IN THE DARK HOURS of a hot July night in 1815, sitting on the outside of a mail coach a few miles from Paris, I woke to the sound of a woman’s voice, speaking in French, deep and roughly textured, like limestone. We had stopped outside a village inn whose sign creaked in the night wind. Attention, she said to the driver. Be careful.

I opened my eyes as a tall figure, her head obscured by the hood of her cloak, climbed into the seat beside me. Groaning with the effort, the driver passed up to her a large bundle wrapped in a red velvet blanket. It was a sleeping child; I could just make out a dimpled hand, the sleep-hot flush of a cheek, and a curl of dark hair. The woman spoke softly to the child, soothing it, rearranging the folds of its blanket.

“There are several empty seats inside, madame,” I said in French, concentrating hard on my pronunciation.

She answered me in perfect English: “But who would want to sit inside on a night like this?”

“Is it safe in France for a woman to travel alone?” I asked as the coach lurched back into movement. The Edinburgh newspapers regularly reported attacks on carriages traveling at night across open country.

She laughed and turned toward me, her face illuminated by the light of a half-moon. Over to my left somewhere a rooster crowed; we must have been passing a farm or a village. “But I am not traveling alone,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper and leaning toward me. “I have Delphine. She is no ordinary child, you see. She is asleep now, of course, so it may be a little difficult for you to believe, but this child, she can fight armies and slay dragons. I have seen it with my own eyes. I have seen her lift an elephant and its rider with a single hand. Non, I am entirely safe with Delphine. Otherwise, of course, I would never travel alone. It is far too dangerous. What about you, monsieur? Are you not afraid?”

“I—”

“No, of course you are not afraid.” She smiled. “You are a man.”

“I have never left England before,” I stammered. “I have never traveled so far or had to make myself understood in another language. Three times I decided I must take the next mail coach back to Calais … I’ve never felt so much of a coward.”

She laughed, her voice mesmerizing in the darkness. “There it is. Paris. See the lights ahead … on the horizon? We will be there by dawn. Imagine …” She stopped suddenly, gazing out toward the flattened shapes of the distant hills. “Sometimes it’s easier to see all that water in the darkness.”

“I can’t see any water,” I said, confused.

“That’s a strange thing to think about,” I said.

“Oui.” She laughed. “I suppose it is. But I think about it often, this earth before man. I look at the fossils in the rocks, the remains of that time so long ago, and I think about how late we came. Even the sea slugs appeared before we did. It took thousands of years for these bodies of ours to take shape, for our clever eyes and our curious brains to come to be. And now that we are big and strong, we think everything belongs to us, that we know and own everything.”

“Come to be?” I said, surprised and a little alarmed. “So you think species have changed? You are a student of Professor Lamarck, the transformist?”

“I was once,” she said. “Lamarck is right about most things. Species are not fixed. Everything is changing, all the time. The animals, the people, the hills—even the little things, skin, hair, everything is constantly renewing itself, taking new shapes. Just think of what we have come from—simple sea creatures with no eyes or hearts or minds—then think of what we might yet become. Doesn’t that excite you?” She ran her fingers across the child’s face. She—Delphine, the dragonslayer—stirred, her eyes flickering open for a moment and then closing again.

“Paris is riddled with infidels,” Professor Jameson had warned me back in Edinburgh. “They are poets, these French transformists, not men of science. They dream up notions about the origins of the earth and the transmutation of species. Castles in the air. Most of them are atheists too—heretics. Steer clear.”

“It will get bigger, you know,” she said, her eyes shining in the dark with a touch of malevolence.

“What will?”

“The city. It doesn’t look so big now, at night, but it will swallow you up. Are you not afraid?”

“Yes.” I smiled. “Yes. Of course I’m afraid.”

Paris aroused complicated feelings in me then. What did I know of cities—the sound of thousands of people moving together, the tangled dealings of commerce and trade? I had always been a country boy. I knew the insides of the cave networks and mine workings of Derbyshire; I knew the angles and curves of the hills, the names of trees, ferns, lichens, and fishes; I could tell you how the light fell across the lakes, but I knew almost nothing of cities.

