The Curse of the Labrador Duck (25 page)

B
ACK AT THE
hotel in Charleroi, I worked on getting down on paper my thoughts on the day while Mom had a quick nap. She awoke keen to go in search of a beer, having earlier spotted an upmarket bar done over in brass and wood and subtle lighting. We ordered a couple of Leffe, which arrived along with a little glass bowl of cheese cubes adorned with garlic salt. I told Mom a few stories about ducks. She told me a few stories about our relatives and other rogues. I pulled
out the euro coins that had accumulated in my pocket since arriving in Belgium. In the currency of the European Union, bills are the same wherever you are, but the coins of each country are unique. Despite the differences on the “heads” side, all coins are legal tender in all countries in the union. As evidence of how truly European Belgium is, I had accumulated one coin each from Ireland, Germany, Spain, and France, four from the Netherlands, and two from Belgium.

I suppose we should have gone in search of food, but with a couple of beers and a couple of bowls of salty cheese in us, a long tramp seemed to be more important. In the remaining light of an early evening we wandered past shops that, at an earlier hour, would have been pleased to provide eyeglasses or glass eyes, women’s dresses or undressed women. A couple of times Mom said, “Let’s just walk to the end of this block, and then we can head back before my legs wear out.” But at the end of each block, she would spot a fountain or a clock tower or a series of particularly tall, thin homes, and we would walk some more. Pausing for a break on a park bench along a tree-lined avenue, she said: “When the time comes, I want you to say my eulogy. Remember to tell people that I knew how to laugh, and that I wouldn’t have done anything different.”

Then she got a hankering for a banana. We found a number of greengrocers that were still open. The first two had no bananas. The third had a boxful, but they were all brown. The fourth had bananas galore, and they seemed to be just ripe enough. “Are you going to go in and get them?” she asked. Under different circumstances I suppose I would have, but I wanted to see how she would get along speaking beer-fueled French, and handed her a fist full of coins. She came out a few minutes later with a big bagful. “
‘Trois,’
I said. He said,
‘Kilo,’
I said,
‘Non, trois.’
” They settled on a kilo for one and a half euros. “That’s all right, is it?” she asked as she handed me the remaining change. “Yes,” I said. “That’s just fine.”

I
really thought that I had nailed it. Surely I had located absolutely every single stuffed Labrador Duck in the world. I had perused Paul Hahn’s 1963 inventory until my eyes were full of gravel, contacted most of the curators of the world’s bird collections, and followed every insidious tendril of the World Wide Web. Fifty-two stuffed Labrador Ducks and one beak had survived the ravages of time, right?

But then Frank Steinheimer sent me a message from Berlin explaining that he had discovered another duck, residing in the teeny-tiny village of La Châtre in the middle of France. Blast! There was even a photograph of this specimen on the website of the village’s Musée George Sand et la Vallée Noire. From what detail I could make out, it seemed real enough. If I had known about the duck a year earlier, I could have snagged it while in France with Julie. Now to ensure that no Labrador Duck would escape my quest, I would have to make a return journey to France and revise my global list.

Oddly, the museum in La Châtre was not dedicated to extinct ducks, but to the nineteenth-century French author George Sand. Sand is a really big name to those who care about period feminist literature, and there is probably no end of biographies. However, my branch of the public library had only one, a 1999 tome entitled
George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large,
by Belinda Jack. The book is really long. Really, really long. It has 411 pages before the explanatory notes. Even having taken six credits of university English literature, I found Jack’s writing opaque. As evidence I offer up the line: “And the physical freedom of her subversive capering in La Châtre not only provided material for prose accounts, it also served as a metaphor for more fundamental shifts in consciousness.” I didn’t finish the book. Nonetheless, I did manage to pan a few nuggets before giving up. Here are ten things to know about Sand in case you are ever called upon to write a snap quiz.

1. Born in Paris on July 1, 1804, she was christened Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin. She picked up the handle George Sand later in life. To family and friends she was Aurore.
   
2. Sand’s father was Maurice François Dupin, an army captain. Her mother was Antoinette Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, a mentally unstable former prostitute. In no big hurry, Maurice and Antoinette waited until four weeks before Sand’s birth to get married. She was not exactly born out of wedlock, but certainly not very far into it. Suddenly finding themselves in a big rush, they had Aurore baptized the day after her birth.
   
3. Dupin married Delaborde, who was well below his station, in secret, and against his mother’s wishes. The matriarch eventually came around and arranged for Sand’s First Communion at La Châtre on March 23, 1817.
   
4. Snooty, perhaps, but no purebred herself, Sand’s grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of Maurice de Saxe. A step further back, we find that de Saxe was the illegitimate son of King Augustus III of Poland, and his mistress Aurore de Kœnigsmark. De Saxe’s niece married a son of Louis XV. After watching all the leaves fall off the family tree, this means that Sand was second cousin to Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, and Charles X.
   
