A Case of Curiosities [Paperback]

In France, on the eve of the Revolution, a young man named Claude Page sets out to become the most ingenious and daring inventor of his time. In the course of a career filled with violence and passion, Claude learns the arts of enameling and watchmaking from an irascible, defrocked abbé, apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller, and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker. But it is Claude's greatest device-a talking mechanical head-that both crowns his career and leads to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette, and far more bizarre.

Hailed by critics for the shimmering brilliance of its inventions and its uncanny fidelity to the textures of the past,A Case of Curiositiesplaces

Allen Kurzweil securely in the ranks of the finest literary artists of our time.

Chapter 1


The Jar

¶Origins can be difficult to trace. But if we are forced to uncover the origins of Claude Page and his invention, and grant those origins some fine and subtle meaning, we must begin by noting the arrival of the Vengeful Widow on the tenth of September, 1780. Though the Widow can be compared to the easterly of Devon and the mistral of southern France, that doesn't quite do justice to her bite. As winds go, she is drier and nastier than her French and English cousins. Parish records indicate that when she hit in 1741, the Widow pulled the steeple off the Tournay church-a steeple that had been mounted and secured just two months earlier-and deposited it in the sty of a heretical farmer. The event provided Father Gamot, the local priest, with a chance for some spirited sermonizing. Ten years later the Widow struck again, this time thrusting the branch of a birch tree through the stomach of Philippe Rochat's piebald pony. Rochat was a devout Catholic, so on that occasion Father Gamot had to keep quiet. But the devastations of '41 and '51 were lcÀ