Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral - David Dobbs (2005)

Part I

Chapter 3. Freiburg

OF THE YEAR that Alexander lived in Freiburg, so few facts survive that it’s hard to know what to make of them. Not yet twelve, he arrived to find his mother living “in most straitened circumstances,” as George Agassiz would later put it, in a tiny apartment near the Schwaben Tour, a tower over one of the city gates.

Apparently never robust, Cécile was now ailing. Still, she reportedly loved Freiburg, an extraordinarily charming town that was then perhaps at its most alluring. “She greatly loved the quaint old walled cathedral town and its beautiful surroundings,” her grandson George relates from the distance of two generations and an ocean, and “although now an invalid, she was still able to take short excursions into the country,” where she would draw the flowers brought to her by her daughters or the beetles, caterpillars, and butterflies captured by Alex. “The Freiburg winter,” he continues, “with its bracing and sunny air, was an especially happy time for the children. Alexander now became a proficient skater, an art in which as a young man he excelled… The boy and his mother spent many happy hours, while she sat in one of the high-backed sleds of that region, which he skill fully guided through the gay crowd of all ages who glided gracefully over the ice.”

This is hard to credit. Having spent the previous eighteen months in limbo as his parents parted ways, by all reports sensitive and prone to melancholy anyway, Alex probably felt something short of “especially happy” that winter. He did go on botanical outings with his uncle Alexander and enjoyed consultations with Braun’s colleague the zoologist Carl von Siebold, who helped Alex classify his bugs, extracting as a fee an occasional choice beetle. These stimulations, along with being reunited with his mother and sisters, must have lifted Alex’s spirits. But the transition from the window-smashing youth to the smiling skater seems forced. Possibly Alex himself held to that memory and passed it down because his skating supplied a pleasure rare in what otherwise must have been a dark winter.

Cécile Braun Agassiz, from a self-portrait in 1829, four years before she married Louis

The winter was grim enough to spoil forever his love of music- a significant loss, given his mother’s cultivation of his taste for it. His bane that winter, he later recalled, was his violin tutelage. He had never loved to play the instrument, and he took his lessons now in the early morning in a cathedral so cold, he later told his children, that he could scarcely hold his bow. His teacher, perhaps frustrated by Alex’s lack of enthusiasm, would correct his worst mistakes by rapping him on the knuckles with his bow.

As spring ripened, Cécile’s health worsened. The lethargy and cough of early tuberculosis expanded to the fever and bloody hack of the disease’s lethal bloom. The children almost certainly absorbed the bacilli as well, but as is often the case with older children, they remained healthy, though doubtless increasingly frightened. Alex assumed the running of the household, keeping the simple accounts and going to market each day, dutifully continuing his studies and violin practice. But the disease had Cécile. She died that summer of 1848.

Cécile’s brother took in Alex and his sisters, and an exchange of letters across the Atlantic soon settled their fates. Louis, busy convincing Harvard to build him a museum, could not come fetch his children. The girls went to live with their aunts in Neuchâtel while Alex stayed in Freiburg with his uncle. What would have become of Alex had his mother lived? Quite possibly he would have stayed in Freiburg, become a naturalist, likely quite prominent, and had a distinguished and perhaps even a brilliant career in Europe.

In spring of 1849, however, Alex’s cousin on his father’s side, Dr. Charles Mayor, decided to move to the United States, and it was arranged that Alex would meet him in Paris and sail with him from Le Havre to Boston. Though his feelings on leaving Freiburg can only be imagined, his actions as reported by his son George seventy-five years later provide some hint. At the Freiburg train station, he removed his violin from its case, set it on the platform, and smashed it beneath his feet.