Page 190 - The Secret Museum

The zoo in the Jardin des Plantes was founded in the 1790s by Saint-Hilaire. He

started it with animals saved from the mobs of the French Revolution who attacked
the royal menagerie in Versailles. The Jardin des Plantes was once royal property –
le Jardin du Roi – a royal garden filled with medicinal plants, and the museum
buildings once housed the royal natural history collection. The Revolution changed
all that and the whole thing was opened to the public. The best natural history
professors in France were hired to research and expand the collections, now brought

together under the renamed Natural History Museum.
The giraffe – like the other animals and plants in the Jardin des Plantes – was

drawn by the best artists of the day. The beautiful drawing at the end of the chapter of
the giraffe’s head and neck was created in the year the giraffe arrived in Paris. It was
drawn by Nicholas Huet, something of a celebrity in the world of nineteenth-century
natural history painting. The drawing has never been on show. It is too fragile. It was
created for scientists, and for posterity. There are no copies and it is so old and
precious it’s best for it to remain within its leatherbound volume in the library, away

from the light. We put the book back in its place and opened the blinds. The body of
the giraffe is now in a museum in La Rochelle. We looked at a little model of her that
sits on the window ledge of the library. Then we headed underground.

Beneath the museum are three floors of stuffed creatures and animals stored in
jars. Few people know that this archive is here and the museum never does tours. It’s
very odd, once you know it’s there, to walk across the courtyard and through the
museum building and imagine the long corridors and dungeon-like rooms filled with
thousands of dead animals, from tiny mice to huge lions, just beneath your feet. I

imagined what would happen if they all came back to life.
The specimens are kept at a steady temperature of 15.5°C (59.9°F) so that the

alcohol in the spirit collection doesn’t vaporize and explode. (That would be a really
bizarre explosion – bits of long-gone creatures from around the world flying
everywhere.) It’s one of the best natural history collections in the world. Michel
believes seventy per cent of the world’s ‘type’ specimens are here. It’s a living
collection and the museum keeps it all, because you never know what will be needed
for research in the future.

A lot of the taxonomic specimens kept here are skins, taken from the skeletons
displayed above ground in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy. Artists love to visit

the museum to draw and learn about the inner workings of all sorts of bodies. I don’t
suppose too many of them have ever wondered what happened to the outer layer of
the animals they are drawing. They might be surprised to know that they are standing
on top of them. The skins have been stuffed, so there is a whole row of ten fierce
lions, whose skeletons are upstairs in the museum, beside a row of shrews, teeth
comically bared.

Michel said they have enough stories down in the dark archive to fill two or three
books. He showed me a selection of the most iconic specimens. First, we met a black