Darwin's Ghosts

by Rebecca Stott

  Metamorphosis was at the heart of biological life, Telliamed claimed. All species were in a state of flux and reflux, just like the planets in the heavens, moving from life to death, through states of extraordinary change. It was the way of things. “The Transformation of a Silk-worm or a Caterpillar into a Butterfly,” he wrote,

  would be a thousand Times more hard to believe than that of a Fish into a Bird if this Metamorphosis was not daily made before our Eyes. Are there not Ants which become winged at a certain Time? What would be more incredible to us than these natural Prodigies if Experience did not render them familiar to us? How easy is it to conceive the Change of a winged Fish flying in the Water, sometimes even in the Air, into a Bird always flying in the Air in the Manner I have explained?

  After describing sea calves, sea dogs, and sea bears, Telliamed begins his lengthy catalog of sightings of sea people with the appearance of a sea man on the banks of the Nile. “Your Histories read,” begins the Indian philosopher,

  that in the Year 592 of your Era, on the 18th of March, an Officer of one of the Towns of the Delta or the Lower Egypt, walking one Evening with some of his Friends on the Banks of the Nile, saw very near to the Shore, a Sea-man, followed by his Female, the Male raising himself often above the Water as far as his secret Parts and the Female only to the Navel. The Man had a fierce Air and a terrible Aspect, his Hair was red and somewhat bristly and his Skin of a brownish Colour. He was like to us in all the Parts which were seen. On the contrary the Air of the Woman’s Countenance was sweet and mild, her Hair black, long, and floating on her Shoulders, her Body white, and her Breasts prominent. These two Monsters remained near two Hours in the Sight of this Officer, his Friends and those of the Neighbourhood, who had come to see so extraordinary a Fact. An Attestation of it was drawn up, signed by the Officer and many other Witnesses, and sent to the Emperor Maurice who then reigned.

  Maillet had been gathering these records of sea people sightings for decades, combing the pages of Arabic as well as European manuscripts, interviewing people, asking for information, compiling it. They included an account of a living girl rescued from the belly of a fish caught in the Caspian Sea in the ninth century who “fetched deep Sighs, and lived for but a few Moments”; a sea girl found in Holland in 1430 half buried in mud at the mouth of the river Tye near Edam after a great flood had receded, who was taught to spin and make the sign of the cross but could never speak; a French officer’s report of seeing off the coast of Martinique in 1671 a “Sea-Monster of a human Form from the Middle upwards, and terminating below like a Fish”; a sea man caught at Sestri in 1682 who “survived for some Days weeping and uttering lamentable Cries”; another who was shot by a sentry while stranded on the shore by the receding tide at Boulogne; a mother and daughter captured from a herd of sea people spotted off the Indian coast by Portuguese sailors, who when caught and taken to King Don Emanuel “were so extremely melancholy that nothing could comfort them” but who when taken to the sea lagoon remained three hours under water “without coming above its Surface to respire”; and a man captured off the coast of Greenland who was “shap’d like us, with a Beard and Hair pretty long, but from the Middle downward, his Body was all covered with Scales.” Maillet’s chronological list of sightings came up to his present, ending with a report taken of a sea man seen swimming around a French ship moored on the bank of Newfoundland as recently as 1720. All these reports share the same features: the sea people were mute, all were irredeemably sad when taken from the water, and all died within days or months of capture.

  In Telliamed, Maillet described genitals, breasts, fur, scales glimpsed or imagined just beneath the waves, a sea woman made to sit on a chair, male and female sea people playing together in the sea. Each one, when out of the water, he portrayed as an infinitely sad and fragile exile. His sea people of the land, the webbed or tailed humans, were similarly both melancholy and sexually irresistible, like the French officer seduced on a boat by a fifteen-year-old courtesan. “Being at Pisa, in 1710,” Telliamed relates, recounting his most erotic story of all,

