Gregory Curtis (16 page)

That wasn’t the only renovation Ravaisson found. The others were more serious, damaging in fact, and they had occurred, as he reluctantly had to admit, in 1821 while the statue was in the workshop of the Louvre.

W
HEN THE
Venus de Milo arrived at the Louvre, the four pieces from the hips were detached and needed to be remounted. The
two from the right side were attached properly. But for reasons that remain unclear, the restorers at the Louvre were unable to reattach the lower section from the left hip where it should have been. The faulty readjustment made the top edge of the broken piece extend higher than the top surface of the lower block of the statue. The restorers tried to chisel the protuberance down, but they couldn’t chisel off too much without causing visible damage. The edge of the broken piece still exceeded the surface of the bottom block by several millimeters, perhaps a sixteenth of an inch. But that small lip sticking up forced a series of readjustments, each one worse for the statue than the last.

The tiny protuberance at the left hip meant that the upper half of the statue could not be placed flush against the lower because it would then be resting on just a few thin millimeters of marble that, sooner or later, would give way under the weight of the upper half. The remedy was to place two wooden wedges about two centimeters wide and twenty-five centimeters long between the two large blocks, one wedge near each hip. That meant that the upper torso rested on the wedges rather than on the thin protuberance at the left hip. But the wedges left a gap between the upper and lower halves of the statue. To keep the gap as small as possible, the restorers made the wedge on the right slightly smaller than the one on the left and beveled both wedges so they were thinner toward the front than at the rear. The result was that the upper torso, leaning toward the front and to the right, met flush with the front edge of the lower block. That hid the line where the two large pieces of the statue met, but the cost was great. The wedges made the upper block incline more to the right front than it should.

That’s not all. From Clarac’s paper we learn that the line where the two major blocks joined was originally horizontal. But after the restoration, the line between the two surfaces was not horizontal but at least six degrees off the horizontal, meaning the statue was out of plumb and subject, in the case of any shock, to sliding further or even falling. This imbalance came about when the old base of the statue, which was level, was
placed inside a new base, which was not level. Although Ravaisson doesn’t say this, the new base must have been added in an excess of zeal to disguise the disappearance of the base with the inscription.

Ravaisson blamed all of the faulty reconstruction—the misplaced piece at the hip with the projecting edge, the chiseling of that edge, the wooden wedges, and the irregular new base—on haste and confusion at the Louvre. This was going a little easy on his predecessors, but we can go further than Ravaisson dared. Whether the inscribed base was destroyed or simply hidden—and the fact that it has never been found despite detailed searches of the Louvre’s warehouses suggests that the base was destroyed—it was suppressed and then lied about to preserve the identity the museum wanted for the statue.

The piece of left hip that was incorrectly restored is another matter. Reattaching it properly could not have been that difficult. And even if it was difficult for reasons we cannot know, there is no excuse for not finding the solution to the puzzle. It’s true that archeology was in its infancy and practices were acceptable then that are considered destructive today. Still, it was obvious that the piece had fit properly once and that it wasn’t fitting properly now. Ignoring that and sacrificing the integrity of the statue at the same time was simply incompetent.

Ravaisson, however, chose to look on the bright side. He wrote that “fortunate circumstances”—that is, the humidity in the basement of the police building—had made it possible to understand the mistakes made previously and to return the statue to the “proportions and appearance that she had in the past.” He concludes, “Now not only is this thing possible, but, according to the preceding argument, it’s a simple thing, too.”

Ravaisson may have thought the change was simple, but instead he found himself suddenly trapped where he was most uncomfortable: at the center of a controversy. The notion of making changes to the Venus de Milo instantly attracted the attention of French officialdom. Such a decision could not be
left to some conservator at the Louvre. Instead the Academy of Fine Arts was summoned to study whether to remove the wedges and restore the statue to its proper appearance or to leave the wedges in and continue to display the statue in the incorrect position it had had for fifty years. Faced with this “problem,” the Academy had two plaster casts made, one in the proper position and one in the false one, and stood them side by side against a background of green drapes.

