Jardin Des Plantes Research Articles

The scientific discovery and subsequent history of the douc monkey Pygathrix nemaeus (Linnaeus, 1771) near Da Nang, Vietnam

Abstract In 1750 Pierre Poivre donated the holotype of the douc monkey Pygathrix nemaeus to R.-A. F. de Réaumur. Its type locality is here restricted from “Cochinchine” to near Da Nang, Vietnam. In 1757, Buffon appropriated the holotype for the King’s collection, wrongly inferring that the species lacks ischial callosities, and conflating it with the sifaka of Madagascar. “D’ouc” is evidently a corruption of Voọc, the Vietnamese word for colobine monkey. In 1819, a French crew shot 100 doucs before breakfast on a mountain near Da Nang. In 2016, the whole mountain population was estimated at 70. By 1831 doucs had learnt to fear gunfire, but locals accepted their proximity, and provided some protection from meat-seeking foreigners. Several doucs were collected for museums in the 19th and 20th century; in 1897 two even lived for a fortnight at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris. The douc was observed and collected near Da Nang during its miraculous survival of the Vietnam War; its evergreen forest habitat surprisingly resilient. This situation is rapidly deteriorating, as forests are reduced to isolated pockets, and hunting prohibitions unenforced. The closely-monitored Mount Son Tra douc population was expanding, but tourist development is illegally eroding the Nature Reserve.

Plant alchemy, Paracelsianism and internal signature theory in the writings of Guy de La Brosse (1586–1641)

In France, the Jardin des Plantes is one of the oldest surviving scientific institutions, the chief botanical garden and the host of many schools and centres studying the natural sciences. It was established in 1640 as the Royal Garden through the tireless labour of the physician Guy de La Brosse (1586–1641). The present article focuses on La Brosse's views of advancement of plant alchemy as the source of knowledge of plants. It discusses his adoption of the Paracelsian physician Joseph Du Chesne's (Quercetanus, 1546–1609) distinction between external and internal signature theory, opting firmly for the latter as the basis of true knowledge. The internal character, La Brosse argues, can only be revealed empirically, by fire analysis and the practice of distillation, which can also harness the occult properties of plants for human benefit.

Delacroix et la nature éd. par Claire Bessède

Reviewed by: Delacroix et la nature éd. par Claire Bessède Karen Quandt BessÈde, Claire, éd. Delacroix et la nature. Musée du Louvre and Le Passage, 2022. ISBN 978-2-84742-482-9. Pp. 160. A product of the pandemic, it is fitting and even poignant that this exhibition extended a breath of fresh air to Delacroix's storied artworks. Country and urban gardens, studies and inventories of trees and flowers, and an array of animal sketches seem like a welcome refuge from the painter's dark and intimidating grand format scenes of massacres, animal combats, and brooding interiors. Yet, the point of Delacroix et la nature is not to position the painter as a nature artist. Instead, all of the letters, journal entries, sketches, curiosities, and paintings recently displayed at the Musée Eugène Delacroix in Paris worked together to embrace the dissonance exemplified by a leading studio artist who was nevertheless sensitive to nature's beauties and processes. The catalog opens with a brief preface by Laurence des Cars, a specialist of nineteenth-century art recently appointed Director of the Musée du Louvre, who applauds the curators' selection of local works that minimized the need for long distance transport. It continues in a "green" vein with three essays that examine how Delacroix "reinvented" nature into his own creations; how his animal paintings differed from conventional hunting scenes of the time period; and how gardens and botany developed his sensitivity to the natural world. The ensuing presentation of the exhibition's works, which are often accompanied by ample notes, helps synthesize an otherwise seemingly eclectic array as it underscores Delacroix's strong sensibilities for nature, his keen eye for flora and fauna, and the processes by which he refashioned his experiences of nature into studio paintings. Smartly interspersed amongst the impressive collection of Delacroix's oil paintings and drawings were several animal sculptures created by Antoine Louis Barye, a friend who often accompanied the painter to the Jardin des Plantes to study its animals and to attend animal dissections. The exhibition culminated in Delacroix's studio (the museum is located on the site of his last residence in Paris, which had the rather unusual distinction of having a garden), where signature colorful oil paintings à la Rubens were juxtaposed with taxidermized animals from the nearby Maison Deyrolle as well as with landscape watercolors by the young Delacroix's friends Theodore and Newton Fielding. Delacroix et la nature might not have the scope of a major retrospective or "blockbuster" exhibition, but it is nonetheless powerful in how it offers an incisive and unique look at an interesting cross-section of Delacroix's works. The catalog is an essential supplement to the exhibition, since it expounds on certain artworks and offers helpful historical and biographical details. Above all, the catalog lends a sense of cohesion to what exhibition viewers might have perceived to be loosely organized themes. Specialists of Delacroix and of nineteenth-century studies are sure to benefit the most from the scholarly expertise that buttresses the catalog, but the exhibition itself was surely a delight for all visitors who could experience the richness of Delacroix's dramatic compositions through his intimate examinations of the natural world. [End Page 204] Karen Quandt Wabash College (IN) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition

Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition

Melvillainy in Paris

Melvillainy in Paris Christopher Rice Click for larger view View full resolution Christopher Rice. Photo courtesy of Christopher Rice. I had only been to Paris once before. I arrived then around dusk during La Fête de la Musique on the heels of a rainy night spent outside at Stonehenge— spent inside Stonehenge, aw ake w ith strange revelers— for the solstice. Both celebrations seem ed to mark something that arrives w ith the [End Page 103] height of the sun, yet both w ere stum bled upon, sort of accidental festivals, for me. I remember the face of a kind Parisian who read the drow sy confusion of my own, as the metro teemed with its musical crowd; I remember him generously handing me a ticket and guiding me as I set out to meet a friend from Nova Scotia who had been working at Shakespeare and Company. I remember, after very little sleep, being revived by the sounds and laughter and movement everywhere, imagining that this was simply how Paris must behave most summer nights. Thus, it was with some surprise, and even a glow of nostalgia perhaps, that I discovered I had arrived again—this time for “Melville’s Energies”—in the midst of La Fête de la Musique. After greetings with my remarkable host (remarked upon at some length below), and an indulgent nap, I wandered through the streets near my new quarters by Jardin des Plantes, hugging close to the park’s sides at first as if the immensity lying beyond them threatened to envelop me—or anything drifting out too far. Before long, I gravitated towards some Cuban music and grabbed a bite, which felt more like a 3 a.m. snack by my internal clock. Then, I gathered myself and strolled towards the only Parisian haunt I knew, up towards Shakespeare and Company, where, over a decade ago, my friend Harriet arranged for me to stay on as a “tumbleweed,” a guest of the bookshop receiving lodging for light labor. I found the old shop late in the evening standing defiantly closed, watching over Notre-Dame across the Seine from its perch on the left bank, on a busy strip of downtown nightlife, on this first summer night of the season. Close to his ninety-fifth year, George Whitman was still the proprietor of Shakespeare and Company when I had been there. Being a tumbleweed in his shop meant sleeping on a dusty pullout mattress alongside the other nomads and outcasts who found themselves assisting with opening up, closing down, and working some short shift during the day. For me, this shift often consisted of the arduous task of walking George’s beloved dog “Kitty” around the Latin Quarter—not the sort of work I had signed up for exactly, and far from the best use of my talents under the circumstances, yet I executed such duties as though they constituted my highest vocation. The bookstore really was an institution in that way. In exchange for these labors, tumbleweeds lived rent-free and had our run of the bookshop late in the evenings, where sometimes I looked out at a large black-and-white image of Walt Whitman on the building’s west wall, wondering whether this was solely in token of George’s reverence for the poet or an elaborate attempt to establish some mythic lineage back to him. As I stood outside the dark shopfront now—studying a cigarette receptacle tallying votes between those backing “to be” and those favoring “not to be”—I looked up at the outline of someone smoking from the window above, drenched in the [End Page 104] balcony’s dusky glare, and from my tiny patch of gloom below, strewn amongst all the noise and carousing of the street, felt that i had been there—had looked out that window, too. Lodgings in Paris this time around were slightly more private, though similarly spartan at bottom. The quarters were advertised as cozy, compact, and “organized like a tiny ship.” Most reviews of the space tended to emphasize the host, or “superhost,” Bernadette, rather than the space itself. self-described as a “good, liberal French woman...

