Gregory Curtis

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by Disarmed: The Story of the Venus De Milo


  Tall and muscular, he flaunted his robustness and endured the most demanding physical hardships almost with relish. Although his crews were loyal to him because he was scrupulously fair, he was too awkward socially to be friendly with them. He usually spent evenings at sea in his cabin poring over botanical specimens and writing in his journal. By the time he became an admiral, he would wear his uniform only when in port; otherwise he was unconcerned with his physical appearance. An officer who sailed with him wrote later that he was “a tall untidy man, without stockings or cravat, wearing torn duck trousers, and unbuttoned twill coat, the whole outfit crowned by an old straw hat full of holes.” When he spoke, he made a whistling sound through his teeth.

  Jules Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville, by Jerome Cartellier (illustration credit 1.3)

  D’Urville’s unconcern for appearances concealed the driving motivation of his life: a desire for fame. Born in Normandy in 1790, he lost his father seven years later. His formidable mother made the fragile boy spend hours outside in the coastal chill without a coat. She thought that would toughen him up, and evidently it did. She was repelled by affection and insisted that her son address her only in the most formal and polite language. When he was ten, d’Urville asked an uncle if any famous men came from the little town in Normandy where he was born. The answer was no. “I promised myself,” d’Urville wrote, “to work twice as hard to place my name on the wings of fame. Habitually plunged in such thoughts, I had acquired an aloof and serious manner, unusual at my age.”

  He had joined the crew of the Chevrette in 1819. Although d’Urville was married with a son who was going on three, he chafed at the shore duty that had been his lot since the Bourbons’ restoration to the French throne. The Chevrette had a mission to study the islands of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. D’Urville was to be one of the scientists on board, his subjects being botany, entomology, and archeology. As always he performed these duties with immense energy and enthusiasm. His immediate superior officer, Lieutenant Amable Matterer, later wrote that “whenever the ship was at anchor, M. Dumont d’Urville left very early almost every day and did not return till after sunset, laden with all sorts of plants that he carefully classified and pressed. He would come aboard tired out but elated to have found some rare plants that had escaped the notice [of previous explorers].”

  While the Chevrette was anchored at Melos, d’Urville and Matterer made excursions across the island. On April 19, after the ship had been in harbor for three days, they made the hour’s climb of the large, steep hill overlooking the harbor to Castro, the main village on the island.

  When they arrived at the village itself, it hardly seemed worth the effort of the climb. The houses, two stories tall with whitewashed sides and flat roofs, all looked alike. A set of bare stairs without any rail led up one wall from the street to the second story, where there was a flat terrace. During the day women sat on the terrace spinning cotton thread and often, if eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers are to be believed, looking provocatively at passersby.

  Inside the houses the first floor was a combination stable, chicken roost, and pigsty. Garbage and muck from both humans and animals were thrown into the street, making it impossible to walk through town without fouling one’s boots. The smell was nauseating. And fleas were everywhere. “The quantity of the insects is truly extraordinary,” one traveler wrote. “One is covered and devoured. They spread over the head and slide into the hair.”

  In Castro, d’Urville and Matterer called on the French viceconsul. With two French officers in front of him, Louis Brest had only one thing on his mind. He began to tell them about the new discovery.

  D’Urville and Matterer, excited by this news, asked Brest to take them to see the statue. He led them down the hill from Castro to the niche where the statue had been found. Matterer simply looked, but d’Urville assumed his role as a scientist and began to measure the niche and the bottom half of the statue, which Yorgos had not bothered to carry to his cowshed. D’Urville copied as best he could the Greek inscription on the wall of the niche, before asking what had become of the upper half. Brest gestured toward Yorgos’s cowshed in a far corner of the field. The farmer’s mother now sat spinning as she guarded the door. In a few moments they had walked across the field, and Yorgos let them in. Like the ships’ captains before them, they waded through the manure on the floor to the place where the upper half stood. They were, according to Matterer, who used the same word as Voutier, “stupefied.” The two sailors stared at the statue in silence. They also examined the herms, the arm fragments, and the hand with the apple. D’Urville was familiar with the myth of the three goddesses and the golden apple. He thought that meant the statue must have originally been part of a group with Juno, Minerva, and Paris. At last he began measuring again and taking notes.