5. Sand’s stuck-up grandmother recognized that Paris wasn’t the safest place to be during the French Revolution, and so took up residence in Nohant, just down the road from La Châtre.
   
6. Sand married Casimir Dudevant in 1822. They had a son and a daughter, but their paternity isn’t crystal clear. This leaves me wondering if a big sexual appetite and a propensity toward infidelity run in the family.
   
7. Biographer Jack described Sand as a “frigid, bisexual nymphomaniac.” To me, two of those words don’t go together. She was also a cross-dresser, and smoking was one of her nasty habits in a time when women just didn’t do that sort of thing.
   
8. Sand’s books were a commercial success, partly because her writing was easy to read, and partly because it was smutty, at least by the standards of the day. Amongst her favorite themes were sex, sexuality, incest, infidelity, sex, and the role of surrealism in contemporary art. All right—I made up the last one.
   
9. Keen on spreading a little joy, Sand took her share of lovers, and the share of a few others as well. Her most famous consort was the composer Chopin. Among her “friends” were musician Franz Liszt, authors Flaubert, Balzac, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and both Brownings, along with a small but elite army of visual artists. Of her lovers, Sand seems to have saved an awful lot of energy for her relationship with Marie Dorval, a famous beauty of the Paris stage.
   
10. Not necessarily a ray of sunshine, Sand described life as “a great wound that never heals.” I think I dated her once. Sand died in Nohant in 1876.
    

G
ETTING TO LA
Châtre to see its duck was no easy matter. The small town is smack dab in the middle of France, and not close to anything else. Getting to the nearest airport, Limoges, required a five-and-a-half-hour layover at Stanstead. I spent much of that time swotting up on George Sand. She wrote great piles of books, including novels and plays, essays, a two-volume biography, and twenty-five volumes of correspondence. Shelves of university libraries sag under her literary output, and students of feminist literature probably wish she had dedicated a little more time to bonking famous composers and a little
less time to writing. Her first novel, written when she was twenty-seven, was entitled
Indiana.
I purchased a copy, and over the next few days, I found spare moments to read it on trains, in airport departure lounges, and on park benches.
Indiana
reads as though written by a thirteen-year-old girl in love with a pony.

The Limoges taxi lobby must be really strong, for there was no bus service into town, and the cost of the short journey from the airport was scandalous. After a short nap in my hotel room, I made my way to the Gare des Bénédictins. If there were only a couple of trains between Limoges and La Châtre the next day, I wanted to make sure I caught one. I asked the only free agent at the information kiosk if he spoke English.
“Non,”
he said, pointing to his colleague at the next spot. When my turn came I asked,
“Parlez-vous anglais?”
She dropped her face into her hands, perhaps hoping that I would go away. So, trying to be polite, I did my best in French, explaining that I needed a return ticket to La Châtre for the following day. I left the last consonant off “Châtre” as my guidebook instructed. She looked at me as though I had asked for a return ticket to her grandmother’s underpants. I tried again, sticking the last consonant back on. She sighed and pushed a pencil and a piece of paper at me. I wrote “La Châtre” and pushed them back. Three of her colleagues wandered over to join her, apparently under the impression that this was the height of entertainment. “Look,” I said in English, “it’s here on the map” pointing to a spot just 55 miles from Limoges. All four of them started chuckling at me. At me, but definitely not with me. With my map as proof, they had to admit that La Châtre actually exists. In French, one of them asked me why anyone would want to go to La Châtre.
“Je voyage là pour les bon marché drogues récréationnelles,”
I said. They convinced their computer to spit out a timetable. It showed that the train doesn’t go to La Châtre. The number 3630 train would require sixty-three minutes to take me as far as Chateauroux, a huge overshoot. I would then have eight minutes to use
un autre mode de transport
to get to the
gare routière
, and hop on the number 42693 bus to La Châtre. Three hours and eighteen minutes after I arrived, I would have to be on the number 42706 bus back out of La Châtre, unless I wanted to spend the night on a park bench. “
Billet ici?
” I asked.
“Non,”
I was told, and in the fashion of
Saint Michael directing Adam and Eve out of Eden, each of the four employees pointed to a distant kiosk. The lady who sold me the ticket was far more pleasant, but crushed my ego by asking if I was eligible for a senior citizen’s discount.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
by train and by bus, I aimed for the museum named in honor of George Sand. I arrived two hundred years, three months, and twelve days after her birth. Sometime in the fifteenth century, the Chauvigny family built a castle in La Châtre. Time saw most of the castle fall down, as time so often does, but its stone tower remains. Sixty-five feet tall, with walls six feet thick, the tower is visible from most parts of town. From 1734 it served as a prison, but in 1937 it was converted to a museum to house Sand memorabilia and, two years later, the town’s collection of birds.

