The Curse of the Labrador Duck

by Glen Chilton

  We walked uphill to the escarpment that divides the two portions of Brussels and entered Parc de Bruxelles, once a hunting estate for mucky-mucks, redesigned as a public park in the late 1700s. We sat on a bench near a fountain at the park’s north end, admiring the tree-lined avenues and watching runners fill their lunch hour with fresh air. The sun played with clouds. When the sun briefly took the upper hand, it created a lovely rainbow in the fountain’s mist. Then the wind changed direction, giving us a good hosing down.

  From the park, we walked east down the rue Belliard, aiming for the European Parliament, on the margin of the Parc Léopold. Just beyond, we should find the Institut royal des Sciences naturelles and their Labrador Duck. Our walk took us through the Big Business and Administrative and Don’t-You-Damned-Well-Forget-It District. I expected the odd restaurant for the lunchtime crowd. I expected the odd bar for the after-work crowd. Not a one to be seen. Our lunch would have to wait until after my examination of the duck. Walking through the Parc Léopold and past the Bibliothèque Solvay, we came across a field full of young women playing baseball, using a tennis racquet instead of a bat, and hula hoops for bases. It seemed to be some sort of team-building exercise. Instead of the flamboyant colors of youth, each wore a white T-shirt and black sweat suit bottoms.

  According to my contact at the institute, Georges Lenglet, the best way to find the museum building was first to find the European Parliament buildings, and then look for a yellow-and-orange tower. The first part was easy. The European Parliament is a behemoth. Then we scanned for a yellow-and-orange tower. Well, I suppose that color might be called yellow on a really sunny day, and that color could be mistaken for orange if it had an immediate transfusion of red. And yellow.

  The Institut royal des Sciences naturelles is not the oldest museum in Europe. It was inaugurated by Léopold II in 1891. The builders designed it to show off a particularly stunning set of iguanodons found near Mons twenty years earlier. The museum’s promotional material didn’t explain what the iguanodons were doing in Mons. The museum’s ornithological collection ranks twenty-fourth in the world, with about 100,000 items. The portions of the museum open to the public display lots of minerals, shells, and stuffed animals and their skeletons, but the real highlight is the dinosaur exhibit.

  Arriving at the appointed hour of 13:00, I found that Lenglet was the quietest and least-assuming man I had met on my duck quest. He wore a sensible white lab coat and held his white-crowned head bent forward slightly, as though his brain were too heavy to be held perfectly upright. Anyone whose job title includes expressions like vertebrate systematics and biochemical taxonomy surely has a rather full brain. He was gentle, polite, and helpful, and probably had a lot of good stories to tell, but I bet those stories aren’t drawn out of him easily. He passed completely on the usual pleasantries of: “How was your journey? How are you enjoying Belgium? Did you manage to find the Charleroi red-light district? Did you like our statue of the peeing boy?”

  Lenglet took us to room 15.55, then rolled the Labrador Duck down the hallway on an antique lab cart to his office, where I was to complete my examination. I appreciated his exaggerated care in negotiating every bump in the floor and every turn in the hallway. Not everyone treats these specimens with sufficient reverence. He pulled up a chair for my mother while I examined and measured the duck. He also earned very big points from me by fetching her a cup of coffee.

  Labrador Duck 25

  This was another taxidermic preparation of an adult drake. While making detailed notes about the appearance of the duck, a strange question came to mind. If, years from now, a Labrador Duck were stolen, and then one came up for sale, would my notes be sufficiently detailed to give evidence in a courtroom? This one was a pretty standard-issue Labrador Duck, but I felt it was notable for two things. First, it was remarkably clean for a very old specimen. You can put this down to the glass case that fits over the preparation. Second, his tail was broken. Not as in broken off, but as in split into a left and a right side. I wanted to have a really good poke to figure out what might have happened to it, but felt that if I did, it might drop off in my hand. I also had notes about exactly where it was painted (legs, toes, and webs, but not the bill) and with what colors (black). I jotted in my book that it had small holes in the inner web of the left foot. I measured the bill and wings with precision. So, if a defense attorney ever asks me, “Are you sure this is the same duck you saw in Brussels forty years ago?” I will be able to give my answer with certainty. By then, stealing an extinct duck will probably be a capital offense. Regrettably, virtually nothing is known about the origins of this specimen. The Royal Institute got it from another Brussels museum sometime before 1845. With a sense of humor that not everyone would understand, my mother named this duck Georges, after our host.

