The Coral Thief (27 page)

CTOBER BROUGHT AN INDIAN SUMMER
. Everything dried up. The leaves on the trees, curled up, brown, and scratchy, seemed to be suspended, waiting to drop. The first week of October circled into the second week as I waited for Deleuze to bring me the final drawing of the map.

A couple of weeks before, I had said to old man Deleuze in the coffeehouse in the Jardin: “You know this place better than anyone. You really ought to write a history of it.” When he didn’t answer, I began to flatter him: “I’d say no one knows more about the Jardin and its history than you do. And the baron’s not going to live forever, is he? What will happen then? The world will want to know the truth about Cuvier.”

“The truth?” asked Deleuze.

“I hear there are many stories about Cuvier they tell in Paris.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Well, some say he’s a tyrant and a bully and that he won’t countenance new ideas. Who will be there to contradict them in the future?”

“Lies. All lies,” Deleuze said, scratching the back of his hand, where the chemicals he worked with had raised a rash the color of raw meat. “The baron hates speculation, that’s true. He is a man of fact. But all those tales about him being a bully and a tyrant, they’re all lies.”

“I know that of course. But how will other people know? Unless someone tells them otherwise? Now, a book, a history, written by the right person, would make the world see that the Jardin des Plantes is the greatest scientific institution in the world. Such a book might describe every detail of the work in the museum, the people who work here, the animals in the menagerie. All the facts. A list of all of France’s greatest men of science. Imagine—your name would be there listed next to Cuvier’s. Joseph Deleuze, assistant botanist. Entered Jardin in 1795. Translator of Erasmus Darwin’s
Loves of the Plants
…”

I remember hesitating, ashamed by how easy it was to reel in old man Deleuze, holding up a mirror to his future glory and walking slowly away from him so that he would follow me, because he would want, above all, to keep that mirror in his sight, holding his reflection a little longer. I surprised myself at the ease with which I had taken to this deception. I could hear myself flattering and cajoling but then I reminded myself what was at stake.

“Of course.” I said. “It would be a monument. It would be read in libraries in hundreds of years by students of science who will ask: How did they do that? How did those French men of science build one of the greatest museums in the world? You could call the book
Utopia’s Garden.”

“I think,” Deleuze said, scratching his chin, “I’d go for something a little less poetic. Something like
The Jardin des Plantes: A History.”
As he spoke he swept his hand through the air as if seeing his book in some shop window in a busy Parisian square.

“Why don’t you start by drawing a map of the whole Jardin?” I suggested. “With a list of the people who work here, where they live what they do. Once you’ve got that in place, the rest will follow. You could draw all the buildings and number them and have a key with
names of all the lodgings, the menagerie, the amphitheater, and the glasshouses.”

“But that would take a long time. You can’t just draw a map any old way. You have to do it accurately, with measurements. I would have to get permission. It would have to go through committees.”

“You can do all of that later. Once you’ve shown Cuvier a decent map and drawn up the list, then you can tell him about your plans. I’d keep it a secret for now. You wouldn’t want anyone
else
deciding to write the same book. Like M. Rousseau. He’s been here a long time too.”

“You’re right. A secret. Yes, I like that,” he said.

“I might even be able to help you get it translated into English. I have connections.”

“You do?”

A week later Deleuze had inky fingers and rings of darkness under his eyes. For a week he walked continuously around the perimeters of buildings in the Jardin, counting his paces and noting down the numbers; he carried notebooks and devices for measuring angles; he walked from the corner of one building to another corner, counting, and then he turned and walked back, counting again, just to check.

“You need to be more discreet,” I said to Deleuze, but his eyes were blank. “You don’t want anyone else to know what you’re doing yet.”

He had given up writing his animal-magnetism book to make this map. Everything had stopped for this, except the Jardin itself. Every day the Jardin seemed to mutate a little more; you could always hear the sound of banging and sawing—new enclosures, new glasshouses, bricks and mortar, earth, wood, plaster, cabinets, cupboards, alterations, new buildings, and demolitions.

Deleuze showed me his first sketch, frustratingly incomplete, on the tenth of October. It was hard to read. He had begun to trace out the rectangles and right angles of the botanical borders and the curves
of the walks through the menagerie and its pens and cages, the blocks that represented the houses of the professors and their assistants and their assistants’ assistants, complete with little dots that were supposed to look like trees from above. It was good but it wasn’t finished. It took him another week, and in the meantime I waited. We all waited. Everything was in limbo.

In Cuvier’s library, at my desk, alongside the other scribes and aides, I continued to copy out page after page of his manuscript of volume 4 of
The Animal Kingdom
, mapping every corner of the avian world, minute descriptions of the curves of claws, or the patterns of plumage, or the precise colors of an egg, or the geographical distribution of bird after bird, noting them all down exactly as Cuvier liked them to be copied, checking all the accents, every last semicolon and hyphen just as he instructed.

The bird volume was almost half completed, but there was a growing sense of urgency in the library that occasionally bordered on panic. Since Sophie Duvaucel, under Cuvier’s orders, had announced that we were now to increase the rate of bird cataloguing from one bird per week to two, we were now all working ten-hour days to keep up. There were no extra assistants appointed. There were none to be had.

