The Paris Deadline (13 page)

     The seventh cylinder held a single folded sheet of paper that simply said in French, "Perhaps I do know a little about Jacques de Vaucanson's Duck. I'm at home anytime. Henri Saulnay."

I
N THOSE DAYS THE
A
MERICAN
L
IBRARY
was on the Right Bank, on a side street by the French president's residence, and it was open on Saturday afternoons if you had a membership key.

     I skipped lunch and at a little past two o'clock sat down in one of the library's second-floor alcoves, looking out on the shops of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where the morning snow flurries had turned to rain and it was already dark enough for the cars and buses to turn their headlights on.

     In front of me, on a carrel desk, I arranged my copies of the two scholarly journals and alongside them every book and encyclopedia volume I had been able to find with information about Jacques de Vaucanson—it was a little like a treasure hunt, I thought as I started to wander up and down strange scholarly alleys, in and out of footnoted byways and pedantic dead ends. I was no Bill Shirer as far as memory went, but I read fast, the old-fashioned eighteenth-century French was brittle and clear, and bit
by bit as the afternoon wore on, the city below me faded into the shadows and an earlier, grimmer Paris came into focus.

     Jacques de Vaucanson, everybody agreed, had been a tall man, gangly, thin, with a classic beaklike nose and a large black mole under his left eye, which he was in the habit of picking at and scratching when he was angry, which was often. He had a lifelong stammer, frequent diarrhea and asthma, possibly the pox. He suffered from constant sore throats and may have been deaf in one ear, and one night in Lyon the rioting laborers chased him through the streets till he fell and wrenched his leg so badly that he walked with a crutch for the rest of his life. Not much later he had fled Lyon disguised as a monk, and when he got back to his Paris workshop he designed a silk weaving loom that could be operated by a donkey, proving, he said, that an ass can make more beautiful cloth than a man.

     "The reverse of the duck," I wrote in my notes, "not excrement from the end of an animal, but silk."

     Then I leaned back and stared at the yellow headlights prowling up and down the street like cats' eyes in the dark. After a time, I took out Henri Saulnay's pneumatique and read it again. The truth was, I thought, it wasn't the duck that interested me now.

     If his body was soft and fragile, given to collapse, Vaucanson's personality was hard and cruel. He desperately wanted to be a gentleman. He wore a sword from the time he was twenty. He was greedy for money. In his private hôtel and workshop on the rue de Charonne—something like Thomas Edison's famous Invention Factory in New Jersey—he kept an entourage of several dozen workers, but he paid them badly and worked them too hard. Except for a man named Hervé Foucault, his employees usually left quickly, in disgust. "All his genius," wrote Foucault to Henri Jacquet-Droz in Switzerland, "is in his fingers. His soul is closed off in a locked box. When he leaves off work, he's more a machine than the machines he makes."

     There was more like that, much more. Vaucanson was known to dabble in secret codes, according to some scholars. He briefly interested himself in mechanical languages. There was a spooky, almost occult quality to what he did—the fingertips of his Flute Player were probably lined with human skin, his Talking Head had a dog's tongue. His spoiled daughter was flighty and had an affair with Hervé Foucault, whose grandson would inherit the family talents and devise the famous Foucault Pendulum. He would also invent the children's toy gyroscope.

     Once, and once only, Vaucanson made a joke about his most famous creation: "If I had devised a shitting man," he wrote Foucault, "instead of a duck, what a grand Prometheus I would be!"

     Not much of a joke.

     There were two more descriptions of the proposed Bleeding Man, which I tracked down from footnotes in Elsie Short's article. Both descriptions were the same—a full-sized human body with a glass or wax torso through which you could see its organs and intestines, rubber veins through which real human blood could flow, a heart that would pump it, legs that would lift the body and move it about. Everybody thought the king had promised him a fortune to build it. Nobody thought it had ever been built.

     It was six o'clock by then, and the library attendants were coming through the stacks with their carts. I shuffled my notes together, piled up the books for them to collect, and made my way out into the twentieth century.

