Although Creoles and Spaniards wrangled endlessly in the political arena and often confessed their loathing for one another, the parents of a Creole daughter typically put aside such feelings when it came to marriage. A Spaniard was viewed as a superior choice. Everyone understood that Creole men did not have the same access to political power that Spaniards did, and Creole men, by and large, had a reputation for being lazy, spoiled, and vain. “Creole women,” Ulloa wrote, “recognize the disaster of marrying those of their own faction.” A Spanish groom would also be certain to have limpieza sangre (clean blood), and thus a white Creole family could be assured that the offspring of such a union would enjoy the many privileges that came with being white in colonial Peru. Those of pure Spanish blood were exempt from many colonial taxes and had a privileged claim on civil and ecclesiastical positions.
Most elite families would pick older men for their young daughters to marry. Six to twelve years of age difference was the norm. At times, however, a father would contract with a forty-year-old man to wed his twelve-year-old daughter, even though this was an age difference that the girls found loathsome. They would sing:
Don’t marry an old man
For his money,
Money, money disappears
But the old man remains.
However, Peruvian girls did want to marry, and at an early age. A girl who passed through puberty and turned twenty years old without marrying risked being thought of as an old maid, and rumors would likely fly that she was no longer a virgin, which would make it impossible for her to ever find a husband. And while elite families looked upon an arranged marriage as a business transaction, the girls naturally had their romantic fantasies. Courtly love was part of the same knightly tradition that prompted their seclusion.
The Amadís novels that were so popular in sixteenth-century Spain were, first and foremost, romances. Although the beautiful maiden may have been locked away in her castle, kept from the world by bars on her windows, such sequestration was necessary precisely because she pined so for her knight, and did so in a feverishly physical way. These books, lamented one sixteenth-century bishop, “stir up immoral and lascivious desire.” Yet another priest lamented that “often a mother leaves her daughter shut up in the house thinking that she is left in seclusion, but the daughter is really reading books like these and hence it would be far better for the mother to take the daughter along with her.” Indeed, Spanish girls devoured the books. Saint Teresa de Jesus of Ávila confessed in her autobiography that as a child she had been “so utterly absorbed in reading them that if I did not have a new book to read, I did not feel that I could be happy.”
In Peru, this vision of romance found a real-world outlet in the amorous liaisons between men of Spanish blood and lower-caste women. As seventeenth-century visitors noted in their travelogues, Spanish men in Peru thought of mulattos and mestizos as their “women of love.” The woman who was the object of such affection was a recognized type in Peruvian society, known as a tapada. She was, American historian Luis Martín has noted, the “sex symbol of colonial Peru.”
She was always dressed in the latest fashions, and her clothing was made of the most expensive, imported materials. She favored lace from the Low Countries, exquisite silks from China, and exotic perfumes and jewelry from the Orient. The length of her gown was shortened several inches to reveal the lace trim of her undergarments, and to draw attention to her small feet covered with embroidered velvet slippers.
While upper-class girls in the convent schools were taught to assume a different role, to be honorable and chaste in their thoughts, they still were greatly influenced by this culture. Rare was the Peruvian girl, one historian wrote, who did not fancy sneaking away at night for “an amatory conversation through the Venetian blinds of the window of the ground floor.” The girls’ seclusion, which allowed their imaginations to run rampant, only reinforced this feeling. Their “frantic desire to marry,” a Peruvian scholar noted, was “aggravated still more by the ban on speaking to men, except cousins.” Moreover, even in the convents, there was an ever-present undercurrent of sexuality. All of the girls would giggle in private over the nicknames that locals gave to the pastries and candies that the nuns produced and sold—the sweets were known as “little kisses,” “raise-the-old-man,” “maiden’s tongue,” and “love’s caresses.”
