Falling in Love While Stuffing a Zebra: A Philosophical Tale

1

A WILD ASS

Paris, Saturday, November 11, 1786

Startled by the sound of the small cannon firing its blank charge, George du Paon awoke. He realised that noon had passed, as that is when the miniature cannon announced midday in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. A few uncomfortable and interrupted hours of sleep slumped on a wooden bench had made his back sore. His limbs had stiffened in the cool air; after a night of debate and debauchery, an indulgent slumber had slipped into a late Saturday-morning nap. The gardens were now pleasantly quiet after the bustling rowdiness of the evening and night. George briefly basked in the silence—only interrupted by the sound of brooms sweeping the gravel avenues under the trees.

It was past time to get to work.

The autumn colours were all around, offsetting the pale rows of columns along each side of the vast rectangular courtyard of the Palais-Royal gardens.

Closely hugging the buildings protruding from the palace itself, each of the round grooved columns was coifed with a sober Doric capital. Above them, exuberant columns with Corinthian capitals embraced the gardens, bushels of acan-thus leaves topping the arcades and rows of vases lining their summit.

The lime trees in the garden grasped their remaining leaves, straight-jacketed into neat lines by an invisible army of ladder-climbing gardeners. Their rigorous geometry formed a quiet reproach to the baroque ornamentation above the bay windows along the façades.

When he had first visited the gardens after their reopening in ’84, George had been struck by the determined effort to encapsulate nature in neat lines and ornaments. He now relished the irony that it had become the place where both ideas and desires most freely flowed. The little cannon had been a great addition. A lens amplifying the sun’s rays lighted the gunpowder, albeit with the unfortunate side effect that it had to be fired manually on overcast days.

Subsequently, another one of the habituals, Jacques Delille, famous for his bon mots, had written a short poem on the ardours and arbours of the Palais-Royal: In this garden one encounters neither fields nor meadows, nor woods, nor flowers. And, even if habits are upended there, at least one’s watch may be set.¹ George recalled a wine-imbibed evening when he had unusually wandered beyond his habitual cafés in the Palais-Royal and had met Delille, as they found themselves at the same table. They had explored at length the importance of knowing time precisely, albeit with a granularity only sensible with mild intoxication.

A keen sailor, Delille had recalled the great invention of the Yorkshire working-class master-clockmaker John Harrison, who had solved the mighty longitude problem for ship navigation only seventeen years prior. However, the grand allocated prize and the recognition promised by the Royal Society had been withheld from him, largely because Harrison did not fit the mould of the British scientist. Somewhat randomly, George and Delille had rejoiced that at least in France, precise time was available to all through a daily cannon shot.

Now, with an uneasy gait, George headed towards the northern exit of the garden, past the theatre where the actors were filing in to practice for the evening’s performance. He observed that most were clad in the well-worn rough linen clothing that identified those with high hopes but limited means. One man stood out in an ill-fitting bright blue silk coat with white ribbons, hinting at an affair with a wealthy admirer who had left the frock as a reward. The two women behind him had likely found the same route to better clothes, but at least they had had the coquetry to make their gifted dresses fit tightly. Actresses and actors were in great demand in the Palais-Royal, both for their good looks and for their ability to shift between identities to the whim of their admirers after the evening applause had dimmed.

Crossing into the gardens of the Tuileries Palace, he felt his head clearing and his senses sharpening.² Their wide expanses onto the Seine on the south side contrasted with the restricted space of the Palais-Royal. The relative anonymity of those who strolled the gardens was a relief from the social, intellectual, and sensual intensity of his evening’s redoubt.

In these gardens, the trees were less controlled. The moss accumulating on the soaring statues celebrating the fame of Louis XIV amplified this sense of laissez-faire. The jumble of colours painted on the autumn leaves echoed the absence of willed aesthetics.

When George finally crossed the moat’s turning bridge and emerged onto la place Louis XV, he was ready to plunge into his workday.³ In the middle of the square stood a somewhat pompous equestrian statue of Louis XV—which Jefferson would express his disapproval of and warn Congress against considering a similar tribute to George Washington. The long, ornate, columned façade along the north side of the square, framing the space between the jumbled trees of the Tuileries gardens and the martial grounds of the Champs-Élysées, had been designed a decade and a half earlier by Gabriel. It was one of the first urban commissions in Paris—which hitherto had been mostly limited to religious edifices.

