The Invention of Nature

11

Paris

IN PARIS, HUMBOLDT quickly fell back into his old routines of sleeping little and working at a ferocious pace. He was tormented by the feeling of not being fast enough, he wrote to Goethe. He was writing so many different books at the same time that he often failed to meet deadlines. Humboldt began giving his publishers desperate excuses which ranged from running out of money to pay his engravers whom he had commissioned to illustrate the books, to ‘melancholy’ and even ‘painful haemorrhoidal incidents’. The botanical publications were also delayed because Bonpland was now the head gardener for Napoleon’s wife, Joséphine, at Malmaison, her country estate just outside Paris. Bonpland was so slow that when it took him eight months to write up a mere ten plant descriptions, Humboldt complained that ‘any botanist in Europe could do this in a fortnight’.

In January 1810, a little more than two years after his return to France, Humboldt finally completed the first instalment of Vues des Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique. This was the most opulent of his publications – a large folio edition of sixty-nine gorgeous engravings of Chimborazo, volcanoes, Aztec manuscripts and Mexican calendars among many others. Each plate was accompanied by several pages of text explaining the context, but the stunning engravings were the main focus. This was a celebration of Latin America’s natural world, its ancient civilizations and people. ‘Nature and art are closely united in my work,’ Humboldt wrote in a note when he dispatched the book with a Prussian courier to Goethe in Weimar on 3 January 1810. When Goethe received it a week later, he couldn’t put it down. Over the next evenings, no matter how late he arrived home, Goethe leafed through Vues to enter Humboldt’s new world.

When Humboldt was not writing, he was conducting experiments and comparing observations with those of other scientists. His correspondence was prodigious. He bombarded colleagues, friends and strangers with queries on topics as wide-ranging as the introduction of potatoes to Europe, detailed statistics on the slave trade or the latitude of the most northern village in Siberia. Humboldt corresponded with colleagues across Europe but also received letters from South America about the growing resentment against Spanish colonial rule. Jefferson dispatched reports about advances in transportation in the United States and added that Humboldt was regarded as one of the ‘great worthies of the world’ – and in return Humboldt sent Jefferson his latest publications. Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society in London, whom Humboldt had met in London two decades previously, remained another faithful correspondent. Humboldt sent him dried plant specimens from South America and his publications, while Banks used his own international network whenever Humboldt needed some information.

In Paris Humboldt rushed from one place to another. He lived, as a visiting German scientist remarked, in ‘three different houses’ – so that he could work and rest whenever and wherever he needed. One night he slept at the Paris Observatory, grabbing a few hours’ sleep between gazing at the stars and taking notes, while the next he stayed with his friend Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac at the École Polytechnique or with Bonpland.¹ In the mornings Humboldt made his rounds between 8 and 11 a.m., visiting young savants all over Paris. These were Humboldt’s so-called ‘garret-hours’, as one colleague teased, because these impoverished scientists usually lived in cheap attic rooms.

One such new friend was François Arago, a talented young mathematician and astronomer who worked at the observatory and the École Polytechnique. Like Humboldt, Arago had a taste for adventure. In 1806, at the age of twenty, self-taught Arago had been sent by the French government on a scientific mission to the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea, but had been arrested by the Spanish who had suspected him of espionage. For a year Arago had been incarcerated in Spain and Algiers but had finally escaped in summer 1809 – with his precious scientific notes hidden under his shirt. When Humboldt heard about Arago’s daring escape, he wrote to him immediately in order to arrange a meeting. Arago quickly became Humboldt’s closest friend – perhaps not coincidentally at the exact moment when Gay-Lussac married.

Arago and Humboldt saw each other almost every day. Working together and sharing results, they had heated discussions that sometimes ended in fights. Humboldt had a big heart, Arago said, but occasionally also a ‘malicious tongue’. Their friendship could be tempestuous. One of them would storm off ‘sulking like a child’, a colleague observed, but they never remained angry for long. Arago was one of the few people whom Humboldt trusted unconditionally – he could show him his fears and self-doubts. They were like ‘Siamese twins’, Humboldt later wrote, and their friendship was the ‘joy of my life’. They were so close that Wilhelm von Humboldt became concerned about their relationship. ‘You know his passion to be only with one person,’ Wilhelm told his wife Caroline, and now Alexander had Arago ‘from whom he did not want to be separated’.

