Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  On September 9, Shit moon, 1814, we set sail for Le Havre from Southampton on the mailship the HMS Beagle. Sieur Réaux did not say a word during the crossing. His silver-blue eyes under his sealskin top hat, his black mustache under his pug nose, his wide shoulders draped in his short black cape, his immense height, and long legs encased in brown and black riding boots, all seemed like separate visions to me, never coming together as one. The person of Sieur Réaux loomed huge against the sails and ropes of the mailboat. I was terrified of him. Alice and I had even sent a letter to Robert Wedderburn in London, explaining our plight and begging him to rescue us, but our plea went unanswered. Perhaps he felt I had spurned his help once, why should he offer it again? Nevertheless, under my skirts, my feet were hobbled by a thick chain. I was Sieur Réaux’s prisoner, yet to a passerby, with his arm around my shoulders enfolding me tenderly, he seemed like an attractive husband or guardian steadying me against the movement of the ship and the slippery wetness of the deck.

  The hard years in the provinces of England had sapped any will I had to escape. I was empty inside, or rather too empty inside to resist. At twenty-five, I was an old woman who wanted only her dagga, her gin, her tobacco, whose body had been used up by the thousands of eyes that had devoured it. It had been battered by so much curiosity and ridicule, it disgusted even me. I refused even to look into a full-length mirror anymore. I had only one wish, to survive, to hide enough money to buy my passage home, to escape Sieur Réaux and stay out of the workhouse, the jailhouse, the crazy house or the whorehouse. I had once been rich, now I was penniless. Once again, ten pounds was a fortune. Under my red riding hood, I was in rags. Would the French police help me? How could I prove who and what I was? I glanced sideways at my master, who was absently lighting a small cheroot and gazing out upon the gray, troubled waters with satisfaction. Adolph was chained in the hold of the ship, along with several other animals. Adolph came from the Caucasus Mountains of Russia and was very old for a bear. He weighed six hundred pounds, his pelt was as stiff and prickly as a hedgehog and he smelled really awful. We were both Master Réaux’s creatures. The only difference was that I couldn’t dance and Adolph was not baptized.

  —I have a surprise for you.

  —Yeah . . .

  —No, really. I’m not such a bad man, Sarah. I’m going to go see if Adolph is all right. I’ll be back, he said as he left me standing on deck.

  Alone and heartbroken, I recalled the beginning of my voyage now four years past. I tasted the salt of tears, nausea and the sea wind. Memories of the crimes committed against me welled up inside me like a nest of vipers: the search for the Reverend Freehouseland, Master Hendrick’s return to South Africa, my husband Dunlop’s betrayal, the lonely years of wandering with Master Taylor, and finally the loss of Alice and Victor.

  It was a warm day and the sea was so calm a light breeze was strong enough to move the boat forward. It skimmed the surface, its sails humming, seagulls shrieking overhead. Small white-capped waves skipped across the dark blue depths to the horizon. The sun shimmering on these waters is the African sun, I thought suddenly. This sky could at any moment turn pink with the flight of a flock of flamingos. I could be dead from all the alcohol I drink. I vowed to make the world pay the price of my humiliations. I had a name, in the eyes of Christ: Sarah, Sarah Baartman. I had a country, which was his Kingdom, and I had a final destination, Africa. I was the ward of no one, the property of no one, the whore of no one, the freak of no one, the slave of no one, the beloved of no one. I leaned too far out over the shimmering waves, my hands slid off the railings, I closed my eyes thinking that this sea was the only freedom I was destined for.

  —You won’ quit this earth as long as I’m o’ it, a voice close to my ear whispered. There was only one voice like that one—Alice’s.

  —You came! I cried.

  —You saved my miserable life. I owe you mine. Victor is safe with a good family. I a’ways wan’ed to see Paris.

  We fell into each other’s arms, laughing and crying.

  —Oh Lord, murmured Alice, more to herself than me, wha’s to ’appen to us now?

