-ad70-53aa-a3c1-4a62aeeecb86)
Title Page (#u60c093bd-6636-5e9b-9bbc-de2813837377)
PART ONE
The Hanged Man (#u90ac3f14-bd69-582f-98a3-7521fb28db67)
The Relic
First Letters
Ferney
The Correspondence
The Passenger
Toulouse
The Scene of the Crime
The Mechanical Hand
The Performance
The Exam
The Bronze Bell
The Execution
PART TWO
The Bishop (#litres_trial_promo)
The Abbot’s Hand
A Friend of V.
Siccard House
Von Knepper’s Trail
The Bishop’s Silence
Kolm’s Walking Stick
Clarissa
The Prisoner
The Burial Chamber
Taps on the Window
Fabres’ Disciple
Mathilde’s Foot
Flight
The End of the Trip
PART THREE
The Master Calligrapher (#litres_trial_promo)
The Wait
Anonymous Libel
The Human Machine
The Halifax Gibbet
The Life of Statues
A Blank Page
Hammer and Chisel
The Locked Door
Silas Darel
Hieroglyphic
Inventory
The Marble Head
Praise for The Paris Enigma
PABLO DE SANTIS
Also by Pablo De Santis
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE The Hanged Man (#ud64a2b5f-b256-54e7-8e85-017bc33f382a)
The Relic (#ud64a2b5f-b256-54e7-8e85-017bc33f382a)
I arrived in this port with very few belongings: four shirts, my calligraphy implements, and a heart in a glass jar. The shirts were threadbare and ink-stained, my quills ruined by the sea air. The heart, however, was intact, indifferent to the voyage, the storms, the humidity. Hearts only wear out in life; after that, nothing can hurt them.
There are countless philosophical relics in Europe today, most as fake as the bones that churches revere. Saints used to be the only protagonists of such superstition, but who today would fight over a rib, a finger, or the heart of a saint? The bones and skulls of philosophers, on the other hand, are worth a fortune.
If an unwary collector even mentions the name Voltaire to any antiquarian in Paris, he will be led to a room at the back and, in absolute secrecy, shown a heart that resembles a stone, locked in a gold cage or inside a marble urn. He will be asked to pay a fortune for it, in the name of philosophy. A hollow, funereal grandeur surrounds these fake hearts while the real one is here, on my desk, as I write. The only opulence I can offer it is the afternoon light.
I live in a cramped room, where the walls erode a little more each day. The floorboards are loose and some can be lifted with ease. That’s where I hide the glass jar, when I go to work in the morning, wrapped in a frayed, red velvet cloth.
I came to this port fleeing all those who saw our profession as a reminder of the former establishment. You had to shout to be heard at the National Convention, but we calligraphers had only ever learned to defend ourselves in writing. Although someone proposed that our right hands be cut off, the egalitarian solution prevailed, and that limited itself to cutting off heads.
My colleagues never lifted their eyes from their work or tried to decipher the shouts that could be heard in the distance. They continued to patiently transcribe texts that had been assigned by now decapitated officials. Sometimes, as a warning or a threat, a smudged list of the condemned would be slipped under their doors, and they would copy it out, never noticing their own name hidden among the others.
I was able to escape because time had taught to me to look up from the page. I gave myself a new name and a new profession, and forged documents to present at the checkpoints between one district and another, one city and another. I fled to Spain, but my fugitive impulse was such that I didn’t stop there; I wanted to get even farther away. With my lack of funds and ragged appearance, I boarded the only ship that offered me passage. It was the first time I had ever been on a boat, perhaps because of the memory of my parents, who had died in a shipwreck. As partial payment for my fare, I took dictation for the captain (he had a mountain of correspondence to attend to from women and creditors). Writing those letters and having my mistakes corrected was how I learned Spanish.
It was a long journey. The ship put in at port after port, but none of them seemed right. I would stare at the buildings along the coast, waiting for a sign that I had found my place, but there was only one sign I was prepared to understand: the one that says there is nowhere further to go. This was the ship’s last stop.
This is a city people come to by mistake, those who are fleeing some peril or government, and wind up running away from the world. On the boat to shore, I was sure my professional life was over, that I would never see another drop of ink. Who in these dark, muddy streets could possibly need a calligrapher? I was wrong: I soon discovered a profound reverence for the written word, even greater here than in the cities of Europe. They love their signed, sealed directives; their papers that pass from hand to hand, generating still more paper; their detailed orders from Europe; their lists of items ruined during the voyage. Everything is stamped and signed with a flourish, then duly filed in a cabinet never to be seen again, swallowed up by the disarray.