La mirada animal en “Axolotl” de Julio Cortázar

In his essay “Why Look at Animals?,” John Berger states that in the first encounter between a human and an animal, the latter's eyes are attentive and wary. The animal looks at the human from the abyss of incomprehension. The human becomes aware of himself by looking back at the animal, who is the radical Other. If the abyss of otherness between humans can be bridged through language, this is impossible between the human and the animal. The gaze is the only possibility for the human to “descend” to the animal. Julio Cortázar wrote “Axolotl,” which tells the story of a man who, fascinated by the axolotls, goes to the Jardin des Plantes aquarium in Paris every day to observe them and ends up becoming one of them. Already in the first paragraph of the story, the character-narrator states: “Now I am an axolotl.” Then he adds: “His eyes above all obsessed me. Next to them in the other aquariums, various fish showed me the simple stupidity of their beautiful eyes like ours. The eyes of the axolotls told me of the presence of a different life, of another way of looking.” The narrator manages to transcend the barrier of “space and time” through the gaze and, finally, becomes an axolotl. KEYWORDS: Cortázar, Animal Gaze, Axolotl, Metamorphosis, Transmigration, Radical Other.

Animal Feeding, Animal Experiments, and the Zoo as a Laboratory: Paris Ménagerie and London Zoo, ca. 1793–1939: The Zoo as a Laboratory

This article elaborates a local history of zoo feeding practices in order to shed light on the construction of knowledge at the zoo, its intersection with laboratory developments in life sciences, and the nature of zoo sciences. It relies on the case studies of two of the oldest zoological gardens in the world-the Jardin des Plantes Ménagerie in Paris (1793) and the London Zoological Gardens (1828)-both of which formed parts of major scientific institutions, thereby facilitating research on the dialogue between zoo knowledge and life sciences. The article argues that zoos developed around an experimental paradigm that consisted of testing on animals the (nutritional) variables of their survival within a highly constrained institutional framework. From the interwar period, the empirical nature of the zoo feeding economy was marked by slow and uneven changes, associated with the development of nutritional sciences as well as internal hygiene, pathology, and veterinary programmes. Despite transfers and networks of people, methods, experiments, concepts, and animals between zoos and life sciences laboratories, the former remained too impure as a research site to act as an extension of the latter. Zoos, however, needed external laboratories to support themselves with the scientific legitimacy that their “biopolitical modernisation” (Chrulew) required. In addressing programmatic changes as well as their impact upon the animals, this paper argues that trial-and-error experiments are constitutive of the zoo, contributing towards the definition of the nature of both zoo management and zoo sciences.

Dwarf emus from Baudin's voyage (1800–1804): an overlooked engraving by Nicolas Huet (1770–1830)

The French voyage of exploration to New Holland (Australia) between 1800 and 1804, commanded by Nicolas Baudin (1754–1803), made substantial natural history collections, notably capturing dwarf emus from the two distinct populations on King Island (Île King) in Bass Strait (December 1802) and Kangaroo Island (Île Decrès) (January 1803). Two of these emus survived their voyage to France, were housed briefly at the Empress Josephine's menagerie at Malmaison, and then the zoological park of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Both died in 1822. With the wild populations on both islands exterminated soon after Baudin's visit, two watercolours, one by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (1778–1846) and one by Léon de Wailly ( fl. 1801–1824), have been central to the history of the dwarf emus. However, an important contemporary engraving by Nicolas Huet (1770–1830) depicting the two surviving emus in captivity has been overlooked. This essay explores the history of the images of the now extinct dwarf emus, as well as the production and significance of Huet's engraving.

