The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  Lamarck’s bones are scattered in the catacombs under Paris. Burdened with debt, his devoted daughters buried him in a pauper’s grave in the Montparnasse cemetery in 1829. Later, when they closed down that cemetery under new public-health laws, his bones were dug up and scattered into the miles of patterned bones in the catacombs. It’s poignant, when you think about how many bones and shells Lamarck catalogued and labeled so carefully when his sight was good, that at the end no one wrote a label or carved a tombstone for him.

  In 1832, Cuvier was buried in a marble tomb in the cemetery at Père Lachaise, a tomb he shared with his daughter Clémentine, who had died four years earlier from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two, on the eve of her wedding. That same day Sophie Duvaucel, devastated at the toll her sister’s death had taken on her stepfather’s health, broke off her engagement to the young English lawyer Sutton Sharpe, in order to assist her stepfather with the fish volume of Le Règne animal. She had few regrets about those years, she told her husband when she finally married a widower, Admiral Ducrest de Villeneuve, in 1834, adopting his three children. My work at the Jardin des Plantes, she said, was the making of me.

  Napoleon died from a stomach tumor on Saint Helena in 1821. There had been escape plots, but it was said that the Emperor had refused to be a part of any of them. He knew there was no way off the island, and even if there had been, beyond it, even in America, there was nowhere to hide. He was buried in the valley of the willows in an unmarked tomb.

  And me? Well, things could never have stayed the same. I had taken a step into the undergrowth, where branchings and forkings chanced along a different axis, and I had begun to see the sublime contingency that is at the root of all things. I had found a set of different answers there.

  I stayed in Paris through the rest of the winter of 1815, working alongside Sophie Duvaucel as a much valued and depended-upon secretary to the baron. I ran errands, translated books, wrote letters, took dictation, mounted and arranged specimens, and I began a new notebook. Sophie said I had changed. She always said it was the accident in the quarries, the shock of it. But I knew that it was the disappearance of the heretics from Paris; they disappeared with the shadows as the gaslights lit up more and more streets, leaving an emptiness there. By the end of the winter, the Jardin des Plantes had become the Jardin du Roi again, and once Cuvier had written his obituary for Lamarck, publicly mocking him, calling him a poet, a builder of castles in the air, a romancer, there was not much left in the Jardin that Lucienne Bernard might have fought for, except Geoffroy, who emerged from his darkened rooms in 1818 with a book called Philosophical Anatomy, which caused a stir. When Fin, who had married Céleste and was making a good living for himself in London as a trainee surgeon, sent me notice of a position at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, I took it. I was ready to leave Paris.

  The London I returned to, the London of West Smithfield, and the anatomy students and young doctors of Saint Barts, was full of radical materialist ideas because so many of the students I worked alongside had also studied in Paris just as I had. Those men understood transmutation, and like Ramon and Evangelista and Céleste, they translated it into reformist politics. In the taverns and the back rooms of student lodgings around Smithfield and in the pages of the new radical medical journals, they called for the appropriation of church property, for working-class suffrage, universal education, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the end of privilege. It was a dangerous time. Young London doctors talked of Geoffroy and Lamarck not as heretics but as revolutionaries, as prophets of democracy and political enlightenment.

  If I turned away from philosophical and political questions, it was not because they stopped being important to me but because I wanted to practice medicine. I wanted to contribute to the great reforms that were coming. And for the last forty years that is what I have done; through the reform bills and the revolutions in Europe, the coming of the gaslights and the railways and the camera and the Great Expedition, I have done my part to challenge the old orthodoxies buried deep in the parlors and church halls of provincial England. These have been small incremental changes, I tell myself, none of them significant in themselves, but they might add up to something meaningful.

  I have a daughter—her name is Beatrice—who would have made a fine doctor. But it is hard to be a woman now. Even more difficult, I remind myself, than it was to be a woman in Paris after the Revolution. Some things improve; others degenerate. Sometimes time goes backward. Women, Beatrice reminds me, have no rights and few opportunities to be of use in the world or to use their natural talents. They are allowed to attend the lectures at the Royal Society but only as the guests of men. I know what Lucienne Bernard would have said about that.

