Hottentot Venus (30 page)

I was surprised when I found myself in the main gallery of the museum, which rose like a church to a glass skylight surrounded by large rectangular windows. I had never visited Master Bullock’s museum in Piccadilly, although I had begged to be taken there many times. I cried out in delight and amazement at being surrounded by all the animals of the savanna; still as statues and dead as wood, yet so lifelike. My heart beat faster: giraffes, elephants, a hippopotamus with all its teeth, buffalo and zebras. But what was more amazing were the skeletons standing amongst them, as if an invisible hand had reached into them and pulled the bones from their forms, throwing them into the air where they had assembled into their original shapes before descending to earth. An orangutan, a forest ape and a dozen other four-legged beasts stood beside their skeletons. In the center was a giant tortoiseshell taken from one of the creatures I had seen on St. Helena. In death, they all stood stiffly, at attention like soldiers, beside their own bodies, nude ghosts, pale, white and luminous; the jaw of a whale, the ribs of a shark, the spine of a crocodile, all warning me to run for my life. Then I spied the trophy heads: severed heads of Chinamen, of Bushmen, of Indians, of Khoekhoe staring back at me from their glass boxes.

As their eerie voices reached me, I bolted for the door with a cry.

—Poor creature, said Master Réaux to the others, she thinks they are real and are going to eat her.

The white men stood in a circle like hyenas, laughing at me. I tried desperately to control myself, repeating to myself that these exhibits were only skinned and stuffed animals, not real souls . . . but what of the human severed heads? In the next gallery, all reason abandoned me. This was the bird room. It was decorated to resemble a forest except that every bird in it was dead. The vaulted stone ceiling and stone walls, the high stained-glass windows gave the space the appearance of a stone cage or a crypt in a mountain. Thousands and thousands of birds sat silent in glass cases, singing no more, taking wing no more, carefully stuffed and mounted as if a whole forest had been emptied. I shrieked with horror and ran from the hall, the silence of the birds still in my ears. Behind me, I heard the laughter of the men. But I didn’t care. Outside the building, I tried to breathe, yet breath would not come.

Around me the landscape emerged like a dawn and I realized there were other real animals imprisoned here as well. The woods were strewn with small pavilions of stone and imprisoned within them were wild animals. There were an elephant couple with their calf in one pavilion. There were orangutans, monkeys and baboons in another pavilion. A great ape, tall and lonely, gazed back at me from a cage made of iron and wire.

—There is nothing here except cages and prisons, I said to the men, who had followed me. Suddenly, they all seemed to understand my distress, for they looked at me with a kind of amused pity as if to say, Well, what did you expect? These animals are dead. This is a zoo. We are their keepers because we have the power to keep them, silly girl.

—Tout est mort ici.

—Perhaps, said Master Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, clearing his throat, we should retire to the reception tent for a glass of champagne before our lecture begins in the pavilion of comparative anatomy . . .

But I couldn’t face the men in the striped tent. My eyes caught those of Master Cuvier, who had been studying my reactions as if I were one of his stuffed birds.

—No, I said, shaking my head.

—Count, would you be so kind as to escort Mademoiselle Baartman directly to the pavilion of comparative anatomy? I want her appearance to be a complete surprise. Perhaps her . . . keeper Sieur Réaux can accompany you. I will be there directly.

The pavilion, set in the park, was round, two stories high, with a dome which sparkled in the sun. Over the portal, shaped like a temple, was written in gold letters PAVILION OF COMPARATIVE ANATOMY. Inside, it was an amphitheater with benches climbing up to the high windows and painted ceiling. It was decorated with stuffed animals and birds perched on high pillars. A large reptile was nailed to one wall. Another wall was covered with shelves crowded with jars of liquid containing things for which I had no names. Below the shelves stood a large gray slate rectangle framed in wood—a
tableau noir,
it was called. A long table of violet granite was placed before it. Near this was a revolving platform similar to the ones we used at the circus. There was a small stepladder nearby, a chair, a speaker’s lectern, and in the corner was a tall blue and white Dutch stove. The theater was empty. A solid ray of light from the windows struck the central enclosure, which was surrounded by a wooden balustrade separating the audience from the lecturer. From that point, the empty benches rose in circles, yawning back at me. The room smelled of blood and some other scent I did not recognize, except it might have been my own fear. I stared up at the empty seats and coughed, choking a bit on my own saliva.

—Try to pull yourself together, Sarah, I’m going back with the count to the reception. You be a good girl. We’ll be back in an hour. Try to rest—there’s a little dressing room behind that green door there . . . There’s nothing to be afraid of and there’s nothing to be nervous about, after all you’ve done this hundreds of times . . . Meanwhile, get yourself undressed.

—Undressed! I cried.