As Isabel reached this moment in her life, she was by all accounts quite fetching. Petite and with delicate features, she had the slender fingers and tiny feet that men in colonial Peru so fancied. While she had the usual dark hair of the Spanish, her skin was milk-white, and in this regard, she looked very much a daughter of Guayaquil, for the women of that port city were known to be “very fair” in complexion. Those who knew her spoke of her “good soul” and of how “very pretty” she was, and of her obvious intelligence. She could speak both French and Quechua, having learned this latter language as a child, when she had had an Indian wet nurse. Even La Condamine, usually so discrete in his comments, pronounced her “delicious” upon meeting her, and remarked that she had a “provocative” mouth. He was, in the manner of the times, simply stating what everyone saw: Isabel Gramesón, who was both pretty and from a prosperous family, was going to be quite the catch.
THE FRENCH ACADEMICIANS finished their astronomical observations around Quito in April 1740, prompting La Condamine to triumphantly declare their work complete. “After four years of a traveling life, two of which had been spent on mountains, we were ready to calculate the degree of the meridian which was the purpose of so many operations.” Yet even at this apparent moment of success, they were gnawed by doubt. Their measurements of stars in the Orion constellation had consistently varied “8 to 10 seconds” from one night to the next. Although this was a small discrepancy, it still prevented them from feeling secure about the precision of their work. They had not quite reached the ambitious goal that they had set for themselves, and as they mulled over this problem, they concluded that the fault must lie with their zenith sectors. If the long telescope flexed by so much as one-sixth of an inch between viewings, a star’s apparent position would shift by twenty seconds. Everyone glumly realized what they must do: Hugo would have to make the instruments more stable or build new sectors altogether, and then they would have to repeat their celestial observations.
While waiting for Hugo to do his work, the others busied themselves in various ways. La Condamine, for his part, returned to Cuenca, intent on bringing Senièrgues’s killers to justice. He wrote to the viceroys in both Lima and Santa Fe de Bogotá,* collected statements from witnesses to the murder, and even mounted a legal case against the priest whose sermons had helped spark the riot. “I love my country,” La Condamine wrote in his journal. “I believe that I have an obligation to defend the honor and interests of my sovereign, of my nation, and of my academy.” That case seemed to stoke his appetite for other legal battles as well. La Condamine sued three individuals who had not returned goods he had loaned them, and then he got into an argument with Ulloa and Juan that also headed to court.
The dispute with Ulloa and Juan was over how the French planned to commemorate the expedition’s work. Even before they departed from France, they had decided to build monuments at the ends of their first baseline. This had been thought out in such detail that the academy had written the inscription that was to be used. La Condamine had taken charge of this task, and he had decided to build pyramids, rather grand in size—twelve feet by twelve feet at the base and fifteen feet tall—to mark their Yaruqui baseline. There was a scientific rationale for putting up markers, as it would enable other geodesists to check their work. But the pyramids would also serve to glorify those who performed the deed, and therein was the problem: La Condamine, as he fiddled with the wording of the inscription prepared by the academy, sought to describe the two Spanish naval officers as “assistants.”
La Condamine’s blueprint for pyramids marking the Yaruqui baseline.
From Charles-Marie de La Condamine
, Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi à l’équateur (1751).
From La Condamine’s point of view, this was exceedingly generous. None of the French helpers—Verguin, Morainville, or Jean Godin—was going to see his name on the marble tablet. But Ulloa and Juan had grown up in a society where swords could be drawn over the use of usted, and they perceived the wording as an unforgivable slight. They informed La Condamine that the inscription should describe them as Spanish academicians—they wanted equal status. Replied La Condamine: “Only the French members of the Academy were charged with this mission [and] we have always remained the masters of our work.” To describe Ulloa and Juan as academicians, he wrote, would be to award them “qualities which they did not possess.” One bemused observer of this squabble—Isabel’s uncle, the Marqués de Valleumbroso—deemed it worthy of “a new comedy by Molière.” But this was colonial Spain, and the argument blew up into a legal contest that clogged the Quito court with hundreds of documents, with the Creoles in the city cheering on La Condamine, for they rather enjoyed seeing two Spaniards humiliated.
