Hottentot Venus (28 page)

—If the princess is amazed at your deformity, he said, Science, I must say, is confounded.

There was cruelty and irony in his voice but nevertheless I allowed Sarah to follow him towards a group of people. I vowed to ask him later about my unanswered letter of months ago. The orchestra struck up, and for a moment, the Venus thought everyone in the world loved her. Cuvier escorted the Venus to her hosts, the prince and princess. I could not believe my luck! Now he could claim he had unearthed the body of the Hottentot, like one of his fossils, quite by accident.

—Here is, Madame, my Venus Hottentot, he repeated dozens of times as he greeted his friends in the crowd as if it were one of his famous “Cuvier Saturdays.” Sarah I could see, was happy. I had complained to her about the scientist who had refused to examine her before her exhibition opened in Paris and whom I had never heard from since. I wondered vaguely what would be the outcome of this unexpected encounter.

But Cuvier escorted her from one group of people to another, from famous writers to fellow scientists to a bouquet of magnificently dressed matrons busily fanning themselves.

—The portraits of Sarah Baartman, said Stendhal, who was standing next to Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, have invaded all of France. They have an exactitude, which is an antidote to the exaggerations of the English caricatures.

—I have seen the vaudeville play
The Hottentot Venus,
which is quite amusing.

—What can we do now that the English have taken all our African colonies?

—Allow me, Madame, to draw your portrait, requested Léon de Wailly, a painter for the court.

—Is there a difference between a Hottentot and a Bushman, Chevalier Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire? asked the Vicomte François René de Chateaubriand. You with your studies of monsters? Which is the most savage?

—Etienne’s been searching for the missing link. Is this it, Etienne?

Several ladies, themselves in transparent dresses, approached the Venus and struck her with their fans. Others peered through the gossamer dress, their eager eyes searching.

—I have long had a passion for teratology, said Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire to Stendhal, that is, the study of monsters. I have actually induced the birth of abnormal chicks by manipulating the embryos in the shell . . . Notice that the Venus has the beginnings of a snout that’s larger than that of the red orangutan that inhabits Madagascar . . . Notice the prodigious size of her hips and buttocks, protrusions that inspire comparison to the female species of the maimon and mandrill monkeys. This pathological condition is called steatopygia, a term I derived from the Latin roots for fat and buttocks but not in use outside of scientific circles . . .

A small group of ladies gathered around Sarah, begging her to remove her mask.

—Oh no, dear, said one, you’re pregnant. Do you want to give birth to a Hottentot baby?!

—Oh, she must be too ugly to look upon in her entirety.

—You haven’t seen the vaudeville play about her?

—But you don’t actually
see
her, injected a voice.

Sarah turned, startled that her reflection, with its feathers, pearls and glass beads, repeated itself in the cut-glass mirrors a thousand times. The banqueting black curves of her buttocks reflected over and over and over again into infinity. The conglomeration of dark-skinned Venuses invaded the pristine gilt-and-white-framed glass as if they had shattered them with cannon, dissolving the image into a regiment of effigies.

—What is it? screamed Madame Destutt de Tracy.

Suddenly, as if an alarm had been sounded, a whole group of ladies stampeded to the back of the salon where the orchestra played, pushing and shoving each other and hiding themselves behind the salon drapes. Sarah looked startled, caught unawares. The violence of the women’s reaction surprised her. Their panic induced a reverie that made her seem to sink downwards before my very eyes. Her head fell onto her breast, her arms hung slackly, her eyes filled with tears. It was as if she had been knocked unconscious by the blow of this final humiliation.

—Now, now, ladies, cooed the princess, Madame de C. She is only a prodigy and a freak, not a spotted leopard! She can’t hurt you, can she, Baron?

—Absolutely not! She’s to entertain us with a recitation . . . Madame Destutt de Tracy and her friends opened a path for the Venus as she made her way to where the orchestra sat.

—Je suis ici pour chanter pour vous,
began poor Sarah.

She began to sing in English “The Ballad of Dame Hottentot.” Her voice quivered but the notes were high and clear.

