PABLO DE SANTIS

Volarire’s Colligrapher

Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Carter

Contents

Cover

Title Page

PART ONE

The Hanged Man

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

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

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

The Relic

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

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

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.’

I recalled how this had been taken to such an extreme at Vidors’ School that we would use our bodies to form letters in gymnasium class. G and h were the worst. Out in the bitterly cold patio, our teacher would stand in a tower and recite passages from the Aenid in Latin that we were forced to spell out all morning long.

‘Do you know, I once planned to write my autobiography using alphabetical order. If I ever undertake such a venture, remember that any letter can be omitted except a and z. They give the impression of having come full circle, even if other letters are missing in the middle. Who knows what Christianity might have become if Jesus had said “I am Beta and Psi” instead of “I am Alpha and Omega.” ‘

He handed me a pen and paper.

‘Show me a sample of your calligraphy.’

‘I’d rather use my own quills, if you don’t mind.’

‘It was thanks to them that you lost your last job. Who’s to say you won’t lose the next?’

I refused to be intimidated.

‘What should I write?’

‘“My hand trembles like an old man’s.” ‘

Indeed, my hand did tremble. The result was wretched-looking. This had never happened to me before.

‘It’s the pen.’

‘Try another.’

I took out a blue goose quill, my favorite, and the result was even worse.

‘That goose is still flapping its wings. Still, I’ll hire you. Your hand shakes so badly people will think I’ve written it myself. You’ll report to my secretary, Wagnière.’

‘And what will I do?’

‘Answer correspondence. Here, in this room. You’ll need to consult me regarding some replies. Others will be at your discretion.’

‘But it will be obvious you didn’t write them.’

‘Don’t worry. In fact, it’s better that way. People will think: If he’s not drafting his own letters, he must be hard at work on an important play. Absence itself can be an element of style.’

We were suddenly startled by a crashing sound. Voltaire headed into the hallway, and I followed. His strides were long but slow, and I had to stop myself from racing ahead. Though it took us a while to get there, papers were still floating in the air, as if waiting for their owner to arrive.

We entered the archives at the same time as a tall man with a sad air about him, dressed in somber clothing. He began to dig among the piles, and I knelt down to help. Someone was coughing and moaning under the weight of those yellowing letters tied with string.

I pulled out a bundle of moth-eaten pages that nearly disintegrated in my hands. Down below was a face so covered in dust it seemed to form part of the correspondence.

‘Let’s get poor Barras out of here. You take one arm and I’ll take the other.’

We pulled out a weedy young man whose head and upper lip were bleeding. He shook us off at the first opportunity, as anxious to leave as if a wild beast were laying in wait for him. He limped down the hallway, shouting:

‘I’m going back to the kitchen! To the archives, never again!’

‘I think we need a new file clerk,’ the tall man said to Voltaire.

‘Here he is. Wagnière, let me introduce you to Dalessius. Dalessius, straighten up this mess. In addition to writing letters, from now on you’ll be in charge of the archives.’

‘Isn’t it dangerous for an apprentice?’ Wagnière asked. ‘Barras nearly died and last month, that student from Alsace…’

‘If M. Dalessius tries, he’ll learn. If not, he’ll be sent home… in the same carriage that brought him here.’

The Correspondence

Voltaire had many enemies, so opening his mail was a dangerous task. There could be poisonous needles concealed between the pages, vials that emitted toxic fumes, venomous spiders.

The packages he received were often hollow books that contained hibernating snakes or sensitive incendiary devices. In a special room, away from the rest so as to limit the number of victims, I would check every envelope and parcel with a paralyzed heart. To assist in the task, Voltaire had bought a series of instruments in Geneva designed to detect tricks and explosives: rock-crystal magnifying glasses, a fine telescope that could be inserted through packaging, a lamp with a blue flame that allowed you to see through paper.

I not only opened the correspondence, but I also replied to it, in Voltaire’s name.

‘Look in my books and add some old witticism to your seminarian’s prose,’ he ordered.