Edinburgh—quiet, solid, rainy Edinburgh, hewn out of the rock and built across a ravine—where I had lived and worked for four years, had overwhelmed me as a seventeen-year-old boy arriving by carriage one frosty morning. As I slipped through the crowd of Princes Street, I could scarcely feel the beginnings and ends of myself in the roar and flow of it. So I had anchored myself, establishing daily routes between the lecture theaters, the anatomy school, the libraries, museums, and taverns. Despite the best efforts of my fellow students, one of whom urged me with mock seriousness to fall in love for the sake of my health, I had lived largely in and among books.

Now that I had graduated, I wanted more than anything to be part of what was happening in Paris—the conversations and discoveries in the debating rooms, the libraries, and the museums. The French professors, given authority, freedom, and money by Napoleon, were making new inroads into knowledge. The museums in Paris were remarkable, the lectures groundbreaking. But it was also the city my father and his friends feared and loathed, the Paris of the Revolution—a city of people so hungry they had marched on Versailles, stormed the Bastille, imprisoned and then killed a royal family. I thought about the newspaper reports my father had kept that described the guillotine swallowing up lives, thousands of them; blood in the streets; mobs; children with sticks and garden tools hunting down the children of aristocrats and beating them to death; a king made to wear a red cap; bloodied heads on spikes; the grocer burned alive on a pyre made of furniture thrown from the windows of the palaces of émigrés.

ON THAT SAME HOT NIGHT, IN JULY, the Emperor Napoleon lay sleepless in a small bed on board the HMS Bellerophon,

AS THE COACH MADE ITS WAY along the length of the Faubourg Saint-Denis, I looked for my thief among the soldiers in vividly colored uniforms and the men and women pushing handcarts, carrying flowers, wood, fruit, and vegetables into the city from outlying farms. Narrow cobbled roadways to each side trickled with stinking water; ancient lanterns hung from ropes overhead. All down the street, as far as I could see, haberdashers were hanging long strips of bright calico outside their shops like flags. On street corners old men clustered around smoky braziers, roasting fish and meat. I was hungry.

The mail coach turned into a wide covered courtyard, where half a dozen other coaches were drawing up at the same time. Drivers were unloading towers of luggage from roofs; porters were bustling about and attendants shouting. “Dis way, sare; are you for ze Otel of Rhin?” “Hôtel Bristol, sare!” Cards were thrust into hands; English voices jabbered. “Hicks, Hicks, take the coats and umbrellas.” “Count the packages, John. There should be twenty-seven.” There were nurserymaids, carpetbags, hatboxes, cloaks, and trunks everywhere. “Enfin,” I heard an old lady say to her daughters, yawning and rubbing her eyes with her cambric handkerchief, “nous voilà!”

“Hôtel Corneille,” I said to the first porter who met my eye. Grinning, he lifted my three suitcases onto his handcart and set off on foot. I followed close behind, lest the man suddenly take off with the rest of my possessions. On each side of the street shopkeepers were opening up their doors to morning trade, setting up their windows and storefronts; waiters put out tables; fiacre drivers washed down the wheels of their carriages at the street pumps or brushed down their horses.

Was I glad Napoleon Bonaparte had fallen? No. Of course not. None of us at Edinburgh had been glad, despite what we might have said at the dinner tables of our professors or in the company of our elders. Napoleon Bonaparte, not Welllington, was the real giant killer.

Of course I had kept silent when my father muttered over his morning newspaper, saying how he would hang the captured Corsican bastard if he were in charge in Paris, how he’d make a public spectacle of him. And there was the fact that it was only after Wellington had defeated Napoleon on that battlefield at Waterloo that my father finally gave his consent to my European travels. “British order,” he had declared, thumping the dinner table with his fist, “is exactly what those barbarians need. We’ll show those French savages a thing or two.”

Now the decadent, aristocratic atmosphere made it almost impossible to imagine the ferocity of the mobs that had so recently surged through here. A military band played music at the door of one hotel where, the porter told me, the Emperor of Austria had his quarters. Valets carried out chairs from the hotel and placed them under the shade of the trees.

My spirits began to lift.

I paced the small bedroom between the window and the sink for twenty minutes or so, talking to myself, veering light-headedly between self-accusation and outrage. It was only when I bruised my right hand badly by punching the wall several times that I decided to find the Bureau de la Sûreté.