Théophile Gautier, an author whose prolific writings included art criticism, was a member of the Academy. He concluded that, when properly displayed, the “Venus appears younger and more slender, but she has not the graceful abandon and voluptuous languor imparted to her by the inclined pose … she is more of a goddess and less of a woman.” This extreme example of French pride contends that the renovations made by the Louvre had actually
improved
the statue. In the end the Academy agreed with Gautier that the wisest course was to leave the wedges in so as not to change the look of the statue and interfere with the public’s “habit of admiration.”

R
AVAISSON
acquiesced to this decision. He didn’t have the wedges removed until twelve years later, in 1883, and then only when some repairs to the antique galleries of the Louvre forced the Venus to be removed from view for a short while. At the same time he had the hideous left foot made of plaster the restorers had added in 1821 taken off. Ravaisson later tried to explain his reluctance to correct the travesty he had exposed by saying that it seemed to him necessary “to give critics time to verify the facts and to get rid of long ingrained prejudices.” In other words, he didn’t want to cause any trouble.

This was typical Ravaisson. He had great gifts—a superior intellect combined with the eye and the hand of an artist. But he was so passive that his passivity could become a weapon. Henri
Bergson, the leading philosopher in France in the late nineteenth century, a man whose thinking was directly influenced by Ravaisson’s philosophical writings, described him precisely: “Never did a man seek less to influence others than did that man. But never was mind more naturally, more tranquilly, more invincibly rebellious to the authority of others: it eluded by its immateriality all attempts to come to grips with it. He was one of those who offer so little resistance that no one can flatter himself that he has ever seen them yield.”

In 1833, when he was twenty, Ravaisson won a contest sponsored by the philosopher
Victor Cousin for the best essay about
Aristotle. Five years later he published
Habit
, a work of barely a hundred pages that was his doctoral thesis and his only work of original philosophy until the last years of his life.
Habit
—and note his predilection even early in life for the quietest possible title—is little known outside France, but it deeply influenced Bergson as well as many German philosophers, including Heidegger. It’s still important in France, still easily available in bookstores, and still read.

Despite its brevity,
Habit
contains a whole philosophy of nature. What, Ravaisson wonders, is concealed beneath such natural laws as the regular working of cause and effect? The key to the answer lies in habit. Habit is an activity that by degrees has passed from a conscious act to an unconscious one, from will to automatism. But aren’t cause and effect and all the other workings of nature the same thing: the unconscious, automatic repetitions of habit? These repetitions must have begun with some will, then little by little become automatic, which means the laws of nature are the remains of a spiritual force. That is how, for Ravaisson, the presence of habit in our lives reveals the existence of God.

After publishing
Habit
, Ravaisson lived in Paris, where, despite the passivity of his nature, he managed to cut an impressive figure. He dressed with élan, favoring brightly colored checkered vests. His uncle, a famous explorer who wrote popular books about his adventures deep in the jungles of
Senegal,
introduced him into the best salons, including that of Madame Récamier. There he met Balzac and Lamartine and perhaps even Forbin, who was then entering his dotage. At the same time Ravaisson was painting and exhibiting at the salons. He was good enough to earn compliments from Ingres and the two men became close friends.

The natural course of his career would have been to become a professor of philosophy at one of the leading universities. But
Victor Cousin, the philosopher who only a few years earlier had given Ravaisson the prize for his essay on
Aristotle, disagreed with the spirituality in
Habit
. Cousin was an uninspired philosopher but an adroit politician who, thanks to a government position, now controlled the appointments to every philosophy faculty in France. He denied Ravaisson a chair. Ravaisson accepted the rebuke without complaint and quietly waited twenty-eight years for the opportunity to take his revenge.