This was not the only issue that Wilhelm had with his brother. He continued to disapprove of Alexander’s decision to stay in Paris, the heart of enemy territory. Wilhelm himself had returned to Berlin from Rome in early 1809 when he had been made Minister of Education. By then Alexander had moved to Paris but Wilhelm had been furious when he had seen that the family’s estate at Tegel had been plundered by French soldiers after the Battle of Jena and that his brother hadn’t even bothered packing up the house to protect its contents. ‘Alexander could have rescued everything,’ he complained to Caroline.

Wilhelm was upset with his brother. Unlike Alexander, Wilhelm was serving his country. First he had left his beloved Rome to overhaul the Prussian education system and establish Berlin’s first university, and then, in September 1810, Wilhelm had moved to Austria as the Prussian ambassador in Vienna. Wilhelm was fulfilling his patriotic duty. He was helping to draw Austria closer as an ally to Prussia and Russia to renew the fighting against France.

To Wilhelm’s mind, Alexander ‘had stopped being German’. Most of his books were even written and published first in French. Wilhelm tried many times to lure his brother home. When he had been sent to Vienna for his diplomatic posting, Wilhelm had suggested Alexander as his successor as Minister of Education in Berlin. But Alexander’s answer was clear: he had no intention of being buried in Berlin while Wilhelm was having a great time in Vienna. After all, he joked, Wilhelm himself seemed to prefer being abroad.

Not only were Wilhelm and his fellow Prussians dubious about Humboldt’s chosen home – Napoleon himself was concerned. Napoleon had expressed his displeasure already by belittling Humboldt during their first meeting just after his return from South America. ‘You are interested in botany?’ Napoleon had sneered. ‘I know, my wife is also occupied with it.’ Napoleon disliked Humboldt, a friend said later, because his ‘opinion cannot be bent’. Initially Humboldt had tried to placate Napoleon with copies of his books, but he was ignored. Napoleon, Humboldt said, ‘hates me’.

For most other savants it was a good time to be in France because Napoleon was a great supporter of the sciences. With reason as the reigning intellectual force of the age, science had moved to the nexus of politics. Knowledge was power and never before had the sciences been so close to the centre of government. Many scientists had held ministerial and political posts since the French Revolution, including Humboldt’s colleagues from the Académie des Sciences, such as naturalist Georges Cuvier and mathematicians Gaspard Monge and Pierre-Simon Laplace.

For a man who loved the sciences almost as much as his military exploits, Napoleon was extremely unhelpful towards Humboldt. One reason may have been jealousy because Humboldt’s multi-volume Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent was in direct competition with Napoleon’s own pride and joy: the Description de l’Égypte. Almost 200 scientists had accompanied Napoleon’s troops to Egypt in 1798 in order to collect all the available knowledge there. Description de l’Égypte was the scientific result of the invasion and, like Humboldt’s publications, it was an ambitious project, eventually consisting of twenty-three volumes with some 1,000 plates. Humboldt, though, with neither the might of an army, nor the seemingly bottomless coffers of an empire behind him, was achieving more – his Voyage would have more volumes and plates. Napoleon did read Humboldt’s work, however, and reputedly even just before the Battle of Waterloo.

Publically, though, Humboldt never received any support from Napoleon, who remained suspicious. Napoleon accused Humboldt of being a spy, instructing the secret police to open his letters, bribing Humboldt’s valet for information and on more than one occasion even had his rooms searched. When Humboldt mentioned a possible expedition to Asia shortly after his arrival from Berlin, Napoleon instructed a colleague from the Académie to write an undercover report about the ambitious Prussian scientist. Then, in 1810, Napoleon ordered Humboldt to leave the country within twenty-four hours. For no obvious reason, and just because he could, Napoleon informed Humboldt that he was not allowed to stay any longer. It was only after the chemist Jean Antoine Chaptal (then the treasurer of the Senate) intervened, that Humboldt was allowed to stay in Paris. It was an honour to France to have the famous Humboldt living in Paris, Chaptal told Napoleon. If Humboldt were to be deported, the country would lose its greatest scientist.

Despite Napoleon’s distrust, Paris adored Humboldt. Scientists and thinkers were impressed by his publications and lectures, fellow writers adored his adventurous stories, while the fashionable world of Parisian society was delighted by his charm and wit. Humboldt dashed from one meeting to another and from one dinner to the next. By now his fame had spread so fast that when he breakfasted in the Café Procope, near the Odéon, he would find himself surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Cab-drivers didn’t need an address, just the information ‘chez Monsieur de Humboldt’ to know where to take visitors. Humboldt was, an American visitor remarked, the ‘idol of Paris society’, attending five different salons every evening, giving a half-hour performance at each, talking quickly and then disappearing again. He was everywhere, a Prussian diplomat commented, and, as the president of Harvard University noted during a visit to Paris, ‘at home on every subject’. Humboldt was ‘drunken with his love for the sciences’, one acquaintance remarked.