Renga Summer 2020

Renga Summer 2020 Marilyn Hacker (bio) and Karthika Naïr (bio) From around the world,Lebanese expats are flownback to al-watan— Moscow, Rio, Montreal,Paris—bringing the virus to their homecomingsin Beirut or the Beka'a.Numbers leap. Katia wrote to me a month ago"Our epidemic's over." I know she followsthe news … Cafés reopenedanyway, and crèches. As for the money-changers,were their counters ever closed? —MH, 10 June 2020 ________ Close encounters, let'scall them, of the fifth or sixthkind: in Bareilly, returnee migrants get sousedwith liquid bleach—yes, the kind bottled with dangerto eyes and skin—as cure,by the State, no less, while Delhi shuts hospitaldoors on its nonresidents. —KN, 12 June 2020 ________ Resident of acity, body, state of mindI shrug off under shadows and sun on the QuaiSaint-Bernard. A yoga class salutes the river;a portly couple tangoesto their own cassette. I walk without a mask, asfar as the Jardin des Plantes. —MH, 13 June 2020 [End Page 10] ________ Assemblage, as faras the eye can feed: litchi,melon, mint, mango, moka, peach … corps de sorbet(and ice) glimmer and curtsy, preen, swirl in their traysto carouse with me, Isa,and Nico—plotters of my first sortie outsidehome and hospital. Lambent this dusk, like our blithereunion at Berthillon,Île-Saint-Louis, still Mecca for bon vivants, eachpalate worshipful in queue. —KN, 15 June 2020 ________ In a queue for breadoutside the bakery onthe boulevard: it's almost normal. An almostnormal Sunday market with hand santizerdispensers at entrance points.Almost no distrust of the masked person next inline for cherries, shrimp, courgettes, hummus, samosas.Which merchants have disappeared?Which shoppers I knew vaguely by sight won't I seeagain? It's chilly for June. —MH, 21 June 2020 ________ June, now, is the monthof solstitial nights, roses,and two presidents convinced the grandeur of theirnations—flanking, from north and south, the Atlantic—resides in statues of dead,all too fallible men, to be safeguarded farmore than the breath of today's denizens; convincednaming evils of the pastwould be a crime (mine christened it separatism).How frail must they find our lands? —KN, 27 June 2020 [End Page 11] ________ Old, frail, nonethelessI walked home from Montparnasse,invulnerable for the moment, pink K-wayagainst the drizzle. Almost-midnight streets full ofmostly local mostly youngdrinkers and flâneurs as if nothing had happened.I kept my mask on, except on the Pont de Sullywhere there was no one, onlyreverberations of music on the quais, nextDecamerons, next clusters? —MH, 29 June 2020 ________ Clusters of color—reign of aestival blossoms—caper on Philippe's third- floor balcony. They join usand a madcap even breeze to celebrate this,my first visit in manymonths; first touch of drink (organic) outside home andhospital since early March. —KN, 4 July 2020 ________ "Since we want to marchfrom the hospital to theBDL and set up our tent, we should wear scrubsand masks," Rachid said. Interns, medical studentswere planning one more sit-in."We'll be wearing masks anyway," said Nour. "They foundforty new cases last night." —MH, 6 July 2020 ________ Another new case,in our land: Martine Landry,all of seventy- six, Amnesty activist,acquitted after three years of legal nightmaresfor her solidarityto teen refugees who'd have been wrongly expelled.Oh, we take pride in being playwrights of the greatdeclaration of humanrights—but, it's a show we'd rather tour or licenseabroad than produce at home. —KN, 10 July 2020 [End Page 12] ________ At home, my brain ormy blood churns out symptoms: stress,swellings, dizziness, unhinged by solitude andanxiety. Telephone calls replace dinners,long walks down known, unknown streetsWe're free, but who's "we"? It was a challenge in March.Is it perpetuity? —MH, 11 July 2020 ________ Is it alreadythe end? That was from Nurse D,distractedly, while...

