Free A case of curiosities by Allen Kurzweil

kept. The Abbe says that if a rainbow ever arched through a window and passed this curtain, it would arch right back in shame." Claude concurred. He had never seen so many pigments. He found it difficult to resist opening the containers.
    Again Henri held out his fingers and counted: "Red lead paste in four hues, burnt sienna from five countries, three paddock blues, a capuchin renamed to assuage the Abbe's religious intolerance, one-two-thtee-fout-five sepias ..."
    For some time theteaftet, Henri talked about the problems of classifying the stores. "What does one do with the Abbe's famed Indian yellow? Should it be placed among the colors, the urines, or the earths?" Claude commiserated with Henri over this organizational quandary. Henri was annoyed to find a rogue bottle of aquafortis inappropriately shelved. He replaced it and observed, "You know, Santerre notes that the palette requires only five elements: massicot, le brun rouge, chalk white, outremer, and Polish black. Rat's whiskers! Take massicot. There are so many different varieties. Chambers describes three. What about the ochers? What about sepia? The Abbe once tried to send for a barrel of live squid to test supplies. They all died and spoiled in transport. And what about orpiment?"
    What about orpiment? Claude was thinking, but he just nodded. The information blurred as Henri went on about enamels kept in varnished pots and varnishes kept in enameled pots. Claude found himself surrounded by oakgalls, Congolese copal, rabbit-skin glue, cashew-nut paint, licorice.
    "Here, try a piece of this," Henri said. "It is ideal for sizing paper."
    "Try?"
    "Take a taste."
    Claude reluctantly licked the substance. It was rock candy. He could not help thinking of the Pompelmoose Atoll. The sugar mines, he decided, might well have offered relief from the exhausting tour.
    They moved on to the spittle bottles and waters. Henri lifted the tops off two barrels. "This is the rainwater we use for Le-mery's ink. And this is the stream water for Geoffroy's formula. That barrel over there contains fresh snow quickly melted. It has a very special texture. Here, have a sip. It is less fine, less limpid, but it lathers well with soap."
    They skipped the herbarium, given Claude's upbringing, but, in passing, Henri made a thoughtless reference to a stalk of devil's finger.
    "I am sorry," he said in the halting speech that had accompanied the early part of the tour. "I did not wish to remind you of your pain."
    Claude was prepared for remarks, inadvertent and otherwise, that invoked his deformity. By the time he came to stay at the mansion house, he had committed the story of the amputation to memory. He told Henri of how, in the early stages, the villagers said the mole would fall off, but how it did not fall off. How it turned odd colors. How Father Gamot had once sermonized on the matter, citing the words of Matthew, not the pig farmer but the tax-gathering apostle from Capernaum. How mockery had become cachet when he noticed the likeness between the mole and the royal face on a freshly minted coin. How, overnight, the deformity was granted a special status. How, a few months later, the Abbe had heard it caused Claude pain, and delivered to the cottage the services of a surgeon. How his mother accepted the surgeon's determination, and how the finger was consequently cut away.
    Claude told all of this to Henri and in so doing diminished the distance between them. They would never be close; Henri would not allow it. But after that little explanation, they would never be strangers, either. In Claude's acknowledgment of anguish, an understanding between them was reached—vague, imprecise, unspoken, but an understanding nonetheless.
    Henri told Claude that the Abbe, returning from the Page cottage after the surgery, had sent a long denunciation to the authorities in the Republic, but that they had never replied. Staemphli was not censured; in fact, there was even talk of providing municipal