The Coral Thief (42 page)

Random House Reader’s Circle:
The novel takes place soon after the defeat of Napoleon by the British Navy at Waterloo. What was it that drew you to this particular time in French history?

Rebecca Stott:
The year 1815 was a remarkable turning point—a vortex in history. It was twenty years or so after the French Revolution. The French had established a republic and then Napoleon Bonaparte had risen to power, appointing himself initially First Consul, then later Emperor of France. He’d been cock-of-the-roost in Europe for more than ten years, conquering one European country after another. He’d made Paris the center of everything, politically and culturally, and literally transformed the map of Europe. He and his men had plundered hundreds of palaces across the continent, and he’d sent back all his spoils of war to Paris so that, by 1815, the museums, libraries, and galleries in Paris were full to the rafters with paintings, rare books, and unique natural history collections.

All of that power came crashing to an end when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo; the Allied armies marched into and occupied Paris, turning the city into a vast military encampment. Because Paris had been pretty much closed to foreigners for ten years, curiosity brought thousands of English visitors to the city. At the same time, the French émigrés were returning, many of them exiled or on the run. And now that Napoleon had fallen, the rulers of the Italian states, Prussia, and Holland sent ambassadors to Paris to demand their stolen treasures back, so the paintings and statues and collections were on the move again. I wanted to send some characters into that historical vortex to see what it was like.

RHRC:
The book intertwines the story of Daniel Connor, a young English medical student, with Napoleon as he makes his way to exile. Why did you decide to link the two?

RS:
Daniel Connor is a brilliant young medical student—ambitious, hardworking, a little bit self-regarding. For most ambitious young men at this point in history, Napoleon was a hero. He had shown what could be done with sheer nerve and intelligence and brilliance. But of course, for Englishmen, Napoleon was also the enemy, a potential invader. Because the Napoleonic Wars had made Paris inaccessible to foreigners for more than a decade, Daniel’s life abroad couldn’t actually begin until Napoleon had fallen, so all through that summer and autumn while he’s in Paris, falling in love, discovering breathtaking new ways of seeing the world, and coming to understand how old the earth really is, he is rising in his own sky at the same time that Napoleon is falling in his. Threading Napoleon’s story through Daniel’s story was a way of anchoring Daniel to history, a way of indicating how the lives of generations intertwine. It also provided something of an evolutionary way of seeing time, not as a single straight line but as a series of overlapping arcs. Everything, to use Charles Darwin’s phrase, is “netted together.” I wanted to show history as a web of mutually entangled lives.

RHRC:
You begin with an epigraph from one of Charles Darwin’s notebooks. What does this quote mean to you?

RS:
The quote is from Notebook C, which Darwin kept in 1838 after he’d returned from the
Beagle
voyage and was gradually working through the stages of his transmutation theory. He wrote: “Once grant that species [of] one genus may pass into each other … & [the] whole fabric totters & falls.” The entry marks a moment when Darwin glimpsed the enormous philosophical consequences of what he was working out. He saw that his species theory would threaten the religious and social premises of so much orthodox thinking and would perhaps even threaten the social fabric. Of course that is what Daniel comes to see too through Lucienne Bernard and through the other students of Lamarck.

Some of the passion of
The Coral Thief
is about fighting to be allowed to think for yourself, about the right to ask questions. Lucienne is not against religion (she might even have some remnants of religious belief in her) but she wants to live in a world in which any question can be asked.

RHRC:
Two very strong scientific personalities figure into the narrative of
The Coral Thief
—George Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Who were they and what impact did they have on science of the time?

RS:
Cuvier and Lamarck were both famous all over Europe. Cuvier was a comparative anatomist with a great deal of power in Paris—he ran the Jardin des Plantes. He was a charismatic lecturer and a brilliant thinker who was developing comparative anatomy in extraordinary ways, but he was also passionately opposed to speculative science in general and to evolutionary ideas in particular.

