The Coral Thief (20 page)

“So there is some proof,” I said, “that Cuvier’s right? The mummies were the same then and now. So species haven’t transformed.” The cat sitting on the roof beside me in Paris was the same as the cat on the roof in Egypt three thousand years ago—four legs, whiskers, a long tail. It was obvious. A cat was a cat was a cat.

“Of course they haven’t changed,” she said, “not in three thousand years. Lamarck knew that. Animal forms take much longer to change. Three thousand years is nothing. Just a blink of the eye, Lamarck told Cuvier that, but nobody listened.”

“And how do you square that with Genesis?”

“What do you mean, ‘square it’?”

“Make it … fit, add up. Bring one thing in line with another.”

“Bring one thing in line with another?” she repeated. “I don’t need to. Science isn’t about making things fit with the Bible. Genesis was written two thousand years ago by men who didn’t know what we know. They weren’t trying to explain how the world began, not scientifically. It’s a creation story. A good one. But there are others. In Egypt they say air and water, darkness and eternity joined to form a blue lotus called Ra. In Syria they say—”

“So the Bible’s not true. Are you saying that?” I could see the pulse beating in her neck. I watched it quicken.

“It’s always a battle with the Bible.” She sighed. “It shouldn’t be. But Lamarck’s ideas about transformism keep spreading across Europe whatever Cuvier says or does, no matter how much he insists that all species are fixed and unchanging. No matter how many times he insists there’s no proof of transformism. All the students who sit at his lectures, they go back to Hungary or Brazil or Russia and they talk.”

“How long have you been thinking about all of this?” I asked.

“Me? Thousands of years. It is the only interesting thing to think
about. In my grandmother’s library, I read Buffon. Then Aristotle and De Maillet’s book
Telliamed …
. Later, when I came to Paris, I signed up for Lamarck’s lectures. That was when he first started talking about transformism—1802, 1803, I think. It was exciting—everyone was speculating about how life began. Everything seemed possible. When Daubenton gave his lecture and announced that the lion could no longer be called the king of beasts because there were no kings in nature, the crowd cheered. You could say anything then. Think anything. Not anymore.”

Professor Lamarck, now seventy-one—the anatomy students called him “the Old One,”
el Viejo—
kept to himself in his house in the Jardin des Plantes, where he lived with his third wife and four of his grown children: three unmarried daughters, Rosalie, Cornélie, and Eugénie, and a deaf son, Antoine, who was also a painter. Little Aristide, Lamarck’s youngest son, had been sent away to the Charenton asylum, six miles southeast of Paris. They called him “the
Aliené,”
the lost one. Other than melancholy Aristide, only two of Lamarck’s children had escaped the crowded house in the Jardin: Auguste was now an important engineer in Paris; André had joined the navy during the Revolution and was stationed out in the Caribbean.

Cuvier and his protégés sneered at Lamarck; they praised his taxonomic work while ignoring or ridiculing his transformist ideas. But while Cuvier may have called Lamarck a dreamer and a poet, Lamarck had a large and loyal following among the anatomy students. He’d been awarded a medal for bravery in the Seven Years’ War, he’d told Ramon, when he was a soldier back in the 1760s. He wasn’t going to give up what he believed, not easily. He knew how to manage a battlefield.

“In Edinburgh no one talks about these things,” I told Lucienne. “Or at least not in public. Sometimes in the student societies, when the professors are not around, someone will talk about transmutation, one of the students who has been here to study, but—”

“It will be the same again in Paris in a year or two,” she said. “Geoffroy is almost blind. Lamarck is old and his eyes are beginning
to fail. Cuvier is winning his battles and closing down the conversation. Now the king is back, hiding behind Wellington’s soldiers. It is not a good time to be in Paris. You should have been here ten, twelve years ago. Not now.”

I thought of what awaited me back home—the gray landscape, my father’s disapproval, and my brother’s blind faith.

“I am glad I’m here now,” I said. “I only want to be here now.”

Fin and Céleste teased me relentlessly about the widow Rochefide, whom they had never seen. Fin often complained that he did not see enough of me either and lamented the loss of our drinking days. He suggested that I ask the widow to join us for dinner, and one night when the excuses I gave on her behalf had grown particularly thin, I simply shrugged and said, “There is nothing I can do. I have no control over her comings and goings. What can I say?”

“I sympathize, my friend,” Fin said, looking over at Céleste with an exaggerated expression of adoration. “Do I have any control over Céleste? She is my master. I am her slave. What is to be done with these women? We will have to go back and marry British women, you know, if we are to have any control over our destiny.”

“Tell me when you are ready, M. Robertson,” Céleste said, “and I will buy a ticket for you and a wedding present for your new wife. Then I might find a man for my bed who does not snore … Perhaps Mme. Rochefide thinks she is too good for us,” she added. “Perhaps she is too grand to mix with shopgirls and students.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “She’s not like that.”

They never did guess that the tall man in the green silk jacket whom they glimpsed me walking with from time to time and whom I called M. Le Vaillant, the botanist, was actually the elusive Mme. Rochefide, nor would they have believed any of the rest of the story that I had begun to unravel—the beguiling tale that twisted out from a garden in Marseilles through prisons and guillotines to the pyramids of Egypt and the caves of the Red Sea.

13

N SEPTEMBER
23, the English and French papers were full of the news of Talleyrand’s resignation and its consequences. Talleyrand, the great French statesman and Napoleon’s right-hand man, was a chameleon, one English journalist wrote, changing his skin, his clothes, his colors, to fit the politics of the day. He’d kept power through three regimes: under the king, then through the Revolution, then under Napoleon, and now he had even brokered the restoration of the king and the return of France to its pre-revolutionary borders. First a priest, then the king’s bishop, revolutionary, exile, foreign minister, grand chamberlain, a prince under Napoleon, now king maker, Talleyrand was a man in constant transformation. But even he had to go. Some said the time of chameleons and turncoats was over. But it wasn’t. Not yet.

I was with Lucienne when the bronze horses came down three days later. Sophie had, at my request, invented a false errand that released me from the Jardin for a whole day without incurring Cuvier’s disapproval. Now we were caught up in the crowd, all swarming in
one direction—toward the place du Carrousel merging into a many-headed, many-limbed tide. We were jostled, pushed, elbowed, knocked about, carried forward. I reached for Lucienne’s hand, afraid for her, but she wouldn’t give it. “I can look after myself,” she shouted in English as she disappeared into the mass of bodies, still dressed as a man, in a tailored brown velvet coat that had seen better days, white breeches, and high boots.

The crowd stopped abruptly where the street met the entrance to the square blocked by a line of standing Prussian soldiers, like a wave breaking against a harbor wall. Beyond them, a mass of men dressed in pale-blue-and-white uniforms, a thousand foot soldiers of the Austrian army, sat or lay on the stones of the square, blocking access to the Arc.

“We can’t get through,” Lucienne called out, catching up to me. “They’re not letting anyone past. We can’t see it from here.”