The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  RHRC: You begin with an epigraph from one of Charles Darwin’s notebooks. What does this quote mean to you?

  RS: The quote is from Notebook C, which Darwin kept in 1838 after he’d returned from the Beagle voyage and was gradually working through the stages of his transmutation theory. He wrote: “Once grant that species [of] one genus may pass into each other … & [the] whole fabric totters & falls.” The entry marks a moment when Darwin glimpsed the enormous philosophical consequences of what he was working out. He saw that his species theory would threaten the religious and social premises of so much orthodox thinking and would perhaps even threaten the social fabric. Of course that is what Daniel comes to see too through Lucienne Bernard and through the other students of Lamarck.

  Some of the passion of The Coral Thief is about fighting to be allowed to think for yourself, about the right to ask questions. Lucienne is not against religion (she might even have some remnants of religious belief in her) but she wants to live in a world in which any question can be asked.

  RHRC: Two very strong scientific personalities figure into the narrative of The Coral Thief—George Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Who were they and what impact did they have on science of the time?

  RS: Cuvier and Lamarck were both famous all over Europe. Cuvier was a comparative anatomist with a great deal of power in Paris—he ran the Jardin des Plantes. He was a charismatic lecturer and a brilliant thinker who was developing comparative anatomy in extraordinary ways, but he was also passionately opposed to speculative science in general and to evolutionary ideas in particular.

  Lamarck was a transmutationist (an early exponent of evolution) and older than Cuvier. He was a professor of invertebrates at the Jardin des Plantes who had written a number of important books on the taxonomy and classification of shells, but since the turn of the nineteenth century he had been working on evolutionary ideas. As a result, he had become associated with radical atheistic ideas, though of course, like Darwin later, he didn’t really write about religion. He was more interested in the origin of the earth and in finding mechanisms to explain the transmutation of species.

  Cuvier’s argument with Lamarck was not a religious one; it was just that he thought Lamarck’s ideas were wrong scientifically and that there was no proof for evolution; it was at best a ridiculous castle in the air.

  When Lamarck died he was buried in a pauper’s grave. Later his bones were dug up and scattered in the catacombs under Paris; Cuvier, on the other hand, was given a large tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery. That was no accident of history.

  RHRC: You have noted that the character of police chief Henri Jagot is modeled on Eugéne-François Vidocq. Who was he? Were the police during this time quite as sinister as your character?

  RS: Vidocq is famous—versions of him appear in several nineteenth-century novels such as Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Balzac’s Père Goriot. He was a notorious thief who had been recruited by the authorities in Paris to run their Bureau de la Sûreté. It was a brilliant choice because, of course, Vidocq understood how criminals worked and he also knew most of them. He was ambitious, ruthless, and highly successful. He is generally held to be the first police agent in France and, because he later set up his own private detective agency, historians credit him as being the first detective. He was also considered by most biographers to have been corrupt. But Vidocq was only one of many agents in Paris, which had been full of agents since the Revolution. Everyone was spying on everyone else, and the intellectuals in Paris were particularly closely watched. There’s a brilliant essay by the historian Robert Darnton called “A Police Inspector Sorts His Files” that describes the working practices of one police agent in Paris during the Revolution whose job it was to watch a number of intellectuals. Darnton argues that it was in this atmosphere of constant surveillance that the concept of the intellectual was born. If Paris is an enormous web of intrigues and surveillance in 1815, which is what I was trying to describe, Vidocq/Jagot is the spider sitting at the center of it. He was also yet another collector (most of my main characters are collectors): He was cataloging criminals while Cuvier was cataloging bones and fossils.

  RHRC: What about collecting? Why is that so important to the novel?

  RS: In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was highly fashionable for aristocrats to have collections in their homes. People would specialize in collecting coins or shells or paintings or natural history or botanical specimens or snuffboxes, or perhaps they’d have a variety of all of these things. Cabinetmakers made a fine living building exquisitely carved shelves and display cabinets for these objects. Agents traveled all over the world to procure rare and beautiful objects for the duchesses and counts who employed them. Those natural history collections were the predecessors of the modern museum. For Lucienne Bernard, I think, reassembling that coral collection of hers, started by her grandmother, was a way of countering the tragic fracturing of her history and her family in the Revolution, shoring up something against the ruins of all that tragedy, trying to make a whole out of the broken parts. And that is something a novelist does too, I think, assembling—in my case, historical—objects, some of them “stolen,” to make a whole.

  RHRC: Much of the novel’s action takes place in Paris’s fascinating underworld. How did you research what seems to be a long-lost world?