I was young, and that work - which I would later miss dearly - filled me with impatience. The routine, even the danger, bored me: I began to open the mail without looking and reply without thinking. To my surprise, Voltaire received letters from a number of amorous women, written in their own blood. If they could only have seen the living corpse that was the object of such futile passion, they’d have scraped it all up to put back in their veins. Out of sheer tedium, I began to answer my employer’s correspondence using all of the implements at my disposal. There was nothing I wouldn’t use: albatross quills hardened in the iodine from sea foam; Chinese monkey hair brushes; inks that shone in the dark; others that disappeared as you read the words, creating the illusion of good-bye. Initially enthused by my own enthusiasm, Voltaire soon grew annoyed that his letters would be blank by the time they reached their destination, or contain jumbled words, or a signature that glowed like a ghost in the night.

To limit my experiments, Wagnière reminded me I still had to organize the archives. There were so many bundles of letters that if you took all the yellow and red ribbons that held them together, you could tie a bow around the world. Correspondence from royalty, like Catherine the Great or the King of Prussia, was to be kept in an iron chest, under lock and key. Insulting letters were burned, like the ones from the Bishop of Annecy, who every fortnight would accuse Voltaire of unconfessed sins. The ridiculous ones were burned as well, like those from a society of alchemists in Geneva that swore they possessed Paracelsus himself. We keep him hidden in the cellar, in a house on the lakeshore. He awakes every three months, mumbles something that sounds like Voltaire, and returns to his centuries-long sleep.

I had never had any trouble with the little iron stove until one day (I was distracted, reading some licentious notes from Mme. F.) a spark set fire to a pile of correspondence from the marquis d’Argenson, a dear friend of Voltaire’s. I always carried a bag of sand for making quills and sometimes to use as a blotting agent, and threw it on the fire before it burned the archives to the ground.

I couldn’t sleep that night, knowing Voltaire would be deciding my fate: expulsion or servitude.

I went to his study at dawn. Through the window, a stand of dark trees mirrored my sadness, the wind bending them into question marks. Voltaire was examining a parasite he had found on one of his plants.

‘We must get rid of everything that consumes us, everything that lives at the expense of others,’ Voltaire said by way of greeting. ‘I want you to pack your bags.’

‘Can’t you give me some other job, instead of sending me away? Don’t you need a gardener?’

‘What do you know about plants? Whenever you go into the garden, the roses impale themselves on their own thorns and the tulips commit mass suicide.’

‘What about the kitchen?’

‘They would cook you, and I’m not sure I’d like that dish.’

I liked life at Ferney. I didn’t want to go back to climbing stairs at the courts, knocking on magistrates’ doors, waiting in paper-filled offices where the air was always stale. All the strength drained out of me as I thought about leaving, and while Voltaire stood tall in front of me, I grew old and stooped.

‘I’ll go pack now and never return,’ I said, feigning dignity and hoping for compassion.

‘What did you think I meant? I’m not firing you. I need you to get ready to leave, but to go to Toulouse.’

‘Why Toulouse?’

‘A traveler arrived last night and told me of a distressing case. He said the court of Languedoc is preparing to execute a Protestant named Jean Calas, and perhaps all of his family as well.’

‘What is he accused of?’

‘Of killing his son.’

‘Then I hope the sentence is carried out.’

‘And I hope you’ll find out why they’re determined to kill this man at all costs. I’ve prepared some briefs; you can read them on the way.’

‘But I’m a calligrapher. I care about the clarity of line, not the truth behind words. That’s for others to do; philosophers, for example.’

‘I’m too old to go. Besides, my reputation there guarantees it’s a shortcut to death. I’m in no hurry to die, much less in Toulouse. You, on the other hand, won’t be in any danger, as long as you never mention my name. I’ve already asked your uncle to send a coach for you.’

‘I thought I’d stay here, to write for you and for history, not travel with the dead.’

‘If your path is one of history, then it’s only natural to be accompanied by the dead.’

The Passenger

The old coachman, Servin, came from the Swiss side of the border this time. He was transporting a couple from Avignon who had been killed in an avalanche. The tragedy had occurred ten years earlier, but the bodies had only recently been found. They were accompanied by a third coffin, but I didn’t bother to ask about it.

Three hours into our trip it began to rain. Ahead were only shadows and darkened trees. I shouted to see whether Servin wanted me to take a turn, but he didn’t reply; he took another swig from his bottle and spurred on the horses, indifferent to the storm.

He soon told me to get some sleep so I could take over for him later. A small iron cot hung down inside the carriage above the three coffins. I crawled up into it, settled onto one blanket, and pulled another one over me. I fell asleep for a few minutes, despite the swaying bed and squeaking chains, but a sudden jolt woke me from a dream in which I was supposed to take Voltaire’s body to some faraway place. Seconds later a violent lurch tossed me into the air and onto the third coffin.

