A case of curiosities
By: Allen Kurzweil.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Published: 1992
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 358
Subjects: Inventors -- Fiction.; France -- History -- 18th century -- Fiction.
Description: In France, on the eve of the Revolution, a young man named Claude Page sets out to become the most ingenious and daring inventor of his time. In the course of a career filled with violence and passion, Claude learns the arts of enameling and watchmaking from an irascible, defrocked abbé, apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller, and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker. But it is Claude's greatest device--a talking mechanical head--that both crowns his career and leads to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette, and far more bizarre.--Publisher description.