In the four vignettes commissioned for Trembley’s Memoir, he and the Bentinck boys stand in various parts of the estate collecting polyps or other water creatures, carrying nets and jars or fishing from the ornamental ponds. They are tiny figures dwarfed by a spectacularly groomed and ordered landscape in which each tree has been planted exactly equidistant from the next in its row. Apart from the occasional dog or flock of peacocks, Trembley and the boys are portrayed as entirely alone, wandering around large empty spaces. Where are the servants, the gardeners, the hundreds of European travelers who came every year to walk in those world-famous gardens? Where is the count? Or the count’s brother Charles, who was always in and out of the house? Or the code breakers and spies the Bentinck brothers employed to shore up their political power and influence in Europe?
Why the emptiness?
Count Bentinck commissioned the vignettes to ensure that the pictures portrayed his beautiful estate, his tutor, and his two sons in the best possible light. But that does not explain why the landscape is so devoid of people. Trembley did not rattle around with the boys in a vast empty house. He was almost never alone there. Bentinck was one of the most important men in the Netherlands and the grandson of one of the most important aristocrats of England. He and his brother Charles were the two youngest children of the elder Willem Bentinck, who had been adviser to William III, king of England and stadtholder of the Netherlands. They were involved in Anglo-Dutch political decision making at every level. Their friends and relations and foreign ambassadors came to stay at his country estate all the time, bringing with them their own servants and friends.
Trembley and the Bentinck boys fishing for polyps in the ponds of the Sorgvliet estate.
Abraham Trembley, Memoires (1744)
Despite the emptiness portrayed in the picture and Trembley’s insistence that he had merely been lucky, the great discovery of the polyp did not come out of an empty house or an empty head. And it did not happen just anywhere. It happened in The Hague, birthplace of the microscope and of experimental optics. It happened not just in The Hague but specifically on a country estate owned by William Bentinck. Trembley was part of an intellectual community that had multiple centers: The Hague, Paris, Geneva, and London. The linchpin to all of these communities was his employer, William Bentinck. There were scores of invisible people behind Trembley in those pictures—not just servants and gardeners, but also all the other people who passed in and out of the great house: microscope and instrument makers, enthusiastic amateur experimenters, encyclopedists, freemasons, freethinkers, booksellers, library curators, publishers, and illustrators. Trembley was working at a powerful crossing point; he was a node at the center of a series of political, trading, and scientific networks: The Hague.
At the time of Trembley’s discovery, the Bentinck brothers, Charles and William, aged thirty-three and thirty-seven, were republicans; later they would be enthusiastic supporters of Rousseau, and they may have been leaders of a group of freemasons called the Knights of Jubilation based in The Hague, some of whom were pantheists, reformers, freethinkers, and Whigs. They had strong links with radical publishing networks in The Hague and read the writings of the French philosophes. The Lodge of the Knights of Jubilation had its own literary salon and magazine, the Literary Journal (Journal Littéraire), which promoted science as the means to reform or challenge certain established social institutions.
The freethinkers of The Hague who passed through the house and with whom Trembley shared conversations in the literary salons or coffeehouses of the city on his visits there were in the main first- or second-generation refugees who had come to the Netherlands by the boatload from France after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 and then again after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which exiled 400,000 Protestants from France, forcing them into Russia, England, Prussia, Switzerland, and the Dutch Republic. These émigrés told horrifying stories of persecution at the hands of the Catholic Church: children detained by the French authorities and forced to convert, separated families, inquisition, imprisonment, expulsion, and systematic torture. At the same time, the increasing circulation of clandestine anticlerical books, the movement of travelers across the world, and the new familiarity with the diversity of world religions and beliefs further undermined the authority of the Catholic Church among these groups. Furthermore, Trembley’s work was certainly spawned within a remarkably freethinking culture in The Hague, but the European and particularly French communities of savants to which he addressed it were considerably more radical. Ultimately, they would determine its meanings.
Trembley’s discovery did not lead directly and immediately to a new flowering of ideas about the origins and transformation of species, but it did shake some of the premises on which all natural philosophy had been founded for at least a century. Seventeenth-century science had been characterized by a narrow and rigid empiricism and an aversion to large-scale theorizing, shaped as it was by Francis Bacon’s opposition to hasty hypothesizing; Trembley’s discovery spawned a new age of natural philosophical speculation. Trembley had created witnesses across Europe, men and women who had seen the polyp repeatedly cut and regenerated with their own eyes and who had been astonished and confounded by the philosophical implications of that regeneration. Increasingly powerful microscopes made the regeneration visible; a growing community of savants in Paris in particular talked it into a philosophical conundrum.
