The Invention of Nature (17 page)

Paris street life (Illustration Credit 9.2)

What amazed foreigners was the fact that all classes lived under one roof in large houses – from a duke’s apartment on the grand first floor to the servant’s or milliner’s quarters in the attic on the fifth floor. Literacy also seemed to transcend class as even the girls who sold flowers or trinkets had their heads deep in books when no customer needed their attentions. Bookstall after bookstall ribboned the streets, and the conversations at the tables that cluttered the pavements outside restaurants and cafés would often be about beauty and art, or a ‘discourse on some puzzling point of higher mathematics’.

Humboldt adored Paris and the knowledge that pumped through its streets, salons and laboratories. The Académie des Sciences1 was the nexus of scientific enquiry but there were many other places too. The anatomy theatre in the École de Medicine could hold 1,000 students, the observatory was equipped with the best instruments and the Jardin des Plantes boasted a menagerie, a huge collection of natural history objects and a library in addition to its large botanical garden. There was so much to do and so many people to meet.

The twenty-five-year-old chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was enthralling the scientific world with the daring balloon ascents that he used to study terrestrial magnetism at great heights. On 16 September 1804, only three weeks after Humboldt’s arrival, Gay-Lussac conducted magnetic observations as well as measuring temperatures and air pressure at 23,000 feet – more than 3,000 feet higher than Humboldt had climbed on Chimborazo. Unsurprisingly, Humboldt was keen to compare Gay-Lussac’s results with his own from the Andes. Within a few months Gay-Lussac and Humboldt were giving lectures together at the Académie. They became such close friends that they travelled together and even shared a small bedroom and study in the attic of the École Polytechnique a few years later.

Wherever Humboldt turned, there were new and exciting theories. At the natural history museum in the Jardin des Plantes he met naturalists Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Cuvier had turned the controversial concept of extinctions into a scientific fact by examining fossil bones and concluding that they didn’t belong to existing animals. And Lamarck had recently developed a theory of the gradual transmutation of species, paving the way for evolutionary ideas. The celebrated astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace was working on ideas about the formation of the earth and the universe which helped Humboldt shape his own ideas. The savants in Paris were pushing the boundaries of scientific thought.

A hot-air balloon over Paris (Illustration Credit 9.3)

Everybody was excited about Humboldt’s safe return. It had been so long, Goethe wrote to Wilhelm von Humboldt, that it felt as if Alexander ‘had risen from the dead’. Others proposed that Humboldt be made president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, but he had no intention of returning to Berlin. Even his family wasn’t there any more. With both his parents dead and Wilhelm now in Rome as the Prussian Minister at the Vatican, there was nothing to tempt him home.

To his great surprise Humboldt found Wilhelm’s wife, Caroline, living in Paris. Pregnant with their sixth child, she had left Rome for France in June 1804 with two of their children after their nine-year-old son had died the previous summer. The milder climate in Paris, the couple believed, would be better for the two children, who were also suffering from dangerous fevers, than the sweltering heat of Rome during the summer. Wilhelm, stuck in Rome, pressed his wife for every single detail about his brother’s return. How was he? What were his plans? Had he changed? After this adventure do people stare at him as if at a ‘fantastical creature’?

He looked really well, Caroline replied. The hardship of the expedition years had not weakened him – on the contrary, Alexander had never been healthier. The many mountain climbs had made him strong and fit, Caroline thought, and her brother-in-law seemed not to have aged during the past years. It was almost ‘as if he had only left us the day before yesterday’. His manners, gestures and countenance were just the same as before, she wrote to Wilhelm. The only difference was that he had put on some weight and that he talked even more and faster – as far as that was possible.

But neither Caroline nor Wilhelm approved of Alexander’s wish to remain in France. It was his patriotic duty to return to Berlin and to live there for a while, they said, reminding him of his ‘Deutschheit’ – his ‘Germanness’. When Wilhelm wrote that ‘one has to honour the fatherland’, Alexander chose to ignore his brother. Just before his departure for the United States, he had already written to Wilhelm from Cuba that he had no desire ever to see Berlin again. When Alexander heard that Wilhelm wanted him to move there, he only ‘pulled faces’, Caroline reported back. He was having far too much fun in Paris. ‘The fame is greater than ever before,’ Humboldt boasted to his brother.

