The Mapmaker's Wife (22 page)

Museo de America, Madrid, Spain
.

All of this produced a society in which violence was ever-present. The French had seen it often. While in Quito, La Condamine wrote,
“[T]here were times when there would not be a week that passed, and sometimes not a single day, without some murder taking place.” Bouguer’s slave had been killed, and while the expedition was working around Riobamba, even the mayor of that graceful city was
“stabbed by a mulatto in broad daylight in the center of town.” Creoles and Spaniards carried swords and pistols, and nearly everyone else went about armed with a knife. At the top of Peruvian society, people worried about whether they were being addressed with the proper grammatical form, and young girls were taught to be pure and virginal. But beneath that patina of civilization
was a very rough society. The French had reason to worry, and now this: Senièrgues was enmeshed in a quarrel, and a five-day festival of bullfighting was set to begin.

S
PAIN
’
S LOVE FOR BULLFIGHTING
dated back to the Middle Ages, the ritual having become popular during the Reconquest. In its earliest incarnation, several nobles mounted on horseback and armed with long lances would fight a bull that had already been repeatedly stabbed by commoners on foot. Later, the bullfight evolved into a more dramatic form in which a lone toreador faced the animal head on, killing it with a single thrust of his sword. The spectacle evoked both a sense of violence and sexual prowess, and when a bullfight was held to celebrate a noble’s wedding, it was viewed as a fertility ritual, the bull’s sexual potency transferred in the killing to the groom. In the early eighteenth century, France and other European countries under the influence of the Enlightenment began to scorn the bullfight as a barbaric relic of the past, but in Spain, where medieval values still held sway, it became more deeply ingrained than ever.
“Bullfights,” remarked the Spanish writer Fray Luis de León, “are in the blood of the Spanish people.”

During a festival, passions tended to rise with each passing day. The bullfights in Cuenca were being staged in a makeshift arena erected in San Sebastián Plaza on a bluff high above the Rio Tomebamba, and each afternoon, long before the gates opened, men and women would gather, eagerly awaiting the spectacle that was about to unfold. On the morning of the fifth day, August 28, Crespo denounced the French once again in his sermon, and by that afternoon, there was a palpable tension in the air, as though everyone knew that something was going to happen.

All of the members of the expedition went to the corrida that day. La Condamine, Bouguer, Morainville, and one or two others had been invited to sit with Gregorio Vicuna, the priest of San Sebastián Church, which graced the square where the bullfight was
being staged. A former corregidor of Cuenca joined them in Vicuna’s box. While they were waiting for the festivities to begin, they engaged in small talk about Crespo and his anti-French tirades, La Condamine dismissing the sentiment as coming from a few rabble-rousers led by a priest who
“did not have any virtue beyond a grand indifference to the beautiful sex.” As usual, La Condamine was in some ways enjoying their ongoing feud with the locals—everyone in the box understood his subtle dig at Crespo’s manhood—but even he did a double take when Senièrgues entered the stadium with Manuela hanging on his arm.
“This was the first time that he had showed up in public with her,” La Condamine later wrote, “and it was, if you wish, imprudent.” But Senièrgues played the moment for all it was worth, slowly strolling to his box, where he took out a handkerchief and made an exaggerated show of dusting off Manuela’s seat.

A murmur of disbelief rose from the crowd. The director of the bullfight, Nicolás de Neyra, rode up to where Senièrgues was seated and angrily told him that his behavior—indeed, his very presence—was disturbing the festival. And, Neyra asked, did Senièrgues understand that neither he, nor anyone else in Cuenca, was afraid of him? More insults were exchanged, and then the French doctor, unable to “contain himself” any longer, threatened to climb down into the ring and give Neyra a thorough beating.

At that, Neyra turned and rode off. The crowd now rained jeers down upon his head for this seeming retreat. The turmoil was mounting, and once outside the ring, Neyra told those gathered for the opening parade that he was calling off the bullfight because Senièrgues had threatened to kill him. “There was,” La Condamine confessed,
“nothing that could infuriate the common man more.” As the news that the bullfight had been canceled swept through the crowd, a chant of “Death to the Frenchmen” leapt from their throats, and suddenly Neyra was leading a mob of 200 men, armed “with lances, swords, slings, and guns,” back into the ring. Even the mayor, Serrano, joined Neyra and, stopping before Senièrgues, demanded that he surrender. Others were threatening to
clamber into the stands to get at the French doctor, who responded with a blast of Gallic pride: Who, he asked, were Serrano and Neyra to give
him
such an order? And then he jumped into the ring, holding a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other, all the while promising to
“give them a spectacle more interesting than that of the bulls.”

At first, nobody dared to approach Senièrgues. But then, as La Condamine later wrote, the mob surged forward:

Seeing himself surrounded, Senièrgues tried to retire from the scene, always facing his attackers, using his sword and stopping their blows, without receiving a single injury. In that manner, he arrived at the corner of the plaza, next to the fence that served as a barrier to the bulls, persecuted at every step by a hailstorm of stones, from which he tried to protect himself with his arms. The continuous throws of the stones knocked the weapons from his hands, and seeing himself disarmed, he could not think about anything other than fleeing. He retreated through the door that shut the fence, leaving his head and half his body exposed, and while he was like that, the mayor shouted to his followers: Kill him! Too quickly and too well was he obeyed: Senièrgues fell punctured with wounds, and if one is to believe the public testimony, it was Neyra who delivered the mortal thrust.

