by Joan Thomas
L. is much improved, and has begun to take an interest in Mrs. Auriol’s tireless efforts to locate a portraitist of social note who can do justice to her daughter’s beauty, as my own portrait executed in London some years ago demonstrably failed to do. This afternoon we interviewed a candidate for the commission, distinguished by his tobacco-stained teeth and fingers and the splatters of paint artfully applied to his frock. Mrs. Auriol and my wife were entranced by the fellow and by his light-filled studio. I was obliged to point out upon leaving that a serious portraitist selects a studio with windows to the north, so as to ensure an unvarying light on his subject. Undeterred, Mrs. Auriol has managed to secure an invitation to a salon that Jacques-Louis David himself is rumoured to patronize, somewhere in the faubourg Saint-Germain. I asked how the fee to such a distinguished artist was to be paid, but in my mother-in-law’s manner I detected the private conviction that M. David will insist on performing this commission gratis out of his appreciation for so extraordinary a subject.
We passed a pleasant afternoon strolling the banks of the Seine. L. has discovered pineapples and white-heart cherries and will be loath to depart for regions where they are not so readily available. She has seen a physician and her pregnancy is confirmed – an unanticipated consideration when I arranged the itinerary. So we are to be parents in the new year, with all that that entails. I am grateful for Letitia’s accommodating spirit and willingness to continue the journey. I am resolved to attempt Mont Blanc before winter sets in. Our plan is to leave Paris as soon as my visit to Cuvier is accomplished.
Perforce we have visited Notre-Dame and perforce we have been impressed – as to its size. The superstition that threatens religion in England has entirely polluted the papist church and, in the palpable form of incense, chokes one upon entry. Through the vast edifice roam black-clad priests swinging censers, and across the uneven stones, supplicants inch on crippled knees towards a crypt where lie the mouldering relics of saints (a toenail or the mummified tip of some medieval wretch’s nose).
July 18
Today at the Louvre I saw a recent acquisition, Portrait d’une femme noire by Marie-Guillemine Benoist, one of the great David’s students. It represents a Negro servant against a backdrop bare of furnishings. I am told that it excited a great deal of talk in the cafés and salons – by the presentation of a Negress as the central subject of a portrait, and by the fact that she was painted by a woman (indeed, the white hand of the painter, while invisible, seems to attract more attention than the subject of the painting itself). The woman portrayed in the painting is unnamed. She wears the white turban I know from childhood and the painter has arranged a snowy cloth around her torso in the neo-classical style. Her breasts are revealed and unadorned and her strong shoulders bear their weight with inexpressible grace. Is the intention political, a brave declaration of liberty? Or is it rather to allow viewers to glory in the beauty of her dark skin and the golden light where the sun rests on it?
What a strange melancholy has settled over me in this city that I so long desired to visit, and which, in all particulars of architecture and delectable food and amusement on the streets, exceeds expectations. Perversely, I awaken in the mornings longing for the rudimentary satisfactions of work under the open sky. I spend my days with the sensation of looking through a pane of glass at the passing pageant of the world.
July 21
M. Jacques-Louis David did not appear at the salon in Saint-Germain; I was told variously that he has died and that he is living in splendid health in Brussels. It was a singular evening nonetheless. In the French fashion, the withdrawal of the ladies signalled the withdrawal of a chamber pot from a drawer for the relief of the gentlemen, and immediately after availing myself of it, I was presented by our over-eager host to an amiable gentleman identified as Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. In such a discomfiting position, with my hands on my flies, I met the natural historian who accompanied Napoleon into Egypt and carried back specimens from the ancient tombs for Cuvier’s examination. He is a genial, round-faced man with a delicately formed mouth and a good command of English, and in that language he inquired as to my impressions of Paris. In short order we had moved through the revolution (of which he had high hopes until sickened by the blood lust), the Emperor’s wars, and the restoration of the monarchy. Through all of this, both he and Cuvier managed to keep their posts at the Jardin du Roi, thanks to a genius for adaptation, and now have every expectation of dying peacefully in their beds.
