Auguste Ménégaux, who died on this date 78 years ago, was in Le Havre when war broke out in 1914.
A magnificent collection of living hummingbirds from South America, in very good health, arrived at the very moment that war was declared. The poor birds were neglected, and they all died on board the boat before reaching Paris, to the great dismay of their owner and collectors.
The business suffered setbacks in London, too, where
many collectors have been able to sell or trade their objects only at very low prices.
And who knows, Ménégaux asks ominously, what may have happened to the trade in live birds and specimens in Wallonia and Belgian Luxembourg.
We tend to think of the end of consumptive natural history hobbies as the result of a new ethic, the cultural abandonment of practices finally recognized as barbarous. But in fact there were other causes, not the least of them the First World War and the attendant breakdown of the international networks of collectors.
