Gregory Curtis (4 page)

Both men seem to be referring to the hand holding an apple that was among the bits and pieces Yorgos found in the niche with the statue and put with the rest of the fragments in the cowshed. Its marble and dimensions were consistent with the statue’s. And, as both Dauriac and Brest seem to have known, Greek statues of Venus often showed her holding an apple. The apple is the central symbol in the myth of how the
Trojan War began. When the mortal Peleus and the goddess Thetis were married, the only goddess who wasn’t invited was Discord. For revenge she threw a golden apple with the inscription “For the fairest” among the guests. Juno, Venus, and Minerva each claimed that the apple was meant for her. Jupiter saw nothing but trouble for himself if he chose any one of the three above the others, so he sent the goddesses to Mount Ida, where Paris, the most beautiful mortal man, was tending flocks of sheep. Each goddess appeared before him and tried to bribe him to choose her. Juno promised power and wealth. Minerva promised triumph in war. But Venus promised the most beautiful woman on earth for his wife. That decided Paris. He chose Venus and gave her the apple. The most beautiful woman on earth turned out to be Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Venus helped Paris persuade Helen to leave with him for Troy. The Greeks united to bring Helen back, and the Trojan War began.

A
LONG
with Voutier’s sketches, Dauriac’s letter, and Brest’s letter, there is a fourth description of the statue from the days that followed its discovery. Its author, an ensign in the French navy who was just a month shy of his thirtieth birthday, had arrived on April 16 aboard a ship named the
Chevrette
. During the next ten years he would emerge from obscurity to become one of the most famous men in Europe. His rise began in
Melos when he appropriated for himself the credit for discovering the Venus de Milo.

This ensign was the driven, indomitable, and peculiar Jules Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville. Although he languished through his twenties as a junior officer without connections, he eventually became a rear admiral. He led three voyages around the world, during which he explored the coasts of Australia, New Zealand, and New Guinea as well as many islands in Polynesia. He established the first French presence in Antarctica. His accounts of these voyages became publishing sensations and were translated into a number of languages (although not English), thus spreading his fame throughout Europe. His work in
botany earned him membership in learned societies, as did his philological studies on the languages of Oceania.

Tall and muscular, he flaunted his robustness and endured the most demanding physical hardships almost with relish. Although his crews were loyal to him because he was scrupulously fair, he was too awkward socially to be friendly with them. He usually spent evenings at sea in his cabin poring over botanical specimens and writing in his journal. By the time he became an admiral, he would wear his uniform only when in port; otherwise he was unconcerned with his physical appearance. An officer who sailed with him wrote later that he was “a tall untidy man, without stockings or cravat, wearing torn duck trousers, and unbuttoned twill coat, the whole outfit crowned
by an old straw hat full of holes.” When he spoke, he made a whistling sound through his teeth.

D’Urville’s unconcern for appearances concealed the driving motivation of his life: a desire for fame. Born in Normandy in 1790, he lost his father seven years later. His formidable mother made the fragile boy spend hours outside in the coastal chill without a coat. She thought that would toughen him up, and evidently it did. She was repelled by affection and insisted that her son address her only in the most formal and polite language. When he was ten, d’Urville asked an uncle if any famous men came from the little town in Normandy where he was born. The answer was no. “I promised myself,” d’Urville wrote,
“to work twice as hard to place my name on the wings of fame. Habitually plunged in such thoughts, I had acquired an aloof and serious manner, unusual at my age.”

He had joined the crew of the
Chevrette
in 1819. Although d’Urville was married with a son who was going on three, he chafed at the shore duty that had been his lot since the
Bourbons’
restoration to the French throne. The
Chevrette
had a mission to study the islands of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. D’Urville was to be one of the scientists on board, his subjects being botany, entomology, and archeology. As always he performed these duties with immense energy and enthusiasm. His immediate superior officer,
Lieutenant Amable Matterer, later wrote that “whenever the ship was at anchor, M. Dumont d’Urville left very early almost every day and did not return till after sunset, laden with all sorts of plants that he carefully classified and pressed. He would come aboard tired out but elated to have found some rare plants that had escaped the notice [of previous explorers].”

While the
Chevrette
was anchored at
Melos, d’Urville and Matterer made excursions across the island. On April 19, after the ship had been in harbor for three days, they made the hour’s climb of the large, steep hill overlooking the harbor to Castro, the main village on the island.

When they arrived at the village itself, it hardly seemed worth the effort of the climb. The houses, two stories tall with whitewashed sides and flat roofs, all looked alike. A set of bare stairs without any rail led up one wall from the street to the second story, where there was a flat terrace. During the day women sat on the terrace spinning cotton thread and often, if eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers are to be believed, looking provocatively at passersby.

Inside the houses the first floor was a combination stable, chicken roost, and pigsty. Garbage and muck from both humans and animals were thrown into the street, making it impossible to walk through town without fouling one’s boots. The smell was nauseating. And fleas were everywhere. “The quantity of
the insects is truly extraordinary,” one traveler wrote. “One is covered and devoured. They spread over the head and slide into the hair.”

In Castro, d’Urville and Matterer called on the French viceconsul. With two French officers in front of him,
Louis Brest had only one thing on his mind. He began to tell them about the new discovery.

