CHAPTER 31

Monsieur Sorbonne Returns to Work

When he returned to work the next day, Monsieur Sorbonne felt a slight disgust upon entering the Artifacts Museum. It seemed dusty. The marble halls seemed high and cold. The crypt in the basement, where he was still cataloging the wall stones from the ancient Egyptian temple, seemed sepulchral and grim. Where was the Ladies’ Room maid he’d photographed two days ago? He sensed that, vaguely, he missed her. And where was Madame Métier? Distinctly he felt that he missed the radiance of her presence in which, for several hours yesterday, before the distracting phone call, he had been able to bask.

There was a memo on his desk from the Chief Curator of Artifacts. Where was—and when would the new collection of Pre-Columbian sculptures and toe rings be organized for display? It was soon to be overdue and Monsieur Sorbonne, the Chief Cuurator noted, had prepared it neither with his former promptness nor enthusiasm, and it was far behind schedule.

In fact—and here the curator seemed to be becoming long-winded, extending his memo over onto the second side of the insipid blue-lined yellow memo paper—Monsieur Sorbonne’s performance in general, wasn’t quite up to snuff.

“If it doesn’t come back up to par soon”—vaguely, between the lines, Monsieur Sorbonne could feel the slight threat of removal—“We shall have to seek other means of accomplishing our exhibits,” it concluded.

This threat, unnerving as it was, did not untowardly affect Monsieur Sorbonne; for by now he had been so deeply affected by something else—the sense, quite distinct, of the utter inappropriateness of his employment at the Artifacts Museum—that he simply could not be bothered by it.

He was thinking, too, of Madame Métier, and, more specifically, of how he had felt in her presence, of how arranging and rearranging her face, her hands, and her hair in the light, he had felt for the first time, a real sense of meaning. To capture the human consciousness, to reveal the mystery of a single human being, to deliver the picture of a soul—and, in particular, of her extraordinary spirit. Ah, yes, all this at last and finally and only, seemed to Monsieur Sorbonne to have meaning.

He studied the memo. He should, he knew, get to work. He unwrapped the boxes of Pre-Columbian figures. As usual, there was an infinity of fragments. Bored by them all, dejected by their endless minute incompleteness, the shattered ancient ridiculousness of every one of them, he laid them all out on the gray felt-covered surface of his long work table.

First it had been Iron Age razor blades. Then it had been Etruscan pot shards. It had been shattered Peruvian pillars and weighty Egyptian wall stones. Now it was Pre-Columbian crumbs. Where would it end—in what disorganized piles and elaborate reconstructions?

Feeling as if not ever again, not once, not even for a minute could he contemplate, let alone scintillate about cataloguing or rearranging anything, he put on his coat and closed up his crypt and, deciding to have a premature lunch, stole out of the Artifacts Museum and went to the Films Development Store to pick up the portraits of Madame Métier.