  Part III

  PARIS, FRANCE, 1814

  All the women you ever met

  Ask for them, every one!

  I am not a woman but a world

  My clothes need only fall away

  For you to discover in my person

  One continuous mystery.

  —GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, “Quidquid Volueris”

  16

  BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,

  Thirty Lessons in Comparative Anatomy

  All the parts of a living body are connected: they cannot function unless they function together; to wish to separate one from its mass is to remove it into the classification of dead substances and to entirely adulterate its essence.

  September 1814.

  To Baron Georges Léopold Cuvier, director, King’s Museum of Natural History, King’s Botanical Gardens, St. Bernard-sur-Seine

  September 13, 1814

  Monsieur,

  The original of the enclosed portrait (engraved), who comes from the banks of the Chamboos River in South Africa, is at this moment in Paris, about to be presented to the scrutiny of the general public. The naturalist will find in the exceptional configuration of the Hottentot tribe a fascinating phenomenon. Before opening the exhibit to the public, I propose to hold a private exhibition and would be most flattered by the honor of your presence on this occasion, Tuesday the Twenty-seventh, rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs no. 15, between noon and six o’clock. I have the honor to be, Monsieur, your devoted servant.

  Sieur Réaux

  I gazed out the window at Notre-Dame, as I thought about the letter I had written Baron Cuvier. The carriage carried me along the quay of the Right Bank towards the Palais Royal. It stopped before the staircase of honor of the palace and the lackeys rushed to unfold the steps of the landau, I stepped out into the September sunshine. Almost on cue, the vast fountains of the Palais Royal sprang up from their basins in a panoply of gushing water and spiraling jets spectacularly enhanced by the bright broad daylight, which danced on their surfaces and fragmented the reflections into droplets of gold and silver. I watched the play of water for a long moment, counting how many minutes out of my life I could now spare for this beautiful spectacle. When I felt I had wasted enough time, I strode up the steps and into the stone building. I was home, I thought. In Paris where I belonged.

  The fountains were fed by the huge waterworks located between the Palais Royal galleries and the rue St. Honoré. The ducts, sluices, locks and valves that controlled the fountains’ movements lay within view of number 7 Cour des Fontaines, where I, Sarah, Alice and Adolph had set up housekeeping.

  The quarter of Les Fontaines had been in the past and still was my absolute domain. It was almost as if the Revolution had never happened, I thought. It was a district that had survived the Terror intact. The narrow cobbled streets remained as they had been in the Middle Ages. The places of pleasure and sin had reopened in the wake of Robespierre’s demise and never looked back. The quarter had catered to the fastidious tastes of the Napoleonic aristocracy and now was the playground of the Restoration courtesans, gamblers, sea captains, sailors, army officers and actresses. There was a tavern for every theater, a bar for every hotel, a hotel for every prostitute. There had been a time, I recalled, when I had rolled up to the Thousand Columns café in my own handsome, coral-red, liveried landau. It had had green leather upholstery and my blazon painted on its doors. I had stepped out of this marvelous vehicle with a different beauty on my arm every evening. I blinked. This was a different world now, just as I was a different man. I would not be happy if people guessed who I had been in the past. So diminished was my person that I even kept my Christian name a secret. With a name so distinctive and so formerly famous, someone might guess who I truly was. It seemed to me that this small dangerous parcel of Paris was the only thing that hadn’t changed in the fifteen year
s I had been gone.

