Hottentot Venus
Page 25
—Now, now, ladies, cooed the princess, Madame de C. She is only a prodigy and a freak, not a spotted leopard! She can’t hurt you, can she, Baron?
—Absolutely not! She’s to entertain us with a recitation . . . Madame Destutt de Tracy and her friends opened a path for the Venus as she made her way to where the orchestra sat.
—Je suis ici pour chanter pour vous, began poor Sarah.
She began to sing in English “The Ballad of Dame Hottentot.” Her voice quivered but the notes were high and clear.
Have you gone to London
And seen the sights of the City?
One can see the most famous of women
In Piccadilly she lives
In a splendid mansion
On which you can read these words
Written in letters of gold
“The Hottentot Venus.”
If you ask her why she lives there
And what makes her famous,
They will tell you she has a bottom
As large as a stove
That’s why the Gentlemen
Push and shove to see
The admirable Hottentot.
—How grotesque! How extraordinary. How disgusting. How quaint. How interesting. How pathetic. How clever of the princess. How ridiculous of the princess. How filthy. How stupid. A freak of nature. A savage. A gorilla. I don’t understand English. It’s English? No. African? No. Hottentot! Impossible, Hottentots don’t have a language!
Sarah’s plaintive wail pierced the frivolous babble of the ballroom and shocked it into silence. Tears streamed down Sarah’s face under the lace mask as if they had spouted from some unseen fountain far away. Finally, there was scattered applause. It came from Stendhal, Cuvier and Arago. The baron, I noticed, was mesmerized by the Venus. It seemed to me his fascination went beyond simple scientific curiosity; a mere desire to possess the means of solving a mysterious equation: Was she real? And if so, was she human? Did she have a soul? And if so, where did she stand in the great Chain of Being? I could see the baron doing the calculations in his head, almost fainting with desire. What, I thought, did this babbling stupid assembly know about real phenomena? About the deep dark revolution of catastrophes? Here was a true scientific gold mine and people laughed or fled. Sarah’s eyes behind the mask and the baron’s held one another’s gaze for a moment in mutual incomprehension. Cuvier seemed at a loss for words. Did he think it was cruel what he had witnessed? Or, as I suspected, had there grown in him a kind of primordial fascination beyond the social or the theatrical for the Venus? This man who classified and catalogued all living things . . . I was beginning to wonder how this encounter was going to turn out when one of the many journalists reporting on the party approached the baron. I overheard his conversation with the man I knew only as Pierre.
—Imagine, said the reporter, that this Hottentot we’re laughing at is a French girl, a young white female who, having gone to the Midi for the sea air, has been kidnapped by a band of Berber pirates and taken to a stronghold somewhere in Africa. From there, she passes through the hands of an Arab who transports her over Mount Atlas and conducts her to Timbuktu, where he exhibits her to the natives as the Parisian Venus . . . She sobs, she cries, she calls in vain to return to her beloved country. And she’ll die far from the object of all her affections . . . This is the Hottentot Venus’s fate, sir . . .
—Baron Cuvier.
—I know who you are, Doctor. Pierre Songe, reporter for the Journal des Dames et des Modes. I was reporting only on the princess’s ball, but now I have another story to write. The Venus’s story. Care to comment, Baron? Personally I am appalled and moved by this pitiful spectacle. What about you? Like freak shows?
The baron studied the journalist in complete puzzlement. What, he asked, did white females, kidnapped or not, have to do with the Hottentot Venus? What did the white race have to do with Africans? They were two separate and distinct species.
—My problem is to establish the scientific relationship between them, not to contemplate white girls . . .
The baron turned away. I was sure he didn’t want to talk to the newspapers. He didn’t want to express an opinion. He just wanted to retire to his laboratory to digest what he had just witnessed: the wondrous discovery of the Hottentot Venus. I came up behind the snubbed reporter.
—I know who you are too, said the man. You are this creature’s keeper, Sieur Réaux. Where did you find her? How long have you had her? How old is she? What does she eat? Is she really a genuine Hottentot?