The shuttered viewing window snapped open, as if someone had answered my knock. I peered in at the third passenger with the help of intermittent lightning bolts. It was the same curiosity that had led me, as a boy, to stare at the hanged man’s blue tongue, the soles of his feet carved with unrecognizable symbols, and the superstitious old women patiently pulling his nails and teeth. I could already picture the unsightly powdered face when I saw her: she had been beautiful, and that hadn’t changed. Her features spoke not of death, but enchantment. I had found a secret door into a fairy tale.

I shouted for Servin to stop and waited for the storm to bring us another flash of lightning. The coachman didn’t bat an eye.

‘Sometimes a dry climate preserves a body intact.’

‘You call this rain a dry climate?’

‘Maybe they embalmed her the Egyptian way. They say there are funeral parlors in Geneva that cover a body in animal fat and replace the organs with sawdust.’

I wanted him to stay and discuss the enigma, but he went back to the reins, unburdened by the curiosity that leads one to search for answers and find only problems.

We hid the carriage behind a copse of trees and spent the night in an inn, keeping the nature of our cargo from the owner or she would never have let us stay: gravediggers, Night Mail coachmen, and executioners were generally unwelcome guests. It was still raining outside and there was a leak above my bed. I moved, but the drips followed me, reminding me there was still a mystery to be solved.

I lowered myself out through a window, being careful not to wake Servin. Inside the hearse, I used the lamp I had brought to illuminate the face behind the glass. The closer I brought the light, the darker it was all around. The woman’s lips were pursed, as if she were about to reveal a secret. No Egyptian technique was capable of such perfection.

The next morning Servin found me asleep on top of the coffin and woke me with a cuff on the head.

‘I’m going to tell the Maréchal. That’s all he needs, for you to fall in love with a passenger. You take the horses as far as Avignon.’

I let the horses take me. They seemed much wiser, their soft side-to-side motion indicating a philosophical acceptance of the world’s contradictions. I began to talk to them and was sure they understood by the way they would sometimes toss their heads, as if agreeing with my arguments.

The storm had ended by the time Servin took the reins again. I didn’t dare tell him I was lost, but one glance at the surrounding forest and the old coachman immediately turned the horses around. He found the road to Avignon, delivered the two bodies from the Alps, and pocketed an enormous tip. He gave me less than a tenth, but promised I would earn a little more once we reached Toulouse.

Whenever we passed through a town to replenish our food supplies, residents would close their windows and cross their fingers: the passing of a Night Mail coach was a bad omen. Twice we were refused entrance and forced to go another way. I tried to convince Servin to remove the black crêpe and carved allegorical images that decorated the hearse. Without these, it would look like any other carriage, but he refused.

‘Maréchal Dalessius personally decorates each coach and no changes are allowed. He wants us to be recognized from afar. Alternate routes and delays shouldn’t concern us. As he says: A detour is just another road.’

Toulouse

I had been eager to arrive but now that the wheels (about to take one last turn before falling off their axles) were shakily tracing the route to Toulouse, I felt that mixture of exhaustion and unease that comes over a traveler whenever he reaches a new city.

We delivered the last coffin to the rue des Aveugles. The house belonged to M. Girard, a toy manufacturer. A long table displayed wooden horses painted blue, puzzles of city maps, porcelain dolls, and armies of tin soldiers that seemed to be returning in defeat: broken, hungry, their flag in tatters.

‘Is she your daughter?’ I asked.

‘The Night Mail is known for not asking questions,’ Girard replied.

‘That’s true, sir,’ Servin said, worried my curiosity might reduce or eliminate the tip altogether. ‘Please forgive him. Young Dalessius is new to the profession.’

The owner gave us each a few coins, but Servin snatched mine from me.

‘You should be glad you rode here for free,’ he said under his breath.

He asked the toy manufacturer whether he wanted us to move the coffin to another room in the house.

‘Just there is fine,’ Girard said, anxious for us to leave. Since we were no longer in danger of losing the tip, I asked about the cause of death.

‘She ate a poison apple,’ he snapped, pushing us toward the door.