I stuck close to his side until I could reveal to him my association with William Buckland, whom I was sure he would know, and when I did, he laughed contemptuously, inquiring as to the state of my colleague’s digestion. He had heard of Buckland’s quest to eat his way through the animal kingdom, and the story has become so frightfully distorted that he believes Buckland to have resorted to cannibalism. I was appalled to think that the English are so demonized in this country that a man of Geoffroy’s intelligence could fall prey to such a tale. Another consequence of the protracted war we have endured.
Before the evening was over, we fell into a discussion of such ideas as could never be broached in an English drawing room. I learned then that, though he and Cuvier remain on congenial terms, there is a fundamental divide in their philosophies. While Cuvier sees each biological species as having its separate logic and integrity, Geoffroy believes that all vertebrates are manifestations of a single archetype. He suggests that the Creator had one divine anatomical plan which, through the ages of time, has manifested itself in diverse forms. In this, he approaches the thinking of Jean Baptiste Lamarck, the man Buckland so disparages as “the professor of insects and worms,” and for whom Geoffroy has the greatest respect.
And so I learned that I have cavalierly dismissed scholars regarded on this side of the Channel as titans of science, and that I have done so on the word of one dogmatic Oxford don. Here on the banks of the Seine, a whole different conversation is being enjoyed. Geoffroy has given himself licence to set aside divine revelation and look openly at the phenomena before him. He alludes to a created prototype, but the process of biological development that follows is reckless and chaotic (unsupervised, one might say), so as to have nothing of the divine in it. While we perched on ancien régime chairs and sipped cognac, Geoffroy spoke of the transmutation of forms with no consciousness of blasphemy, not even looking around to see who might be overhearing!
I hardly knew what to say. I have no facility to grasp ideas so novel and shocking. It is only now that I can begin to identify the questions that I should have put to him. Geoffroy has published few works himself, but recommended to me Philosophie zoologique by Lamarck. I am resolved to read this text and to propose a debate at the Geological Society on the notion of transmutation. Is it not highly relevant to our study of the giant reptiles so mysteriously vanished from the Dorsetshire shore? Does it not propose a solution we have been unwilling to countenance, that these creatures have not disappeared, but have changed in succeeding generations? How I long for this sort of scientific freedom – both to make observations from nature that have no basis in doctrine and to disagree with one’s brothers. For even with Lamarck, Geoffroy has grave differences. And yet he outlined Lamarck’s theories with the greatest concern for accuracy, explaining Lamarck’s notion of slow change that comes through biological traits being acquired as the need arises, or falling into disuse and so disappearing (and leaving their traces only in vestigial organs, such as the shrunken and useless eyes of a mole that lives entirely in the dark). For his part, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire holds to a different mechanism of change, asserting that species are transformed in bursts as a result of accidents of conception and incubation. As we drank coffee, this gentleman confessed his passion for fetal malformations, which in his view pull back the veil of nature to reveal valuable biological secrets.
I left the salon in a stupor that L. attributed to the drink. My conversation with Geoffroy was not an exchange of ideas: I could contribute nothing bu
t a keen will to understand. This I frankly confessed to him, and he seemed to like me the more for my frankness. We parted with such genuine sympathy that I have no doubt now of being invited to Cuvier’s salon, where God willing I shall profit from further conversation with this community of savants. At moments, I feel an undying gratitude to Mrs. Auriol for contriving to take me to Saint-Germain, and at other moments, I am so uneasy as to wish these pathways of thought had never been opened to me.
August 14
We have our portrait at last. It was executed by one Jean-Marie Poliquin, not David but a painter of some note in the city, who won L. over in his first breath with the ultimate compliment one can pay an Englishwoman in Paris: “On ne devinerait jamais que vous êtes anglaise.” He has painted L. as an ideal primitive. She leans on a mule and from one hand dangles a dipper for skimming milk. Her form is as he imagined it to be before her pregnancy – I think he intends a virginal effect. It is not entirely a successful portrait: he has given a more discerning eye to the mule than to my wife, and in the finely wrought hands (smooth and clean and absent of calluses) lies, in my mind, a repudiation of the central conceit of the painting. How much more logical to go directly for a subject to the milkmaid on the Gosling Bridge!