—Madame, said Master de Blainville as they left. I didn’t answer either of them. I was about to throw a wicked tantrum. I was about to scream that I would not pose naked—that I would not show them my apron. That I was not a stupid beast. I would not play their game of . . . of zoo as they had planned.

Noisily the men filed into the theater. They spoke loudly and jovially, I suppose because of the champagne they had just consumed. Others spoke in serious, hushed tones, all of which blended into an incomprehensible babble that could have been Khoekhoe. Through the opening I could see an audience of about sixty men in afternoon dress and top hats. Within the circle of the balustrade stood the masters de Blainville, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and the baron.

At the back of the room stood four men not dressed as the others, but in loose-fitting indigo smocks and large felt hats. Artists. They were setting up their easels and were preparing, I imagined, to paint my portrait. My image had been reproduced in London so many times that I had no doubt as to what they were doing.

There was one young man about my age who was not like the rest and who reminded me of the never-forgotten Master Kemble. He stood like a hawk, a mysterious half smile on his face, listening to the other men converse. He had neither pencil nor paper nor easel. His hands were covered in red clay and before him stood a small wire figure on a pedestal to which he was applying small bits from his fingers. He would do this throughout the lecture until he had stolen my shape completely.

The noise abated when Master de Blainville rose to announce that the session was open. He nodded to Baron Cuvier, who raised his notebook in the air. Master de Blainville cleared his throat and then began.

—Gentlemen, everyone here has heard of the Hottentot Venus, a Bushwoman who has been exhibited for the past year as a circus attraction at 188 rue St. Honoré in Paris. Today, an unusual set of circumstances allows us to examine this extraordinary subject for three days, here at the museum, in the nude, for sessions of up to six hours a day. Discussions of all the implications of her appearance here, her origins, her physical properties, her race and her scientific position in our classifications of the human race of mammals will be the main topics of discussion of our colloquium. I see that colleagues from as far away as London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Brest, Marseille and Lyon are here at the invitation of our esteemed director, Baron Cuvier, commander of the Legion of Honor.

—I would like to remind you, gentlemen, that smoking is not allowed in the laboratories for reasons of safety. There will be several breaks for smoking and refreshments. I will ask you to keep silent during my introduction and the baron’s discourse.

—As I said, the Hottentot we are about to examine this afternoon was born on the river Camboos in the Cape of Good Hope, in austral Africa, and is a female of about twenty-six years old, of the Bushman or Hottentot race . . . her color and formation certainly surpass anything of the kind ever seen in Europe or perhaps even produced in the world . . . She is a pure and priceless specimen of the great Chain of Being, and as such is inestimable in value . . .

Applause greeted the end of Master de Blainville’s introduction. The baron rose, a long pointed cane in his hand.

I felt a burning in my head, in my womb, in my soul, as if I danced on hot coals like Adolph. Flames licked at my skin and the amphitheater of men seemed to be taking bites of my flesh. I concentrated on the young man, who was stealing my shape as the baron’s French incantations reached me and although I understood little of what he said, his words ignited a furor in me, leaving me breathless and gasping. His voice seemed to fill the universe with revolutions and more revolutions as time passed.

He beckoned me towards him with his forefinger. I stepped forward timidly. I was holding my handkerchief in front of me to hide my private parts, but otherwise I was completely naked.

18

A true historian must have the power of reshaping the universally known into what has never been heard and to announce what is universal so simply and deeply that people overlook the simplicity in the profundity and the profundity in the simplicity. An eminently learned man and a great numskull, those go together very easily under a single hat.

—BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,
Correspondence

March 1815. I could feel the Venus’s gaze upon me like a kind of enchantment. She would not take her eyes from me, and as I felt a rush of blood that ended in a blush, I wondered if she was trying to send me some kind of message. I believed in fate. After all, I had not been invited by name as the other artists had. I was here only as a substitute for my illustrious patron, Jacques-Louis David, the most famous painter in France.

—Nicolas, he had said, I don’t want to insult the baron by ignoring his invitation.

Ever since Bonaparte’s return, my boss, old political animal that he was, had been lying low until the Emperor consolidated his power. At the moment, the Emperor was still at war.

I was sure that my employer resented Cuvier’s miraculous ability to survive intact three political regimes not only without a hint of a prison cell, exile or death but, on the contrary, with an avalanche of important positions, honors, decorations and powerful responsibilities. Louis David’s life, on the other hand, had hung in the balance in 1793 when he had been arrested as a supporter of Robespierre and released only as a result of his wife’s intervention. He had been at that time an ardent republican, a member of the National Convention and a signatory of the death warrant of Louis XVI. After the Revolution, he had changed his allegiance to Napoleon and had painted his coronation. He was, I thought cautiously, fence-sitting between the deposed Louis and the restored Napoleon, waiting to see which way the wind blew. As were many of the celebrities, I thought, whom I had seen milling around the green-and-blue-striped guest tent in the garden. Now, at exactly four o’clock, everyone was jammed into the pavilion of comparative anatomy to behold what the baron doctor called “my” Hottentot Venus, who, he claimed, would prove his theories about the great Chain of Being . . .

