The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  “Yes,” Fin said, a little embarrassed. “I’ve been there.”

  “And are they as people say?” she said. “Her parts, I mean. They say they protrude like a man’s. Is it interesting?”

  “Well, it’s rather distasteful really. She dances a little. Then reveals herself, part by part…”

  “It is alluring, seductive?”

  “No, it’s a freak show. A circus. She wears a mask. But yes, her body is remarkable. From the scientific point of view, I mean.”

  “And you, M. Connor? Does the body of the Hottentot woman interest you?”

  “No,” I said. “No. I don’t think I would want to see that.”

  “She fell down on the stage last night, they say. Drunk.”

  “Why do you take an interest in this woman, mademoiselle?” I asked.

  “My stepfather bought her a few weeks ago when he was sure that she was dying, of course. I hear daily reports about her health, like weather reports. She is coming here, to the museum—as soon as she is dead. She’s in the last stages of syphilis, you see, although she is still young.”

  “Surely you can’t buy people in Europe,” I said. “She’s not a slave.” The conversation was making me angry, an emotion I could not afford that evening.

  “Oh, you can buy dead people, monsieur, in Paris. My stepfather buys dead bodies—for the purposes of enlightenment, of course. He’s going to dissect the Hottentot Venus in the laboratory where you work, M. Robertson. Then he’ll make a series of casts. She’s to go in the main hall in the museum between the orangutan and the male African. A prize exhibit. She’ll be more famous here than she is onstage. She is to be promoted from the freak show to the museum.”

  “That’s grotesque,” I said. “There’s something very degrading in that.”

  “Yes, M. Connor,” she said suddenly, her voice at a whisper. “There is something very degrading in that. It sickens me. There are sometimes things here in this house and in this museum that sicken me.”

  “Sophie?” Clémentine Cuvier had approached us, dressed in her old-fashioned dress with ruffs at the neck. Her hair was pinned rather too tightly to her head, giving her a pinched expression.

  “M. Robertson, may I introduce my sister, Mlle. Clémentine Cuvier. Clémentine, M. Robertson. You know M. Connor, of course.”

  I glanced over to Cuvier. In the corner near Brugmans, he seemed to be struggling. A little pale, a little sweaty, he had lowered himself into a chair. His secretary, Charles Laurillard, passed him a glass of water. I couldn’t imagine Cuvier out in the forests of India collecting wild animals. No, he sent his protégés to do that. Some of them would die collecting for him.

  “Will you excuse me, messieurs,” Sophie said. “We have duties.”

  At the same moment, on the night of October 29, 1815, while Cuvier performed for the Dutch ambassador, in another part of Paris on an unlit road in a region called Picpus, a fiacre followed a woman in a black fur-lined coat who was walking toward the convent carrying a child’s soldier’s uniform wrapped in dark blue tissue paper and tied with gold ribbon.

  Manon Laforge knew she was being followed, of course, but it didn’t stop her from feeling anxious. It was meant to be this way. All was as it should be. It was all part of the plan she had gone over and over again with Lucienne. This was the most difficult part of the plan to choreograph.

  “It’s the only way,” Lucienne had explained to me. “If Jagot knows we’re going to break the deal and escape through the quarries, he will take Delphine from the convent and bring her as a hostage in exchange for the diamond. Which is exactly what I want him to do. Once Delphine is down there in the quarries, I can reach her. We will be on my ground. But Delphine must not be alone with Jagot’s men. She will be afraid. She must have someone who can protect her if anything goes wrong. I can’t go; it must be Manon.”

  So this part of the plan had depended on the staged and slow exchange of secrets between me and Jagot over the course of the previous week. Manon Laforge will try to rescue the child from the convent on the night of the robbery, I wrote. Nine o’clock. When your men change shifts. She will come to the side door dressed in a black fur-lined coat. She will carry a parcel—a red soldier’s uniform for the child. A disguise.

  Excellent. A second hostage will only strengthen my hand, Jagot replied by return.

