Extraordinary Theory of Objects: A Memoir of an Outsider in Paris

by Stephanie LaCava

  * The television show My So-Called Life, starring Claire Danes as fifteen-year-old Angela Chase, first aired at the end of the summer of 1994 at the 8 P.M. time slot on national network ABC. Later that year, New York Times journalist Matt Zoller Seitz wrote, “What the series’ narration does best: it shows how teenagers try to control their chaotic inner lives by naming things, defining them, generalizing about them.” What everyone loved about the show was its authenticity—an unreliable, even unstable, narrator experiencing universal feelings. It was the outsider’s answer to the vapid world of Beverly Hills 90210. In early episodes, Chase dyes her hair a bright shade of red (“It’s not red, it’s ‘Crimson Glow’ ”), leaves behind her childhood best friend, and falls for Jordan Catalano, played by Jared Leto (“I love how he’s always leaning against stuff, he leans great”). The program was groundbreaking in its portrayal of the complicated teenage experience. In an episode, Chase comments on the yearbook: “If you made a book about what really happened, it would be a really upsetting book.” Fans were disappointed when the series was canceled less than a year later. There were even ads taken out in the likes of the Hollywood Reporter to renew the series, which was eventually rebroadcast on MTV. The whole production was very nineties—ending in its prime so passionate viewers could still worship the show without inevitable disappointment.

  * Within catacombs, great religious men were laid to rest underground, before the furor over relics caused the pilfering of these mass graves. The origin of the word catacomb is Greek for “cavity” or “below,” which is apt to describe the massive, vast winding tunnels created for the bones of the dead. Eventually the term came to mean simply an underground tomb or crypt, once the caves were ravaged for relics. (See relics footnote on pages 111–13.)

  * The world is distorted or clarified through various lenses, seen differently according to the glass’s definition. When the microscope was invented around 1590, it became easy to distinguish between fairies and fruit flies. Before the camera’s creation, people often thought insects were magical creatures. Science allowed them to marvel at real gossamer wings. The optic discoveries of the Victorian age then effectively changed the way humanity saw the world. Even before these advancements, Belgian magician Étienne-Gaspard Robert, also called “Robertson,” was known for his stage antics, creating phantasmagoria using projectors, screens, and smoke. He took over the ruined Couvent des Capucines near Place Vendôme and turned it into a macabre theater where he would pretend to channel Rousseau and Voltaire by projecting their images on his fanciful stage. Robertson suggested the French use enormous mirrors to torch the British navy (an idea they declined).

  During this time there was also a penchant for animated paintings, à la Dorian Gray, moving statues, and other diversions of this nature. These amusements were the precursors to the earliest cinema from the likes of the Lumière brothers.

  * The cult of relics raged during the Middle Ages, when the blood and body parts of holy men and women became venerated objects, their location—be it church or temple—the place of pilgrimage for thousands of believers seeking to be closer to their god. Christian examples are among the most well known, but such objects exist for other religions, such as the Buddha’s left canine housed in the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, Sri Lanka, or Muhammad’s footprint among the treasures of Topkapi Palace. In Christianity, relics include the Shroud of Turin, thought to be the cloth that covered Jesus Christ at his death (it is said that photographs in negative show the outline of his face) and splinters of the crucifixion cross, known as the True Cross. The Sudarium of Oviedo is a remnant of bloodstained material believed to be from Jesus’s death as well. The Sainte-Chappelle once held the crown of thorns, which is now within Notre Dame in Paris. There is also the Catholic phenomenon of the Incorruptibles, bodies of saints that when exhumed remain intact and smell of flowers. The body of Saint Bernadette, the visionary of Lourdes, did not decay after thirty years underground. Another Incorruptible, Saint Catherine Labouré, now lies in a glass coffin at 140 rue du Bac, the same street where one finds Deyrolle full of its preserved animals. Relics may also be objects such as a chalice or personal effects, like Saint Bernadette’s umbrella from her trip to Nièvres. All are physical evidence of the divine.

