The Invention of Nature

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.