The expedition, however, was clearly sputtering as the academicians tried to bring it to a close. The zenith sectors were in the repair shop. Louis Godin’s relationship with La Condamine and Bouguer remained so strained that more often than not they communicated with each other by letter. Senièrgues and Couplet were dead, and yet another member, Jussieu, was in bed with a raging fever, so sick that he had “put his affairs and his conscience in order.” As a group, the expedition was falling apart, and then, late in 1740, the Peruvian viceroy called Ulloa and Juan to Lima. A British armada was sailing around Cape Horn with plans to attack Peruvian ports, and he wanted the two Spaniards to help prepare the colony’s defense. The expedition, at least for the moment, had come to a halt.*
EVEN MORE THAN THE OTHER ASSISTANTS, Jean Godin was left at loose ends by this scattering of the expedition members. The others still had tasks to do. Hugo was working on the instruments, Morainville was building the pyramids, and Verguin was assisting La Condamine with his drawing of maps. But Jean’s job had been to act as a signal carrier during the triangulation work, and now there was little for him to do. Nor was there money left for the expedition as a whole. His cousin Louis was descending ever deeper into debt, while La Condamine was relying on his personal funds to pay for his expenses and for the construction of the pyramids. In order to earn some money, Jean decided to travel to Cartagena, planning to trade in textiles. Before he left, however, La Condamine gave him a trunk filled with “natural curiosities” to take to the port, where he could arrange for its shipment to France. This request picked up Jean’s spirits, for it made him feel connected, in some small way, to the others.
He departed from Quito on October 3, 1740. It was 900 miles to Cartagena, along a tortuous route that could take three months to travel. The first 500 miles involved a trek by mule across the dry plains north of the city and then along the spine of the Andes. The most treacherous segment in the mountains was Guanacas Pass, “the most famous in all South America” for its perils, Bouguer later wrote. The peaks in this region near Popayán were covered with snow, and so many mules had perished while crossing the pass that their bones covered the trail, making it impossible “to set a foot down without treading on them.” This route, Bouguer concluded, was “never hazarded without the utmost dread.”
Jean Godin found it slow going; at times he was able to cover only three or four miles a day. It took him until the middle of November to make his way through the mountains and to reach the Magdalena River, where he was able to trade his mule for a canoe. This was a much more comfortable form of transport. Near Bogotá, he even took a short detour to Tequendama Falls, a waterfall “200 toises” in height that, at the time, was thought to be the tallest in the world.
When Jean arrived in Cartagena, the city was busily preparing for an attack by the British. Jean found some textiles to buy, and handed off La Condamine’s trunk to the captain of a French frigate. It contained a number of archaeological items certain to intrigue the Europeans: fossil axes, rock samples, petrified wood, the skin of a small crocodile, a stuffed coral snake, several Incan artifacts, and antique clay vases that were shaped with such skill that the water whistled when poured. Unfortunately, the ship did not sail right away and was still docked in Cartagena on March 15, 1741, when the British launched their assault. They set fire to ships in the bay, including the frigate loaded with La Condamine’s trunk of curiosities, and all of the items were lost.
Tequendama Falls.
From John Pinkerton, ed., A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World, vol. 14 (London, 1813).
Godin’s journey to and from Cartagena took more than six months, and as had so often been the case during his time in South America, he had traveled alone. He had grown quite accustomed to this difficult life. His trek to Cartagena, he wrote, reminded him of the years he had spent “reconnoitering the ground for the meridian of Quito, fixing signals on the loftiest mountains.” But back in Quito, he was once more at loose ends. As La Condamine said, “His duties regarding the objective of our mission had ceased.” He was adrift in a Spanish colony far from his home, and it was then, over the next several months, that he became engaged to thirteen-year-old Isabel Gramesón.
There is no record of their courtship, either in Jean’s writings or La Condamine’s. The match, however, could only have been made with Pedro Gramesón’s approval, and in that regard, it was surprising. While he may have welcomed the French visitors into his home and delighted in their tales, he almost certainly would not have considered Jean Godin a good husband for his daughter. It was true that the two families shared common friends, the Pelletiers from Lignieres—alliances often lay behind arranged marriages. And Jean, during his years of service to the expedition, had proven himself to be a person of industry. But he was not Spanish and was planning to return to France, and it would hardly make sense for Pedro Gramesón to invest Isabel’s dowry in such a suitor.