Through his uncle’s influence, he obtained a government sinecure in the education bureaucracy. He wrote little until 1867, when, as part of a jubilee celebrating the fifteenth year of Napoleon III’s reign, Ravaisson was commissioned to write a history of French philosophy in the nineteenth century. After a feverish period of reading and study, he wrote a huge volume that contained a brilliant and devastating attack on Victor Cousin. Cousin’s preeminence and power were immediately broken, and he never recovered.

After being appointed to his post at the Louvre in 1870, Ravaisson retained it until his death in 1900. He had a wife, two daughters, and a quiet, self-effacing son named Charles, who worked for him at the Louvre. Ravaisson’s thirty years at the museum were a period of what was for him almost frantic activity. He wrote on Pascal, on funereal vases and bas-reliefs of antiquity, on
Leonardo da Vinci, on the history of religion, on the French civil code and factory workers, and on the one subject about which he knew less than any other man in the world:
military strategy. In his philosophical writings, which became more frequent toward the final years of his life, he continued his consistent theme of linking
Christianity with ancient philosophy and art. And he became a surprisingly skillful sculptor, taking up the chisel because of his continued, almost obsessive interest in the Venus de Milo.

I
N
1874, just three years after Ravaisson’s paper revealed the addition of the wooden wedges, a series of articles began to appear in the newspaper
Le Temps
in Paris. They contained the sensational news that when the Venus de Milo was discovered, her arms were intact. The author of the articles was a young writer named
Jean Aicard, but the source for this inflammatory information was a minor character in the drama of the discovery, the faithful Amable Matterer, the old naval officer who had befriended the young Dumont d’Urville on the
Estafette
and remained loyal to him for the rest of his life.

When d’Urville died in the train wreck with his wife and son in 1842, he left no heirs. Around 1860 a box of his papers turned up at an auction in Toulon. It was bought by an unnamed collector, who found in it a handwritten version of the paper d’Urville had published in 1821, proclaiming himself the discoverer of the Venus de Milo. However, there were certain small but interesting differences between the manuscript and the paper as it was published. One was that in the manuscript d’Urville had mentioned Matterer, called him a man “of great merit and one of my good friends,” and said he would never forget his kindness. D’Urville had deleted this short passage from the published version of the paper.

By the 1860s Matterer was eighty years old. He was living in Toulon, retired for many years. The unnamed collector took d’Urville’s manuscript to the old man, who was deeply moved
by the tribute to himself. D’Urville had written it when he was only an ensign, but after all this time Matterer took those words as coming from the famous admiral d’Urville had become.

Matterer’s affection for d’Urville was real and constant. While the great admiral was off on his journeys to
Polynesia or
Antarctica, Matterer paid visits to his lonely wife and son and maintained these visits even after Madame d’Urville became so peculiar that their other friends began to avoid her. Shortly after d’Urville’s death, Matterer, who always claimed that he was nothing but a rude seaman, nevertheless wrote a dignified memoir that he called
Notes nécrologiques et historiques sur M. le contreamiral Dumont a’Urville
. He published it in the
Annales maritimes et colonials
of October 1842.

As Matterer returned d’Urville’s manuscript to the collector, he said, “The whole truth about the Venus de Milo is not known, but I know it.” After some prompting and after obtaining a promise of secrecy, Matterer told the collector that the statue’s left arm was still attached when he and d’Urville had first seen the statue. It was raised and held an apple in its palm. Later, the comte de Marcellus had arrived on the
Estafette
to buy the statue just as the evil monk Oconomos, leading a troop of marines who had arrived on a Turkish warship, was taking it away. On Marcellus’s order fifty armed French sailors immediately went ashore to rescue the statue from the
Turks. During the fight, the Venus de Milo, bound by ropes, was dragged across the beach, where small rocks pitted its surface and the arm was broken off. Finally, the French sailors prevailed and saved the statue.

The collector, with more promises of secrecy, insisted that the old man write his story down, which he did. Matterer died in 1868, when he was eighty-seven years old. Several years later, assuming that Matterer must have wanted his story to be known after all—otherwise why consent to write it down?—the collector took the manuscripts by both d’Urville and Matterer to Jean Aicard in Paris.