  Eventually, d’Urville asked his friend for his opinion. Matterer said he thought it was beautiful, but he mistrusted his own judgment in art. Yorgos, who from the first was eager to get the thing off his hands in exchange for some cash, offered to sell the statue to the two officers. They refused. They didn’t have enough money with them. More important, though, their ship had a long and difficult mission in the Black Sea and was already crowded with crew, supplies, and scientific equipment of every description. There was no room for a heavy and unwieldy statue.

  Daylight was waning now. After profuse thanks to Brest, the two men returned to the Chevrette. That was the end of it for Matterer but not for d’Urville. He spent the evening in his cabin and wrote, as he did each night, in his journal. He could not have known how famous the Venus de Milo would become. But along with Olivier Voutier, Captain Dauriac, Louis Brest, and even Yorgos, he sensed that the statue was not just one of thousands of antique statues but something special and powerful, something less like a thing than an event.

  So, on this night of April 19, 1820, he began to create the legend that would first make him famous. From that moment everything he did or wrote was a mixture of truth, errors, and lies of omission designed to make d’Urville himself, and only him, the discoverer of the Venus de Milo. He tried and almost succeeded in sweeping everyone else, including the faithful Matterer, off the stage and out of history.

  The kaptan pasha’s dragoman

  ON APRIL 22, three days after d’Urville and Matterer had seen the statue, their ship, the Chevrette, weighed anchor at Melos and sailed for Constantinople. By then the four other French ships that had been at Melos during the time of the discovery had departed as well. The Emulation and the Bonite were returning to France. The Lionne and the Estafette, with Olivier Voutier aboard, were bound for Smyrna. Now Louis Brest was left alone on the island to handle the primates as best he could.

  The primates were the legal authority on the island, but exactly what the law was in 1820 is no longer clear and may not have been clear even then. Melos was part of the Ottoman Empire, but no Turk or Turkish official lived there. The Turks imposed heavy taxes that an official came around regularly to collect. And a magistrate appeared from time to time to sit as a judge in criminal cases, which he would decide according to the bribes he received. Other than this corrupt magistrate, the islanders received no governmental services of any kind in return for the burdensome taxes they paid to the Ottomans. There were no police or civil courts. There was no protection from pirates and no public works. There was not even a postal service. The whole Ottoman Empire, which at this time stretched from Persia to the Balkans, was administered by communications sent via personal messengers.

  The possessions of the empire were divided into provinces, each ruled by its own pasha. The Greek islands in the Aegean formed one of the provinces. Their ruler was the kaptan pasha, who was also supreme admiral of the Turkish navy. The kaptan pasha, like most of the other pashas, used an intermediary known as a dragoman to administer the island province entrusted to him.

  This peculiar position rose to importance as the Turks expanded far into Europe in the sixteenth centu
ry. The Turks did not know Western languages or customs, nor did the European powers know the Turkish language or Turkish ways. Since each side regarded the other as ignorant barbarians who were infidels besides, neither side was particularly inclined to learn the intricacies of living with the other. Dragomans bridged the gap. Typically, they were from European families who lived in Constantinople. Some of these families had been there for generations. They were hired by the European states to represent them to the Sublime Porte, as the sultan’s government was known, but dragomans as a class were notoriously corrupt and devious. In the eighteenth century, England and France began sending young men to Turkey to train as dragomans in order to avoid this corruption. It was considered lonely and onerous duty. Its single attraction was that after ten or twelve years among the despicable but wealthy Turks, the young men could return home to England or France with a fortune.

  In 1820 the dragoman for the kaptan pasha was a Greek prince named Nicolas Morousi, third son of the prince of Moldavia. Like most of the other dragomans for the Greek possessions, Morousi was a Christian who came from Constantinople. Although he was technically a servant of the kaptan pasha, Morousi was in fact the real ruler of the islands. The system worked this way: the kaptan pasha had to pay a tribute to the sultan in return for his dominion over the islands. He was then permitted to make the tribute back, plus a profit, by taxing the islands under his authority. But instead of collecting the taxes himself, the kaptan pasha sold that right to his dragoman Morousi, who could now profit by imposing any taxes he wished. That’s how dragomans acquired vast wealth. Morousi might even sell the right to collect taxes on certain islands to still other individuals, who would then recoup their expenses and squeeze out their profit. Something like this system had been in place since biblical times, which explains why publicans—tax collectors—were so despised in the New Testament.

