Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  20

  SIRE

  The brain is at the same time the last station of sensible impression and the receptacle of images that memory and imagination submit to the spirit. It is, within that relationship, the objective instrument of the soul.

  —BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,

  Letter to the Emperor Napoleon

  on the progress of science before 1789

  January 1816. When I returned to the Cour des Fontaines, I found the door I had left unlocked slightly ajar, not exactly as I had left it. Something was wrong that I couldn’t put my finger on. Slowly I pushed the door further open and stepped inside. As my foot touched the threshold, I realized what it was. There was an absence within. Sarah was gone. Surely, after all our plans, she hadn’t left without me? Would there be a note telling me where to find her? Would there be a rendezvous at an inn, a stable, the mail coach?

  Fear coiled itself around my knees like Sieur Réaux’s boa constrictor. My knees buckled. This was not right. It was too hot, almost suffocating, and there was a smell I couldn’t place, like wet clay. The door to Sarah’s room was closed. Had I closed it upon leaving? Light flickered through the crack beneath the door. My hand went to my throat.

  —Sarah?

  —Sarah? I repeated.

  —Sarah, I whispered again before I flung open the door.

  Even before kneeling beside the inert body, I knew she was dead.

  —Lord ’ave mercy, I moaned as I crossed myself.

  She had left, I thought selfishly, without saying goodbye. She’s left me alone in this God-forsaken place. I looked around and then up at the ceiling as if I expected to see Sarah’s spirit hovering there.

  The Venus, or what remained of her, had fallen over the side of her bed, her head and upper torso stretched across it. Her head was turned to one side, and clutched in her left hand was the Bible she had so adamantly refused to read for so long. There was a note sticking out. I lifted the cover of the book to retrieve it. It was addressed to me in Sarah’s childish scrawl. I didn’t read it. I couldn’t through my tears. Hurriedly, I slipped it into my coat pocket. I was sobbing now, my whole face pulled down in inestimable grief, open, raw and limitless. I lifted the Venus’s hind parts and laid her on the bed, straightening out the limbs and arms so that she lay straight and neatly placed in the center. Then I lit as many candles as I could find and placed them at the head and foot of the bed. I washed and clothed the naked body, tugged at the bloodstained sheets to change them, cursing and sweating. When I was finished, I took off my coat and hat and sat down in a chair. I dragged it up to the side of the bed with my heels so that I could study Sarah’s face. I slipped my hands into Sarah’s red kid gloves. She possessed dozens of pairs, leather, silk and satin, always in red. It was as if I had slipped on her skin. I decided to wait for Réaux to come home. I would not leave Sarah alone, I thought. I would wait here until her keeper came back from his whoring before going to look for a priest. Snow still swirled outside. It was almost dawn, and in the small circle of light made by the candles, I bowed my head, sobbing.

  I understood suffering and I was moved by pity. There is no kindness of the heart without a measure of imagination and I had imagined Sarah better than Sarah had imagined herself. My heart, like the rest of me, was made of steel. My short life (I was only thirty years old although I looked fifty) had witnessed every species of death: from disease and starvation, heat exhaustion in the brick fields, black lung in the mines, white lung in the mills, suffocation in the dye factories, lead poisoning in the lime pits, crushing, mangling, hemorrhaging, tuberculosis, cholera, typhus, smallpox, the plague, infanticide, hanging and firing squad. But never, I thought, had I seen a more lonely or pathetic death than Sarah’s.

  I stood perfectly motionless, lost in myself, listening for Réaux’s footsteps; only the hem of my skirt stirred in the draft: The rays of the rising sun broke over my disheveled hair. The sudden flood of light enhanced the opulence of my form and the vigor of my real age. We had been together not only servant and mistress but godmother and godchild, which meant neither would abandon the other. Out of mutual loneliness and despair, we had become sisters under the skin and all that that meant. We had framed a hard yet orderly pattern in our relation to Réaux, our mutual enemy yet our master. I had been Sarah’s servant but also her jailer. I had taken Réaux’s money and locked Sarah’s door every night, turning the keys over to him. We had lived together in the same house, yet each had kept her own private rituals, utensils, rhythms, sins and vices, each one had recited her own private litany of pain, independent of the other. We had submitted to this ugly, brutal woman-beater to escape the whorehouse, the crazy house, the workhouse or the jailhouse. But never again, I vowed, would fear rule my life. I lifted my bowed head and swore I would avenge my friend Sarah if I never did another thing in life.