  I still think of her. I imagine that we meet by chance on a railway platform or a crowded street. It is always by chance, and it is always under pressure of time because one of us has to catch a train or because there is a vague sense of danger. Sometimes in these imagined encounters, she asks me if I have found love again. I say yes. Just that. I don’t describe the women I have loved—the actress in London whom I followed to Rome, the heiress, the nurse, the young widow—and I certainly don’t tell her about the brilliant and dark-eyed woman I married who, on first meeting at her father’s house in Derbyshire, offered me the use of her library and showed me the volumes of Cuvier’s La Règne animal, which had just arrived from Paris. She would read them in French, she said. French natural history was so much more interesting.

  I don’t tell my imagined Lucienne about Celia because I don’t think she wants to hear about her. And I don’t tell Celia about Lucienne because it has always seemed too difficult to explain how the first woman I loved was wanted by the French police and disappeared in a roof fall in the Paris quarries. So Lucienne Bernard came to be the secret that the child in the big house always seemed to be searching for. There is some peace in that.

  I still wonder if there will come a day when we will know absolutely, without question, how time began or what happened in those first few seconds. I still think about the direction of time and whether we are right to imagine it as a train moving from one side of a landscape to another. I couldn’t even have imagined trains back then in Paris, or omnibuses. But I did sometimes wonder if time might move in other directions—vertically, for instance, or even backward down that railway track, or along multiple branches of possibility.

  Silveira told Lucienne she should leave philosophical questions alone. Some things were simply unknowable, he said; angels on a pin-head. But Silveira, I want to say to the Portuguese coral trader—if it were possible to speak to him now across the span of fifty years from this study in Derbyshire, if it were possible to cross the geographical gap that separates this house near the slanted church in which I write, to where he is, if he is still alive, which he almost certainly isn’t, in India or Florence or Brazil, prison, warehouse, jeweler’s shop, grave—there’s a book, Silveira, I want to say, that everyone is talking about all across Europe. You can buy it in the shops and on station platforms.

  The author, an English squire, son of a respectable family, works on coral atolls; like Lucienne, he reads corals as if they were books or clocks. He thinks like she did. This book, well, people don’t like it—or at least the bishops don’t like it, but people are reading it everywhere. The author, Charles Darwin, grandson of Erasmus Darwin, builds his argument with the ordinary things, just as she did: not with corals, but with bees and pigeons and earthworms. There is grandeur in this view of things, he writes, reaching for the sublime through the commonplace. She would say that too. She did, didn’t she? I’m sure she did.

  Someone else will get there, she’d said. It’s not about the Napoleons or the Cuviers. The answer lies in the one-eighth of an inch rise of seabed. Knowledge is slow, the slowness of polyps and imperceptibilities, things we can’t see in the dark. The grand dramas, the bizarre, the ordinary, the fantastic, and the commonplace are all tangled together. And time isn’t always a strai
ght line; sometimes it makes a web or a net or a branching tree.

  She had seen Red Sea coral spawn, she said. When the sea reaches the right temperature, when they are ripe, when the moon reaches a certain point, just once a year, down there on the coral reefs, the dark waters explode into white smoke clouds. It’s like fireworks or seed heads opening, thousands and millions of them, released into the water all at once. And when the coral spawn, all the other sea organisms follow. It’s like a trigger. The fishermen say it’s the moon that makes them spawn, she had said, and I said: How can they see the moon? They have no eyes. Perhaps they have other ways of seeing and knowing, she had said. Perhaps we all do. There’s a grandeur in that.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  HIS IS A NOVEL GROUNDED IN FACT. Thousands of young men like Daniel traveled to Paris at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Many of them wrote detailed descriptions of their travels and of their adventures in what was to them an exotic, occupied city. Many of them were transformed. I have invented fictional characters—Daniel Connor, Fin Robertson, Lucienne Bernard, and the thieves—and put them into a real historical situation, a community of scientists and a city that is as accurately rendered as the historical scholarship, journals, prints, drawings, maps, and other historical sources allowed. Likewise, I described the historical characters of Cuvier, Lamarck, Geoffroy, and the men and women of the Jardin des Plantes as faithfully as I was able. Henri Jagot is modeled on François-Eugène Vidocq, a notorious criminal who was appointed to run the Brigade de la Sûreté in 1811 and was one of the first private investigators in Europe. The Jardin des Plantes is still where it always was and is largely unchanged, but the streets of Paris that I describe were replaced in the 1850s by the wider streets designed and built by Georges-Eugène Haussmann for Napoleon III.