  * Scotsman David Brewster grew up in Inchbonny, where he spent time with a young blacksmith, James Vetch, who taught him about telescope mirrors. Fascinated by optics, Brewster, an inventor and philosopher, continued to explore the field only to discover in 1816 he could create beautiful patterns with lace, beads, and glass pieces reflected in many folds. The invention of the kaleidoscope caused a sensation that, sadly for Brewster, led to immediate copies and mass production of the marvelous little toy, owing to an improperly worded patent. What is most alluring about the kaleidoscope, and perhaps what contributed to its great popularity in the nineteenth century, is the human draw to symmetry—in beautiful faces, flowers, and other phenomenon.

  * Just as Egyptian tombs and medieval catacombs were ravaged for treasure, butterflies are also victims of contemporary black market smugglers like Hisayoshi Kojima, the Japanese-born king of a vast multimillion-dollar ring of insect poachers. They were two Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing butterflies ordered by an undercover agent that led to Kojima’s eventual capture. The species is the largest in the world, with a yellow body and mint-and-black-colored wings sometimes reaching almost a foot in width.

  * In Inuit lore, the creation of man began with a raven coming forth from the darkness to create an enormous pea pod. The bird didn’t intend for anything extraordinary to come from it, so it was quite surprised when a man emerged fully formed, splitting the seedling’s skin. The two were equally perplexed to find each other, and the raven, realizing the man’s hunger, set about to find him something to eat. The bird returned with berries and soon created beasts, as well as a woman to be the companion for this new being. As pods continued to bear seeds and fruit, perhaps this is why pea pods became lucky gifts in English country courtship, said to bring love and fertility.

  * Shipping heiress Nancy Cunard was born in 1896 into an English life of finery. The slim beauty chose, however, to reject this lineage in favor of escaping to Paris’s Left Bank and the pulsating world of surrealism and Dada, as started by the likes of her lover Louis Aragon. She found her inner circle among men like Man Ray, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce while being ostracized from the society she left behind. She would go on to establish the Hours Press, which would publish the impressive nearly nine-hundred-page Negro: An Anthology. Cunard was known for her affair with black pianist Henry Crowder, her work against fascism, and her armfuls of African bangles. In 1965, she succumbed to mental illness and passed away in Paris.

  * Like Miller, Jean Seberg was from a small American town and later found herself French. She was born in 1938 in Marshalltown, Iowa, and eighteen years later, out of countless hopefuls, she was cast as Joan of Arc in Otto Preminger’s film of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. She went on to become known for her roles in Bonjour Tristesse and as the New York Herald Tribune–hawking American ingenue in Breathless. Early in her career she expressed her sympathy for Sagan and her premature fame. Seberg committed suicide in 1979, allegedly prompted by an FBI conspiracy. Ten years later, her first husband, Romain Gary, would do the same.

  * About a hundred years ago, when tea importer Thomas Sullivan received his usual shipment of sea cargo from India and China, he decided he didn’t want to pay for the standard tin boxes to send out samples to his vendors. Instead Sullivan measured tiny amounts of tea in silk sachets, which retailers unwittingly placed directly into hot water to brew a cup. Thus, tea bags were serendipitously created. Silk became too expensive, and soon gauze and other materials were used for the disposable sachets.

  * How does one manage to transport a sixty-eight-foot high and nearly 250-ton piece of red granite from Egypt to New York, London, or Paris? The move happens with the aid of a series of deceptively primitive levers and machi
nery, much the same way the hulking obelisks were once created in ancient Egypt and carved with hieroglyphs celebrating Ramses II. It was in the early nineteenth century that Muhammad Ali of Egypt and Sudan gifted the two obelisks that guarded the Temple of Luxor to France. The first one arrived in 1833 and was moved three years later to the square where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been guillotined at the turn of the century, the Place de la Concorde. New York’s and London’s own misnamed “Cleopatra’s needles” (neither has a distinct link to the queen) arrived at the end of the nineteenth century. The twin obelisk promised to Paris remained in Egypt until François Mitterrand, nearly one hundred years later, announced it should stay in its original country. In 1998, the French government gave their obelisk a special gift, a new gold chapeau, as somewhere in history it had lost its original cap.

  * Abbé Grégoire was a controversial eighteenth-century figure—a Roman Catholic priest and ardent supporter of republican virtue, religious equality, and abolitionism. Inspired by the Philadelphia Quakers and the organization of Washington, D.C., he is known for his work to rename the Parisian streets postrevolution. “Each name ought to be the vehicle of a thought, or, rather of a sentiment that reminds citizens of their virtues and duties,” he was quoted as saying. In 1989, his body was moved to the Panthéon in recognition of such forward-thinking ideals, though there was still resistance among certain Frenchmen.

