Von Knepper’s Trial
The watchmakers of Paris were notoriously hard to find. They never set up in a given street but traveled around the city as if it were the face of an enormous clock and they were the obedient hands. Surrounding them was an assemblage marked by time: almanac vendors, fortunetellers, and astronomers who wanted their celestial observations to be added to calendars.
I asked around for Von Knepper, whose name had appeared in the letter from Father Razin. No one knew him, but they were so completely unaware of his existence that the very possibility of him seemed to fill them with fear. I asked one after the other, receiving negatives or silence in reply, until one watchmaker furtively pointed to a woman who was displaying some books on a stone bench.
“Madame Buzot is an expert in the history of machines. She might be able to help you.”
I looked over at the woman wearing a black cloak that revealed only her hands and face, mapped with old scars. I asked the watchmaker about them: their precision betrayed a method, not simply chance or bad luck.
“Madame Buzot was the only female watchmaker in Europe. She was to replace old Van Hals, who was responsible for all the clock towers in Strasbourg. On December 31, 1750, he activated a device to stop the hour hand at precisely twelve o’clock. When Madame Buzot came to repair it, Van Hals was hiding and pulled her inside the clock, intending to kill her. She survived because the mechanism jammed. All of the clocks in Strasbourg came to a halt while she was trapped, and only when she was rescued did time start up again.”
I approached this Mme. Buzot. The books open on the bench showed detailed diagrams of cogs, springs, and gears. It was hard not to stare at her scars, but I greeted her, commented on her merchandise, and finally mentioned Von Knepper.
“You won’t find his name in any book,” she said.
“It’s not a book I’m looking for. I want to find Von Knepper.”
“If you knew what you were saying, you wouldn’t say it out loud. The makers of automatons have fallen from favor; rumor has it they never existed.”
She began to whisper in my ear. Her many years around clocks had given her words a regular beat, as if each syllable corresponded exactly to a fraction of time.
“Von Knepper was a disciple of Jacobo Fabres and worked with him until his death. Fabres taught him to build geese and flautists, but Von Knepper wanted to make the most difficult piece of all: a scribe. No one knows if he succeeded.”
“Where can I find him?”
“I’ve heard of an artisan in a dark street, not far from here, who can restore a clock figurine’s precise movements. If you buy something, I might tell you the name of that street.”
I asked the prices, but they were all too high—particularly when I had no interest in the topic. Mme. Buzot finally pulled a small book with a clock on the cover out of a bag and asked a reasonable price.
Once I had paid, the watchmaker brought her lips to my ear and told me where I might find him. I glanced at the little book as I listened: there was a drawing of a clock on each page, so if you flipped through it quickly, it looked as though the hands were moving.
Everyone around us was gone; the watchmakers had abandoned the place, as if the distant pealing of bells were a summons.
With the little book in my pocket and the street name in mind, I headed to Siccard House, as I did every other afternoon. The more dexterous I became, the more I hoped to postpone the moment when my mercurial position as a spy would force me to leave. My hand no longer trembled, and I had learned to adapt my writing ever so slightly to the pliancy of skin. There were four messengers, and they all liked to converse as they waited for us to finish. Most of all they enjoyed talking about their trips, which sometimes took them far away for weeks at a time. At first I answered in monosyllables, trying to forget the surface under my quill was a woman. Later I intrigued, then amused, and finally bored them with my knowledge of the history of calligraphy. I often think I did some of my best work there, on those words that were inevitably lost between the sheets, with soap and water, or in a sudden rain shower.
Only Mathilde still threatened my calligraphy. I envied the men she was sent to, who would watch her undress and read the message, late at night, next to a fire. I spent much more time with her than they did, but the fact that she wasn’t addressed to me put her out of my reach.
Dussel, a calligrapher from Leipzig, was even more obsessed with Mathilde. He had come to Paris after fleeing his native city, where he was wanted for destroying a printing house. Dussel had belonged to the Hammers of God, a sect that believed the printing press would prevent man from ever discovering the original language, prior to Babel. They saw the printed word as the true Tower of Babel and, using calculations that were incomprehensible to anyone else, established similarities between the types of lead used in printing and the elements the Bible said were used to build the tower.
Mathilde’s nakedness was more unsettling to Dussel because he pretended to be pure, while I couldn’t have cared less about purity. Mathilde enjoyed this power and used conversation to try and distract him from his perfectly uniform letters. No matter how tense Dussel was when he wrote (and he was often so tense he would fall unconscious when a job was done), he never made a mistake.
Dussel would avoid writing on Mathilde’s most secret places, condensing his script so as to finish before the work became unbearably indecent. Mathilde would shift imperceptibly, to force him to use more space, but he never crossed the line he had set for himself. From the office next door, I heard Mathilde issue him an even greater challenge: since the Bible was the only book young Siccard deemed edifying enough to leave in the offices, could Dussel transcribe the entire New Testament on her body?
Aristide Siccard trusted Dussel, paying him double what he paid me, even though he was no better. In Siccard’s mind, unhappiness was sensible, obsession responsible, and misery virtuous.