Saving Beauty

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The appearance of the mold soon after the new apparatus was put in place in April 2001 suggests it was unequal to the task of maintaining Lascaux's equilibrium. By the end of that year, Geneste ordered the fans taken out altogether. "If we knew then what we learned later, we wouldn't have installed that machine," says Alain Rieu, the director of conservation for the region of Aquitaine, which ultimately signed off on — and paid for — the work. "But the old machinery was in a bad state of repair, and we all decided unanimously that we couldn't take the risk of doing nothing. It seemed like the least bad solution."

If so, it was pursued at arguably the worst time. While a roof over the entrance was removed for the installation of the new system in early 2001, drenching rains poured directly into the cave's entrance, bringing with them dirt and, some suspect, fusarium spores. The danger that spores or other biological agents might contaminate the cave had been foreseen. Jean-François Nicolas, director of contractor Forclim Sud-Ouest Alary Vimard, says his workers were under instructions to wash their feet, limit their working hours, and stay out of the painted chambers of the cave; Desplat himself installed a padlock to insure they did so. "We worked under the rules we were given," says Nicolas. Geneste, responsible for monitoring the work once a week with Oudin's representative, contends that wasn't always the case. "The workers often ignored us and the architect's representative and didn't disinfect their feet," says Geneste. "They didn't keep the door closed all the time; they wanted to get the job done quickly." What's more, France's Research Laboratory of Historical Monuments (lrmh), responsible for monitoring the cave's biological condition, made no inspections during the construction work.

Godin was shocked by what she found when she was first dispatched to Lascaux by the lrmh. "The construction site was run like someone redoing a bathroom," she says. "The entrance to the cave was like a swamp, and there was construction waste all over the place. It was an apocalyptic vision." Contractor Nicolas counters that: "It was not a disordered work site as long as we were there," but says masons and carpenters may have followed. When she first arrived, Godin says, she was flying blind: "I was like a fireman, with no documents, no instructions, nothing," she says. In September, the lrmh identified the fungus as Fusarium solani, a virulent mold that commonly infects soil and crops and often proves so drug-resistant that whole crop fields must be dug up and burned.

Not everyone is convinced that the fungus entered the cave on the thick soles of contractors' boots. Isabelle Pallot-Frossard, director of the lrmh, says that a long-term, low-level presence of formaldehyde in the cave — ironically used as a foot wash for decades to prevent such infections — may have killed off many of the other organisms that might have prevented such an explosion of fusarium. "The fusarium strains we found in the cave are extremely resistant to formaldehyde, unlike strains from elsewhere," says Pallot-Frossard. "It didn't come from outside, but had been there all along. All it needed was a slight modification in climate to take off."

And take off it did. At first Godin's team sprayed the mold with an alcohol solution of Vitalub, a common ammonium disinfectant. But the fusarium appeared oblivious: scientists learned that it lived in diabolical symbiosis with a bacterium, Pseudomonas fluorescens, which was degrading the fungicide, so the restorers added antibiotics to the mix in which they soaked bandages to plaster the lower walls of the cave. Tons of quicklime, which kills the fungus but also temporarily raised the cave's ambient temperature, was spread on the floor. Since the worst of the infection has been brought under control, "mechanical removal" continues — that is, carefully plucking the filaments from the wall by hand.

Lascaux would have escaped history and its indignities if four boys rambling on a hillside just east of the Vézère River in southwestern France in 1940 hadn't decided to investigate an opening revealed by a fallen tree. Soon Abbé Henri Breuil, a pioneer in the study of Paleolithic cave art who had been examining cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain for almost 40 years, arrived to inspect their extraordinary find. He theorized that Lascaux's broad galleries of compositions suggested a magical or religious function for the drawings; Lascaux became known as the "Sistine Chapel of prehistory" and people clamored to see it. After the war the La Rochefoucauld family, which owned the property, authorized work to enlarge the entrance, shunt off the water that had once cascaded through the cave, and install steps and concrete flooring through much of the underground complex. As many as 1,700 visitors traipsed through Lascaux every day, but by the late 1950s, the presence of so many carbon dioxide–exhaling, warm-blooded bodies had altered the cave's climate to the point where calcite deposits and lichen were threatening the paintings.