D’Urville and Matterer, excited by this news, asked Brest to take them to see the statue. He led them down the hill from Castro to the niche where the statue had been found. Matterer simply looked, but d’Urville assumed his role as a scientist and began to measure the niche and the bottom half of the statue, which
Yorgos had not bothered to carry to his cowshed. D’Urville copied as best he could the Greek inscription on the wall of the niche, before asking what had become of the upper half. Brest gestured toward Yorgos’s cowshed in a far corner of the field. The farmer’s mother now sat spinning as she guarded the door. In a few moments they had walked across the field, and Yorgos let them in. Like the ships’ captains before them, they waded through the manure on the floor to the place where the upper half stood. They were, according to Matterer, who used the same word as Voutier, “stupefied.” The two sailors stared at the statue in silence. They also examined the herms, the arm fragments, and the hand with the apple. D’Urville was familiar with the myth of the three goddesses and the golden apple. He thought that meant the statue must have originally been part of a group with Juno, Minerva, and Paris. At last he began measuring again and taking notes.

Eventually, d’Urville asked his friend for his opinion. Matterer said he thought it was beautiful, but he mistrusted his own judgment in art. Yorgos, who from the first was eager to get the thing off his hands in exchange for some cash, offered to sell the statue to the two officers. They refused. They didn’t have enough money with them. More important, though, their ship had a long and difficult mission in the Black Sea and was already crowded with crew, supplies, and scientific equipment of every
description. There was no room for a heavy and unwieldy statue.

Daylight was waning now. After profuse thanks to Brest, the two men returned to the
Chevrette
. That was the end of it for Matterer but not for d’Urville. He spent the evening in his cabin and wrote, as he did each night, in his journal. He could not have known how famous the Venus de Milo would become. But along with
Olivier Voutier,
Captain Dauriac, Louis Brest, and even
Yorgos, he sensed that the statue was not just one of thousands of antique statues but something special and powerful, something less like a thing than an event.

So, on this night of April 19, 1820, he began to create the legend that would first make him famous. From that moment everything he did or wrote was a mixture of truth, errors, and lies of omission designed to make d’Urville himself, and only him, the discoverer of the Venus de Milo. He tried and almost succeeded in sweeping everyone else, including the faithful Matterer, off the stage and out of history.

O
N
A
PRIL
22, three days after d’Urville and Matterer had seen the statue, their ship, the
Chevrette
, weighed anchor at
Melos and sailed for Constantinople. By then the four other French ships that had been at Melos during the time of the discovery had departed as well. The
Emulation
and the
Bonite
were returning to France. The
Lionne
and the
Estafette
, with Olivier Voutier aboard, were bound for Smyrna. Now Louis Brest was left alone on the island to handle the primates as best he could.

The primates were the legal authority on the island, but exactly what the law was in 1820 is no longer clear and may not have been clear even then. Melos was part of the Ottoman Empire, but no Turk or Turkish official lived there. The
Turks imposed heavy taxes that an official came around regularly to collect. And a magistrate appeared from time to time to sit as
a judge in criminal cases, which he would decide according to the bribes he received. Other than this corrupt magistrate, the islanders received no governmental services of any kind in return for the burdensome taxes they paid to the Ottomans. There were no police or civil courts. There was no protection from pirates and no public works. There was not even a postal service. The whole Ottoman Empire, which at this time stretched from
Persia to the Balkans, was administered by communications sent via personal messengers.

The possessions of the empire were divided into provinces, each ruled by its own pasha. The Greek islands in the Aegean formed one of the provinces. Their ruler was the kaptan pasha, who was also supreme admiral of the Turkish navy. The kaptan pasha, like most of the other pashas, used an intermediary known as a dragoman to administer the island province entrusted to him.

This peculiar position rose to importance as the Turks expanded far into Europe in the sixteenth century. The Turks did not know Western languages or customs, nor did the European powers know the Turkish language or Turkish ways. Since each side regarded the other as ignorant barbarians who were infidels besides, neither side was particularly inclined to learn the intricacies of living with the other. Dragomans bridged the gap. Typically, they were from European families who lived in Constantinople. Some of these families had been there for generations. They were hired by the European states to represent them to the Sublime Porte, as the sultan’s government was known, but dragomans as a class were notoriously corrupt and devious. In the eighteenth century, England and France began sending young men to Turkey to train as dragomans in order to avoid this corruption. It was considered lonely and onerous duty. Its single attraction was that after ten or twelve years among the despicable but wealthy Turks, the young men could return home to England or France with a fortune.

In 1820 the dragoman for the kaptan pasha was a Greek prince named
Nicolas Morousi, third son of the
prince of Moldavia.
Like most of the other dragomans for the Greek possessions, Morousi was a Christian who came from Constantinople. Although he was technically a servant of the kaptan pasha, Morousi was in fact the real ruler of the islands. The system worked this way: the kaptan pasha had to pay a tribute to the sultan in return for his dominion over the islands. He was then permitted to make the tribute back, plus a profit, by taxing the islands under his authority. But instead of collecting the taxes himself, the kaptan pasha sold that right to his dragoman Morousi, who could now profit by imposing any taxes he wished. That’s how dragomans acquired vast wealth. Morousi might even sell the right to collect taxes on certain islands to still other individuals, who would then recoup their expenses and squeeze out
their
profit. Something like this system had been in place since biblical times, which explains why publicans—tax collectors—were so despised in the New Testament.