  I was informed that there was a Courtesan who boasted of having known a Stranger who had been there three Years before, and who was one of the Species of Men with Tails. This inspired me with a curiosity to see her, and examine her with respect to the Fact. She was at that Time no more than eighteen Years old and very beautiful. She told me, that in returning from Livorno to Pisa in a Passage-Boat in 1702, she met three French Officers, one of whom fell in Love with her. Her Gallant was large, well-made, and about thirty-five Years of Age; he was of a very fair Complexion, his Beard was black and thick, and his Eye-brows were long and shaggy. He slept all Night with her, and came very near that Labour for which Hercules is no less famous in the Fable than for his other Exploits. He was so shaggy that Bears themselves are hardly more so. The Hair with which he was covered, was near half a Foot long. As the Courtesan never met a Man of this Kind, Curiosity led her to handle him all over, and putting her Hands to his Buttocks, she felt a Tail as large as one’s finger, a half a Foot long, and shaggy like the rest of the Body, which she grasped, upon which she asked him what it was. He reply’d with a harsh and angry Tone that it was a Piece of Flesh he had had from his Infancy, in Consequence of his Mother’s longing for a Tail of Mutton when she was big with him. From that Moment, the Courtesan observed that he no more testified the same Affection for her; the Smell of his Sweat was so strong and particular, and smelt, as she said, so much of the Savage, she could not get quit of it for a month afterwards.

  Maillet, now in his early seventies, drafted his “Origin of Species” conversation during what he described as “troublous times.” When his treatise on Ethiopia finally came out in the edition of Lobo’s travels in 1728, it was unrecognizable. The editor had taken enormous liberties with his manuscript; indeed, he had practically rewritten it. Maillet was furious. And despite frequent letters, he had heard nothing from Monsieur Liebaux, who still had the manuscript of his Description of Egypt; the geographer was ill, people said. Maillet was also short of money after a series of expensive lawsuits and was now forced to try to sell some of his furniture and art. He offered his eighty-volume oriental library to the Abbé Bignon, the royal librarian of the Bibliothèque du Roi, a library that included one of the very first Arabic editions of A Thousand and One Nights, a Coptic version of the Book of Ezekiel, the lives of Nouredin and Saladin, and his beloved three-volume edition of al-Makrisi’s History of Egypt. The librarian declined his offer.

  When one of Maillet’s patrons in 1733 finally recommended a new editor for the Egypt book, the Abbé Jean Baptiste le Mascrier, Maillet traveled to Paris to meet him. The French capital overwhelmed his imagination, he wrote to the Marquis de Caumont. Brilliant gold and azure coaches seemed to him like flying chariots guided by celestial hands; from inside the coach people looked like “flying arrows transfigured into memory paths of passing flight.” He bought a five-foot-tall Egyptian queen from a Paris dealer as a present for another patron, the governor of Marseilles, Pierre Cardan Lebret. His “belle Egyptienne,” carved from striated green marble with black touchstone head and feet and removed from a pyramid, weighed more than a hundred pounds. He also sent the governor a crate of clocks that broke on the riverboat journey to Avignon.

  The Abbé Jean Baptiste le Mascrier was a Jesuit-trained Catholic priest and poet living on the edge of a Parisian philosophical coterie, supporting himself financially by hackwork: editing, ghostwriting, translating, or prefacing controversial and sometimes anonymously or posthumously authored texts for Parisian publishers. He was thirty-three years old, and the exasperated and eccentrically dressed ex-consul who arrived carrying bundles and files of tattered papers was seventy-seven. Mascrier warned his visitor that he might not have time to turn his hand to the Egypt book for a while. He was writing a verse preface to a play by Montfleury that was being staged at the Comédie Française and co-translating from Latin sixteen volumes of Jacques-Auguste de Thou’s hist
ory of the French wars of religion. But leafing through the descriptions of pyramids, ancient cities, and Egyptian customs and manners in Maillet’s papers, Mascrier changed his mind. Everyone in Paris, he reflected, was enthralled by the mummies, carvings, and hieroglyphs that had arrived back in Paris from Egypt, and yet no one had written in detail about the country since Herodotus. This crazy pile of papers and descriptions could be a bestseller if it were handled right.