  And again, I heard Sarah’s voice, feebly but with a penetrating effect in the quiet of the room. The enormous discord of her sobs, as if sent from some faraway and remote spot, beyond the reaches of human suffering, crushed every bone in my body. Sarah was gone and I, Alice, was to blame. I had stood and watched, played the dunce, the joker, the errand runner, the governess, serving as a shield for Réaux and as a shield for Sarah’s descent into hell. A passive white woman who, even though a servant, had more prerogatives than her colored mistress. Sarah had saved my life and I had repaid her by failing to save hers.

  When Réaux returned in the early hours of the morning, drunk and happy, he let out a wail and a string of curses that sent a chill down my spine. He could have been Othello lamenting his murder of Desdemona.

  —Saartjie! My own Venus! Sarah! he howled, waking up those who were still sleeping and bringing a curious crowd to the door.

  —Murderer, I screamed to his face and for all to hear.

  But Réaux no longer saw or heard me. He had sunk into the quicksand of his own torment. He struggled for several moments and then, as if I had dealt him a blow to the head, sank to his knees; his arms stretched downwards, his hands clasped. The other inhabitants of the Cour des Fontaines, the sleepy freaks, the wide-awake whores, the sailors and soldiers of vanquished disbanded armies, the circus managers, the beggars, the thieves, the waiters from the Pied de Porc, all gathered in the doorway of the small room for a last look at the Hottentot Venus. Their faces, deformed by disease, alcohol, accident, smallpox, imbecility, insanity or simply God, glowed in the light like a religious painting. I fought my way through the gathering crowd and the babbling cries. I must, I thought, get to the parish priest. Sarah was a Christian. I felt a hand on my sleeve, it was William.

  —Father Lawrence is at la Belle Limonadière’s place. I’ll go to fetch him.

  I nodded mutely, making my way past William and down the crowded staircase. People were arriving from everywhere, blocking the winding staircase and flowing out into the courtyard. The Venus is dead, they whispered. The news of Sarah’s death traveled by word of mouth up and down the corridors, the streets, the alleys, the impasses of the quarter. Slowly, all the things-that-should-never-have-been-born filed by the supine Venus, openly weeping or stony-faced with grief, their horrendous faces and deformities half lit by the flickering candles, which cast their black forms against the wall as in a shadow play.

  —The Hottentot Venus is dead.

  —The Hottentot Venus is dead.

  By the time I had returned with the priest, the crowd had dispersed and in its place were the police prefect and Baron Cuvier. Réaux had composed himself and the corpse was already wrapped, mummylike, on a stretcher, ready to be transferred to the waiting cart below. As Sarah had died without witnesses, explained the inspector, the police would carry out an inquiry before she could be released to her nearest kin, if there were any kin. Helplessly Father Lawrence and I watched Sarah’s body being taken away. Two men carried the canvas-wrapped body down the stairs and past the still-lingering crowds. Snowflakes fell on the corpse as it was hauled into the two-wheeled
charrette. The croque-morts asked no questions when the illustrious Professor Cuvier ordered them to go to the morgue instead of the Hôpital de la Pitié nearby. It was, after all, none of their business. The charrette struggled over the rutted ice and garbage.

  I snatched Sarah’s red cloak from its hook. Sarah and I were both familiar with the Paris morgue. I hurried towards it. The morgue dated from 1804. Built on the Quai du Marché Neuf, not far from Notre-Dame, it received the bodies of the unidentified dead, fallen on the pavements of Paris or drowned in the Seine. The dark, cavernous stone building built on the foundation of medieval ruins also received the murdered, the hanged, the guillotined, the aborted and the indigent from the Hôpital de la Pitié. Newborns, children, adults, victims of smallpox, executed criminals, all lay in neat rows, waiting to be identified. The dead were separated from the living by a wall of cut glass, through which not only people searching for a family member peered but the general public on any given day, out on an excursion or a Sunday afternoon walk. Whole families stood on the balconies overlooking the pens, fascinated by this exhibition of death. Sarah and I used to come here on occasion for that very reason.

