CHAPTER 1

Monsieur Sorbonne and Madame Metier’s Portrait

Monsieur Sorbonne was very excited the next day to go to the Films Development Store, where the clerk who ordinarily looked slightly like a monkey, today looked somewhat more like a baboon.

“I’m sorry, Sir,” said the baboon, handing Monsieur Sorbonne a large gray envelope. “But once again there is a problem with your photographs. The prints, Sir, all have errors which, in spite of a number of printings, we have been unable to correct. Perhaps your light measurer was off, or you were shooting from an incorrect angle. In any case, there’s a problem. Once again, may I kindly suggest, Sir, that you have your camera checked.”

So downhearted was Monsieur Sorbonne that, paying for the misfit pictures, he put the large gray envelope, without so much as a passing glance at the photographs, into his dog-eared briefcase. He hadn’t realized until just now how much he was invested in these particular photographs, how much, without admitting it, he had secretly hoped that photographing Madame Métier could somehow lead him to work that had meaning, deposit him eventually, or sooner, into a new profession.

Whatever, he wondered, could be the problem? The first photographs—buildings, cornices, and balconies—had been ruined, no good. The second set—the maid, the guard, and the orphan children—had all been fine. As well as the ones of Madmoiselle Objet.The camera had been so-called “fixed,” but now, once again, problems. He could feel a small squall rising in him, that horrible, roller-coaster, out-of-sync feeling, which, as a man, he so despised. He hated emotions gone out of control. He felt awful—hopeless, helpless, deranged—the way Mademoiselle Objet must feel, it occurred to him now, when she got so upset that her feelings came out in her hands.

It was amazing, awful really, how various things about one’s work could be so terribly upsetting. Except that this wasn’t his work. This was his art, his form of expression. That’s why he was so upset. Unlike his job, which he did merely for money, this was his life’s work, his calling—a source of meaning, a reason for living. And all true life’s works, he realized now, had certain things in common. The forms of them were varied, but no matter how simple or grand they were, each was the expression of a single human spirit; each was unique in what it had to offer; each somehow spoke to the human condition and served in some way to heal and transform. Madame Métier did that by being her radiant self. Mademoiselle Objet did that by serving, one step removed, but devotedly, in the mysterious chain of healing. And he—he had wanted to do it, too—by taking Madame Métier’s photograph, by capturing on film the spirit of this rare human being.

But perhaps, it occurred to him now, as once again he contemplated the failure of his photographs, he had merely been self-serving. Perhaps he had just wanted to be delivered from his crypt—his little death trap of a cell in the basement of the Artifacts Museum. Or perhaps he had overlooked the meaning that already existed in his work. Artifacts, after all, were a tribute to the human spirit. Even Iron Age razor blades were statements of human ingenuity. Maybe the photographs had vanished in order to teach him a lesson.

It was all so confusing. Maybe nothing had any more meaning than anything else. Or, maybe everything had meaning. Art did. Artifacts did. People did. Service did. Healing did. Even his search for meaning, he realized, had a meaning in itself. But in spite of his contemplations, he was mortally confused. Perhaps it was just that he had wanted so much to be the person to photograph Madame Métier, because like Mademoiselle Objet, he had felt a sort of beautiful internal tingling in her presence.

He had been so around all the corners of the cosmos in his thinking that now nothingwas clear anymore except that he was, indeed, disappointed that the photographs had not turned out. And thinking a little sadly of the plain gray envelope, he returned, almost acceptingly, to his crypt at the Artifacts Museum.

When he finally got home, Mademoiselle Objet could feel his deep disappointment, the sense of meaninglessness that had obviously invaded him, as, despairing, he set his briefcase down on the table. “The photographs didn’t turn out,” he said. “I can’t believe it. That camera’s jinxed.”

“Not any of them?” asked a hopeful Mademoiselle Objet.

“I don’t know. I haven’t looked, but the man at the Films Store told me they didn’t.”

Hearing this, Mademoiselle Objet, too, was distressed. Like Madame Métier when she was distressed, Mademoiselle Objet suggested that they have some tea and then look at the photographs. And so it was that, in her most profoundly exquisite, object-arranging way, on two yellow-striped placemats, she set out two green-rimmed cups and two carved silver teaspoons. For she knew no other way, except by arranging objects, of how to comfort Monsieur Sorbonne.

“I can’t even look at them,” he said. “The man at the Films Store said once again that something is wrong with the camera. I can’t believe it!”

Having poured out the tea, Mademoiselle Objet retrieved from his briefcase the large gray envelope.

“Now, close your eyes,” she said, teasing, and then she opened the envelope and riffled through its contents. Then, one by one, upside down, she laid out all the photographs on the clear center field of the table.

“Now open your eyes,” she said, and at once they both opened their eyes. One by one, Mademoiselle Objet turned each of the photographs over until there on the table before them lay seven blank sheets of shining paper. They were all marked out by only the merest, faintest immaterial mist of an image of a woman, shadows of light upon light, in which floated two beautiful blue-gray eyes.

They had not turned out, and yet, as she contemplated them, Mademoiselle Objet suddenly realized that they referred not to the person of Madame Métier, but to that mysterious something she always felt when she was in Madame Métier’s presence, a weird consuming peacefulness that always made it worthwhile, no matter how hopelessly disorganized she was, to work with Madame Métier. Far from not turning out, the photographs had more than turned out. For most remarkably, they had recorded not Madame Métier’s visage, but her essence.