  The three primates of Melos, in turn, were obliged to raise taxes for the dragoman from the people of the island. If they failed, the dragoman had the power to punish them with fines, dispossession, imprisonment, or beatings. The primates lived in terror of the dragoman. And now, just a few days after the departure of the last French ship, a representative of Morousi arrived at Melos. He had come to search for antique statues.

  At least he said he represented the dragoman. This man was a priest named Oconomos. Accused of embezzlement by his superiors in the church, he had been summoned to Constantinople to account for himself. Now he had returned. He was to find statues for the dragoman as a kind of penance to earn back Morousi’s favor. As soon as he learned of the recently discovered statue, he demanded that Yorgos sell it to him on Morousi’s account. He claimed the dragoman would settle the debt when the statue was delivered to him.

  The primates didn’t know whether to believe Oconomos. Perhaps all his claims were part of an elaborate swindle; even at best, how could they be sure the dragoman would pay? Brest reminded the primates that they had promised to do nothing until he had further instructions from his superiors. Yorgos, meanwhile, had been listening to his neighbors, who had made him believe the statue was worth twenty to thirty thousand francs, a vast fortune on an island like Melos. Neither the French nor the dragoman was likely to offer that much money. They all found themselves stalemated.

  The portrait of a girl

  THE CHEVRETTE, with d’Urville and Matterer aboard, sailed straight from Melos to Constantinople and arrived there on April 28, 1820. After a few days in port the captain invited d’Urville to accompany him to a dinner on shore at the Russian embassy. There d’Urville met an assistant to the French ambassador, a man who at twenty-five had the air of someone quite at home in the halls of diplomacy and with the intrigues of the sultan’s court. Marie-Louis-Jean-André-Charles Demartin du Tirac, comte de Marcellus, was a small, aquiline man who wore his wavy hair piled high on his head to conceal his receding hairline. His eyelids were hooded, his nose was long, and his mouth was small and straight. All this combined to give him an air of superiority that was somewhat misleading. In fact, he was good company. He was kindly, intelligent, and enjoyed a good laugh.

  The young Marcellus had attracted the attention of the great Talleyrand, now returned to power after the restoration of the Bourbons to the French throne, who sent him first to Corsica and in 1815, when he was only twenty, to Constantinople. There he became secretary to the marquis de Rivière, the French ambassador.

  At the dinner at the Russian embassy, Marcellus was impressed by d’Urville, who was spilling over with his enthusiasm for botany. He wanted to take a long hike in the countryside around Constantinople to search for specimens, and Marcellus volunteered to be his guide. D’Urville later recalled his particular pleasure during this expedition in finding a Daphne du Pont, a lys de Galcédoine, and a bourrache d’Orient. Marcellus, however, was more excited by d’Urville’s account of the statue he took credit for finding on Melos. The count pressed him with questions, which d’Urville answered readily. He even showed Marcellus the copies of the inscriptions he had made and drew his own sketch of the statue.

  Demartin du Tirac, comte de Marcellus, by Ingres (illustration credit 1.4)

  The intensity of Marcellus’s interest was just a bit disingenuous, for a secret reason of his own. He had met the Viennese painter Johann Ender who had done a portrait of a beautiful girl who lived on Melos. She was the daughter of a hideous old ship’s pilot, who allowed Ender to paint his daughter’s portrait on the condition that he show the painting only to Europeans. The old man feared that if the Turks saw the picture, they would take his daughter for the seraglio. Once Marcellus had seen this painting, he thought about the girl obsessively, although he had faint hope of ever meeting her. Now, Marcellus realized, there might be a way to fulfill his longings after all.