  Manon looked around. There was no one else in the street, just the fiacre moving toward her. She was anxious, despite the carefully orchestrated plan. She knew there were risks on every side. She walked faster. The blinds of the fiacre were drawn. It moved very slowly, following her through the night as she passed the dark ponds and the clearing, as she headed toward the darkest end of the street, to the side door of the convent, where a nun took the parcel from her and a few moments later passed out a small child dressed in a red soldier’s uniform.

  Manon told Delphine that she was going for a midnight walk in her new costume. Stranger things had happened. The child talked incessantly about chickens, snails, about her new friends. She was excited. She brandished her soldier’s sword.

  “Whatever happens now, Delphine, you do exactly as I say, you understand?” Manon whispered. Delphine nodded.

  Manon recognized the voice of Jagot as he stepped out of the fiacre and called to her sharply: “Madame Laforge,” he said, “there is nowhere to run. For the safety of the child …”

  She ran anyway, taking Delphine’s hand. Her fur-lined coat, bought from the secondhand clothes shop on the alleyway that ran off the rue Vivienne, a coat that had once belonged to a countess who had lost her head, her house, and her name, slipped off her shoulders as she fell.

  Delphine, disoriented by the night and imagining herself to be fighting against the English on the side of Napoleon at Austerlitz, brandished her sword to defend herself and her fallen compatriot against the sweaty and unshaven police agent. Jagot and his two men soon disarmed her but she left several tooth marks on the back of Jagot’s hand.

  Manon Laforge and Delphine Bernard were now the hostages of Henri Jagot. They were about to spend a few hours under guard in an inn called the Black Cat, on the corner of a street near the Jardin des Plantes, where Manon would order Delphine madeleines and tell her again about Napoleon’s battle positions at the siege of Toulon.

  26

  N CUVIER’S DRAWING ROOM the butler rang a bell for silence. Because the guests were now deep in conversation and reluctant to stop talking, he rang it a second time.

  Cuvier stepped into the center of the room, speaking in perfect clipped French, which was simultaneously translated by his secretary, Charles Laurillard: “Mesdames et messieurs,” he began.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Laurillard followed.

  “In honor of our guest, M. Brugmans,” Cuvier went on, “we will now take a tour of the fifteen rooms of the Museum of Comparative Anatomy, before we adjourn here for further entertainment. Please. If you would gather in the hall downstairs, we will enter the museum through the main entrance.”

  Fin emptied his glass of wine. So did I. I shouldn’t really be drinking, I thought, but I wasn’t going to impose any rules on myself just yet. It was going to be a long night.

  The thirty or forty guests and Jardin attendants followed Cuvier out onto the landing and down the curved staircase into the hall, where the canna lilies glimmered in the light of velvet-shaded lamps. The butler took his position at the front door; Cuvier took his position on the staircase above us. He waited until the crowd had fallen silent, then began to speak slowly, turning from time to time to address M. Brugmans; a corpulent man, expensively dressed, from his necktie to his medaled dark blue frock coat, to the jewels of his shoes, he puffed himself up like a courting bird.

  “Gentlemen, ladies. Please take your time in the museum entrance hall. There is much of interest to see.”

  Cuvier descended the staircase to take up his next position at the door; the professors of the Jardin lined up behind him on either side of Brugmans. When L
aurillard opened the door, a string of paper lanterns strung from trees marked a path from Cuvier’s house around to the museum entrance. A cloud unveiled the moon, illuminating a fringe of flattened trees. The night air was cold and damp, full of the smell of leaf mold and abandoned bonfires; a lion roared or yawned somewhere in the menagerie and out on the clipped lawn a small band of musicians played chamber music under a blue canopy.

  Spots of light punctured the dark bushes and enclosures of the menagerie to the left, where I could hear the muffled sound of peacocks and the cries or grunts of creatures I could not recognize. It was the evening feed. I looked at my pocket watch. “They’re early again,” I said aloud, thinking of the feeding schedules I had watched and recorded through long nights in the warehouse.

  “What’s early?” Sophie Duvaucel had dropped back to accompany me the few yards through the garden.

  “The birds,” I said, quickly. “They’re early to migrate this year. That usually means a harsh winter. It’s cold, don’t you think? For October, I mean.” I offered her my arm.

  The guests gathered outside the front door of the museum while Cuvier stood on the threshold. His next stage. The servants brought the lights closer to him. They had practiced this before, I thought.

