The Dutch rhinoceros Clara in Paris: visits of 1752 and 1753

Besides the widely publicized exhibition of Clara, the female Greater one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis), in Paris in 1749 by her owner, Douwe Mout, she was again reported in the French capital in 1752 and 1753. The visit in 1752 is embedded in a letter by the German anatomist Johann Friedrich Meckel Sr., who wrote on 20 August 1752 that he had compared Clara’s teeth with a fossilized mammal tooth, which had been excavated at the start of 1751 in the German Harz Mountains and was studied by Samuel Christian Hollman in Göttingen. The adventurer Giacomo Casanova recalled that he went to see a rhinoceros at the Foire St. Germain, the famous annual fair in Paris. His recollection is undated, and available evidence now places the event within his first stay in Paris from June 1750 to August 1752. The following year, there were notices in a local newspaper on 12 and 14 February 1753 publicizing Clara’s visit to the Foire St. Germain. This is substantiated by the text of a broadsheet, undated, but giving her age as 15 years, indicating that it dates to 1753. A diary kept by the Dutch physician Wouter van Doeveren, includes an account of a visit to see the rhinoceros at the Foire on 24 February 1753.