Chapter 2

A Treasure Discovered

 

 

 

 

Now, Hank knew as much as I did about why I simply had to see her little book, and despite her attempts at looking angry, her eyes betrayed a growing excitement at the prospects it might open.

We walked the short distance from the pub, on the rue des Ecoles, to Hank’s book store, whose sign, in ornate script, proclaimed this to be the home of “Livres Oubliés” (Forgotten Books). At the door, Hank turned, her wide, blue eyes playing mischievously, as she rattled the key. “Your treasure lies within,” she said with a wink.

She gave a little nudge with her shoulder, and I heard the tinkling sound of the small suspended bell, tripped by the opening of the door. We went up to the counter, and Hank began rummaging melodramatically on a low shelf, beneath the portion of counter that supported the cash register. “I have always had a secret fantasy,“ (she rambled on to fill the silence during her search) “about finding, in someone’s old attic, some misplaced treasure - such as a first edition of John Donne’s poetry or a rare manuscript of Victor Hugo or somebody - hidden among the mountains of re-cycled reading, its value unknown or unnoticed for many generations. After all, aren’t many of these old attics like tiny literary grave yards, the final resting place of students’ used text books and old ladies’ carefully preserved prayer books and missals? Somewhere, in all that reading material, there lurks an almost silenced voice, a piece of work that wishes to be discovered and saved from oblivion. I know it’s there, if I could only pick it out from among the piles of paper I’m always digging through.” Then she stopped abruptly and turned to me, almost apologetically. “Look at me, going on like this, instead of producing the little treasure you came here to see.” At that, she reached under the dusty counter, and pulled it out.

It was old, very old, its pages yellowed and moulded into strange shapes by the crumbling of their brown edges. The plain binding, with no embossing or even fragments of lettering, was leather, peeling and discoloured but not too brittle to be handled. “It was one of several volumes in similarly poor condition,” Hank said. “They were just tossed aside in no particular order.” She held it out to me, and I felt a twinge of excitement as I reached for it.

My fingers gently wrapped around it, and I very carefully cracked open the cover. The fragile binding instantly separated from the stitching. as if it were made from a spider’s web, and I was careful to hold it as if it were still attached, hoping that the book would simply remember how to stay intact. I was afraid the pages would dissolve into dust in my very hands, if not from my touch then from the sudden exposure to the air. I made sure that I kept it out of direct sunlight and put as little pressure as possible on the brownish sheets.

I turned to what looked like a title page. It was not printed from type face or by any other method that I could identify. Rather, it was written with what can only be described as a calligraphic hand, using an instrument capable of making both broad and thin linear strokes and loops. The original tincture of the ink had long since faded, leaving indelible marks in a rust and dirt colour that were, in some places distinct and in others were in the process of blending with the brownish hue of the page itself. I had the impression that the ageing paper, thin to the point of transparency, like the skin of a wizened old man, was trying to absorb the pen strokes into the depths of the layers of pages as a sponge absorbs spills, eventually swallowing the words themselves into the texture and contours of the ancient book.

The words that I could still make out were in Latin, announcing “Incipit Historia Vitae Meae in Lutetia” (“The Beginning of the Story of My Life in Paris”), by a certain Henry Howard, of Reigate Manor, Surrey. This was the same Henry Howard I had been reading about, the son of Lady Frances de Vere and the Earl of Surrey, the poet, who had been responsible for introducing the sonnet to the English language, the same Henry Howard who had quarrelled, in 1582, with Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Then, Henry Howard must have been living in Paris in…yes, Hank had been right about the date: “MDLVII”, the year 1557. Let’s see, born in 1540: that would make him 17 years old at the time.

As gently as if I had been lifting a thin shelled quail’s egg, I turned the page to a dated and much less elaborately penned entry. These hand written words were in a kind of English which, even without the handicap of faded ink, I understood, at first, only about as well as I had grasped the thread of the Latin text on the title page. This Henry Howard’s orthography was imaginative, to say the least, but most of the words, once I had mouthed my way through the phonetic spelling, were recognisable by sound, if not by sight.

I began making a mental catalogue of certain words and what I extrapolated were their equivalents in modern English -words such as:

 

Yf = if

Euer = ever

Mynde = mind

Deuill = devil.