Have you gone to London
And seen the sights of the City?
One can see the most famous of women
In Piccadilly she lives
In a splendid mansion
On which you can read these words
Written in letters of gold
“The Hottentot Venus.”
If you ask her why she lives there
And what makes her famous,
They will tell you she has a bottom
As large as a stove
That’s why the Gentlemen
Push and shove to see
The admirable Hottentot.

—How grotesque! How extraordinary. How disgusting. How quaint. How interesting. How pathetic. How clever of the princess. How ridiculous of the princess. How filthy. How stupid. A freak of nature. A savage. A gorilla. I don’t understand English. It’s English? No. African? No. Hottentot! Impossible, Hottentots don’t have a language!

Sarah’s plaintive wail pierced the frivolous babble of the ballroom and shocked it into silence. Tears streamed down Sarah’s face under the lace mask as if they had spouted from some unseen fountain far away. Finally, there was scattered applause. It came from Stendhal, Cuvier and Arago. The baron, I noticed, was mesmerized by the Venus. It seemed to me his fascination went beyond simple scientific curiosity; a mere desire to possess the means of solving a mysterious equation: Was she real? And if so, was she human? Did she have a soul? And if so, where did she stand in the great Chain of Being? I could see the baron doing the calculations in his head, almost fainting with desire. What, I thought, did this babbling stupid assembly know about real phenomena? About the deep dark revolution of catastrophes? Here was a true scientific gold mine and people laughed or fled. Sarah’s eyes behind the mask and the baron’s held one another’s gaze for a moment in mutual incomprehension. Cuvier seemed at a loss for words. Did he think it was cruel what he had witnessed? Or, as I suspected, had there grown in him a kind of primordial fascination beyond the social or the theatrical for the Venus? This man who classified and catalogued all living things . . . I was beginning to wonder how this encounter was going to turn out when one of the many journalists reporting on the party approached the baron. I overheard his conversation with the man I knew only as Pierre.

—Imagine, said the reporter, that this Hottentot we’re laughing at is a French girl, a young white female who, having gone to the Midi for the sea air, has been kidnapped by a band of Berber pirates and taken to a stronghold somewhere in Africa. From there, she passes through the hands of an Arab who transports her over Mount Atlas and conducts her to Timbuktu, where he exhibits her to the natives as the Parisian Venus . . . She sobs, she cries, she calls in vain to return to her beloved country. And she’ll die far from the object of all her affections . . . This is the Hottentot Venus’s fate, sir . . .

—Baron Cuvier.

—I know who you are, Doctor. Pierre Songe, reporter for the
Journal
des Dames et des Modes.
I was reporting only on the princess’s ball, but now I have another story to write. The Venus’s story. Care to comment, Baron? Personally I am appalled and moved by this pitiful spectacle. What about you? Like freak shows?

The baron studied the journalist in complete puzzlement. What, he asked, did white females, kidnapped or not, have to do with the Hottentot Venus? What did the white race have to do with Africans? They were two separate and distinct species.

—My problem is to establish the scientific relationship between them, not to contemplate white girls . . .

The baron turned away. I was sure he didn’t want to talk to the newspapers. He didn’t want to express an opinion. He just wanted to retire to his laboratory to digest what he had just witnessed: the wondrous discovery of the Hottentot Venus. I came up behind the snubbed reporter.

—I know who you are too, said the man. You are this creature’s keeper, Sieur Réaux. Where did you find her? How long have you had her? How old is she? What does she eat? Is she really a genuine Hottentot?

—Would you like to talk to her? Alone?

—Are you serious?

—I will allow you to escort her home in a hired cab where you can ask her anything you like if you promise an article in tomorrow’s
Journal des
Dames et des Modes.

—Tomorrow? Give me a day to write it.

—You can stay up all night and write it.

—Agreed.