From Museum to Menagerie: Théodore Géricault and the Leonine Subject

Théodore Géricault's The Head of a Lioness resists art historical conventions of picturing lions by encouraging up‐close engagement with a wild animal who can paradoxically be construed as both sensually alluring and patently dangerous. The sentience of Géricault's leonine subject would have been impossible to achieve without direct encounters with live lions during the work's elaboration. The act of seeing and depicting this animal in the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes, a public, state‐controlled space, emerged from a carefully orchestrated set of relationships and transactions involving international diplomacy, public policy, and scientific inquiry.

Visions of concord: Wild animals and the Garden of the Revolution (Jardin des Plantes menagerie, 1793-c. 1820)

The Jardin des Plantes menagerie was established in the context of the French Revolution in opposition to princely and commercial menageries. Considered by historians as the first zoological garden, it would become a model, inspiring the foundation of other, powerful institutions, such as the London Zoo (1828). Its designers intended to resolve old tensions regarding the status of wild animals and to build more symmetrical relationships with them. This article aims to shed additional light on this movement, from the revolutionary seizures of animals deposited at the National Museum of Natural History to the construction of the first permanent building erected for the ‘ferocious beasts’ (1818-1821). Taking into account the animal side of history, in line with the recent animal turn, it posits that the designers of the Jardin des Plantes menagerie reinforced precisely the carceral constraints some of them intended to renounce. In so doing, they determined and shaped modes of interacting with nonhuman animals that, ever since, have continued to permeate our relationships with them.

The Lesson of Novelli and the Geometry of the Textual Landscape in Le Jardin Des Plantes

« La lecon de Novelli et la geometrie du paysage textuel dans Le Jardin des Plantes » est une micro-lecture de la premiere partie du roman, vouee a en analyser la fragmentation typographique, descriptive et thematique. En particulier, cet article entrevoit les enjeux de la materialite de la page et de la poetique du fragmentaire propre au Jardin des Plantes dans l’influence de l’art de Novelli, archetype pictural des possibles de l’espace, du fragment et de la ruine.

Les arbres ne montent pas jusqu’au ciel by Marianne Rubinstein

Reviews 269 Rubinstein, Marianne. Les arbres ne montent pas jusqu’au ciel. Paris: Albin Michel, 2012. ISBN 978-2-226-24298-3. Pp. 197. 17 a. Rubinstein’s third novel traces the evolution of its protagonist, a forty-one-yearold economics professor and mother, through the first year of a difficult separation. Presented as diary entries with dates, divided into chapters for each season, Yaël Koppman’s story begins with five sentences, some of them incomplete, written, like most of the novel, in terse, emotionally charged language. She often omits the “je” in the first sentence of her entries, emphasizing the sense of loss and absence of self. It is only in the last entry, just over a year later, that she includes the subject and its helping verb in the passé composé, instead of beginning the sentence with a single anonymous past participle, demonstrating the discovery of a clear and well-defined “I.” The backdrop for this search for self is contemporary Paris. References to places like the Jardin des Plantes, Berthillon ice cream on l’île Saint-Louis, and the Seine near the Institut du Monde Arabe, where impromptu dance groups form in the summers, contribute to the creation of a real and tangible world and resonate of autobiography, since Rubinstein is herself an economics professor at Université Denis Diderot in Paris. In this context, the first-person protagonist navigates contemporary women’s issues such as balancing work and family life, finding contentment in amorous relationships, the dynamics of female friendships, and most importantly surviving a life crisis, which make this novel significant and immediate for any twenty-first century reader. One question resurfaces throughout the novel in conversations among her girlfriends: what does being forty mean to you? The first-person protagonist finds answers in Roland Barthes’s theory of vita nova, where a single event can change one’s life and divide it into two segments of before and after. The author, citing Barthes, states that one must embrace the second half of life, seize it, and devise a new plan of action. For Barthes and all writers, including Yaël Koppman, this also means adopting a new kind of writing, something that she eventually accomplishes by inserting a heretofore absent “je” in the last entry of the novel. Along the path of self-discovery, the narrator looks to various poets and writers including Virginia Woolf (the inspiration for Rubinstein’s previous novel) and Sei Sho -nagon (author of The Pillow Book), whom she quotes and analyzes. The narrator is also inspired by her own profession and sees things from a socioeconomic perspective, something reflected in the title of the book. Like an economic bubble, which at some point has to burst, a tree will not rise inexorably to the heavens. Similarly, personal catastrophes wreak havoc, but at some point dissipate. Although modest and straightforward, this novel, like the proverb from the title, offers insight into managing personal and literary crises, finding solace in their inevitable conclusion, and creating something new from the vestiges. East Carolina University (NC) Marylaura Papalas ...

