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 cortege. 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 Chateau Ferney two months after his death. The only grave they found for him was on the outskirts of the city, in Sellieres, 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.
The Marble Head
Catherine the Great inherited the archives, and the secretaries and file clerks who were bound to those pages for life went with them. I didn’t want that fate and returned to Paris, with Voltaire’s heart among my belongings.
I worked in the mornings as a calligraphy expert at Siccard House (the second-floor activities had been shut down) and spent my afternoons looking for Clarissa. There was no trace of her or her father anywhere in the city. To a certain extent, I’ve never abandoned the search: even here in this faraway port, whenever newcomers have passed through France, I find them to see if they’ve heard the name Von Knepper.
I only ever came across one witness, and that witness I lost. The night before I left, I was walking along the Seine when a bearded man in rags stepped out in front of me. I had seen him from afar on other occasions: he would stop passersby, show them something he carried in a bag, and let them go. But this time he startled me: for a moment I thought he was going to kill me, so I drew my only weapon, the quill I had used to kill Silas Darel. Despite the beard and the darkness, I recognized Mattioli, but he didn’t seem to know who I was. Showing me the contents of a bag he could barely lift, he asked:
“Have you seen this woman?”
“No,” I replied, in barely a whisper.
“It’s all over then,” the sculptor said, as if his last hope had died with me and there was no one left in the entire city to ask.
He climbed up onto the railing with a familiarity that obviated any sense of danger. Before securing the knot that tied the bag around his neck, he looked at the marble head one last time. I ran to stop him: I too wanted to kiss those icy lips. He didn’t give me a chance. Mattioli embraced the head and jumped into the dark waters. The last image of Clarissa drowned with him.
About the Author
PABLO DE SANTIS was born in Buenos Aires, studied literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and subsequently worked as a journalist and comic-strip creator, becoming editor in chief of one of Argentina’s leading comic magazines. De Santis won the inaugural Premio Planeta-Casa de America de Narrativa Prize for Best Latin American Novel for
