Deyrolle, founded in 1831, is Paris's most venerable
taxidermist. Photo from www.deyrolle.com
Up the creaky circular wooden stairs, a chestnut horse pokes his head through an oval window in the wall. A baby elephant is captured in mid-stride, a polar bear in mid-snarl. Suspended in a glass case is a magnificent North Atlantic lobster, nearly a meter long, all of its spiny parts deconstructed and perfectly reassembled. Each leg and claw is distinct, yet retains its spatial relationship to the exoskeleton.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” says the bespectacled woman at my elbow. With a silver streak running through her black hair, she fits perfectly into this menagerie. “But it would never survive the trip to America.”
It’s Saturday afternoon and Deyrolle is crowded with fathers and flocks of well-behaved small chidren. Hand in hand, they survey the stuffed animals as if they were exhibits at a museum. And in a way, this strangely wonderful taxidermist is a museum, except that nearly everything is for sale.
The trio of spacious, high-ceilinged rooms on the premiere etage are a cabinet of curiosities, a collector’s dream—if at heart you’re the sort of person who centuries ago might have met ships returning from Africa or the Far East, eager to snare a rare butterfly or shell or,,, maybe a zebra. In 2001 Prince Albert Louis de Broglie performed a national service by rescuing Deyrolle from extinction. It's less dusty than before, and its odd treasures are beautifully displayed (even if he did fill the rez de chaussee with his glam gardening gear.)
Everything you need to start your own natural history collection is here: ancient fossils, chunks of amethyst, coral from the South Seas, greenish iridescent beetles, even an African water buffalo or a crocodile from the Nile. (I’m obliged to report that only the elephant on the website is made of resin.) At least one music video has been shot here and the windows of the smartest boutiques in Paris are lately teeming with egrets and other creatures from Deyrolle.
The company was founded in 1831 by Jean Baptiste Deyrolle, a passionate insect lover and taxidermist. Over the decades, he, with his son Achille, and grandson Emile, turned Societe Deyrolle into a sort of educational resource for the schools of France. They assembled vast collections of perfectly preserved and mounted insects, butterflies, sea shells, minerals and animals as teaching aids for natural history classes. Butterfly hunters and botanists came here for the gear they needed, while game hunters brought their trophies, big and small, to be stuffed. There are a lot of heads and antlers on the walls at Deyrolle
As for me, I love the detailed, occasionally bizarre Planches Pedagogiques. Starting in 1866, these oversize posters were commissioned by the French government for use in classes in zoology, botany, anatomy and other sciences. Some, like diagrams of human musculature or the digestive system of the horse are too graphic for my taste, but I adore the circa-1900 nursery school posters depicting tea, cacao and other foods in the most delectable ways. The, which features a Chinaman with a long pigtail, follows the leaf from the camillia sinensis plant to teapots of various sizes and shapes. Confiture, or jam, shows a copper pot encircled by luscious cherries, apples and pears that eventually wind up in a glass jar of preserves.
The food posters are only available in reproduction (great ones, actually, for just 15 euros), but you can also find originals here, including a lovely botanical of the chickory plant by the French botanist Gaston Bonnier. I fell for the Arabic version of Les Arbres, which depicts 19 trees in wondrous detail. The gorgeous calligraphy is Arabic—it was done for schools in Lebanon--so I have no idea what it says.
But that’s part of the fun. Putting together your own cabinet of curiosities means you get to wonder about things.
Deyrolle, 46 rue du Bac, 75007, Paris. Telephone: 01 42 22 30 07.
Fax: 01 42 22 32 02. Web: www.deyrolle.com