Écrivain-écologue. La naissance de l'écologie scientifique dans Jardin des Plantes d'August Strindberg

August Strindberg wrote Jardin des Plantes in 1896 as an attempt to gain recognition as a botanist and chemist. This paper evaluates the scientific relevance of the text, taking into account the status of science at the end of the nineteenth century. A comparison with Œcology of Plants : An Introduction to the Study of Plant Communities, written one year previously by Eugenius Warming (a Danish botanist and major founding figure of the scientific discipline of ecology) shows that Jardin des Plantes is a fairly accurate summary of the state of botany in the late nineteenth century. Strindberg expresses a vision of ecology which is comparable in many aspects to that of Warming, but unlike Warming he is unable to found a new epistemology.

Mallarmé, Huysmans, and the Poetics of Hothouse Blooms

Mallarmé, Huysmans, and the Poetics of Hothouse Blooms Suzanne Braswell In his carnavalesque "Exhortation," the liminal poem to La Muse à Bibi (ca. 1879), André Gill admonishes his muse to reject poetic conventions of the past. Among the traditions that he targets in this satirical diatribe are those associated with French nineteenth-century flower poetry: "Envoie aux ronces tous les voiles, / Envoie au diable la pudeur, / Et n'assomme plus ton lecteur / Avec des fleurs et des étoiles," he wails in the sixth quatrain of his poem. Although Gill's exasperation with the persistent sentimentality of floral allusions in nineteenth-century poetry is palpable, poetic reflection on floral symbolism and discourses had already begun to undergo a considerable evolution among French poets by the 1870s, most manifestly in the wake of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), the title of which essentially attacks the benign sentimentality of popular floral discourses. Certainly, Baudelaire was not insensible to the traditions and symbolic charge carried by flowers during the nineteenth century. The final verse of his poem "Élévation" makes this abundantly clear: it is the poet's mind that easily grasps "[l]e langage des fleurs et des choses muettes" (Baudelaire 10). Following Baudelaire's model, and advancing diverse lines of inspiration that would become associated with symbolist poetry and decadent prose, respectively, Stéphane Mallarmé and Joris-Karl Huysmans devoted considerable attention to floral symbolism in their works. Indeed, their engagement with such imagery, despite their diff ering aesthetics, suggests the pervasiveness of floral discourses during the second half of the nineteenth century in France.1 In Huysmans's novel A rebours (1884) and in various poetic works by Stéphane Mallarmé, including "La Chanson de Deborah" (1854), "Les Fleurs" (1866 and 1887), and "Les Noces d'Hérodiade" (1869, 1871), floral symbols are manifold, as critical literature on these works shows.2 Yet the role that contemporary floral discourses and popular practices played in the [End Page 69] poetic meditations of these authors has largely escaped critical attention, most notably with respect to texts inscribed in what I shall call a "language-of-flowers" tradition. As this analysis will show, examination of their appropriation of formal and discursive conventions associated with this tradition reveals an important though under-researched dimension of their works. It will also enable us to assess the extent to which this tradition impacted both popular culture and the poetic imaginary of nineteenth-century France, and to grasp the radical extension of traditional floral discourses that the floral poetics of Mallarmé and Huysmans eff ected during the fin-de-siècle period. Before we turn to analysis of these authors' texts, we begin with an overview of practices and discourses associated with the language of flowers, in nineteenth-century France. A Tradition Begins Given during courtship and mourning, worn in hair and on clothes, flowers were an enduring presence in French social practices during the nineteenth century, and across many domains.3 In England and France, this was the "era of horticultural societies, flower shows and competitive displays" (Goody 232). It was also a time in which colonial travels resulted in the importation of and fascination with exotic plants (Candolle 9-10; Schiebinger and Swan 2, 11). In 1836, for example, the architect Charles de Rohault de Fleury, with Joseph Newmann at the museum of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, constructed the Mexican and Australian Hothouses, in which a diverse array of succulents and other flora was cultivated and elegantly displayed in newly constructed, glass greenhouses. Similarly, from 1855 forward, a burst of construction and plant cultivation added to Paris "eighteen greenhouses and an orangery," providing both intimate natural spaces within the expanding urban milieu and a remedy to the "exhalaisons novices de la ville" (Chalaye and Kalantzis, Jardins et intimité dans la littérature européenne 326 and 348, 357, respectively). Botanical pursuits were also regarded as "particularly suitable for women" (Campbell 608), and played a role in women's scientific, moral, and "sentimental" education. Among the foundational texts in this line was Charlotte de Latour's Le Langage des Fleurs (1819).4 Her text advanced a belief in the expressive qualities of flowers...

