Hottentot Venus (38 page)

23

Sire,

The moral sciences start beyond this limit: they demonstrate how a particular idea is born from these repeated sensations, and from the comparison of these generalized ideas, a combination of ideas, judgments; and out of these, reason and will . . .

—BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,
Letter to the Emperor Napoleon
on the progress of science since 1789

Little Eland, the English month of December, 1860. Master Tiedeman made his way across the Jardin des Plantes and entered the stone façade of the Museum of Natural History. He had done so every month since my installation as exhibit number 33 nearly forty-five years ago. Master Tiedeman was still handsome, but his red hair now was bone white, his hands shook and his step was stiff and faltering. He was an old, old man. It was a cold winter’s day. His long, wet woolen cloak hung in stiff folds like an Oriental skirt and his walking stick struck the polished wood floors of Salle number 6 like a drum. He always came late to see me to avoid the crowds that came to stare at the collection of stuffed wild animals, trophy heads and mummies. As he approached, he frowned on finding himself not alone. There was another tall figure standing in front of exhibition case number 33. He stood shoulder to shoulder beside the stranger who was obviously an English gentleman of means. Master Nicolas removed his hat, as he always did before my skeleton. It hung from a hook like a strange fruit beside the glass cage, which contained my death mold. Then, he recognized the other man.

—Sir, are you Charles Darwin, the evolutionist and author of the newly published
On the Origin of Species
? I would recognize you anywhere!

The other man simply smiled that strange English lifting of the upper lip and nodded shyly. For almost fifty years I had observed all the specimens in this museum and all its visitors and I had never seen a white man who so resembled an ape. The jut of the jaw, the flat nose, but above all the slanted, protruding brow over the tiny round black eyes gave him that appearance. The gentleman too had removed his hat and his bald pate shone in the overhead light, accentuating the enormous slope of his prominent forehead, which completely overshadowed his fiercely intelligent but simian eyes. His thin, chimpanzee-like lips were surrounded by a magnificent white beard of great thickness which ran into his small ears.

This famous book of his had provoked a great war amongst the naturalists who frequented the museum and discussed such things in my presence, on which, as a good servant, I eavesdropped. They had over the years, divided themselves into two groups: the monogeneticists and the polygeneticists. The theory that man was not created by God, but evolved from lower animals, had caused a furor in the Reverend Brooks’s Church of England. And here was its author, staring at my skeleton as if his life depended on it. For a while, the two white men stood silently in front of my case. After his outburst, Master Tiedeman pretended to read its label, which he already knew by heart and which was as explicit as the old circus posters. I eavesdropped on the following conversation.

—The Hottentot Venus offers certain particularities that are more strongly marked than they are in any other race, but it is well known that these characteristics are not constant, remarked Darwin.

—The great writer Gustave Flaubert comes here often to see her, old Master Nicolas said, quoting the famous writer by heart:

. . . and his whole soul would swell before nature like a rose blooming under the sun; and he would tremble all over, under the weight of an inner exquisite delight, and his head in his two hands, he would fall into a lethargic melancholy . . . his soul would shine through his body, like the beautiful eyes of a woman hidden behind a black veil.

These forms so unattractive and so hideous, this sickly yellow complexion, this shrunk skull, these rachitic limbs, all of these would put him in such an air of delight and enthusiasm, there was so much fire and poetry in these ugly monkey eyes that he would seem then as violently moved by a galvanism of the soul.

Master Tiedeman fell quiet. The silence of the two neighbors lasted a long time as each man was lost in his own thoughts, not thinking of the other man standing beside him, or why one of them had spoken.

—Oh, said Master Darwin, she is superb, varnished, polished, waxed, magnificent. I didn’t know the Zoological Department had made such a superb skeleton . . .

—I stole her skull in 1817, the very year her skeleton was put on display here. I spirited it away to my atelier and kept it for more than a year, drawing it every day. I drew it more times than I can count, but it was not only for that reason . . . I imagined her very lonely in this place. I . . . wanted to keep her company. I don’t regret it. I’d do it again. No one was the wiser. I returned it because I believed she was haunting me, and I got scared. I come to visit her here once or twice a month, but when there aren’t the crowds that are here on Sundays. This is the first time I have ever found someone else at this hour. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, except that I am Nicolas Tiedeman, one of the artists who sculpted her from life and in the nude in 1815 during Napoleon’s hundred days. I never turned over my model to Baron Cuvier, or exhibited her death mask, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

—Ah, the late esteemed Dr. Cuvier, replied Master Darwin.

—Sir, Master Nicolas blurted, I must congratulate you on your stupendous
On the Origin of Species . . .

—Well, thank you, although I am fully convinced of the truth of my views, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all considered, during numerous years, from a viewpoint directly opposite to mine . . . It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the “plan of Creation,” “unity of Design,” “the great Chain of Being” . . . Monsieur Tiedeman . . .

—Small, isn’t she?

—Yes, quite.

—I never fail to be surprised by her smallness. Her air of surprise, the yellow color of her skin, her silence, her lack of recrimination . . .

—I personally am revolted to find human remains amongst the stuffed animals.

—I have studied and drawn every line, wrinkle, pimple and muscle of her body, the shape of her ears, the set of her jaw, the layers of fat over bone . . . It took me far into her wildness, her geography, and convinced me that the whole human race was one, said Master Tiedeman.