  RS: I read journals, diaries, old prints, books, guidebooks, letters— hundreds of them. I’m lucky to live five minutes away from one of the greatest copyright libraries in the world, Cambridge University Library, and I often work in the Rare Books Room. I found an 1815 guidebook to Paris that tells you where to get hats mended, where to buy the best cut flowers or a whole pig, how to hire a valet or a carriage, as well as a review of all the theaters and marionette shows and wax museums. It made Paris of 1815 so immediate and vivid. At one point I had memorized so much that I felt I could walk down the present Rue Vivienne, for instance, and describe all the long-gone shops on either side. Then I found a rare book that mapped all the quarry tunnels and listed all their entryways. So pretty soon I could map Paris overground onto Paris underground. And there really were people living and working down there in the tunnels— an illegal mint, and Knights Templar tunnels. Actually, going to modern Paris only helped me picture the Paris of 1815 up to a point. Modern Paris has been utterly remade and the labyrinthine streets I wanted to see were largely destroyed in Haussmann’s redesign of Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century. So walking through Marrakesh in Morocco and some small towns in Jordan was more useful to me as a way of imagining how parts of Paris might have been then: food being cooked in the streets, smoke, the smells of coffee, lemons, fish, and the people: picaros, street peddlers, street entertainers, prostitutes. Another big problem was light—there was too much of it in Paris. There seems to be almost nowhere in modern Paris where you can walk the streets in darkness. But you can in Marrakesh.

  RHRC: For all of the laymen out there, what is the evolutionary significance of coral?

  RS: Coral pieces were beautiful and collectible objects in their own right, but they were also tools for the philosophers—they were clocks, ways of measuring time and of thinking about animal, plant, and mineral definitions. Sea creatures like corals and sponges were important to natural philosophers at this time because they seemed to sit on the borderline between what was defined as a plant and what was defined as an animal. They also reproduced in strange ways. Corals were particularly difficult to classify—they looked like trees; they had flowers. But when they were taken out of the sea, they went hard like rock. It wasn’t until people started to look at them closely that they realized they were actually animals—they had free-swimming larvae and they digested. Corals were also important in terms of time. Natural philosophers like my character Lucienne Bernard (and Charles Darwin, later) worked out that certain islands and reef systems had been built by corals growing on top of one another over a period of thousands of years. So if you knew how quickly a coral reef grew and
if you could measure or estimate the depth of a coral reef, you could prove that the earth was much, much older than the church leaders claimed. So corals are silent, but they’re also eloquent.

  RHRC: Your character Lucienne Bernard is a strong, well-educated woman. Were talented women active in science during this time period—or were they relegated to the sidelines?

  RS: They were both—active and relegated to the sidelines, visible and invisible. Women were often the assistants to fathers, brothers, husbands, botanical or anatomical illustrators, managers of what we would now call laboratories. They ran salons and organized conversaziones; they did calculations; they rewrote or edited scientific manuscripts; they translated; they labeled. But they were rarely credited. Sophie Duvaucel and Clementine Cuvier, Cuvier’s two daughters, were very important to him and to his work. Lamarck also had daughters who kept everything going and managed his work. No doubt these women had conversations with their fathers about the philosophical consequences of their work. And in the literary world of Paris, too, there were a number of women who were rocking the boat, living in unusual ways, sometimes even cross-dressing—later George Sand, the female novelist (Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin), went around Europe dressed as a man with her lover, Chopin.

  RHRC: Your two novels—first the national bestseller Ghostwalk and now The Coral Thief—have featured great scientists in history (first Sir Isaac Newton, now Darwin—even though he was only six when much of the novel takes place!). What is it about scientific discoveries and the (now) larger-than-life men who “made” them that inspires you to write fiction?

  RS: I guess because once we turn so many great scientists into icons and their life stories into myths, lots of other important people disappear into their shadows. But no scientist or philosopher exists in isolation. Newton didn’t. As much as he might have wanted to keep himself away from the world and his head down, he actually depended on so many other invisible people. He was always connected up. But those people who brought him manuscripts and worked behind the scenes become more invisible the more we tell ourselves that geniuses like Newton were lone geniuses, and almost supernatural. Darwin knew he wasn’t a lone genius. He knew how dependent he was on all the other little people who had the nerve to go into print about evolution before him. He gave them credit in a preface he wrote to On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. So Lucienne Bernard and her band of heretic thieves stand for all the invisible people behind the scenes who did the incremental work that, bit by bit, made evolutionary ways of looking at life acceptable. The corals are like that too—the invisible architects of reefs, working away just under the waterline.

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. The Coral Thief opens with Daniel Connor’s reflection that when he first traveled to Paris at the age of twenty-one, he “still believed time traveled in straight lines.” What do you think he means? How does Daniel’s understanding of time change over the course of the book? Did the book make you think about time differently?

  2. The story of Napoleon’s journey to St. Helena is told in short chapters interspersed throughout the book. What do you think is the purpose of those chapters?

  3. Throughout the novel we watch characters shift their identities, take on one role, drop another, change genders, put on disguises. Discuss the ways in which boundaries are crossed in the novel, and how the theme of shifting identities functions in it. How does Daniel’s sense of who he is in the novel change?

  4. During his first encounter with Lucienne Bernard, Daniel tells her that “we will soon discover the key to all of nature’s laws. Soon we will know God’s purpose and design”. Lucienne interrupts him and says, “Are God and Nature the same thing, or different? … I wonder if they argue sometimes, Nature and God—it seems to me that they want different things”. How do nature and God conflict with each other in the novel? Do you agree with Lucienne that they “want different things”?