No one in Paris, I thought, refused an invitation from Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier, peer and baron of France, weighed down with so much power spanning the Revolution, the Empire and now the Restoration.

How did he do it, I wondered. No man in history had elevated the art of organization of time and the cultivation of each moment. With Cuvier, each hour was dedicated to a certain task, each task had its own laboratory or bureau, and each bureau was perfectly equipped for each task. My boss, who had had dealings with Cuvier while he had been painting his portrait, said that the great man moved from bureau to bureau, functioning without a second of distraction, like a machine.

—You like him, don’t you? I said.

—I admire him, my patron had said. Why, he even insisted on posing with a book so he could read while he sat for me, so as not to lose any time . . .

I had studied that famous painting, while it had been in the studio. The masterful portrait had been that of a melancholy, cold and fastidious aristocrat with bright red hair, pale skin and military bearing. The eyes held a compelling and consuming intelligence just as the mouth held an overwhelming arrogance and avariciousness. It was so beautifully painted, I thought, that it wouldn’t have mattered if the subject had been a murderer. And that, the baron certainly was not. After the Emperor, he was simply the most brilliant man in France.

I was twenty-six years old and had been David’s assistant since the age of twenty. Before that, I had served as apprentice to Charles-Philibert du Saillant, in whose atelier I had learned not only the art of watercolor and engraving but also lithography. But now, I specialized in the sculpting and portraiture of animals, and as an animalist, I spent a great deal of time at the King’s Botanical Gardens and the Museum of Natural History.

I came from a modest family of grain merchants. I knew I was lucky to be admitted into the company of this elite group of men. I had a healthy respect both for my elders and for my betters and rumor had it that even Bonaparte might show up at his old friend’s museum today.

I knew the three other artists present: Nicolas Huet, Léon de Wailly and Jean-Baptiste Berré. I made a beeline to their side. They were all huddled together in the back of the auditorium, as intimidated by the forces gathering in the amphitheater as I was.

—I’m not going to do anything today, said de Wailly, I’m just going to see what this creature looks like.

—Well, then you’ll be a day behind getting your watercolors printed and published, because
La Quotidienne
and the
Reporter
are both here to see what Cuvier has up his sleeve.

—What about you, Nicolas? Sculpting today or just looking?

—I don’t know, I replied honestly, I’m going to play it by ear.

—It seems she’s some kind of hermaphrodite with the genitals of both a man and a woman.

—Supposedly all Hottentots are.

—No, they’re supposed to be the missing link between Negroes and the orangutan.

—You’ve never been to see her show down near the Palais Royal?

—You doing sanguine or watercolor? Surely not gouache.

—I haven’t decided yet. I’ve brought everything. I’m thinking to do some charcoal today.

But that morning, even the most successful painters felt apprehensive before the challenge of illustrating one of the great Baron Cuvier’s scientific specimens.

—She’ll be absolutely in the nude for these drawings.

—You know, this may be all Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s idea, not Cuvier’s; after all, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire is the expert in teratology.

—Freaks, not monsters.

—He experiments on the embryos of chickens to produce abnormal manifestations or deformation.

—Well, that may be Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s obsession, but the baron is interested in the classification of the races . . .

—Everyone smells adventure, joked Berré, confrontation with the unknown, the unexplored, the odor not just of Africa but of the primordial, the monstrous, the real Eve . . . She’s the real Eve . . .

—Shush . . . Here comes de Blainville.

I took the time to arrange my sculpting tools and armature on the pottery wheel which I had already set up while de Blainville was making his introduction. The amphitheater was full as medical students filed in to fill up the spaces left empty by the guests and professors.

There was an excited buzz in the room when the Venus stepped out of the side room, timidly, holding a handkerchief before her, but otherwise in the nude. I caught my breath. I had never seen a female body quite like the Hottentot’s, and I brushed my hair out of my eyes and began to sculpt furiously as Cuvier began his lecture. That was when the Venus had focused her mysterious chestnut gaze on me. The baron approached the lectern and began to speak. I concentrated on sculpting her, raising my eyes only to register the forms, curves, shadows, lines . . . I lost myself in my work, thinking only of somehow reproducing this extraordinary mortal—this African Eve . . .

