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17th Century 18th Century Animals French History History Museums Royal History Uncategorized

Strange Meetings: The Royal Menagerie at Versailles – an Extract from Vintage Script Magazine

Royal Menagerie at Versailles

This month, you’ll find a piece I’ve written in Vintage Script, a new magazine dedicated to all things vintage, historical and retro. What’s most delightful about it is the range of different historical periods, as well as the different approaches taken to bringing them to life. In this month’s edition you’ll find stories on the history of tea time, flapper girls of the 1920s, Durham Cathedral and the truth behind the Scarlet Pimpernel. It really is well worth a read, so do please visit the web site and take a look.

Versailles Menagerie by D'Aveline

The Versailles Menagerie during Louis XIV’s reign, by D’Aveline.

In an attempt to whet your appetite, here’s an extract from my article on the history of the Royal Menagerie at Versailles. You’ll have to take my word for it, but the stuff I’ve cut out here is stupendous, so you really should get the magazine!

We take up the story from Louis XIV’s death. Before the Sun King, the French Royals had not had a permanent menagerie but instead contented themselves with a band of exotic or entertaining animals which followed them around their various royal residences. Louis XIV established two permanent menageries – one at Vincennes and one at Versailles, each with a different purpose and personality. The Vincennes menagerie was used for dramatic fights, such as the battle between a tiger and an elephant staged to amuse the Persian ambassador in 1682. The Versailles menagerie, on the other hand, was a model of order and rationality, where the far more fortunate animals were intended for peaceful display and, as all things at the palace, to augment the glory and prestige of the king. The conflict between these two very different styles of menagerie reflected the conflicts in Louis’ personality and style of leadership, but by the end of his reign the Versailles style had clearly won out, and the Vincennes zoo was closed.

Map of Versailles, by Delagrive (1689-1757), 1746.

Map of Versailles, by Delagrive (1689-1757), 1746 (via Wikimedia Commons), with the location of the menagerie highlighted. Below, the former site of the menagerie today, from Google Maps.

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In some magical way Versailles transformed itself to match the character of the king at its heart, so when the Sun King died and was succeeded by his grandson Louis XV, everything changed. Louis XV was more interested in hunting animals than observing them in his menagerie, and his taste for exotic wildlife restricted itself more or less to Madame de Pompadour and his seraglio of royal mistresses. Animal gifts kept coming from every corner of the ever-expanding French trading empire, but the king lacked both the funds and the inclination to give them much of a welcome. When an elephant arrived in 1772, it was forced to walk more than three hundred miles from the coast to Versailles.

One can imagine the elephant was quite miffed about the debacle (but must have created quite a stir in the towns and villages along the road) and things got no better once it arrived at Versailles. The pond dug for the exotic birds to wade in was full of silt. The wall enclosing the rhinoceros which arrived two years earlier was literally crumbling (not a good thing, as the rhino was no doubt angered by visitors who laughed at its absurdly wrinkled skin). Even the animals in the once beautiful paintings which lined the walls of the observation room were faded and peeling. The elephant stuck it out for as long as possible, but in 1782, broke free of its enclosure and rampaged round the grounds of Versailles. Next morning, a strange new elephant-shaped island was found floating in the Grand Canal.

Sadly, the elephant died too late to witness the last gasp of the royal menagerie. Louis XVI had ascended the throne in 1775, and found a financial and political situation as neglected as the menagerie. Unlike his grandfather Louis XV, Louis XVI could not rely on winning charm to see him through – he had none. He was therefore much more attuned to symbolism, and strove constantly, in the face of an ever-deepening crisis, to project an image of undimmed power and royal prestige.

Although they never knew it, the animals of the menagerie were a perfect instrument for this. The very fact that they were there at all spoke eloquently of the scope and scale of the king’s influence. Overcoming the difficulties of finding and catching such rare and beautiful creatures, overcoming the problems of long distance travel and communication, overcoming the self-interest of every captain and sailor along the way who might have sold his precious cargo, the king had commanded that animals be brought, and they had come. The strength of his will even seemed to overcome death itself: such animals were notoriously difficult to keep alive on long voyages. Exotic birds especially had an irksome habit of dropping down dead when cannon fired, or simply pining away. Whispers began to circulate that the most beautiful birds of all simply could not live without their liberty.