     Halfway down the rue Royale, I went into a nearly empty café and ordered a marc. On the other side of the zinc bar, in a big floral mirror, I watched myself drink. On the second glass I turned around and watched the cars and trucks on the street drive up and down through my ghostly reflection on the window.

     What none of the academics got, I thought, was
why
Vaucanson built automatons.

     Why, Toby? Do tell us.

     Well, all of his automates, it seemed clear to me, even the shitting duck, were mirrors of his own diseases, reversals of his own weaknesses. Why else build an animal with bowels of steel and digestion like clockwork? Why else build a Talking Head that doesn't stammer and have sore throats, a statue that stands up straight and walks without a limp and plays the flute and doesn't choke and strangle with asthma? When you're flawed and damaged, you make yourself over, if you can, if you know how. You make yourself whole. You fix what's broken. You try to create yourself the way you were before . . . before you broke down.

     In the wavering light of the cafe window I could see my own body, but not my face.

     Across the way, in front of a toy store, a street mime in a top hat and red velvet cape stood on a little wooden box, arms akimbo. His face was weirdly white with makeup, his head cocked at an unnatural angle, clicking slowly from left to right as if on a ratchet. He was a person pretending to be a machine.

     If you want to write a good story, Root likes to say, it's very simple—you give somebody an obsession, then wind him up and turn him loose.

Sunday was much better. The weather was cleaner, warmer. I went for a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens and watched the boys play with their sailboats in the fountain. In the afternoon I sat in the Café Edmond Rostand and listened to two students from the Sorbonne perform scenes from "Cyrano." An old couple from Lille bought me tea and talked about General Pershing. At six o'clock I started to walk.

     People sometimes ask me, frustrated Americans thumbing their pocket dictionaries, how long do you have to study before you really start to understand French? And speak it so they don't wrinkle their noses and walk away?

     In my case it happened in the spring of 1917, when I worked
six tempestuous weeks as the liaison between Norton-Taylor's 23rd Tunnelers Group and General René Lanrezac's 222nd Field Artillery. Get it straight, Norton-Taylor had instructed me grimly, because any mistake or mistranslation could turn the big French guns the wrong way and point them toward our tunnels instead of the Germans. And in those days a fifteen-inch howitzer shell weighed 1200 pounds and would drive six or seven feet into the ground before it exploded. Every tunnel below or beside it would simply collapse into a long, dark coffin.

     Nothing concentrates the mind, Dr. Johnson said, like the prospect of being hanged. Or, he might have added, suffocated.

     Root told me his French came to him one night in the Métro, when he suddenly realized, like switching on a light, that he understood every word the pretty girl beside him was saying. But I don't take the Métro.

     It was five minutes to seven when I turned off halfway down the boulevard des Invalides and walked up a quiet tree-lined street toward the severe eighteenth-century facade of the École Militaire.

     This part of the 7th Arrondissement was one of Paris's wealthy quartiers. The long rectangular Champ-de-Mars was its green park, with the Eiffel Tower and the Seine squaring it off at the north end, the École Militaire at the south. On either side of the Champ-de-Mars, in an elegant grid of side streets, ran two or three rows of handsome, very expensive modern apartment buildings, uniformly six stories high, topped with penthouse gardens. In the dark, except for the mansard roofs and the cat's-eye yellow headlights on the passing cars, you might have thought you were on the Upper East Side in New York.

     That, of course, and the faint Parisian smell of urine on the street from the vespasienne at the corner.

     I sat down on a bench and watched the spotlights revolve on the Eiffel Tower, a sight I very much enjoyed. Hard to believe now, but the Eiffel Tower had originally been painted red. Then
the second year of its existence it had been repainted a bright, eye-curling yellow. Three hundred artists and writers had signed a petition to tear the tower down, on the grounds that it was the single ugliest structure in Europe. But then the war came and the Army had galloped in to the rescue, and now it served as the world's largest military radio antenna and the artists and writers were off in the outer darkness, gnashing their teeth as usual.

     Even harder to believe now, of course, is that in 1925 the Citroën car company had placed the name "André Citroën" in great luminous letters on all four sides of the tower. The letters were in six colors and twenty meters high. People said they could be seen forty miles away.

