The Invention of Nature

Stuck in Berlin, Humboldt continued to yearn for adventure. He wanted to escape from Berlin, a city that according to him was ornamented not by knowledge but only by ‘flourishing potato fields’. Then, in the winter of 1807, politics for once dealt him a good hand of cards. Friedrich Wilhelm III asked Humboldt to assist a Prussian peace mission to Paris. The king was sending his younger brother, Prince Wilhelm, to renegotiate the financial burdens imposed on Prussia by the French with the Treaty of Tilsit. Prince Wilhelm would need someone who knew people in powerful positions to open the doors for the diplomatic talks – and Humboldt with his Parisian connections was thought the perfect candidate.

Humboldt happily accepted and left Berlin in mid-November 1807. Once in Paris he did what he could, but Napoleon was not willing to compromise. When Prince Wilhelm returned to Prussia after several unsuccessful months of negotiations, he arrived without Humboldt, who had decided to stay in Paris. Humboldt had come prepared and had brought all his notes and manuscripts to France with him. In the midst of a war that saw Prussia and France as hardened enemies, Humboldt ignored politics and patriotism, and made Paris his home. His Prussian friends were horrified, as was Wilhelm von Humboldt who could not understand his brother’s decision. ‘I don’t approve of Alexander’s stay in Paris,’ he told Caroline, thinking it unpatriotic and selfish.

Humboldt didn’t seem to care. He wrote to Friedrich Wilhelm III, explaining that the lack of scientists, artists and publishers in Berlin made it impossible for him to work and publish the results of his travels. Surprisingly, Humboldt was allowed to remain in Paris – still quietly pocketing his salary as the Prussian king’s chamberlain. He would not return to Berlin for another fifteen years.

¹ In the Essay Humboldt explained plant distribution in great detail. He likened the conifers in high altitudes in Mexico to those in Canada; compared the oaks, pines and flowering shrubs in the Andes to those from ‘northern lands’. He also wrote about a moss on the banks of the Río Magdalena that was similar to one in Norway.

² Goethe’s only problem was that the all-important drawing – the Naturgemälde – had not been delivered with his copy of the book. He decided to paint his own and then sent Humboldt his sketch, ‘half in jest, half in seriousness’. Goethe was so excited when the missing Naturgemälde finally arrived, seven weeks later, that he packed it when he went on holiday to nail it on the wall so that he could look at it all the time.

³ These annotations, however, were gems in themselves: some were little essays, others were fragments of thoughts or pointers towards future discoveries. Here Humboldt, for example, talked about evolutionary ideas long before Darwin published his Origin of Species.

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.