Pablo Santis - Voltaire’s Calligrapher

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.’

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.