—Would you like to talk to her? Alone?
—Are you serious?
—I will allow you to escort her home in a hired cab where you can ask her anything you like if you promise an article in tomorrow’s Journal des Dames et des Modes.
—Tomorrow? Give me a day to write it.
—You can stay up all night and write it.
—Agreed.
The journalist escorted Sarah home in his carriage, and in doing so got his exclusive story. He published it the next day in an article everyone in the Cour des Fontaines would read. The Venus, in learning to read and to write, had also learned to lie. The life story she told the sympathetic reporter had little to do with what had truly happened to the real Sarah Baartman. Nevertheless, Sarah’s life had made the morning newspapers on page two. She was truly a celebrity. It changed the way the Venus was perceived by the Cour des Fontaines. La Belle Limonadière took Sarah under her wing, William the Will, Cock and Penis offered her love and affection. Mickey Foucault offered her a loan to go back to Africa. The vaudeville theater sent her free tickets to their play. The chocolatier sent her a huge box of chocolates named after her. The florist delivered a bouquet of African orchids named after her. The patrons of the Thousand Columns all rose as she entered, and gave her a round of applause. Several clients bought her gin. A committee of acrobats, clowns and dwarfs petitioned me to reduce her hours of work so she could get more sleep. Alice vowed to wean Sarah from the bottle and from her unreasonable fear of me and her unreasonable fear of leaving me. She knew if she was to save Sarah’s life, she might have to kill me or have me killed. I contemplated that thought calmly. And certainly the thought gave neither me nor, I wager, her any sleepless nights. But I noticed that Sarah was never the same after that. Her melancholy took on a morbid cast and her drinking increased even more. But all in all, her appearance at Madame de C’s ball had the consequences I had been hoping for.
The Baron Cuvier finally answered my letter of six months before. He respectfully requested my permission to examine and sketch the Hottentot Venus for a period of three days at the end of March at the Museum of Natural History. The baron then wrote an accompanying letter to Inspector Boncheseiche, chief of the first section of the Paris police, and sent a copy to me.
Monsieur,
We would like to profit from the circumstances that the presence in Paris of a Hottentot female offers us in order to convey with more precision than was possible up to now the distinctive characteristics of this curious race. We will have her drawn and engraved. We have for this reason contacted the master of this woman presented to the public under the name of the Hottentot Venus. He has pointed out certain constraints to our wishes due to obligations contracted with your administration, in that Sieur Réaux needs your authorization in order to conduct his Hottentot across the Seine to the King’s Botanical Gardens. We ask you to have the goodness to bestow it.
Your obedient Servant,
Baron Georges Cuvier
—I don’t want to go, said Sarah, I’m afraid. I don’t want to pose naked.
—You will go, I order you to, I said. I was jubilant.
—I don’t have to obey you. I’m a free woman.
—Oh really?
—Yes. And I won’t take off my clothes.
—You stupid cow. The contract I won from Dunlop was for six years. There is still a year and three months to go.
—It doesn’t matter. Alice and me, we’re leaving.
I eyed Sarah, my nostrils flaring. I had had all that I could stand of Miss Baartman.
—I could sell your contract to a number of people, Sarah, several impresarios are anxious to exploit you: circuses, vaudeville, the anatomists . . . Madame de C’s salon was good publicity, so was Songe’s article. The scientific world is not so bad—and it’s certainly better than the crazy house, the jailhouse, the poorhouse or the whorehouse, I repeated. Except these doctors and scientists and so-called intelligentsia are worse cannibals than circus owners or impresarios. True, we do it for money; but they talk only about contributing to knowledge, scientific progress. Those cheap bastards only want their theories, their experiments, their decorations and academies, their trophies and stipends and publications. Yet we are more honest. The entire world is a voyeur, and that includes our “Napoleon of Intelligence!”
—We’re still leaving this time, pouted Sarah stubbornly.
