The Coral Thief (16 page)

“I’ve written to Cuvier and sent him the letters from Jameson. He wrote back yesterday. It was easy. I have an appointment with him at three o’clock on Monday, and then on Tuesday I start work. I wish it was sooner. There are so many things I want to discuss with him.”

“A week today,” she said. “
Bon
. A new beginning for Daniel Connor. Yes, that is good. Where will you work? For how long?”

“Seven hours a day. Monday to Saturday. In the Museum of Comparative Anatomy. I have my own desk. I am to go to Cuvier’s own study for the appointment. He writes that he is overwhelmed with the work for his new book.”

“Bon,”
she said. “That’s very good. You are lucky. You will learn many things in Cuvier’s house.”

“He is writing a catalogue of the whole animal kingdom,” I said, “which will include a description of every species in the world. No wonder he is overwhelmed. It’s the most ambitious project since Buffon’s
Historie Naturelle
. Just think—all the species on earth will be collected in those pages.” It thrilled me to imagine my own name listed among others on the title page of one of those volumes.

“All the species that have been
discovered,”
she said. “That is not the same as all the species on earth. It seems a strange thing to be cataloguing species when there are so many important questions to be answered—like how life began or why species change. Cuvier still wants to prove that species are fixed.”

“I am to work on the bird volume,” I said, slightly offended by her disparagement of Cuvier’s work. “That is where I will begin. With the birds. The volume is progressing, but it is behind schedule, apparently. He needs more assistants.” Although I was beginning to question everything I had ever known, even the definition of species, the full implications of transformism still alarmed me. Without belief in order and structure and providence, where would we be? The imagined godlessness of such a world frightened me.

“And by the time you begin your work with the Baron,” she said, “I will be back in my study in Italy, among my books and papers.”

“The end of the summer,” I said. In an instant, thinking of the loss
of her, what had seemed important dulled into insignificance. “Stay in Paris till the end of the summer. Till the leaves have fallen. Jagot can’t find you. He has too much to do and too few men. You are not in danger now.”

And Lucienne smiled that slow smile of hers that said she knew better. But she promised to stay just a little longer, and in that last week before my work began in the Jardin, as the days shortened and the gardeners tended late-summer roses, she showed me the Paris she remembered—her Paris: rooftops, hidden coffee shops and bars by the river,
traiteurs
that sold the best fish in Paris for a few sous, abandoned pleasure grounds and old palaces. One afternoon we lay in the bottom of a boat under a willow tree for hours in the sun talking about the circulation of the blood, spontaneous generation, and the colors of the corals on the seabed off the coast of Egypt.

Fin and Céleste never tired of asking me about Mme. Rochefide, the beautiful widow—what she wore, whom she saw, what she did. When I could, I made things up, though doing so made me feel uncomfortable. I’d never been much good at lying. But I had no choice. I was always vague about the street on which she lived. Eventually, Fin began to goad me, persuaded by my evasiveness, saying that Mme. Rochefide was not a widow after all, and that there must be a jealous husband waiting in the wings.

10

N AUGUST
27, in a new sky-blue coat I had bought for the occasion, I stood outside Cuvier’s house in the Jardin, clutching the mammoth bone in its case and the manuscript, waiting for the bells to sound out the hour of my appointment. All the shutters were closed against the hot afternoon sun. A family of French visitors had laid white tablecloths across picnic tables in the shade of the plane trees. Women in straw bonnets passed children plates of small cakes and poured glasses of milk from earthenware jugs. Beyond them and beyond the latticework wooden fence that surrounded all the enclosures in the Jardin, a gardener pruned white roses.

The woman who opened the door introduced herself as Cuvier’s stepdaughter, Sophie Duvaucel, a tall, handsome, but tired-looking young woman who worked as Cuvier’s assistant and one of his many illustrators. From the hallway I glimpsed a series of rooms with polished floorboards, full of books, vases of flowers, and richly colored rugs.

She took me up a flight of stairs. I followed her through a long library
broken up into a suite of rooms, each containing works on a single subject—osteology, law, ornithology—and then to the door of Cuvier’s studio. This was his famous sanctum sanctorum where he wrote his books and thought his thoughts and solved the puzzles of time and origins.

“No one is allowed in here,” Sophie whispered as she pushed the heavy door open, “except by invitation. Not even the
aide-naturalistes
.”

The room—dark and shuttered and with eleven desks arranged around the walls—was scattered with bones, books, and papers. Cuvier sat behind his desk like an eastern sultan receiving a dusty foreign envoy in his inner chamber. Yes, I had traveled a long way, I thought, with these gifts. More than he could know.

It was a little hard to breathe.

Cuvier was impressive: his bulk, his bearing, his clothes, even his head of thick, loose curls, flecked with gray. He had the bearing of a man of state; his dark blue tailcoat was decorated with medals.

