with the corollary possibility that the pattern of Earthly evolution might be a recapitulation of one that had already unfolded elsewhere, perhaps many times.”
Again, I thought: No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. An infinite process, with no need of a first cause. As rhetoric went, however, it looked suspiciously like cheating to me.
“Do you believe that?” I asked.
“It’s not a matter for belief,” he said, sharply—and inevitably. “We can only speculate.”
“But you do believe that all life on Earth ultimately had a single point of origin in some kind of primal cell,” I pointed out.
“That’s a different matter,” he said. “The patterns of relatedness between species, scrupulously catalogued by taxonomists like Carl von Linné and the Chevalier de Lamarck provide strong evidence to that effect. To begin with, Linné and Buffon tended to map the relationships in series of circles placed in varying degrees of proximity, but that conceptual geometry is now being replaced by a diagrammatic ‘tree of life,’ in which phyla, orders and genera are represented as branches from a single root-stock. Polygenists, of course, believe in a more generous mechanism of continuous creation or spontaneous generation, which is still ongoing, with respect to primitive organisms, but the monogenists have the upper hand now.”
“I see,” I said, although I was now out of my depth. As usual, when he saw me out of my depth, Dupin hastened to explain—with the inevitable effect of dragging me into even deeper intellectual waters.
“Polygeny is the thesis of multiple origins, as opposed to monogeny, which proposes a single point of origin. As Madame Guérande mentioned, it was one of the principal axes of debate in Achille Malet’s salon. If we had had Malet’s full text available to us then, it would have added an extra dimension to the debate—although our discussions usually focused on the corollary issue of the origin of man, which also gives rise to polygenist and monogenist arguments. Modern monogenists, who believe that the human species had a single point of evolutionary origin, tend to place it in Central Asia—with which Maillet would have agreed—but their estimates of the timing of that origin vary considerably. Polygenists, of course, attribute separate origins to the various human races now extant, some even disagreeing as to the nature of the ancestor-species that preceded the human.”
“Apes, that is,” I said, eager to show that I understood something.
“That’s the most common opinion,” he agreed, “among those who dare voice an opinion at all. Linné and Lamarck both regarded it as obvious, although they would only admit to the conviction in private—but I have heard seals mentioned, and pigs too. The polygenist is, of course, free to accept all three as hypothetical possibilities, although the monogenist is forced to choose.”
“And that was the sort of thing you used to debate in Professor Malet’s salon?”
“Among others. We thought of ourselves as very bold freethinkers—as, indeed, we were. Nor was our secrecy unwarranted. The spies thronging the Sorbonne might have been paid by Monsieur Fouché—who contrived to keep his post as Minister of Police even after the Empire’s fall, just as Napoléon had been forced to recall him to it because he knew too much to be left out in the cold—but their reports reached the Church as well as the Crown, and those members of the salon who had salaried positions in the university still had something material to fear from accusations of heresy.”
“It sounds to me more like metaphysics than biology,” I confessed, “and it surely has no relevance to whatever problems Monsieur Guérande has with his problematic research in the caves of Mont Dagon, legal disputes over the ownership of the land and Thierachian nomads.”
“It’s difficult to imagine how it might,” Dupin admitted. “The probability is that Julie plucked the book off the shelf because she recognized it as one that she had given me, rather than because it struck any chord with regard to her mysterious problem. She has not changed as much as I might have expected, given that she is a quarter of a century older than when I last saw her, a dutiful wife and doting mother. She has not lost her taste for temptation and teasing.”
“She referred to her old self as a flirt,” I told him, “although that was for my benefit, as an American—she was, I think, flirting with me, ever so slightly.”
“Doubtless she was,” Dupin said, dryly. “Even at seventeen, she thought that she could twist us all around her little finger—including poor old Lamarck, while he was still able to attend our gatherings. She had known him for years by then, of course. And she was right—about being able to twist us all around her little finger, that is. The adorable Julie, we called her.”
That, I knew, was a quotation, referring to the star of some eighteenth-century salon, about which Molière had written a famous satire. I could not quite recall the salon-keeper’s name, but I had a vague memory that her daughter—the “adorable Julie”—had kept her multiple suitors dangling for fourteen years before finally condescending to become a Duchesse. But Dupin’s Julie—or, to be strictly accurate, Monsieur Guérande’s Julie—had obviously not strung things out to that extent, and evidently had not granted herself, in the end, to the suitor with the highest-placed rank in the peerage...not that the peerage had counted for much in the 1820s, in spite of the Restoration.
Perhaps, I thought, science had its own peerage now, and perhaps Julie Malet had accepted the proposal of the most promising young scientist in the Lamarckian clique: the man most likely to carry evolutionary theory forward to its inevitable triumph over superstition. If so, that promise did not seem to have come to fruition. I could not imagine, however, that anyone would have considered Dupin to have been a better catch, given the manifest eccentricity of his own interests and exploits. Lucien Groix, on the other hand....
“I was surprised to learn that Monsieur Groix was a member of Achille Mallet’s coterie,” I observed, curiously.
“He wasn’t, quite,” Dupin replied. “He was a regular in the salon, for a while, but his commitment to the Lamarckian doctrine, as preached by Malet, was even weaker than mine. His primary interest was the professor’s daughter, I suspect—and if so, he was not alone in pretending a greater interest in science than he actually had, in order to gain entrée to the circle. On the other hand, he might simply have been Fouché’s spy, at the very outset of his glittering career as a policeman.”
“You’re not serious?”
“Perfectly serious. Fouché had spies in every significant salon in the capital. They were the richest source of information he had. Monsieur Groix has kept up the tradition and his successors will doubtless do likewise. It is, after all, through salon society that ideas circulate at their greatest and most careless ease, and where they thrive in their natural environment. Do you imagine that Louis XIV’s lieutenants of police did not collect regular reports from the Marquise de Rambouillet’s drawing-room?”
The Marquise de Rambouillet, I remembered then, had been the mother of the original “adorable Julie.”
“But Malet and Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire were pillars of society,” I said. “They were men of science, among the glories of the nation in an Age of Enlightenment. They surely posed no danger whatsoever to the interests of Louis XVIII.”
“With the aid of hindsight,” Dupin admitted, “we can probably conclude that they did not—but monarchy, in the final analysis, derives its privileges from the myth of divine right. Evolutionism was seen then—and is still seen, in certain quarters of society—as a dangerous threat to that notion, inherently supportive of the belief that all men are essentially born equal, and