Each morning, in a frigid office at city hall, I transcribe official documents and legal rulings. My colleagues often mention the name Voltaire, but they’d never believe I once worked for him. They all assume everything that arrives on these shores is either untrue or unimportant.
A wind blows in through my window and sets everything aflutter. I place the heart on my papers to keep them from blowing away.
First Letters (#ud64a2b5f-b256-54e7-8e85-017bc33f382a)
When the Retz sank and my parents were lost, I was left in the care of my uncle, maréchal Dalessius. He asked me what my talents were, and I showed him some alphabets I had invented. On one page the letters were the branches of a tree, hinting at leaves and thorns; on another they were oriental palaces and buildings; and on the third - the most complicated - the letters were resigned to simply being letters. My uncle had been waiting for some indication of how best to get rid of me, and those sheets of paper were his answer. He sent me to Monsieur Vidors’ School of Calligraphy, where the mysterious Silas Darel had studied.
My difficulties with authority soon began: I wasn’t satisfied with writing alone; I wanted to invent pens and inks, to reestablish our craft. Calligraphy was a dying art, condemned by a shortage of masters, besieged by the printing press, reduced to the lone squad or man. I would scour the history books for heroes who might be considered calligraphers, but there were only heroes who never wrote a word.
The most enterprising of us, those who hoped to follow in Silas Darel’s footsteps, would read whatever we could, from old school textbooks to anonymous dissertations on cryptography. Our profession was so dead that we felt like archaeologists of our own kind.
Complete silence reigned in the classroom, interrupted only by the scratching of quills on paper - a noise that was itself a metaphor for silence. The long hall had floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides, and our teachers insisted they remain open, even in winter, claiming that a well-ventilated room was essential to good penmanship. In blew dirt, twigs, and pine needles that my classmates would angrily brush off the page, but I would leave them, believing you must respect the marks of circumstance when writing. All but a few resigned themselves to using the school’s supplies, purchased twice a year from a Portuguese sailor: black ink that soon lost its color, red ink full of lumps, sheets of paper whose imperfections caused letters to jump off the page as if skipping rope, and goose quill pens chosen at random.
After dinner and prayers, I would hide in my room or the garden, beside a stone fountain with green water so putrid you could write with it, and experiment with my own inventions. My favorite ink consisted of pig’s blood, alcohol, and iron oxide. I would buy the left wings of black geese at the market and pluck the feathers one by one, discarding fourteen out of every fifteen. Having selected the best, I would heat sand in a copper bowl then pour it into a wooden case: there I would leave the quills to harden. I kept all of my implements in a sewing box that had belonged to my mother, and still held a bronze thimble and the smell of lavender.
When I left Vidors’ School, my uncle found me a job with the courts. It was a natural fit for those of us who graduated; others wound up as librarians or as private scribes for the most distinguished families. I began to carry the tools of my trade from one government office or courthouse to another. This was an era of all things fragile and futile: I have never seen anything like it since. I was once given a death sentence to prepare, that was then shown to the convict, full of arabesques and wax seals, on his way to the gallows. He said: Thank the calligrapher for having turned my crimes into something so beautiful; I would kill ten more men just to have him create something similar again. Never, in my life, have I received higher praise.
Bottles of squid ink, scorpion venom, sulfur solution, oak leaves, and lizard heads all sat together in my room. I had also experimented with invisible inks, based on instructions I found in a copy of De Occulta Caligraphia that I bought from a bookseller on rue Admont, and was forbidden at Vidors’ School. It promised water-based inks that would become visible upon contact with blood, or when rubbed with snow, or exposed for long hours to the light of a cloudless moon. Other inks took the opposite route, and would go from black to gray and then disappear altogether.
My career in the courts came to an end when I prepared the death sentence for Catherine de Béza, convicted of murdering her husband, General de Béza. When the general fell ill, his wife sent for his long-time physician - a man who, nearly blind, was prone to prescribing obsolete medications and signing death certificates with no questions asked. But that very morning the old doctor awoke with a fever and sent his young protégé instead. By the time he arrived, the general was already dead. It took no more than a minute for the young physician to determine it wasn’t of natural causes: he peered under the cadaver’s nails with a magnifying glass and found traces of arsenic.
