Across the Endless River (17 page)

They followed him down a long, light-filled gallery whose floor was worked in large squares of black and white marble set diagonally. On both sides, busts and vases stood on classical pedestals between window bays that gave on to a side garden. “My wife's family collected antiquities in Italy under Napoleon,” he told Baptiste, who looked with curiosity at the statues, “but despite my given name, Mark Antony, I do not share their passion for long-dead emperors.” He turned to Paul and added, “Nor, now that I come to think of it, for recently dead emperors, either.” The rounded ceiling was covered with paintings, and Baptiste caught glimpses of what looked like processions and battle scenes, richly tinted against a sky that varied from the palest blue to the ominous gray clouds of a thunderstorm, as if damnation were arriving from on high.

They stepped out into a garden bathed in sunlight. It was warmer there, as the high walls protected it from the March wind. In the center lay a formal array of flower beds around a large fountain of carved dolphins. Beyond the round basin, the paths led into a tree-filled park. The fountain was dry, the flower beds unturned, but Baptiste could envision the luxuriance of spring in this hidden place south of the Seine, so near the heart of the city. Picard led them through an iron gate recessed in a tall evergreen hedge to a long, low stone pavilion that looked out onto the park. Picard pushed wide the oak door and beckoned them in with a flourish.

“Gentlemen, my
sanctum sanctorum!”

Baptiste's eyes adjusted slowly to the dark interior, and out of the gloom materialized a very large room filled with long oak tables covered with objects. He saw rocks and mineral specimens; two tables along a wall held bones and partial skeletons; at the far end of the room, he noticed, were several stuffed birds. Along the bank of windows that looked out on the park, several tables supported numerous tall jars containing specimens in fluid. Baptiste approached and saw that the smaller bottles contained large scorpions and spiders suspended in blue liquid, and the larger ones held small mammals—mice, squirrels, a pair of raccoons—in a yellowish solution, their legs extended and feet splayed as if they had been frozen while swimming. On an adjacent table, the partially dissected body of an animal lay in a pool of blood at the center of a marble slab, next to several scalpels and probes and a flickering gas lamp. The professor had no doubt been summoned from this operation; the air was heavy with the odor of preserving alcohol.

“Felis pardalis,”
Picard said with evident pride, “a nocturnal wildcat recently collected by a colleague in Mexico. It much resembles a miniature leopard.” He opened a small cupboard and produced the skin. “Have you ever felt more luxuriant fur? Of course Monsieur Villandry skinned it
in situ
so the viscera could be preserved, but one can imagine the heavenly grace of this”—he brandished the pelt—“in motion.”

Paul and Baptiste ran their hands through the fur, whose mottled bands and black-ringed spots of orange made a vivid pattern against its tawny background. Paul peered at the cat's organs. “A mature male, is it?”

“That's right. Quite a bit smaller than his cousin
Panthera onca,
what the Spanish call ‘jaguar.' This species we call ‘ocelot,' from the Nahuatl word
ocelotl.
I'm sure we're far from done with the cat family in Central and South America.” He replaced the fur in the cupboard carefully. “How I would love to observe this fellow in the wild! But an old man must content himself with pleasures closer to hand.” He motioned them to the back of the long atelier.

They eased between the laden tables and shelves. Baptiste corrected his first impression of impenetrable clutter; as they threaded their way through the room, he saw that although every surface was crowded, each object was carefully arranged. Octagonal paperboard labels bearing the scientific details of its subject in a precise hand were attached to every specimen. The atelier was meticulously clean.

At the back of the room, the professor's broad desk sat diagonally across a corner, facing his collection. It was covered by an intricately patterned Turkish carpet whose deep reds and blues overhung the sides of the desk. A blotter pad was flanked by a crystal inkstand and penholder. The only other object was a large round wooden platter; its dark center was incised with asymmetric carvings, and its rim decorated with eight white triangles evenly spaced around the circumference. On the blotter lay a sheet of paper with what looked like a tracing of the platter's central design. When Picard saw Baptiste's inquisitive look, he picked up the platter and said, “Haida, from the northwest coast of your continent. A colleague in Saint Petersburg collected it from a fur trader.” He set it down carefully and motioned them to several chairs drawn up nearby in front of a small tile-covered stove; its faint heat made the corner of the cool room comfortable.