Louis sent out a shopping list to his representatives around the world. “An elephant; 2 zebras, male and female; mandrill and baboon monkeys; 6 guineafoul”. Perhaps Louis wished to tame the zebras and teach them to draw his carriage, as some of his more flamboyant contemporaries did. But Louis was never to receive an elephant and only got one of the zebras he asked for, though the menagerie did benefit from an influx of new inmates, including a lion, a panther, some hyenas, a tiger, some ostriches and several kinds of monkey.

The popularity of the menagerie was also boosted by great vogue for the study of nature that flowered during Louis XVI’s reign. Naturalists had grown tired of studying the dusty tombs of Cabinets of Curiosity, where brown pickled fish bobbed in vinegar and faded birds stood stuffed in a peculiar imitation of life that seemed to startle the thought of death into everyone who looked at them. There was now, prompted by the bestselling work of Buffon, a desire to observe living animals. Now then, the animals of the menagerie had a new torment, as fashionable men and women toured the menagerie, staring deep into the eyes of monkeys and, with a pained expression, wondered aloud “What is it to be human?”. Nobody ever seemed to wonder what it is to be monkey.

As it turned out, of course, even if Louis had managed to obtain a hundred zebras to draw his carriage, they couldn’t have saved him from the coming of the Revolution. Perhaps the animals noticed a glow of torchlight up at the palace on the night in October 1789 when a crowd of thousands arrived to remove the royal family and take them back to Paris (henceforth to be caged and regarded with the same mixture of awed and disgusted curiosity that the inhabitants of the menagerie had been).

The menagerie must have been a sad and dispiritingly quiet place for the next couple of years, as history was written elsewhere, and the fate of a dwindling bunch of pampered pets was of no importance. But, in a perverse way, the violence and inhumanity of the revolution was to foster a new concern for these animals. After a few years, with the Terror in full flow, the bourgeois leaders of the Revolution began to grow concerned that the populace was becoming too accustomed to blood, too wild. They needed to be brought back to the civilising influence of orderly society – and what better way to demonstrate its advantages than through the example of these wild animals. If even a lion, when it is well cared for by enlightened rulers, can be tamed and made gentle, then there’s hope for anyone. This attitude to animals was extraordinary: in 1794, the Paris Commune received complaints about ‘disgusting displays’ of animals in the Place de la Révolution, but none about the twenty guillotinings that took place in the same square every day.

At the last minute, the few remaining animals of the royal menagerie, which had been due to be killed and stuffed, were saved, and made a part of plans for a new state menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Following a ban on animal shows, the authorities had sent out agents to round up all wild animals being kept or sold in Paris for this purpose. The only problem was, there was nowhere to put them except the basement of the museum at the Jardins des Plantes.

The wrinkly rhinoceros died before it could make the journey (run through, according to legend, by a revolutionary’s sabre), but the lion from Versailles was taken to Paris in 1794, and found itself in a room full of the motliest collection of animals since the Ark. Here was a leopard, there a sea lion. Perched on a crate were three eagles, bleating in the corner were three sheep with various lurid deformities, and god-knows-where was what had been promised to be a sea lion when the harassed zookeeper agreed to take it on, but was discovered on arrival to be a polar bear. There were in total 32 mammals and 26 birds.

Gradually a permanent, if very basic, home for these forlorn creatures was put together, and, amid trumpeting revolutionary rhetoric that the animals would “no longer wear on their brows, as in the menageries built by the pomp of kings, the brand of slavery”, its doors were opened to the public. This new, state menagerie was intended to be a pacifying haven of contemplation and rational study. It didn’t quite work out that way. As soon as the doors opened, the citizens of Paris made a beeline for the old lion from Versailles. They pulled at his fur, and shouted abuse when he tried to sleep, and spat at him because, they said, he used to be a king too.

The lion bore his torment for a short while, but in the famine-frosted winter of 1795, when there was no money for food and none to buy anyway, half the animals died, the lion probably among them. After this time, conditions at the menagerie slowly improved, and with the conquests of Napoleon, it was repopulated with inhabitants from new outposts of empire.

Today, there’s no trace of the menagerie beneath the impeccably manicured lawns of Versailles, but a piece of it survives. If you go to the Jardins des Plantes, past the small zoo which still survives and into the Natural History Museum, you’ll find a large glass case, containing a leathery rhinoceros, the first to ever be stuffed and preserved. Today people file by and study him quietly, as civilised and dispassionate as they were always meant to be, save perhaps for the occasional chuckle at his absurdly wrinkly skin. But this is an extraordinary survivor, called across the sea by the last pulse of royal power from France, witness to the end of an era, one of the last beings ever to truly live at Versailles, victim of the violence of the revolution – and yet, here he is. Through all the storms of history and politics, the revolutions and counter-revolutions, monarchies and republics, wars and peaces, the rhinoceros has stood safe in its glass case. Even today, the Versailles menagerie is drawing long-severed worlds into strange meetings.