  But Mascrier had not realized how much time the old man from Marseilles would demand from him. Letters arrived almost daily, sometimes several. In each one Maillet had more to say, more to restructure, more complaints and readjustments and corrections, even more ideas. The book was impossible to finish. As soon as Mascrier had knocked the Egypt book into shape, structured it as a series of letters, found a publisher, completed the proofreading, received the first batch of copies, and dispatched one to Maillet in the country, Maillet immediately sent back a list of errata and omissions and complained that Mascrier had put his own name on the title page as author and not as editor.

  Nonetheless, Maillet respected Mascrier’s editorial skills enough now to send him his five notebooks on Ethiopia and Coptic Christianity, instructing him to include an edited version in the second edition of the Description of Egypt. More important, he forwarded to him the extraordinary pile of papers that was Telliamed. Maillet knew he would not live much longer; his health was deteriorating. This was his last chance to see his life’s work appear in print. Mascrier was a priest, albeit one whose faith had taken some dents as a result of long years spent reading and editing seditious books and working with atheist publishers. What would he make of this seditious book? If Mascrier had gained a reputation with publishers as an editor who defused heretical books, he was now doing that work with rapidly declining conviction. He had recently been commissioned to coedit a new pirated edition of a bestselling heretical book written by two Dutchmen called Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde) that for its disrespectful representation of the Catholic Church as just one religion among many had been put on the papal list of forbidden books. Would Mascrier dare to take on the incendiary conversations of Telliamed?

  As Maillet lay dying in his house in Marseilles, knowing that Mascrier was working his way through the editing process, he became increasingly anxious about the fate of his great book. He was still revising the last pages about the origin of man until a month before he died, propped up in bed under his Egyptian mosquito net, eating figs and sweet pears, drinking camomile tea, and writing by the light of a lamp in which he burned pure olive oil because, he told the marquis, olive oil rendered the light brighter and more constant. For three years he had sent Mascrier letters that were high-handed or anxious by turns, instructing the abbé to insert new material or to contact someone in Amsterdam or to rewrite yet another version of the preface. In his last months he became preoccupied with death and immortality. “Time is eternal,” he wrote. “In nature nothing dies, but everything is enfolded back into the earth to be remade; soft to hard, hard to soft, the law of the earth, of the planets and of all bodies, is that of perpetual remaking.” “Even after centuries of petrification,” he wrote on January 8, 1738, “certain marine organisms could spring back into life in the womb of the earth.” He had felt sure of this for some time, it seems, having made the Constable Colonna promise that she would make contact with him after her death. She had, he recorded, kept that promise.

  Then in January 1738 the letters from Maillet to Mascrier stopped. Maillet had died of pneumonia in the midst of writing a letter that assured the Marquis de Caumont that a bound copy of Telliamed would arrive at any moment. But that bound copy was still a long way from the printer. Now that Maillet was no longer in a position to pay for Mascrier’s time, the overworked editor, relieved, put the Telliamed manuscript aside and returned to coediting Religious Ceremonies of the World. The Parisian publishers of Ceremonies had grown impatient with the delays, and however heretical that work might be, Mascrier must have reasoned with himself, Telliamed was much more subversive. But as Maillet’s own copies of Telliamed continued to circulate in Paris, the book was gaining a reputation. It was a dangerous book. It was also a book that Mascrier knew would sell.

  Telliamed at last found its way into print in 1748 in Holland, ten years after its author’s death. Mascrier realized that he would never get the book past the Paris book censors; Amsterdam was his only option. Fearful of his own safety now that he was under police surveillance as a subversive, he published the manuscript under the name of an obscure Dutch lawyer, Jean-Antoine Guer. He had done what was necessary to sanitize Maillet’s last book. While the original manuscript papers of Telliamed claimed that the earth was billions of years old, Mascrier changed this to “thousands” or used vague phrases such as “a great number of years.” Everywhere he did his best to square Telliamed’s theory with the biblical version of creation and to introduce a sense of divine purpose behind Telliamed’s description of blind forces at work in the world. He systematically deleted Maillet’s references to le hasard, or chance, and all of Maillet’s powerful refutations of the biblical flood. To imitate Fontenelle’s Conversations, he divided Telliamed into six days. Finally, he dedicated the book to Cyrano de Bergerac in order to persuade readers that it was a semifictional work.