  * William Faulkner found solace in the calm and civilized world of France far from his native Mississippi. He loved to sit in the Luxembourg Gardens and watch old men sail boats. “Think of a country where an old man, if he wants to, can spend his whole time with toy ships, and no one to call him crazy or make fun of him!” he once said. The pleasures of these gardens was also not lost on Zelda Fitzgerald, who in one of her letters recounts taking her daughter, Scottie, to play there. “When we were not in school,” she recalled, “we would meet each other at the Luxembourg Gardens to sail the toy boats or ice skate at the grand palace or roll hoops… . It was a delightful time.”

  * The jeweler James de Givenchy once said that the luxury of a bangle is in that it is not precious: “You don’t really care what happens to them; you can’t care.” No matter how precious the piece, the nature of a bangle is that it “bangs” into the bracelet next to it, often creating a sound that warns of its wearer’s arrival. “Somehow I keep making them, even though they cannot be too fragile. A bracelet that is supple has a different purpose, it hugs the wrist.” Still, there are always women who love to fill their arms with bangles, like Nancy Cunard and her arms of ivory, or Diana Vreeland. Givenchy recalls one of his uncle Hubert de Givenchy’s models, actress Capucine. “She often wore bangles, when we knew dinner was coming all you could hear was the bangles coming down the stairs, look at her such a beautiful girl.”

  * Wax is an odd medium; it may cast molds of ephemera just as it may melt away when lit with fire. The ancient Fayum portraits on Coptic caskets were created using the encaustic technique, where wax is mixed with paint to produce lifelike colors. Ancient Grecian puppeteers also worked in wax, creating beautiful statues of little boys and fruits and vegetables. It was the eighteenth-century physician Philippe Curtius, Madame Tussaud’s uncle, who first perfected the use of wax for models and miniatures, which he then taught to his niece. During the French Revolution, Tussaud would pull decapitated heads from heaps of carnage to create casts, as she did with Robespierre and Marie Antoinette. In 1777, she was invited to London by phantasmagoria expert, Paul Philidor to join in his show.

  Wax bodies also served as a fetish for the bizarre. When entertaining, the Marchesa Casati is said to have set places for wax mannequins at dinner parties, including tragic figures like the murdered Baroness Mary Vetsera.

  * In French, scallops are known as coquilles, while their Latin name is pecten, meaning “comb.” The ridged shell of the creature has come to represent the fervor of dedicated pilgrims making their way to Santiago de Compostela, known as the Way of Saint James. At the end of this Roman trade route, it is believed that when Saint James’s body was being moved, a horse fell in the water and washed ashore unharmed and covered in scallops. The shells are not only symbolic but also practical in that pilgrims used them to scoop just enough food or water from offerings to sustain them along the journey. The scallop’s primary enemy is the starfish, also parasitic sea creatures like barnacles or worms, which may weigh down the skilled swimmers.

  * Human adornment began not only out of a need for beauty but also for charmed protection. The ancient Egyptians wore rings of cut stone scarabs attached to the finger with fine gold wire. Ancient Romans exchanged signet rings as symbols of brotherhood and allegiance, often carnelians or garnets carved with official seals used in correspondence. The sixteenth century brought memento mori jewelry, reminders of mortality. In the following century, rings also commemorated the lives of the beloved who had passed away, some bearing ciphers or hair of the lost. In the eighteenth century, rings began to depict sepia painted urns or other morbid scenes. And along with new archaeological advances came the revival of interest in ancient Greece and Rome. The most privileged were able to obtain actual ancient stones. Sigmund Freud liked to present A.D. first-century Roman gifts to colleagues, while those with lesser means turned to James Tassie to make alternatives in paste known as “Tassies.” Posy rings were named for the poems inscribed inside the band for one’s beloved. Regards language also became popular, in which the first letter of a stone—often the same in French and English—would be used to spell out a message. Regard (ruby, emerald, garnet, amethyst, ruby, and diamond, as example). Love would be lapis lazuli, opal, vermeil (the ancient name for a type of garnet), and emerald.