  Giving my eyes periodic breaks from squinting at the duck, I looked around Lenglet’s office. It was an absolute masterpiece. At least eight times as big as my office, it had a wealth of bench space, plenty of bookshelves, and room for all the filing cabinets that a scientist could ever want. The office was many floors up, and with windows on two sides, it had a great view. There were stuffed fish on the wall and foul-looking creatures in jars of foul-looking preservative. To add to the whole effect, the office had a spiral staircase that led to a second level, which housed Lenglet’s research library. Tucked in the corner of the library was a grotesque skeleton. It was like a road accident, and I couldn’t help but look at it. Brown with age, it was the skeleton of a very small child, topped by a huge and grossly deformed skull. “Hydrocephaly?” I asked. “Yes,” Lenglet responded. He described his office as a museum within a museum.

  LEAVING THE INSTITUTE, Mom and I zigzagged through the buildings of the European Parliament before aiming for the train station. Don’t let anyone tell you that Brussels is all gray. Some of it is silver, and some of it is sand-colored. I explained to Mom that I particularly hate tall glass buildings because of their impact on migrating songbirds. Traveling at night and navigating by the stars, when they pass over cities they can become disoriented by twinkling lights reflecting off the glass. Many die when they collide with buildings. To illustrate, I pointed out a small dead bird at the edge of the sidewalk.

  We descended to train platform 6 to await the 15:36 train to Charleroi with about one hundred other travelers. At 15:30 a train pulled up to the platform. An information screen confidently told us that this was the 15:36 to Charleroi. A few people got on board, but most of us held our ground, looking at each other skeptically. One minute later when the doors closed and the train rattled away, the information screen told us that we had all missed our chance, and that the next train would depart at 15:47 for Brussels Midi. Everyone groaned, and a few vulgar words were uttered in both French and Flemish. “Oops, no, wait a minute,” proclaimed the information screen. “My mistake,” it said. “The next train will be the one for Charleroi. Sorry!” I’m sure that I wasn’t the only one who wondered where the riders on the 15:30 mystery train finished up.

  BACK AT THE hotel in Charleroi, I worked on getting down on paper my thoughts on the day while Mom had a quick nap. She awoke keen to go in search of a beer, having earlier spotted an upmarket bar done over in brass and wood and subtle lighting. We ordered a couple of Leffe, which arrived along with a little glass bowl of cheese cubes adorned with garlic salt. I told Mom a few stories about ducks. She told me a few stories about our relatives and other rogues. I pulled out the euro coins that had accumulated in my pocket since arriving in Belgium. In the currency of the European Union, bills are the same wherever you are, but the coins of each country are unique. Despite the differences on the “heads” side, all coins are legal tender in all countries in the union. As evidence of how truly European Belgium is, I had accumulated one coin each from Ireland, Germany, Spain, and France, four from the Netherlands, and two from Belgium.

  I suppose we should have gone in search of food, but with a couple of beers and a couple of bowls of salt
y cheese in us, a long tramp seemed to be more important. In the remaining light of an early evening we wandered past shops that, at an earlier hour, would have been pleased to provide eyeglasses or glass eyes, women’s dresses or undressed women. A couple of times Mom said, “Let’s just walk to the end of this block, and then we can head back before my legs wear out.” But at the end of each block, she would spot a fountain or a clock tower or a series of particularly tall, thin homes, and we would walk some more. Pausing for a break on a park bench along a tree-lined avenue, she said: “When the time comes, I want you to say my eulogy. Remember to tell people that I knew how to laugh, and that I wouldn’t have done anything different.”

