ZARAFA

LYON, FRANCE — June 5, 1827 — On a chilly spring morning, as cathedral bells chime toward eleven, the largest crowd gathered since the Revolution swarms through the sprawling Place Bellecour.  Amidst the statues and stonework, families huddle together, searching, pointing.  Police on horseback struggle to contain any budding mob.  Soon she is spotted — le belle Africaine.

Her head and neck tower above the crowd.  Her long, black tongue, reaching up to graze the leaves of linden trees, has people gasping.  Slowly she comes, bobbing, striding, oblivious to six men holding her by rope.  Nothing seems to bother her, not even the shouts of the crowd.  Merveilleuse!  Incroyable!  On she walks, “a beautiful stranger” in a foreign land.

In the past two weeks, the giraffe has walked from Marseilles, nearly 200 miles.  Her route through Aix and Avignon and Orange was lined with crowds, cheering, waving.  Now she is in Lyon where her daily promenades draw 30,000 admirers.  Soon she will leave the city, striding on toward her destination — Paris.

Europe had seen giraffes, aka camelopards, before.  Caesar paraded wild animals through the streets of Rome before sending them to slaughter in the Coliseum.  In the 1480s, the Medici harbored a giraffe in Florence, a gift of the sultan of Egypt.  But that giraffe lived just two years in captivity, and never took to the streets.

Now, in a country still healing from Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, comes le belle Africaine, walking, walking. . .

A gift of the viceroy of Egypt, Zarafa had been captured on the highlands of Ethiopia.  Too young to survive without her mother, killed in a hunt, she was taken on camelback to Khartoum.  Already six feet tall, she was nursed on cow’s milk and pampered like royalty.

Finally ready to travel, Zarafa sailed 2,000 miles up the Nile in a sturdy Egyptian felucca.  At Alexandria, on the Mediterranean’s southern coast, she lived outside viceroy Muhammad Ali’s palace until a boat could be prepared.  Finally, given her own bunk with a hole for her protruding neck, she set sail on the brigantine I Due Fratelli.

The journey across the Mediterranean took two weeks.  Zarafa stood the whole way, gazing out at the waves, pausing only to drink milk from several cows brought specially for her nourishment.

No one knew what to expect when a giraffe was paraded across Marseilles.  Panic?  Riots?  Zarafa was kept on board while arrangements were made.  Finally, after the cows were paraded through the port city, a twelve-foot tall African giraffe walked “across sleeping Marseilles.”

Local naturalists got the first look.  One described her as “badly built, unbalanced on her feet, and yet one is seized by astonishment at the sight of her, and one finds her beautiful without being able to say why.”

She spent the winter, the coldest in years, roaming the spacious grounds of the city’s prefect.  A two-piece yellow coat, with leather shoes, kept her warm.  Occasional promenades accustomed her to crowds and trained her to walk behind horses or cows.  Nightly soirées à girafe brought dinner guests, huddled against the cold, to marvel at her.  But how do you get a growing giraffe from Marseilles to Paris?

The plan was to ship her around Spain and up the Atlantic coast.  But the ocean seemed far more hazardous than the Mediterranean.  Come March, as warmer weather allowed longer strolls, a naturalist noticed that “this animal easily allows herself to be walked.”  Why not walk her to Paris?

The journey took 41 days, each filled with wonder.  Europe’s naturalists had studied giraffes, but only on paper.  Sketches showed them not with knobs but will full horns.  Described as “a kind of camel that stems from the leopard,” they seemed other-worldly, like Africa itself, distant and exotic.  Their horns and nails, it was said, could be ground into a powder to treat epilepsy and diarhhea.  And now, here came one, walking through Dijon, Auxerre, gazing calmly across vineyards and mustard fields.

In Zarafa, Michael Allin writes:  “People came out of their fields and vineyards and distant villages to marvel at this living mythological combination of creatures.”  As Europe reeled from another war — Ottoman forces beseiging Greece — this miracle on four legs covered a dozen or more miles a day, drawing smiles at every turn.  Finally, on July 9, Zarafa reached the city of Light.

By then, she was famous.  Newspapers had followed her trek, sketched her beauty, and counted down the days.  Thousands met Zarafa on the southern edge of Paris and followed her to the Jardin des Plantes, where naturalists examined her.  After almost 600 miles, was she tired? Lame?  Au contraire. . .

She had gained weight and her coat was smoother, glossier.  She was “as debonair as she is intelligent.”  And everyone wanted to gawk at her.  Crossing the city to the palace at Saint-Cloud, she trailed admirers.  After astonishing Charles X and his children, Zarafa returned to the Jardin des Plantes where she drew tens of thousands of visitors each day.

Paris was soon in the grip of girafomania.  Elegant women had their hair coifed à la girafe.  Balzac wrote a story about a giraffe.  Porcelain was painted with her image.  Men wore her portrait on neckties.  Children ate giraffe-shaped cookies. . .

Two other girafffes gifted to European royalty that year quickly died in captivity.  In Paris, however, Zarafa loped around the Jardin des Plantes for 18 more years, finally succumbing to old age in 1845.

Come the new century, the proliferation of zoos throughout Europe made the novelty of Zarafa almost routine.  But today, this most beautiful and graceful of beasts is endangered.

“If they were to disappear,” wrote French author Olivier LeBleu, “humanity would lose more than the most beautiful representatives of African fauna: it would lose part of its very soul.”

If you love giraffes as much as France did, as I do, and would like to adopt one, click here.  Meanwhile, walk on, Zarafa.