AT THE JARDIN des Plantes, Rembrandt befriended one of the keepers, Monsieur Moussinac. No one knows the animals better, he thought, than the people who live in daily contact with them. Moussinac was assigned to the carnivores, and at a certain time of day he would stop by the zoo’s butcher and fill up his pushcart with chunks of meat. Donkey meat most of the time. Then he would push the cart to the area where all the big cats were located. Their cages were unlike the others. They were divided almost exactly in half, with a front part and a back part. The front was where the lions, tigers, cheetahs, or panthers appeared before the public. The cages were lined up next to one another and as a whole they formed a single structure, one big block, with a little door on the side. The smell of meat, the scent of blood, reawakened the beasts and aroused them. And putting on an exhibition of that sort, it would seem, was not considered suitable. The keeper entered the little door and walked down the long corridor, stopping in front of each of the cages and tossing through the bars one, two, or three chunks of meat. Moussinac knew the appetite of each of his animals. For one of them twenty pounds of meat a day might not be enough, while for another five pounds was more than sufficient. Just as each animal’s hunger was different, so was the manner of satisfying it, Monsieur Moussinac explained to Rembrandt. One might set aside its ration to consume it in solitude during the night, while another would pounce on it immediately, tearing into it until its teeth found no more bone, and then walk away. There were even some who pounced on a bone with their jaws, picked it clean, gnawed on it, licked it, and broke it into pieces to get to the marrow. But all of them, once they had finished their meal, assumed an expression of resigned, calm sadness.
One morning Rembrandt, having appeared early in the morning, as usual, before the gate to the zoo, found it closed. On that day no one was allowed in. “They’re waiting for the gendarmes,” Monsieur Moussinac explained. The night before, a man had hidden in the big warehouse where the zoo equipment was kept and waited until closing time. After dark he left his hiding place and, with the help of a ladder he found in the warehouse, he lowered himself into the bear’s den. Maybe during the day he had seen someone toss a coin into the den. Maybe he had chosen that awful manner to end his days. Moussinac described to Rembrandt how he had discovered the man’s body in the cage. He was lying on his back, with his chest ripped open from neck to belly. The ladder was still leaning against the wall of the den.
The bear, thought Rembrandt to himself, did not take advantage of that ladder to return to freedom.
II
A blue enamel plaque affixed to the wall by the foot of the stairs indicated in white capital letters the availability of EAU & GAZ À TOUS LES ÉTAGES. Rembrandt Bugatti climbed the few steps that led to the mezzanine, the location of his lodgings, which also served as his studio. By that point Bugatti could consider himself satisfied with his artistic career. He had become a rather well known sculptor in France, Italy, and Belgium. But to do so he had had to overcome no small amount of misunderstanding, of skepticism.
The first obstacle had been the wishes of his father, who had envisioned a career as an engineer for him. As a railroad engineer, to be exact. There were already more than enough artists in the family. He changed his mind only on the day that he found, beneath a damp cloth in his studio, a terracotta group—a cowherd leading three cows—which Rembrandt, who was not even fifteen at the time, had modeled with his own hands.
And then there was the lack of enthusiasm shown by Adrien-Aurelién Hébrard, the owner of the art gallery on Rue Royale 8 and of the foundry where Bugatti had cast, by the lost wax method, the animals that he had modeled in Plasticine. According to Hébrard, it was the boy’s last name that had intimidated him, since it evoked too much glory, too much art.
Nevertheless, journalists and critics began, as the years went by, to take notice of him and to consider, first with respect and then with admiration, the works he created. A few of them sensed the exceptional nature of the relationship between Rembrandt and his models. What distinguishes the talent of Monsieur Bugatti, they wrote, is his exact knowledge of the habits and behavior of animals: he seems to have lived with them, to understand their every movement and expression. Other critics boldly remarked that Rembrandt Bugatti loved animals not only as an artist, but also as a human being, with a love that verged on tenderness. It was therefore the man who helped the sculptor to grasp all the feelings that animals are able to manifest and to distinguish between their feelings—anger, affection, motherly love—as if they were human beings. If there was so much talk about him, they wrote, it was because the animals by this sculptor did not remotely resemble the efforts made by other artists thus far. And if one critic emphasized how in Bugatti there was a conscientious study of their flesh, a sharper perception of their skin, of their feathers, another would underline how it was thanks to his courage, his willpower, and also his patience that his achievement was there for all to see.