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Physicist and former Representative Bill Foster has put plans for a political action committee "on indefinite hold." And a recent experiment carried out in the Jardin des Plantes in central Paris revealed that feral pigeons can recognize human faces.

The true world's first sculptures of antediluvian animals, which never were…

In 1852, the French state commissioned the artists Frémiet and Jacquemart to execute bronzes of a plesiosaur and a pterodactyl for the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The orders were cancelled before the sculptures could be realized, largely because of petty jealousies among the professors of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, who maintained that the long-extinct animals were too poorly understood for accurate reconstructions. In this way an important opportunity to educate and inspire the French public about the life of the past was lost.

Rinman, Diderot, and Lavoisier: New Evidence Regarding Guillaume Franois Rouelle's Private Laboratory and Chemistry Course

AbstractThis paper will present two recently discovered documents that shed light on the activities of the French chemist Guillaume Franois Rouelle.In 1746 the Swedish chemist and mineralogist Sven Rinman visited the private chemistry laboratory recently set up by Rouelle in Paris, and he has left us a record of this visit, including some rare sketches. Given the crucial contribution made by Rouelle's laboratory to the development of the science of chemistry in 18th-century Europe, Rinman's description is reproduced here in full.Rouelle also taught an extremely popular chemistry course at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and conserved in the archives of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier are some notes taken by Denis Diderot in 1757 which demonstrate that for a period the prominent Enlightenment figure attended these lectures regularly.

Flaubert’s Tentation: Remapping Nineteenth-Century French Histories of Religion and Science by Mary Orr

