Curiosity (42 page)

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.

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.”

“Was it in this chamber that she was examined?”

“No. It was in the Pavilion, where there is room for the illustrators to set up their easels. We paid her trainer a pretty penny for three days. They promised us her full co-operation, but she refused our every question. She merely babbled in some barbaric
tongue and recited bits of verse in Dutch. She would not cease from coughing.”

“Was she naked throughout?”

“It was a scientific examination.”

“Did you not seek a doctor for her?”

Frédéric made an amused snort. “She took care of herself, that one. M. de Blainville offered her a gold napoleon if she would show her privates, but she defied him.” He planted a confiding hand on Henry’s arm and lowered his voice. “We had to wait until she died.”

Henry was filled with loathing of himself and of this man. He removed the hand. “There is nothing of science in this – it is prurience of a most disgusting sort!”

“
Cher ami
, you do not appreciate the science of it. You may wish to avail yourself of the entire display –” And he gestured to the cases at the centre of the room. Henry turned his head and saw in a glass case the fleshy petals of an elaborate tropical flower. Then understanding burned through him and he turned fiercely back on Frédéric. Frédéric met him with his guttersnipe eyes. “
Eh, bien
,” he shrugged, and went out through the double doors.

Henry turned and stumbled back the way they had come. Ahead of him, two servants moved down the corridor, extinguishing the lights. He put his hand out to the wall of the dim corridor to steady himself. And then the servants had vanished and he was alone, almost running, trying to retrace their way, although in fact he had no memory of leaving the dining room. He found himself in a great hall lined with animal skeletons. They loomed on either side, facing inwards as though to charge, gleaming from the light of the Paris night sky let in through high windows. He scurried along, keeping to the centre of the aisle, as a child who was afraid of shadows might. At the end, he spied a small passage, and threw himself down it, and that was worse,
it narrowed as though leading to a crypt. He leapt and shrieked as a door opened – it was a watchman with a massive key ring, letting in cold night air. At Henry’s insistence, the man let him out, and Henry stumbled into the night and wandered a long time in the maze of the garden, almost weeping with frustration, before he found an unlocked gate to the street.

It was freezing cold and gently raining. The street was still full of carriages. The bell at Notre-Dame rang midnight as he passed. Then he was at Pont Neuf, standing before a massive statue, the new king on horseback. He leaned over the balustrade, peering down at the black water smeared with the yellow reflections of torches through the rain. Pedestrians crossed continually beside him, brushing against him. A group of English in their long cloaks, silent. A lone gentleman, his walking stick tapping on the pavement. He thought he might be sick, he longed to be sick, but not here; he wanted to get down to the water’s edge. There was a wide stone balustrade built along the bank especially to prevent him, and a sharp ridge laid along the top of the balustrade for the intimate punishment of the man who tried to go over it one leg at a time. And then, somehow, he was over it and lurching down the bank. There at the water’s edge was the prone body of Sophie, lying on her front, her face turned to the side. She had been lying there all night. Her body was fringed with land crabs, crabs like ivory tea saucers climbing clumsily over each other in an effort to get at her. His mother sat sipping punch.
Poison
, she said.
She would have picked it in the jungle
.
Something only the Creoles know of
. He looked for his father, but his father was gone. It was Peter, the Igbo houseboy, who took his hand and led him stumbling back up to the bridge and across to the other side.

TWENTY-EIGHT

e was gone; that dangerous season of her life was over and done with. But the townsfolk never forgot. Walking up Broad Street on a windy April day, Mary encountered Mrs. Stock, the brim of her bonnet fouled from the blacking she smeared on her whitening curls. Mary refused to lower her gaze, and Mrs. Stock muttered something and stepped back elaborately to avoid passing too close.