In salons and at parties he met scientists but also the artists and thinkers of his age. As so often the handsome and unmarried Humboldt attracted the attention of women. One, desperately in love with him, described a ‘layer of ice’ behind his constant smile. When she asked him if he had never loved, he said that he did ‘with a fire’ – but it was burning for the sciences, ‘my first and only love’.

As he hurried from one person to another, Humboldt talked faster than anybody else but with a gentle voice. He never lingered but was a ‘will-o’-the-wisp’, as one hostess recounted, there one minute and absent the next. He was ‘thin, elegant and nimble like a French-man’, with unruly hair and lively eyes. Now in his early forties, he looked at least ten years younger. When Humboldt arrived at a party, it was, another friend recalled, as if he opened a ‘sluice’ of words. Wilhelm, who sometimes had to endure a few too many of his brother’s stories, told Caroline after one particularly long session that it ‘tired the ears as his flow of words whooshed past relentlessly’. Another acquaintance compared him to an ‘overcharged instrument’ that played incessantly. Humboldt’s way of speaking was ‘actually thinking out loud’.

Others feared his sharp tongue so much that they did not want to leave a party before Humboldt departed, worried that once they had gone they would be the object of his snide comments. Some thought Humboldt was like a meteor that whizzed through the room. At dinners he held court, jumping from one subject to another. One moment he was talking about shrunken heads, one acquaintance remarked, but by the time a dinner guest, who had asked his neighbour quietly for some salt, had returned to the conversation, Humboldt was lecturing on Assyrian cuneiform script. Humboldt was electrifying, some said, his mind was sharp and his thoughts free of prejudice.

Throughout these years, wealthy Parisians did not feel much affected by the ongoing European wars. With Napoleon’s army marching across the continent as far away as Russia, Humboldt’s life and that of his friends and colleagues remained the same. Paris was thriving and growing in tandem with Napoleon’s victories. The city had become one giant building site. New palaces were commissioned and the foundations of the Arc de Triomphe were laid, though only completed two decades later. The population of the city rose from just over 500,000 at the time of Humboldt’s return from Latin America in 1804 to about 700,000 a decade later.

As Napoleon brought Europe under his control, his army returned with carriage-loads of art from their conquests, filling the museums of Paris. The loot poured in: from Greek statues, Roman treasures and Renaissance paintings to the Rosetta Stone from Egypt. A forty-two-metre-high column, the Vendôme Column, in imitation of Trajan’s victory column in Rome, was built as a monument to Napoleon’s victories. Twelve thousand pieces of artillery taken from the enemy were melted to create the bas-relief that spiralled up to the top where a statue of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor watched over his city.

Then, in 1812, the French lost almost half a million men in Russia. Napoleon’s army was decimated by the Russian scorched-earth tactic in which villages and crops were burned so that the French soldiers had no food. With the onset of the Russian winter, what was left of the Grande Armée was reduced to fewer than 30,000 soldiers. It was the turning point of the Napoleonic Wars. When the streets of Paris became filled with invalids – wounded and battered from the battlefields – Parisians realized that France might be losing. It was, as Napoleon’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Talleyrand, said, ‘the beginning of the end’.

By the end of 1813 the British army, under the command of the Duke of Wellington, had driven the French out of Spain and a coalition of Austria, Russia, Sweden and Prussia had beaten Napoleon decisively on German territory. Some 600,000 soldiers met in October 1813 at the Battle of Leipzig, the so-called ‘Battle of the Nations’ – the bloodiest encounter in Europe until the First World War. Russian Cossacks, Mongolian horsemen, Swedish reserve soldiers, Austrian border troops and Silesian militia were among the many who fought and destroyed the French army.

Five and a half months later, in late March 1814, when the Allies marched down the Champs-Élysées, even the most frivolous Parisians couldn’t ignore the new reality any more. About 170,000 Austrians, Russians and Prussians arrived in Paris and toppled Napoleon’s statue on the Vendôme Column, replacing it with a white flag. British painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who visited Paris at the time, described the mad carnival that ensued: half-clothed Cossack horsemen with their belts stuffed with guns, next to tall soldiers from the Russian Imperial Guard ‘pinched at the waist like a wasp’. English officers with clean-scrubbed faces, fat Austrians and neatly dressed Prussian soldiers, as well as Tartars in chainmail armour with bow and arrows, filled the streets. They exuded such an aura of victory that it made every Parisian ‘curse within his teeth’.

