The entrance to the paleontology museum at the Jardin des Plantes is graced by a statue of Lamarck, with the engraving “The Father of Evolution,” in giant letters, on its pedestal. Darwin, on the other hand, is nowhere in sight.
There is nothing more exasperating than French monuments to unheroic local heroes. In the Luxembourg Gardens, where I run many mornings, there are statues of the great writers of France, genuinely towering and Olympian figures—real all-stars, the greats. Baudelaire scowls at the southern end of the gardens;
Delacroix is greeted by angels at the other end. I salute them both every morning, while jogging by Verlaine and Sainte-Beuve. In the midst of them all there is a statue to a man whose name I, at least, have never heard, a guy named Branly, whose pedestal proclaims him to be the father of the wireless communication, radiotelegraph, and television. I am skeptical of this claim. It is a few feet away from the small, just larger than life-size Statue of Liberty, made by Bartholdi for fund-raising back when. This Liberty looks, well, sexy, free.
At last we get to the big Hall of Evolution, and Darwin sneaks in there—sideways. He gets a plaque. The Hall is filled with stuffed animals, giraffes and elephants, from another time, all apparently done by the artisans of Deyrolle but now placed in modernized half-light, the same kind of light you see in the fish restaurants of the Seventh Arrondissement. Recessed lighting says modern in France the way that a pastel arch says postmodern in New York.
The boy, however, wants to see his dinosaurs, so we go down in the gardens to the old Hall of Paleontology, off by itself down by the entrance to the gardens. It is two floors of pure bones—all bones, wall-to-wall bones, more bones than I have ever seen. At the entrance, a few feet from the Lamarck memorial, there is a statue by Fremiet of the Eternal Struggle. It shows a great ape—a species unknown to nature, with the ears of an elephant, the face of a magazine executive, and the grin of a Santa Monica maitre d’—who, clutching his (her?) infant, has just wrapped his hands around the throat of a beautiful human youth. The youth, before being killed by the ape, managed to plant his ax in the ape’s side, where it has left a hideous and gaping wound, perfectly cut out in stone. It is lurid, preposterous, and loud, the most improbable memorial, and this by the guy who made the golden and boring St. Joan on the rue de Rivoli. It defeats my dusty and out-of-date attempts at iconographic analysis, despite Luke’s constant questions: Why the ape, why the man…? Does it represent the triumph of Lamarckian evolution? Then the man with the culture (i.e., the ax) should be triumphing over the ape. It can’t represent the domination of the ape-in-man over the beauty-in-man. Is it the Triumph of the Monkey in Us? Or is it simply (simply!) a lurid show piece? Eugenio would have pointed out that the “trope” or conceit of the ape-on-the-loose is a rich nineteenth-century Parisian one, ranging from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to this. Man and Ape in Evolutionary Metaphor… these days you could probably put it out front of the Concorde and redub it “France and America.”
The dinosaurs are upstairs. They are enormous and articulated to look big. Of course, this is easy: They are big. But they are made to look even bigger, perhaps by contrast with the delicate beaux arts architecture. They loom. There is a single mold of a T rex head, which turns out to be a copy taken from the New York T. rex. Just as the famous mechanical nightingales of Byzantium that Yeats admired so were, as you discover when you read Byzantine history, the same damn bird, brought out century after century to impress out-of-town visitors, until the paint was peeling off the thing, so the T. rex that has scared several generations of schoolchildren in the two cities is the same damn lizard, dead so many million years.
In the new New York hall, where we took Luke last Christmas, the dinosaurs look wise and cunning, balanced forward on their middle feet, delicate little hands trembling like base stealers. They have fabricated fiberglass skins too, in gleaming, subtle, elegantly understated two-tone, Armani colors. Here, in Paris, in the old museum, they are still upright and looming and stolid. There is even a brontosaurus, still called that, though I think I read that there never were brontosauruses, that they were a false association of two different animals.