Louis XV's Rhinoceros

Louis XV’s rhinoceros, at the Natural History Museum in Paris.


The rhinoceros was recently featured in an exhibition at Versailles, ‘Sciences and Curiosities at the Court of Versailles, which I’m bereft at having missed. This nice little video was made to coincide with the exhibition.

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18th Century 19th Century Animals French History Historical Places Lost Paris Paris

Lost Paris: The Elephant on the Place de la Bastille

Lost Paris: The Elephant on the Place de la Bastille

Of all the strange monuments that ever appeared on the Parisian skyline (and there have been a few), one of the most outlandish is surely the Elephant that occupied the Place de la Bastille in the wake of the Revolution.

 

The Bastille prison had been despised by Parisians for many reasons, not least among them (as can be clearly appreciated from the zoomable 1730s map of Paris discussed in my last post) its hulking, mouldering, medieval physical presence. After the Bastille fell, there was some debate about what should become of it – after all, the place was a potent and potentially useful symbol, and for a few days the old prison looked like it could become a sort of shrine to that first, audacious act of the Revolution. In the end though, it was simply too much of an anachronism, too much a reminder of an old world to be allowed to exist in the new one. This thought process was certainly hurried along by Pierre-François Palloy, an opportunistic entrepreneur who quickly greased the necessary wheels and secured the rights to begin demolition of the prison. By November of 1789 the structure was largely demolished, and Palloy was doing a roaring trade in trinkets made from the stones of the Bastille (which were also used in the construction of the Pont de la Concorde).

But what could take the place of the mighty Bastille? This was a difficult decision that was not to be answered in the turmoil of the revolutionary years. But when Napoleon came to power, such sensitivity to the nuances of revolutionary history evaporated, and Paris found a new purpose – as a stage to celebrate the glories of his empire, and storehouse for its spoils. Napoleon was impatient to bend the city to these aims, and when the realisation dawned that changing the physical makeup of Paris was a long and difficult task, Napoleon resorted to any means possible in what now seems an urgent, if not desperate, attempt to assert his power and vision. He dreamed of building a 180-foot-high obelisk on the Île de la Cité, but when obstacles arose simply built a paste-board model and placed it on the site. He needed a triumphal arch for the entry of his new Empress, Marie-Louise, but when time ran short he had the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile built from wooden scaffolding and canvas instead.

And on the Place de la Bastille, birthplace of the Revolution, Napoleon’s fantasies settled on a great elephant – a statue so monumental that visitors could climb inside through a staircase in one of its legs, and up to a tower on its back. Presumably the choice of an elephant reflected his ambitions in the East, though one wonders if Napoleon was aware of the architect Charles Ribart’s 1758 plan to build a similar structure, complete with opulent rooms inside, on the site where the Arc de Triomphe now stands.

 

Charles Ribart’s plans for another monumental elephant, 1758.

Napoleon stipulated that the elephant was to be cast in bronze, melted down from cannons captured during his conquests. But as usual, Napoleon’s impatience meant that rather than waiting for this bronze to arrive, a full-scale model was created in plaster and placed on the site. I can find no record of what Parisians made of this strange new resident in their midst, but it seems as odd and alien a feature as ever the Bastille was, and yet what a wonderful vision – another of those peculiar, unexpected and unique sensory experiences Paris has always been so good at creating.

The copper to transform the elephant into a permanent structure never arrived, and as Napoleon’s rule descended into a spiral of defeat and disorder, the plaster structure was left to rot. Victor Hugo evocatively describes the state of the elephant in 1832 in Les Misérables, in which we find Gavroche living in the very belly of the beast.

Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner of the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal, excavated in the ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular monument, which has already been effaced from the memories of Parisians, and which deserved to leave some trace, for it was the idea of a “member of the Institute, the General-in-chief of the army of Egypt.”

We say monument, although it was only a rough model. But this model itself, a marvellous sketch, the grandiose skeleton of an idea of Napoleon’s, which successive gusts of wind have carried away and thrown, on each occasion, still further from us, had become historical and had acquired a certain definiteness which contrasted with its provisional aspect. It was an elephant forty feet high, constructed of timber and masonry, bearing on its back a tower which resembled a house, formerly painted green by some dauber, and now painted black by heaven, the wind, and time. In this deserted and unprotected corner of the place, the broad brow of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his tower, his enormous crupper, his four feet, like columns produced, at night, under the starry heavens, a surprising and terrible form. It was a sort of symbol of popular force. It was sombre, mysterious, and immense. It was some mighty, visible phantom, one knew not what, standing erect beside the invisible spectre of the Bastille.

Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it. It was falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached itself from its sides formed hideous wounds upon it. “The aediles,” as the expression ran in elegant dialect, had forgotten it ever since 1814. There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling, surrounded by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen; cracks meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail, tall grass flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the place had been rising all around it for a space of thirty years, by that slow and continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of large towns, it stood in a hollow, and it looked as though the ground were giving way beneath it. It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker. There was something about it of the dirt which is on the point of being swept out, and something of the majesty which is on the point of being decapitated. As we have said, at night, its aspect changed. Night is the real element of everything that is dark. As soon as twilight descended, the old elephant became transfigured; he assumed a tranquil and redoubtable appearance in the formidable serenity of the shadows.
Being of the past, he belonged to night; and obscurity was in keeping with his grandeur.

The sick old elephant was only finally demolished in 1842, and legend has it that as the gigantic body crumbled, a plague of rats emerged from inside and, naturally unhappy at the destruction of their home, terrorised the neighbourhood for weeks.

In case you’re wondering (as I did), this plaster pachyderm is not the origin of the phrase ‘white elephant’ – for that story you have to go much further than the Place de la Bastille.

Traces today

Sadly, no trace of the glorious elephant has survived, but it stood where the July Column stand today, in the centre of the Place de la Bastille. Special paving stones in the area mark the outline of the Bastille and a couple of sections of the foundations survive, which can be found in the park on the Square Henri-Galli off the Boulevard Henri IV (see map below) and, rather wonderfully on the line 5 platforms of the Bastille metro station. The marina that runs off the Place de la Bastille was once part of the fort’s ditch.

Bastille/Sully-Morland

Boulevard Henri IV – Vestige of the foundation of the Bastille (see map below). By FLLL on Wikimedia Commons.

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American History Animals Books History

How beavers and fops saved America

How Beavers and Fops Saved America

Oh, alright. the title of this post is a little misleading. But, as may be becoming apparent, I can’t resist ridiculous animal history, and it turns out the humble beaver really did play a crucial role in the early chapters of the American story.

Here’s the tale, quoted from Raymond Seitz’s review of Nick Bunker’s (by all accounts excellent) Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and their World in April’s Literary Review.

If proof were needed of their godly mission, it came in the providential form of the castor canadensis, the North American beaver. For five hard years, the Pilgrim colony at New Plymouth had clung by calloused fingertips to the edge of the New England coast with little prospect of posterity, or even survival, and with scant support from its financial backers in London. The settlers grew enough corn and salted enough fish to get by, but their reserves were meagre and they had few goods to trade with the natives. In fact, relations with the Indians in the narrow hinterland around Cape Cod were circumspect and often uneasy, especially after the indigenous population was repeatedly decimated by epidemics.

The beaver saved the colony (if not the Indians). Demand in Europe for beaver pelts was soaring at the very moment in 1625 when Edward Wilson, one of the original Mayflower Pilgrims, led a small expedition up the Kennebec River in Maine to the elevated swamplands where the beaver thrived. By the end of 1628, at least three thousand skins had been shipped across the Atlantic to the ports of Barnstaple, Bristol and Plymouth. From the soft felt made of the beaver’s downy underfur, London’s haberdashers fashioned warm, rain-resistant hats, and in one of those inexplicable Spasms of sartorial fashion, the beaver hat became a symbol of rank, wealth and status in English society. So a beguiling irony of the period is that the strictly modest Calvinist Puritans of New England were rescued by the foppish vanity of old England’s upper classes. Two years later, with economic security now assured, John Winthrop established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in present-day Boston, and the Great Migration from England was launched.

It got me wondering – can any of Culture&Stuff’s readers think of other examples of animals changing the course of human history? Get commenting, people.