REMBRANDT STOOD BY the door. He slipped the key into the lock and went in. His portrait was hanging on a wall, inside a thin, dark, wooden frame. I have to decide whether or not to remove it, he thought.
The portrait was by André Taponier, the famous photographer. His atelier on Rue de la Paix had received not only some of the crowned heads of Europe but also a great many writers, artists, actors, politicians, and aristocrats, who would come to sit complacently for their portraits.
In the photograph, Rembrandt is dressed in his customary impeccable manner: a dark gray, double-breasted jacket with black silk trim on the cuffs and pocket flaps, a white shirt with a wing collar and the top buttons unbuttoned, a loosely knotted tie, and pearl-gray trousers. When he looked at the photograph Rembrandt could not help but think of Consul, the chimpanzee.
The story of Consul was a miserable affair that someone had related to him. It seemed that Consul used to go around wearing a tuxedo and donning a top hat on his head. He was well-mannered and elegant, ate and drank politely, patting his thick lips dry with a napkin that he would then replace on his knees. He had a small, graceful apartment with a furnished dining room, in the English style, as they say, a quite comfortable bedroom, and, finally, a bathroom with a chimpanzee-sized bathtub. They say that he had many interests but that the races were his greatest passion. Every year, on the first Saturday in June, he would attend the Epsom Derby, but without ever going so far as to wager a bet. A few years earlier, when the Olympic Games were held in London, the Daily Mail had launched a fund-raising drive so the city could offer the best possible accommodations to the athletes, who were coming from every corner of the world. Consul did not fail to pledge his own support, sending in a check for one guinea, signed by his own hand.
AT THE CIRQUE Molier, in Passy, on the western outskirts of Paris, Bugatti witnessed something one night that gave him a sense of malaise and also great pain. It was a cross between a conference, an experiment, a demonstration, and what in the circus world is called a “number.” (Bugatti didn’t usually go to the circus, but this one time he made an exception.) Professor Pierre Hachet-Souplet, director of the Institut de Psychologie Zoologique, was at the podium.
The Institut’s offices were near the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, which was located, like the zoo, inside the Jardin des Plantes. It is there that the professor normally held what he insisted on calling his “lessons.” Sometimes, however, the halls of the Institut, which were small and dimly lit, were not big enough. More space was needed, as well as an actual ring. So Hachet-Souplet, together with his young assistants, moved to the circus. Not to the grand Cirque Medrano, but rather to the more discrete Molier.
Professor Hachet-Souplet had studied the Greek and Roman classics and published a few poems, as well as an essay on Stéphane Mallarmé. Then he started to study what he called “Techniques of Animal Faculties.” To delve in deeper he wanted to learn in detail the practices adopted by professional trainers. He reached the conclusion that “in general, the better trained an animal is, the freer it
is.” In his opinion, every action learned during taming pivoted on hunger and fear, or on both at the same time: to allow the trainer to come close, the animal has to know the desire and the need to eat food; to take its distance from the whip, it must know pain.
One day Rembrandt came across an issue of the quarterly bulletin published by the Institut de Pyschologie Zoologique. It featured two studies by Professor Hachet-Souplet. The first was titled, “Animals in Front of the Mirror”: a half dozen pages, complete with illustrations, in which the professor explained that all mammals, large and small, require training in order to recognize themselves in a mirror. The director of the Institut gave the example of an old lioness that, seeing its image reflected in a mirror, became ferocious, bared its teeth in anger, and started to roar. It was only after a few attempts—“forty-five,” to be exact—that it managed to recognize itself. Similar experiments—“all with the same encouraging result”—had been conducted at the Institut’s laboratories on other animals—a bear, a tapir, a young zebra—and also on some birds: night herons, egrets, and pigeons. Although, with regard to this last species, the professor had to admit in all honesty that, “they take time to recognize themselves, and even then I’m not so sure that they do.”
