The Lady and the Octopus

The Lady and the Octopus — page 1 — INTRODUCTION ΤΗ Ε MYSTERY OF THE ARGONAUTS Sleeve rolled up arms dripping seawater Jeanne Villepreux Power holds the most beautiful seashell she's ever seen and tries to break it The translucent pearly material flexes under her fingers Several long arms reach out of the shell and wrap their suckered lengths around Jeanne's hands She adjusts her grip not wanting to hurt the octopus who lives inside She tries a new angle applying more pressure until finally crack A large piece of shell comes off in her hand leaving a jagged gap in the once perfect spiral 4

The Lady and the Octopus — page 2 — Jeanne leans over the side of her boat to put the broken shell and octopus back into an underwater wooden enclosure that she designed The sky and the Mediterranean Sea are both clear and warm and Jeanne settles in to watch the octopus with the broken shell She takes notes and sketches as her small craft bobs gently in the waves just off the Italian island of Sicily surrounded by the cries of seagulls and fishermen It is 1833 and she is a working scientist trying to solve an ancient puzzle The octopus too is hard at work She is fixing her shell Of course octopuses are famously squishy they have no bones no teeth no scales and usually no shells Their only hard part is the beak they use to eat As long as that beak can fit through a crack or under a rock the rest of the octopus's body can squeeze along with it But this kind of octopus is different She is called an argonaut and she lives in a delicate coiled shell For thousands of years people have wondered how the argonaut gets her shell Does she steal it like a hermit crab or grow it like a snail Jeanne intends to find out A young female argonaut floats near the water's surface clinging to the inside of her shell with the suckers on her arms Learning to pronounce names from languages not our own can take some effort but it's an important way to show respect to people both living and dead After all none of us like to hear our name mispronounced Scientists before Jeanne have guessed and argued about the answer to this question based on their studies of dead argonauts But Jeanne wants to study these animals while they are still alive Such an undertaking is not as easy as bringing a live tortoise or weasel like pine marten into her house which Jeanne has also done Octopuses are aquatic so Jeanne has had to design special underwater homes to keep them alive while she observes them She began with glass aquariums and then developed wooden cages that could be anchored to the seafloor Nothing like this existed before There are no public aquariums no fish tanks in doctors waiting rooms In 1833 doctors all make house calls anyway Jeanne Villepreux Power sounds close to ZHEN VEEL prooh POW er THE MYSTERY OF THE ARGONAUTS As Jeanne watches the octopus mending her shell she might feel a twinge of sympathy Like the octopus 5

The Lady and the Octopus — page 3 — Jeanne has done her fair share of mending and like the octopus she has labored to create something eye catchingly beautiful Seventeen years ago when she was a young dressmaker in Paris France Jeanne sewed a wedding gown for a princess Though it had nothing to do with the sea that remarkable feat set her on the path that led her here Because of the gown she married a merchant because of the merchant she moved to Sicily and because of Sicily she met the argonaut Now she's up to her elbows in seawater rather than fabric and her attention has shifted from chemises to shells For most kinds of octopuses distinguishing females from males is difficult Both sexes have eight arms attached directly to their head which bears two large eyes and a siphon for breathing and jetting A large soft body called a mantle contains their organs gills stomach kidneys and three separate hearts The mantle's size and shape are similar in both sexes The only difference is that one of the adult male's arms is slightly modified to deliver sperm with a groove along its length and a rounded tip The giant Pacific octopus a relative of the argonauts Jeanne studied is often displayed in public aquariums THE LADY AND THE OCTOPUS 6

The Lady and the Octopus — page 4 — ON HISTORICAL ACCURACY A biography presents the facts of a person's life places and dates experiences and discoveries It offers historical context the political and cultural movements a person lived through Ideally it tells a human story To get it all right biographers conduct research We read what the subjects of our biographies wrote and what has already been written about them We hunt for drawings photographs and movies of them Unfortunately Jeanne lived and died before the invention of audio or video recordings and even photography became available only late in her life Jeanne wrote volumes and extensively illustrated her work but most of her notes and drawings were destroyed in a shipwreck This biography relies heavily on her surviving books and papers as well as a handful of articles written about her during her lifetime We can imagine aspects of Jeanne's life based on how women of her age race wealth and social status typically lived in the various places she called home We can also make inferences by combining different sources of information For example if we know that a famous naturalist visited Sicily while Jeanne was there we can guess that the two of them met and conversed And if they were both interested in reptiles then what do you suppose they talked about We do know that Jeanne would not have described herself as a scientist That word didn't even exist until 1834 and then it took a while to enter common usage I've chosen to call Jeanne and her colleagues scientists anyway because that's how we think of them today In this book you'll come across plenty of maybes and probablys to qualify educated guesses about Jeanne's life You'll also read direct Jeanne Villepreux Power lived through the invention and popularization of photography This portrait was taken by the famous French photographer André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri quotes from Jeanne and her friends telling as much of the story as possible in their own words Perhaps more historical sources will one day come to light literally dredged from the deep if the shipwreck is ever salvaged They would doubtless improve our understanding of Jeanne and her work and might even contradict some of my educated guesses I like to think that Jeanne would be understanding of such errors After all she was wrong about a few things in the course of her research but she did her best with what was available to her That is what I too have done

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