Curiosity (41 page)
Colonel Birch was in his big chair in the drawing room. Mary was struck by the streaks of colour running down his massive moustaches, as though the iron hull of his cheeks were rusting. She could tell at a glance that he was in a fine, dignified humour, and her fear drained out of her – it would be like the day when she came with her mother. He reached forward and gravely handed her the catalogue from the sale. It was a twelve-page booklet printed on cream-coloured paper. On the flyleaf was the engraving of the strange shrimp-like creature she had once found on the tide flats below town. There was a list of every item, with flattering descriptions. Colonel Birch told her she might keep this catalogue, that he had brought this copy for her. He directed her to read the text at the front of it and she sat on the settle and read out:
A small but very fine collection of organised fossils, from the Blue Lias Formation, At Lyme and Charmouth, in Dorsetshire, consisting principally of Bones, Illustrating the Osteology of the Ichthio-saurus, or Proteo-saurus, and of specimens of the Zoophyte, called Pentacrinite, the genuine property of Colonel Birch, Collected at considerable expense.
She read the rules for the sale and the list of items right through while Colonel Birch dozed. Then tea was brought in and, while they drank it, he told her the story of the auction from beginning to end. Buyers had come from as far away as Paris and Vienna. The sale had been dominated by a man in a velvet jacket, who bought the Ichthyosaurus head and numerous other
pieces, who bid by touching his index finger to his left nostril, a finger with a long nail sharpened like a file. A stranger to the others in the room – but he had money behind him. He was certainly the agent for someone of consequence. For the Ichthyosaurus skull alone, he paid one hundred guineas! Colonel Birch conspired to be in his path in the foyer afterwards and boldly inquired whom the man represented.
Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert
, the man said in the outlandish way that Frenchmen speak. Colonel Birch looked at Mary triumphantly and she stared back. “Cu-vi-er,” he bleated, and she felt a thrill go through her to think that the great Monsieur Cuvier would be studying her collection. And a sadness that her collection was all disbursed, sent out across many lands, those creatures that had all died here at Lyme Regis.
Then Colonel Birch made a ceremony of handing her the pouch. He seemed to be searching for words that would make an event of it, but finally settled for the prosaic. “With best wishes for the health and prosperity of the Annings,” he said. “From their humble friend and servant Colonel Thomas Birch, S.S.” He held her eye. “A sinner saved.”
Some of the money was paper, and then there was a sack of gold sovereigns. “They must pay in guineas at such a sale,” Colonel Birch explained, “and the auctioneer changes the coin to sovereigns or pound notes, whatever he has to hand, and keeps the extra shilling for his fee.” The sovereigns had a head of the king on one side, dead now in the material sense of the word, and on the other, Saint George slaying the dragon – a dragon with pleated wings that folded like a parasol, and a muzzle and paws like a dog.
“Go ahead, my dear, reckon it up,” he said. “It is all there, every pence, less your last quarter’s rent.” And though it seemed rude to do so, she did, for she was dying to know the sum and he
seemed to want the pleasure of watching her look through the money. She sorted the coins and bills by kind and added them up, her heart pounding. Even without the last quarter’s rent, it came to almost four hundred pounds.
They took their supper in the dining room, served by a silent, flat-faced girl. They ate a whole pike with a pudding in its belly, and venison pasties. It was a supper fit for a king. The sweetmeats were served in a porcelain dish with three sections like three seashells and a fish tail in the centre for a handle. How Lizzie would adore it! Back in the drawing room, they drank Madeira from the vessel with the duck swimming in the stream. With her glass in her hand, Mary roamed the drawing room. She stood by the fire, and it warmed her stomach and thighs and cast an orange light on her apron. She had not been warm that winter. It was such a fire as they would never have at home, even now, with hundreds of pounds. In Colonel Birch’s house, it was possible to believe that the sea did not exist, and Black Ven. She saw herself in a house such as this, with a lace cap on her head. Everything in the room was beautified by the firelight. She knew her own beauty, just at that moment. She saw it without a looking glass, without Henry’s glowing eyes on her, the firelight gleaming off her dark hair, her eyes that gathered up all the light in the room.
