Gregory Curtis

by Disarmed: The Story of the Venus De Milo

This was typical Ravaisson. He had great gifts—a superior intellect combined with the eye and the hand of an artist. But he was so passive that his passivity could become a weapon. Henri Bergson, the leading philosopher in France in the late nineteenth century, a man whose thinking was directly influenced by Ravaisson’s philosophical writings, described him precisely: “Never did a man seek less to influence others than did that man. But never was mind more naturally, more tranquilly, more invincibly rebellious to the authority of others: it eluded by its immateriality all attempts to come to grips with it. He was one of those who offer so little resistance that no one can flatter himself that he has ever seen them yield.”

  In 1833, when he was twenty, Ravaisson won a contest sponsored by the philosopher Victor Cousin for the best essay about Aristotle. Five years later he published Habit, a work of barely a hundred pages that was his doctoral thesis and his only work of original philosophy until the last years of his life. Habit—and note his predilection even early in life for the quietest possible title—is little known outside France, but it deeply influenced Bergson as well as many German philosophers, including Heidegger. It’s still important in France, still easily available in bookstores, and still read.

  Despite its brevity, Habit contains a whole philosophy of nature. What, Ravaisson wonders, is concealed beneath such natural laws as the regular working of cause and effect? The key to the answer lies in habit. Habit is an activity that by degrees has passed from a conscious act to an unconscious one, from will to automatism. But aren’t cause and effect and all the other workings of nature the same thing: the unconscious, automatic repetitions of habit? These repetitions must have begun with some will, then little by little become automatic, which means the laws of nature are the remains of a spiritual force. That is how, for Ravaisson, the presence of habit in our lives reveals the existence of God.

  After publishing Habit, Ravaisson lived in Paris, where, despite the passivity of his nature, he managed to cut an impressive figure. He dressed with élan, favoring brightly colored checkered vests. His uncle, a famous explorer who wrote popular books about his adventures deep in the jungles of Senegal, introduced him into the best salons, including that of Madame Récamier. There he met Balzac and Lamartine and perhaps even Forbin, who was then entering his dotage. At the same time Ravaisson was painting and exhibiting at the salons. He was good enough to earn compliments from Ingres and the two men became close friends.

  The natural course of his career would have been to become a professor of philosophy at one of the leading universities. But Victor Cousin, the philosopher who only a few years earlier had given Ravaisson the prize for his essay on Aristotle, disagreed with the spirituality in Habit. Cousin was an uninspired philosopher but an adroit politician who, thanks to a government position, now controlled the appointments to every philosophy faculty in France. He denied Ravaisson a chair. Ravaisson accepted the rebuke without complaint and quietly waited twenty-eight years for the opportunity to take his revenge.

  Through his uncle’s influence, he obtained a government sinecure in the education bureaucracy. He wrote little until 1867, when, as part of a jubilee celebrating the fifteenth year of Napoleon III’s reign, Ravaisson was commissioned to write a history of French philosophy in the nineteenth century. After a feverish period of reading and study, he wrote a huge volume that contained a brilliant and devastating attack on Victor Cousin. Cousin’s preeminence and power were immediately broken, and he never recovered.

  After being appointed to his post at the Louvre in 1870, Ravaisson retained it until his death in 1900. He had a wife, two daughters, and a quiet, self-effacing son named Charles, who worked for him at the Louvre. Ravaisson’s thirty years at the museum were a period of what was for him almost frantic activity. He wrote on Pascal, on funereal vases and bas-reliefs of antiquity, on Leonardo da Vinci, on the history of religion, on the French civil code and factory workers, and on the one subject about which he knew less than any other man in the world: military strategy. In his philosophical writings, which became more frequent toward the final years of his life, he continued his consistent theme of linking Christianity with ancient philosophy and art. And he became a surprisingly skillful sculptor, taking up the chisel because of his continued, almost obsessive interest in the Venus de Milo.