Madame de Béza was tried and found guilty. She was taken to the gallows, but the executioner was unable to proceed: the page containing the verdict, covered in writing just a few hours earlier, was now a blank sheet enlivened only by red wax seals. Some understood the disappearance to be a sign from God, attributing it to the virtue of the accused rather than the folly of the calligrapher, and so Catherine’s noose was exchanged for jail.
As for me, they tried to accuse me of conspiracy; I attempted to explain my mistake using arguments of science and fate but was still sent to prison for three months.
I went to my uncle’s as soon as I was released, yearning to sleep night and day in a real bed, free of the stench, the screams, and the rats. My uncle, however, had already gathered my things, and his cold embrace celebrated not my return but my departure.
‘I took the liberty of offering your services while you were in prison. I sent some old acquaintances a brief list of your abilities and a long list of your incompetence, so as not to be called a liar.’
‘Did anyone respond?’
‘The only reply came from Château Ferney. They read everything backwards there: they understood your vices as virtues, and agreed to hire you immediately.’
Ferney (#ud64a2b5f-b256-54e7-8e85-017bc33f382a)
I was twenty years old and all I owned was a sewing box full of quills and inks. It would have been impossible to get to Ferney if my uncle, maréchal Dalessius, hadn’t run a company called Night Mail that transported the fallen. Hundreds of bodies arrived in France during wartime that had to be returned to their cities and towns. The post had initially seen to this, but letters and merchandise would arrive in such a deplorable state that people stopped reading their correspondence; as soon as the mail arrived, it was burned. The dead had managed to isolate the outer regions of our kingdom.
The Night Mail was devoted solely to funeral transport. My uncle inherited the business from my grandfather, and operations were run out of a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris that had once been a meat salting facility. There the bodies were sorted, put into coffins - often filled with salt, as if to maintain the tradition - and sent out on the roadways of France. There were only twenty-five hearses; since routes were uncertain and mistakes common, families could wait months for a body to arrive. At first, in the clamor of war, the fallen were received as heroes, but as time wore on and the fighting came to an end, the traveler would reach home like a postman bearing bad news, an inopportune visitor who spoke of a conflict everyone had managed to forget.
My uncle had a small shuttered window put in the caskets, to view the occupant and thus prevent mistakes. Another of his innovations was to hire a button manufacturer to strike medals so every soldier could be given a set. In this way, everyone went home a hero. We have very strict rules in this profession, maréchal Dalessius would say: Wear black, work at night, keep silent.
Business would fall dramatically whenever there were no wars or epidemics. In order to build up his clientele, my uncle began to disseminate a Benedictine theologian’s theory: he asserted that, to get into heaven, a person must be buried in his birthplace, or at a distance of no more than that between Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulcher. This little ruse, plus an agreement with the government to cart corpses from the gallows and prisons, ensured my uncle was never short of patrons, even in the worst times of peace.
Ferney was far away, on the Swiss border. Banished from Paris by the king, Voltaire had bought the château to be able to escape to his estate in Geneva if his life were ever in danger. By the time we arrived, all of the bodies had been delivered and I was the only remaining passenger. I said good-bye to Servin, the coachman, and stood alone at the door to the castle.
A clerk studied my papers then told me to take a seat. The sun soon faded from the windows, and I was left in the dark. No one came to light the lamps; I thought I had been forgotten. It had been an exhausting trip. All I wanted was food and a bed, but a servant finally appeared and led me to the east wing of the castle. There were clocks in every room and the noise was deafening. This tick-tock, I soon learned, was so pervasive it crept into the domestic staff’s dreams, tormenting them with images of gears, hands, and Roman numerals.
Voltaire had seen his share of conflict, prison, and exile; I expected to see a giant of a man, with an enormous head and piercing eyes. Instead I found an old man who seemed unreal, more like a drawing in a book (a book left in the garden through a night of rain). His teeth had been lost to scurvy, his bald head was covered in a woolen cap, and his tongue, thanks to his habit of licking his quill whenever it ran dry, was as blue as a hanged man’s.
Voltaire didn’t turn when I walked into the room; perhaps he was deaf as well. He was studying a sheaf of papers with a gold-rimmed magnifying glass.
‘Idiot,’ he said.
‘Sorry I’m late.’
‘The man who wrote this is an idiot.’
‘One of your enemies?’
‘Worse: me. Why this stupid fondness for dictionaries? Can you tell me that? It must have rubbed off when I worked on the Encylopédie.’
‘As a calligrapher, I’m quite fond of alphabetical order, too.’