     I looked at my watch and noted with obscure satisfaction that the first two letters of the "André" facing me had burned out. Originally, the École Militaire had used the park for troop maneuvers and drills—hence the "Mars" in Champ-de-Mars—but all that was gone with the days of the musket and the saber. My grandfather had come to Paris for the Universal Exhibition of 1878 and told me that he had been on the Champ-de-Mars when a well-known Irish courtesan named Lee d'Asco went up in a balloon, wearing men's clothes and carrying a revolver. She came back down perfectly naked, except for the revolver, having thrown out her clothes piece by piece to lighten the basket. It was my grandfather who taught me my first words of French.

     Somewhere nearby a municipal clock struck a sluggish seven bells. Around me shoppers were still going past with their Christmas packages. A few soldiers from the École drifted by in kepis and mufflers. There were no armed ducks, no academic bounty hunters, no thuggish persons with billy clubs and quilted jackets. No ghosts, no Moles.

     I watched a dog running back and forth on the snowy grass, and slowly, slowly the same nagging question began to circle around in my head again, like a scrap of paper in the wind.

     I was a rewrite man. I edited stories and tried to figure out what
people really meant to say, consciously or not, and I was usually not too bad at it. And right from the start Elsie Short's clearly written but oddly illogical essay had set off a blinking light—she hadn't written about the Flute Player, or the Tambourine Player, or Vaucanson's remarkable silk weaving looms, which in the great historical scheme of things could be said to have started the Industrial Revolution in France. Those were clearly far more important than a few mechanical toys.

     She had written about two things only, not logically linked. "Vaucanson's Duck and the Bleeding Man."

     And what in the world did the one have to do with the other?

     I pulled my right hand out of my overcoat pocket and saw that I had made it into a fist.

     At seven-twenty-two Root came bounding up from the Métro like a six-foot rabbit popping out of its hole, and we set out across the park for Vincent Armus's party.

T
HE RUE
J
EAN
C
ARRIÈS RUNS AT RIGHT
angles to the Champ-de-Mars, on the southwest side, about a third of the way down toward the river. In the lobby directory of number 8, I was not surprised to find that Armus lived on the penthouse floor.

     There was an elevator, but in deference to me, Root and I walked up the stairs. Root found the hall light and knocked, and a butler in correct evening dress opened the door.

     "You are . . .?"

     "Gentlemen of the Press," said Root. He gave a confidential pat on the head to the boxy black camera he had lugged all the way from the rue Lamartine. "Here early, to take some pictures for the Society Page."

     The butler looked from Root to the camera to me. "I'm Mr. Pulitzer," Root said. "This is Mr. Hearst."

     "Who is it, Nigel?" said a female voice in the hallway. Nigel took a step backwards, swept a white-gloved hand in our direction, and murmured, "Mr. Pulitzer and Mr. Hearst, madame."

     The voice gave a throaty chuckle, said, "Then I must be Jenny Lind," and materialized in the form of a tiny, sharp-nosed, dark-haired middle-aged woman. She was dressed in an ink-black silk Chinese jacket and trousers, and she looked, as Root would say later, like one half of a pair of crows. But she gave us each a quick smile and said, "Well, this must be one of those sex-change operations you read about, or did dear old gray-haired Millie Cubbins just split in half like an amoeba?"

     "We're from the
Tribune
," I said. "Not the
New York Herald
, I'm afraid."

     "And you're selling subscriptions door to door, like a troop of Boy Scouts?"

     Root has a way with older women, which he modestly attributes to a certain mischievous handsomeness (his phrase). He lifted the camera and tripod up to his shoulder like a soldier with a rifle and switched on a dazzling, if slightly piratical grin. "This is Toby Keats," he said. "Lost soul, solemn recluse, harmless drudge. Possibly the second-best writer in Paris. He wants to do a long, brilliant story about Mr. Armus and his automates, and I'm Waverley Root and I like to eat and I just wanted to crash the party."

     Mrs. Armus kept her expression blank for a long moment while somewhere behind her Nigel coughed like a sheep into his glove. Then her face opened into an equally roguish smile, and she stepped aside with a little mock bow. "Well, then come right in," she said, "and feed."