  The story of the fight on the shore

  IN 1874, just three years after Ravaisson’s paper revealed the addition of the wooden wedges, a series of articles began to appear in the newspaper Le Temps in Paris. They contained the sensational news that when the Venus de Milo was discovered, her arms were intact. The author of the articles was a young writer named Jean Aicard, but the source for this inflammatory information was a minor character in the drama of the discovery, the faithful Amable Matterer, the old naval officer who had befriended the young Dumont d’Urville on the Estafette and remained loyal to him for the rest of his life.

  When d’Urville died in the train wreck with his wife and son in 1842, he left no heirs. Around 1860 a box of his papers turned up at an auction in Toulon. It was bought by an unnamed collector, who found in it a handwritten version of the paper d’Urville had published in 1821, proclaiming himself the discoverer of the Venus de Milo. However, there were certain small but interesting differences between the manuscript and the paper as it was published. One was that in the manuscript d’Urville had mentioned Matterer, called him a man “of great merit and one of my good friends,” and said he would never forget his kindness. D’Urville had deleted this short passage from the published version of the paper.

  By the 1860s Matterer was eighty years old. He was living in Toulon, retired for many years. The unnamed collector took d’Urville’s manuscript to the old man, who was deeply moved by the tribute to himself. D’Urville had written it when he was only an ensign, but after all this time Matterer took those words as coming from the famous admiral d’Urville had become.

  Matterer’s affection for d’Urville was real and constant. While the great admiral was off on his journeys to Polynesia or Antarctica, Matterer paid visits to his lonely wife and son and maintained these visits even after Madame d’Urville became so peculiar that their other friends began to avoid her. Shortly after d’Urville’s death, Matterer, who always claimed that he was nothing but a rude seaman, nevertheless wrote a dignified memoir that he called Notes nécrologiques et historiques sur M. le contreamiral Dumont a’Urville. He published it in the Annales maritimes et colonials of October 1842.

  As Matterer returned d’Urville’s manuscript to the collector, he said, “The whole truth about the Venus de Milo is not known, but I know it.” After some prompting and after obtaining a promise of secrecy, Matterer told the collector that the statue’s left arm was still attached when he and d’Urville had first seen the statue. It was raised and held an apple in its palm. Later, the comte de Marcellus had arrived on the Estafette to buy the statue just as the evil monk Oconomos, leading a troop of marines who had arrived on a Turkish warship, was taking it away. On Marcellus’s order fifty armed French sailors immediately went ashore to rescue the statue from the Turks. During the fight, the Venus de Milo, bound by ropes, was dragged across the beach, where small rocks pitted its surface and the arm was broken off. Finally, the French sailors prevailed and saved the statue.

  The collector, with more promises of secrecy, insisted that the old man write his story down, which he did. Matterer died in 1868, when he was eighty-seven years old. Several years later, assuming that Matterer must have wanted his story to be known after all—otherwise why consent to write it down?—the collector took the manuscripts by both d’Urville and Matterer to Jean Aicard in Paris.

  In 1874, when he began publishing his stories on the Venus de Milo in Le Temps, Aicard was twenty-six. He was quite visible on the Paris literary scene, where he reveled in his role as the conquering provincial. He was handsome, wore his dark hair and beard long, and was blessed with a seductive, theatrical voice with which he entranced the audiences who
crowded into his readings.

  He had just published Poèmes de Provence, a series of lyric poems about the life and countryside of his native region. The book became a spectacular success. For the rest of his life, his childhood in Provence continued to inspire his many poems, plays, essays, and novels. Eventually he was admitted into the Académie Française. He wrote rapidly while lying in bed and refused to rewrite. When friends urged him to use more care, he said, “It’s useless. I can’t. You have to take me as I am.”

  Aicard expanded his articles in Le Temps, added some new information uncovered after they had appeared, and quickly published the result as a book called The Venus de Milo: Investigations of the History of the Discovery according to Unpublished Documents. Being by Aicard, it is sloppy, shallow, and a long way from presenting a rational argument. He often refers to both arms being intact, although his sources mention only the left arm. But the book is also passionate and readable. Aicard gives a stirring account of the supposed battle on the shore. That, in addition to his glee in revealing what he believes is a long-hidden secret, has given his book an influence out of proportion to its merit.