On 6 April 1814 Napoleon was exiled to Elba, a small island in the Mediterranean. Within a year, though, he had escaped and marched back to Paris, assembling an army of 200,000 men. It was a last and desperate attempt to bring Europe back under his control, but a few weeks later, in June 1815, Napoleon was beaten by the British and the Prussians at the Battle of Waterloo. Banished to the remote island of St Helena, a tiny fleck of land in the South Atlantic, 1,200 miles from Africa and 1,800 miles from South America, Napoleon never returned to Europe.

Humboldt had watched how Napoleon had destroyed Prussia in 1806 and now, eight years later, he observed the triumphal entry of the Allies into France, the country that he called his second fatherland. It was painful to see how the ideals of the French Revolution – of liberty and political freedom – seemed to disappear, he wrote to James Madison in Washington, who by now had succeeded Jefferson as the President of the United States. Humboldt’s position was awkward. Wilhelm, who was still the Prussian ambassador in Vienna and who arrived with the Allies in Paris, thought that his brother seemed more French than German. Alexander certainly felt uncomfortable, complaining about ‘fits of melancholy’ and recurring stomach pains. But he stayed on in Paris.

There were public attacks. An article in the German newspaper Rheinischer Merkur, for example, accused Humboldt of preferring the friendship with the French to the ‘honour’ of his people. Deeply hurt, Humboldt wrote a furious letter to the author of the article but remained in France. As distressing as Humboldt’s balancing act might have been for him, it brought advantages for the sciences. When the Allies arrived in Paris there was much looting and plundering. Some was justified, with the Allies collecting the stolen treasures from Napoleon’s museums to return them to their rightful owners – but more often it was an undisciplined occupying force.

It was to Humboldt that the French naturalist Georges Cuvier turned when the Prussian army planned to turn the Jardin des Plantes into a military camp. Humboldt used his contacts and convinced the Prussian general in charge to locate the troops elsewhere. A year later, when the Prussians returned to Paris after the victory against Napoleon at Waterloo, Humboldt once again saved the valuable collections in the botanical garden. When 2,000 soldiers camped next to the garden, Cuvier began to worry about his treasures. They were disturbing the animals in the menagerie, he told Humboldt, and touching all sorts of rare items. After a visit to the Prussian commander, Humboldt received assurances that the plants and animals were not in danger.

The Jardin des Plantes in Paris which encompassed a large botanical garden, a menagerie and a natural history museum (Illustration Credit 11.1)

Not only soldiers arrived in Paris. Close behind were tourists – especially those from Britain who had not been able to come to Paris during the long years of the Napoleonic Wars. Many came to see the treasures in the Louvre because no other European institution contained so much art. Students sketched the most famous paintings and sculptures before workmen arrived with wheelbarrows, ladders and ropes to remove and pack them, so that they could be returned to their owners.

British scientists also came to Paris, and whenever they arrived, they knocked on Humboldt’s door. A former secretary of the Royal Society, Charles Bladgen, visited, as did a future president, Humphry Davy. Maybe more than anybody else, Davy lived what Humboldt was preaching because he was a poet and a chemist. In his notebooks, for example, Davy filled one side with the objective accounts of his experiments, while on the other page he wrote his personal reactions and emotional responses. His scientific lectures at the Royal Institution in London were so famous that the streets around the building were jammed on the days he performed. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge – another great admirer of Humboldt’s work – attended Davy’s lectures, as he wrote, to ‘enlarge my stock of metaphors’. Like Humboldt, Davy believed that imagination and reason were necessary to perfect the philosophic mind – they were the ‘creative source of discovery’.

Humboldt enjoyed meeting other scientists to exchange ideas and share information, but life in Europe increasingly frustrated him. Throughout these years of political upheaval he had remained restless and, with Europe so deeply torn, he felt that there was little holding him. ‘My view of the world is dismal,’ he told Goethe. He missed the tropics and was only going to feel better ‘when I live in the hot zone’.

¹ In 1810 Humboldt moved into an apartment that he shared with Karl Sigismund Kunth, the nephew of his former tutor and a German botanist, whom he had commissioned to work on the botanical publications, relieving – after some discussions and rows – Bonpland from the task.