After their arrival Bonpland had first gone to visit his family in the port town of La Rochelle on the French Atlantic coast, but Humboldt and Carlos Montúfar, who had accompanied them to France, had immediately travelled to Paris. Humboldt threw himself into his new life in the capital. He wanted to share the results of his expedition. Within three weeks, he was delivering a series of lectures on his explorations to packed audiences at the Académie des Sciences. He jumped so quickly from one subject to another that nobody could keep up. Humboldt ‘unites a whole Académie within him,’ a French chemist declared. As the scientists listened to his lectures, read his manuscripts and examined his collections, they were astonished at how a single man could be so familiar with so many different disciplines. Even those who had been critical about his abilities in the past were now enthusiastic, Humboldt proudly wrote to Wilhelm.

He conducted experiments, wrote about his expedition and discussed his theories with his new scientific friends. Humboldt worked so much that it seemed as if ‘night and day form one mass of time’ during which he worked, slept and ate, one American visitor in Paris noted, ‘without making any arbitrary division of it’. The only way Humboldt could keep up was by sleeping very little, and only if he had to. If he woke in the middle of the night, he got up and worked. If he was not hungry, he ignored mealtimes. If he was tired, he drank more coffee.

Wherever Humboldt went, he sparked frenzied activity. The French Board of Longitude used his exact geographical measurements, others copied his maps, engravers worked on his illustrations and the Jardin des Plantes opened an exhibition displaying his botanical specimens. The rock samples from Chimborazo caused an excitement similar to that afforded to the rocks that would be brought back from the moon in the twentieth century. Humboldt was not planning to keep his specimens, but was instead sending them to scientists across Europe because he believed that to share was the path to new and greater discoveries. As a gesture of gratitude to his faithful friend Aimé Bonpland, Humboldt also used his contacts to secure him a yearly pension of 3,000 francs from the French government. Bonpland, Humboldt said, had greatly contributed to the success of the expedition and he had also described most of the botanical specimens.

Although Humboldt enjoyed being fêted in Paris, he also felt like a stranger and dreaded the first European winter – and so perhaps it was no surprise that he gravitated towards a group of young South Americans living in Paris at that time whom he probably met through Montúfar. One was twenty-one-year-old Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan who would later become the leader of the revolutions in South America.2

Born in 1783, Bolívar was the son of one of Caracas’s wealthiest creole families. They could trace their lineage back to another Simón de Bolívar who had arrived in Venezuela at the end of the sixteenth century. The family had flourished since then and now owned several plantations, mines and elegant town houses. Bolívar had left Caracas following his young wife’s death from yellow fever only a few months after their wedding. He had loved her passionately, and to drown his grief he had embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe. He had arrived in Paris around the same time as Humboldt and threw himself into a round of drinking, gambling, sex and late night discussions about Enlightenment philosophy. Dark, with long black curly hair and beautiful white teeth (which he particularly cared for), Bolívar dressed in the latest fashion. He adored dancing, and women found him immensely attractive.

When Bolívar visited Humboldt in his lodgings, which were filled with books, journals and drawings from South America, he discovered a man who was enchanted with his country, a man who couldn’t stop talking about the riches of a continent unknown to most Europeans. As Humboldt spoke of the great rapids of the Orinoco and of the soaring peaks of the Andes, of towering palms and electric eels, Bolívar realized that no European had ever painted South America in such vivid colours before.

They talked about politics and revolutions too. Both men were in Paris when Napoleon crowned himself emperor that winter. Bolívar was shocked to see how his hero had transformed himself into a despot and a ‘hypocritical tyrant’. But at the same time, Bolívar also saw how Spain struggled to withstand Napoleon’s military ambitions and began to think what this changing shift in power in Europe could mean for the Spanish colonies. As they discussed South America’s future, Humboldt argued that while the colonies might be ripe for a revolution, there was no one to lead them. Bolívar, though, told him that the people would be as ‘strong as God’ once they had decided to fight. Bolívar was beginning to think about the possibility of a revolution in the colonies.