If the short welcome speech seemed rehearsed, I did not mind, but I did mind the fact that in the full ten-minute interview, Cuvier barely looked at me. I knew I was one of many scores of
aide-naturalistes
who had stood where I was now standing, but I had persuaded myself that, as a protégé of Jameson, as the Edinburgh student specially selected and commended most highly for his skills of dissection and observation, who had been sent bearing gifts for the great French professor, I would be regarded as a particularly important arrival. It seemed it was not so. Cuvier was distracted, a little impatient, although he managed a certain degree of warmth in his welcome and in his handshake. He spoke in French with a pronounced German accent. His voice was tight, a little constricted, a small voice for such a big man.

“I trust your health has returned in full?” he asked, looking at me warily for signs of weakness. “Mlle. Duvaucel says you have been quite ill since you have been in Paris. We need young men who have strong constitutions. Your eyes are good, I trust.”

“I am entirely well again, monsieur, I assure you,” I said, hoping my
manners were good enough when translated into French. “I am eager to begin work. To be of use. And my eyesight is excellent.”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Good. That is good. Jameson speaks highly of you.”

I had prepared a short speech on behalf of Jameson, but once Cuvier had asked about the reception of his new book,
Discours préliminaire
, in England, made a few complimentary remarks about Jameson and inquired about his health, he dismissed me. When I hesitated, holding out the case containing the mammoth bone, muttering a phrase or two about comparative anatomy, Jameson, and the new relations between France and England, he even waved me away. Sophie gently took the case from me, laid it on the table nearest her, and opened the door.

“Don’t take it personally, M. Connor,” she whispered, as we walked back through the library. “My stepfather is a very busy man. You won’t see much of him. He has a great deal to do for this new book, and he has many responsibilities in France now that the king is back. So you must never take anything personally. All of us who work with him have learned that. The work is good. It brings its own rewards … The blue jacket,” she added, “it’s very fine. But the professor prefers his assistants to dress in more somber colors. Black or brown is fine.” She smiled.

And so it was that, the following day, I finally began work as
aide-naturaliste
to Professor Cuvier in the library of the Museum of Comparative Anatomy in the Jardin des Plantes. The work was painstaking and laborious and seemingly without end. There were ten of us working that summer on the bird volume of Cuvier’s
Règne animal;
eleven, if you counted Sophie Duvaucel, who worked alongside us. We worked at desks arranged in a long row in the library near the windows. The other
aide-naturalistes
, apart from Sophie, were all young men in their twenties, but it was with Achille and Joseph that I dined
in the Jardin café every day. Achille Valencienne had been born in Paris and had published a paper on parasitic worms; Joseph Risso, from Nice, had published a book on the ichthyosaurs of the region and had begun a study of the natural history of oranges. Neither of them was particularly interested in birds, but they were Cuvier’s assistants and so they did what they were told.

Being Cuvier’s
aide-naturaliste
was an apprenticeship. And it was competitive; we were all under pressure to perform. What Achille and Joseph both wanted was a posting out to India or up into the Himalayan mountains or to Sumatra to collect specimens for the museum. However, no one was assigned to fieldwork until they had done the graft, learned the craft, earned their spurs, or so they said. And in the autumn of 1815, because of Cuvier’s new volume, earning your spurs meant birds—bird illustration, bird description, and bird taxonomy. Alfred Duvaucel, Cuvier’s stepson and Sophie’s younger brother, was next in line for a posting, according to Achille and Joseph. He was going to Chandannagar with Pierre-Médard Diard. These two young men had finished working in the library and were now learning taxidermy in the laboratory on the other side of the Jardin. They would have to be able to stuff birds out in the wet heat of India, on the banks of the Ganges. They were a good deal farther down the line than Achille and Joseph.

I longed for a conversation with Cuvier about embryological questions, but I barely saw him. As a newly appointed councillor of state he had many official engagements that took him away from the museum, and as Achille explained, mocking my optimism, it was not Cuvier’s way to have conversations with his assistants about anything, even if he had had the time to do so.

“You are merely an illustrator and a scribe, M. Connor,” Achille postured, imitating Cuvier’s German accent. “A humble foot soldier in the long march toward knowledge. You must not get ideas above your station. And you will leave the philosophical questions to the professors. Facts, M. Connor, facts are what is needed. We will have no speculation here.”

I carried on honing my questions just the same, and when the work was particularly laborious and myopic, I reminded myself of the important part I was playing in shaping Cuvier’s magnum opus; I hoped eventually to attract the notice of the professor, not only through my diligence but also through the precision and speed of my descriptions. I imagined that one day I might ask him a question so dazzling that he would be bound to summon me into his office to
talk
.

I began to work longer hours than the other assistants. Despite my impatience to see Lucienne, I was often the last to leave. The trouble was that now I couldn’t separate Cuvier’s taxonomic questions from Lucienne’s speculative ones. The hours I spent on bird taxonomies ensured that. Why, I wanted to ask, are there so many minute variations in the claw structures of birds from very similar subspecies and from close but distinct habitats? The facts would not stay as facts; they kept transforming into difficult questions about divergence and variation. I took those questions to Lucienne Bernard’s bed in the locksmith’s atelier, where I was given more controversial answers and rather different scientific books and papers to read than Professor Cuvier might have given me.