Preface
I DIDN’T WRITE this book. I stole it.
Several summers ago, I received a call in my workshop on Rue des Bernardins from the noted bibliophile and book collector Beattie Ellingham. She wished to have me bind a loose-leaf manuscript that she described as the pride of her collection. There were no constraints of time or money, she said, but there was a condition, to which I agreed: I was not to read its contents. The manuscript was, in her estimation, priceless and I was to bind it accordingly. We agreed that it would be bound in what is called the Cosway style, in doublure, framed with pearls, using materials that she would provide.
I’d known Beattie Ellingham all my life. She was one of the Philadelphia Ellinghams. She’d married into the Belgian aristocracy but, having been widowed early, reverted to her maiden name and never remarried. She divided her time between her apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann and her estate in Belgium. Privately and as a term of affection, my wife and I referred to her as the Baroness, although there was in fact nothing remotely pompous or ceremonial about her. The Baroness was my oldest and most loyal client, as she had been for my father before I inherited the bindery. In the course of a long collector’s life, she’d assembled one of the finest private libraries in existence of material pertaining to Charles Baudelaire. She was more than a collector; even the word bibliophile did not quite do her justice. She was an obsessive. She lavished on her books the same doting affection other members of her class reserve for horses and wine. She accorded as much importance to a book’s binding as to its contents. To her, bookbinding was an art, and a bookbinder an artist almost the equal of the writer. A well-crafted, bespoke binding, she liked to say, is the finest compliment a book can be paid. Whenever I undertook one of her commissions, the Baroness would visit my studio, keeping an interested eye on proceedings without interfering. For her, it was a pleasure to witness a rare book given a second lease of life in an equally rare binding. And as her collection was intended only for her private pleasure, and her fortune inexhaustible, she liked to indulge her whims to the fullest extent of the law, and even, on occasion, beyond it. Previously, I’d bound a rare Arabic edition of Le Spleen de Paris in leather made from the skin of a black panther, and an illustrated underground edition of the banned poems of Les Fleur du mal in alligator skin with inlays of water python.
Three days after her call, the manuscript was delivered by a young fellow on a scooter. He didn’t remove his helmet, which muffled his voice and obscured his face. He handed me a package containing the manuscript and the leather with which to bind it. I immediately placed it in a safety deposit box I keep above the workshop.
There are many decisions to be made when binding a book, over and above the choice of binding material. The inlays, onlays, gilding, embossing, stitching, stamping, endpapers, ex libris, boards, frontispiece, edges, headband, glue, joints, marbling, slipcase, the title page – all these were choices about which the Baroness, for all the trust she invested in me, liked to be consulted before any work could begin. That evening, I opened the package to inspect it. Seven lustrous pearls tumbled out of their black velvet purse. The enclosed leather was dyed coral-red. The ivory miniature was not, as is traditionally the case with Cosway-style binding, a portrait, but a stylised illustration in black ink of an open eye. Finally, I took in hand the manuscript itself. Even when specifically instructed not to read it, the most scrupulous bookbinder cannot help but accidentally glimpse certain words or phrases. In this case, the handwritten title leapt out at me: Crossings. Underneath the title was a long jumble of figures, also handwritten, seemingly without any bearing on the manuscript. It consisted of what appeared to be three separate documents, all written by hand in French, although one of them was significantly older than the other two and written in a different hand. The manuscript appeared to have had an eventful existence: many of the pages were creased, folded over or mottled with damp, and the paper itself was yellowing and pungent with the chocolatey, nutty aroma that old paper exhales as it decays.
It took me a week to call the Baroness, a little longer than usual, and when I finally did so a man’s voice I didn’t recognise answered the telephone and informed me she’d very recently passed away, peacefully, in her sleep. When I enquired about the funeral, I was told it had taken place only the day before, at her Belgian estate. The news so surprised me that I forgot to ask what to do about the manuscript.
The book-collecting fraternity is a small circle, and news travels fast. Two days later, as I was walking by the river along the Quai de la Tournelle, I ran into Morgane Rambouillet, a riverside bouquiniste who specialises in nineteenth-century romances and who I knew had counted the Baroness among her regulars. She was beside herself with excitement. According to Rambouillet, the Baroness had not died in her sleep at all. She had been murdered, and moreover her body had been found with its eyeballs missing. I shuddered when I heard this, remembering the illustrated ivory miniature that had arrived with the manuscript a week and a half earlier. I hurried home to investigate the matter online. The obituary in Le Monde repeated the version of events I’d been given over the telephone – a peaceful, somnolent death – while Le Figaro’s obituary glossed over the circumstances of death altogether. The only mention of the Baroness’s grisly demise was in a short report in the Belgian newspaper, L’Echo, published the day after the incident. To an untrained eye, it seemed as if the details surrounding the Baroness’s death had been hushed up.
For days afterward, my wife and I discussed the matter. What haunted me, no less than the murder of one of the last grandes dames of Paris, was the fate of those two grey agate wonders, remarked upon by all those who’d known her – her eyes. My father had told me that, in her youth, though not especially pretty, Beattie Ellingham had passed as a great beauty thanks to those eyes. They were the wellspring of her charm, perhaps even the key to her destiny. Her marriage to the Baron de Croÿ had turned out unhappily, but her eyes never lost their sparkling, feline quality.
My wife, always more practical than I, considered it perfectly understandable that I’d been lied to on the telephone. ‘They have to think of the family’s reputation,’ she said. ‘They’re not going to tell every random stranger who happens to call that she was mutilated and murdered.’ We concluded that the Baroness must have been mixed up in some shady book business. Rare books can bring out the worst in people. Naturally, this led us to the same thought, one almost too awful to contemplate: could the murder of the Baroness be connected somehow with the manuscript now lying in my safety deposit box?
I waited, over the following weeks, for instructions from the estate – whether to go ahead with the commission or to return it to its new owner, whoever that might be. But I never heard from anyone. If I didn’t volunteer the information that it was in my safekeeping, it was not entirely out of self-interest, but also from dread. Obviously, I didn’t wish to visit upon my own family the fate that had befallen the Baroness. There was only one person in the world, other than my wife, who might know where it was: the man who’d delivered it – and I hadn’t so much as seen his face. I wasn’t even sure it had been a man. Given the value of the package, I was confident the estate would eventually contact me, and so I left the manuscript unbound.