In a tiny librairie on rue Descartes, I purchased a copy of Philosophie zoologique. It is Lamarck, apparently, whom we can thank for the very term invertebrate. He began his studies by observing the molluscs of the Paris basin, and noting the small changes that occurred in them through subsequent strata. He takes as a matter of course that the strata of this basin were laid down over a vast history, and that by studying them systematically he can read the story of biological transmutations through time. As an observant collector could at Lyme Regis, recording ammonite finds on a vertical chart of the cliffs. But all these years, we clever gentlemen of science have gazed at the strata of the blue lias, blinded by an orthodoxy that would not let us read what we saw.
August 21
Cuvier’s salon.
That’s all he can write. Two maids are chattering in the corridor, and he sits motionless. He’s just read the entire volume through from the beginning. A journal penned by a youth intoxicated by his own idealism, ready to throw over the scholarship of his forefathers, carefully accrued through many generations, ready to leap into an abyss. And so eager to sneer at his wife for her pretensions! And yet behold the young dandy himself the night before, swaying beside a potted palm in a reception hall at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, a glass of burgundy in his hand (a glass he never once removed from his lips without its being immediately refilled), leaning familiarly towards the great anatomist Georges Cuvier, murmuring in classroom French, “You are familiar with English compound cookery?” Cuvier cast him a look of bemusement and contempt, but still he had to elaborate. “It is performed between the jaws of the eater,” he had to add, “who spears a potato and a cabbage leaf with the same fork.”
He leans his head against the cushions. He’s still wearing the linen shirt of the night before – he smells tobacco and sweat, and something sickening exuding from his pores. He sent Tom out to the chemist’s, which prevents him bathing. The fire has gone out, the sitting room is cold, and he has rung the bell repeatedly. A taste lingers, the taste of a certain dish from the night before, which he tried unsuccessfully to throw up into the Seine on the way home. Lark, someone told him, lark in a most peculiar sauce. And now, what to write as his valediction to Paris? His vertigo rises. Very well, he’ll limit himself to the subject of William Buckland. He’ll write just that one moment in the reception hall: when Georges Cuvier swung his shaggy red curls in Henry’s direction (the head of an old-world bison) and said, “Tell me. Has your friend Buckland yet published an account of the fossils found in the Stonesfield quarries?” It was the massive thigh bone in the museum at Oxford that he meant, but other fossils as well. Apparently, Cuvier examined them in 1818 when he visited England – a piece of lower jaw with teeth, some vertebrae, fragments of pelvis, scapula, and hind limbs. Buckland had all of them in his possession. “They are, monsieur, the remains of a gargantuan land reptile, a whole new order of beast with no extant cousins.”
“Did you tell Buckland your opinion?”
“Of course. He concurred with me entirely. But I knew he would not publish! He will not dare to jeopardize his chair at Oxford with a finding so contrary to religion.”
Henry sits listening to shouts on the street below. He wants to be out of Paris. When they reach the outskirts tomorrow, he’ll stop the carriage and make a ceremony of shaking the dust from his feet. For now, he’ll write nothing but a record of bare fact, as prudent journalists do. He sits back down at the desk and dips his pen.
August 21
Cuvier’s salon. I was introduced to the celebrated M. Cuvier who invited me to dine with him and ordered his galleries of comparative anatomy to be open – a collection of human skulls – gradual approach to the monkey through the Hottentot.
He slides a blotter over his journal and goes back to the divan, where he lies down, lowering himself by degrees to prevent the room revolving. There’s a flurry on the landing outside the sitting room and Letitia comes in, followed by her mother and the maids. He hears them sorting out parcels. Letitia pauses by the divan. Henry lies still until she moves away. “It’s a lovely lace, maman,” she says, “but it was made in Nottinghamshire. You could have bought it at home for half the price.” Some minutes later, she’s standing over him again. “Henry,” she says. “Where is your cloak? Where is your hat? Mercer wants them to clean for the journey.”