In the longer and more detailed study, Hachet-Souplet returned to the more general question of training and focused his attention on the “trainer’s voice.” He wrote that in training, the voice, and in particular its tone, played a very important “impulsive or moderating” role. During the training sessions, the voice has to go through a whole range of intonations, “from cheerful encouragement to loud cavernous shouts.” According to the professor the various nuances of tone had to be applied wisely: the voice served, depending on the occasion, to caress or to castigate. And particular attention should be paid to pronouncing and articulating words very clearly: “Commands must be short,” he concluded, “it’s useless to attempt long conversations with animals.”
SO ONE AFTERNOON, Bugatti decided to attend one of these conferences, or rather lectures, that Hachet-Souplet gave at the Cirque Molier at irregular intervals, but at a minimum of two or three times a year.
The Molier had a small, covered riding ring inside a sturdy, luxurious building with wood plank floors and globe lights which hung from the ceiling. The gallery ran all along the walls and had a parapet with short thin columns making it look more like the balustrade of a terrace or an Andalusian balcony than the bleachers of a circus. The ring was surrounded by a raised divider covered in red velvet, like a sofa. Rembrandt found a seat among the public, in the first-floor gallery, close to the back row. On his face he wore the tense and restless expression that only a state of physical indisposition or apprehension could create.
A few days later Rembrandt would give his brother Ettore a desolate description of what he had witnessed that afternoon.
“It was nauseating,” he said, “a disgrace!”
Ettore was the only person whose advice Rembrandt sought, and the only one in whom he regularly confided.
“A truly abject spectacle,” continued Rembrandt. “Ernest Molier, the owner of the circus, appeared in the ring and announced that Professor Hachet-Souplet would be arriving shortly. Before he came on two acrobats performed, dancing and doing a high-wire routine. Molier, in order to introduce the number or maybe only to buy some time and allow the professor and his students to complete all the preparations for their performance, took the floor, entertaining the audience with a speech on the intelligence of animals. From ants to monkeys. The usual stories. In his comments on ants, he brought up Montaigne, who had frequently, he claimed, praised their amazing organizational abilities. He started to cite, one by one, lizards, ostriches, bears, bees, elephants (mainly to assert that the notions of big and little are not absolute concepts, but have meaning only in relationship to humans) and fleas, in which he saw not only the gift of intelligence, but also the capacity to employ, when the need arose, an incredible muscular force. Then he expounded on the behavior of spiders, celebrating what he called their magnificent and mysterious webs; ended his disquisition by mentioning crows and their ability to mimic the sounds of dogs, roosters, and tree frogs, the patriarchal habits of mice and their vivid, penetrating gaze, and concluded, finally, with an encomium of cats, which can open closet doors by themselves. After which he invited the professor to come to the ring. Hachet-Souplet arrived, made a bow of sorts, thanked Molier for the opportunity being granted to him once again, and also ventured to say a few words before beginning his number. A few words that sounded to me almost like a defense, though uttered in a haughty and peremptory tone. ‘Training,’ he shouted, addressing the audience, ‘is a systematic, total fight against laziness. The idea of taming might not be agreeable to those who are almost hypnotized by the word freedom, the tamers of the sentimental school, shall we call it that, but the truth is that, as a rule, the better trained animals are, the freer they are, while if it were up to them, they would exert the least muscular and mental effort.’ He went on to conclude that, ‘Excellent training cannot but include, inevitably, excellent discipline.’”
Ettore listened to Rembrandt’s story, nodding distractedly and without comment. Anyway his thoughts, for a few months now, had been focused mainly on the “Hermès vehicle,” a prototype that carried a four-cylinder engine with a 140mm cylinder bore and a 160mm stroke, two valves per cylinder and the camshaft in the front. He couldn’t shake the idea, which he talked about—as a journalist from the Gazzetta dello Sport wrote—with such enthusiasm that he already seemed to be going sixty miles an hour.
The only animals my brother is interested in are steam horses, Rembrandt once remarked, more resigned than displeased, in one of the only witty remarks that ever escaped his lips.