 

I became so engrossed in this process that I was totally unaware that Hank was staring fixedly at the book she had surrendered into my hand, like a parent at once proud and anxious as she watched her child preparing to leave home forever, in pursuit of God knows what greater destiny. I felt suddenly embarrassed. as if I were holding the hand of her only daughter and leaving for some motel where I intended to take her virginity that very night. It must have shown on my face, for Hank just smiled knowingly and raised her hand in a gesture of sad magnanimity. I could take her and do with her as I pleased, because, my need to have her was greater than Hank’s need to withhold her yet a little longer. Then I was aware of how inexplicably happy Hank was for me. She glanced at the book, as if to convey to it some parting words. “Be good to him,” her eyes said to it, “for when he leaves me, he takes you with him.” I reached out and cupped her still child-like face under her raised chin, holding her effortless smile, as it were, in my hand. We leaned into each other, and I felt her lips brush mine, for a breathless instant. I choked back what must have looked like a nearly tearful “Thank you,” and, holding the journal, like a copy of the Sacred Scriptures, in both my hands, I strode to the sidewalk, as another patron held the door for me, after opening to the tinkle of the doorbell.

I looked for the nearest side walk café and found a side table away from the street but with enough indirect light to help me make out what was readable on the fragile pages of my 450 year old diary. I wanted to know more about this Henry Howard, and his do-it-yourself spelling. With only my voyeuristic curiosity to urge me on, I started analysing variously dated entries in no particular order, trying to understand as much of his vocabulary and convoluted sentence structure as I could. I was also searching for – and not finding – a thread, a story line from what were evidently random reflections, reminiscences and brief episodes about what happened to this or that person on a particular day. I knew that this would not be easy reading, and I wasn’t at all sure whether Howard had finished the account of his stay in Paris or if there remained enough readable text in this journal to allow me to divine what he had finished. I felt compelled, nevertheless, to mine the book for everything that I could get from it, and to try to fill in just enough of the gaps to be able to discover and understand what Henry Howard considered important enough to record in his journal.

Before my eyes had become too itchy and sore with straining through the faded entries, I found one passage that particularly sparked my attention. I render it now exactly as I found it, with just enough added punctuation and standardisation of the spelling to make it readily readable:

“Long and tedious were the days of June, with plenteous sun and scant hours of darkness, passed here in the quarter of students and robbed scholars, with their scrolls and tablets and throats endlessly clearing themselves of fowl fluids. On such a day did I tarry with my fine fellows, Gaudin and the dower faced Dormoy in the Cutters Tavern on Rue Traversiere, a stone’s throw from the St Séverin, to settle our parched throats with a draught of the local mead.

“We spoke of our homes and the secret places where summer days pass in peace and solace, when suddenly, we saw the figure of a man in the dress of a threadbare scholar, with a pointed, red beard, edged and lined in white. He was stooped over a wooden mug, eyes half closed and lips moving, addressing words to no one, in particular, that we could see.

“’Hast thou seen, in Cutters, such a figure before?’ I asked Gaudin, whilst turning my head so as to silently laugh, unseen.

“‘Nay, never,’ said he, making no effort to hide his own bemusement.

“’Nor I,’ added Dormoy, looking more curious than entertained.

“Still kept he talking, this mysterious stranger, in a tongue neither Latin nor French, occasionally punctuating a point with a wave of the arm or a point of a finger. We tried to continue our discourse, but we could not keep from gaping at his strange demeanour and continuous muttering. Strange, in truth, he was, yet also steeped in dignity and fiery fervour. We moved ever closer, until he looked up, leaned forward and pushed three stools in our direction, drawing us into the circle of his strangeness.

“’Je suis le Docteur Michel,’ said he. ‘Mangez vous ce soir?’

“We knew not what to say nor where to go; he fixed us so with dark eyes deep and black. I caught a glimpse of Gaudin’s face which bespoke of the same amusement he might derive from a juggler at a country fair, whilst Dormoy fixed his gaze upon him with a kind of morbid curiosity. What I saw, in those black eyes, fierce and intent, was the face of one who would be our father.”

 

***

 

I had no idea who these people were. (What were their names - Gaudin, Dormoy?) Nevertheless, I was fascinated by this strange Doctor Michel, and I knew I wanted to learn more about him from these tattered pages. I began to form a plan. I decided to assign myself the project of transcribing everything that I could make out from Henry Howard’s 450 year old journal and defining (imposing?) some kind of order with respect to these bits of description and / or narrative, to try to string them together based on what?...chronology, themes, persons, events? I didn’t know how to structure these entries, but I was determined to find a way to do it – a way that was consistent with what the young author wanted to say, in these crumbling pages.