“I allow just one of my servants in here, and that infrequently,” Picard said, “so I can only offer you the Armagnac I pour myself.” As he sat down, Baptiste looked at Picard closely. His sparse hair was black on top and gray at the temples, cut short and brushed forward without much care. The deep lines on his face amplified an impression of age and authority. Picard poured three glasses and sat back. “Here's to the unknown, gentlemen.”

As they drank, two men arrived with Paul's trunk. Picard carefully guided them to the back of the atelier with their unwieldy burden, and they deposited their load in the open space before the stove. He rubbed his hands with anticipation.

For the rest of the afternoon they sat together, enthralling Picard as Paul showed him woven blankets, embroidered buckskin shirts and leggings, weapons, tools, jewelry, handicrafts, and what he called “fetish pieces,” which Baptiste knew as sacred objects that bound their owner to a specific clan or ceremonial society. Paul savored the role of benefactor and collector, removing each piece in turn and, as he unwrapped the folds of cloth, telling the story of its provenance and how he had bought or traded for it. His surprise and delight were as evident as Picard's at the appearance of certain pieces, as if he, too, were seeing them for the first time. Baptiste thought he had quite likely forgotten about many of the things he had brought home.

“This is from the Sioux,” Paul said as he lifted a painted round shield of stretched buffalo hide two feet in diameter. “Every Indian brave has his own.”

Picard rose up from his chair, not waiting for it to be handed over for examination. “Oh, what an extraordinary piece!” he exclaimed, running his fingers across its surface. “I wonder how effective it would be in battle.”

Picard's spontaneous eagerness to know about each object intrigued Baptiste, and made him feel knowledgeable. He explained that it was an essential part of a warrior's weapons. “The designs aren't just decoration; they are sacred. Once the rawhide has been stiffened with lye, it can withstand the impact of an arrow.”

“I would never have known,” Picard murmured.

Paul next produced a pair of elk-hide moccasins richly embroidered with porcupine quills worked in a circular pattern. “I collected these from a Pawnee when we stopped at Cabanné's Post,” he said.

Again, Picard was taken with the beauty and strangeness of the objects. “Have you ever seen such beadwork on a moccasin?” His eyes, his voice, his whole body expressed joy at seeing wonderful things whose existence he had not imagined.

Baptiste had never seen anyone take such pleasure in holding ordinary things used by all the tribes, and Picard's curiosity puzzled him.
Why did he trace the designs of the Haida platter, or turn quivers and
shields and knives this way and that against the light?
Even Paul seldom examined so closely the things he bought and traded for.

When Paul held up a bow that he identified as Arikara, Baptiste gently corrected him. “That's a Cheyenne design on the handle,” he said. “They can look very similar.” Paul shrugged and handed the piece to Picard, who turned its arc slowly in his hands and felt the bone and hide inlays. “Gervais brought me one not unlike it from the Crow tribe three years ago,” Picard told them.

As he expounded on the origin or function of a piece, Paul often turned to Baptiste for confirmation, and Baptiste supplied the askedfor information as plainly as possible. “No, that is a warrior's necklace. A squaw would never wear grizzly claws,” or “Those are not Blackfoot leggings; they are Lakota Sioux. The quill work shows the warrior was a member of the Bear Clan.” His lucid elaborations brought a courteous assent from Paul.