  “M. Brugmans, honored guests,” he said, Laurillard still bravely translating. “Welcome to the Museum of Comparative Anatomy. Everything inside this building, all the many thousands of specimens gathered from around the world, have been arranged in sequence; it is natures ordered sequence. There is no other collection like it in the world.”

  Inside, as if on cue, two blue-liveried servants pulled open the enormous doors; liquid light poured into the darkness, onto the assembled crowd. The hall in front of us was full of human skeletons, some casts, some actual bones, arranged as if they were standing there in the flesh, all facing the door, a salon of bone people, pinned and wired together in the hallway of what had once been a coach house. At the base of a great staircase, a skeleton stood with arm outstretched, as if gesturing in midsentence; beside it another stood limply, arms hanging low like an ape.

  A theater of bones. Cuvier had arranged the skeletons into a single line to illustrate his theory on the hierarchy of races. At one end the bones were pinioned into figures in upright postures of conversation or address, at the other end of the line, they stooped, looking vacant, arms dangling; white races at one end of the line, black races at the other. I remembered what Sophie had told me and located the space at the far end of the row, where the skeleton of the Hottentot Venus would go.

  In a different line altogether were the skeleton curiosities: the thirty-seven-inch skeleton of Nicolas Ferry, a dwarf from the court of Stanislaus, king of Poland, one of three dwarfs born to French peasants, who had made good money from the sale of their tiny children. There was an ancient Egyptian skeleton, bones disinterred from a tomb, and the twisted and distorted remains of the famous Mme. Supiot, who died from a disease that made her bones so soft that her legs could be twisted around the back of her neck and who, in the course of her last miserable five years—during which she bore three children—shrank in height from five feet six inches to twenty-three inches.

  Several guests gasped as the smoky light fell down through the bones, giving the effect of elongation, as if the bone people were stepping or sliding toward the door. A woman pulled her shawl more closely around herself.

  Skulls, ears, legs … I tried to remember the order of the fifteen rooms I knew so well that led off from the hall and from the landing upstairs.

  Men in black frock coats and women in satins and silks now wandered among the bone people. Cuvier now stood next to a skeleton that was pinned into a tableau of horror and pain, head tilted toward the sky, mouth open in a silent scream, a stake running through the now-invisible flesh. He waited, patiently for the guests to turn their attention to him. He beckoned to Brugmans.

  “May I introduce you to M. Suleiman of Aleppo, M. Brugmans,” Cuvier intoned. “Please, you must shake his hand. It is a tradition here in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy for honored guests to shake the hand of M. Suleiman.”

  Brugmans stepped forward, bowed, and took the charred bones of the skeletal hand in his own. The crowd clapped.

  “He models his lecturing style on the French actor Talma, you know,” Sophie whispered. “He’s good. Knows his timing. He has been practicing a good deal lately.”

  Cuvier began to speak again, gesturing toward M. Suleiman: “This young Syrian assassinated the French general Kléber in Cairo fifteen years ago,” he said. “A French court sentenced him to death and impaled him in the main square of Cairo, where it took him four hours to die. His right hand was cut off and burned in front of him—an example to the enemies of France. We have restored his hand for our display. But if you will look closer at his skull, just here, a little closer, you will see an unusual shape … It is the swelling of crime and fanaticism, yes, visible on the bone, just here.”

  Cuvier’s men eased us into Room 2, the home of the carnivore skeletons. Here, in the absence of a chandelier, the servants carried lamps that swung from side to side so that, as we walked the length of the room, between the skeletons of rhinos and whales, the lamps cast ovals of light onto rows of eye sockets and nasal cavities and jaws. Here rows of bird skulls, there rows of antelope skulls, next fish heads of every conceivable shape: heads with beaks, antlers, tusks, elongated noses, foreshortened jaws, each species arranged in sections, in shelves and rows and boxes, all staring out, visible for a moment in the swaying circles of light, then gone.