Lamarck was a transmutationist (an early exponent of evolution) and older than Cuvier. He was a professor of invertebrates at the Jardin des Plantes who had written a number of important books on the taxonomy and classification of shells, but since the turn of the nineteenth century he had been working on evolutionary ideas. As a result, he had become associated with radical atheistic ideas, though of course, like Darwin later, he didn’t really write about religion. He was more interested in the origin of the earth and in finding mechanisms to explain the transmutation of species.

Cuvier’s argument with Lamarck was not a religious one; it was just that he thought Lamarck’s ideas were wrong scientifically and that there was no proof for evolution; it was at best a ridiculous castle in the air.

When Lamarck died he was buried in a pauper’s grave. Later his bones were dug up and scattered in the catacombs under Paris; Cuvier, on the other hand, was given a large tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery. That was no accident of history.

RHRC:
You have noted that the character of police chief Henri Jagot is modeled on Eugéne-François Vidocq. Who was he? Were the police during this time quite as sinister as your character?

RS:
Vidocq is famous—versions of him appear in several nineteenth-century novels such as Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
and Balzac’s
Père Goriot
. He was a notorious thief who had been recruited by the authorities in Paris to run their Bureau de la Sûreté. It was a brilliant choice because, of course, Vidocq understood how criminals worked and he also knew most of them. He was ambitious, ruthless, and highly successful. He is generally held to be the first police agent in France and, because he later set up his own private detective agency, historians credit him as being the first detective. He was also considered by most biographers to have been corrupt. But Vidocq was only one of many agents in Paris, which had been full of agents since the Revolution. Everyone was spying on everyone else, and the intellectuals in Paris were particularly closely watched. There’s a brilliant essay by the historian Robert Darnton called “A Police Inspector Sorts His Files” that describes the working practices of one police agent in Paris during the Revolution whose job it was to watch a number of intellectuals. Darnton argues that it was in this atmosphere of constant surveillance that the concept of the intellectual was born. If Paris is an enormous web of intrigues and surveillance in 1815, which is what I was trying to describe, Vidocq/Jagot is the spider sitting at the center of it. He was also yet another collector (most of my main characters are collectors): He was cataloging criminals while Cuvier was cataloging bones and fossils.

RHRC:
What about collecting? Why is that so important to the novel?

RS:
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was highly fashionable for aristocrats to have collections in their homes. People would specialize in collecting coins or shells or paintings or natural history or botanical specimens or snuffboxes, or perhaps they’d have a variety of all of these things. Cabinetmakers made a fine living building exquisitely carved shelves and display cabinets for these objects. Agents traveled all over the world to procure rare and beautiful objects for the duchesses and counts who employed them. Those natural history collections were the predecessors of the modern museum. For Lucienne Bernard, I think, reassembling that coral collection of hers, started by her grandmother, was a way of countering the tragic fracturing of her history and her family in the Revolution, shoring up something against the ruins of all that tragedy, trying to make a whole out of the broken parts. And that is something a novelist does too, I think, assembling—in my case, historical—objects, some of them “stolen,” to make a whole.

RHRC:
Much of the novel’s action takes place in Paris’s fascinating underworld. How did you research what seems to be a long-lost world?