His daughter, however, was strong-willed, and this was a union that would fulfill many of her wishes. She had often stated her desire to go to France. As Jean later wrote, she was “exceedingly solicitous” of traveling there. Hers was a childhood dream woven from many strands: Her grandfather on her father’s side was French, her father had entertained these famous visitors in his home, and all of Quito had gossiped about the wonders of Paris when the expedition had first come to the city. Women there, or so she had been told, presided over salons, attended the theater in fancy gowns, and danced the minuet at elegant balls. Marrying Jean promised to make all of that a reality, and at last Isabel’s father consented: He would provide the couple with a dowry that consisted of jewelry, textiles, 7,783 pesos in silver, and two slaves.
Jean and Isabel were married by Father Domingo Terol on December 29, 1741, in the Dominican College of San Fernando in Quito. La Condamine, Verguin, and Jussieu—who had recovered from his fever—all attended, as did many of the elite in Quito and other rich Creoles from miles around. The large crowd was a reflection of the Gramesóns’ prominence, particularly on Isabel’s mother’s side. It is likely that Louis Godin, Bouguer, and Morainville also attended, bringing together all the French members of the expedition one final time.
The marriage ceremony was followed by a grand feast and dance. The guests sipped on liquors chilled by ice chipped from Mount Pichincha, drank grape brandy, and ate to their hearts’ content. Great plates of fish, fowl, and meats were served, and the dining tables were loaded with bowls of succulent fruits—chirimoyas, avocados, guavas, pomegranates, and strawberries. After the food was put away, everyone danced the fandango, the rhythm tapped out with a tambourine and castanets. More than one guest had brought a guitar, and according to one account, the Gramesóns had shipped in a clavichord from Guayaquil for the occasion. Isabel’s parents had spared no expense, and everyone could see how happy Isabel and Jean looked. Theirs, it seemed, w
as a marriage certain to bring good fortune to both.
After the wedding, Isabel went into seclusion for a month. In a society in which the cult of the Virgin Mary held sway, it was considered improper for a woman to be seen during the time of her “deflowering.” Once the thirty days had gone by, she and Jean began a round of visits to family and friends, a ritual signaling that she had passed into adulthood. Although it was expected that Isabel, in the future, would rarely venture out alone—social protocol required that she have a maid or her husband with her—she no longer needed to be to be hidden. She was fourteen years old and he was twenty-eight, a match that seemed right and proper to all, and even as they made their social rounds, she was already pregnant with their first child.
During this period, La Condamine, Bouguer, and Louis Godin repeated their celestial observations, but without success. Hugo’s repairs to the zenith sectors did not make any difference. A star’s zenith position would vary from five to twenty seconds from night to night. They now had to confront a painful possibility: Perhaps they were trying to do the impossible. Perhaps they could not measure a degree of latitude with sufficient precision to definitively answer the question of the earth’s shape. They were sure that Maupertuis’s measurements in Lapland were not as accurate as theirs already were, and yet they knew that if they went ahead and used these imprecise celestial observations to calculate the length of a degree of latitude at the equator, some doubt would remain.
There were any number of factors that might be causing the variation. Perhaps, they speculated, atmospheric refraction was not constant. Perhaps its strength varied from night to night. Or perhaps the adobe walls of their observatories contracted or expanded ever so slightly in response to changes in temperature and humidity, which in turn caused a slight movement in the wire strung up to align the zenith sector along the meridian plane. Or could the star’s position actually be changing? Maybe, in their effort to make measurements more precise than anyone had ever made before, they had discovered something new about the universe: A star’s movement through the heavens might not be quite as fixed as previously believed. Perhaps a star could wobble. They mulled over all these possibilities and then, in late 1741, Bouguer wrote La Condamine with “devastating” news. He had concluded that the problems with their two zenith sectors had never been resolved. Hugo would have to make additional improvements to one of the sectors and build a second one anew. Sighed La Condamine: “At a time when I was flattering myself that all of the obstacles that had been holding us back for so long were going to be removed and that I could finally set off en route back to France, I found myself forced to begin the work again. Although it was painful, it was clear to me that our work was not nearly done.”
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