We came out of the house, and Servin said good-bye there and then. A shipment was waiting for him on the outskirts of the city. He offered his hand, and in it was a coin. He told me to take care, and if anyone asked who sent me, to say anything at all, that I was an emissary to the devil or the Huguenots themselves, but under no circumstances was I to tell the truth.

I found lodgings near the market and took a room where I had to pay two nights in advance.

‘Are you here for the festivities?’ the proprietor asked. His face was scarred by illness and injury, and he was missing three fingers on his right hand.

‘No. Is something happening tonight?’

‘Celebrations begin in a few days.’

‘And what are you celebrating?’

‘The day the people of Toulouse had the courage to get rid of four thousand Huguenots. It’s the two hundredth anniversary.’

‘They were expelled?’

‘Straight to the hereafter. Never, sir, will you see such fireworks - not even in China! I lost three fingers when I was igniting them fifteen years ago, but don’t think I regret it. The moment I was hurt, I thought: Others have to smell gunpowder and are blown to pieces on the battlefield; I get to be a hero right here. I’d do it again, especially now, with the Calas family as the guests of honor. A whole year of boredom, sitting by the fire, greeting visitors as they come and go; a whole year of waiting just to watch the world explode. I can start to feel my lost fingers as the day draws closer.’

That night I looked out the window in my room and saw five men dressed in white robes, hoods pulled up, carrying an image of Christ. Voltaire had warned me: Be careful of the White Penitents. Windows opened as they passed and wilted flowers showered down on their linen hoods.

The Scene of the Crime

The room I took was cramped and cold. Previous guests had scratched their names into the musty walls. The blanket was so dirty it was much heavier and warmer than if it had been clean. Insects of every kind crawled along the floor. As I waited for sleep to free me from these annoyances, I studied the bugs with my magnifying glass. I even kept a few specimens: I liked to press them between the pages of my books as reminders.

The next morning, I bought a fresh loaf of bread. The bakers of Toulouse were paying homage to the Calas boy: it was in the shape of a hanged man, sprinkled with salt and raisins, the little noose decorated with sesame seeds. I finished reading Voltaire’s briefs and set out for the Calas house.

The judges had ordered a twenty-four hour guard be posted there. I asked the only soldier on duty if I was allowed to go in, but he said no. I had predicted as much and pulled out a bottle of wine with a loaf of that bread. The guard stepped aside, and I wandered through the now empty rooms.

All of the inhabitants had been hauled away: the father, the mother, the sister, the brother, the friend who was visiting, even the maid was in prison, and every last piece of furniture had disappeared as well. All that remained was the large, rusty nail that had held Marc-Antoine’s rope. I felt I had crossed all of France just to see that nail.

‘Why didn’t anyone take it?’ I asked the soldier.

‘They say it’s cursed. No one wants to touch it.’

I walked over to test its strength and show him I wasn’t superstitious, but changed my mind.

‘Were you here when they looted the house?’

‘No, but I was told they came down the street singing and carrying torches. As soon as they got here, they stopped and stood in silence: inspiration had vanished and they didn’t know what to do, whether to kneel down or lay waste. Their enthusiasm was renewed the moment they stepped through the door: most of them had never been in a house like this, and they discovered what fun it was to empty drawers and upend furniture. Other people’s lives are such mysteries. At some point, one of the women wanted to burn down the house and set fire to a curtain; the others put it out and nearly set her on fire. They all arrived together but left alone, arrived singing but left in silence, arrived with torches but disappeared in darkness.’

I studied every last corner with my magnifying glass as the guard followed me around. There were fewer signs of the Calas family’s whole life than of the looters’ brief stay: tatters of clothing, splinters of wood, chicken bones, and broken bottles.

‘There aren’t enough saints in these godless times; that’s why people are willing to pay such a high price for relics. You can buy the hanged man’s teeth on the black market for two francs apiece.’

‘I wonder if they’re even real.’

‘Oh, the hundreds of teeth, nails, and locks of hair for sale are all real. By the time I came on duty, only the martyr’s books were left. No one wanted them because books aren’t relics. But you seem like you might be interested. Maybe we could come to an arrangement.’

The guard mentioned an exorbitant sum. I gave no reply but concentrated on examining the nail instead. He dropped the price lower and lower until, discouraged and irritated, he knew he had no choice but to listen to my offer.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ I proposed as I cleaned the magnifying glass on my shirt. ‘I don’t have the money to buy the books, but if you let me look at them I’ll pay you one coin now and another when I’m done.’