Trembley’s polyp memoir was not the only bestselling science book in the bookshops of Paris in the late 1740s. Many Parisian intellectuals ordered both Trembley’s memoir and a book that was as bold, outrageous, and fantastic as Trembley’s was deferential, fact-obsessed, and myopic. This work, published in The Hague in French, appeared in the Paris bookshops in 1748 with the strange title Telliamed, or Conversations Between an Indian Philosopher and a French Missionary (Telliamed, ou, entretiens d’un philosophe indien avec un missionnaire françois). It proposed that the earth was billions of years old, that all animals had transformed through vast tracts of time from primitive aquatic creatures, and that the earth’s crust had been formed by the gradual diminishment of the sea. It caused a scandal. For a hundred years it formed the backbone of all discussions about the origins of the earth and the beginnings of time, and it was still being discussed in radical circles on the eve of the French Revolution. It was this book, and the heretical speculations about the formation of the earth and the past and continuing mutation of species and landscape, that catapulted Trembley’s polyp to even greater philosophical fame.
It came from The Hague, via Cairo.
*The surviving house at Sorgvliet is now the country residence of the Dutch prime minister, and its once extensive estates have been engulfed by the spread of The Hague.
*The freshwater polyp is what we now call a Hydra.
*The term “parthenogenesis” was coined in 1849.
*The angled-arm microscope that Trembley used for the polyp experiments was one that he was probably already using for insect observation.
*The war (1740–48) began as a challenge to the succession of Maria Theresa of Austria to the Habsburg thrones of her father, but in reality it was a struggle for power between France and Prussia on one side and the rest of Europe on the other.
6
The Consul of Cairo
CAIRO, 1708
As the call to prayer began across the city, as the air cooled and the moths gathered, the French consul, Benoît de Maillet, dressed in a white turban, silk robe, and embroidered slippers, sat writing at a table on the roof terrace of his house. Through the arch of the elaborate reed-woven pavilion he had designed to frame the view, beyond the roofs, domes, palm trees, and glittering minarets of the city, he could see the Nile, a line of silver-blue, now stained pink by the setting sun. From the city’s harbor in the distance, trading boats set sail for Africa, Europe, and Asia carrying wheat, rice, and vegetables, cotton and linen cloth, leather, spices, coffee, and sherbet. Barques and feluc
cas ferrying goods from the upper Nile moored alongside them. Beyond the wide river, great pyramids jagged the desert skyline.
Immediately below Maillet’s roof terrace, the streets of Cairo’s French quarter branched out from a narrow, foul-smelling alleyway. It housed the forty-five or so French traders and their families and servants whose interests Maillet was here to protect; they were making their fortunes shipping coffee and other exotic goods to the coffee shops and aristocratic tables of Europe. It was Consul de Maillet’s job to maintain order among the French community, to ensure that taxes were paid, and to send reports back to the secretary of state for the navy, his employer, Jérôme Phélypeaux, Comte de Pontchartrain: detailed descriptions of commercial, trade, and taxation matters as well as local disputes, rumor, and gossip. He was, in Cairo, the eyes and ears of the French king. No one was more important in this small French community than Benoît de Maillet, though he struggled to make his compatriots acknowledge that.
Benoît de Maillet, dressed for formal consul duties.
Benoît de Maillet, Description de l’Égypte (1735)
There was very little sense of camaraderie in the French quarter, Maillet complained to his patron in Paris. The young French traders were unruly, greedy, and openly hostile to their consul; they accused him of being in the pocket of the Turkish pasha and were suspicious of his friendships with the high-ranking Arab and Turkish intellectuals and of his numerous trips into the desert. They fought and schemed among themselves and with the local traders; though French protocol dictated that they should attend church, few actually did; they resented paying taxes; many had taken Muslim women as mistresses and fathered half-Arab children.
Cairo, once a great capital, had been swallowed up by the Turks and was now little more than a provincial trading post of the Ottoman Empire, albeit a wealthy one. Maillet spent his days sorting out taxation disputes, trying to enforce regulations, and doing his best to control the unruly militia. Patient, firm, and canny by nature, over the sixteen years of his consulship he had become carefully attuned and attentive to the cultures, beliefs, and etiquette of the different groups who depended upon one another for their daily well-being and trade: the French, Turkish, Indian, and Jewish traders, the pashas, the Turkish militiamen, the missionaries, the ships’ captains and sailors who passed through the port. He knew exactly when and how to flatter or threaten, bribe or stand his ground.
The consul was never at rest; in Cairo he was the spymaster; he had spies everywhere, men and women who were his eyes and ears. Cairo was a tinderbox; his power and that of the French ministers running the Paris Chamber of Commerce was continually contested. In 1708 he had finally come to the end of his consulship. When in 1704 eighty French traders and their relatives mutinied against consular authority, a royal inspector had been sent from Paris. In the ensuing investigation, Maillet had been required to answer the French traders’ list of grievances, but he had also managed to establish thirty-one new articles of conduct and to bring about some expulsions. In return he had negotiated a transfer to the prestigious consulship of Leghorn, an important northern Italian port city on the Ligurian Sea.* Now that another, less controversial consul had arrived in Cairo to succeed him, Maillet, in preparation for departure, had begun to hand over his papers and files and auction off his furniture and effects. But the French traders, still furious about the new regulations, had begun making trouble; they chanted under his window at night. There were even rumors of assassination plots.