ORR, MARY. Flaubert’s Tentation: Remapping Nineteenth-Century French Histories of Religion and Science. Oxford: Oxford UP: 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-925858-1. Pp. 368.£ 50.00. If one organizes the criticism of La Tentation according to particular macrostructures, Michel Butor and Michal Peled Ginsburg have done the major work on “parade” or sequential structure. I have argued that a trinitarian construction brings the entire text into a whole. And, like R. B. Leal, Dominique Cardin, and Robert Griffin, though with far more detailed exposition and textual justification, Professor Orr, a well-seasoned Flaubertian, sees La Tentation as a duality that creates a dialogue between science, on the one hand, and faith (or philosophy and religion), on the other. Although I believe Flaubert exploited all three overriding structures, conceptualizing the novel as duality serves Orr well to reveal the depth of Flaubert’s understanding of and allusion to religion and science in the fourth and nineteenth centuries. The vision from the cliff-top in front of Antoine’s door gives her reason to argue that readers must read with a much wider optic than that of realism: acceptable reading must be open to the figurative, the allusive, and the literal. While Orr is by no means the first to delve into the history of the fourthcentury church, she is unusually well versed and able to provide well-organized summaries of that reality. As she points out convincingly, Flaubert wanted to offer a prismatic vision of Antony’s Egypt and nineteenth-century France and Egypt. Not only did Constantine, the two Napoleons, the various Egyptian rulers, and the secular governments of France exhibit similar abuses of power, but the problematic relics, popular miracles of the nineteenth century, and nonconformist cults like the Saint-Simonians make persuasive comparisons with what was occurring in the historical Antony’s (and the fictional Antoine’s) world. As she says, “Surely the significance of Vatican I and the first Council of Nicaea are too similar not to be comparable?” (45), but this is only one of many examples. In the second half of Remapping, Orr turns first to Flaubert’s (and her) impressive knowledge of the fourth century, then to the Bible and saints’ lives, and finally to the books Flaubert read in order to demonstrate that the Antoine of La Tentation alludes especially to Nebuchadnezzar, Jesus, Jerome, and Athanasius, as he figuratively fills out a representation of orthodox faith, while opposing the Queen of Sheba, as the whore of Babylon, and Hilarion, reincarnated as a composite of Arius and, in perhaps the most interesting argument concerned with reason and science, Renan. She then lays down her detailed reasons for claiming that Flaubert alludes to various approaches to nineteenth-century science. Orr shows remarkable insight as she looks carefully at a number of major scientists of the nineteenth century, like Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Lacépède, Lamarck, Laplace, Cuvier, et j’en passe, and museums and institutes like the Jardin des Plantes, the Muséum National, and Napoleon’s Institut d’Égypte that they created, including what we would today recognize as science, as well as the quasi-scientific freaks and monsters of popular appeal. She easily finds many parallels between the science of Flaubert’s day and that of Antoine’s. Given Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt with 167 of the most learned people of France and the many archeological endeavors, no nineteenth-century person could fail to recognize the major links tying the Egyptian past to contemporary France and Egypt. In the end, Orr’s book is not just original, but essential to any reader who wishes to read La Tentation well. While it is impossible to do justice to Orr’s subtle, Reviews 165 learned, and convincing argument in this brief review, Flaubert’s [. . .] Remapping is one of the most important considerations of La Tentation that has appeared in a long, long time. It is, moreover, a model of erudition and critical sensitivity. Once again, Mary Orr sheds new light on Flaubert’s most difficult novel. University of Kansas Allan H. Pasco CLAES, PAUL. La Clef des Illuminations. New York: Rodopi, 2008. ISBN 978-90-4202501 -1. Pp. 359. $104.00. Dans...

Autobiography as Criticism, Criticism as Autobiography

Okay, okay, okay, we get it: you stutter and so, irredeemably self conscious, you're devoted to yourself as subject, also as symbolic subject, even as some sort of featured player in collage movie. Don't you finally want to get outside yourself? Isn't that finally what this has to be about, getting beyond the blahblahblah of your endless? Yes, yes, thousand times yes. Or, rather, yes and no. want to get past myself, of course do, but the only way know how to do this is to ride along on my own nerve endings; the only way out is deeper in; the only portraits I'm really interested in are self-portraits as well. I'm just trying to be honest here. I'm drawn to writers who appear to have Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle tattooed across their forehead: the perceiver by his very presence changes the nature of what's being perceived. In the Afterword to Lolita, Nabokov mentions a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes which, after months of coaxing by scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal; this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage. admire Hilton Als's The Women, W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, and VS. Naipaul's A Way in the World?books in which the chapters, considered singly, are relatively straightforwardly biographical, but read as whole and tilted at just the right angle, refract brilliant, harsh light back upon the author. I only know an object in so far as know myself and my own determination through it, Hegel says, for whatever am is also an object of my consciousness, and am not just this, that or the other, but only what know myself to be. know my object, and know myself; the two are inseparable.