Джоанна Скотт - Excuse Me While I Disappear - Stories

After much discussion among the boy’s relatives, it was decided that the codex should be delivered to Cosimo de’ Medici, who was famous for, among other things, his love of books. The boy’s uncle was appointed as emissary and made his way to Florence without incident, putting the Codex K.E. in the hands of Cosimo himself. But the uncle failed to return to the palace for his promised reward, and he never arrived home in Ancona. The mystery of his fate remains unresolved to this day. Some speculate that he got drunk and drowned in the Arno, others that he was murdered by the Medici guards in order to save Cosimo the cost of the reward.

The Codex K.E. joined other rare manuscripts in the vaults of the palace. It went unread for years, until it was selected as one of the gifts to Catherine de’ Medici, in celebration of her marriage to Henri II of France. She had little interest in the book but was obliged to carry it with her to Paris, where it was examined by the royal chaplain, who resolved to have the biblical passages transcribed. The process was painstaking, but eventually a fair copy was completed, and the codex was filed away in the library at Fontainebleau.

Decades stretched into centuries. Finally, in 1742, an esteemed scholar who had long been familiar with the rumors about the secret contents of the Codex K.E. asked to examine it. As it happened, a beam of sunlight shone through a high window at such an angle that it lit up the parchment, revealing, below the surface, the shadows of inked lines and feathery curlicues. The man suspected at once what he was seeing: these were the legendary instructions for performing miracles, written in a forgotten language that he was sure he could decode, if only the lettering were clear enough to be deciphered.

In a daguerreotype I have of my great-great-grandfather Hercule, he is a boy, dressed in knickerbockers and a matching jacket fastened at the neck, trimmed with braids and buttons. A banded cap is perched on his head like a saucer. His lips are pressed tightly together, his cheeks puffed and dented with the Fourniers’ signature dimples. You don’t need to know the family stories about him to see that the boy in the daguerreotype has a mischievous glint in his eye. Clearly, he was a rascal who loved practical jokes. My hunch is that my great-great-grandfather had been told that he mustn’t smile while the daguerreotypist was capturing his image, and his form of protest was to fill his cheeks with air and slowly emit a farting sound—that’s what we’d hear, I bet, if the daguerreotype came with audio.

According to the family lore, it was decided by his parents that Hercule would be trained in the apothecary profession. In preparation, he was sent to work for Monsieur Lambertine, a renowned chemist and inventor of a solution used to clean paints from zinc blocks. Tinctura lambertina was popular with lithographers who were churning out colored advertisements and playing cards at the time. The patent made Lambertine a small fortune, and his laboratory functioned like a factory. Lambertine employed six apprentices, who prepared great vats of his signature potion for sale. Two boys were in charge of pounding minerals into dust, and another boy mixed the ingredients with alcohol. Three boys sweated over the boiling vats, stirring them continuously. Somehow my great-great-grandfather secured himself the easiest job: pouring the finished product into half-pint jars.

A small additional duty for Hercule was to carry a daily sample of the tincture to Lambertine in his laboratory on the upper floor, for the chemist to check for consistency. Lambertine was in search of new concoctions that would earn him additional patents and so was usually too busy with his beakers and vials to notice when Hercule set the jar on the table. But one day in September of 1847, he happened to look up when Hercule came in. Hercule would later report that Lambertine seemed to be waiting for him; he was standing on the opposite side of the table, his eyes fixed on the door, and when Hercule entered, the red-faced old chemist, sprouting a few wiry white tufts from his otherwise bald head, sneered and licked his lips as if he were about to spring on his apprentice and gobble him up. My great-great-grandfather Hercule was justly unnerved and so couldn’t be blamed when the jar in his trembling hand tipped and the tincture spilled across a letter that happened to be laid out on the table.

My great-great-grandfather liked nothing more than to recast a careless action as heroic, and that’s what he did when he returned home later that day. He stood on a chair in front of his parents and younger siblings and announced that he, Hercule Fournier, had changed the course of history. He, Hercule Fournier, might as well have turned lead to gold. He, Hercule Fournier, had risked losing his apprenticeship in order to demonstrate that the Tinctura lambertina had a secret property more powerful than Lambertine himself had ever guessed.

Some people are blessed with good luck, and Hercule, from what I’ve heard, was one of them. He certainly was lucky that day he spilled the solution across the letter Monsieur Lambertine had intercepted from the caretaker of their country estate to Lambertine’s wife.

Lambertine was a jealous man by nature, and he had come to doubt his wife’s virtue. He had been searching for evidence to support his suspicion and was scouring the letter from the caretaker. By the time Hercule arrived in the room, Lambertine had concluded that the letter was no more than it appeared to be: an itemized list of repairs that the caretaker would complete by the end of the month. The chemist failed to find anything obviously fishy about the letter—not on the surface, at least. And then Hercule spilled the tincture.

Even as Hercule braced for a beating, his master watched in amazement as the damp rag pulp seemed to fill with an internal light. Invisible words began appearing, as if floating up from the depths, words that had been hidden beneath a whitewash and that now emerged, ever so faintly visible, as an address at the top of the page: My beloved Eveline .

Eveline was Lambertine’s wife. In an instant, he must have understood what he was seeing. Beneath the trivial details on the surface, the letter contained an outpouring of secret affection. The sly caretaker had covered his love letter with a wash and then written over it with details about commonplace matters. He’d been doing this for a long while as a precaution, since it was understood that many of the letters addressed to Eveline would end up in her husband’s hands. When Eveline received the caretaker’s letter, she had only to apply a detergent to rinse away the ink on the surface, along with the whitewash, revealing the writing underneath.

Lambertine’s tincture, it turned out, had more unusual properties than an ordinary detergent. While it effectively dissolved the whitewash, it preserved the surface writing on the paper and simultaneously revivified the writing underneath. The two letters were equally visible, like a man and his shadow.

Lambertine crumpled the paper and threw it into the fire. Watching it burn, he pictured his wife’s red lips pursed, waiting to be pressed in a kiss. He felt a bitter satisfaction now that his suspicions had been validated. Only after the paper had transformed into smoke and ash did he begin to consider the potential value of his chemical solution.

You would think that the librarians for King Louis Philippe would have wanted assurance that Monsieur Lambertine had conducted extensive testing of his tincture before he applied it to the parchment pages of the invaluable Codex K.E. But consider that it was a time of civil unrest, and the king had narrowly escaped several assassination attempts. Maybe the king wasn’t even aware of the scholarship devoted to the codex and could not have cared less about preserving it for future generations. Or maybe the royal librarian, in his eagerness to see the earlier writing, simply forgot to ask for any guarantee.