  Then she got a hankering for a banana. We found a number of greengrocers that were still open. The first two had no bananas. The third had a boxful, but they were all brown. The fourth had bananas galore, and they seemed to be just ripe enough. “Are you going to go in and get them?” she asked. Under different circumstances I suppose I would have, but I wanted to see how she would get along speaking beer-fueled French, and handed her a fist full of coins. She came out a few minutes later with a big bagful. “‘Trois,’ I said. He said, ‘Kilo,’ I said, ‘Non, trois.’” They settled on a kilo for one and a half euros. “That’s all right, is it?” she asked as she handed me the remaining change. “Yes,” I said. “That’s just fine.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Echoes of Once-Great Voices

  I really thought that I had nailed it. Surely I had located absolutely every single stuffed Labrador Duck in the world. I had perused Paul Hahn’s 1963 inventory until my eyes were full of gravel, contacted most of the curators of the world’s bird collections, and followed every insidious tendril of the World Wide Web. Fifty-two stuffed Labrador Ducks and one beak had survived the ravages of time, right?

  But then Frank Steinheimer sent me a message from Berlin explaining that he had discovered another duck, residing in the teeny-tiny village of La Châtre in the middle of France. Blast! There was even a photograph of this specimen on the website of the village’s Musée George Sand et la Vallée Noire. From what detail I could make out, it seemed real enough. If I had known about the duck a year earlier, I could have snagged it while in France with Julie. Now to ensure that no Labrador Duck would escape my quest, I would have to make a return journey to France and revise my global list.

  Oddly, the museum in La Châtre was not dedicated to extinct ducks, but to the nineteenth-century French author George Sand. Sand is a really big name to those who care about period feminist literature, and there is probably no end of biographies. However, my branch of the public library had only one, a 1999 tome entitled George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large, by Belinda Jack. The book is really long. Really, really long. It has 411 pages before the explanatory notes. Even having taken six credits of university English literature, I found Jack’s writing opaque. As evidence I offer up the line: “And the physical freedom of her subversive capering in La Châtre not only provided material for prose accounts, it also served as a metaphor for more fundamental shifts in consciousness.” I didn’t finish the book. Nonetheless, I did manage to pan a few nuggets before giving up. Here are ten things to know about Sand in case you are ever called upon to write a snap quiz.

  Born in Paris on July 1, 1804, she was christened Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin. She picked up the handle George Sand later in life. To family and friends she was Aurore.

  Sand’s father was Maurice François Dupin, an army captain. Her mother was Antoinette Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, a mentally unstable former prostitute. In no big hurry, Maurice and Antoinette waited until four weeks before Sand’s birth to get married. She was not exactly born out of wedlock, but certainly not very far into it. Suddenly finding themselves in a big rush, they had Aurore baptized the day after her birth.

  Dupin married Delaborde, who was well below his station, in secret, and against his mother’s wishes. The matriarch eventually came around and arranged for Sand’s First Communion at La Châtre on March 23, 1817.

  Snooty, perhaps, but no purebred herself, Sand’s grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of Maurice de Saxe. A step further back, we find that de Saxe was the illegitimate son of King Augustus III of Poland, and his mistress Aurore de Kœnigsmark. De Saxe’s niece married a son of Louis XV. After watching all the leaves fall off the family tree, this means that Sand was second cousin to Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, and Charles X.

  Sand’s stuck-up grandmother recognized that Paris wasn’t the safest place to be during the French Revolution, and so took up residence in Nohant, just down the road from La Châtre.

  Sand married Casimir Dudevant in 1822. They had a son and a daughter, but their paternity isn’t crystal clear. This leaves me wondering if a big sexual appetite and a propensity toward infidelity run in the family.

  Biographer Jack described Sand as a “frigid, bisexual nymphomaniac.” To me, two of those words don’t go together. She was also a cross-dresser, and smoking was one of her nasty habits in a time when women just didn’t do that sort of thing.

  Sand’s books were a commercial success, partly because her writing was easy to read, and partly because it was smutty, at least by the standards of the day. Amongst her favorite themes were sex, sexuality, incest, infidelity, sex, and the role of surrealism in contemporary art. All right—I made up the last one.

  Keen on spreading a little joy, Sand took her share of lovers, and the share of a few others as well. Her most famous consort was the composer Chopin. Among her “friends” were musician Franz Liszt, authors Flaubert, Balzac, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and both Brownings, along with a small but elite army of visual artists. Of her lovers, Sand seems to have saved an awful lot of energy for her relationship with Marie Dorval, a famous beauty of the Paris stage.