La Condamine, Bouguer, and the others had all sought to rush to Senièrgues’s aid the moment he had jumped into the ring, but Vicuna had held them back, certain that they too would be killed. With blood having been spilled, chaos was erupting everywhere. Senièrgues stumbled to the patio of a house in the corner of the plaza, the crowd continuing to kick and beat him. The deputy of the town drew his pistol to shoot him in the head, but at the last moment, the owner of the house cried out in protest, taking
“up in his arms the wounded man and helping to lay him in a bed.” Meanwhile, those in the stands turned their rage on the other members of the French expedition, including Ulloa and Juan, chasing
them into the streets of Cuenca. As they fled, the mob hurled stones at them, and Bouguer was at some point stabbed in the back. “We ran in fear of our life,” La Condamine later recalled, and even as they were scrambling into the sanctuary of a Jesuit’s house, a knife was hurled at Bouguer’s head that barely missed its mark. The priest and his servants quickly barred the door, the mob banging on it and trying to force it open, until at last their fury was spent and they retreated.

The murder scene in Cuenca.

From Charles-Marie de La Condamine
, Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi à l’équateur
(1751)
.

For the next four days, Senièrgues lay dying. He was brought to the home where the others had found refuge and where Jussieu tended to his gaping wounds and to Bouguer’s back.
“
Senièrgues alone has paid for all of us
,”
Jussieu wrote in an August 31 letter to his brother. The locals, he concluded, had become enraged by all things French. Bouguer had not been badly injured, but Senièrgues died the next day. The news of his murder spread throughout the
colony and even to Europe, although there the details of what happened became somewhat garbled in the retelling. “It seems,” wrote the Scottish mathematician Colin Maclaurin, in a letter to a colleague,
“that they were shewing some French gallantry to the natives’ wives, who have murdered their servants, destroyed their Instruments, & burnt their papers.”

L
A
C
ONDAMINE AND THE OTHERS
had planned to return to the surrounding area to do their astronomical observations. But in the wake of the riot, this seemed the height of folly. On the day that Senièrgues had been stabbed, the mob had eventually descended on the ranking official in town, an assistant to the corregidor, and forced him to promise that the Frenchmen would be made to leave the city. Serrano, meanwhile, had decided that
he
would direct the investigation of the killing, and as a first step, he told Neyra—the very person who had stabbed Senièrgues—to gather information about the doctor’s criminal activities. Even the arrival of the corregidor of the Cuenca district, who had hurried to town to restore order, did not make the French feel safe. At their urging, he did initiate criminal proceedings against Neyra, Serrano, and Leon, who had been a leader of the mob as it surged through the streets. But he feared that if he arrested them, the town would revolt. Many in Cuenca were toasting Leon for having vanquished his rival, and Neyra, La Condamine wrote bitterly, had been publicly praised “for having done the killing.” All that the corregidor dared to do was send a secret indictment to judges in the Quito Audiencia, which allowed the three ringleaders of the riot to remain at liberty.

Even so, after a few weeks, La Condamine and the others resumed their scientific work, and they did so in and around Cuenca. They were not going to let death threats keep them from completing their measurements.

At first glance, this last step in their mission—apart from the danger that the people of Cuenca presented—seemed simple.
Determining latitude by measuring the altitude of the sun or another star was an age-old science. However, as had been the case with their triangulation work, the French savants were intent on making measurements that were accurate down to one second of a degree. That precision had never before been achieved.

The instrument they would use for this purpose was the zenith sector. Rather than measuring a star’s altitude above the horizon, a zenith sector determined the complement of this angle: It measured the difference between the star’s position and a point directly overhead. The sector’s long stationery arm would be aligned along the vertical axis,
^*
while its telescope would be pointed at the star as it crossed the local meridian (the imaginary line of longitude drawn through the observatory and the earth’s two poles). The telescope was attached by a swivel to the sector’s vertical arm, and thus pointing it at the star created an angle that could be measured, which was known as a star’s zenith distance. By taking zenith-distance readings of the same star from different points on a north-south line, astronomers could determine the difference in latitude of those two points.

The academicians had brought a sector with a twelve-foot radius from France, the instrument having been skillfully constructed by Graham in England. However, Louis Godin, anticipating this moment in their work, had asked Hugo to construct a twenty-foot sector, which, since it had a larger radius, could theoretically provide more accurate measurements. La Condamine and Bouguer took the twelve-foot sector to the plains of Tarqui, where they built an observatory during the month of September, while Godin set up his twenty-foot sector in Cuenca, using the bell tower of the church in the
plaza mayor
as a makeshift observatory. Because the two groups had measured separate meridian lines, they needed to continue working apart. Each would determine the latitudes of the endpoints of its own meridian.

The use of a zenith sector required spending long hours in an awkward position. A pendulum clock can be seen on the observatory wall.