—There are two things that I would like to demonstrate, began the baron. One, a detailed comparison of this woman with the lowest race of the human species, the Negro race, and the highest race of primates, or the orangutan. Secondly, to explain in the greatest detail possible the abnormalities of her organs of generation. I will commence by presenting to you, also in as much detail as possible, the background of this woman as has been extracted in Dutch and English from the subject herself.

—Sarah Baartman, better known under the name of Saartjie in England or the Vénus Hottentote in France, was born around twenty-six years ago to Bushman parents in the European part of the Cape Colony near Algoa Bay, now known as Zwarts Korps Bay, in the Graaf Reinet district, about five hundred miles from the Cape. Kidnapped at the age of nine, she remained in the hands of the Dutch and the English, whose language she therefore speaks. Everyone in Paris has had a chance to see her during her eighteen-month stay in our capital and verify for themselves the enormous protuberance of her buttocks and the brutality of her face.

—You will notice that her movements also have something brusque and capricious that resembles that of the orangutan. However, her memory is good, exceptional even. As I have said, she speaks Dutch, which she learned at the Cape, and English passably well, and has begun to say a few words in French. She has a good ear and sings and dances while playing her guitarlike instrument. Her height is a bit over one meter thirty-nine, or four feet seven inches, which, in comparison to that of her compatriots, is fairly tall.

—Her trunk seems extremely short, because of the extraordinary swelling of her backside and accompanying parts; nevertheless, the center of the length of her body is still the pubis, and one can say in general that the proportions of these parts resemble closely those that one finds in the Caucasian race. Only the arms are a little bit shorter.

—The head is remarkable for its general form and for certain details of its components. Considered in its ensemble, it is evident that she does not have exactly the aspects of a Negro head and that there is more of a rapprochement to that of an orangutan: an observation already noted by Dr. Barrow. Generally small, the head seems to be composed of two parts, one the cerebral cavity or cranium, and two, the face or snout, which does not join the profile in a manner to form a straight line, where the inclination determines the facial angle, but unites one to the other at the base of the nose almost at a right angle, in the manner one sees most markedly in the orangutan; so that the forehead is straight—almost vertical—and the rest of the profile is concave like that of the primate or the monkey species. The symphysis of the chin is not very elevated, and instead of bending forward in order to make what we call a chin, it flees perceptibly backwards; all these characteristics are found, but in a way, indeed, a lot more marked, in the orangutan.

—The teeth are beautiful, very white, close-set and big, especially the upper incisors, which seem to be proportionally even larger than in the Negro race; the canines are not sharp at all. The oblique layout of the incisors in the two jaws gives the aspect of pincers.

—The lips are quite thick and sharp, though perceptibly less than in the Negro race; they are badly formed, that is to say, the upper one doesn’t have a median point corresponding to the lower one, the corners are lowered; the half canal of the upper lip is hardly marked; both are pale pink.

—The mammaries are very big, hanging quite near to the hemispheric median line towards their lower part. They go down to the line the crook of the arm makes, two or three inches above the navel. The nipple is very thick. Its color is dark brown, the areola, of the same color, is extraordinarily large.

—Concerning the organs of generation, in the ordinary position, that is to say in the vertical position, we can see no trace of a kind of pedicle which would be formed by the large lips, as can be seen in the figures of M. M. Perron and Le Sueur.

The Venus must have heard certain words, I thought, repeated again and again that were similar to the English . . . race, orangutan, monkey, Negro race, Caucasian race, Tatar race . . . Hottentot
. . . extraordinaire . . . remarquable . . . surprenante . . .
very big, very small. Her name, Sarah . . . She must understand some of this, I thought.

But the Venus seemed determined that not one doctor or scientist would view her apron.

—The upper limbs, continued the baron, are quite thin, short in general, though well built; the shoulders, quite narrow from their base, the forearm is short and well shaped, the hand is very small, with delicate fingers, very remarkable and charming.

—The pelvis, in general, is very narrow, but it seems even narrower because of the tremendous swelling of the lower and posterior parts of the trunk; it is indeed what, at first sight, is most striking when looking at this Hottentot. Her buttocks are really enormous, they are at least twenty inches high, jutting out six to seven inches from the dorsal line, their width being at least of the same dimensions. Their shape is quite singular; instead of starting from the end of the loins, they spread horizontally, in an upward curve to their summit, to form a kind of flat saddle. It is said that Hottentot children literally ride on this saddle. We easily establish that the majority of this mass is cellulofat, which trembles and quivers when this woman walks, and when she sits down flattens and spreads out.

—Her formation is extraordinary, first because of the enormous width of her hips, which exceeds eighteen inches, and secondly because of the curve of her buttocks, which protrude out more than six inches. For the rest, she is normal in her proportions, both body and limbs. Her shoulders, her back, the height of her bosom have grace. The curve of her stomach is not excessive.