This was a museum of technology, after all.You're in a museum of technology, I told myself, an honest place, alittle dull perhaps, but the dead here are harmless. You know whatmuseums are, no one's ever been devoured by the Mona Lisa¡Xanandrogynous Medusa only for esthetes¡Xand you are even less likelyto be devoured by Watt's engine, a bugbear only for Os-sianic andNeo-Gothic gentlemen, a pathetic compromise, really, betweenfunction and Corinthian elegance, handle and capital, boiler andcolumn, wheel and tympanum. Jacopo Belbo, though he was far away,was trying to draw me into the hallucinations that had undone him.You must behave like a scientist, I told myself. A vulcanologistdoes not burn like Empedocles. Frazer did not flee, hounded, intothe wood of Nemi. Come, you're supposed to be Sam Spade. Exploringthe mean streets¡X that's your job. The woman who catches you hasto die in the end, and if possible by your own hand. So long,Emily, it was great while it lasted, but you were a robot, you hadno heart.
The transportation section happened to be rightnext to the Lavoisier atrium, facing a grand stairway that led tothe upper floor.
The arrangement of glass cases along the sides,the alchemical altar in the center, the liturgy of a civilizedeighteenth-century macumba¡Xthis was not accidental but symbolic, astratagem.
First, all those mirrors. Whenever you see amirror¡Xit's only human¡Xyou want to look at yourself. But here youcan't. You look at the position in space where the mirror will say"You are here, and you are you," you look, craning, twisting, butnothing works, because Lavoisier's mirrors, whether concave orconvex, disappoint you, mock you. You step back, find yourself fora moment, but move a little and you are lost. This catoptrictheater was contrived to take away your identity and make you feelunsure not only of yourself but also of the very objects standingbetween you and the mirrors. As if to say: You are not the Pendulumor even near it. And you feel uncertain, not only about yourself,but also about the objects set there between you and anothermirror. Granted, physics can explain how and why a concave mirrorcollects the light from an object¡Xin this case, an alembic in acopper holder¡Xthen returns the rays in such a way that you see theobject not within the mirror but outside it, ghostlike, upside downin midair, and if you shift even slightly, the image, evanescent,disappears.
Then suddenly I saw myself upside down in amirror.
Intolerable.
What was Lavoisier trying to say, and what werethe designers of the Conservatoire hinting at? We've known aboutthe magic of mirrors since the Middle Ages, since Alhazen. Was itworth the trouble of going through the Encyclopedic, theEnlightenment, and the Revolution to be able to state that merelycurving a mirror's surface can plunge a man into an imagined world?For that matter, a normal mirror, too, is an illusion. Consider theindividual looking back at you, condemned to perpetualleft-handedness, every morning when you shave. Was it worth thetrouble of setting up this hall just to tell us this? Or is themessage really that we should look at everything in a differentway, including the glass cases and the instruments that supposedlycelebrated the birth of physics and enlightened chemistry?
A copper mask for protection in calcinationexperiments. Hard to believe that the gentleman with the candlesunder the glass bell actually wore that thing that looks like asewer rat's head or a space invader's helmet, just to avoidirritating his eyes. Quelle delicatesse, M. Lavoisier! If youreally wanted to study the kinetic theory of gases, why did youreconstruct so painstakingly the eolopile¡Xa little spouted spherethat, when heated, spins, spewing steam¡Xa device first built byHeron in the days of the Gnostics to assist the speaking statuesand other wonders of the Egyptian priests?
And what about this contraption for the studyof necrotic fermentation, 1789? A fine allusion, really, to theputrid, reeking bastards of the Demiurge. A series of glass tubesthat connect two ampules and lead through a bubble uterus, throughspheres and conduits perched on forked pins, to transmit an essenceto coils that spill into the void...Balneum Mariae, sublimation ofhydrargyrum, mysterium conjunctionis, the Elixir!
Or this apparatus for the study of thefermentation of wine. A maze of crystal arches leading from athanorto athanor, from alembic to alembic. Those little spectacles, thetiny hourglass, the electroscope, the lens. Or the laboratory knifethat looks like a cuneiform character, the spatula with the releaselever, the glass blade, and the tiny, three-centimeter claycrucible for making a gnome-size homunculus¡Xinfinitesimal womb forthe most minuscule clonings. Or the acajou boxes filled with littlewhite packets like a village apothecary's cachets, wrapped inparchment covered with untranslatable ciphers, with mineralspecimens that in reality are fragments of the Holy Shroud ofBasilides, reliquaries containing the foreskin of HermesTris-megistus. Or the long, thin upholsterer's hammer, a gavel foropening a brief judgment day, an auction of quintessences to beheld among the Elfs of Avalon. Or the delightful little apparatusfor analyzing the combustion of oil, and the glass globules arrayedlike quatrefoil petals, with other quatrefoils connected by goldentubes, and quatrefoils attached to other, crystal, tubes leadingfirst to a copper cylinder, then to the gold-and-glass cylinderbelow it, then to other tubes, lower still, pendulous appendages,testicles, glands, goiters, crests...This is modern chemistry? Forthis the author had to be guillotined, though truly nothing iscreated or destroyed? Or was he killed to silence what his fraudrevealed?
The Salle Lavoisier in the Conservatoire isactually a confession, a confession in code, and an emblem of thewhole museum, for it mocks the arrogance of the Age of Reason andmurmurs of other mysteries. Jacopo Belbo was reasonably right;Reason was wrong.
I had to hurry; time was pressing now. I walkedpast the meter, the kilogram, the other measures, all falseguarantees. I had learned from Aglie that the secret of thepyramids is revealed if you don't calculate in meters but inancient cubits. Then, the counting machines that proclaimed thetriumph of the quantitative but in truth pointed to the occultqualities of numbers, a return to the roots of the
