Casaubon's overnight concealment at the Conservatoire

Casaubon’s overnight concealment at the Conservatoire is the act of a man who believes that leaving the museum would mean losing the only route to an answer. Waiting for the mysterious Masters he expects near midnight, he hides among the exhibits and tries to outlast the night watch. The episode makes his suspicion physical: he must remain still, unseen, and awake in a building where he has begun to read even the placement of machines as a message.

The Decision to Stay

Casaubon has come to think that Saint-Martin-des-Champs is more than the public museum it appears to be. Its history as a priory and its collection of planes and electromagnetic devices have led him to imagine a hidden dialogue whose meaning has escaped him. He wonders whether he, Jacopo Belbo, and Diotallevi alone have guessed the truth, and whether the Masters will provide an answer that night.

The danger is not simply that someone might see him. Casaubon has no idea how the Masters could enter the building; he imagines a passage through the Paris sewers, perhaps near Porte St.-Denis. Yet he is certain that if he leaves, he will not find his way back in. Uncertainty about their route becomes a reason to commit himself to the one place he can control: inside the museum, after closing.

The Nave as Hiding Place

Casaubon tries to look at the nave coldly, insisting to himself that he is seeking information rather than an epiphany. The distinction does not hold for long. He calculates that the other halls are too exposed because guards make rounds to check for thieves, while the crowded nave offers a more plausible refuge. He chooses to hide inside a vehicle, becoming a living man concealed within a lifeless machine. The choice is practical, but it also turns the museum’s exhibits into instruments of his own game of concealment.

His vigil is organized around the rhythms of closing time. He hears the last visitors and guards pass, resists the temptation to crouch beneath a bridge, and decides that if a guard glances inside, he can pose as an enthusiast who stayed to admire the exhibit. Once the lights go out, the screen keeps the periscope cubicle faintly lit. He remains on his feet, or crouches if his feet ache, knowing that the visitors’ departure is not the same as the employees’ quitting time.

Waiting Through the Night

The hours stretch as Casaubon tries to calculate how long he must remain hidden. He fears that the cleaning staff might search every room, then reasons that because the museum opens late in the morning, the cleaners probably work by daylight. The building offers him only partial reassurance: he hears distant voices and occasional louder sounds, perhaps doors closing, but nobody passes nearby. He believes he can return to the church between ten and eleven, or later, because the Masters will not come until close to midnight.

Outside the cubicle, ordinary life continues without reference to his vigil. A group of young people leaves La Rotonde; a girl walks down rue Conte and turns into rue Montgolfier. Casaubon wonders whether he can endure hours of watching this humdrum world with his back to it, and whether the periscope’s placement has a secret meaning. Even his bodily discomfort becomes part of the discipline of waiting: he feels the need to urinate and tells himself to ignore it as nervousness.

The periscope makes concealment feel like a passage to somewhere else. Casaubon compares himself to a stowaway hidden in a ship’s hold, emigrating to a distant land, then thinks of the Statue of Liberty in the museum’s New York diorama. The image gives his confinement an imagined destination, but the practical problem remains immediate: sleep might make him wake too late. The scene’s suspense arises from that gap between a grand anticipated revelation and the small bodily demands of staying awake and undiscovered.

Suspicion and the Episode’s Significance

The museum’s instruments sharpen rather than settle Casaubon’s suspicions. He fixates on the periscope, wondering why it stands in the hall of glass instead of with the optical instruments, and why a device that seems so positivist and scientific should be beside the emblematic lion and serpent. Its location becomes a question to decode, just as the museum itself has become, for him, a concealed arrangement of signs. The vigil therefore does not confirm the existence of a secret passage or the Masters’ arrival; it records Casaubon acting on his conviction before he possesses proof.

His belief that the Masters will come near midnight also echoes his earlier experience of how a supposed secret can acquire force through repetition and suggestion. At a séance, a medium had spoken of six seals, a long wait, and thirty-six invisibles, details that connected in Casaubon’s mind with the message of Provins. The police investigation into Colonel Ardenti’s disappearance made that remembered connection a matter of scrutiny as well as fascination. In the museum, however, Casaubon is alone with his interpretation: no visitor or guard confirms it, and no one explains the periscope’s position.

The episode’s irony lies in the refuge’s identity. Casaubon seeks hidden knowledge in a museum conceived as a public shrine to arts and trades, and chooses a scientific exhibit as his hiding place while trying to quiet his desire for mystical revelation. His plan is to wait for an answer, yet the long, watchful interval is already shaped by the assumptions he hopes the answer will resolve. The concealment shows a threshold in his growing paranoia: the possibility of a secret is no longer merely an idea to discuss with Belbo and Diotallevi, but a reason to spend the night hidden inside a machine, listening for footsteps.