“The water hen”, by Jean Rolin
On September 22, 2020, during the dispersal at Drouot of the “prestigious taxidermy collections of the Princes of Arenberg, Count Greffulhe and Count Charles de Gramont”, I did for a small fee (no one else wanted it) the acquisition of lot number 43: a specimen of water hen, Gallinula chloropus, “presented on a wooden base with a label and old calligraphy”, and guaranteed “naturalized by the Verreaux Establishments before 1880”. It was therefore a very old hen, so old that its plumage, uniformly grey-brown, had lost that beautiful slate blue shade which it usually presents all over the front of the body. As for the red of the frontal plate and the beak, it was in vain that I tried to revive it, using a colored pencil whose lead broke in one of the nostrils. Moreover, if I had acquired this specimen stuffed by the Verreaux Establishments, it was certainly not because of its beauty or its freshness, nor of its resemblance to an active water hen, but well because the date of his naturalization before 1880 and the collection from which he came, which I liked to think was that of Count Greffulhe, made it possible, if not probable, that Marcel Proust had seen him, if not to have really looked at it, during one of his visits to the principal model of the Duchesse de Guermantes. In this case, if it was indeed the only water hen – or at least the only stuffed water hen – whose trajectory had one day crossed that of Proust, we could without fear of being mistaken affirm that by being the only one to raise my hand, at Drouot, on the afternoon of September 22, 2020, when lot number 43 had been put up for auction, I had shown more discernment than all the rest of the potential buyers, among whom, moreover, there must have been a good number of professionals.
Where does the campaign around Paris begin? Jean Rolin leads the investigation
As for my own predilection for this species, it dates back to May 19, 2016, when shortly after 3 p.m., in Gennevilliers, in the Chanteraines park, a moorhen strode across the sandy path where I was walking with a friend. Which made a photograph of this incident, using her mobile phone, otherwise I would probably have forgotten the date and time, if not the incident itself and the place of its occurrence.
The sequel after the ad
Over the following years, and to this day, I have had many occasions to see and hear water hens again, for example when, in the spring of 2019, on numerous occasions, I returned to study the progress of the reproduction of a couple who had made their nest, in Meulan, on a raft made of twigs, old soaked newspapers or yogurt pots, and held by a network of floating branches between two piles of the Perches bridge.
Or when, a year later, during the first confinement – the one during which we did not give much to the future of the elderly –, I took advantage of the time and distance granted to me, the one and the other ridiculously short, to observe, through the gates of the Square du Temple, the two pairs of moorhens established on the tiny pond half-covered by luxuriant vegetation.
Bezons, Conflans, Corbeil… the Greater Paris of Jean Rolin
Since then, I have regularly engaged in prolonged observations, attested by photographs, of this colony (if that is the right word to designate such a small number of birds), without ever managing to solve this triple enigma: is it always the same couple – or the same two couples – that reproduce? What happens to – where do the birds swarm – resulting from this reproduction? And above all, knowing how reluctant water hens are to fly except at low level, how the original couple, coming from God knows where, managed to reach the vertical of the Square du Temple, to locate this one, lost in the middle of the disorder of the city, then to realize that it contained a small pond apparently compatible with the requirements of its reproduction?