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18th Century Animals Theatre

Dogs vs Flying Cars: A surprisingly Georgian night at the theatre

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Flying Car Vs Dog

A couple of weekends ago I went to see the touring production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the Bristol Hippodrome. I felt much the same about the show as I did when I saw it on the West End. Although it has some fun moments, it’s lumbered with some distinctly average new songs, and an extremely messy second act. Criminally, the stage production chooses to abandon some of the most enjoyable elements of the film, most notably the secret, murderous hatred between the Baron and Baroness Bomburst, disguised by sickeningly cutesy lovey-dovey language. ‘Chu-chi Face’, the ostensible love song sung by the pair as the Baron tries several ways to murder the Baroness, is a wonderfully ironic highlight of the film. On stage, this side of their relationship is jettisoned, and the Baron becomes merely an overgrown child, pathetically reciprocating the Baroness’s sugary sentiments.

All the same, the stage production remains enjoyable thanks in large parts to its sheer spectacle. The flying car is as bewitching and convincing a piece of stage magic as ever, and gets a huge reaction from audiences. They say nobody leaves the theatre humming the scenery, but in Chitty they’ve given it its own curtain call before they head out into the night.

Another highlight of the show, I must confess, is its cast of capering canines – at times, dozens of dogs fill the stage. I’ve always felt that dogs are under-appreciated thespians. Actors spend years in training, learning not to act, to be the part rather than merely acting it. Dogs get this right off the bat. A dog is a dog, always will be. In Chitty, the dogs seemed to be enjoying themselves far more than many of the chorus, too. And, most excitingly, when a dog’s on stage, you never know quite what’s going to happen. They may run off and on when they’re told, and perform any number of other tricks on cue, but they’re still dogs. They’re not worrying about getting shouted at by the stage manager or the producer complaining to Equity. Professional theatre can get incredibly stale and predictable, so much like a day at the office, that anything that sets that even slightly on edge is always a joy. At the climax of the Chitty, the dog and the flying car appear on stage together. Millions of pounds of development, a whole team dedicated to building the thing, packing it into lorries and keeping it going every night, and somehow, I still found myself staring at the chubby little dog.

Sometimes I wonder if I might not be a bit simple, so it was reassuring to read in The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, that the Georgians would be firmly on my side on this one. In this book, Andrew McConnell Stott paints a wonderful picture of the awe-inspiring excess of Georgian theatre in London, as rival playhouses vied to add ever more spectacle to their spectaculars, and draw crowds of hungry theatre-goers. In 1794, the Covent Garden theatre staged a production of the full-blooded romance Lodoiska. Its climax featured a siege on Lovinski Castle by a horde of Tartars. Military extras swarmed the stage, firing rifles and cannon, while real flames erupted eighteen feet high at the back of the stage (frequently threatening to engulf it entirely). The heroine of the piece is trapped in a high tower, surrounded by the flames, prompting the hero to dash across a bridge, scale the tower and rescue the maiden, seconds before carpenters backstage knocked out supports, sending both bridge and tower hurtling towards the stage. One night, one of the carpenters proved rather too keen, scuttling the bridge too early, while the hero was still on it. He fell to the stage, and somehow managed to catch the heroine as she fell with the collapsing tower. When he stepped out of the smoke, with her in his arms, the pair received such a rapturous response from the audience, thinking that this was all part of the show, that they were forced to repeat this new hair-raising climax every night.

Not wanting to be outdone, Sadler’s Wells ripped out its entire under-stage area one season, so that it could be filled with water and used to stage mock naval battles (with children employed to man the ships so as to disguise their miniature scale). Buoyed by Nelson-mania, the venture was a roaring success, and performances continued nightly in the increasingly unsanitary waters.

The Georgians, like me, also had a particular fondness for animal actors, albeit taken to a typically outrageous extreme. One notable hit in 1784 involved Moustache, a dog cast as the star of a play called The Deserter. The plot of this impossibly bizarre piece of theatre centred on Moustache leading his platoon of canine soldiers into battle against their enemies. Frederick Reynolds remembered seeing him,

“in his little uniform, military boots, with smart musket and helmet, cheering and inspring his fellow soldiers to follow him up the scaling ladders, and storm the fort”

That I would pay to see. As did the Georgians, in their droves. The following season was replete with a Noah’s Ark of entertaining animals, from a hare playing the drums to a singing duck, two dancing horses and, Samuel Johnson’s favourite, a pig who could read and tell the time.

Clearly, this was not the ultimate expression of what theatre can achieve, but it is telling that men like Johnson and Sheridan (who managed Covent Garden at this time) had such open attitudes to this type of theatre. Georgian theatre might have been chaotic, hopelessly extravagant, rampantly commercial, often shallow and sometimes desperate, but it was also exhilariting, bold, extremely popular and wildly entertaining. It’s a reminder of how deadening the limits of snobbery can be, and of the joys of a willingess to try anything once.

Further Reading