George was stopped from crossing the street by a long parade of horse-drawn wagons covered in black tarps. Ahead of the procession were men carrying torches, and between them priests chanting the Mass of the Dead. The Parisian cemeteries were overflowing with corpses. The living were clamouring for more space; the dead needed to move away, driven by their inexorable growth in numbers, as generation succeeded generation. A solution was found. The chain of wagons was transferring six million skeletons into the vast labyrinths carved over centuries in the limestone beneath the city. On a prior year’s visit to these catacombs, as he walked through the tunnels carved under Paris, George had witnessed the bones sorted and stacked, femur upon femur, skull upon skull, and so on. It had struck him that his work was always concerned with the external shape of animals and that he never dealt in bones, which were a mere afterthought, and yet through their presence, millions of people retained a small toehold in today’s reality. At the thought of his sister’s bones, tears briefly surged to his eyes, as if propelled by a great pressure. Violette would have laughed dismissively at the mere thought of her bones being separated, sorted, and stacked.

Crossing the Seine, now walking at a brisk pace, he soon reached his atelier in the rue des Saints-Pères. The large oak doors onto the street were open, as was usual during the day. At the back of the second courtyard, he was engulfed by the familiar, mildly nauseating smell of formaldehyde from the atelier.

The workshop was the reign of his collaborators Gaston and Jeanne. They greeted him gaily, displaying not the slightest surprise at his late arrival. They were used to the alternative daily rhythm that distinguished the social strata.

When Gaston had started his employment over a decade before, he’d been very slim, but over the years, he’d grown both in size and in confidence. His girth, gradually expanding over the period, testified to the ample food that the workers enjoyed. Gaston interrupted his whistling to greet his employer with a joyous Monsieur! You’ve returned. I hope your lunch was as good as ours. Jeanne only barely touched hers, so I enjoyed it for the both of us. His dark hair and eyes were offset by an even and joyous nature.

George had learnt to value Gaston’s loyalty over his wits. Whenever Gaston left the atelier for his weekly visit to his brother in Saint Denis, his whistling echoed in the street, bouncing between the façades. He never failed to return with a bottle from his brother’s meagre wine trade, which notwithstanding its basic nature, he insisted on sharing with Jeanne and George.

Jeanne pushed Gaston aside. Monsieur George, you must see what has just been delivered!

At twenty-one, Jeanne’s steadfastness exuded seriousness, the sparkle in her eyes cast a mineral hardness that betrayed the harshness of her early years. Her lips had acquired the slightest Parisian pout. Her head tilted upwards, making her carved nose more enticing and prominent, and her chestnut hair flowed down the back to the hem of her corset.

George observed how she complemented Gaston’s rougher presence with the undulating movements of her hands. But years of scrubbing floors and later carcasses had left a coarse imprint on those hands.

A client appeared in the entrance, and Jeanne smiled and bowed slightly. I am sorry, sir, she politely told the man, we are closed today, but if you can come back tomorrow, I will be very happy to show you all the new work.

The man smiled back and made his retreat.

Jeanne’s unmistakable charm had become an additional enticement for George’s clients to remain faithful to the atelier. Du Paon’s firm was much sought after and his business was thriving, but most commissions consisted of mere foxes, deer, rabbits, or the odd peacock.

Jeanne closed the door and walked to the back of the room towards the new arrival.

Well done, said George, in appreciation of Jeanne’s elegant handling of the client. With such a charming rejection, he may well return.

The highlight of the morning had been a poorly cleaned new delivery betraying a disarming lack of skill. Jeanne had laid out the animal on the large wooden table at the centre of the back room of the workshop so they could all observe the sample.

After the initial thrill at the sight of the striped beast, George observed the deficiencies in its preparation and frowned. This is very messy. Who prepared this? Where on earth did they learn their trade? I do hope that we can repair this.

Jeanne looked deeply concerned, then suddenly delighted. These stripes! Not at all like a cow, much as if it was painted by someone. And so big!

Salt had conserved the inside merely adequately, but George was relieved to see that the outer skin had remained in perfect condition. This would be critical in obtaining the high-level result that the queen would surely expect.

How should we proceed? asked Jeanne as she bit her lip.

Such an exotic animal was the rarest of challenges. Alive, along with its sibling, it had been a present given in 1762 to the young Queen of England, a welcome distraction a year after her marriage to the rather dull King George III.

