Anonymous Libel
My break ended and I went back to writing, not with quill and ink but with my footsteps and the dust of the road. As soon as I arrived in Paris, I went to find the printer Hesdin, who had worked for Voltaire on previous occasions. His address was on a piece of paper that had been soaked by the rain, and the street name was now nothing but a few faint blue lines. Thankfully, almost all of the printers lived in Les Cordeliers, and Hesdin was well known; I soon found his shop, not far from the Comédie-Française.
I didn’t go straight in; there were suspicious-looking people all around, and I wondered whether Abbot Mazy had already heard I was in Paris. But those men with faces obscured, lurking on corners and in doorways, weren’t interested in me. These were playwrights in a city so overrun with them that theaters had barred them from entrance; they already had enough plays to stage until the end of the century. The new tragedians would prowl around, waiting for any opportunity to slip into the theater. Once inside, they would hide until they could leap on the stage manager or director. Some would even threaten suicide if their work wasn’t read immediately. None of this seemed like a problem at the time, but now, looking back, I think it was the ferment for everything that happened later. The Revolution was led, primarily, by frustrated writers, and their literary jealousies and failure to make it onto the stage were what led to the Reign of Terror.
Inside the print shop, an assistant was turning the press. When I asked for Hesdin, I was taken into the back, where a white-haired man was painting gold letters on the cover of a book. Tottering stacks of books were all around.
“Where’ve you come from?” he asked. “It looks like you’re being followed by a cloud of dust.”
“I’ve come from Ferney, sir.”
“Then you’re not only being followed by dust but by problems as well.”
The only chair was covered in books, which Hesdin brushed to the floor. I knelt down to pick up a copy of Varieties of Calligraphy by Jacques Ventuil, with twelve illustrations by the young Moreau.
“Does that interest you?”
“I’m a calligrapher.”
“Then do me a favor and take it. I only sold thirty-seven copies. I’ve fonder memories of books that have been burned than those that were an absolute failure. At least a banned book doesn’t take up space. Look closely, that’s Baskerville, the print type vaguely reminiscent of human handwriting. Baskerville was a calligrapher before he became a printer and wanted to acknowledge his old profession.”
Hesdin stopped what he was doing to fetch a jug of wine, some bread and cheese. I told myself to eat slowly so as to interject a friendly comment every now and then, but I devoured the food without a word. In the meantime, Hesdin spoke.
“On page one hundred eight, there’s a story about a Chinese calligrapher who was to transcribe a long poem arguing that calligraphy was imperfect. The order came from the palace, and the calligrapher felt a great weight of responsibility. If he used all his skill to perform the task, the contrast between the subject of the poem and its transcription would be obvious, and he’d have sinned by calling attention to the art of calligraphy over poetry. However, if he decided to write with an unsteady hand and create artificial imperfections, he ran the risk of being fired as palace calligrapher. With the blank page in front of him, brush in hand, the calligrapher thought and thought until he came upon the solution. He wrote the most beautiful ideograms ever, but when he reached the complex character for calligraphy, he lightened his stroke, as if in reading the poem, he’d been convinced by the poet’s argument and had begun to doubt. And so he gained the emperor’s favor.”
Hesdin fell silent, waiting for me to finish chewing and explain why I was there. I reached into a bag I had hidden under my shirt and pulled out Voltaire’s manuscript. Hesdin sighed deeply.
“Under what name is it to be published?”
“No name.”
“A name can be an alias and we never know who the author is. The minute it’s anonymous, however, all doubt is erased: we immediately know who wrote it.”
Hesdin read the tale out loud, while I finished off the last of the bread and wine. The story had seemed innocent enough when I transcribed it from Voltaire’s illegible script, and I’d paid little attention: it was just another of his whims, a show of his excessive faith in the power of words. But the printer read it with an air of mystery, as if it were full of questions and secrets. The story was lost over time. Fearful, Hesdin printed only a few copies and not one survived, not even in Kehl’s seventy volumes. I only have a vague recollection of it, which I ineptly write below, for the sole purpose of helping you understand subsequent events.
Early in the sixteenth century, the priest Piero De Lucca found volume five of Mechanical Alchemy by Johannes Trassis in the library of his monastery. The other four volumes had been lost a century earlier. When he finished reading the text—which he knew was banned—De Lucca began to build a creature made of metal and wood in the cellar.
He worked for an entire year in absolute secrecy. He became known among the other priests as a loner. When finished, his creature learned to walk and to stammer a few words in pure Latin, in a monotonous, metallic voice. It could give simple answers, but whenever the question exceeded its ability, it would reply: “I cannot be certain of the answer in that regard.”
De Lucca was amazed by his work. For months he had thought of nothing but its construction; now that it was done, however, he began to consider his pride and wonder whether the creature might be an instrument of Evil. He decided to ask it, and as on so many other occasions, it replied: “I cannot be certain of the answer in that regard.”
The priest decided to consult a higher authority. He sent the creature to Milan, with a letter for the archbishop. In it, he asked his superior to carefully study the messenger and reply as to its nature.
Years went by without any word from the archbishop. The priest would sometimes think fondly of his creature and wonder where it might be: if it was living the life of a common man, was corroding at the bottom of the river, or had been burned as a heretic. He could have taught it so many things, but he needed to know whether he had done right or wrong. And so he was damned to wait for a reply.
Now old and infirm, Piero De Lucca told his confessor about his dilemma. He told De Lucca to travel to Milan immediately, so as not to risk dying in doubt and in sin.
The archbishop had by then been succeeded three times (once because of a poisoning), but De Lucca still hoped to find an answer in the underground city of the archives.
Piero De Lucca made the trip. At over eighty years of age, he was exhausted by the time he arrived. He was given a small room next to the cathedral. When the time came to meet with the new archbishop, De Lucca was so weak he was unable to get out of bed.
The thought of dying without an answer pained him. Seeing him so fragile and distraught, the other priests interceded with the archbishop, asking him to go to De Lucca.
Piero De Lucca lay dying when the archbishop came to see him. Full of interruptions, repetitions, and omissions, the priest told the story that had brought him to that dark little room. He begged for an answer to his original question. That answer came at the very moment of death, when he heard the archbishop say: “I cannot be certain of the answer in that regard.”
“I’d rather the action take place in some Oriental palace, with a caliph or a mandarin instead of an archbishop,” Hesdin said. “The Egyptians, Arabs, and Chinese never come to complain.”
“It’s fantasy. Automatons. Magic. Nothing real.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with it, either, but that means very little. In this profession, you get used to reading into things. It’s only when a book erupts in scandal and flames that we printers realize what we’ve published. In any event, leave the text with me. I’ll understand one day. After all, there’s no better way to read a book than by the light of a bonfire.”