Across the Endless River (19 page)

On one of my walks in Paris I came across a building on fire in a crowded section of the city. Black smoke was pouring out of the windows and there were flames on the roof. Suddenly I heard bells and horns and the fire brigade came around the corner. Over here they're called
“sapeurs-pompiers.”
There were a dozen men in fancy blue uniforms with red stripes, shiny buttons, and big brass helmets. Four of them pulled a huge oak cask on a caisson mount. It looked like a delivery of Augie Schmitt's tavern brew, on the double, but this one was filled with water.

The crowd cheered and they went to work. Two of them pumped until they got a spray of water going onto the flames. Half a dozen others went at the door with axes, then barreled in and up the stairs with the hose. They can't waste any time; otherwise, the whole city would burn to the ground, since everything is built so close together. When it was all over, one of the
sapeurs
had burns on his arm and shoulder, though they were not too serious. Everyone got out of the building. It turns out it was a shop that makes wigs, and (you will appreciate this) it smelled just like singeing the fur off a dog before a Mandan feast. They don't eat dog here, though when I told him about it, Duke Paul remembered the smell from his time in the Pawnee villages. I would say it was not one of his better memories.

There is one other thing I want to tell you about Paris. Duke Paul took me to something called Le Diorama. It's a big round room, at least thirty feet tall and sixty across,
“la rotonde,”
with three long rooms that stick out from the side like the spokes of a wheel. The public sits on a platform in the middle of the
rotonde
and looks down one of the rooms done up with big paintings of the outdoors, like a long theater. Then the whole platform rotates with some complicated machinery on pivots and rails, and you're looking down the next room at a different set of paintings. The day we went, it was a representation of “A Storm in Nature.” The big paintings were of trees and mountains and clouds with changing lights, and in front of it they had running water, like a creek, and sheep and rabbits and ducks on real grass. The lights on the sky changed and—that was it! Then they all came out and told each other that it was just like a day in the country. Someone actually said that to the Duke. Strange to think that people can sit in a dark room and have nature presented to them in a painting and think it's real! If you could put a frame around the Mississippi, you could sell tickets to these Parisians.

I have met some people who have traveled a lot and tell interesting stories, though. Recently, a friend of Prince Franz, who is half French and half Irish, and who sells wine, described how the English took him from an American ship in
1812
and accused him of being a French spy. They were about to hang him, but he was traded for some English prisoners at the last minute.

You can probably guess that I miss the Missouri sky, and the river, but I know I will miss Paris, too. There is always something going on in the street, even at night, with gas lamps and crowds in the theaters. But you have to be rich so that you can enjoy it. Most people are very poor. I can't think of a harder life than being trapped in a city with nothing to live on.

I'll write to tell you my news when I can. We are supposed to leave for Württemberg soon. Please remember me kindly to Mrs. Clark. As ever, your affectionate,

Pomp

S
EVENTEEN

T
wo days after their visit to Professor Picard, Baptiste found Paul in a state of rare excitement. He had just received a note from Picard, replying to his request to visit Georges Cuvier at the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle. Cuvier would receive them on the following day and show them his renowned collection.

Baptiste knew that this museum in Paris was revered as the most important center for the study of the natural world, and he had learned that its scholarly papers were hotly debated among those who collected, observed, and classified plants and animals. Paul regularly mentioned the great names of the museum's faculty—Lamarck, Lacépède, Jussieu, Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier. Professor Picard explained Cuvier's importance the next day as they sat together in the carriage on their way to Cuvier's apartment.

“ ‘Form follows function' is Monsieur Cuvier's guiding principle,” Picard told Baptiste, “and that credo informs his display of specimens. He has set himself no less a task than classifying the whole animal world, and the number, diversity, and condition of his specimens is unparalleled. The placement and development of the internal organs is his special concern, and he is uniquely attentive to the interplay of physiology, structure, and natural conditions in determining an animal's form. For people like Paul and me, who concern ourselves with comparative anatomy, Monsieur Cuvier's findings have made possible a whole new approach to classifying species.”

“No one comes close to his overview,” Paul added. “He was born a subject of Württemberg in Montbéliard and speaks flawless German. His initial studies were at the Karlsschule in Stuttgart!”

Baptiste thought they looked like two excited schoolboys anticipating a special treat.

Cuvier received them cordially. Framed by a shock of white hair, his features were finely drawn; deep-set eyes, a prominent arching nose, and delicately etched lips gave him a dignified air. He looked to Baptiste far older than Picard, though Picard had said they were about the same age. But the wrinkles disappeared when he talked of his work. “Alas, my responsibilities as permanent secretary have me permanently tied to Paris. I must rely on such intrepid adventurers as you,
Monsieur le Duc”—
he bowed to Paul—“to provide me with the raw material that fuels my studies.”

After some small talk, Cuvier offered to show them what he called his
“cabinet,”
and he led them outside, down a small staircase, and around the walls of a long building to the main entrance of the galleries. They began their visit with a tour of three rooms, each of which contained the fully intact skeletons of related animals: cows, sheep, goats, and antelope in the first; deer in the second; camels and llamas in the third. Baptiste's hunter's eye was drawn to the bones, which differed from those of the buffalo and elk that he knew. Cuvier explained some details that he found significant, responded to questions from Picard and Paul, and led the small party into a very long room with a high ceiling.

Nothing prepared Baptiste for what stood before them. The skeleton of a whale was propped on a series of metal stands that extended from one end of the room to the other. It was more than twenty yards long, Baptiste guessed. Shafts of sunlight streamed through a series of high windows set in the side wall, bathing the top of the whale in a soft light.