  The quarries of Paris continue to be used for subversive activities. In 2004 the Paris police found a thirty-seat cinema in the quarries that had been built by a group called the Perforating Mexicans. It was connected illegally to the state power company’s cables, and pipes drew water from the Trocadero gardens above. When Commander Luc Rougerie, the police chief in charge of underground Paris, was asked how many quarry entrances exist today, he replied, “There are those I know and those I don’t.”

  Evolution was not discovered by Charles Darwin in 1859. Though Darwin brilliantly codiscovered the mechanism of evolution, natural selection, in 1859, evolution—the belief that all living things have evolved in some way from other living organisms and that nature is in flux, not fixed—is an idea that had been around in some form or other since Aristotle. Darwin knew this and paid homage to his intellectual predecessors in On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Those predecessors—scattered across the world, some isolated, others in touch with like-minded natural philosophers—believed that species were mutable, that man had evolved from earlier, simpler, aquatic filaments, and that Nature was on the move. They were bold thinkers, prepared to challenge the intellectual and religious orthodoxies of their age, and they were often ostracized as heretics and infidels. Many were also migrants perpetually traveling from one university to another in search of other freethinkers, museum collections, and libraries, and answers to the natural philosophical questions that bore upon them. The Coral Thief pays homage to those heretics.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  HANKS GO FIRST TO MY READERS—my son, Jacob Morrish, and daughters Hannah Morrish and Kezia Morrish, Susan Sellers, Ricciarda Barbieri, Jan Michael, Giles Foden, and Richard Cook; to the magicians who have edited with such intricate skill: Kirsty Dunseath and Cindy Spiegel; to my agent, Faith Evans, for her kindness, vision, and patience, and to Emma Sweeney, my U.S. agent. To fellow writers and friends, Anna Whitelock, Patricia Fara, and Sara Crangle. To friends Judith Boddy and Richard Ashrowan. To Ed Holberton and Rich Katz, with whom I made a journey that made all the horizons bigger—through Jordan, along the Dead Sea, and into the red sands of the Wadi Rum. To the librarians of Cambridge University Library and to the British Academy who helped to fund some of the research. To Sara Perren and Geoff Wall, who gave me a Paris comparable to Daniel Connor’s Paris in their home in York in 1984, where I came of age in the shadow of Freud, Balzac, and Flaubert; thanks to Jonathon Burt for a museum of locks in Paris and a man-moth; to Steffie Muller for the trapdoor in the Paris street and what came out of it. I am immensely grateful for the distinguished scholarship of the historians of science: Mary Orr, Toby Appel, Ludmilla Jordanova, Martin Rudwick, Emma Spary, Devinda Outram, and Pietro Corsi. Any historical inaccuracies or reinterpretations I have made are entirely my own. Finally, I thank my late father, Roger Stott—his editing skills, enthusiasm, and literary brilliance were sadly missed this time.

  FURTHER READING

  FICTION

  Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862)

  Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (1835)

  Louis Aragon, Holy Week (1961)

  Stendhal, The Red and the Black (1830)

  NONFICTION

  Nina Burleigh, Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt. Harper, 2007.

  Vincent Cronin, Napoleon. HarperCollins, 1990.

  Andrew Hussey, Paris: The Secret History. Penguin, 2007.

  Ludmilla Jordanova, Lamarck. Oxford University Press, 1984.

  Jean-Paul Kauffmann, The Dark Room at Longwood. Harvill, 1999.

