The Coral Thief (18 page)

11

N THE LIBRARY
of the Museum of Comparative Anatomy, my days disappeared into the minute tangles of Cuvier’s handwriting, which I copied out, page after page, or into the delicately inked lines that traced the plumage of birds, wing after wing and beak after beak.

After a week, once I had adjusted to the life of the museum and had come to know the assistants better, I took great pleasure in my work, especially when, after two or three weeks, Cuvier began to gave Sophie Duvaucel special assignments for me, because I was quick and my drawings were accurate. He had said, she told me, that I had a talent for the concise phrase when it came to describing the body parts of birds. It didn’t seem like any special kind of talent to me, I told her, and after all, given that she checked my French so carefully, any credit for my success belonged to her. Despite her evident pleasure in my remark, she told me that the Museum of Comparative Anatomy had more than enough sycophants and there were no vacancies for any more.

We were only, of course, a small part of the production line of Cuvier’s ambitious cataloguing and taxonomy project,
Le Règne animal
. We were only the illustrators and the scribes. Behind us a web of adventurers and field naturalists and missionaries and explorers stretched out to every corner of the world. On the front line, in the wet heat of the jungles of Sumatra or Madagascar or the East Indies or in the scrubland of New South Wales, Cuvier’s field assistants were hunting, shooting, and stuffing every new species they could find.

Missionaries and civil servants, diplomats and ambassadors sent Cuvier stuffed birds from every port in the world. The specimens came in by the boatload every few weeks, delivered to the Jardin gates by barges carrying crates of labeled boxes. The birds were of every color and shape imaginable, and each arrived with carefully recorded details of where it had been found and the contents of its stomach, and usually an anatomical drawing.

Cuvier’s praise of my work sometimes made things difficult for me with the other assistants. They said I was climbing the ladder more quickly than was fair. But when the pressure rose in the weeks leading up to the Dutch ambassador’s expected arrival in Paris—Ambassador Brugmans, they said, was going to take a large number of the stuffed birds and skeletons we were working with back to Holland—we all benefited from any special accuracy or efficiency, as Cuvier’s temper and impatience increased by the day.

From time to time Mme. Cuvier appeared in the library with her eleven-year-old daughter, Clementine, who liked to watch us or to sit and draw the stuffed birds lined up near the window. Clementine was a pious, even austere, child, dressed always in black, an enthusiastic member of the Ladies’ Bible Society and, with her governess, a regular visitor at the Hospital for Aged Women. She was already a talented anatomical illustrator and scribe. Her father had seen to that.

Mme. Cuvier had had a difficult time of it, the other assistants said. She was already a widow when Cuvier married her in 1803. Her husband, General Duvaucel, had been sent to the guillotine, leaving
her with four children and no money. And of the four children Cuvier himself had then fathered after their marriage, all of them except Clementine had died. The first, a boy, died a few days after he was born. A second, George, had died at the age of seven in 1813, and Anne had died in 1814, at the age of four. One of the Duvaucel boys had died too, caught in the cross fire when the French army had retreated from Portugal in 1809. So Mme. Cuvier had buried four of her eight children, and Cuvier still had no natural male heir, and male heirs were important among the dynasties of the Jardin.

There was, therefore, an air of protracted and strained mourning about the place. The work we did was mostly carried out in complete silence, following Cuvier’s instructions, except for the days on which both Cuvier and Clementine were absent from the building; then Sophie Duvaucel allowed us, even encouraged us, to talk while we worked. Sometimes she would even sing. Just for the sake of it, she said. Just to break the silence. I admired her energy. No one else could have kept us working for such long hours.

The assistants imitated Cuvier’s pronounced German accent, and behind his back they called him Herr Kufer, for, German by birth, he’d been christened not Georges Cuvier but Johan Kufer, the German word for “cooper,” a maker of barrels, buckets, and vats. Achille told me to keep quiet about that, since Cuvier didn’t like people to know. Apparently, it was when the young Johan Kufer, promising student at the university in Stuttgart, was appointed tutor to the twelve-year-old grandson of the Marquis d’Héricy in Normandy, that he had renamed himself Georges Cuvier in order to fit in to provincial French society.

Sometimes I even heard Sophie calling him Herr Kufer under her breath, usually when he was at his most despotic. She was very respectful, but I don’t believe she much liked her stepfather, although she admired him; sometimes she would raise an eyebrow just a little when Cuvier began the stories about his life that he so loved to tell his protégés. Those stories rather paled in repetition, and Cuvier always talked about his life as though he was dictating his memoirs.

