Page 189 - The Secret Museum
P. 189
IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE Natural History Museum in France are 70 million objects of
high scientific or heritage value belonging to the French nation. Mustachioed
Monsieur Michel Guiraud has been curator of natural history at the museum for 20
years. He and Madame Michelle Lenoir, a lovely lady who is in charge of the
collection of books, showed me around.
We began in the library. Michelle flipped the window blinds shut to protect her
precious books, then began to pull out curious volumes. The books she is most proud
of are those in the ‘Vellum Collection’, which is made up of 7,000 drawings on
vellum, bound up into one hundred red leatherbound volumes which now live in the
cool, dark library and are rarely visited.
The red volumes contain three centuries’ worth of drawings of plants, animals and
birds by the best artists in France. A few pages are missing, taken in the nineteenth
century by naughty curators, perhaps to hang at home. We looked through them,
marvelling at the detailed drawings of plants and animals collected over the decades
since the museum began. The vellums were used as study material before
photography took over as the best medium in which to collect images of natural life.
Many of the animals in the drawings once lived in the museum’s Jardin des
Plantes, France’s most important botanical garden, which also has a zoo. I liked a
sweet picture of a camel born in the Jardin des Plantes, drawn when she was only 28
hours old. I also love a beautiful drawing of a long, fluttering-eyelashed giraffe.
Michelle explained to me that this baby giraffe was the first to come from Africa to
France, and ‘everyone went crazy for her.’
She arrived in 1827, as a gift from the King of Egypt. Born in the Sudan, the
gangly giraffe was packed onto a boat and sent across the water from Africa to
Europe; the boat had a hole cut on deck for her head and long neck to peer out of.
Three cows were taken on the trip so she would have milk to drink. She was held in
quarantine on the island of If, the former residence of the Count of Monte Cristo.
Then, when she arrived in France, she walked for 41 days, from Marseille to Paris,
to meet the King of France, Charles X. The procession across France was led by
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a top scientist and one of the founders of the Natural History
Museum in Paris.
All the way along her route, the people of France poured out of their homes to
watch her walk past: never had they seen such a mysterious creature. Such a long
neck! Such bizarre markings! A blue tongue! The French were obsessed with her, and
women began wearing their hair ‘a la giraffe’ (a bit like Marge Simpson’s) and
potters painted ceramics galore with the image of the pretty lady giraffe. In Lyon,
30,000 people turned out to see her cross the city.
When she arrived in Paris, she was installed in her own enclosure in the Jardin
des Plantes. She lived there for 20 years, with a man from Sudan named Atir, who
had travelled with her from Africa. Each night, he climbed a ladder to the mezzanine
to sleep. From there, he could reach out to scratch the pretty giraffe’s head.