—You think you’re leaving, Sarah, but you aren’t going nowhere. Not only did I win Dunlop’s contract, but I bought you as his wife. In England, a man can do that, didn’t you know? In Halifax, a man can sell his wife if he has a good reason—like bankruptcy or debt. It’s perfectly legal, an ancient English custom known as wife sale.
—What! exploded Alice.
—Wife sale is illegal and a crime, she shouted from the doorway. You could never make it stick! Besides, Dunlop is a bloody bigamist.
—Try me, I said. And you’ll both end up in a whorehouse. This contract gives me, as her husband, complete control of all her worldly goods . . . That which the husband hath is his own. That which the wife hath is the husband’s. She belongs to me as wife and I am her husband. Only incidentally does Sarah have a contract with me as impresario. In court Sarah is nothing but my appendage. I am tutor, guardian, owner, treasurer and head of household, protector and moral authority. Until death, girl.
—You son of a bitch, screamed Alice.
On March 20, Napoleon escaped from his prison on Elba and returned triumphant to a Paris Louis XVIII had fled just hours before. He restored himself as Emperor of France. One of his first proclamations was to abolish slavery and the slave trade that he himself had reimposed after the Revolution five years before. For the third time Baron Cuvier changed camps, and rebaptized himself a Bonapartist, and I got out my old Grand Army uniform. Who would remember now that I had deserted?
17
There are no missing links . . . What law is there which would force the Creator to form unnecessarily useless organisms simply to fill the gaps in a scale?
—BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,
Thirty Lessons in Comparative Anatomy
Twisted Ears, the English month of March, 1815. The sharp light was almost blinding and it cut everything into different shapes of color: triangles, squares, circles, outlined by milk-white stone. The King’s Botanical Gardens were the most beautiful I had ever seen. Magnificent and precise, laid out with a ruler and a compass, the gardens were very different from the English gardens and parks I had known up until now.
Master Réaux held my arm tightly as he walked me through the gates, emphasizing what an important day this was and how I was to comport myself. He went on to explain why it had been necessary to have this exhibition at all. I put one foot in front of the other, listening not to him but to the sound of my leather boots scraping against the pink and gray pebbles underfoot. Alice had dressed me in the most conventional clothes I possessed. Somehow I felt my most important garment should be my own dignity. After all, I was not at number 188. I was not to meet a mob of carnivalgoers but the cream of Parisian intelligentsia; scientists, writers, artists, doctors and professors had all gathered here to behold my person. This was hardly our “public.” These were the masters of the world. Of one thing I was sure, I would never allow these white men to examine my sex. I would cover myself with the white handkerchief I carried in the pocket of my dress. My apron was my own business.
—Baron Cuvier has agreed to certify your scientific importance in La Quotidienne next Saturday.
I didn’t answer. Master Réaux had not received permission for us to cross the Seine to the Museum of Natural History in the King’s Botanical Gardens until the end of March. During that time the exiled Napoleon had returned from Elba, invaded the Gulf of Juan, rallied the army sent to stop him and incited a general rebellion which had borne him triumphantly to the gates of Paris. Bonaparte had entered Paris on the shoulders of the army on March 1 as Emperor once again—and on the coattails of King Louis, who had fled the same day. Even now, Paris was still caught up in the jubilation of Napoleon’s return.
We made our way towards the tall white château situated at the end of the gardens.
—This is fantastic publicity for you, repeated Master Réaux. The baron is famous as “the Napoleon of Intelligence” and he’s Napoleon’s surgeon general—his favorite scientist! It’s a miracle of good luck! I asked him if he wanted me to introduce you but he just looked at me very strangely and declined, saying he had his own introduction . . . So, don’t open your mouth unless someone asks you a direct question. You are not here to talk. You are here to be seen. Great painters will draw you as well and the professor baron will allow me to reproduce one of the illustrations for our own publicity . . . besides the certificate! Imagine the most famous, most brilliant mind in Paris . . . in the realm . . . the Emperor’s surgeon general . . .