  It was almost dawn and around the roulette tables were about fifty or sixty people, most of them, including myself, mere spectators. My time to gamble had not yet come, I thought, but soon it would, as soon as I had presented my Hottentot to the scientific world and set up my exhibition hall, right here next to the casino. But just breathing the air gave me wings. I had gambled and won the Hottentot by a stroke of luck. I didn’t intend to waste it. Every species of gambler was concentrated around me; the addicted but unlucky doctor, the courtesan, the professional gambler, the adventurer, the Russian countess, the furloughed lieutenant, the arrogant duchess, her ladyship from London, the Oriental potentate. Here was the ultimate human equality as the chips were thrown onto the table, the faces intent, eyes on the small round roulette ball, which turned and churned, all united in greed and vice, I thought. No one could claim he was better than the other. All classes mixed pell-mell together as in the days when my inferiors had had the nerve to call me “Citizen” instead of Marquis. There were people of all nationalities: Italians, English, Greeks, Moroccans, Spanish, Dutch, Belgian, Swiss, Polish. The representatives of a Europe that was only now emerging from wars that had torn the fabric of European civilization into shreds. All ages were represented too, I mused, young, middle-aged, in the prime of life, decrepit and already dead. Yet there was a uniformity of expression that was the hallmark of gamblers: veneration and innocence. They could all have been sitting in pews in Notre-Dame, so intently religious were their expressions. So nothing had changed at all.

  A lackey passed by carrying a tray of fluted glasses filled with champagne. The croupier swept the hundreds of glistening napoleons into his basket as he repeated the hypnotic Faites vos jeux, Rien ne va plus. I clenched my fists. My fingers ached to fling out a napoleon or two. But, I reasoned, that would come soon enough.

  I was illegally dressed in a French officer’s uniform. It suited me best and its military elegance had seduced many women. It gave me a kind of regimental neatness that my ravaged soul did not possess. It gave me the appearance of belonging to society and its rules in a way that I had never practiced. Moreover, it gave me physical comfort as few things did: the heavy gold epaulets weighing on my shoulders, the fine worsted of my pantaloons, the slight acid odor of my polished brass buttons, the starched cleanness of my linen and collar band. Several beautiful women had glanced my way. I smoothed my mustaches and moved closer to the handsomest one, the one wearing the most expensive parure. Actually, everything except my luck at cards was turning out as I planned. In desperation I threw a napoleon onto the table: black. Nine. The wheel turned. Nine won. Happily I scooped up my winnings. It was enough to open a barrack along the rue St. Honoré for the Venus. I took a carriage back to the courtyard of Les Fontaines, not trusting the dangerous streets with the stake we had to live on for the next few weeks. I had considered getting rid of Alice, but I realized I could not take care of the Venus on my own. Alice gave me the necessary freedom to exploit Sarah. Alice was in fact my accomplice and as such invaluable, just as I had threatened Sarah, I had threatened her as well with the jailhouse, the workhouse or the whorehouse, and since she was just as terrorized of all three, as Sarah was, she complied.

  My ground-floor apartment at number 15 Neuve-des-Petits-Champs looked out onto an interior courtyard in which a single tree grew and around which a representative section of the quarter’s population was housed. Within lived freaks and prostitutes, gamblers, con men, actresses, musicians, magicians, high-wire acrobats, dancers, clowns, racketeers, usurers, professional gangsters. Only steps from the notorious Palais Royal galleries and a world apart from the sumptuous apartments of the King around the corner. There I lived with Sarah and her maid.

  When we had stepped off the Beagle mailboat onto French soil, my eyes had filled with tears and I had fallen to my knees and kissed the ground.

  —This is the first time I’ve been home since 1791, I said, rubbing my eyes like a child. From this moment it will be different, I had decided. My luck had changed, I had won the Hottentot Venus!

  I looked up at the sky. Caesar and Taylor and Dunlop were all in the past now. There was only me and Venus. Adolph, sitting in his iron cage, yawned and let out a loud sneeze. He shook himself, fluffing out his pelt, and let out a large fart. Alice and Sarah laughed but I was so happy I didn’t even smell my bear’s antics.

  The bright sunlight touched the rolling flat lands of Le Havre village, a sleepy harbor west of Paris. The mail and passenger coaches waited to be loaded and to receive passengers. Other voyagers were hurrying to and fro, admonishing the porters to unload their trunks and crates. A few of the passengers cast curious looks at our outrageous entourage. Sarah had pulled her veil down. Alice picked up a satchel and looked at me expectantly.