He agreed and went to the window to make sure no one was coming.

‘I’ve hidden them.’

We went into what had been the maid’s room. The soldier lifted up some floorboards and handed me five dusty books. I surreptitiously looked for even a scrap of paper that might have been left behind, but all I found were notes penciled in the margins beside certain passages. I read the titles of the works: a collection of essays by Seneca, organized by topic; Hamlet by William Shakespeare; a speech by Cicero; The Apology of Socrates by Plato; and a fifth book that, no matter how hard I try, refuses to come to mind. Every paragraph the reader had marked praised death at one’s own hand. He hadn’t been so distraught or depressed that he committed suicide; he had prepared himself until he was ready for the rope.

‘These could save the Calas family. Why don’t you take them to the court?’

‘Books have never saved anyone. It’s too late for them anyhow. We need a martyr: the fanatics need one and so do we, men like you and me who don’t know what to believe in. My mother had a boil on her left leg that was already affecting her knee; she went to the funeral, prayed, and it went away. How do you explain that? Pray to the hanged man!’

‘I’d rather pray to a saint with a little more experience.’

‘Well, I’ve been blessed by him: I’ve already earned one coin and now I’m about to earn another.’

He held out his hand. I paid and left the ransacked house.

The Mechanical Hand

All around the Church of St. Stephen, relic vendors secretly displayed their little trophies in glass jars so thick they deformed and enlarged the treasures inside. The church was full of parishioners who needed increasing amounts of incense, which created an impregnating fog. The candles cast their yellow hue on the darkness. A blackened skeleton hung down, a tag proclaiming it was property of the Toulouse school of medicine. In its right hand was a quill dipped in blood and in its left a palm leaf, symbols of the conversion the murder had prevented. Used to being a simple object of study, the skeleton seemed taken aback by such sanctification.

I walked on to the courthouse where the Calas family was being tried. Armed guards stood at the door, and no one was allowed to enter. Conversations continued inside even though it was late; the windows above were illuminated. About a hundred people were gathered outside, circulating rumors and looking up as if the wavering light might contain a message. Everyone who came in or out of the court was accosted for news; though none replied, the crowd saw its hopes and convictions confirmed by the hush. The only person not questioned was a tall man in a cloak, who seemed to impose silence from afar and whose every step was like a period at the end of an empty phrase. I heard a whisper beside me:

‘That one there cleaned the body. He used to be an executioner.’

I followed the man in the cloak, rummaging in my bag for coins to pay for any information he could provide. He strode along briskly, and I had to run to keep pace. Windows closed and lights went out as we passed, giving the distinct impression his steps had ordered them to. I stopped next to a fountain whose waters were black: my quarry had disappeared. Before I knew it, I felt a rope around my neck and my feet were off the ground, not very high but enough that I longed to feel the earth below. The moon was reflected on the water. I struggled in vain, dancing the final jig of the hanged.

‘The last man who tried to rob me lost his right hand. I carry it in a box of salt; it brings me luck wherever I go.’

I tried to speak but couldn’t. I reached into my pocket for a coin and let it fall on the cobblestones. My attacker dismantled the gallows, and my feet touched down once more.

‘I came to pay you, not rob you,’ I said.

‘I’m not selling anything.’

‘I buy words.’

‘I don’t talk much.’

‘I heard you washed the body of Marc-Antoine Calas.’

He wanted to know what so interested me that I was willing to pay for answers. I told him I worked for the Jesuits, and that they wanted to be absolutely certain the Calas boy was a martyr. The Jesuits, I explained, were trying to speed up the canonization process for priests who had been murdered in the Orient, and didn’t want any old impromptu veneration to supersede the urgent needs of the Church. I handed him another silver coin.

The executioner spoke:

‘I attended to the body until the White Penitents took it from me. Six of them came down to the courthouse basement, showed me a piece of paper I never got to read, and carried it out in procession.’

‘Was he bruised, as if hanged by force?’

‘Not a single mark, other than a scar on his left shoulder - a very old wound.’

We sat on the edge of the fountain.

‘I wasn’t going to kill you. It’s bad luck to kill a man on a full moon: he’ll haunt your dreams.’

The executioner had big hands scarred by ropes and blades. I told him I knew about his former profession.