On a table at Mary’s end of the settle was an ornament of the languid body of Jesus, laid out dead, his mother leaning weeping over him and two plump angels floating at her shoulders, one of them holding up its hand as though to say,
Do not come near
. And she had to think of Lizzie, who would never see this room filled with tender light. Sadness for Lizzie welled up, tears stung her eyes – tears for herself too. She tried to breathe steadily, in
through her nostrils. She was like the flowers in the tidal pools that moved their fringes at unseen currents, curling up at the slightest touch.
Colonel Birch sat with one foot on a stool, his head tipped back against the cushions. There would be no more lewd demonstrations, he would do nothing to hold her. The fine gentlemen had overpaid for the fossils – fair market value did not always rule. She had the money bag tied to her waist and she was free to go. But the drink that had been travelling a journey from her throat to her stomach rose and warmed her mind at just that moment, and so she went and sat on the hassock beside his chair, holding her glass of Madeira.
“Why did you collect the old bones, sir?” she asked.
He smiled, showing his sturdy young teeth. His moustache did not move when he smiled. It betrayed his inner expression, which was sadness, like hers. “It’s the mystery, I reckon,” he said. “Something lost, turned to stone.”
“What happened to all these creatures, that we never see their type no more?”
“Mayhap they all died,” he said. “Mayhap they became something else.”
“That is what I wish to know,” she said. “Can a creature be changed into something else?”
She waited a long time for his answer, then she saw that he was asleep, his head tipped to the side and his mouth loosely open. His chest rose and fell with his breath. The firelight glowed on his cheeks, on his flesh, the something on his skull that was other than bone and would not endure. A shutter banged and Colonel Birch started. “The latch wants fixing,” she said. His eyelids slid down again. She reached a hand over and touched her fingers lightly to his temple. “The latch,” she said again. “It is the sort of thing that
I would take in hand.” He peered at her, awake now. She saw in his pale eyes that he understood – he did not assume she was offering to join his employ as a housemaid.
His hand, dangling off the arm of the chair, reached blindly for her leg and found it, pressed the calf of her leg through her skirt. “It could never be, my dear,” he said. His voice was kind. “For all my fondness – and I am very fond of you – there are proprieties.” He sat and looked at the fire and then his hand dropped and he fell back into his doze.
She turned away from him and got up. She went back to the fireplace and leaned her head against the mantel. There were proprieties to her heart, her heart had proprieties, and she would have flouted them. For the fire, just for that, to be warm every night.
TWENTY-SEVEN
July 9, Paris
We are installed on rue de la Paix in lodgings that are anything but peaceful, but were recommended by Professor Buckland. While this is not the hotel preferred by my mother-in-law, it is very near the Opera, which pleases just as much. All signs of the revolution, all Napoleonic insignia, have been removed. It is Royale-this and Royale-that, everywhere. Yesterday, eager for exercise and missing the shores and lanes of Dorsetshire, I walked as far as the Jardin du Roi, the vast grounds of which are open to the public. I wandered at length through the gardens, foreign trees and bushes sheltering foreign beasts, and listened to the peacocks screaming. Before leaving, I delivered my letter of introduction from Doctor Leach to a Monsieur Royer, who seemed suitably impressed by the seal of the curator of the British Museum, and indicated to me that an invitation from M. Cuvier would be forthcoming. He encouraged me to visit the exhibition halls of the museum as an ordinary sightseer, but I believe I will rest on my privilege and wait for a tour by the great man himself.
As for the city, which I explore daily (most often alone, as L. continues unwell), I have never seen a patch of ground where the impulses of nature have been so utterly stifled – whether by the outright razing of trees, or by tortured topiary which allows to no humble shrub the exercise of its own will, or by gardens laid out as an operation in geometry, grass replaced entirely by shingle. One cannot but think of the verdant tumble of foliage in the Undercliff. Here nature asserts itself only in the unpaved streets, when rain transforms the thoroughfare into a muddy channel.
July 11
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 but 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.