  —We’ll stay here at the inn overnight, I said. If we start out for Paris now, we won’t be there before nightfall and I don’t want to enter the city at night. I want to return in broad daylight so our carriage can take us through the city, along the Quai de Branly past the Ile de la Cité to rue St. Honoré and my old quarter. I want to savor every moment of our arrival.

  I had intended to go straight to the vaudeville theater with my idea of a play about the Venus. Sarah and Alice stood close by, dazed by the sunlight and dizzy because the ground under their feet, they complained, still seemed to move with the motion of the ship. The countryside was beautiful. Everything looked clean, serene and prosperous. I called a porter with a cart. I pointed to the baggage and told him to take it to the inn, and then to Adolph, to be moved to the inn’s stables. Adolph was sitting quietly, licking his paws. The porter’s eyes widened and we had a furious discussion about his transport. Finally a cart pulled by a bullock was found to move Adolph and we three humans walked to the village square, on foot, Indian file, following the porter with the luggage. Alice and Sarah spoke together as they walked, thinking I could not overhear them.

  —If we try to get away now, where will we go and what will we do for money?

  —Whore, said Alice without hesitation.

  —You’ve never done that in your whole life, Alice Unicorn, and neither have I.

  —Just because I’ve never done it doesn’t mean I don’t know how to do it!

  —Then why didn’t you in Manchester? When you and Victor were starving?

  —Perhaps we should have stayed in England, where at least we can speak the language . . .

  —Never mind about the language. Adolph can’t speak French either. He has learned only to dance . . .

  At this, I interrupted their whispered conversation.

  —Bears don’t learn to dance, I said. They are tortured into dancing. The trainer smashes their teeth in with hammers to destroy their most important means of defense. Then their noses or lips are pierced with a metal ring and attached to an iron chain. Then they are cast onto burning coals or hot metal grilles while the music of drums and tambourines play. Soon, the bear is rearing on its hind legs, hopping from one foot to the other to escape the flames and the fire. From then on, whenever the bear hears music, he repeats the same movements whether there is fire or not, even when there are no flames . . . only tambourines. He remembers the pain. That’s how you teach bears to dance . . .

  My eyes never left those of Sarah.

  I knew that Sarah was still grieving over Dunlop’s abandonment. She kept looking over her shoulder as if she expected him to jump out from behind one of the hedges. But now her eyes fastened on Adolph’s cage in despair.

  —He’s gone, Sarah, I admonished her. By now he’s in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I moved ahead of them still listening.

  —Perhaps we should go to America, whispered Sarah to Alice.

  —Perhaps. But there’s slavery in America. And at the moment, we’re in France. We can think about the United States of America tomorrow. But it’s not for Africans, Sarah . . . Resign yourself. Dunlop has deserted you, and for the second time.

  —If we run, who’s g
oing to hire us, not speaking any French?

  —You don’t have to speak the language to do what we’re going to do.

  —Just dance on hot coals like his bears . . .

  —We need Réaux. We are lost without him. He has shelter and money. We don’t. He has the cashbox.

  —Four years in England and what do we have to show for it? Sarah said.

  —But, whispered Alice, we are humans, not dancing bears. We can run . . .

  I laughed to myself at their ignorance and naïveté. Nobody ran away from me.

  The next day, in the late afternoon, the Paris stagecoach left the flat rolling plains of Normandy and made its way into the city. It was sunny and brilliant, just as I had predicted, and our entrance through the gates occurred just as the bells of Notre-Dame tolled. I directed the stage to rue St. Honoré, my old quarter, and by nightfall we were installed in a rented flat. Adolph still waited at the stables in Le Havre. Within a week, Sarah was once again the Hottentot Venus. I advertised her in the Journal de Paris:

  Just arrived from the Chamboos River in the Cape. The most

  extraordinary specimen of primitive humanity ever to be shown

  in Paris. Open to the public at 188 rue St. Honoré from eleven in the