‘I’ve beheaded criminals in Paris, hanged poor wretches in Marseille, and pushed offenders off the top of a tower in Italy. They would land on marble below, and a painter would capture their final pose. But the real art is the ax: not many can cut off a head with a single blow. The rope, on the other hand, is the simplest yet least reliable of all the methods.’

‘Why? Did someone survive?’

‘Only one man lived to say “I was executed by Kolm.” He paid my assistant to fray the rope so it would break when he dropped. A man can’t be hanged twice for the same crime in Marseille, so he was set free. But let’s talk about happier things.’

Kolm worked for the courts in Toulouse, where he washed bodies in tubs of bleach water, sutured wounds, and sometimes determined cause of death. He was hired because of his experience as an executioner.

‘Do you miss your old profession?’

‘No. I got tired of being needed but despised. Take a look at this walking stick.’

He held up a long cane made of dark wood. On the bottom was a small but perfect replica of a hand, operated by a mechanism on the silver handle.

‘I was never allowed to touch any food when I went to the market. No one would speak to me. Then I had an artisan from Nuremberg make this walking stick. At first no one had a problem greeting the silver hand, letting it pick up apples or fish. But then it started to malfunction and now it crushes everything it touches.’

The hand opened and closed. Kolm invited me to try it. I lifted the walking stick and, as I looked up, saw a woman standing in a window. It was the passenger we had delivered to the toy manufacturer on rue des Aveugles.

I heard the sound of the window as it closed.

I had no intention of saying anything, but suddenly heard my voice, as if it were another’s:

‘A dead woman just closed a window.’

‘I know the dead and I know they never come back; I’d have been visited by now if they did.’ Kolm looked over at the house. It was the only one that still had any lights on. A bronze bell hung out front. ‘There are seventeen women who work there. They might disappear during the day, but they come back to life at night.’

His words did nothing to reassure me, and I hurried away down the deserted street. I don’t know why, but Kolm followed me, and the moon followed him.

The Performance

I went to see Kolm two days later, as he had promised to ask whether there were any openings at the court for a calligrapher. Kolm lived in a rooming house reserved for the brotherhood of executioners; they owned a building in every city to avoid the usual problems of lodging. Never having executed anyone, I wasn’t allowed in, but Kolm told me the rooms were decorated with axes, hoods, and belts that had belonged to legendary executioners. These made him nostalgic. I asked why he had left such a profitable profession.

‘Five years ago I helped to suppress an uprising against M. Ressing. I had cut off about ten heads when it seemed a pair of familiar eyes was staring up at me. I reached into the bloody basket and found my father’s head. We hadn’t seen one another in a long time, and I had executed him without even noticing. I know he recognized me, and yet he didn’t say a word: he wouldn’t interrupt my work. I haven’t executed anyone since. I was only able to recover my father’s head, which I put in a glass case and took to the town where he was born. There I gave him the funeral he deserved. For his epitaph I wrote: Theodor Kolm lies here. And elsewhere as well. ‘

It was Sunday and Kolm’s day off. We walked until we saw a crowd beside the market: a theatre company was performing The Calas Murderers.

The actors had erected a stage in a derelict square, amid statues of sleeping horses. The church had never been kind to actors, refusing for centuries to bury them in hallowed ground, but this company had chosen a topic of such popular interest that the White Penitents had even agreed to pay for the production. That night I wrote an account of the play and sent it to Ferney:

The Calas family is sitting at the table. A friend arrives from far away. He begins to talk about his city. After a while, he realizes they aren’t paying attention; no one is responding to his comments. The father, Jean Calas, finally interrupts him: he says they have a decision to make.

Marc-Antoine is preparing to convert to Catholicism, the father explains. He has been shut away in his room, reading the Bible, for the past seventeen days. We’ve hidden spiders and snakes between the pages, but nothing distracts him.

At night, the mother says, we give him candles with most of the wick removed, so they won’t last long. But he keeps reading, using mirrors to capture the moonlight. Then, on nights when there is no moon, in absolute darkness, he repeats the sacred words - words that aren’t sacred to us.

Is there no way to convince him, the friend asks. Women? A trip?

We’ve tried everything, the father says. Now we must sacrifice the lamb.

But he’s our lamb, the mother says. If we wait just a little longer…

The father says: Tomorrow he’ll sign his conversion at St. Stephen’s, and he can finally work as a lawyer. He may take action against us, to prove his sincerity. There is no faith more dangerous than the faith of the converted.

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