I poured water from the jug beside the sink into a basin and found my razor and the small pot of shaving cream. Since I had left Edinburgh these daily rituals had come to be important. They provided a kind of tethering, a connection to home. Rising at seven o’clock, a morning walk, breakfast, a shave. I studied my face in the cracked mirror as my skin became visible with each sweep of the razor. It was a face that seemed to look different every morning and, despite the familiar features—black curls, blue eyes, a full mouth, the tiny scar on my chin where the hair wouldn’t grow—I did not recognize myself.

ONCE INSIDE THE OFFICES of the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité the next morning, I found a long line of people sitting on chairs in a windowless corridor with scuffed blue walls and highly polished floors. Most people sat staring at nothing, clutching documents; others read newspapers or talked in hushed voices. A child started to spin a hoop down the long corridor until a clerk admonished her.

Another clerk standing behind a hatch took down details from the queue of new arrivals—name, address, nature of complaint. He asked questions and crossed boxes on his form. In his questions I heard words and phrases that I had not heard spoken before: cambriolage, un vol avec armes, un vol sans armes. With weapon. Without weapon. Known to victim. Not known. I watched him flush with irritation when a woman said she didn’t know whether her necklace had been taken from her bedroom or her sitting room. Such distinctions seemed to be important as a way of defining the type of crime more exactly.

I could hear my brother Samuel’s voice as if he was sitting next to me. Samuel, the brother who was closest to me in age and who was studying for the ministry, would certainly have said that this theft was God’s way of telling me I had taken the wrong path, reminding me that the pursuit of natural knowledge was always a chimera, a vanity. My mother would always nod wisely when Samuel talked like that. Come home, Daniel. Come home, they whispered.

Once Samuel and I had collected butterflies, fossils, and newts, dissected frogs, read the reports of the scientific societies in the local paper, shared a tutor, kept up with the latest geological theories. Now that Samuel was entering the church, he had put away his collections and his instruments, and we argued about God. When I asked him a string of rational but vaguely heretical questions about transubstantiation or the precise nature of the relationship between God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost, Samuel’s answer was always the same: that if I prayed for long enough and with sufficient humility, God would show me the way. That pious refusal to answer my questions infuriated me. Samuel had given me an expensive copy of Paley’s Evidences of Christianity for my journey to Paris in the hope that it would strengthen my faith. I had not opened it. I tried to pray there in that corridor at the Bureau but failed.

Two hours I waited—and it seemed I was one of the lucky ones.

“M. Jagot will see you himself, M. Connor,” the clerk whispered, stooping to speak to me as quietly as he could. He looked impressed. “M. Jagot has taken an interest in your case. His room is the last door on the right at the end of the corridor.”

LATER THAT AFTERNOON I walked to the Louvre in search of the Caravaggios, stopping first at a traiteur, where I ordered a bowl of thick beef soup with vermicelli for fifteen sols, noting down the price and the date in one of the new notebooks I had bought. I have them still, those small black leather notebooks, filled with tiny rows of numbers, totals and subtotals. It was a habit I had taken on at medical school when my meager allowance barely stretched to give me enough food for the day. Now in Paris I was rich it seemed, at least in comparison with my former life. But I had to make my inheritance last. Everything depended on that.

I had to regulate my expenditure. The day spent with Fin had been expensive. Since entry to the Louvre was free to foreign visitors, I could spend an afternoon there and then come to a decision about what to do next. I couldn’t see Jagot's man anymore, but I knew he was probably still out there somewhere. I began to feel affronted by the suspicion that being followed by a police agent implied. I am the victim of a crime, M. Jagot, not a suspect, I muttered to myself.

REBECCA STOTT is a professor of English literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. She is the author of the novel Ghostwalk and a biography, Darwin and the Barnacle, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio. She lives in Cambridge, England.

A Conversation with Rebecca Stott about The Coral Thief

The novel takes place soon after the defeat of Napoleon by the British Navy at Waterloo. What was it that drew you to this particular sliver of time in French history?

