I had a bit of time between jobs yesterday and decided to drop in to the Boston Public Library.

The day before, while waiting for my ride out in front of the McKim building I saw a big, beautiful pink banner that intrigued me:



It read: "The French Ventriloquist Who Changed the World."

(There was another banner on the other side of the entrance that said "The Extravagant Ambassador: Alexandre Vattemare," but this one intrigued me more, I have to say.)

So I had a look.

And I can say without hesitation that the Alexandre Vattemare exhibition is the finest I have ever seen at the Boston Public Library. Yes, ever. And I have seen my fair share.

It may have something to do with the French influence. The show was first staged in Paris. And for it, Curator Pierre-Alain Tilliette, from the Bibliothèque administrative de la ville de Paris, partnered with Earle Havens, Acting Keeper of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Boston Public Library to put together an engaging multimedia show with an impressive array of objects from Vattemare's life and times.

But they both owe a debt to Anne Gratadour, the celebrated theatrical set designer, who was responsible for the exquisite exhibition design which brings their narrative to life.


Vattemare is a perfect subject for an exhibition of this kind, too, as an avid collector of books and cultural artifacts, which he was eager to exchange with others. So eager, in fact, that he singlehandedly created the first "major, sustained enterprise of intercontinental cultural exchange" in modern history. Tilliette estimates as many as a hundred thousand publications, art objects, coins and medals, even specimens of natural history (examples of all of which are on display at the BPL) were exchanged in his lifetime thanks to the system of cultural exchange he came up with.

The Boston Public Library probably owes its very existence to, and most certainly benefited immensely from his enthusiasms. It was Vattemare, after all, who came up with the idea of a unified public library in Boston.  Harvard Professor Georges Ticknor is also credited with coming up with the idea—twenty years before Vattemare, to boot—but he was never able to generate much interest in or support for it. Only after Vattemare's arrival on the scene were Ticknor and the ubiquitous Edward Everett able to get the project off the ground. As it turned out, more important than the idea for the library was Vattemare's star power, and his ability to persuade the French government to donate thousands of books to start its collection.

Though all he got for his efforts at the time was a small brass plaque in the foyer of McKim, he is once again being celebrated as a founder of the library, sort of. Going in you'd hardly guess that the exhibition celebrates the monumental achievement you come out knowing it does. The original title for the exhibition, "Voyager and Visionary: Alexandre Vattemare and the Origins of International Cultural Exchange," gives you a hint. A far cry from "The French Ventriloquist Who Changed the World." Lured me in, though, didn't it?


Aside from appreciating the visionary, I left the exhibition with a question. Why, after Vattemare's death, did he, as Tilliette laments, "nearly disappear from the memory of man"? The show doesn't touch on this at all.

Though apparently beloved for his theatrical talents by European heads of state ("feted by three emperors, and by quite a rabble of kings"), once he embarked on his philanthropic work Vattemare came to be reviled by intellectuals and artists as a charlatan (Dickens called him "the once starving mountebank," and when he is mentioned at all in Walter Muir Whitehill's centennial history of the BPL, it is as the "volatile little French ventriloquist"). A true blue blood himself, he was still no match for Boston's Brahmins.

As one of his contemporaries wrote, Vattemare's "zeal...would probably have attained greater success had it been more largely tempered with discretion." By all accounts, discretion was not Vattemare's strong point. His unbounded exuberance was a source of inspiration, to be sure, but it also lead to trouble. He was forced into a life of prodigal ventriloquism, to name one example, when he was refused a diploma "after making cadavers speak too many times from their storage place in the cellar or during surgical exercises."

It was likely some particular indiscretion, the specifics of which have been lost to history, all record of which has been expunged, that lead to Vattemare's excommunication from polite society, revocation of his official recognition as "Cultural Ambassador" to Congress, and ultimately to his "disappearance from the memory of man."

Josiah Phillips Quincy, an obvious admirer, reporting the proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1884, attributed Vattemare's infamy in part to his son Hypolite Vattemare's support for the Confederacy in the Civil War. After the war, negotiations for the continuation of the book exhange were "abruptly closed" upon the revelation of the young Vattemare's allegiances, and, Quincy reports, "the well-earned fame of the elder Vattemare suffered some eclipse before a nation to whose services he had been especially devoted."

But Quincy thought Boston "society" had a larger role in Vattemare's downfall. He admitted that the frenchman may have been indiscreet...

No doubt Mr. Vattemare's decisions were often rough, and by no means closed the subject upon which they were uttered. He disclosed his passing feelings and opinions with utter frankness. Absorbed in his great work of diffusing knowledge among the nations, he would wear his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at,—a circumstance which the daws, as their nature is, did not leave unnoticed. Report our unguarded talk, and the best of us are vulnerable.... It is perhaps doubtful whether reminiscences of conversation ought to be preserved. We can never supply the social medium in which the dead words were once alive and penetrative; the reader may easily receive a false impression as he hurries over them....

[H]is brilliant life-work... has been obscured by vague and irresponsible innuendo. His name has been associated, if not with actual reproach, at least with a slur of interrogation, the justice of which I emphatically deny....

The larger problem, Quincy suggests, was Boston's "polite society" itself...

...[T]here was in it a certain narrowness of perception, which could not easily admit the merit of contemporary character which influences the world outside its own very respectable boundaries. It was apt to take its own notions of what was proper as criterion for the rest of mankind; it would in all honesty say its Sunday prayer "for all sorts and conditions of men," but found some difficulty in a week-day effort to understand them and to do them justice.

Others had had mud from the banks of the Charles slung at them, Quincy went on to say, but "it did not stick. In the case of Mr. Vattemare, it did stick." And it stuck largely, it seemed to Quincy, because Vattemare was an outsider:

He was a foreigner, one of a nation always under suspicion of revolutionary vehemence; his methods were not in accordance with the sober movements dear to the Anglo-Saxon temperament;... and so it came to pass that the hasty word of disparagement which was cast at him left a mark which is not yet effaced.

The length and vehemnce of Quincy's defense of Vattemare's reputation should tell us a little of the lengths to which those responsible for besmirching it went, and their vehemence in doing so.

Qunicy concluded, sagely:

The muse of History has sometimes been described as prejudiced and purchasable; but the sub-muse of Local History... is far more open to such accusations. She approaches the urn under strong social and pecuniary bias, and often draws out singular names to receive homage. If one of the names therein contained is that of a foreigner, she is pretty sure not to find it."

The curators of this delightful show are to be commended for not highlighting the provincialism of Boston "society" in smearing Vattemare and obscuring his legacy, even as it snatched up his marvelous gift.

"The Extravagant Ambassador: Alexandre Vattemare, The French Ventriloquist Who Changed the World" is showing at the Boston Public Library through September 29th.