Page 191 - The Secret Museum

emu from an island just south of Australia that once belonged to Joséphine de

Beauharnais, wife of Napoleon. She commissioned the French explorer Baudin to
bring her animals to put in her menagerie. Baudin obliged with this small black emu
which, when it died, came into the museum collection. It is the only specimen of this
species known in the world and so is the ‘type’ for the species. Curators have gone
back to the island where it was collected to look for more black emu, but haven’t
managed to find any. Scientists who have studied the creature in the archives don’t

know whether it is an elusive species of its own, or a form of the mainland species
that evolved on the island to be very small.

Next, I saw an albino quail. It was shot by King Louis XV, and kept because it
was an albino. It is one of the oldest specimens in the collection. Taxidermy was an
embryonic art at the time, so arsenic soap was used to protect its skin from bugs.
Michel told me, ‘It also killed the taxidermists, but there were plenty of them at the
time. We also have a white thrush shot by King Louis XVI. Maybe shooting albino
birds was a French king’s privilege …’

Finally, I saw a chimp that belonged to the Comte de Buffon (1707–66), who was
the director of the Jardin du Roi which became the Jardin des Plantes. Luckily,

Buffon himself isn’t down in the archive … Or is he? I wouldn’t be surprised if he
were. Descartes’ skull is there, but not his body. That, according to Michel, is in
Sweden.

I went for a walk around the Jardin des Plantes, with a friend who was writing a
poem about an orangutan and wanted to see the one that lives there. She’d seen a
photograph – a friend texted it to her from the zoo – but she’d not seen him in the
flesh. When we spotted him he was sitting up on a ledge, with a handkerchief over
his head to keep the sun off. When he saw people watching him he swung about a bit,

waving his handkerchief.

Afterwards, we walked out on to rue Geoffroy St-Hilaire, named after the man
who led the gentle giraffe across France to Paris, and to the museum gardens. On this
road there is an ornate mosque (and a tasty Moroccan restaurant with birds flying
around inside it, and a hammam). It’s a shame it was built a century after the giraffe
lived in Paris because the sound of a call to prayer from the mosque might have made
the giraffe from Sudan, via Egypt, feel more at home.