I wasn’t listening to Master Réaux. I hadn’t listened to him since we stumbled off the mailboat from Southampton and he had kissed the ground of his native France. He had even shed a tear, but was smart enough to keep me from the money I had earned since then. Alice found out that he had been a deserter from Napoleon’s army before he had been an animal trainer. And that before that, he had been the black sheep of a respectable French family. I was busy thinking of all this when his voice interrupted my thoughts.
—Are you listening to me, stupid? Didn’t I tell you to wear your circus dress?
—I wanted the great masters to see me as I am, not with a costume on . . . That’s for the crowds at number 188 . . . It seemed to me . . .
—It seemed to you? Since when do things seem to you? How would you know what they want or wish to see? Have you ever been to the Museum of Natural History in the King’s Botanical Gardens before? Have you ever seen a scientific laboratory before? Or the greatest collection of specimens, animals, fossils and skeletons on the Continent? Do you know Cuvier himself has a private collection of 11,486 items? You give me any more lip and I’ll smash you one . . .
He drew me closer to him and pinched my arm. He rubbed his jaw.
—Look how beautiful these grounds are . . . I wonder who’s invited to the lecture . . .
The day was warm and the light clear and calm as after a storm. It was spring light and spring weather and at the end of the perspective stretching perhaps half a mile stood the Museum of Natural History between two avenues of chestnut trees. Halfway up the avenues was a large pool with a shining, spouting fountain of stone animals. From the fountain radiated triangular flower beds and sculpted boxwood shrubbery. The pool reflected the sky. The château of white stone had two sets of steps leading to twin entrances. The slate roof with its glass dome gleamed, and above the dome flew the Emperor’s flag. On either side of the gardens were somber woods where tropical plants from Africa and India grew in glasshouses. These were called hothouses and plants for the garden were grown in them all year round. This was why the gardens were called Le Jardin des Plantes.
In the distance I spied a large blue-and-green-striped tent from which the most beautiful music came. I turned my head from left to right, not having time as we walked to take everything in: the gardens which descended to the banks of the Seine, the tall trees, the caged animals, the dark-frocked men strolling amongst the clipped hedges. I saw two elegantly dressed white men hurrying towards us. One was dressed in black with a black shirt and black cravat and black trousers. Only his shiny golden deco
rations flashed in the sunlight. He was hatless and his bright wavy red hair stood up in the breeze. The other man was slightly smaller, dressed like a peacock in bottle green and lavender. He too was covered with decorations and was hatless. His receding blond hair plastered down across his bald pate was worn long and pulled back in a ponytail. As they approached, my master adjusted his stiff white cravat nervously.
—Here they come, he croaked. Remember to curtsy. Let me do the talking. Just greet them with a nod. Don’t smile. Don’t speak unless you are spoken to. I’ll . . . I’ll take care of this. Remember your French?
—Bonjour, messieurs.
—And you curtsy like you would in South Africa.
—And I curtsy . . . I repeated.
I regretted not having insisted that Alice come with me. My heart was racing. I was about to encounter science thanks to the man who was approaching slowly with a stately stiff-legged walk.
—Bitch, stand up straight . . .
—Yes, Master.
We came face-to-face with the two men.
—Good morning, Sieur Réaux, may I introduce the Chevalier Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, professor of zoology at the University of Paris . . .
—Good morning, sirs, chirped Master Réaux.
—Bonjours, maîtres, I murmured.
As I curtsied a cold chill went up my spine. There was no recognition in the baron’s eyes. As if this were the first time we had met. Didn’t he remember the ball? His introductions? The unblinking gaze of the doctor was as cold as ice and inspected me as if I had just arrived in a crate. How could he pretend he had never beheld me before? It was the cold stare of a cobra, paralyzing with fear before striking. I felt my chest being squeezed tighter and tighter as if in a fatal embrace, one in which I recognized my own fate in helpless horror. Oh Lord, this man’s a murderer, I thought. I kept my eyes lowered, my lower lip trembled, my hands were wet and clammy in their gloves. I had what Caroline called stage fright. This was not the Parisian mob but God himself.