  The mortal remains of these nameless strangers were exhibited for three days in hopes of identification. Adjoining the morgue was the clerk’s office, the autopsy room and the coroner’s cabinet. At the end of the exhibition period, the body could be buried and a signed death certificate, made out as “person unknown,” issued. The morgue also served the nearby Préfecture de Police, which deposited body parts and merchandise recovered from grave robbers and body snatchers. For the morgue was also a place of traffic for the anatomists, phrenologists and physicians who searched for cadavers to dissect. The bodies, skeletons and fetuses were the coveted objects of the medical schools and laboratories and universities.

  So it was not surprising, I thought, that Réaux had notified Baron Cuvier of the sudden death of Sarah and that less than an hour later they were both in the morgue bartering over the price of her body while Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire arranged the paperwork with the clerk on duty. The baron had even brought one of the artists from the Jardin des Plantes, Nicolas Tiedeman, to make a death mask of the body. He was the one who told me Sarah had been sold to the baron for five thousand francs. The young handsome sculptor had brought his modeling kit. I watched as he stuffed a bit of beeswax in each nostril to avoid fainting from the stench of rotting bodies and began to make Sarah’s death mask. I willed myself not to think about the consequences of the episode at the Jardin des Plantes where they had met. Sarah had been ill even then, I thought, yet an amphitheater full of doctors had failed to observe this simple, poignant fact. She had been dying before their very eyes and not one had bothered to live up to his Hippocratic oath. They had seen not a human being, but a specimen for their delectation and nothing more. Her anemia, her fever, the yellowed whites of her eyes, the labored breathing, the tremors of advanced alcohol poisoning, the general physical weakness I had observed so minutely, had gone unnoticed and untreated by sixty great Parisian physicians. And a girl had died, as Nicolas Tiedeman pointed out, because their prognosis had had to do not with her humanity but with her distance from it. I was no longer surprised by the nausea and revolt I felt not only against the physicians but myself. I watched as Tiedeman squeezed the soft wax tightly, ruining the work he had just accomplished. Finally he simply sat there in the dim and wretched pit, motionless, letting unbidden tears roll down his cheeks.

  —They want me to make a death mask . . . but I cannot, he said sobbing. I walked over to him and put my hand on his shoulder. We remained so, both helpless. The oil lamps and torches cast grotesque black shadows over the entire assembly of anatomists, physicians, functionaries, hospital workers, gravediggers and croque-morts. There was no sound except the silence of the dead.

  Tiedeman wiped away his tears and resumed sculpting. I watched the death mold take shape under his swift movements. He vowed to me he would never sculpt a human figure or face again. He would remain an animalist who sculpted beasts of the forest, the sea creatures, domesticated animals: bulls, dogs, cats, geese and those inhabitants of the jungle one called savage . . . the lion, the lynx, the leopard, the panther. They were all species that didn’t recognize and didn’t anticipate death. That innocence, he said, he would try to capture for the rest of what was left of his life. There had been a human being in mortal danger and he had stood by, a passive murderer, he repeated over and over. And without a particle of pity, he blamed himself. I was too mortified to confess that I too had done the same thing. Tiedeman began packing up his supplies. His hands shook. He earned his living with his hands, he said. If they shook, what would become of him?

  —I am not a great sculptor, he continued. Not even a competent one. I was lucky to have been accepted in David’s atelier. I helped him finish portraits of great men.

  Tiedeman, his sculpting kit on his back, took my hand as we traversed the shadows and chiaroscuro of the morgue. He cast the same freakish silhouette of a hunchback as Victor’s turtle-boy. An indifferent guard waved us out, not bothering to ask us to sign the register since he assumed Tiedeman was one of Cuvier’s men. We passed poor, ill-clad, desperate people looking for a lost relative, a missing wife, a husband who had disappeared, a stolen child, all the dramas and tragedies of the human comedy. I had been too late to claim Sarah Baartman. She had been claimed by her enemies. We were both almost running now, our legs pumping, our capes flapping, desperate to escape from the purgatorial shadows of the morgue. In our rush, Tiedeman bumped into Sieur Réaux, whose broad shoulder knocked the animalist’s thin frame against the filthy wall. I stepped back into the shadows. I didn’t want to meet Réaux here. I had another meeting place in mind. And another plan. Réaux begged his pardon.