“After that Hachet-Souplet called his assistant,” Rembrandt continued his story, “and I was stuck watching first a rabbit playing the drums, and then a kangaroo, or maybe a bear, riding a tricycle. Nothing new. The audience applauded that travesty, of course. But the next scene was beyond the pale. From out of the darkness came another of the professor’s assistants, bringing on a leash four animals that from a distance looked like dogs. In reality they were four jackals that jumped rope, walked upright on their hind legs, and in the end danced the waltz. It was disgusting, intolerable. I stood up and left.”
A spectacle of this sort depressed Rembrandt. One day he listened to Foujita, a Japanese artist who lived in Paris and drew female nudes, still lifes, and cats, describing the miniature theaters in his country where trained birds would perform. Birds that play miniature musical instruments, Foujita assured him, fence with microscopic swords, ride on little wooden horses, walk a tightrope while holding a tiny umbrella in their beaks. Once I saw with my own eyes, in one of those theaters, a courtroom of canaries administering justice. The trial was for a canary accused of desertion. But the most extraordinary thing, he added, happened after the judges issued their sentence, the death penalty, while the canary deserter listened stiffly in his blue military-style frock coat: another canary wearing a miniature black hood appeared on the scene and executed him, cutting off his head!
IN HIS APARTMENT on Rue Joseph-Bara, Rembrandt did not have a single pet. Not a dog, not a cat, not even a bird. Perhaps he could no longer bear the sight of human beings and animals living in close confinement. Years before, when he had just arrived in Paris from Milan, he lived with his father and mother on Rue Jeanne-d’Arc and had his studio at a short distance, on Rue Duméril. On more than one occasion, on his way home, he chanced upon a little man taking a walk followed by a pack of dogs of every size and breed.
The man was Maurice Boissard, someone told him one day. He was the theater critic for the Mercure de France and lived on the Passage Stanislas, in a house filled with animals. Every night he would go out wearing a misshapen hat on his head and a filthy overcoat. He was taking his dogs out to do their business. And he often spoke with them.
One night Bugatti witnessed a fight
between Boissard and a passerby. One of his dogs must have bitten the man’s leg. The man started screaming, cursing and complaining about the pain. The critic from the Mercure de France, when Bugatti approached, also started to shout and to hurl abuse. “You, sir, are a peasant and a lout!” he said, looking at Rembrandt for approval.
THE ONLY ANIMALS that did share Rembrandt’s studio on Rue Duméril for a few months were two small antelopes from Senegal, a male and a female. They were sent to him one day by Michel L’Hoëst, the director of the Antwerp zoo, entrusting them to his care. It’s not that there were no antelopes at the Jardin des Plantes. It’s that Rembrandt wanted to work particularly on the two animals he had gotten to know in Antwerp and whose life behind bars he had long observed.
“They’ll stay with me for a little while,” he told his mother, “they’re just a little bit bigger than a dog.”
Madame Bugatti bent down, her nose almost touching the fur on the back of one of the antelopes. “But they have a nauseating smell,” she said, then added, “Well, if it makes you happy.”
With a few light taps on their necks, Rembrandt drove the two animals up the stairs. That same night he started working on the antelopes. No preliminary sketches, no rough outlines on paper. As was his custom. Rembrandt observed them, observed them a second time, and then observed them again. But this time there were no cages, there were no bars. He watched them roaming around the studio, sniffing in the corners, licking the few sticks of furniture, chewing at the stuffing of an old sofa, beating their hooves on the floor. He contemplated them while they nibbled on the lettuce leaves, small green apples, corncobs, and carrots that filled the bathtub, which had been transformed into their trough. Rembrandt had also arranged some straw in a corner of the studio. They’ll sleep on it, he thought. He called one of them simply “the little one,” to distinguish her from the male, who was slightly bigger (Rembrandt didn’t want to give them names, since he considered names one of those things that, in the relationship between man and animal, serves the useless purpose of humanizing the beasts). Well, the little one huddled in front of the door and, ever since that moment, fell asleep every night in that same spot. The two antelopes of Senegal would stay at Rue Duméril from June to September, after which they returned to their cage in Antwerp.
The Animal Gazer Page 2
