France has commemorated the third centenary of Count Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788), the naturalist who spent 49 years of his life dedicated to describing the Earth and all its creatures.
Around 1600, Miguelde Cervante began to write a short comic novel about a madman who believed himself to be a knight errant, and the story grew until it took up the rest of his life and became the almost a thousand pages that Don Quixote has. In 1739, at the age of thirty-two, CountGeorges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, newly appointed director ofKing’s Cabinet, the Natural History Collection of the King of France, began the description of its contents and spent the forty-nine years remaining in his life dedicated to describing nature as a whole. Last year was the second centenary of his birth; also that of Linnaeus, Buffon’s great adversary in the study of natural history. Confronted with the dizzying variety of living beings, each set himself an equally impossible task: Linnaeus, to invent a classification system that encompassed all species; Buffon, write a book describing each of them. But his ambition was even more inordinate, after describing the creatures of the Earth he realized that he had to begin with the description of the Earth itself, so that in addition to Zoology and Botany, he included Geology in hisNatural History, General and Particular, which begins, like the Bible, with Genesis, and explains that the planets of the Solar System originated with the collision of a large comet against the Sun.
Buffon had planned that the Natural History would occupy 50 volumes; in life he had seen 36 published, and eight more appeared after his death. According to some testimonies, he worked seven hours a day on his vast rural estate in Montbard, where he had established a zoo and botanical garden, as well as a foundry laboratory in which he studied, observing the cooling of hot iron balls, the possible stages in the formation of the Earth. Other sources claim that his workday was fourteen hours, and that he wrote with an apron and muffs designed by himself to avoid ink staining his aristocratic head. Eight months a year he dedicated them to writing Natural History in his retirement from Montbard; the other four lived literary life in the salons of Paris. As in France there is a particular talent for commemorating national glories, Buffon’s third centenary has brought with it at least three lasting tributes: a complete new edition of Natural History, the newly published first volume of no less than 1,367 pages; a very selected selection of his works in the Biblioteca de la Pléiade, which remains modestly at over 1,600 pages; and a prodigious website (www.buffon.cnrs.fr) in which the entire immense work of the naturalist can be found, volume by volume, species by species, rocks, plants, insects, mammals, human roots, fish, birds, the reptiles?
The astonishment at a human intelligence that wanted to know and tell it all produces almost the same vertigo as the complexity of the natural world. In order not to lose ourselves in it, we have the instinct to classify, to enumerate, to put names: it was the first thing that Adam did when he looked around him in Paradise. Most of us dedicate ourselves to the minimum portion of our direct experience, which is also inexhaustible. The sciences and the arts seem to live in worlds completely isolated from each other, but deep down their impulse is the same, to understand and tell, to venture into the mystery, to make sense of the confusion, to make intelligible through a story, a hypothesis, an equation, what would otherwise be a whirlwind. of events close to fright or to pure absurdity.
You look and start writing. Cervante began that novel that he imagined rather short and light in tone and little by little embarked on a journey that would explore all the possible ways of telling and so many facets and nuances of human experience that each new reading and each reader over the centuries widens the richness of his book even more. Buffon wanted to describe the King’s Cabinet, and perhaps at the beginning he knew that truly describing anything can become infinite work, and that each object, each animal, each plant, being a prodigy in itself, is also the starting point for other connections, the thread that leads to another labyrinth. .
If he hadn’t really existed, we would think that Buffon is a character invented by Borges, a cartographer determined to draw an exact map that drew the very territory he represented. That his name is now in the Pléiade’s library catalog is proof that he belongs equally to the history of science. than the literature. From fantastic literature, to be more precise.