1815 was a remarkable turning point – a vortex in history. It was twenty years or so after the French Revolution. The French had established a republic and then Napoleon Bonaparte had risen to power, appointing himself initially as First Consul, then later Emperor of France. He’d been cock-of-the-roost in Europe for more than ten years, conquering one European country after another. He’d made Paris the centre of everything, politically and culturally, literally transforming the map of Europe. He and his men had plundered hundreds of palaces across Europe and he’d sent back all his spoils of war to Paris so that, by 1815, the museums, libraries and galleries in Paris were full to the rafters with paintings, rare books and unique natural history collections. Then all of that power came crashing to an end when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo; the Allied armies marched into and occupied Paris turning the city into a vast military encampment. Because Paris had been pretty much closed to foreigners for ten years, curiosity brought thousands of English visitors to the city. At the same time the French émigrés were coming back, many of them exiled or on the run. And now that Napoleon had fallen, the rulers of the Italian states, Prussia and Holland had sent ambassadors to Paris to demand their stolen treasures back, so the paintings and statues and collections were on the move again. It was a fascinating vortex. I wanted to send some people in there to see what it was like.

The book intertwines the story of Daniel Connor, a young English medical student, with Napoleon, as he makes his way to exile. Why did you decide to link the two?

Daniel Connor is a brilliant young medical student – ambitious, hardworking, a little bit self-regarding. For most ambitious young men at this point in history, Napoleon was a hero. He had shown what could be done with sheer nerve and intelligence and brilliance. But of course, for English men Napoleon was also the enemy, a potential invader. Because of the Napoleonic Wars, Daniel’s life couldn’t begin until Napoleon had fallen, so all through that summer and autumn whilst he’s in Paris, falling in love, discovering breathtaking new ways of seeing the world and coming to see how old the earth really was, he was rising in his own sky at the same time that Napoleon was falling in his. Threading Napoleon’s story through Daniel’s story was a way of anchoring Daniel to history, a way of indicating the way that the lives of generations entangle. It also provided something of an evolutionary way of seeing time, not a single straight line but a series of overlapping arcs. The animals in the novel are important too – like the ostrich in one of the later chapters and the giraffe at the end. Everything, to use Charles Darwin’s phrase, is ‘netted together’. I wanted to show history as a tangle of mutually entangled lives – not just Napoleon and Daniel’s lives but also all the animals who had got caught up in history too – the animals transported across Europe by Napoleon’s soldiers and brought into Paris to the menagerie in the Jardin. ‘It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank,’ Darwin wrote, ‘clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.’ That’s the kind of history I wanted to write. To take a moment in time and look at the tangle of mutually dependent lives, and to make that include the animals too.

You begin with an epigraph from one of Charles Darwin’s notebooks. What does this mean to you?

Yes, the quote is from Notebook C which Darwin kept in 1838 after he’d returned from the Beagle voyage and was gradually working through the stages of his transmutation theory. He wrote: ‘Once grant that species [of] one genus may pass into each other . . . & whole fabric totters & falls’. The entry marks a moment when Darwin glimpsed the enormous philosophical consequences of what he was working out. He saw that his species theory would threaten the religious and social premises of so much orthodox thinking and would perhaps even topple the social fabric. And of course that is what Daniel comes to see too through Lucienne Bernard and through the other students of Lamarck who come to Finn’s salon. Lucienne knows that scientific knowledge can be stunted by politics and religion. She can see that the re-establishment of the King and the Bourbon government in France and the return of the priests will ensure radical and heretical scientific debate was silenced in Paris. The novel is about falling in many ways – falling roofs, falling people, falling orthodoxies. Some of the passion of The Coral Thief is about that – about fighting to be allowed to think for yourself, about the right to ask questions. Lucienne’s passion is driven by that – she’s not against religion or against the priests (she might even have some remnants of religious belief in her) but she wants to live in a world in which any question can be asked.

Two very strong scientific personalities figure into the narrative of The Coral Thief—George Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Who were they and what impact did they have on science of the time?

They were both famous all over Europe. Cuvier was a comparative anatomist with a great deal of power in Paris. He ran the Jardin des Plantes. He was on a number of committees and in many ways he dictated the development of natural history in Paris. He was a charismatic lecturer and a brilliant thinker who was developing comparative anatomy in extraordinary ways, but he was passionately opposed to speculative science in general and to evolutionary ideas in particular.