  Marcellus brought d’Urville to the marquis de Rivière and had him repeat his story. Marcellus then asked the ambassador for permission to go to Melos to buy the statue. Rivière seemed unenthusiastic. Marcellus was becoming desperate as he saw his chance to visit the island drifting away. However, a royalist himself, he knew that Rivière was a fawning idolizer of the Bourbon monarchy. He suggested that he, Marcellus, could buy the statue for Rivière, who could then donate it to the king in homage. Although still doubtful, Rivière reluctantly agreed. He had already ordered Marcellus on a tour of the eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt and Palestine, which he considered more important. He gave Marcellus permission to go to Melos only if it didn’t delay his diplomatic mission.

  Either the next day or the day after, May 4 or 5, d’Urville sailed with the Chevrette through the Bosporus and into the Black Sea as it continued its scientific voyage. On May 6 the Estafette anchored in Constantinople, with Robert the Devil in command and Voutier on board. The Estafette had come to Constantinople in order to take Marcellus on his diplomatic tour. Now Melos had become the first stop on that tour, but the winds did not cooperate. The Estafette was unable to leave before May 15 and didn’t arrive at Melos until a week later. During all that time it seems impossible that Marcellus and the two naval officers—Voutier, who had discovered the statue, and Robert the Devil, who had seen it—wouldn’t have discussed it. And wouldn’t Voutier have shown Marcellus his drawings? Evidently, he did not. In the extensive memoir Marcellus published about this voyage, he never mentions Voutier at all.

  Marcellus negotiates a purchase

  AS THE ESTAFETTE glided into the harbor at Melos early on the morning of May 22, 1820, Marcellus and the crew were in a joyful mood: After a week at sea they had at last arrived at their destination. But they were greeted by a sight so alarming and so coincidental that they couldn’t help but laugh out loud. There out in the bay was the Venus. It was in a lifeboat that sat deep in the water because of its heavy load. A group of Russian sailors were rowing it toward another ship anchored in the harbor. In a memoir he published decades later, Voutier says he was incredulous. “Look,” he shouted. “Someone’s taking our statue away. This can’t be real.”


  But it was. It had been more than a month since Brest had received the promise from the primates that the statue would not be sold until he had received further instructions. In the meantime French ships had come and gone from Melos, but none had brought any word from Constantinople. Oconomos had been there on the island all the while and had become more and more insistent. Finally he had promised Yorgos 750 francs and wrenched the statue away practically by force. He then had it taken down to the harbor and tried to book passage on a ship.

  At this point Vice-consul Brest proved he could be both decisive and effective under the right circumstances. Claiming that the sale was illegitimate, and most likely hinting about the results of disregarding French power in the Aegean, he persuaded the captains of all the ships in the harbor to refuse to take the statue. After all, at this point the captains had nothing to lose: The wind was against them, so they couldn’t leave the harbor anyway. Why not humor Brest? But Oconomos kept offering more and more money, until finally the captain of a Russian ship agreed to take the statue. His sailors rowed to shore to fetch it, rowed back, and loaded it on board as Marcellus and the sailors on the Estafette watched helplessly. Luckily for them, the winds had become even stronger and were still contrary to leaving the harbor.

  The moment the Estafette anchored, Brest rowed out and came aboard. He told Marcellus what had happened. The count, annoyed by the way the vice-consul had been treated by the islanders and propelled, as he put it, “by the ardent desires of a young heart eager to fight against apparently impossible odds,” resolved to seize the statue for himself at any price even if “later she would not justify the excesses of my zeal.”

  Marcellus immediately began the fight against apparently impossible odds. First he ordered Robert the Devil to stop the Russian ship if it should try to leave with the statue. Then he went ashore and made the long climb to Castro. Establishing himself in Brest’s house, he sent for the primates. When the three men arrived, he asked to be taken to the Russian ship to see the statue. The primates refused. Angry, Marcellus began to lecture them. They had arbitrarily refused to sell the statue to the agent of France who was the first on the scene and the first to make an offer. A refusal to sell to him prohibited a sale to anyone else. Consequently, any sale that had been entered into under these conditions was null in his eyes and in the eyes of any reasonable judge. He concluded by reminding the primates that he could even use arms to enforce the sale to France. He had fifty trained men aboard his warship.

 

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