  James Morton, The First Detective: The Life and Revolutionary Times of Vidocq: Criminal, Spy and Private Eye. Ebury Press, 2005.

  Derinda Outram, Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science, and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France. Manchester University Press, 1984.

  Simona Pakenham, In the Absence of the Emperor: London-Paris 1814-1815. Cresset Press, 1968.

  Lord Rosebery, Napoleon: The Last Phase. Cosimo, 2008.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Laocoön Engraving from Charles W. Knight, The Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature (1858).

  Jardin des Plantes Map drawn by Joseph Deleuze, Histoire et Description du Museum Royale d’histoire naturelle (Paris, 1823).

  Coral Cabinet Engraving from Vincent Levinus, Wondertoonel de nature (Amsterdam, 1706).

  The White Featherwing’d Moth or Tinea Argentea From Robert Hook, Micrographia c. 1665. Scheme 30, facsimile edition. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Science Heritage Ltd, 1987.

  Chameleon Woodcut from Conrad Gesner, Thierbuch (Zurich, 1563).

  Bosson Cabinet J. B. Courtonne, Designs for the Cabinet of Bonnier de la Mosson, Bibliothèque d’Art et Archeologie, J. Doucet (Paris, 1739).

  The Arrival of the Northumberland at St. Helena From G. W. Melliss, Views of St. Helena; Illustrative of its Scenery and Historical Associations (London, 1857).

  The Pavilion at the Briars From Frederic Masson, Napoleon à Sainte-Hélène (Paris, 1912).

  A CONVERSATION WITH REBECCA STOTT

  Random House Reader’s Circle: The novel takes place soon after the defeat of Napoleon by the British Navy at Waterloo. What was it that drew you to this particular time in French history?

  Rebecca Stott: The year 1815 was a remarkable turning point—a vortex in history. It was twenty years or so after the French Revolution. The French had established a republic and then Napoleon Bonaparte had risen to power, appointing himself initially First Consul, then later Emperor of France. He’d been cock-of-the-roost in Europe for more than ten years, conquering one European country after another. He’d made Paris the center of everything, politically and culturally, and literally transformed the map of Europe. He and his men had plundered hundreds of palaces across the continent, and he’d sent back all his spoils of war to Paris so that, by 1815, the museums, libraries, and galleries in Paris were full to the rafters with paintings, rare books, and unique natural history collections.

  All of that power came crashing to an end when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo; the Allied armies marched into and occupied Paris, turning the city into a vast military encampment. Because Paris had been pretty much closed to foreigners for ten years, cur
iosity brought thousands of English visitors to the city. At the same time, the French émigrés were returning, many of them exiled or on the run. And now that Napoleon had fallen, the rulers of the Italian states, Prussia, and Holland sent ambassadors to Paris to demand their stolen treasures back, so the paintings and statues and collections were on the move again. I wanted to send some characters into that historical vortex to see what it was like.

  RHRC: The book intertwines the story of Daniel Connor, a young English medical student, with Napoleon as he makes his way to exile. Why did you decide to link the two?

  RS: Daniel Connor is a brilliant young medical student—ambitious, hardworking, a little bit self-regarding. For most ambitious young men at this point in history, Napoleon was a hero. He had shown what could be done with sheer nerve and intelligence and brilliance. But of course, for Englishmen, Napoleon was also the enemy, a potential invader. Because the Napoleonic Wars had made Paris inaccessible to foreigners for more than a decade, Daniel’s life abroad couldn’t actually begin until Napoleon had fallen, so all through that summer and autumn while he’s in Paris, falling in love, discovering breathtaking new ways of seeing the world, and coming to understand how old the earth really is, he is rising in his own sky at the same time that Napoleon is falling in his. Threading Napoleon’s story through Daniel’s story was a way of anchoring Daniel to history, a way of indicating how the lives of generations intertwine. It also provided something of an evolutionary way of seeing time, not as a single straight line but as a series of overlapping arcs. Everything, to use Charles Darwin’s phrase, is “netted together.” I wanted to show history as a web of mutually entangled lives.