accompanied by one or two other representatives, which occasionally renewed my fear for
. ,, 79 requisitions .
Van Marum’s written correspondence with the three commissioners supports his later account
of the events. Although there is no mention of their initial visit, the letters show that van
Marum was clearly aware of what was going on in The Hague. The Frenchmen kept him up to
date on their efforts to pack up the former Royal collections and ship them to France - a total
of 150 crates was eventually sent to Paris - and van Marum’s tone suggests he was clearly
willing to oblige wherever necessary in order to pacify the occupiers.80 On the other hand, the
letters also suggest a certain intimacy and trust amongst the correspondents, and certainly a
high degree of respect for van Marum and his achievements on behalf of the French. Rather
than obstruct his work, they seem to have supported their old acquaintance, and treated him
like a Dutch brother-in-arms. In February Roberjot saw to it that van Marum was exempted
from billeting, for instance.81 And they appear to have carried no animosity in later years
either. When van Marum travelled to Germany in 1798 and spent some days in Kassel, Faujas
happened to be in town as well, and repeatedly suggested visiting collections or going on
excursions together. Reading van Marum’s account of this journey, one gets the impression he
almost had to fend off his French friend. His last entry in Kassel for instance reads: “Faujas
tried to persuade me to remain a few days with him at Cassel, to visit the Meissner again with
him, and to go together to Gottingen; but I did not agree to this.”82
Yet in assessing van Marum’s account of events in 1795 one also has to bear in mind that the
overall aim of his recollections was essentially to badmouth the trustees. As has already been
pointed out this did not mean that he gave a false account of events, and all factual evidence
he presents can be corroborated S but it would have been in his interest to dramatise the
situation he found himself in as director of both major scientific collections in Haarlem, and
then emphasise how it was he who had ensured Teylers Museum survived the political
turmoil unscathed. And even if his personal acquaintance and general standing undoubtedly
raised the threshold for any possible interference with his work or Teylers Museum, there was
another significant and ultimately perhaps even far more important reason why Teylers
Museum remained unaffected by the change in government, a reason which van Marum fails
to mention in his recollections: Teylers Museum was a private collection — the Stadholder’s
79 “ ’s morgens vroegtijdig”; “Zij bemerkten, onder het beschouwen dezer verzamelingen, mijne vrees, dat zij
sommige zeldzame voorwerpen, met te begeerlijke oogen zouden aanzien”; “Van tijd tot tijd kwam de een of
ander dezer Commissarissen alhier terug, dan eens een alleen, en dan weder een o f twee andere representanten
mede brengende, het geen ook wel eens weder mijne vrees voor requisitien vemieuwde”; Martinus van Marum:
“De Geschiedenis van de oprigting van Teyler’s Museum”, 1823-1833, Haarlem, NHA, Archief van Marum,
vol. 529, nr. 9, fol. 59.
80 The correspondence between van Marum and the commissioners has been preserved amongst van Marum’s
papers: For Faujas see: Haarlem, NHA, Archief van Marum, vol. 529, nr. 16. For Thouin see: Haarlem, NHA,
Archief van Marum, vol. 529, nr. 22b. For Roberjot see: Haarlem, NHA, Archief van Marum, vol. 529, nr. 20a.
On the commissioners’ work in the Netherlands see: Bert Sliggers and Marijke H. Besselink, eds., Het
verdwenen museum: natuurhistorische verzamelingen 1750-1850 (Haarlem: Teylers Museum, 2002), 37—39.
81 Roberjot to van Marum, 02.03.1795, Haarlem, NHA, Archief van Marum, vol. 529, nr. 20a. The letter has
been translated and published in: vol. 6 o f E. Lefebvre, J.G. de Bruijn, and R.J. Forbes, eds., Martinus van
Marum: Life & Work (Leyden: Noordhoff International Publishing (formerly Tjeenk Willink & Zoon, Haarlem),
1976), 300.
82 Marum, “Journey to Kassel, Göttingen, Gotha, Erfurt, Weimar and Jena in 1798,” 287.
collections in The Hague, on the other hand, were public property in the sense that they had
belonged to the defeated Stadholder. In this sense, and more importantly by international
convention, the collections in The Hague were legitimate booty for an occupying army,
whereas Teylers Museum was off limits. What underscores this is that in the Dutch Republic
the Stadholder’s collections were pretty much the only collections that were transferred to
Paris. All private cabinets remained untouched — with one notorious exception, the fossil
collection of the Dean Godding in Maastricht.
Almost ironically, this one exception - which proved to be almost strangely traumatic for
Maastricht and the Netherlands! seems to underscore van Marum’s worst fears, and at the
same time provides an outstanding example of the indirect impact the French occupation had
on Teylers Museum.
13. One Mosasaur, two Mosasaur...
As for van Marum’s fears, the point is that it was Faujas himself who was intricately involved
in this somewhat dubious annexation, although he himself was not even in Maastricht yet
when six French soldiers removed the fossil from the home of the Dean Godding, on whose
grounds it had been discovered sometime around 1770.83 Faujas published an extensive
account of all the Maastricht fossils in 1799, and chose a somewhat dramatised depiction of
84 the mosasaur for the frontispiece of his treatise.
As for the indirect impact of the political developments on Teylers Museum, it is important to
realise that the fossil specimen brought to Paris by Faujas was in fact the second of its kind to
be found in the quarries around Maastricht — and the first was in the possession of Teylers
Museum. As was already mentioned in the previous chapter, this was even one of the very
first significant acquisitions undertaken by van Mamm, when he bought it off Major Drouin
in 1782. So one can see why his worries that Faujas would want to take the mosasaur from
Haarlem to Paris as well might have been amplified; but what is in fact far more significant
with regard to the museum’s collection as a whole is the research that was performed on both
these fossils in the years before and after the confiscation of the mosasaur from Maastricht, as
well as by whom that research was performed. A simple list of names of the main researchers
that undertook research on, and were involved in controversies surrounding, the fossils
besides van Marum himself provides an indication of why van Mamm was drawn to this
fossil - and any interest of his was of course reflected in the museum’s collections. The four
83 F.J.M. Pieters, “Natural History Spoils in the Low Countries in 1794/95: The Looting o f the Fossil
Mosasaurus from’ Maastricht and the Removal o f the Cabinet and Menagerie o f Stadholder William V ” in
Napoleon’s Legacy: The Rise o f National Museums in Europe, Berliner Schriftenreihe Zur Museumsforschung
27 (Berlin: G+H Verlag, 2009), 59-60. f .
84 Barthélémy Faujas de St. Fond, Histoire naturelle de la Montagne de Saint-Pierre de Maestricht (Paris. Chez
H.J. Jansen, 1799).