Inventory

On a corner of my desk is all the work I have to do: write up agreements for immediate signature, detail expenses from the last two months, prepare a clean copy of two court rulings. Any documents that put the security of the state at risk are entrusted to someone else. If they see me as being so different and, therefore, suspicious, it’s not because they’re thinking of France but of that enormous and exotic realm: the past.

After the events at Arnim Palace, I returned to Ferney, where I worked as calligrapher for seventeen years. I never did set up my workshop with quills and inks, having chosen a safer and more idle life instead. In the mornings I attended to Voltaire’s correspondence and sometimes his books; in the afternoons I dealt with his commercial paperwork and drafted documents. It was a peaceful job, and I would have liked it to last forever.

Many years later, when Voltaire announced he was going to Paris, I felt there was nothing left for me at Ferney. Everyone else agreed; they all carried out every act—cleaning a vase, preparing a meal, pruning the yellow rosebushes—with the care and indifference particular to those who know they are doing it for the very last time.

Those of us who accompanied Voltaire’s carriage as it left did so in silence. We were supposed to be celebrating, but it felt more like a funeral cortège. The mood turned out to be appropriate: Paris awaited Voltaire to shower him with every imaginable honor, to subject him to a stream of visitors at Mme. Villette’s hotel, to exhaust him to death, and then to deny him burial.

Voltaire’s heart arrived at Château Ferney two months after his death. The only grave they found for him was on the outskirts of the city, in Sellières, where his nephew was abbot. Before his body was buried, the doctor removed his heart. He acted as if it were an impromptu operation, but it was obvious to those in attendance that the decision had been made much earlier: on a night when urgency and chaos reigned, he had brought several jars of salt and a blue liquid that irritated the eyes. I don’t know who might have fought over the heart or who sent it to Ferney; it was delivered by a Polish messenger who spoke not a word of French and stayed no more than a minute.

In the confusion that now governed the house, the heart was put in the study with all the eccentricities that distinguished travelers had brought from distant lands over the years. No one had gone in there since Voltaire’s death, and the pieces were now covered in cobwebs and dust. The master of the house was gone, and the house itself seemed to sicken and die. The heart lay forgotten among rocks that shone in the dark, sea creatures, and unicorn bones.

I was assigned to take inventory. As soon as I noted things down, they would disappear, and before long almost none of the eccentricities were left. It was common to see the servants’ children out in the garden playing with a whale jawbone, a polar bear hide, or a martyr’s mummified hand.

At first, I tried to maintain a certain sense of order, but in the end I joined the looters and hid the heart among my things. So no one would notice its absence, I put the embalmed heart of a sixteenth-century Venetian countess in its place—a gift from Voltaire’s friend, the marquis d’Argenson.

I finished the inventory one day before leaving. My handwriting was no longer what it was when I started: it was now serene and simple and made no attempt to dazzle. It was the writing of someone who knows that the words on the page hide both what’s there and what’s lost.