Casaubon infiltrates the Paris Museum of Science

Casaubon infiltrates the Paris Museum of Science because he cannot bring himself to abandon Jacopo Belbo, whose confessions suggest that a dangerous gathering will take place at the Conservatoire that night. His decision carries him from an early-morning choice in Belbo’s apartment, through a wary encounter in a Parisian occult bookshop, to a hiding place inside the closed museum: he is now watching for the others, while recognizing that the Plan may have outgrown his control.

The decision to go to Paris

At six on Saturday morning, June 23, Casaubon finishes reading Belbo’s confessions in Belbo’s apartment and weighs what to do. There is no point in going to Garamond; De Angelis has left; Diotallevi has said all he can; and Lia is far away, somewhere without a telephone. If anything is to happen, Casaubon concludes, it will happen that night in the Conservatoire. The urgency is practical, but his motive is less certain: he feels curiosity, perhaps duty, and friendship, and decides he cannot desert Belbo.

Later, while hidden in the museum, Casaubon revisits the decision from a more skeptical perspective. Belbo’s writings might be the work of a madman, and Casaubon cannot be sure that Belbo even called from Paris. He asks himself why he did not simply pretend nothing had happened. The question exposes the gap between the evidence he possesses and the risk he accepts: he goes not because he has established that Belbo is in danger, but because uncertainty does not release him from the bond of friendship.

His imagined rescue is deliberately extravagant. Casaubon pictures himself bursting into an underground temple with armed followers as Belbo is about to be sacrificed. That fantasy gives heroic form to the obscure task ahead, but the actual journey is less assured. He has little money, no reliable address, and no clear knowledge of what he can accomplish. The contrast between imagined intervention and improvised concealment defines the episode: Casaubon acts, but he does not know whether his action will save anyone.

The search on Rue de la Manticore

In Paris, Casaubon takes a taxi to Rue de la Manticore. The driver grumbles because the street cannot be found in his guides, and the taxi cannot enter it. Casaubon is left at the corner and proceeds on foot into an alley little wider than a train aisle, in the neighborhood of the old Bièvre and behind Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. The concealed, almost unlocatable street makes the search feel like entry into a world organized around secrecy, though Casaubon has come there with no secure plan for what to do once he arrives.

The alley opens slightly at an eccentric bookshop, Librairie Sloane. Its number is 3 although there appears to be no number 1, number 2, or any other street number. A single bulb lights the grimy shop; a section of its double door serves as a display case. Among the books are dusty boxes of incense, small amulets from different traditions, tarot decks, and pendulums. Inside, books crowd the walls and floor, and a decrepit bookseller attends to a handwritten ledger while two customers pull nearly all unbound volumes from precarious shelves. The shop’s disorder and its mixture of texts and ritual objects offer Casaubon no reliable distinction between scholarship and occult practice.

A telephone call interrupts the customers’ browsing. The bookseller listens, then adopts expressions of puzzled refusal and tells the caller that the shop sells books and can advise about catalogues, but cannot help with deeply personal problems; he mentions that other practitioners may provide exorcisms. The call is not about Casaubon, but its subject gives the shop a role that is at once commercial and occult. When the other customers leave, Casaubon approaches the bookseller and asks for an acquaintance who may visit: Monsieur Aglie.

The bookseller’s guarded manner sharpens when Casaubon adds that Aglie may be known as Rakosky or Soltikoff. The man remarks coldly on the curious names of Casaubon’s friends, then says his partner is arriving and may know the person Casaubon seeks. He invites Casaubon to sit and picks up the telephone to make a quiet call. Casaubon recognizes the danger in remaining: he has given a stranger names that connect him to Aglie, and a supposed invitation to wait could leave him exposed.

Withdrawal and entry into the museum

Casaubon leaves abruptly, saying goodbye before the bookseller can complete the call. He is out of the alley within a minute and reaches the Seine shortly afterward. His departure is not a successful confrontation or a discovery of Aglie; it is a withdrawal from a situation in which he suspects that his presence has been noticed. He reproaches himself for expecting to find Aglie ready to apologize and return Belbo unharmed, and realizes that the bookseller may now know he is in Paris.

Past noon, with the night’s gathering still ahead, Casaubon turns into Rue Saint-Jacques and keeps looking over his shoulder. He interprets an Arab-looking passerby as a possible follower, then questions his own assumption: he cannot say what made the man seem Arab and reflects that appearances do not reliably identify people as Arabs in Paris. At the hotel, he sees the presumed follower enter from the landing; then he notices other people in the corridor who might also fit his suspicion. The neighborhood, he acknowledges, has many small hotels for Arabs. The episode makes his vigilance self-undermining: each observation produces another possible threat, but also another reason to doubt the observation.

Casaubon rents a decent room with a telephone, though he knows no one he can call. He dozes fitfully until three, washes his face, and heads to the Conservatoire. By then he sees no alternative to entering the museum, remaining after it closes, and waiting for midnight. He carries out the plan and, a few hours before midnight, is inside the periscope. The transformation is decisive: the man who arrived seeking Aglie now chooses not to pursue him directly, but to hide and observe the gathering from within the museum.

The periscope and the uncertain Plan

From the periscope, Casaubon reflects on Nezah, which some interpreters associate with endurance and patience and others with victory. He places himself provisionally among the victorious because he knows about the others while they do not know about him. The advantage is informational rather than secure: he has found a concealed position and can watch, but the test still lies ahead, and his knowledge has not yet become power over events.

Casaubon calls this concealment the first part of his scheme and judges that it has gone according to plan. Yet the wording immediately opens a larger uncertainty: will the second part go according to his own plan, or according to the Plan? This distinction marks the episode’s consequence. Casaubon has moved from reading Belbo’s confessions to acting within the story they describe, but the possibility that the Plan itself now directs events unsettles the agency he hoped to exercise. His infiltration ends not with rescue or explanation, but with a hidden vantage point and an unresolved wait for midnight.