Before considering how to proceed, George stared at the striped apparition, recalling how it had been mentioned many times in the Journal de Paris. Let me describe its English background a little. You realise the remarkable item we have here, right?

I always thought the English were strange, and their animals as well, ventured Gaston.

No, no really, these animals do not live in England, George reassured him. It comes from the south of the African continent. This one survived the long journey from the Cape of Good Hope, alongside its sibling, to England, where it was offered to the queen—and then went on to live to a remarkably old age—that alone should impress us. The queen had grown so excessively fond of it that she wanted it eternalised. That is how it has made its way to Paris.

The zebra had been a source of inspiration for the satirist’s pens of the day, and George recalled one particularly bawdy song which he recited to his collaborators:

"Though squeamish old Prudes with Invective and Spleen,

May turn up their Noses and censure the Queen;

Crying out, ‘Tis a Shame, that her Queenship, alas

Should take such a Pride—in exposing her Ass.’"

Ass! screamed Gaston in delight.

A text from the English court had been delivered along with the skin, and it related the story of the animal. George loosely quoted from it: While the first zebra had been given away and finished stuffed in the Blue Boar pub in York, in keeping with the fashion to exhibit exotic animals in taverns and coffee houses, the queen, it seemed, desired a more deserving afterlife for her second one. The first one had been rapidly decaying through the ineptitude of an insufficiently skilled taxidermist. The Leverian collection at Leicester House was a great favou-rite of the queen. She had ordered the collection to be open and at no cost for visitors, a generous gesture her court had sought to temper by making the free access contingent on arriving in a private carriage.

Skipping past a few less interesting paragraphs, George went on. As the queen intended the second zebra to be included in the Leverian, she apparently sought out the most reputable artisans in Europe to conserve the animal. This led to the crate with the zebra materialising on this November day in the rue des Saints-Pères, on our doorstep. The choice of a French master over a British one was made barely palatable by a brief lull in the habitual tensions between our countries.

A bundle of prints and a folder with several dozen drawings had been delivered along with the skin. George peered over Jeanne’s shoulder as she sifted through them. It appears that an added benefit of the sordid past of the widely mocked ‘Queen’s Asses,’ George said, is that there is no shortage of sketches and drawings of the animals during their lives. Since neither George nor any of his collaborators had ever seen a zebra, these images were of essential importance to their work.

Last year they painted a horse for carnival. I thought it was a bad joke, but this one seems to have been created with stripes! blurted out Gaston.

They do look like grazing donkeys on the drawings, Jeanne added, setting the stack of drawings down on a nearby cabinet, but somehow more muscular, more ready to pounce.

There was an additional reason why this commission was so important to George, and he was keen to discuss the history of the beast with his friend Nicolas de Condorcet during his next visit to the Palais-Royal. Well-read and well-connected, he would no doubt have an original view. Nicolas was a most prominent economist, mathematician, and nobleman. Their friendship was an improbable one—which made George all the more grateful for it. Sharing a compulsion to observe the world from a distance, Nicolas and George had become close friends, notwithstanding the gap in their social rank. They met regularly, most often at one of the cafés in the Palais-Royal, and thrived through each other’s observations and speculations on the challenges of the times.

A regular at court, Nicolas had told him of the zebra that lived at the Versailles court and was the subject of many experiments. Buffon, Nicolas explained, on one of their recent outings, wanted to understand whether they might improve the species, perhaps by crossing it with a French female ass. The main court naturalist Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon was a shared acquaintance.

Buffon has been a great supporter of my workshop, and I owe him much gratitude. You, my friend, probably owe him much champagne! George had commented in jest.

With a brief smile, Nicolas had gone on to describe the outcome of Buffon’s efforts. Alas, he told George, a sparkle in his eye, the zebra spurned all attempts at forced courtship. Painting stripes on the unfortunate French ass could equally not excite the Versailles zebra. The comte had concluded that this coldness could not be attributed to another cause than the disagreement of their natures, for this zebra was then four years of age and was very lively in every other exercise.

George had heard from a colleague naturalist that this experiment was widely followed with considerable interest, as zebras were notoriously untameable, contrary to their European cousins, who were the very metaphor of domestic servitude in the city, farm, and on the battlefield. The inability of man to subjugate the zebra, a beast so much a horse in its likeness, was felt as a notable failure.

This had an impact well beyond the loss of an ornamental carriage puller, casting a shadow over the essence of the relationship of man with the natural world. Although eroding