Both men had a deep-seated desire to see the Spanish driven out of South America. Humboldt had been impressed by the ideals of the American and French revolutions, and also espoused emancipation in Latin America. The very idea of a colony, Humboldt argued, was an immoral concept and a colonial government was a ‘government of distrust’. When he had travelled through South America, Humboldt had been astonished to hear people enthuse about George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. The colonists had told him that the American Revolution gave them hope for their own future, but at the same time he had also seen the racial mistrust that plagued South American society.

For three centuries the Spanish had stoked suspicions among classes and races in their colonies. The wealthy creoles, Humboldt was convinced, preferred to be ruled by Spain rather than share power with the mestizos, slaves and indigenous people. If anything, he feared, they would only create a ‘white republic’ based on slavery. To Humboldt’s mind these racial differences were so deeply ingrained in the social make-up of the Spanish colonies that they were not ready for a revolution. Bonpland, though, was more certain and encouraged Bolívar in his emerging ideas; so much so that Humboldt believed Bonpland was as deluded as the impetuous young creole. Years later, though, Humboldt would fondly remember his encounter with Bolívar as ‘a time when we were making vows for the independence and freedom of the New Continent’.

Although surrounded by people all day, Humboldt remained emotionally distant. He was quick in his judgement of people, too quick and indiscreet, he admitted. There was certainly a streak of Schadenfreude in him and he enjoyed exposing people’s missteps. Always quick-witted, he would occasionally get carried away, inventing derogative nicknames or gossiping behind people’s backs. The King of Sicily, for example, he renamed the ‘pasta king’ while a conservative Prussian minister was declared ‘a glacier’ who was so icy, Humboldt joked, that he had given him rheumatism in the left shoulder. But behind Humboldt’s ambition, hectic activity and sharp comments, his brother Wilhelm believed, was a great gentleness and a vulnerability that no one really noticed. Though Alexander hankered after fame and recognition, Wilhelm explained to Caroline, it would never make him happy. During his explorations nature and physical exertion had fulfilled him, but now that he was back in Europe, Humboldt was feeling lonely again.

As much as he was forever connecting and relating everything in the natural world, he was strangely one-dimensional when it came to his personal relationships. When Humboldt heard, for example, that a close friend had died while he had been away, he wrote the widow a letter of philosophy rather than of condolences. In it Humboldt talked more about Jewish and Greek opinions of the concept of death than about the widow’s late husband – he had also written the letter in French which he knew she didn’t understand. When, a few weeks after his arrival in Paris, Caroline and Wilhelm’s own three-month-old daughter died after a smallpox vaccination – the second child they had lost in a little more than a year – Caroline fell into a deep melancholy. Alone in her grief and with her husband far away in Rome, Caroline hoped for some emotional support from her busy brother-in-law but felt that his expressions of sympathy were just ‘demonstrations of sentiments rather than deep feelings’.

But Caroline, despite her own misery, worried about Humboldt. Though he had survived his expedition, he was less capable when it came to the more practical aspects of his day-to-day life. He ignored, for example, the extent to which the five-year voyage had eaten into his fortune. Caroline thought him so naïve about his financial situation that she asked Wilhelm to write a serious letter from Rome to explain the true nature of Alexander’s dwindling funds. Then, in the autumn of 1804, as Caroline prepared to leave Paris to return to Rome, she found herself reluctant to see Alexander stay behind. To ‘leave him by himself without any restraint’, she wrote to Wilhelm, would be disastrous. ‘I trembled for his inner peace.’ Hearing her degree of concern, Wilhelm suggested that she stay on a little longer.

Alexander was as restless as ever, Caroline reported to her husband, constantly concocting new travel plans. Greece, Italy, Spain – ‘all European countries are wandering through his head.’ Fired up by his visit to Philadelphia and Washington earlier that year, he was also hoping to explore the North American continent. He wanted to go west, he wrote to one of his new American acquaintances, a plan for which Thomas Jefferson ‘would be just the right man to aid me’. There was so much to see. ‘I have my mind set on Missouri, the Arctic circle, and Asia,’ he wrote, and ‘one must make the most of one’s youth.’ But before setting out on yet another adventure, it was also time to start writing up the results of his previous expedition – but where to begin?