I was met by Brigitte Massonneau, who had been corresponding with me by postcard. She pleased me by speaking not a single solitary word of English. I knew that I could count on my elementary grasp of French if the person I was speaking to knew an equal amount of English. My interactions with Massonneau showed me that I could stumble along even if my French companion was completely unilingual. As she fetched a table and chair from a storage closet, I looked at the cabinet, just down from the reception desk, that housed the duck. He looked real, and I was more than a little relieved. It would have been a long trip for another painted domestic duck. The cabinet also housed a Carolina Parakeet, an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, an Eskimo Curlew, and a Passenger Pigeon. Far and away the highlight of their collection was the Labrador Duck.

The museum has something like 400 stuffed birds on display, part of its collection of 3,000. The collection came together in the eighteenth century under Jean-François-Emmanuel Baillon, a lawyer and bailiff in the town of Abbeville, very close to the English Channel in Somme. Whenever he got a few free minutes, he spent them in the world of natural history, collecting and stuffing birds and corresponding with great naturalists of the day. His son, Louis-Antoine-François Baillon, picked up his father’s passion for all things outdoorsy. When he was twenty years old, the younger Baillon moved to Paris to take up the post of assistant naturalist in the botanical garden.
After just a few years, the elder Baillon snuffed it, and his son returned to Abbeville. He expanded on his father’s collection, bringing it to 6,000 specimens. When the younger Baillon died, in 1855, the collection was divided in half. The first 3,000 birds went to his daughter, a Mrs. Delf, who stored them in a wet cellar until they rotted. The second 3,000 birds had a better time of it. They were given to Baillon’s other daughter, the wife of Philippe Bernard, a physician in La Châtre. Philippe Léonce, a Major General and Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, inherited the surviving specimens and turned them over to the Village of La Châtre in 1888.

It was now 11:00. The museum was due to close for a two-hour lunch at noon, and, promising Massonneau to be finished by then, I tucked in. The duck, a male stuffed by a taxidermist, looks as though he has had a rough time of it. He has no glass eye on the right side. His left eye, quite dirty and possibly brown, is sunken in its socket. The webs of his feet and some of his toes have been nibbled away by mice. His tail is bashed up, probably post-mortem. Overall, he is a bit scruffy. Despite all this, I felt excited to be in the presence of a “new” Labrador Duck.

According to an assortment of labels and plaques associated with the specimen: “
Canard du Labrador
: (Camptorhynchus Labradorius), Anatidae, un mâle du Haut Missouri, capturé par Wied (USA), espècies éteinte depuis 1875.” I also found that “La ville de La Châtre” had been given the specimen by “Mr. LE Général de Division L. de Beaufort.”

If these labels are anything to go by, the drake in La Châtre was collected by German naturalist Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied while traveling in North America, perhaps somewhere near the upper reaches of the Missouri River, or upper Missouri State. This is the same von Wied who had collected the pair of Labrador Ducks now in Leiden and one of the adult drakes in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

In the hour I spent poring over the duck, the museum didn’t receive any other visitors. The telephone rang twice, and both times I
heard Massonneau say, “
Canard du Labrador
,” and “Canada” and “Professeur Chilton.” My name sounds a lot sexier when said with a French accent.

A
ND ALL THIS
left me with nothing to add but a long string of thank-yous to Massonneau for her help and a two-hour stroll around town before my bus left. Luckily, La Châtre is the sort of town that can be strolled in two hours. Home to 4,700 inhabitants, La Châtre is renowned for its annual stone sculpture competition. A stage of the Tour de France runs through town. And…after that, it’s pretty much down to George Sand. Two hours wouldn’t leave me with time to get to the
cimetière
, the
gendarmerie,
or the
hôpital psychiatrique
, but I would get to almost everything else. I started by picking my way down to the river Indre, which splits and melds many times as it flows through town. The river had been used to soak animal hides as part of the tanning process. Two hundred years ago La Châtre was a center of the tanning industry, which died away as tanneries closed one after another.

The tanneries may be long gone, but at least La Châtre had the reputation of George Sand to fall back on. If someone had left me holding a dead cat, I would have found it difficult to swing it in La Châtre without hitting something linked to George Sand. I stopped to admire the Maison de Bois, Place Laisnel de la Salle. In one of Sand’s novels, the heroine, a florist, lives in the house. I passed the Maurice Sand Théâtre, named after George’s son, a theater producer and puppeteer. Slipping behind the town hall, I came across the George Sand Junior High School, then stumbled across a statue of George Sand, commissioned the year after she died. This seemed an odd tribute from a town Sand was said to have despised. The statue is flanked by two 114-year-old giant sequoia trees, representing Sand’s position in nineteenth-century French literature. Or perhaps someone on the town council just liked sequoias. I walked along George Sand Avenue, peered down Impasse George Sand, and discovered the Lycée George Sand.