Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [72]
“Yeah, okay. Thanks,” I say, signing. “Hey, do you know why there isn’t a birth certificate?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Amadé Malherbeau’s death certificate is here but not his birth certificate. Why is that?”
“When would he have been born?”
I know when he died, and how old he was, so I do a quick calculation. “Seventeen seventy-five,” I say.
The man smiles. “That was a very long time ago. It’s likely his birth certificate was destroyed during the many uprisings and invasions Paris has experienced. It might have gone up in flames. Been pulverized by bombs. Or destroyed by damp if it was stored in a basement room, as many records were. If Malherbeau was born in the country, it could be sitting in the attic of some ancient town hall.”
He takes his clipboard back, places it on his trolley, and starts to motor off. But then he stops suddenly and turns around. “Or …” he says.
“Or what?”
“Or he wasn’t born Amadé Malherbeau. Perhaps he went by another name. Our birth and death records are cross-referenced by year if you care to look through them.”
Hmm. Didn’t think of that. “How many do you have for 1775?” I ask.
“A few thousand.”
“Um, no thanks. I’ve just got today, you know? Not the rest of my life.”
The moleman leaves and I get busy. It’s 10:15 now and I have a lot to do before lunchtime. I’ve just started to open the box with the death records in it when I hear a loud, sharp banging.
I look up, startled. It’s Yves Bonnard. He’s pounding on his desk with a gavel. “Number twelve! Gloves, please!” he barks.
Number twelve is me, of course. All the other researchers are giving me a look like I just killed someone. “My bad,” I say. I put the gloves on and snap Yves a sharp salute. He narrows his eyes at me, holds up one finger. I’m pretty sure he means strike one.
I open the first box and carefully take out Amadé Malherbeau’s death certificate and his will. It’s pretty straightforward stuff. He died at the age of fifty-eight, in his house. He had no wife and no heirs, so he left everything to the Paris Conservatory. Neither document tells me anything I don’t already know, but they sure look cool, with all their big scrolly ink letters and flourishes. They’ll make great visuals.
Next, I open the box of personal papers and start going through them. There are receipts in here. Tons of them. For everything from horses to furniture to clothing to a carriage.
There are letters from music publishers, from concert hall owners, from people who wanted him to perform in their homes. There’s one from the violinist and composer Paganini with a return address in London. I pull it out and read it excitedly, thinking maybe the scholars missed this one since I haven’t read about it in any book; hoping for a long, involved, enlightening discussion of their shared musical philosophies.
But no. Paganini spends the whole letter bitching about English roads, English audiences, damp English hotels, the terrible English weather, and the inedible English food. He signs off by saying that he’s looking forward to stopping in Paris in June, on his way back to Genoa, and sharing a pot of coffee with his friend Malherbeau underneath a canopy of red roses in his garden.
I put it all back in its box, disappointed. I’m going to photograph a lot of it, the receipts and the letters—if I fade them out they’ll make great backgrounds for my PowerPoint slides—but I still have to talk about Malherbeau the man in my introduction, I still have to say something meaningful about him, and none of this, and none of what I’ve read in any of the books, is bringing me any closer to understanding him. I mean, what can I say? That he liked coffee and roses? That’s not going to get me to the airport.
Then I open the first box of his music. Malherbeau’s Concerto in A Minor is on the very top. I’ve seen the music. I own a copy of it. It’s the Fireworks Concerto. I’ve played this particular piece a hundred times. But I’m not prepared for this—for seeing the notes and measures exactly as he wrote them, for feeling the master’s hand upon the page.
The paper is still milky