The Coral Thief (37 page)

“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.

“M. Brugmans, how are we to understand our future if we do not know our past? We need important collections of specimens for the anatomists to decipher; they are our libraries; they are books to be read. Students travel to Paris from all over the world; we teach them to read the language of bones. Here in this museum we have the Alexandria of natural history. It must not be broken up. The world will lose out. We will all lose out.

“With the combined wealth of this collection, made as a gift from Holland to France, and the genius of French bone readers, we have a science that is creating a new world. Together the Dutch and the
French are making a new highway into knowledge. Who will dare follow them?”

As the crowd applauded, I maneuvered myself back toward the door frame, checking that the servants were in front of me, checking where the lights were. I stepped through the doorway and headed down the staircase lined with shelves displaying the skulls of horses, stags, and dolphins, then into the hall, where I slipped a few drops of Silveira’s strong opiate from a blue perfume bottle into each of the decanters of expensive Madeira that had been arranged on the table for the guests to drink after the speeches. Then I found the door to the cupboard under the staircase—unlocked, as I knew it would be—and stepped inside.

27

ROUCHED IN THE CUPBOARD
I could now see everything. Through a chink in the door, I watched guests passing through the hall, heard their feet upon the staircase above me and their muffled voices. I saw the museum porter talking to Cuvier, taking instruction, rubbing his eyes; I saw old man Deleuze exchange a remark or two with Fin, who was biting his fingernails, yawning, and looking around for me.