Lamarck was a transmutationist (an early exponent of evolution) and older than Cuvier. He was a Professor of Invertebrates at the Jardin des Plantes. He’d written a number of important books on the taxonomy and classification of shells but since the turn of the nineteenth century he had been working on evolutionary ideas. As a result, he had become associated with radical atheistic ideas and with dangerous speculation, though of course, like Darwin later, he didn’t really write about religion, he was more interested in the origin of the earth and in finding mechanisms to explain the transmutation of species.

Cuvier’s argument with Lamarck was not a religious one; it was just that he thought Lamarck’s ideas were wrong scientifically and that whilst there was no proof for evolution, it was at best a ridiculous castle in the air. He did his best to lampoon Lamarck’s ideas where he could, whilst also trying to retain an air of scientific neutrality and fairness.

When Lamarck died he was buried in a pauper’s grave (his bones were later dug up and scattered in the catacombs under Paris); Cuvier was given a large tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery. That was no accident of history.

Why thieves and theft?

Theft is one of many things that fascinate me. The Coral Thief explores the nature of theft, particularly in Paris in 1815 when the city was full of ‘stolen’ spoils of war. What does it mean to steal something that has already been stolen? I also love heist movies but there’s usually a lack of development of character in them because character is sacrificed to plot. I wanted to see if I could write the equivalent of a heist movie with historically complex situations and people. Not sure if readers will think it works, but it was something I wanted to do. The novel is also about curiosity too, like Ghostwalk, and about how far people will go to find out something.

You have noted that the character of police chief Henri Jagot is modeled on Francois-Eugene Vidocq. Who was he? Were the police during this time quite as sinister as your character?

Vidocq is famous. Versions of him appear in several nineteenth-century novels such as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Balzac’s Père Goriot. He was a notorious thief who had been recruited by the authorities in Paris to run their Bureau de la Sûreté. It was a brilliant choice because, of course, Vidocq understood how criminals worked and he also knew most of them. He was ambitious, ruthless and highly successful. He is generally held to be the first police agent in France and, because he later set up his own private detective agency, historians call him the first detective. He was also considered by most biographers to have been corrupt. But Vidocq was only one of many agents in Paris. Paris had been full of agents since the Revolution. Everyone was spying on everyone else, and the intellectuals in Paris were particularly closely watched. There’s a brilliant essay by the historian Robert Daunton called ‘A Police Inspector Sorts His Files’ which describes the working practices of one police agent in Paris during the Revolution whose job it was to watch a number of intellectuals. Daunton argues that it was in this atmosphere of constant surveillance that the concept of the intellectual was made. If Paris is an enormous web of intrigues and surveillance in 1815, which was what I was trying to describe, Vidocq/ Jagot is the spider sitting at the centre of it. He was also another collector – most of my main characters are collectors – he was cataloguing criminals whilst Cuvier was cataloguing bones and fossils.

What about collecting? Why is that so important to the novel?

In the 18th and 19th centuries it was of course highly fashionable for aristocratic people to have collections in their houses. People would specialize in collecting coins or shells or paintings or natural history or botanical specimens or snuff boxes, or perhaps they’d have a variety of all of these things. Cabinet makers made a fine living building exquisitely carved shelves and display cabinets for these objects. Agents travelled all over the world to procure rare and beautiful objects for the Duchesses and Counts who employed them. Those natural history collections were the predecessors of the modern museum. And the objects in these collections were objects to think with, to speculate upon, to talk about in relation to the great mysteries of nature. For Lucienne Bernard, I think, reassembling that coral collection of hers, started by her grandmother, was a way of countering the tragic fracturing of her history and her family in the Revolution, shoring up something against the ruins of all of that, trying to make a whole out of the broken parts. And that is something that a novelist does too, I think, assembling (in my case, historical) objects, some of them ‘stolen’, to make a whole.

Much of the novel’s action takes place in Paris’ “Underworld”—how did you research that? I would imagine they didn’t keep excellent records.