RS:
I read journals, diaries, old prints, books, guidebooks, letters— hundreds of them. I’m lucky to live five minutes away from one of the greatest copyright libraries in the world, Cambridge University Library, and I often work in the Rare Books Room. I found an 1815 guidebook to Paris that tells you where to get hats mended, where to buy the best cut flowers or a whole pig, how to hire a valet or a carriage, as well as a review of all the theaters and marionette shows and wax museums. It made Paris of 1815 so immediate and vivid. At one point I had memorized so much that I felt I could walk down the present Rue Vivienne, for instance, and describe all the long-gone shops on either side. Then I found a rare book that mapped all the quarry tunnels and listed all their entryways. So pretty soon I could map Paris overground onto Paris underground. And there really were people living and working down there in the tunnels— an illegal mint, and Knights Templar tunnels. Actually, going to modern Paris only helped me picture the Paris of 1815 up to a point. Modern Paris has been utterly remade and the labyrinthine streets I wanted to see were largely destroyed in Haussmann’s redesign of Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century. So walking through Marrakesh in Morocco and some small towns in Jordan was more useful to me as a way of imagining how parts of Paris might have been then: food being cooked in the streets, smoke, the smells of coffee, lemons, fish, and the people: picaros, street peddlers, street entertainers, prostitutes. Another big problem was light—there was too much of it in Paris. There seems to be almost nowhere in modern Paris where you can walk the streets in darkness. But you can in Marrakesh.

RHRC:
For all of the laymen out there, what is the evolutionary significance of coral?

RS:
Coral pieces were beautiful and collectible objects in their own right, but they were also tools for the philosophers—they were clocks, ways of measuring time and of thinking about animal, plant, and mineral definitions. Sea creatures like corals and sponges were important to natural philosophers at this time because they seemed to sit on the borderline between what was defined as a plant and what was defined as an animal. They also reproduced in strange ways. Corals were particularly difficult to classify—they looked like trees; they had flowers. But when they were taken out of the sea, they went hard like rock. It wasn’t until people started to look at them closely that they realized they were actually animals—they had free-swimming larvae and they digested. Corals were also important in terms of time. Natural philosophers like my character Lucienne Bernard (and Charles Darwin, later) worked out that certain islands and reef systems had been built by corals growing on top of one another over a period of thousands of years. So if you knew how quickly a coral reef grew and if you could measure or estimate the depth of a coral reef, you could prove that the earth was much, much older than the church leaders claimed. So corals are silent, but they’re also eloquent.

RHRC:
Your character Lucienne Bernard is a strong, well-educated woman. Were talented women active in science during this time period—or were they relegated to the sidelines?

RS:
They were both—active and relegated to the sidelines, visible and invisible. Women were often the assistants to fathers, brothers, husbands, botanical or anatomical illustrators, managers of what we would now call laboratories. They ran salons and organized
conversaziones;
they did calculations; they rewrote or edited scientific manuscripts; they translated; they labeled. But they were rarely credited. Sophie Duvaucel and Clementine Cuvier, Cuvier’s two daughters, were very important to him and to his work. Lamarck also had daughters who kept everything going and managed his work. No doubt these women had conversations with their fathers about the philosophical consequences of their work. And in the literary world of Paris, too, there were a number of women who were rocking the boat, living in unusual ways, sometimes even cross-dressing—later George Sand, the female novelist (Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin), went around Europe dressed as a man with her lover, Chopin.

RHRC:
Your two novels—first the national bestseller
Ghostwalk
and now
The Coral Thief
—have featured great scientists in history (first Sir Isaac Newton, now Darwin—even though he was only six when much of the novel takes place!). What is it about scientific discoveries and the (now) larger-than-life men who “made” them that inspires you to write fiction?

RS:
I guess because once we turn so many great scientists into icons and their life stories into myths, lots of other important people disappear into their shadows. But no scientist or philosopher exists in isolation. Newton didn’t. As much as he might have wanted to keep himself away from the world and his head down, he actually depended on so many other invisible people. He was always connected up. But those people who brought him manuscripts and worked behind the scenes become more invisible the more we tell ourselves that geniuses like Newton were lone geniuses, and almost supernatural. Darwin knew he wasn’t a lone genius. He knew how dependent he was on all the other little people who had the nerve to go into print about evolution before him. He gave them credit in a preface he wrote to
On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection
. So Lucienne Bernard and her band of heretic thieves stand for all the invisible people behind the scenes who did the incremental work that, bit by bit, made evolutionary ways of looking at life acceptable. The corals are like that too—the invisible architects of reefs, working away just under the waterline.