Voltaire's Calligrapher

futile: I have never seen anything like it since. I was once given a death sentence to prepare, full of arabesques and wax seals, that was then shown to the convict on his way to the gallows. He said: Thank the calligrapher for having turned my crimes into something so beautiful; I would kill ten more men just to have him create something similar again. Never, in my life, have I received higher praise.

Bottles of squid ink, scorpion venom, sulfur solution, oak leaves, and lizard heads all sat together in my room. I had also experimented with invisible inks, based on instructions I found in a copy of De Occulta Caligraphia-forbidden at Vidors’ School-that I bought from a bookseller on rue Admont. It promised water-based inks that would become visible upon contact with blood, or when rubbed with snow, or exposed for long hours to the light of a cloudless moon. Other inks took the opposite route and would go from black to gray and then disappear altogether.

My career in the courts came to an end when I prepared the death sentence for Catherine de Beza, convicted of murdering her husband, General de Beza. When the general fell ill, his wife sent for his longtime physician-a man who, nearly blind, was prone to prescribing obsolete medications and signing death certificates with no questions asked. But that very morning the old doctor awoke with a fever and sent his young protege instead. By the time he arrived, the general was already dead. It took no more than a minute for the young physician to determine it wasn’t of natural causes: he peered under the cadaver’s nails with a magnifying glass and found traces of arsenic.

Madame de Beza was tried and found guilty. She was taken to the gallows, but the executioner was unable to proceed: the page containing the verdict, covered in writing just a few hours earlier, was now a blank sheet enlivened only by red wax seals. Some understood the disappearance to be a sign from God, attributing it to the virtue of the accused rather than the folly of the calligrapher, and so Catherine’s noose was exchanged for jail.

They tried to accuse me of conspiracy; I attempted to explain my mistake using arguments of science and fate but was still sent to prison for three months.

I went to my uncle’s as soon as I was released, yearning to sleep night and day in a real bed, free of the stench, the screams, and the rats. My uncle, however, had already gathered my things, and his cold embrace celebrated not my return but my departure.

“I took the liberty of offering your services while you were in prison. I sent some old acquaintances a brief list of your abilities and a long list of your incompetencies, so as not to be called a liar.”

“Did anyone respond?”

“The only reply came from Chateau Ferney. They read everything backwards there: they understood your vices as virtues and agreed to hire you immediately.”

Ferney

I was twenty years old and all I owned was a sewing box full of quills and inks. It would have been impossible to get to Ferney if my uncle, marechal Dalessius, hadn’t run a company called Night Mail that transported the fallen. Hundreds of bodies arrived in France during wartime that had to be returned to their cities and towns. The post had initially seen to this, but letters and merchandise would arrive in such a deplorable state that people stopped reading their correspondence; as soon as the mail arrived, it was burned. The dead had managed to isolate the outer regions of our kingdom.

The Night Mail was devoted solely to funeral transport. My uncle inherited the business from my grandfather, and operations were run out of a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris that had once been a meat-salting facility. There the bodies were sorted, put into coffins-often filled with salt, as if to maintain the tradition-and sent out on the roadways of France. There were only twenty-five hearses; since routes were uncertain and mistakes common, families could wait months for a body to arrive. At first, in the clamor of war, the fallen were received as heroes, but as time wore on and the fighting came to an end, the traveler would reach home like a postman bearing bad news, an inopportune visitor who spoke of a conflict everyone had managed to forget.

My uncle had a small shuttered window put in the caskets, so the occupant could be viewed and mistakes prevented. Another of his innovations was to hire a button manufacturer to strike medals so every soldier could be given a set. In this way, everyone went home a hero. We have very strict rules in this profession, marechal Dalessius would say: Wear black, work at night, keep silent.

Business would fall dramatically whenever there were no wars or epidemics. In order to build up his clientele, my uncle began to disseminate a Benedictine theologian’s theory: he asserted that, to get into heaven, a person must be buried in his birthplace or at a distance of no more than that between Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulchre. This little ruse, plus an agreement with the government to cart corpses from the gallows and prisons, ensured that my uncle was never short of patrons, even in the worst times of peace.

Ferney was far away, on the Swiss border. Banished from Paris by the king, Voltaire had bought the chateau 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; 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 ticktock, 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 Encyclopedie.”

“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 on the bitterly cold patio, our teacher would stand in a tower and recite passages from the Aeneid 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.