In Normandy—Cuvier’s sycophantic secretary, Charles Laurillard, never tired of telling this story—Cuvier had been discovered by the brilliant local surgeon, Antoine Tessier, a Parisian abbot living in disguise in the countryside to escape the guillotine. Tessier, the story went, was so impressed by the young tutor’s extraordinary knowledge of natural history that he wrote excitedly to his friends in the Jardin des Plantes: “I have just found a pearl in the dunghill of Normandy.” Cuvier was summoned to Paris and appointed assistant professor at the Jardin.

And then there was Joseph Deleuze—old man Deleuze we called him—eccentric and obsessive, who joined us in mid-September in order to speed up the production of the bird volume ahead of Brugmans’s arrival. Deleuze had lived in the Jardin, in lodgings next to the museum, for twenty years. He led a kind of double life. In the Jardin he was a senior botanist who classified, catalogued, and illustrated plants. But outside the Jardin he was the president of the Magnetic Society and the author of
A Critical History of Animal Magnetism
, volume 1, which, he told me with pride, was enjoying some success in the expanding world of Parisian animal magnetists.

“Not enough of you young men take magnetism seriously,” he said when I smiled at the idea of a Magnetic Society. “You have closed minds. I was young when I saw my first magnetism, and like you, I was a skeptic. But there’s nothing occult about it. If we learn to harness magnetism properly, it will revolutionize medicine. You must come along to one of our meetings on the rue Rivoli. Or perhaps you would like to borrow some of the society journals?”

I liked old man Deleuze. However much he proselytized about magnetism, he knew everything there was to know about the Jardin.

Meanwhile, after several weeks in which Jagot’s man had not appeared, Lucienne was becoming increasingly reckless. Certain that the success of her disguise was the reason Jagot had called off the surveillance,
she continued to dress as a man outside the atelier, but she walked in daylight down the streets with me, and even came to meet me at the Jardin.

As Lucienne’s recklessness increased, so did my sense of foreboding. For me, Jagot’s absence was considerably more troublesome than his presence. I didn’t know what it meant and he still had my passport in his office. Although I knew I should petition for its return, I did not want a further conversation with the man. I resolved I would not need the passport until I left Paris, and I had no immediate intention of doing that.

Despite my protestations about her safety, Lucienne and I took a boat to the Jardin des Plantes on one of my rare holidays from the museum. It was a fine early-September morning. Our waterman picked his way among barges, colliers, and small trading boats, looking over his shoulder every few minutes to avoid rusty chain cables, floating wood, and buoys. Brown-green water slapped along the side of the stone quais and reflected river light played across brick walls and the underside of the arched metal bridges, where pigeons sat in rows.

“What happens next?” Lucienne asked the waterman.

“Pardon,
citoyen
?”

“Now that the emperor is gone?”

“I can tell you one thing, monsieur, for free: The new king will never do what the emperor did for Paris. Look at all the bridges, slaughterhouses, covered markets, the Canal de l’Ourcq, the covered passageways along the Right Bank. Paris needs him back.” Others in the boat nodded their agreement. A woman moved her child onto her lap, pulling her cloak about them both. “
Vive l’empereur,”
she said.

Walls and trees and the hulls of boats seemed to disappear below the scum and oil of the water’s surface. We sailed past the yards of boatbuilders and ship breakers, rusty anchors sticking up out of the mud, we heard the sounds of hammers against metal saws and clashing engines; watermen shouted to each other over the bulwarks. Gradually the gates of the Jardin came into view.

“Hanz and Marguerite, they called them,” she said, when we had disembarked and were standing among the tourists looking down the long garden to the natural-history museum. “Hanz and Marguerite, yes. The elephants they brought from the Netherlands, from the stadtholder’s menagerie.”

“I think they’re dead now,” I said.

“That’s sad,” she said. “They were famous all over France. You had to line up to see them. The keepers brought in musicians from the Conservatoire de musique to play to them and persuade them to mate.”

Lucienne handed a few coins to the man in the kiosk at the entrance to the menagerie, and we walked through the turnstile. At the top of a series of stone steps, men, women, and children were gathered around the bear pit, leaning forward over the railings to watch a brown bear climbing a tree trunk. Three other bears paced on the stone flagging below, swaying slightly.

To our left a crowd collected outside a large round building surrounded by a railed enclosure. Behind the black shiny hats and parasols a large gray mass moved back and forth, its elephant trunk reaching toward the crowd, who clapped and roared each time it swung in their direction. For a second I caught a glimpse of a large wet eye.