  Not necessarily a ray of sunshine, Sand described life as “a great wound that never heals.” I think I dated her once. Sand died in Nohant in 1876.

  GETTING TO LA Châtre to see its duck was no easy matter. The small town is smack dab in the middle of France, and not close to anything else. Getting to the nearest airport, Limoges, required a five-and-a-half-hour layover at Stanstead. I spent much of that time swotting up on George Sand. She wrote great piles of books, including novels and plays, essays, a two-volume biography, and twenty-five volumes of correspondence. Shelves of university libraries sag under her literary output, and students of feminist literature probably wish she had dedicated a little more time to bonking famous composers and a little less time to writing. Her first novel, written when she was twenty-seven, was entitled Indiana. I purchased a copy, and over the next few days, I found spare moments to read it on trains, in airport departure lounges, and on park benches. Indiana reads as though written by a thirteen-year-old girl in love with a pony.

  The Limoges taxi lobby must be really strong, for there was no bus service into town, and the cost of the short journey from the airport was scandalous. After a short nap in my hotel room, I made my way to the Gare des Bénédictins. If there were only a couple of trains between Limoges and La Châtre the next day, I wanted to make sure I caught one. I asked the only free agent at the information kiosk if he spoke English. “Non,” he said, pointing to his colleague at the next spot. When my turn came I asked, “Parlez-vous anglais?” She dropped her face into her hands, perhaps hoping that I would go away. So, trying to be polite, I did my best in French, explaining that I needed a return ticket to La Châtre for the following day. I left the last consonant off “Châtre” as my guidebook instructed. She looked at me as though I had asked for a return ticket to her grandmother’s underpants. I tried again, sticking the last consonant back on. She sighed and pushed a pencil and a piece of paper at me. I wrote “La Châtre” and pushed them back. Three of her colleagues wandered over to join her, apparently under the impression that this was the height of entertainment. “Look,” I said in English, “it’s here on the map” pointing to a spot just 55 miles from Limoges. All four of them started chu
ckling at me. At me, but definitely not with me. With my map as proof, they had to admit that La Châtre actually exists. In French, one of them asked me why anyone would want to go to La Châtre. “Je voyage là pour les bon marché drogues récréationnelles,” I said. They convinced their computer to spit out a timetable. It showed that the train doesn’t go to La Châtre. The number 3630 train would require sixty-three minutes to take me as far as Chateauroux, a huge overshoot. I would then have eight minutes to use un autre mode de transport to get to the gare routière, and hop on the number 42693 bus to La Châtre. Three hours and eighteen minutes after I arrived, I would have to be on the number 42706 bus back out of La Châtre, unless I wanted to spend the night on a park bench. “Billet ici?” I asked. “Non,” I was told, and in the fashion of Saint Michael directing Adam and Eve out of Eden, each of the four employees pointed to a distant kiosk. The lady who sold me the ticket was far more pleasant, but crushed my ego by asking if I was eligible for a senior citizen’s discount.

  THE NEXT MORNING, by train and by bus, I aimed for the museum named in honor of George Sand. I arrived two hundred years, three months, and twelve days after her birth. Sometime in the fifteenth century, the Chauvigny family built a castle in La Châtre. Time saw most of the castle fall down, as time so often does, but its stone tower remains. Sixty-five feet tall, with walls six feet thick, the tower is visible from most parts of town. From 1734 it served as a prison, but in 1937 it was converted to a museum to house Sand memorabilia and, two years later, the town’s collection of birds.

  I was met by Brigitte Massonneau, who had been corresponding with me by postcard. She pleased me by speaking not a single solitary word of English. I knew that I could count on my elementary grasp of French if the person I was speaking to knew an equal amount of English. My interactions with Massonneau showed me that I could stumble along even if my French companion was completely unilingual. As she fetched a table and chair from a storage closet, I looked at the cabinet, just down from the reception desk, that housed the duck. He looked real, and I was more than a little relieved. It would have been a long trip for another painted domestic duck. The cabinet also housed a Carolina Parakeet, an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, an Eskimo Curlew, and a Passenger Pigeon. Far and away the highlight of their collection was the Labrador Duck.