  The room was bare when I returned in the early hours. Sarah’s long red cape swept the bare hardwood floor as I inspected her vandalized room. What Réaux hadn’t packed up or sold had been taken by thieves and souvenir hunters. The posters were stripped off the walls. The furniture was gone. Sarah’s clothes were gone. Réaux had taken the jewelry that was left. I had only the opal ring I had slipped off Sarah’s finger as I had dressed her. The pamphlets, newspapers, clippings and receipts had all disappeared. All that I salvaged from the sack of Sarah’s room was her Bible, the red cloak I was wearing, the opal ring and several pairs of the red silk gloves she so adored.

  I opened the shutters and the low January sunlight streamed in. Sarah’s bathtub stood in the middle of the empty room. No one had been able to lift it down the winding staircase.

  I had no more tears left. I had failed to rescue Sarah’s corpse and arrange for the Christian burial Father Lawrence had promised her. Réaux had sold Sarah’s body to the anatomists—to Cuvier, the Hottentot-lover. By tonight I would be gone. I dipped into the pocket of Sarah’s cloak and pulled out Sarah’s letter—her last words:

  THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD

  I SHALL NOT WANT

  HE MAKETH ME TO LYE DOWN

  IN GREEN PASTURES

  HE RESTORISH MY SOUL

  TO AFFRIKA

  I was so dumb with grief, I thought I might never speak again, might remain in mute horror for the rest of my life. My eyes sought escape from the bare room. Through the window, I could see the top of the lone leafless tree swaying to and fro as in a nightmare. I thought I might wake and find Sarah there trying on a new pair of gloves. I settled into that state of partial wakefulness that is the worst part of not sleeping. I remembered how Sarah and I spent the afternoon off that Réaux had begrudgingly given her shopping, buying gloves, eating ice cream or chocolates or both. How we had strutted down Bond Street under new black umbrellas. How I had held Sarah’s morphine-crazed body in my arms, listening to her tales of Africa. How I had cradled Sarah’s head over a washbasin while she vomited the leftover poison of a night of drinking and brawling. How we had read together the Collects, Reading Made Easy, the Times Almanac and the Bible until Sarah could read them by
herself.

  I saw Sarah’s hand reaching out to me that first night in Manchester when I had been sure I would not see another dawn. I still remembered the feel of the cold cobblestones scraping my knees through the dirty rags I had been wearing. There should have been a sign, some warning, a black crow, a bat overhead, Sarah’s purple heron—something that should have warned me, I thought. I should never have left Sarah alone New Year’s night. And now my heart beat and beat and beat and wouldn’t stop like Sarah’s and wouldn’t let me sleep or eat. I clutched the tiny slip of paper, Sarah’s last will and testament, and vowed to avenge her death and all that she had endured. It was the only way I could think of to assuage my own terrible guilt. I had let Sarah die. I had to make sure she was buried.

  I went through the newspapers looking for clues as to where they had taken Sarah’s body. Some of the papers already carried the death notice of the legendary Venus: Le Mercure de France, Le Journal de Paris, La Quotidienne, Les Annales Politiques, La Gazette de Paris. Finally I found what I was looking for in Le Journal Général de France.

  Taking place at this moment, on the premises of the Museum of Natural History, is the molding of the body of the Hottentot Venus, who died yesterday of an illness that lasted only three days. Her body offers no visible trace of her sickness if not a few reddish brown spots around the mouth, on her thighs and hips. Her stoutness and her enormous protuberances have not diminished and her extremely kinky hair has not straightened out as it ordinarily does with Negroes who are ill or after their death. The dissection of this woman will supply Mr. Cuvier with an extremely curious chapter in the history of the variations of the human race . . .

  I stifled a cry. I could never recover Sarah’s body now. The Venus was in the hands of politicians, scientists, masters of the world.

  OBITUARY

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 3

  THE ANNALS OF POLITICS, MORALS AND LITERATURE