Creatures Great and Small

Last Thursday, I accompanied École Dirigeable on a school trip to Paris, where we visited the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée and the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution at the Museum of Natural History.  The trip had all the predictable pleasures of looking at dinosaurs and stuffed giraffes in the company of children: the childlike wonder with which the students admired the tail bones of an Apatosaurus; the childlike mischievousness with which students who had illicitly touched the taxidermied specimens sought to “contaminate” their classmates; and the all too adult anxiety with which the students fussed over their digital cameras.  Between gallery visits we had a rainy picnic in the Jardin des Plantes and played What Time is it, Mr. Wolf?, churning up the gravel alleys under the horrified eyes of the paramilitary gardeners who consoled themselves by rigorously enforcing the prohibitions of walking on, placing bags on or even looking at the garden’s lawns.  How did you say pelouse interdite in English, the small French children wanted to know, and I had to resist the temptation of offering them the unidiomatic calque of ‘forbidden lawn.’

The day’s real surprise was the museum itself.  Unlike its gleaming analogues in London or New York, redolent of cutting edge museological pedagogy, the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée seems to have survived the last half-century virtually untouched.  The ground floor of the imposing 19th-century pavilion (Figure I) is filled with skeletons of extant species, while display cases around  the walls are packed with smaller specimens, each with a handwritten label; the upper floor contains a similar gallery of vertebrate fossils, overlooked by the invertebrates in the mezzanine.  Aside from the labels, there is little explanatory material, and almost no printed or electronic graphical content; and the labels themselves casually assume that the visitor is familiar with both caecum and duodenum.  Yet, rather than rendering the collections dry, or uninteresting, this intellectual seriousness and simplicity of presentation conveys magnificently the curiosity about the world and the excitement of discovery which surely underlies the entire project of natural history.  Who needs shiny pictures and dumbed-down exegesis?, the gallery seems to ask – look, here is nature! And here is nature, in all its variety: items which, at other museums, are hidden away in subterranean storage closets – cyclopic kittens, two-headed ducklings, kangaroo livers and crucified and dissected cats – here appear proudly, floating their jars of formaldehyde.  As realized here, the museum is not only a ghetto for hyperactive children, but proudly advertises its original function, as a place for serious scientific contemplation, and a monument to human curiosity.  It is surely no accident that first sight on entering the gallery is model human body, striding forward, arm raised triumphantly – an appropriate avatar for the museum’s curators and visitors alike.

While the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée seems to have passed through recent decades unchanged, the Grande Galerie d’Évolution spent much of the last half-century in a state of total neglect.  Closed to the public in 1966 as a result of leaks in its roof, the Galerie de Zoologie, home to the museum’s collection of stuffed animals, was covered by an emergency metal roof in 1968, plunging it “dans la pénombre,”  according to the font of human wisdom, and transforming it into “une immense cathédrale immobile” (Figure II); only in 1994 was the space reopened as the Grande Galerie.  Owing to this recent restoration, this gallery is unmistakably modern, complete with explanatory displays, video presentations, and electronic activities.  Even so, it, like the gallery of comparative anatomy, retains a not-quite-contemporary aura, some vestige of the orientalism and exoticism which must have motivated the men who hunted and collected these specimens in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a spirit exemplified by a reconstruction of a tiger attack experienced by the Duc d’Orléans and Prince d’Orléans while on a tiger  hunting expedition in India, a display in which the unlucky stuffed tiger is reprising his role from the day itself (Figure III).  Within the vast, dimly lit, Eiffel-era pavilion, dramatic spotlights pick out the specimens which, rather than being confined in glass cases, stand exposed behind low guardrails.  With the exception of the Tiger and the Elephant there are no dioramas here, no attempts made to situate the creatures among the authentic grasses and rodents of their native habitats.  Instead, the pièce de résistance is the cavalcade of African savannah mammals which snakes diagonally across the gallery’s central floor, giraffes leading hippopotamuses marching in step with water buffalo.  Although entirely unrealistic, the display doesn’t come across as cheap sensationalism, but rather as a healthy embrace of spectacle, a fitting acknowledgement that we want to see these animals not simply (or even primarily) to learn about them, but also because they excite our imaginations.  Like the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée, the Grande Galerie captures the specificity of a museum’s public function: in this case as not only a neutral repository of information and dispenser of educational activities, but also a kind of theatre to which we come in order to be amazed, delighted, and entertained.

At the end of the day, our return to Beauvais was delayed by a large demonstration directly in front of the Jardin des Plantes – linked to the day’s national strike in protest against the government’s proposed reform of the retirement system – which prevented our buses from returning on time to collect us.  The small French children were very taken with the protest: “ah yes,” they said, matter-of-factly, “those are the fonctionnaires on strike.”  As the wait dragged on, their attitude towards the strikers shifted from interest to unconscious emulation.  “There’s no way I’m coming to school tomorrow,” more than one student declared, “It’s just ridiculous.  I won’t be home until 11 PM, and then I’ll have to eat dinner, and I won’t be in bed before midnight.  How could I possibly get up for class in the morning?  Outrageous!”

