Natural History Museum key-control rules

The Natural History Museum key-control rules turn access into a daily institutional routine: keys are assigned, tracked, and kept within the buildings they open. At the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, the rules serve an immense and varied complex, but wartime pressures reveal that locks can protect collections only imperfectly—and that a locksmith’s ordinary tools can be recast as suspicious evidence.

Scope and Daily Administration

Daniel LeBlanc is the museum’s principal locksmith. He estimates that the complex contains twelve thousand locks, spread among laboratories, warehouses, four public museums, the menagerie, greenhouses, the gardens of the Jardin des Plantes, and numerous gates and pavilions. The key pound holds thousands of iron keys in six glass-fronted cabinets: from long keys nearly as long as Marie-Laure LeBlanc’s forearm to tiny ones shorter than her thumb, with many forms suited to different locks.

Each morning, Daniel distributes keys from the front of the key pound. Zookeepers arrive first, followed by office staff, technicians, librarians, scientific assistants, and, later, scientists. The keys are numbered and color-coded, a system meant to make assignments legible across a workplace with many buildings and kinds of access. Every employee, from custodians to the director, must carry their keys while at work. They may not take them out of the building to which they belong, and they may not leave them unattended on a desk.

Collections and the Need for Control

The procedures answer to the value and variety of the museum’s holdings. Its collections include thirteenth-century jade, cavansite from India, rhodochrosite from Colorado, and a Florentine dispensary bowl carved from lapis lazuli. Specialists travel a thousand miles each year to examine that bowl. Daniel has designed the lock behind which it sits, making his craft part of the institution’s effort to protect objects that are both scientifically and materially precious.

The rules also shape Marie-Laure’s education. Daniel tests her on the names of keys and on where displays and cabinet contents are located, while placing unfamiliar objects in her hands—a lightbulb, a fossilized fish, a flamingo feather. The key system is thus not merely a list of permissions: it is part of the orderly knowledge of the museum that he shares with his daughter, joining the location of objects to the locks and routes that structure access to them.

Wartime Custody and Layered Locks

As war approaches, the museum’s protection measures intensify. A small group of couriers moves collections to country estates; every crate must be padlocked, and each transport manifest kept secure. Daniel works until midnight or later, and the loading docks receive armored trucks. Locks and keys become more urgently needed as fossils, manuscripts, minerals, and other valuables are prepared for transport.

The Sea of Flames is protected through uncertainty as well as physical security. The museum’s director arranges for three replicas and the real diamond to be sent along separate routes, with each carrier expected to behave as though their stone is genuine. Daniel carries one stone in his tool case but tells himself that it cannot be the real diamond. The arrangement depends on not knowing which object is authentic; the key rules form part of a wider institutional effort to control access and custody, but cannot by themselves settle the stone’s identity or whereabouts.

A later search of the museum reveals several successive barriers: a small door at the back of a gallery requires two keys; beyond it, a second gate opens onto corridors leading to a storeroom, where a simple combination safe contains another box. Yet the sequence is not invulnerable. The assistant director appears inexperienced with the first lock, opens the safe relatively easily, and there is only one guard and no alarm. The scene makes the difference between having locks and having secure custody tangible: safeguards exist, but their effectiveness depends on people, procedure, and the layers behind the visible door.

Keys as Evidence and Narrative Significance

After Daniel is seized outside Vitré, plainclothes policemen take his notebook and tool case and count seven skeleton keys on his key ring. They question him about what the keys open, how he uses his small files and saws, and why his notebook contains architectural measurements. Daniel explains that the measurements are for a model for his daughter and that the keys belong to the museum where he works. The same expertise that made him responsible for museum access is now interpreted by interrogators as a possible means of entry or sabotage.

The rules therefore carry two linked meanings. Within the museum, they distribute responsibility and protect collections by keeping keys identifiable and within assigned buildings. Under occupation, the keys and tools that make Daniel’s work possible can be treated as evidence against him, even when his explanation is professional and domestic. The system’s precision contrasts with the uncertainty surrounding the Sea of Flames: keys can specify which doors a person may open, but they cannot guarantee the safety, rightful custody, or eventual recovery of what lies behind them.