  Cuvier stopped in front of a glass display cabinet and beckoned to a pair of servants to bring the lamps closer. Another servant unlocked the cabinet and passed a pair of skulls to Cuvier. Fin eased his way to the front as the servants arranged their lamps on the table in front of Cuvier. I would have moved up closer too, responding to the magnetism of our puppet master, but there was another place I needed to find. I moved slowly to the back of the crowd.

  “Two elephant skulls,” Cuvier began. “This one an Indian elephant from Ceylon”—he lifted it high into the air, pausing for effect—“this one African, from the Cape of Good Hope. Both elephants, yes. But are they the same species? This question of species is a puzzle that has challenged naturalists for many years.”

  Cuvier looked up to find the face of Brugmans in the crowd. Securing the ambassador’s gaze, he continued, “M. Brugmans will know that these two elephant skulls once belonged in the cabinet of the stadtholder, the father of the present king of the Netherlands. It was one of the greatest natural-history collections the world has ever seen. M. Brugmans will know that when the French and the Dutch made peace at the Treaty of The Hague in 1796, the great stadtholder conferred these beautiful and important objects upon the French people for the enlightenment of the world.” Cuvier stopped again, seeking Brugmans’s acknowledgment. But the ambassador was giving nothing away. No nod of the head or slight bow. In this ambassadorial minuet, Brugmans was refusing to dance.

  Cuvier, undoubtedly irritated, flushed. He was not used to such resistance. He raised himself to his full height, pointedly moved his gaze away from Brugmans, and went on—his speech a rhetorical series of carefully honed phrases and well-chosen words. Confer. Gift. Alliance. I could hear where Cuvier was taking this and I admired the audacity of it. This was not a competition, he was implying, not a battle for ownership; it was an alliance. Enlightenment must transcend national borders. It was all so beautifully understated.

  “Until the stadtholder’s cabinet came to Paris,” he continued, “the world had been of the opinion that the African and Asian elephants were of different species, one wild, the other domesticated. They looked different; they behaved differently. But it was the arrival of these two skulls from the Dutch collection that changed everything. Here in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy we knew that only the bones would give us the answer. We studied the teeth. Look at the teeth—see.”

  Two aide-naturalistes
held aloft large and intricate drawings of the patterns on the teeth of the two elephant skulls.

  “The markings on the Indian elephant teeth here,” Cuvier said, taking a stick to point at the drawings, “are like festooned ribbons. The African elephant’s teeth here have diamond-shaped markings. There are absolute differences.

  “Until now naturalists looked only at the outside of animals, at their skin, behavior and shape. Instead we anatomists look inside the animals to the structures beneath the skin; we use our eyes, our microscopes, and the skill of the scalpel; we look at the shapes of bones and teeth. And now, at last, after thousands of years, nature is yielding up her secrets.”

  There was a murmur of approval from the crowd and more applause. “She tells us that these are indeed different species.”

  “Now look at this.” A servant placed a third skull on the table. Cuvier reached for it and held it up high for the crowd. The gesture, repeated for a second time, brought to mind images of the Terror—the men of the guillotine lifting severed heads to whip up the crowd.

  “Large numbers of these strange skulls,” he continued, “have been dug out of the ground in the far northern parts of the Old World and the New World. If you found this skull in a mine in Siberia or Germany or Canada, you might think it an elephant skull. But how can elephants live in the cold, in the Siberian wastelands, you may ask? Yes, it is a riddle. Another of nature’s riddles. Ignorant people tell fantastic stories about these creatures. In Siberia people say these animals were elephants that lived underground like moles; others say that the bones were swept there by great tidal waves. But here in France, we do not tell fantastic stories. We are not speculators or poets or storytellers. We are men of science. We look at facts. We perform experiments. We learn to read the bones.”

  An aide-natumliste held up two new drawings into the air.

  “Yes, the bones have the answer, ladies and gentlemen. If we look closely at the teeth and the jaw under a microscope, we can see that this animal wasn’t an elephant at all. See—the shape of the jaw here is curved. The jaw of these two latter-day elephants is not. This creature is completely different from the elephant. It is not the ancestor of our modern elephant, so we can put away our childish stories and our superstitions, our castles in the air. We can say, without hesitation, that nature makes no leaps. There is no bridge”—he lifted the two skulls again—“no bridge between this creature and this, between the past and the present.