Cuvier led them to the head, pointing out how the structure was adapted for a marine mammal, but Baptiste was mute with awe at the fantastic proportions. When Paul spoke to him and indicated that they were continuing to the next gallery, Baptiste said, “I prefer to stay here for a moment, if you don't mind.”

Cuvier nodded his assent. “Very well, Monsieur, as you wish. We shall return this way.” They filed out and Baptiste was left alone with a creature that seemed more like a spirit than an animal. He sat on a bench against the wall and contemplated it.

The head rose high to one side, the upper jaw bone like the beak of an enormous bird, long and pointed, with two massive curved bones forming the mandible of the lower jaw. The ribs enclosed a huge space; each bone was as thick around as a supporting timber in a Mandan lodge. Above the ribs, the long voluptuous arc of the spine stretched away to the other end of the room, each vertebra topped with a bony spur that gave the shoulder the look of a castle battlement. The fluid line tapered and descended, then rose again to end in the triangular forms of the tailbone.

Baptiste remembered his excitement when he had first seen a whale close by the ship in the North Atlantic: the creature's sleek blue-black skin; the huge, watchful eye; the jet of watery spray that was its breath; and the long, smooth arc of the body as it descended, the flukes towering high for a split second as if in farewell. The majesty of the animal's skeleton that stood before him revived that sense of wonder.

Captain Clark had told him many times of how a dozen members of the Corps of Discovery had set out to find the beached whale near the mouth of the Columbia, and how his mother had insisted on being included in this group, since she had not yet been to the ocean. Sacagawea, Clark told him, had never been so satisfied as on that sunny, blustery day in January when she stood in the tidal shallows of the Great Waters and played with Baptiste in the sand, the stones, and the white foam.
I have stood inside a whale before,
Baptiste thought.

He began to comprehend, in a way he had not before considered, the fascination that Paul, Picard, Cuvier, and their like all felt at seeing the structure of animals revealed. A strange beauty spoke to you when the bones were reassembled, and comparing different kinds revealed unsuspected truths.
How much can you learn from such things?

E
IGHTEEN

D
UKE
P
AUL, FROM HIS PRIVATE JOURNAL
M
ARCH 27, 1824
P
ARIS

We have been in Paris for over a month and the time has passed rapidly. I look back at last summer on the far reaches of the North American frontier and I am amazed at how entire is the contrast with Paris. Yesterday I took delivery of a splendid matched thermometer, barometer, and hygrometer to replace those that were destroyed when a buffalo stampede sent my pack animals into a desperate gallop. That particular eventuality illustrates the contrast eloquently.

Along the Missouri, I walked and hunted incessantly, collecting and describing plant and animal specimens. My sole activities were moving up the river, choosing a campsite, and finding food enough for meals in the evening and again the next morning. Many of our days were devoted entirely to overcoming obstacles that arose unexpectedly: clearing impassable jams of driftwood across the river's channel, taking shelter from storms of a rare violence, contending with the river's endless propensity to rise above its banks and find a new path across the surrounding lowlands. How can I forget taking refuge on an island when grizzly bears prowled the river's banks? Or the merciless attack of huge mosquitoes?

Every day we had to ask ourselves whether the Indians we might encounter would be heartless savages bent on our destruction or members of a tribe whose contact with the white man had left them open to accommodation, if not real friendship. These concerns were constant, but to catalog the dangers is to lose sight of the context that made them not just challenging but enjoyable.

All these pitfalls had elements in common: each had to be overcome to ensure the eventual success of our expedition, and each required all the strength, intelligence, wiliness, and good instincts I possessed. I had never before felt my being so concentrated in a single purpose. I had never felt so wholly alive.

Here I am surrounded with the accomplishments of civilization and all the comfort and pleasure they afford, yet my life feels empty, as if the undertakings the city offers are displacing something more vital. This morning, Uncle Franz went for an early-morning ride along the boulevards, then, upon his return, concluded a delicate negotiation with the finance minister on the assessing of import duties on goods from Württemberg. He gave us a sumptuous private lunch with delicacies only Paris can provide and wines that have no equal, while regaling us with stories of the increasingly delicate position of the Bourbons: a catalog of industrious activity for half a day. Six thousand miles to the west, we would have considered ourselves fortunate to have advanced five miles up the river in the same amount of time, with nothing but the flesh of the previous night's kill to fuel our efforts. Uncle Franz's abiding concern when I met him in the morning, and again during our noonday meal, was whether the five new pairs of boots his boot maker is preparing for him will be as comfortable as those he had made last year in Milan. I had to laugh—inwardly, of course—when I considered that our new shoes on the frontier were always a matter of strict necessity, never of vanity, and were fashioned like Indian moccasins, in rough-hewn strips of hide from whatever deerskin or buffalo leather was available.

Nor is it simply a matter of the city and its inevitable comforts. When we rode in the forest of Royaumont last week, I felt myself contained and protected, even though we traversed the deepest parts of the woods. No grizzly bears lurked among the oak trees, nor any animal that presented a real danger. Nor was there a possibility that any plant or animal life I came upon would be unknown or unexamined. Every beetle and lichen and bird and fern and squirrel on this continent has been collected, studied, and cataloged for generations. The newcomer will find no
terra incognita
to fire his imagination.

As I write, I recall how exciting it was to wake each day along the river and to know—to know for certain!—that we would happen upon plants, animals, geographic features, native tribes, and entire ways of life that had never before been observed systematically by a European. This awareness that so much was unknown, that so few had been there before me, that so vast an area remained to be discovered, gripped me each morning, as if von Humboldt and Cuvier were themselves laying encouraging hands upon my shoulder and whispering in my ear, “Go forward, for all of us, and find what is unknown to science!”