  Aicard’s Venus de Milo reproduces a number of original documents concerning the statue that are difficult to find elsewhere. For that scholars owe him some thanks. Otherwise, he attempts to prove that the fight occurred and that the arms of the statue were lost by quoting Matterer’s written recollections; by a careful parsing of d’Urville’s paper; by reading between the lines of Marcellus and Clarac; and by the later claims of Brest, Brest’s son, Yorgos’s son, and Yorgos’s nephew, all as quoted in a letter from a former French ambassador to Greece. Unfortunately for Aicard, each of these arguments is easily refuted.

  Aicard accepts Matterer’s story of the fight as true in every detail. But when Matterer wrote his Notes nécrologiques about d’Urville in 1842, he never mentioned either an intact arm or any fight on the shore. Why not? Matterer says he did not commit this “imprudence” because “I would have incurred the wrath of the great men of Paris, especially that of the minister of the navy. Undoubtedly, this minister would not have printed my notice and might have even forced me to retire, for I was still in service as a ship’s captain.” Matterer is trapped by his 1842 reminiscence, and this clear prevarication was nothing more than his way out.

  Neither d’Urville nor Marcellus nor Clarac mentions any fight in his account of the events. To Aicard that doesn’t mean there was no fight; on the contrary, it is absolute proof that they are all complicit in the cover-up Marcellus began in order to make his diplomacy more impressive. Aicard doesn’t propose to tell us what Marcellus could have said or done to keep all fifty sailors on the winning side of a fight from ever bragging about it even years later.

  After his newspaper articles appeared, Aicard received a letter from Jules Ferry, formerly France’s ambassador to Greece. Aicard includes this letter in his book. As ambassador Ferry had visited Melos in 1873. There he met Louis Brest’s son, who, like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, was France’s viceconsul on the island. In the fifty years since the affair, local legend had greatly amplified Brest’s role. Bitter because he thought the French government had neglected him and diminished his role in the discovery of the famous statue, he himself was the source of his growing local reputation. Just a few years after the discovery, he began telling stories about his role to anyone who would listen. Supposedly, he had purchased the statue long before any of the French ships arrived; when he bought it, the statue had its left arm; there was a fight on the shore. Brest, old and fat, would get a laugh by posing as the statue, with his left arm raised in the air.

  The ambassador also met the son and the nephew of the farmer Yorgos. They both claimed to have been present at the discovery, and they too insisted that the left arm was intact. It extended straight out to the left and held an apple in its palm, exactly the pose that Matterer describes in his final recollections. They had seen the fight on the shore as well.

  Unfortunately, Brest seems to have forgotten the letters he himself wrote at the time of the discovery. For instance, he wrote to Pierre David, the consul in Smyrna, “She is a little mutilated; the arms are broken.” And d’Urville’s paper, which does say that there is a hand holding an apple, also says that the arms “have been mutilated, one and the other, and are presently detached from the body.”

  The drawings reappear

  AICARD’S case collapsed from its own weight, but the popularity of his book brought the proofs that would clinch the case against him to the surface. The most important person to emerge from obscurity was Olivier Voutier, the dashing Bonapartist and revolutionary soldier in Greece who had been digging nearby when Yorgos first uncovered the statue. When Aicard’s book appeared, Voutier was seventy-eight years old and living in his château on the Côte d’Azur. (This beautiful property later belonged to Edith Wharton.) After fighting for Greek independence and winning a hero’s medals, Voutier found his later years something of a disappointment. Like Forbin and Ravaisson, he had been a friend of Madame Récamier’s, and he had written her long, intense letters about the fighting in Greece. He had known Napoleon III when they were both young men, and Voutier expected to be rewarded for his lifelong Bonapartism with an important position in the government or military. But the new emperor inexplicably shunned his old friend. Wounded, Voutier retired to his château, married, and quietly raised two daughters.