The force—I suppose I have to say the image—of the dinosaur, as it was understood by the nineteenth century, comes through here, terrifyingly. It is like reading Conan Doyle’s “Lost World.” The giant Irish elk (a mammal and, anyway, not that amazing—just a big moose) shares pride of place here with the big lizards, as he does in Doyle’s story. The reason, I suspect, is that it wasn’t so much the distant, scary past that drew the nineteenth century, but the simple specter of giganticism, bigness itself. They wanted their dinosaurs to loom over them, as their tycoons did. In the “Lost World” of Conan Doyle, in fact, the dinosaurs are constantly being called Gothic. They were interested in big, whereas we are interested in mean. (Was this because bigness was their problem—mass armies, mass society, massive-ness—whereas meanness is ours—small wars, horrible murders?) The difference between the old Parisian and the new New York dinosaurs is the difference between an industrial dinosaur, big and dumb and looming, and the postindustrial dinosaur, swift and smart and a scavenger. We make our monsters according to the armature of our fears. They wanted what loomed over them to be huge, stolid, immovable, and a little slow, like J. P. Morgan or Mr. Frick. We want them now to be smart, fast, mean, ugly, and wearing expensive suits, like Barry Diller or Rupert Murdoch.
A little while later I visited the new Bibliotheque Nationale, the big—the unbelievably vertigo-inspiringly enormous—library, out at the other end of the quai in the Thirteenth. It seems to have been designed by a committee made up of Michel Foucault, Jacques Tati, and the production designer of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The whole thing is set up, way up, on a wooden platform the size of six or seven football fields, high up off the street. There is an unbelievably steep stairs, leading up to this plateau, which is like nothing so much as one of those stepped pyramids where the Aztecs plucked the hearts out of their sacrificial victims. Then there are four glass skyscrapers, each one set at one of the corners of the platform, and all very handsome, in a kind of early-sixties, post-Lever House, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill way. The vast space has been planked with teak boards, to make it “warmer,” but this just makes it more slippery. They have had to put down cheap-looking runners on a sticky backing, to keep people from breaking legs. (Apparently there were quite a few victims early on.)
The vast, windswept plaza, with the four towers at its corners, is so vast that it creates what one would have thought would be a perfectly predictable wind tunnel effect. This not only means that you walk with your head down against the gusts, even in the middle of July, but also means that all the bushes and shrubbery that were meant to “humanize” the wooden plaza had to be put inside vertical cages of mesh, which in turn are placed between white bunkers. Left out on their own, the shrubs would just die in the wind. It looks like a bad conceptual art installation about the domination of nature by man. (This is the Foucaultian part.) A stray piece of foliage peeks out forlornly from some of the enclosures, like Hans’s fingers from the witch’s cage. Looking across the platform toward the tiny and impossibly steep steps, you cannot see the stairs at all; it simply looks like a platform from which one could leap, suicidally, gratefully.
Downstairs you wait at the accueil for your card. This is done with the usual French functionary hospitality: Who are you, what do you want, what makes you think, etc.? Finally, after an hour, you may get a card. First you visit the desk of one severely disciplinary young lady, who takes your coordinates and enters them into the single-overseeing computer system that was intended as the glory of the place. You are now sent to another young woman, who reenters and corrects all the information the first girl entered, and then asks if you are ready for your picture. (This is the Jacques Tati part.) You nod and rise, looking for the photo booth. She shakes her head gravely and tells you just to sit back. A camera, mounted to your right and above, swivels, moves down on its track, and gawks at you, musing in and out. Don’t move; your hostess has just become Annie Leibovitz, she is the photographer. She clicks her mouse forward onto the next screen of her computer, and there you are: The photo system is computerized too. She waits, thoughtfully for the moment of maximum exhaustion, and snaps your picture. You can, if you crane your head a bit, see a thousand images of yourself on the screen, being entered into the system.