“They’re gone,” Henry says without opening his eyes.
She makes an exasperated sound. “Get up!”
“I am desperately unwell, Letitia. Kindly leave me in peace.”
“How much wine did you drink last night?” She stands waiting for an answer. When none comes, she crosses the room to the landing. At the door, she stops. “Maman and I are going to the café. Then we’re walking up rue Violette to try to find a necklace like Mme Bournier’s.”
The door closes. On the landing, she delivers herself of a disgusted comment he can’t make out and her mother murmurs a reply.
It was a long way home in the dark, along the river for an hour or more and then past the Louvre and through the first arrondissement, still shaken from stumbling through the Great Hall in the dark, moving in and out of a wineish giddiness, the cold gradually penetrating his senses, rain soaking through his coat, the realization coming to him that his cape and hat and gloves lay in an anteroom back at the Muséum. You are starving with cold, Mary said, tenderly.
He had parted abruptly from the company during the tour, in a gallery at the centre of a maze of corridors. They were sixteen: the geologist Brongniart, the amiable Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (with whom Henry never managed to speak), Georges Cuvier’s long-clawed brother Frédéric, prancing in burgundy velvet, and a delegation of savants from Vienna, dressed as though to evoke necromancers. But no Jean Baptiste Lamarck – an Austrian murmured of a recent rift between Cuvier and Lamarck. As they entered the gallery, servants scurried around lighting sconces. “This collection is as yet inferior to certain collections of our German friends,” intoned Cuvier, “but serves to illustrate the same point.” The light came up to reveal a row of human skulls with tickets. The first was labelled européen, the second asiatique. Someone asked how brain capacity can best be measured. Mustard seed, Georges Cuvier said, and the party laughed.
Henry stared at the great curator’s own massive skull. There is not mustard enough in France, he thought. Then he turned back to the display and his eyes fell on the last skull in the row. It was the low-browed skull of an ape. They’re trying to provoke, Henry thought. Well, so could he. Cuvier-the-lesser was at his elbow. “So, man is of the same order as ape, is he?” Henry said.
Frédéric smirked. “A modest illustration of the Great Chain of Being, nothing more,” he said. But Henry saw something crafty in Frédéric’
s face, and he pressed the point.
“Your discussions regarding the transmutation of forms – do they extend to man?” he asked.
Frédéric recoiled. “Transmutation of forms? There is no such subject of discussion at the Jardin,” he said. He bowed and turned to another guest.
The great bison stood by a display case in his ornate brocade coat, holding court among the Austrians. Henry moved away from them, down the row of skulls. Under the second-to-last was fixed a ticket that said HOTTENTOTE. A queer sensation ran along Henry’s spine. There were four large engravings pinned to the wall opposite the display cases. Three were of apes and the fourth was a human female, certainly the woman he had seen as a youth in Piccadilly. She was portrayed naked with nothing to provide her with a modicum of modesty – not the apron, not the shell necklace. His eyes were drawn to the large areolas of her breasts. Henry walked towards the etching and stood before it. The woman stood facing the illustrator, her arms at her sides. The portrait was almost life-sized; viewer and subject were at eye level. Her eyes did not bear the anger he had seen in Piccadilly. Rather, he was struck by the comeliness of her face and by her look of sad appeal.
And then the group was moving to the next hall, Cuvier-the-lesser ushering them through double doors, and Henry was across the room in three paces and had his hand clamped to the man’s arm. Frédéric turned with an amused smile on his tapered face.
“Who is the woman pictured here?”
“La Vénus hottentote. Surely you know of her.”
“But what is her name?”
“Saartjie Baartman, I believe.”
“That’s a Dutch name.”
Frédéric offered an elaborate shrug.
“And this is her skull?”
“It is.” A little bow.
“How –?”
“We examined her here in 1815. She was being displayed by an animal trainer in rue St-Honoré. She was a dipsomaniac with a particular taste for gin, or so they said.”