Most of the birds we drew were illustrations of stuffed specimens displayed behind glass either in the Natural History Museum or in Cuvier’s Museum of Comparative Anatomy; some came from storerooms wrapped in paper. Those that belonged to the stadtholder’s collection were now brought out and lined up along the shelves of the library in order of priority, birds in waiting, birds in glass-fronted boxes, or folded in paper inside closed boxes. All were labeled. I had a list of the birds that I was to draw, and all through October a procession of birds of different colors, shapes, and sizes passed across my desk, so many that my dreams were feathered and whatever I touched, I could feel plumage perpetually against my fingers. I remember the English names of the birds better than the Latin ones I was supposed
to use. That October I painted the supercilious Widowbird, the Magellanic Stare, the Esculent Swallow, the Dwarf Warbler, the Sumatra Bee-eater, and the Purple Gallinule.

In the laboratory, a few buildings away, Fin and several other young men, including Cuvier’s stepson Alfred Duvaucel and his friend Pierre-Medard Diard, working in overalls at dissection tables under the direction of M. Dufresne, senior taxidermist, stripped, flayed, dissected, and studied under microscopes the feathers, bones, feet, and beaks of another series of birds, looking for common structures and patterns. Fin had already mapped the nervous system of the dead female ostrich from the menagerie, a nervous system until now inadequately understood; now he was mapping its digestive system. Once that was complete the flayed ostrich would be placed in the bath of acid at the back of the laboratory to strip it back to bleached bones, and then the skeleton would be stitched back together with wires, mounted, and sent over to Cuvier’s museum, where a space had already been made for it in Room 2.

I was glad of the precision and concentration the work required, though Lucienne’s words twisted like smoke through everything I wrote.
I need you to get me in
. What was the attraction in those words that excited and aroused me, that brushed across my skin?
I need you to get me in
.

“M. Connor,” Cuvier said one evening, stopping abruptly as he swept by the desk where I was working late to finish the description of the Black-crested Tern. Accompanied by his stepdaughter, Sophie Duvaucel, he was on his way to his Thursday-evening salon. He cleared his throat before continuing, “M. Connor, you have set a pace for the completion of this volume that is to be commended. You have an attitude to your work that is to be commended. Mlle. Duvaucel says you are to be depended upon in all things. You are discreet, trustworthy. These are important qualities. I commend you, sir. I do indeed. I have been asked to recommend three or four young men for a position at the University of Leiden. I would like to put your name
forward, M. Connor. It is a prestigious post. Once you have finished here, of course, with the bird volume. In perhaps two or three years’ time. You understand?”

“Thank you, Baron,” I said, trying not to show my excitement. “I am grateful to be of use.”

“What he means, M. Sycophant,” Sophie said a few minutes later when Cuvier had left the room, “is that you must not refuse the Leiden job if it is offered to you. He also has plans to send you and my brother to Sumatra, plans that will involve considerable
discretion
. You will need to think about that, if you want to be
of use
, of course.” She smiled. “Are you discreet, M. Connor? Yes, I think you are. Discreet, charming, and completely unfathomable. That’s a fine combination. There will be important rewards, of course, for such work. Positions of consequence. Now, you must excuse me. The baron does not like to be kept waiting.”

I had heard of positions such as these—such men were Cuvier’s eyes and ears, planted in the universities and laboratories and courts of Europe, or in the colonial outposts of Asia, employed not only as important collectors and field assistants, but also as assistants to his rivals, other natural philosophers in the British or Dutch colonies who were putting together collections to rival Cuvier’s. Parts of such collections, they said, would occasionally go missing en route from one country to another. Important and rare skeletons sometimes disappeared. There were always explanations—a ship that had run aground off a rocky coast, a cart that had lost a wheel in the jungles of India, an attack by natives on the border of Tibet. An entire boatload of hundreds of stuffed exotic birds had once disappeared on the Madeira River somewhere between Pôrto Velho and Abuná. It was never found.

These assistants of his were always well rewarded, their names listed in footnote after footnote of Cuvier’s published works, their reputations accelerated, their work in the universities of Europe guaranteed. “It is a case of keeping up, staying ahead of the game,” Sophie
said, “for the reputation and honor of France, of course.”
Yes
, I wanted to say.
This is exactly what I have always dreamed of
. But there was something in her tone that suggested such a post might be a mixed blessing. It was always difficult to read Mlle. Duvaucel. Sometimes she seemed to mean exactly the opposite of what she said. Only a few days before I had found her staring out the library window and when she had asked me about work, I had turned to her and said: “But you, mademoiselle, are you happy here? Does the work not burden you?”

“What a strange question,” she said, smiling. “You know, no one has asked me that before. M. Connor, since it is you who ask, I consider myself to be one of the most privileged women in France. Here in the Jardin I do a hundred things every day that no other woman can do anywhere in the world. You see what I do. You see how busy I am. I read scientific papers and books. I don’t have to wait for my brothers to finish with them—the baron sees that they come straight to me. I read to the baron; I translate for him, edit for him. I have his confidence and I argue with his conclusions. I mount specimens. I draw; I classify. I host the baron’s salons, where I meet some of the most interesting men in Europe. In a few years, I will travel to England with the baron. Look at what I might have been—what my convent friends have become. Married. Bored. With nothing to do. No, M. Connor, the work here at the Jardin does not burden me. You think like a man.”

Brugmans was now in Paris, staying at the Hôtel Royal; he also was waiting, biding his time. He was a good ambassador and he knew how to apply pressure. There was going to be no rushing into the Jardin with soldiers for him. He wanted to make Cuvier sweat. He knew how it was going to be: First Cuvier would offer replicas of the specimens; Brugmans would refuse. Cuvier would try again. He would refuse again. A dance. Repetition with variation. Eventually the Dutch ambassador would agree to take replicas in exchange for a thick portfolio of political concessions, treaties, and trade agreements. Stalling
was essential. The choreography must be slow if he was to return with all the trade agreements he had been entrusted to negotiate.