 

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Then again, perhaps the real reason I so enjoyed this trip to the museum was simply the joy which every overgrown child gets from looking at wild animals.  On Sunday, I returned to Paris by myself to see a retrospective of husband-and-wife sculptors and furniture designers François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne at the Musée des Arts décoratifs.  Animals and plants are the sole subject of the Lalannes’ whimsical oeuvres, and my visit to the exhibition was one of the most joyful hours I have ever spent in a museum.  A wonderful spirit of magic realism suffuses many of the pieces on display, ranging from François Xavier’s larger-than-life sized sheet metal sculptures of minotaurs and hoofed rabbits, standing calmly on strips of Astroturf, to Claude’s cabbages with feet and miniatures of snails metamorphosing into human thumbs (although the exhibition is entitled Les Lalanne, the two artists rarely collaborated on individual pieces).  François-Xavier’s work, in particular, blurs the line between sculpture and furniture to terrific comic effect: a hippopotamus whose belly opens up into a bathtub, and whose mouth becomes a sink; birds with lamps for tail feathers; a series of rhinoceroses which fold out into writing desks or disassemble into armchairs.  Most magical of all, though, are his monumental, gimmick-less animal sculptures which blend realism with the irrepressible joy of plush toys and cartoons: a herd of bronze-and-wool sheep, on casters for easy realignment, or a pair of impossibly shaggy metal and wool camels, perched contentedly on their Plexiglas dunes.

 

May Daze

And so, Dear Reader, another month has come and gone without any updates to the Historiae.  For the last three weeks your correspondent had the pleasure of an extended visit from his girlfriend, whose lovely presence permitted him to pour his burden of trivial observations and failed witticism into an actual human ear, rather than spewing it forth solipsistically into the silence of cyberspace.  Now, sadly, she has returned back across the pond and I, with apologies both for the Historiae’s cessation, and for its recommencement, turn to my recherches des billets du blog perdus.


The end of April and beginning of May saw the first coming of sustained spring warmth to Bellovacum.  Even as the giant cloud of volcanic ash cast a shadow  over Europe, the town enjoyed two weeks of unbroken sunshine and cloudy skies.  Indeed, by the time transatlantic links had been restored, it felt like Bellovacum had shot through spring into a Mediterranean summer.  Conditions inside school rapidly deteriorated, as the small French children yearned to abandon lists of English words for sandwich ingredients and return to the sunny asphalt of the cour.  My policy of celebrating good weather with outdoor games of “What Time is it Mr. Wolf?,” honed during greyness of February and March, threatened to derail the entire English-language curriculum, a problem exacerbated by the ability of my charges to manipulate the game in order to both prolong it indefinitely and drain it of any educational value.   At École Dirigeable, the students discovered that by taking miniscule steps forwards they could remain forever out of range of Messrs. Loup, while at École Rex the fastest runners in one class decided that the chase would be more exciting if they ran away from safety and taunted their chubbier pursuers.   Inside, École Rex was transformed into a greenhouse, as classrooms, their red and yellow curtains vainly shut against the sun, heated and filled with a sweaty vapour, whose remarkable extent only became apparent when one stepped back into the Alpine coolness of the hallway.  Students returned from recess panting, with glassy eyes and fevered cheeks, and wet out again rosier and damper than before.  The miasma brought with it a predictable lethargy: during one sleepy afternoon review of the words for pizza toppings, a seven year-old, without any particular surprise or interest, looked at a pair of onions on a flashcard (Figure I) and remarked “ah, un soutien-gorge.”

In a way, then, it was a relief when, by the end of the first week of May, normality, grey skies, and chilly rain had all returned.  Mental acuity also put in a renewed appearance, and the curiosity of small French children turned once again to questions of language.  “Léwon, Léwon” cried one ten year-old, her mispronunciation of my name betraying an alarming ignorance of great leaders of the Front Populaire, “how do you say ‘Michael Jackson’ in English?”  Other groups of students were fonder of pronouncements.  One class of seven year olds, confronted with the fact that only one of their number had managed to learn any of the weather vocabulary on which we’d been working for two weeks, observed that Fatima’s aptitude for English was only natural, since she was Spanish.  My own ability to speak the language of Shakespeare occasioned more interest: how, they wanted to know, had I learned English?  I parried: how had they learned French?  This response was clearly unsatisfactory: it was obvious how one learned French, the question was how one learned English.  Finally, one of the brighter students burst out: “It’s obvious: he comes from Canada where there are many people who speak English; he must have learned it there!”  Most remarkably of all, this same class finally determined, after seven months of following my instructions given in French, that I actually spoke the language.  How, they wondered, could I speak both French and English?  After much puzzlement, the same class wise man gave his judgement: “You see, he speaks English to people who speak English, and French to people who speaks French.”

This was only a passing moment of lucidity, however.  By last week the heat had returned, with its attendant neural haze.  After taking my girlfriend to the airport on Monday,ⁱ I wandered sweating through the northern arrondissements of Paris, weighed down by shopping bags full of clothes and sleeping bags, the debris of a weekend trip to Amsterdam.  As I paused before entering a small supermarket near the Gare du Nord, a middle-aged woman asked me, with an unexpected intentness, “Is this supermarket new?  I haven’t seen it before.”  Before I could finish mumbling my uncertain reply, a young man, unshaven, in a black woollen trench coat and wire-rimmed glasses stuck his thumb, green under the nail, into my face.  “A Euro?  I’m unemployed.”  As I was taking a bottle of shampoo down from the shelf, the woman reappeared. “This supermarket is very expensive,” she observed, fixing her gaze on me.  “There’s a cheaper one around the corner.  I could take you there?”  Excusing myself, I came up against a familiar coat, a familiar thumbnail.  “Give me a Euro.  I’m unemployed.”  On the stifling train, I sat next to a man who was unaccountably agitated by his failure to validate his ticket; crushed by the late-afternoon sunlight, I fell asleep on his shoulder.

Back in Bellovacum, the small French children weren’t much better.  The ten and eleven year-olds at École Rex had passed some kind of event horizon and were sliding inexorably towards the hormonal cesspool of puberty and juvenile delinquency.  One girl got up to distribute the day’s exercise, and a boy, fat and soprano, squeaked, “Ha ha, she’s wearing a soutien-gorge.”



ⁱMonday was Pentecost, one of May's four public holidays, the others being Worker's Day (May Day), V-E Day and Ascension.