The journalist escorted Sarah home in his carriage, and in doing so got his exclusive story. He published it the next day in an article everyone in the Cour des Fontaines would read. The Venus, in learning to read and to write, had also learned to lie. The life story she told the sympathetic reporter had little to do with what had truly happened to the real Sarah Baartman. Nevertheless, Sarah’s life had made the morning newspapers on page two. She was truly a celebrity. It changed the way the Venus was perceived by the Cour des Fontaines. La Belle Limonadière took Sarah under her wing, William the Will, Cock and Penis offered her love and affection. Mickey Foucault offered her a loan to go back to Africa. The vaudeville theater sent her free tickets to their play. The chocolatier sent her a huge box of chocolates named after her. The florist delivered a bouquet of African orchids named after her. The patrons of the Thousand Columns all rose as she entered, and gave her a round of applause. Several clients bought her gin. A committee of acrobats, clowns and dwarfs petitioned me to reduce her hours of work so she could get more sleep. Alice vowed to wean Sarah from the bottle and from her unreasonable fear of me and her unreasonable fear of leaving me. She knew if she was to save Sarah’s life, she might have to kill me or have me killed. I contemplated that thought calmly. And certainly the thought gave neither me nor, I wager, her any sleepless nights. But I noticed that Sarah was never the same after that. Her melancholy took on a morbid cast and her drinking increased even more. But all in all, her appearance at Madame de C’s ball had the consequences I had been hoping for.

The Baron Cuvier finally answered my letter of six months before. He respectfully requested my permission to examine and sketch the Hottentot Venus for a period of three days at the end of March at the Museum of Natural History. The baron then wrote an accompanying letter to Inspector Boncheseiche, chief of the first section of the Paris police, and sent a copy to me.

Monsieur,

We would like to profit from the circumstances that the presence in Paris
of a Hottentot female offers us in order to convey with more precision than
was possible up to now the distinctive characteristics of this curious race.
We will have her drawn and engraved. We have for this reason contacted
the master of this woman presented to the public under the name of the
Hottentot Venus. He has pointed out certain constraints to our wishes due
to obligations contracted with your administration, in that Sieur Réaux
needs your authorization in order to conduct his Hottentot across the
Seine to the King’s Botanical Gardens. We ask you to have the goodness to
bestow it.

Your obedient Servant,
Baron Georges Cuvier

—I don’t want to go, said Sarah, I’m afraid. I don’t want to pose naked.

—You will go, I order you to, I said. I was jubilant.

—I don’t have to obey you. I’m a free woman.

—Oh really?

—Yes. And I won’t take off my clothes.

—You stupid cow. The contract I won from Dunlop was for six years. There is still a year and three months to go.

—It doesn’t matter. Alice and me, we’re leaving.

I eyed Sarah, my nostrils flaring. I had had all that I could stand of Miss Baartman.

—I could sell your contract to a number of people, Sarah, several impresarios are anxious to exploit you: circuses, vaudeville, the anatomists . . . Madame de C’s salon was good publicity, so was Songe’s article. The scientific world is not so bad—and it’s certainly better than the crazy house, the jailhouse, the poorhouse or the whorehouse, I repeated. Except these doctors and scientists and so-called intelligentsia are worse cannibals than circus owners or impresarios. True, we do it for money; but they talk only about contributing to knowledge, scientific progress. Those cheap bastards only want their theories, their experiments, their decorations and academies, their trophies and stipends and publications. Yet we are more honest. The entire world is a voyeur, and that includes our “Napoleon of Intelligence!”

—We’re still leaving this time, pouted Sarah stubbornly.

—You
think
you’re leaving, Sarah, but you aren’t going nowhere. Not only did I win Dunlop’s contract, but I bought
you
as his wife. In England, a man can do that, didn’t you know? In Halifax, a man can sell his wife if he has a good reason—like bankruptcy or debt. It’s perfectly legal, an ancient English custom known as wife sale.

—What! exploded Alice.

—Wife sale is illegal and a crime, she shouted from the doorway. You could never make it stick! Besides, Dunlop is a bloody bigamist.

—Try me, I said. And you’ll both end up in a whorehouse. This contract gives me, as her husband, complete control of all her worldly goods
. . . That which the husband hath is his own. That which the wife hath
is the husband’s. She belongs to me as wife and I am her husband. Only incidentally does Sarah have a contract with me as impresario. In court Sarah is nothing but my appendage. I am tutor, guardian, owner, treasurer and head of household, protector and moral authority. Until death, girl.