It's a salon like no other. At the Deyrolle taxidermy showroom in Paris you'll find a menagerie of wild animals, birds and insects, waiting for new homes, writes RUADHAN MACCORMAIC,Paris Correspondent
PUSH OPEN THE old-style bottle-green door at number 46, rue du Bac. Make your way through what looks like an ordinary gardening supplies shop and follow the creaking wooden staircase to the first floor dining room, a high-ceilinged space with green panelled walls and a dazzling chandelier. You now find yourself in the midst of the trippiest, most eclectic and least voluble dinner party set in Paris. Among the guests, sitting around a long table set with candles and crockery, are a zebra, a monkey, a stag, a lynx, an Asian tiger, a donkey, a penguin, a squirrel and a South African buffalo. Everything about the scene – exotic birds and butterflies motionless in mid-flight, the tiger paused as he prowls, the zebra staring right at you – is framed to look as if the raucous revellers froze the second you appeared.
It’s vintage Deyrolle, the sort of thing that makes it one of the strangest, most enchanting and category-resistant institutions in Paris. A cabinet of curiosities. A temple of taxidermy. A natural history museum. A showroom of stuffed stiffs. An art gallery. A dead zoo. Deyrolle is all of these. In the third of its large rooms where the walls are lined with ornate wood-and-glass displays containing thousands of insect species from around the world, Peio Rahola is preparing a gift box set of blue translucent butterflies, handling each one with the sure, deft touch of a craftsman. As director of the showroom, Rahola, an affable entomologist with a deep voice and a dense black beard, is responsible for the day-to-day running of the business. “There is no typical customer,” he says. “We sell to young people who want to start an insect collection, to decorators, artists, collectors, people who never would have thought of having something like this in their home but fall for the charm of, say, a fragmented crustacean or a skeleton. They could be considered objects of natural history but also simply as aesthetic objects, as sculptures.”
Many visitors treat Deyrolle like a museum. On Wednesdays, when most schools in the city are closed, the shop fills with children and their grandparents gaping at the collection, as families have done ever since it opened on the rue du Bac site in 1888. “I’ve been coming here since I was 11 or 12 years old,” Rahola says. But it’s also a business. Every piece in the collection is for sale, from the cheapest bugs at €2 apiece to the rare polar bear at €45,000. In between are everything from a mounted fox (€800) to a tortoise (€3,600) or an African elephant (€20,000). Taxidermy hasn’t been badly hit by the recession, Rahola says, and the shop’s bestsellers – gift boxes of pinned butterflies that start at €50 – did well over Christmas. At the higher end of the price scale, Deyrolle’s client list includes Hollywood stars, multi-millionaires from Japan and the Gulf, and expensive hotels around the globe. Fashion houses and magazines often hire the animals for photo-shoots. “We work quite a lot these days with the luxury industry – people like Hermès, Chanel, Dior and so on, who buy birds for their window displays or fashion shows,” Rahola says.
Jean-Baptiste Deyrolle, a renowned entomologist, founded his taxidermy business in 1831. He sold insects and hunting equipment initially before expanding into education and publishing. Riding the wave of interest in natural history in the mid-19th century, Deyrolle became a major supplier of books and materials – its charts were especially famous – to schools in France and overseas and by 1888, when the shop opened in its current location, the family business had 300 staff working in three factories in the Paris suburbs. The surrealists Salvador Dalí and André Breton were regular visitors to the shop on rue du Bac.
After a period of slow decline in the 20th century, Deyrolle was bought in 2001 by the banker-turned-conservationist Prince Louis Albert de Broglie. He vowed to restore the menagerie to its former glory with a major refurbishment, and the plan was bearing fruit when disaster struck on February 1st, 2008. That night, a fire raged through the building, gutting the first floor and destroying 90 per cent of Deyrolle’s interior. What happened next was a remarkable rallying of the “Deyrolle community”. De Broglie suddenly had a plethora of donations and offers of help. France’s culture minister wrote to natural history museums asking that they lend a hand. The house of Hermès issued a limited edition silk scarf and gave the proceeds to Deyrolle. Contemporary artists then produced a series of works based on the shop’s burnt, twice-deceased animals and auctioned them through Christie’s for the reconstruction.
Four years on, Deyrolle is thriving. The showrooms are fully stocked, the internet is helping to raise overseas sales and the education division – now producing modern versions of the famous charts – is again supplying French schools. The stock in the menagerie is constantly changing, and one of Rahola’s jobs is to find enough dead animals to keep up with demand. About 95 per cent of its animals died in captivity – zoos and circuses are Deyrolle’s primary sources – and Rahola stresses that any imports adhere rigorously to the Washington Convention, which regulates international animal trade. I ask about the polar bear. “He was a wild bear who was killed by Inuits,” he replies. “Every year they kill between 500 and 600 polar bears – they eat them, use their skin to make clothes, but every year they sell a few skins. In this case, it was one of our taxidermists who bought the skin in Canada and then prepared the bear in France.”
Working with four French taxidermists, Deyrolle still offers customers one of its oldest services: having an animal stuffed. Do they get many people turning up with their dead cats? “We get that a lot,” Rahola replies. But it turns out that doing business with Inuits or sourcing rare beetles in Borneo is as nothing compared to the headaches involved in dealing with bereaved Parisian cat owners.
“When an old woman of 90 years, who has lived with her cat for 20 years, arrives home and puts it on a table, she obviously doesn’t have her companion back. There’s disappointment. So we prefer not to do domestic animals. We’ll do birds, guinea pigs – animals like that. But cats and dogs, no.”
THE MOST MYSTERIOUS MUSEUM IN PARIS?
AT THE Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, one of Paris’s most inventive and quirky collections, not everything is as it seems. Founded in 1964 by the avid hunter and conservationist François Sommer, the museum – housed in the 17th-century Hôtel de Guénégaud in the Marais – was thoroughly renovated and rethought in 2007.
The emphasis is on the evolving relationship between man and the natural world. Lavishly appointed rooms are filled with revivified animals, antique weaponry and nature-themed art by the likes of Rubens and Gentileschi.
But don’t expect to understand everything. As chief curator Claude d’Anthenaise explains, it’s an experimental museum that likes to baffle the visitor. “I wanted to create a museum where the visitor would feel constantly disconcerted and lose his bearings – just like someone walking in nature,” he says. “In a wild setting, you’re confronted with all sorts of things you don’t understand. You’re not on your own territory.”
So “totally insignificant, even repulsive” objects have been deliberately placed alongside art of the highest quality. Visitors often have to search out explanations for displays. There are hoaxes, traps and false leads. For example, a fake appeau – a device used to imitate the sounds of animals – is presented in what looks like a serious, scientific collection.
“In the hunting trophy collection, there’s an animal that is actually an artistic creation. It’s like a wild boar’s head, which is completely imagined but plausible, all white, and it follows the visitors with its eyes. We can even make it talk as they pass. Sometimes the security guard will turn it on.
“Suddenly the visitor is confronted by this animal which is not fully dead. It invites him to challenge the entirety of the collection. He says to himself, ‘if this is an invention, maybe other things are too’. So he observes them differently.
See chassenature.org