  5. Lucienne Bernard is not only a woman in a male-dominated field, but she’s also tall, talks with a deep voice, and sometimes dresses in men’s clothes. Were you surprised to see a strong female character in a novel that takes place in the early nineteenth century? Historically, what might have been the reasons why certain women chose to pass as men?

  6. The plot of The Coral Thief centers around theft, but many of the objects being stolen are spoils from war. How does the novel complicate conventional notions of what constitutes theft and ownership?

  7. When Lucienne first meets Daniel, she says to him, “Daniel into the lion’s den”. Later, Daniel muses on his similarities to the biblical Daniel: “that Daniel was the boy who remained steadfast, true to his principles, even among those seductive pagans”. Compare Daniel Connor to the biblical Daniel, who risks his life for his beliefs while in exile.

  8. As Daniel becomes swept up in Finn’s heady Parisian lifestyle, he starts staying up all night and sleeping during the day. Daniel contrasts his reckless, dreamlike nocturnal state with “the world of the Jardin des Plantes, with its taxonomies and classifications and labels”. What importance do order and hierarchies hold for Daniel? How has his conception of the world changed by the end of the novel?

  9. In The Coral Thief, transformism is considered not just a scientific movement but also a political one. Compare Lamarck’s theories with Cuvier’s. What are the differences between the two theories and their political ramifications?

  10. There are animals in almost every scene in the novel—from termites to corals to ostriches, elephants, and parrots. Why do you think Stott populates her story with so many animals? What role do they play in relation to the unraveling human histories the novel describes?

  11. Who or what is “transformed” in the novel?

  12. At the heart of the novel is a relationship between a young man and an older woman. What is the significance of this to the ideas and plot of the novel? How would the story have read without such an age gap between the principal characters?

  13. The plot is based on a series of journeys—literal, intellectual, emotional—all of which move Daniel beyond the familiar. As he now reflects on those events, what has he learned?

  14. From rural Derbyshire to the glittering Parisian metropolis, from Paris to St. Helena, what is the significance of place in the novel?

  REBECCA STOTT is a professor of English literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. She is the author of the novel Ghostwalk and a biography, Darwin and the Barnacle, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio. She lives in Cambridge, England.

  ONE

  Over the last two years, as I have tried to tease out the truths from the untruths in that series of events that seeped out through Elizabeth’s death, like lava moving upwards and outwards through salt water from a tear in the seabed, I have had to be you several times, Cameron Brown, in order to claw myself towards some kind of coherence. Sometimes it was—is—easy to imagine the world through your eyes, terribly possible to imagine walking through the garden that afternoon in those moments before you found your mother’s body in the river. After all, for a long time, all that time we were lovers, it was difficult to tell where your skin ended and mine began. That was part of the trouble for Lydia Brooke and Cameron Brown. Lack of distance became—imperceptibly—a violent entanglement.

  So this is for you, Cameron, and yes, it is also for me, Lydia Brooke, because perhaps, in putting all these pieces together properly, I will be able to step out from your skin and back into mine.

  Alongside Elizabeth’s body floating in red in the river, there are other places where this story needs to start, places I can see now but wouldn’t have seen then, other beginnings which were all connected. Another death, one that took place around midnight on the 5th of January 1665. That night, Richard Greswold, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, had opened a door onto a dark, unlit landing above a staircase in Trinity. A draught caught the flame from the lamp in his hand, twisting and elongating the shadows arou
nd him. As a thin stream of blood began to trickle from one, then both of his nostrils, he raised the back of his hand and wiped it across his cheek, smearing the blood into streaks, and fell forward, very slowly, into air, through the palest of moon shadows cast through casement windows. He fell heavily, his body twisting and beating against the steps and walls. The lamp fell too and bounced, making a metallic counterpoint to the thuds of flesh on wood. By morning the blood from the wound on Richard Greswold’s head had run through and across the uneven cracks of the stone flagging on which he died, making a brown map like the waterways across the Fens to the north, the college porter said, prying a key—the key to the garden—from the dead man’s clenched fist. Encrusted blood, as thick as fen mud.

  Greswold’s death was bound up with Elizabeth’s. She came to know that before she died, but we didn’t. Two Cambridge deaths, separated by three centuries, but inseparable, shadowing each other. Richard Greswold. Elizabeth Vogelsang.

  Elizabeth Vogelsang drowned in September 2002, the first of three deaths that would become the subject of a police investigation four months later. The police took a ragged testimony from me, which I gave in answer to the questions they asked and which were recorded on tape in a windowless room in the basement of the Parkside Police Station by a Detective Sergeant Cuff on the 16th of January 2003.

  “All the interview rooms are occupied this morning, Dr. Brooke,” he said, struggling to find the right key as I followed him down grey corridors. “So we’ll have to use the central investigation room. I’m afraid it’s not ideal, but it is at least empty this morning. There’s a staff training morning—health and safety. We have about an hour. This is not a formal interview, you understand. We’ll do that later. Just a chat.”