For seventeen years, at night, when the air was cool and the merchants quiet, Consul de Maillet had retreated to his roof terrace to write. His book, he told himself, would raise him forever above the petty gossip and machinations of the ignorant French traders and would couple his name across the world with those of Galileo and Copernicus. He believed he had discovered the origin of the earth and of species. When the time was right, when he had gathered enough proof—more measurements, more facts, more documentation—he would publish.
Since he had arrived in Egypt in 1692, Maillet had been gathering information about the country, collecting detailed geological observations about rocks, strata, and fossils, about sea levels and species. His mountain of facts, copied out carefully on paper and stored in so many carved chests with his precious books and manuscripts, had become an enormous cabinet of curiosities. But how much proof would he need? What weight of facts would be required to persuade the savants of Europe to overturn the beliefs of millennia? When would he ever have enough?
In 1697, sitting on his roof terrace in Cairo, Benoît de Maillet had begun an extraordinary book written in French with a very long subtitle called Telliamed, or Conversations Between an Indian Philosopher and a French Missionary on the Diminution of the Sea, the Formation of the Earth, and the Origin of Men and Animals. It was the first sustained attempt to prove that species had mutated, the first directly transformist account of earth history. Nearly forty years in the making, it was added to, edited, censored, and finally published ten years after its author was buried in a small cemetery in Marseilles.
Maillet wrote Telliamed on the border between East and West, at the crossing point of two cultures. Cairo’s population in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was not characterized by the easy cosmopolitan alliances of Jahiz’s ninth-century Basra. The city was much more volatile, but for someone as curious and imaginative as Maillet, it was an extraordinarily fruitful place in which to speculate about the origin of the earth and of species. The signs of prehistoric time were all around him, in the pyramids and their strange hieroglyphs, in the shifting coastlines and delta of the Nile.
Egypt wove its spell around Maillet from the moment he stepped off the boat that moored in Alexandria in 1692. The architecture of the domed mosques left him breathless. “One cannot but admire the beauty of these domes, their grace, their proportions, their boldness,” he wrote. He became an Egyptologist by degrees. His consular duties in Egypt included collecting and shipping back to the Chamber of Commerce archaeological curiosities and reports about the Egyptian people’s trade, customs, language, and manners, but it was the search for the ancient origins of Egypt that captured his imagination.
On board the boat that sailed from Marseilles to Alexandria, Maillet began his investigations into Egyptian history by rereading Herodotus’ famous description of Egypt written in the fifth century BC. Under the swinging cabin lamp, he studied a map of the country, tracing the great Roman geographer’s route up the Nile from Alexandria, marking out the places he had visited. In Histories, Maillet read Herodotus’ excited observations of the different soils found in Egypt, his description of the omnipresence of salt and the layers of shells in the mountain rocks around inland Memphis, and he was persuaded by Herodotus’ conviction that Egypt was “the gift of the Nile,” that the land had been formed by the silting up of the great river and that there had once been a sea here. Herodotus described iron rings he had found in Memphis that were set into rock, rings that had been used to moor ships hundreds of years before, in the seventh century BC. Astonishingly, by the fifth century BC, when Herodotus stood contemplating those vestiges of an ancient harbor, there was no sea or river to be seen from even the highest roof terraces of Memphis.
Two thousand years after Herodotus had stared at the ruins of Memphis, contemplating the Egyptian sea that had disappeared from what had once been a port city, Benoît de Maillet set out to find Memphis for himself and to discover if the seashells and the iron rings that Herodotus had described were still there. But finding Memphis was not so easy. When he and his men finally arrived, the great ancient city that had once been the center of its own empire was no more than a looted ruin, a quarry of old stones in the desert, some twenty miles south of Cairo and now “25 Leagues [some 75 miles] from the Sea.” Dusty from the desert wanderings and disappointed that there was so little of the great city left, Maillet was nonetheless elated to find the ruins and the rings that Herodotus had touched and the scatterings of seashells in the bo
ulders on the plain.
In search of that lost sea, and for further evidence of shifting coastlines and falling sea levels, Maillet read Seneca, Plato, and Pliny, each of whom had been to Egypt thousands of years before. The ancient historians all noted that ships took a day and a night to reach Alexandria from the island of Pharos, whereas in Maillet’s time the two landmasses were connected by a simple bridge. The sea had evidently been much higher and broader two thousand years earlier. It followed that sea levels were falling. As they fell, and as rivers moved more sediment around, Maillet was now convinced, new landscapes were opening up, imperceptibly slowly. The idea of the earth being in a constant state of flow fascinated him. He called it, borrowing a phrase from Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes), “this fame Flux and Reflux.” What he could see happening in the Nile delta was happening all across the surface of the earth, and it was repeated in the star systems that Descartes described. Waxing and waning. Flux and reflux. Growth and decay.
As Maillet traveled up and down the Nile in his wooden consular barge accompanied by servants and bodyguards, or made expeditions by camel out across the desert to see the pyramids or to ancient white stone Coptic monasteries barely holding their own against sandstorms, he witnessed and noted down the marks of immense tracts of time inscribed upon the landscape. He saw the tracings left by the Nile as it flooded and contracted over thousands, perhaps millions, of years. And everywhere he looked for vestiges of a retreating sea, searching for seashells among the hieroglyphed ruins.
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