The Coral Thief (33 page)
Authors: Rebecca Stott
Hearing those stories about Lucienne was like turning the pages of a book, but I couldn’t fit them together into anything that looked like a life with a trajectory, an arc, a beginning, a middle, and an end. I imagined her in the desert in white robes and then again in a derelict house among books, or with a parrot, standing in a queue at the gates of the Jardin.
“I hope Napoleon remembered to take my map,” Saint-Vincent said as he began to fall asleep. “I expect you didn’t know that I drew the very first map of Saint Helena. Yes. It’s true.
Absolument
.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“My crew docked there en route back from Mauritius thirteen years ago. I collected butterflies too so I presented Napoleon with my map and the best butterfly in my collection when I got back to Paris.”
“What was it like?” I saw a bare rock rising out of endless ocean.
“The butterfly? Spectacular. Blue and white with piebald markings—”
“The island.”
“Oh. The island. Forty-seven square miles of paradise: samphire, tea plants, gumwoods, redwoods, she-cabbage trees, and some of the most beautiful ferns I’ve ever seen up on the ridges. Not such a bad place to be imprisoned.”
N OCTOBER
1815,
the Emperor’s captors provided lodgings for him in a marquee adjoining the Balcombes’ ballroom. Soon Betsy Balcombe was bringing tea to the Emperor every morning in the shady grove of vines where he liked to work. He would only stay at the Briars for three months, until the paint had dried on the walls of his new prison, Longwood
.
In the Briars’ garden the Emperor continued to assemble the story of his life, dictating each account of battle or victory to each member of his household in turn, producing the great flow of words that would make him a legend. The Emperor was surprised by the poignancy of some of his memories. A dog came to embody all his feelings about war. “In the deep solitude of a moonlit night,” he told Las Cases, “that dog came out from underneath the clothes of a dead soldier. It rushed at us and then returned to its shelter, howling with pain. It licked its master’s face and then rushed at us in turn. It was asking for help and seeking revenge at the same time. Nothing,” he said, “has ever made such an impression on me on any of my battlefields.”
Betsy, who would leave Saint Helena for England with her mother a few years later in the wake of allegations that her father had been smuggling Napoleon’s letters off the island, spent the rest of her life talking about her conversations with the Emperor of France, until she could no longer remember where the edges of dream and reality began
.
The garden at the Briars, then full of white roses and oranges, would not last another ten years. The East India Company, which owned the house, bought it when the Balcombes left the island. They planted mulberry trees there and tried to cultivate silkworms. The enterprise failed, and the garden, where an Emperor had once unwrapped a Sèvres bowl to show a child a hand-painted ibis, reverted to wilderness
.
23
ARLY ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER
18, only a few hours after she had risen from her bed and asked for coffee, fried fish, and a loaf of bread before pulling on the plaster-splashed clothes of a laborer retrieved from the back of a cupboard, Lucienne took me back to the Jardin des Plantes.
“I have an idea,” she said. “I want to see what you think before I tell the others. And don’t tell me I’m not well enough. I am perfectly well. We have twelve days. Twelve days is not long.”
“You’re not still planning on going in?” I said. “That’s madness. I told you—”
“Doucement,”
she said. “Silveira says they’ve doubled the guard at the convent. They’re expecting trouble. They are not going to get it. We play the game, Jagot’s game. Right until the end.”
We were early so we had to wait for the gates of the Jardin to open. Lucienne sat on the edge of the stone parapet on the quai, kicking her boots against the stone impatiently. The clothes were too big for her and made her look thin, but she had color in her cheeks and had
walked so quickly I had hardly been able to keep up with her. I thought of the broken woman with the parrot standing outside the gates of the Jardin in 1793 among the keepers and cages and wondered if Lucienne remembered her too.
The embankment was now empty. It began to rain a little, light autumn rain. The drops made intersecting circles on the water which streaked and stirred the rainbow colors of the oiled surface. A few barges began to make their way downriver; an oarsman or two took coins from a few early passengers. It made me tired to watch these moving things. It was cold.
“Before Napoleon, all of this was just mud,” she said, “open land. On a day like today there’d be only swamp between here and the river, a little quai over there and timber yards and piles all along here and gardens farther down. People walked across the swamp on planks. Everything sank into the mud. Now look at it.”
