Salon

Salon is an elderly taxidermist whose laboratory transforms the impulse to preserve life into a world of stuffed animals, skeletal remains, and assembled monsters. During a chance visit, he presents his work as a repair of death and corruption, but the scene unsettles Casaubon: Salon’s creations seem caught in a dead eternity, while the subterranean theories he advances bind natural history to conspiracy and inherited Russian antisemitism.

Identity and Introduction

Casaubon encounters Salon when the old man, wearing a yellow apron, opens his door and invites him inside. Casaubon has almost reached his office and has never seen the laboratory before. Its strangeness begins with the architecture: what had apparently once been an apartment has been stripped of its dividing walls, leaving a vast, hazy space beneath a mansard roof. The light falls obliquely and seems like late dusk, whether because of the windows, the shades, or the accumulated objects that fill the room.

Old pharmacy shelves divide the laboratory into passages and perspectives. Brown objects, tables, and patchy lamplight reinforce the impression of an instrument-maker’s workshop abandoned for centuries. At first Casaubon imagines a dusty atelier; as his eyes adjust, the room resolves into something closer to a petrified zoo. The shift from workshop to menagerie establishes Salon’s defining doubleness: his skill is technical and methodical, yet its results make the living world appear already dead.

The Taxidermist’s Workshop

The specimens include a glass-eyed bear cub climbing an artificial branch, a rigid owl, and a small animal Casaubon cannot identify as a weasel, marten, or skunk. Nearby lies the skeleton of a large feline or doglike animal, partly covered with straw and paste and supported by an iron armature. The laboratory’s objects are not simply collected; they are disassembled and reconstructed, their organic bodies made to depend on wire, plaster, and crafted supports.

Salon explains his process through a Great Dane preserved for a wealthy woman who wants to remember it as it appeared during her married life. He skins the animal, coats the inside of the skin with arsenical soap, soaks and bleaches the bones, then reconnects them with wire and mounts the skeleton on an armature. Hay, papier-mâché, or plaster supplies the stuffing before the skin is fitted back into place. He describes the work as repairing the damage caused by death and corruption, and asks whether the owl seems alive.

For Casaubon, the effect runs in the opposite direction. After seeing Salon’s specimens, every living owl seems dead in advance, consigned to what he calls a sclerotic eternity. Salon himself becomes difficult to distinguish from his work: Casaubon studies his bushy eyebrows and gray cheeks and cannot decide whether he is looking at a living man or at one more masterpiece of the taxidermist’s art. The preservation that promises to restore life instead blurs the boundary between living body and crafted object.

Kircher’s Dragon and the Underground

As Salon continues showing his curiosities, Casaubon steps backward and sets a pendulum in motion. The encounter takes place against the thought of Lia’s pregnancy: Casaubon had wanted to stay home that day, but Lia had told him to go to work, and the sight and smell of the laboratory sharpen his fear of the creature growing in her belly. He imagines wanting, if it died, to bury it in the earth, where it could feed worms and enrich the soil. Against Salon’s preservation of animal bodies, Casaubon’s private wish makes decay part of continued life.

Salon next displays a roughly thirty-centimeter dragon with black membranous wings, a cock’s crest, and gaping jaws lined with tiny sawlike teeth. He identifies it as his own composition, assembled from a salamander, a bat, and snake scales. Its model, he says, is an image in a costly first edition of Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus, published in Amsterdam in 1665. Salon claims the pictured dragon lives in volcanic caves, and invokes Kircher as a man who knew the known, the unknown, and even the nonexistent.

A further illustration shows the globe as an anatomical organ, swollen and black, threaded with luminous, serpentine veins. Salon reads the image as a map of the earth’s interior: if Kircher was right, the heart of the earth contains more paths than the surface, and natural events derive from the heat and steam below. Casaubon recognizes the continuity between this fascination and their earlier conversation in Munich, as well as words he had overheard through the Ear of Dionysius. Salon’s underground is at once a physical realm of caves and currents and a theory through which hidden forces explain what happens above ground.

Conspiracy and Inheritance

Salon grounds his account of subterranean power in an antisemitic reading of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He says he was born in Moscow and recalls that, when he was young in Russia, people discovered supposed secret Jewish documents claiming that governments could be controlled by working underground. To support the claim, he consults a small notebook in which he has copied passages and reads one about metropolitan railways and underground passages being used to blow up the world’s capitals, attributing it to Document Number Nine.

Casaubon looks at the laboratory’s spinal columns, the box of eyes, and skins stretched over armatures and briefly thinks of an extermination camp. He rejects that immediate association, recognizing instead an elderly man nostalgic for the old days of Russian antisemitism. When Casaubon asks why conspirators would have to work underground, Salon answers by treating secrecy as self-evident: plotters operate beneath the light of day, and dominion over the world means dominion over what lies beneath it, the subterranean currents. His claim turns a prejudiced conspiracy narrative into a universal explanatory scheme.

When Casaubon challenges Salon’s account, Salon dismisses the written sources as false and says his knowledge came from his father. Asked whether his father was a geologist, he laughs and clarifies that his father worked for the Okhrana, directly under its chief, the legendary Rachkovsky. The disclosure gives Salon’s ideas a family history, but not the neutral authority of geological expertise that Casaubon had wondered about. The inherited source is instead the world of the Tsarist secret police and the Russian antisemitic milieu Salon has just recalled.

Narrative Significance

The laboratory brings Salon’s method and worldview into a single, oppressive space. In one register, he is a skilled taxidermist who explains the practical labor of skinning, bleaching, wiring, and mounting. In another, he makes a fabricated dragon appear continuous with Kircher’s printed image, then takes subterranean pathways and currents as proof of concealed control. The same impulse to assemble parts into a convincing whole governs both the specimens and the conspiracy: construction is presented as recovery of a hidden reality.

Casaubon’s response is not simple belief. He links Salon’s subterranean preoccupations to what he has heard before, but when the Okhrana and Rachkovsky enter the conversation, he catches himself making another connection. Salon’s father worked for Rachkovsky; Casaubon remembers the colonel’s mysterious visitor, Count Rakosky, and notices the resemblance between the names. He then rebukes himself for seeing another coincidence and declares that he no longer stuffs dead animals but creates living ones. The thought exposes his own dangerous contrast with Salon: the taxidermist gives dead bodies the appearance of life, while Casaubon’s pattern-making threatens to animate coincidences into a world of conspiratorial agents.