  In 1860, prompted by having come across one of Marcellus’s books, Voutier wrote him a long letter expressing fond memories of the count and their voyage around the Levant on the Estafette with the Venus de Milo on board. Voutier also explained for the first time his role in the discovery. He even told Marcellus about the drawings he had made on the spot and added that, despite the vicissitudes of the years, he still had them in his possession.

  Marcellus, who had married the comte de Forbin’s beautiful younger daughter, Valentine, had had a distinguished career as a diplomat. He had left government service in 1830 when Charles X was overthrown and retired to his wife’s estate. Presumably Valentine’s miserly grandmother had either died or loosened her grip on the family fortune. Marcellus occupied himself by writing a series of popular memoirs about his years as an ambassador in the Levant and in England. He responded to Voutier with a joyful letter. He reminisced happily about their voyage together. He even remembered the comic sacrifice of the chicken when they were hungry and their ship was becalmed near the mouth of the Nile.

  Marcellus died in 1865. The only other person who knew of this correspondence was his widow, Valentine. When Aicard’s book appeared in 1874, she was insulted because it imputed lies and an unattractive careerism to her husband. She wrote Voutier asking him to tell Ravaisson all he knew about the discovery of the statue. Voutier, responding to the request of his friend’s widow, but perhaps also aware that here was his final chance to secure at least a small place in history, at last broke his silence about his role in the discovery. He published a short pamphlet that told the story of finding the statue with Yorgos and making drawings at the site. Then he sent tracings of the drawings to Ravaisson. They show both halves of the statue and the two herms, each one standing on an inscribed base. The base of the herm with the young man’s head is inscribed with the name of the sculptor from Antioch. The base of the bearded herm also has an inscription, which had by now been completely lost. These two inscriptions proved the validity of Voutier’s drawings, since he could not have known about them except by seeing them with the herms when the statue was discovered.

  The most important detail in the drawing is this: At the time of the discovery the statue had no arms. It looked just as it does today.

  Now, just months after the 1874 publication of Aicard’s book, Ravaisson had proof that its revelations were false. But the ethereal philosopher had spent all his life avoiding conflict, and he avoided it once again. Eventually, he did write a paper in which he published Voutier’s drawings. And he used them to attack Aicard
’s book directly. But that was eighteen years later, in 1892.

  This long delay had its consequences. Many people read Aicard’s book with its fight on the shore, but only diligent scholars read Ravaisson’s refutation so many years later. Meanwhile, the story about the fight between French sailors and Turkish marines rallied by the evil priest Oconomos became an established “fact,” and, sadly, it has remained part of the lore about the Venus de Milo ever since. Here is Matthew Kangas writing in the November–December 1990 issue of Sculpture: “It seems clear that the statue was found in two parts in a cave on the Greek island of Melos and then reassembled, and that later, during a battle between French consular officials and Turkish agents trying to prevent its export, the arms were broken off.”

  In 2001, the generally savvy Mary Beard and John Henderson wrote in their Classical Art from Greece to Rome that after “a scuffle on the beach between some Turkish and French soldiers (who were both claiming the prize), she fell into the hands of the French.”

  The fight on the beach is an article of faith among certain academics whose political beliefs almost demand that a fight have taken place. Here is Olga Augustinos, author of French Odysseys: Greece in French Travel Literature from the Renaissance to the Romantic Era (1994): “Years later, Marcellus’s account of his feat was contradicted by eyewitnesses, some of whom maintained that when the statue changed hands, force was used and there was an armed confrontation between the Greeks and the crew of the Estafette, who won in the end.” She admits that the “evidence surrounding this episode is conflicting.” Nevertheless, she concludes:

  The conduct of the whole affair shows clearly that in European eyes the modern Greeks had no right to the monuments of antiquity because they could be of no use to a people who had neither enough culture nor sufficient means to appreciate and safeguard them. So pervasive was this patronizing and arrogant attitude that even philhellenes such as Marcellus subscribed to it implicitly.