She was staring out across the water, lost in thought. Both banks of the Seine were clustered with washing women, casting great sails of white into the water, scrubbing fabrics of every kind against the wooden sides of washing boats or against the wide shelves of the wooden structures that jutted out into the water. Fabric, hung on lines to drip and billow in the wind, made white squares and rectangles against the green-brown of the moving water and the ragged platforms of wood. I had tried to draw them, these women with their white scarves tied across their chests and their black dresses and white bonnets, but they moved too fast.
“You were right,” she said.
“Je suis désolée
.”
“About what?” I said.
“About everything. Well, almost everything. Jagot. You were right about Jagot. You are still wrong about species.
Stupide
, if you don’t mind me saying so. Daniel Connor is still blind about species.”
“So you say,” I said, and smiled. “Pig-headed, crow-headed, fish-headed. Whatever you say.”
We looked down over the thin stretch of mud at the platforms on
the river where bargemen stacked wood or hauled coal, and where all that wood, nailed and bolted against the water’s movement, made a fragile, splintered existence, a kind of shantytown.
I thought of the huts I had seen spring up alongside the canals that were being built across the north of England—temporary shacks, like something that had been expelled from some hellish region underground. At night you could see them across the moors, lit up, smoky, loud with drinking and shouting. As a boy I had been fascinated by them, watching from the hill above as the figures of men dug deep into the earth; from time to time they used explosives to blast their way through a rocky hillside. There were fatalities. I had seen men, bloodied and half-alive, carried from the moors into the town. Some had later been buried in the local churchyard.
Here, even in Paris, I thought, in this most stony and solid of cities, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs had once swum. Even now miners were digging out their bones from the quarries of Montmartre and the canal workings of Derbyshire. In the Jardin, where rows of plants made neat squares in the manicured lawns, here too there had been a seabed populated by trilobites and sea squirts and other creatures that I could conjure an image for but not name. Elephantine creatures would have lumbered their way up the hill of Montmartre, where windmills now turned against the skyline.
“You’ve changed the way I see things,” I said. “Everything, the whole world, looks different now. Older. Even more of a miracle than before. I see mammoths everywhere.”
“You must join an expedition,” she said, “like Saint-Vincent did. Get a job as a ship’s naturalist, and then you can sail around the world collecting specimens and taking trips inland, up into the mountains. Then you will start to understand how it all fits together. Go to countries you’ve never even dreamed of: South America, Chile, Australia …”
“Where would you go, if you could go anywhere?” I asked, thinking of Cuvier’s plans to send me to Sumatra, which seemed to me a
land full of exotic princes and palaces buried deep in monsoon-drenched jungles. I couldn’t tell her about Cuvier’s promise. I didn’t want her to know how much I was risking.
“The Keeling Islands,” she said, “halfway between New South Wales and Ceylon. Silveira’s been there. He says there are coral reefs there that are the largest he has ever seen. And New Zealand. And Tahiti and Peru… or to the fossil coral beds on the mountains of Timor.”
Beyond the wooden platforms, the Seine, swelling, rising, and falling, had left the imprints of its own movement on the mud printed like the annotations of music or the marks of wind on sand. There were the prints and scratchings of men and river birds and animals—horses’ hooves and the paw marks of dogs. A boy, in the water up to his waist, appeared to be looking for treasure, filtering river water and mud through an old sieve. He had already amassed a neat pile of driftwood. Later he would tie the wood into bundles and sell them as firewood at the market.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“Lamarck calls it
la marche,”
she said. “He calls it progress. He assumes everything is moving forward, progressing, improving. That process is still a straight line though—even for Lamarck. I don’t see straight lines. I see a net. Nature is a great tangle, like the coral reefs. Like a garden in which everything lives on everything else, some things changing, others staying almost the same. Everything—animals, trees, rocks—made of the same materials.”
“And if the Bible …” I couldn’t finish the sentence. My questions were breaking up; I didn’t know how to frame them. “And if?” I repeated and stopped.
“Look at this rock,” she said, running her finger along the pink-white stone of the embankment wall. “See the madrepores, the circles here and here, and these sea creatures here, mixed in among the shale. Their bodies made the continents, over millions and millions of years. Not God in one sudden sweep of his hand. Napoleon may have built the wall, but sea creatures made the stone.”
“There is no god?”
“That’s not what I said. Who am I to say? Who are any of us to say?”