—Of course, remarked Master Darwin, there is only one race of mankind. One tree with many branches advancing from its origins in the midst of time towards the perfection of the species by natural selection. One day, with instruments and techniques we can only dream of, in one great leap of the imagination which scientists call discovery and artists like yourself call inspiration, but which in both cases is divine intuition, it will become clear and common knowledge.

—What about the ethnographic chart established by Count Gobineau and so eloquently refuted by the Baron Humboldt?

—We think we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Anyone whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to a certain number of facts will certainly reject my theory. A few naturalists endowed with some flexibility of mind, like Huxley for example, may be influenced by my volume; but I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of this question with impartiality. Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed. When the views entertained in
On
the Origin of Species,
or when analogous views are generally admitted, there will be a considerable revolution in natural history . . .

—A considerable revolution! laughed Master Tiedeman, more like a cataclysm or, as Baron Cuvier would say, a catastrophe . . .

With this, Master Darwin chuckled, a mild, gentlemanly snort. He seemed not sure why he was having this conversation with a man he didn’t know. Master Darwin was nothing if not the caricature of a stiff, reserved Victorian gentleman, who didn’t speak to strangers. Yet I had brought them together.

—I have a confession to make. I saw the Hottentot Venus when I was a little boy, with my mother. I must have been six or seven. She is as fascinating to me now as she was then . . . to my childish eyes. I recall that my mother was disgusted, for she was an abolitionist, like my wife, Emma. I have rarely seen her so angry. She knew people, like Jane Austen, who had seen the Venus in the flesh when she had been on display in the circus in London . . . then to see her here, in that glass cage . . . stuffed . . . Poor creature . . . Cuvier’s brain may have weighed twice as much as hers, but he was also her double or triple in body weight. He was twice as tall and I’m sure his kidneys too were twice as heavy.

—Is it true that the heart is practically the same size and weight in all grown humans whether they be six feet two and weigh six stone or four feet and weigh two?

—It is one of the mysteries of human anatomy, replied Master Darwin.

—Baartman’s heart was not preserved.

—Anatomists don’t consider it a scientific organ of measure . . .

—I wonder why?

—Perhaps it’s not a scientific organ at all, but a metaphysical one . . .

—I don’t think scientists, in their own heartlessness, trust that organ . . .

—Perhaps they don’t. But one day, a heart will be interchangeable with another . . . a damaged heart will be replaced by another—all organs will be.

—Incredible . . .

Master Tiedeman’s eyes returned to my skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

—Strange, seeing her this way always brings tears to my eyes. I will never forget those three days that I sculpted her right here in the museum’s amphitheater. Forty-five years ago, March fifteenth, 1815, during Baron Cuvier’s famous lecture . . .

—Then you knew the baron personally . . .

—As a young man of twenty-six. I’m seventy-one now.

—Well, sir, I’m fifty-one. Strange . . . but I have the same birth date as Abraham Lincoln.

—Really? The American President?

—Yes, February twelfth, 1809.

—What’ll he do now, after Fort Sumter?

—He will abolish slavery, sir, and keep the Southern states in the Union by force of war . . . he has said that he’ll free some slaves, all slaves or no slaves, in order to preserve the Union of the United States of America . . .

—The Confederate states think differently.

—The Confederacy is like the dodo bird, it is a doomed species, ready for extinction, because it has not adapted to its environment . . . I have collected many geological and biological specimens, studied many fossils and made observations of the numbers, diversity and living habits of different forms of life. One day I came across a species of ant in which I discovered the
slave-making instinct.
This remarkable instinct is found in the
Formica sanguinea.
This ant is absolutely dependent on its slaves; without their aid, the species would certainly become extinct in a single year. The males and fertile females do no work. The workers or sterile females, though most energetic and courageous in capturing slaves, do no other work. They are incapable of making their own nests, or of feeding their own larvae. When the old nest is no longer suitable and they have to migrate, it is the slaves that determine the migration, and actually carry their masters in their jaws. So utterly helpless are the masters that when I shut up thirty of them without a slave, but with plenty of the food which they like best, and with their larvae and pupae to stimulate them to work, they did nothing; they could not even feed themselves, and many perished of hunger. I then introduced a single slave
(F. fusca),
and she instantly set to work, fed and saved the survivors; made some cells and tended the larvae, and put all to rights. What can be more extraordinary than these well-ascertained facts? If we had not known of any other slave-making ant, it would have been hopeless to speculate how such an instinct could have been perfected. I tried to approach the subject in a skeptical frame of mind, as anyone may well be excused for doubting the truth of so extraordinary and odious an instinct as that of making slaves. Hence I will give you, Mr. Tiedeman, the observations that I have myself made. I opened fourteen nests of
F. sanguinea
and found a few slaves in all. Males and fertile females of the slave species are found only in their own proper communities, and have never been observed in the nests of
F. sanguinea.
The slaves are black and not above half the size of their red masters, so that the contrast in their appearance is very great. When the nest is slightly disturbed, the slaves occasionally come out, and like their masters are much agitated and defend their nest. When the nest is much disturbed and the larvae and pupae are exposed, the slaves work energetically with their masters in carrying them away to a place of safety. Hence, it is clear that the slaves feel quite at home. I never saw the slaves, though present in large numbers in August, either leave or enter the nest. Hence I consider them as strictly household slaves. The masters, on the other hand, may be seen constantly bringing in materials for the nest, and food of all kinds. The slaves habitually work with their masters in making the nest, and they alone open and close the doors in the morning and evening.