Vintage Théâtre de la Girafe--Marseille France Zoo

Book Excerpt: 'Zarafa: A Giraffe's True Story'

I wonder if Zarafa, lived in this restored Giraffe building above for a time:

After sailing down the Nile and across the Mediterranean to arrive as France’s first giraffe, Zarafa spent the winter of 1826-1827 ensconced in queenly comfort on the grounds the prefecture in Marseilles. In the spring she and her bizarre retinue of French, Arab and African handlers walked from Marseilles to Paris, 550 miles in 42 days.

La Belle Girafe immediately became the rage of Paris. En route from Marseilles, villages had named streets and squares de la Girafe to commemorate her passage. Even taverns and inns not along her way were named for her, as provincial proprietors all over France either heard of her or saw her at the zoo in Paris and went home and renamed their establishments.

After being received by King Charles X, Zarafa was put on daily public exhibition at le Jardin du Roi (as the Jardin des Plantes was renamed during the Restoration.) In the last three weeks of July 1827 60,000 people came to see her. In August 40,000 people bought tickets to stand in line moving past her. Her combined 100,000 visitors in July and August represented one-eighth of the entire population of the city. She was soon the subject of songs and instrumental music, poems and vaudeville skits, and anonymous political satires criticizing the king’s censorship of the press. Paris adored her.

Children playing in the parks of Paris bought snacks of gingerbread giraffes. Their mothers wore their hair a la giraffe, coiffured so high that they had to ride on the floors of their carriages. That summer the Journal of Women and Fashion reported the chic of “a necklace a la giraffe, a narrow ribbon from which is suspended a pink heart or better yet a small locket of the seraglio in the form of the amulet seen around the neck of the Giraffe at le Jardin du Roi.”

The most stylish colors of that year’s fashion season were “belly of the Giraffe,” “Giraffe in love,” “Giraffe in exile.” Men wore “Giraffic” hats and ties, and a magazine of the day diagrammed instructions for tying a gentleman’s cravat a la Girafe.

Zarafamania was everywhere – in textiles and wallpaper, crockery and knickknacks, soap, furniture, topiary – anywhere her distinctive spots and long-necked shape could be employed. The recently invented claviharp was renamed the “piano-Giraffe.” That winter’s influenza was “Giraffe flu”; and people inquired of the sick, “How goes the Giraffe?”

Zarafa’s Sudanese handler, Atir, remained with her and they took up residence together in one of the five radiating, hexagonal, two-story alcoves of la Rotonde, which still stands on the grounds of le Jardin des Plantes. The distinctively shaped building had been completed in 1805 as an architectural replica of the pentacular cross of the Legion of Honor – another of Zarafa’s links to Napoleon, who created the award in 1802 and designed the cross himself to honor excellence in whomever he found it, part of his intention to create an aristocracy of achievement.

“Her winter apartment,” as the head of the zoo described in a letter to the prefect in Marseilles, was floored with parquet and insulated with an “elegant mosaic” of straw matting on the walls. Opposite sets of double doors provided access either outside or into the center of the building, which was heated with stoves and the body heat of other animals as needed to maintain the warmth “of African health…It is truly the boudoir of a little lady…Atir arrives at his bed by two ladders…the two characters visit each other, the Giraffe and Atir, head to head in the high spaces of the enclosure.”

Atir greatly enjoyed his renown as Zarafa’s handler, exhibiting her every day to the crowds, then publicly grooming her with a currycomb attached to a long pole. This proud but laborious daily ritual became part of the vernacular of Paris in a common expression of reluctance, “Do that or comb the Giraffe.”

Long after they were gone, Atir and Zarafa lived in the memory and speech of those who had seen them. Gustave Flaubert was four years old when Zarafa arrived in France; as a child, he visited Paris from his native Rouen and saw her in le Jardin; over thirty years later he wrote in a letter to his friend, Georges Sand, that he was “as tired as the Turk with the giraffe.”

The head of the zoo – Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who had made the long journey with Zarafa from Marseilles – was amused by Atir’s other reputation as a ladies’ man and reported to the prefect: “He is a true French chevalier with good luck: he causes talk” as well as a police dossier citing eyewitness accounts of him climbing at night over the fence of le Jardin, en route to and later returning from his neighborhood trysts.

Zarafa, though, never had a mate. Except for her reflection, fragmented in the panes of the tall glass doors of her enclosure, she did not see her own kind for 13 years. Then, for the last six years of her life, she lived in le Jardin with France’s second giraffe, a young female around the same age Zarafa had been when she had so captivated Paris.