Journals, diaries, old prints, books, guidebooks, letters - hundreds of them. I’m lucky – I live five minutes away from one of the greatest copyright libraries in the world and that is where I work – often in the Rare Books Room, a beautiful room with long desks and people sitting reading manuscripts that are hundreds of years old. I found a guidebook to Paris for 1815 that tells you everything – where to get hats mended, where to buy the best cut flowers or a whole pig, how to hire a valet or a carriage, as well as a review of all the theatres and marionette theatres and wax museums. It made it all so immediate and vivid. At one point I had memorized so much that I felt I could walk down the Rue Vivienne, for instance, and point out all the shops on either side. Then I found a rare book which listed all the entries into the quarries and mapped all the quarry tunnels too. So pretty soon I could map Paris overground onto Paris underground. And there really were people living and working down there in the tunnels – an illegal mint that worked in the quarry system under the streets, and Knights Templar tunnels. Of course, actually going to modern Paris only helped me picture the Paris of 1815 up to a point. Modern Paris has been utterly remade and the labyrinthine streets I wanted to see were largely knocked down in Haussmann’s redesign of Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century. So Marakesh in Morocco and some small towns in Jordan seemed to me more useful as a way of imagining how parts of Paris might have been then: food being cooked in the streets, smoke, street sellers, people selling you things everywhere, the smells of coffee, lemons, fish, and the people: picaros, street entertainers, prostitutes. Another big problem was light – there was too much of it in Paris. There seems to be almost no where in modern Paris where you can walk in streets in darkness. But you can in Marakesh.

For all of the laymen out there, what is the evolutionary significance of coral?

Coral pieces were beautiful and collectable objects in their own right but they were also tools for the philosophers – clocks, ways of measuring time and ways of thinking about animal, plant and mineral definitions. Sea creatures like corals and sponges were important to natural philosophers at this time because they seemed to sit on the borderline between what was defined as a plant and what was defined as an animal. They also reproduced in strange ways. Corals were particularly difficult to classify – they looked like trees; they had flowers. But when they were taken out of the sea they went hard like rock. It wasn’t until people started to look at them closely that they saw that they were actually animals – they had free-swimming young and they digested. Corals were also important in terms of time. Natural philosophers like Lucienne Bernard (and Charles Darwin later) worked out that certain islands and reef systems had been built by corals growing on top of each other over a period of thousands of years. So if you knew how quickly a coral reef grew and if you could measure or estimate the depth of a coral reef you could prove that the earth was much, much older than the church leaders claimed. So corals are silent, but they’re also eloquent. I guess they had the same kind of fascination for me as the prism in Ghostwalk.

One of the main characters is a strong, well-educated woman. Were talented women active in science during this time period—or were they relegated to the sidelines?

Both. Active and relegated. Visible and invisible. Women were often the assistants to fathers, brothers, husbands, botanical or anatomical illustrators, managers of what we would call laboratories, they ran salons and organized conversaziones, they did calculations, they rewrote or edited scientific manuscripts, they translated, they labeled. But they were rarely credited. Sophie Duvaucel and Clementine Cuvier, Cuvier’s two daughters, were very important to him and to his work. Lamarck also had daughters who kept everything going and managed his work. No doubt these women also had conversations with their fathers about the philosophical consequences of their work. And in the literary world too of Paris there were a number of women who were rocking the boat, living in unusual ways, sometimes even cross dressing – later George Sand the female novelist (Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin) went around Europe dressed as a man with her lover, Chopin.

Your two novels—first the national bestseller Ghostwalk and now The Coral Thief—have been linked to great scientists in history (first Sir Isaac Newton, now Darwin—even though he was only 6 when much of the novel takes place!) What is it about scientific discoveries and the (now) larger-than-life men who “made” them that inspires you to write fiction?

I guess because we’ve turned so many great scientists into icons and their life stories into myths and once that has happened lots of other important people disappear into their shadow. But no scientist or philosopher exists in isolation. Newton didn’t. As far as he might have wanted to keep himself away from the world and keep his head down, he actually depended on so many other invisible people. He was always connected up. But those people who brought him manuscripts and worked behind the scenes became more invisible the more we tell ourselves that geniuses like Newton were loners, lone geniuses, almost supernatural. Darwin knew he wasn’t a lone genius. He knew how dependent he was on all the other little people who had the nerve to go into print about evolution before him. He gave them credit in a preface he wrote to On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. So Lucienne Bernard and her band of heretic thieves stand for all the invisible people behind the scenes who did the incremental work that, bit by bit, made evolutionary ways of seeing acceptable. The corals are like that too – the invisible architects of coral reefs, working away just under the water line.

The Coral Thief

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