Paul gently lifted a bundle from deep within the box. “These are toys from the Mandan tribe,” he said as he unfolded a brown cloth wrapper. He picked up a sphere and held it in the palm of his hand. It was six inches in diameter and minutely embroidered with colored porcupine quills in geometric patterns of green, red, and yellow. Its bright colors caught the light and glistened as Paul turned it in his fingers. “It is used in the women's ball games,” he said, placing it on the table. Next he picked up an eight-inch hoop of light-colored wood, across which rawhide strips had been fastened to divide it into quadrants, with several large openings spaced along the inner circumference. He held it high as he reached in the box with his other hand for a three-foot length of slender blond wood, one of its ends sharpened to a point. He jabbed at the crisscross circle with this improvised spear and said, “Many such hoops and poles are used by the boys of the tribe in a fast-moving game in which they run about the entire village.”

Paul smiled as he reached for the next piece. He lifted out two footlong cylinders bound together, put them to his lips, and produced a raucous discord as he blew into their slender chambers. They were whistles made of goose bone, each one wrapped in bright beadwork bands of green, black, and red, hanging together from a long loop of rawhide. They looked like tiny snakes, exotic and mysterious, in the atelier's dim light. “A child's toy, I suppose,” Picard volunteered, and Paul nodded.

Baptiste was unable to contain his uneasiness. The ball, the hoop, and the pole were, in fact, used in Mandan games; many times he had raced about the village with his friends as they battled for control of the fast-rolling hoop. But the double whistle was sacred. Only a member of the Ravens, the men's secret society, would be allowed to blow in it, and then only during their ceremonies. He wondered how Paul had convinced its owner to part with it.

Baptiste's emotions danced around in his chest. Pride, surprise, nostaligia, regret, anger—all came to the surface, triggered by these familiar objects. He knew almost every one from his own experience, having encountered them among the tribes who had fashioned them and used them daily or bartered them as trade objects along the Missouri. How lifeless they were here as Paul and Picard examined them with admiration. Seeing them away from that long stretch of river and endless plain that had been his entire world until recently, he felt sad. He missed the world of his childhood, and he didn't like seeing these things handled this way.

When Baptiste described the function of a bone scraper used to clean hides, Paul said, “My dear Picard, you see how lucky I am to have brought back with me such a knowledgeable informant.”

A moment of pure silence descended upon the room, punctuated only by the faint hissing of the stove.

“Come, come Paul,” Picard said. “You are very fortunate to have this young man in your company, but you mustn't talk as if he, too, comes out of your box of treasures.” He smiled at Baptiste. “I should like to know something about your background and how you came to know so many languages. But it is my understanding that it is the practice of many of the peoples of North America to offer information about themselves before making inquiries into the background of their guests. Much the same courtesy is expected here in Europe. Allow me to tell you about my family and my origins, and how I have come to be preoccupied with natural history.”

F
IFTEEN

P
icard had been raised in Burgundy on his family's lands, the third son among many children. He described a childhood of privilege as the son of a marquis, but his story differed greatly from what Baptiste would have imagined. It was filled with family misfortune, political intrigue, and the social convulsions that racked France in the years before the Revolution. His mother died in childbirth, his father turned to drink and gambling, and the children were left to fend for themselves, with the help of in-laws, servants, and friends. Picard told a tale of hurt and loneliness assuaged by the solace of nature. Baptiste thought of his own early years and how the open plains had been a refuge from the solitude he often felt in St. Louis.

“My mother was a d'Andelot,” he said, “one of the oldest Huguenot families in Burgundy, and my father was a rigorous Catholic who thought that Jesuits made the best schoolmasters. Whenever I could, I took refuge from both creeds in the woods.” A cousin owned a château renowned for its forests and streams, and there the young Picard had discovered a love of nature and science. “At Courances, I understood that the simple act of observation, however pleasing, was not enough. I learned to analyze, then to observe again, then to compare my findings with those of others. It was an escape that became a fascination and eventually”—he gestured broadly to include the pavilion and all its contents—“an obsession.” His father had refused to emigrate when the Revolution came, he explained, but since his mother had always treated the peasants with dignity, the family and their château were saved from the upheavals. “That's one thing you can say for the Protestants in France—they took seriously their notion of responsibility toward others.”