  Mascrier’s editorial acrobatics and neutralizations did not prevent Telliamed from provoking a scandal. Outraged reviewers and naturalists wrote angry or mocking repudiations in scientific journals and newspapers. The naturalist and collector Dezallier d’Argenville denounced the book in the third edition of his Natural History, published in 1757: “What a folly in this author to substitute Telliamed for Moses, to bring man out of the depths of the sea, and, for fear that he should descend from Adam, to give us marine monsters for ancestors! Only a kind of godlessness could invent such dreams.” Twenty years later, when Telliamed had become one of the bestselling books of the century, with copies to be found in the majority of great French libraries, Voltaire was still outraged by its claims. “This consul Maillet was one of those charlatans who wanted to imitate God, and create a world with words,” he wrote. “It was he who, abusing the story of some upheaval that arrived in the world, claims that the seas had formed the mountains, and that fish have turned into men.”

  By the time Maillet had met Mascrier, the abbé was already under surveillance by a senior police agent, the new inspector of books in Paris, Joseph d’Hémery. Despite the large number of people he was watching, d’Hémery was especially perceptive, even intuitive, in his assessment of the slow radicalization of this particular Jesuit priest. He composed his portrait of Mascrier from fragments of interviews with friends, colleagues and acquaintances, booksellers and publishers, and from overheard conversations in cafés. “He was a Jesuit for a long time,” d’Hémery wrote.

  He edited Telliamed and various other publications for the booksellers. He contributed to Religious Ceremonies of the World and worked over Maillet’s Description of Egypt, which does great honour to him by its style. He turns poems very nicely, as is clear from a prologue to a play that was performed some years ago.… The Benedictines, where he worked, agree that he is a man of talent. Too bad he isn’t more creative. He has published an excellent work of poetry, a book that is useful to every true Christian, but the people who know him most intimately think that the need to produce copy is making him gradually shift to different sentiments.

  What file would Joseph d’Hémery have kept on Benoît de Maillet? Alienated from his own community, judgmental, inflexible, and high-handed, Maillet was connected to a global community of savants that stretched from Egypt across Europe. He was an outsider, enabled by his consular position and by his command of languages and cultures to access libraries and collections across the world and to synthesize different scientific positions, beliefs, and ideas. He was imaginative. He could stand in a landscape and propel himself back in time to conjure th
e great forces that had been at work to carve out mountain ranges and riverbeds. He was a traveler whose experience of diverse beliefs, peoples, landscapes, and cultures had enabled him to imagine a world in flux and reflux and to embrace a version of a world that was for him, as it was for Aristotle and Epicurus, timeless and eternal, pulsing its way through darkness and light, growth and decay. He spent an entire fortune on his obsession, funding his own research centers, paying for measurements, proofs, stories, and translations, and building a library of materials that he did not live to see published, and always to the end, like Jahiz, dependent on the goodwill of enlightened and wealthy men.

  A hundred and twenty-two years after Maillet’s death, in February 1860, Charles Darwin added the name Demaillet to his list of nineteen predecessors and posted that list, now entitled “A Historical Sketch,” to the botanist Asa Gray in New York asking him to include it in the first authorized American edition of On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. On those pages Darwin paired Maillet with the great naturalist the Comte de Buffon, making them the only two people on Darwin’s list who stood in that great void of time between Aristotle and Lamarck—that void of time that frightened Darwin because he knew that his grasp of history had always been weak.

  Two months later, in April 1860, Darwin opened the pages of the Edinburgh Review to find Richard Owen’s poisonous notice of Origin in which the writer sneered at him as another fantasist as deluded as the merman believer Benoît de Maillet. Darwin was both embarrassed and enraged. Without reading Telliamed, he now erased Maillet’s name from the new version of the “Historical Sketch” that he was preparing for the third English edition of Origin. When the Scottish horticulturalist Isaac Anderson-Henry offered to send him his own copy of Telliamed in 1867, Darwin wrote, no doubt with a frisson of remembered embarrassment, “I am bound to read it as my former friend and present bitter enemy Owen generally ranks me and Maillet as a pair of equal fools.”