Honoré Fragonard, the first director of the school, spent his life in the terrain vague between science and art, using bodies rather than clay for raw material, and Paris’s least-known museum is filled with some of the most disturbing sculptures ever created. The school still treats animals large and small; however, if the young woman carrying her poodle across a courtyard knew what was hidden away in the museum’s collections, she might turn and run.
The few rusty signs that point to the museum’s entrance aren’t likely to excite much suspicion. The name Fragonard has long since been associated with the refined pursuits of the upper echelons of French culture: the paintings of Honoré’s cousin Jean-Honoré Fragonard hang in the Louvre, and there are two Fragonard Museums of Perfume in the city. But Fragonard the anatomist had other interests.
Born in the Provençal town of Grasse, he trained to be a surgeon and was named director of the world’s first veterinary school in Lyons. In 1776, at the age of 33, Fragonard came to what was then the newly-opened École Royale Vétérinaire. (Today the full name is École Nationale Vétérinaire d’Alfort.)
The sickly-sweet smell of formaldehyde is the first thing to greet a visitor at the entrance to the three-room museum. The second is the hand-lettered sign on a desk in front of the skeleton of a rhinoceros: “Unfortunately, we have too few visitors. If you enjoy the museum, why not send us your friends—if not your enemies.”
After buying my ticket from a man who immediately returns to the dissection room below, I’m alone for the afternoon. Apart from the cracking of the herringbone parquet underfoot, and the occasional sounds of horse’s hooves striking gravel in the courtyard below, a sepulchral silence reigns over the rows of tall exhibition cases.
Freud said of the French, “They are a people of psychic epidemics, of massive historic convulsions....” He observed the French up close during several long trips to the country; the first took place from October 1885 to February 1886. During this time he fell in love with the city, but was not impressed with Parisians, whom he found deceitful, unkind, and “possessed with thousands of demons.”
—Paris Notes
As I roam from cabinet to cabinet in the first of three linked rooms, it’s hard to say whether the items in the collection, most of which date from the 19th and early 20th centuries, were chosen because they were instructive, bizarre, or simply beautiful. There’s a jewel box of iridescent, perfect pearls—formed in the kidneys of cows. A piglet displayed in the cross-section has undergone “diaphanisation”—its organs have been treated with a chemical that makes them transparent—so that it resembles some kind of ghostly deep-sea fish. The pale blue fetus of a horse, injected with mercury to highlight the vessels in its outer membranes, floats in a jar, surrounded by a tracery of quick-silver. Ostensibly, all the works are meant to illustrate some principle of anatomy; at some point, however, their anonymous creators must have yielded to a stronger impulse.
The cabinets devoted to teratology, the study of monstrosities, are a journey through Greek and Roman mythology. There is the head of a Cyclops—a colt with a malformed facial bone that caused it to develop one huge eye. A siren floats in a cracked jar of liquid—in reality a baby, born in Maisons-Alfort, whose joined legs make it look like a mermaid. There are monsters whose birth would have augured the outbreak of a dozen Athenian Plagues: Siamese twin lambs, locked chest-to-chest in a permanent waltz; chicken skulls the size of basketballs; a ten-legged sheep, floating in a tank of formaldehyde. It makes a show by the British artist Damien Hirst look like a trip to the petting zoo.
As shocking as they are, these mutations do nothing to prepare the visitor for the contents of the museum’s third room. Beyond a central chamber packed with the skeletons of ostriches, camels, and lions caught in midroar, the work of Fragonard, the oldest part of the collection, appears.
To know Paris is to know a great deal.
—Henry Miller
The silhouette of a horse in full gallop, mounted by a stiff-backed rider, attracts the visitor to the display case of this final room. As one draws closer, however, it becomes clear that something is wrong. This horse has no skin. Although it’s caught in midstride, it looks as if it’s been flayed alive. Every cord of its flexed muscles is visible; bulging blue veins stretch over its jaws, tendons and ligaments strain to raise the out-thrust neck. The upright rider, arms bent as if to grip reins and a whip, is not exactly a skeleton, but neither is it human, rather an accumulation of brown ligaments, red arteries, yellow tendons. The shining orbs of his eyes stare fixedly into the distance, over rows of gritted teeth. It’s Dürer’s Horsemen of the Apocalypse by way of Madame Tussaud (she was a contemporary of Fragonard’s), except that this is no wax-works—these are real bodies that have been carefully stripped of their skin and elaborately posed.
There are over a dozen other flayed figures, or écorchés, on display in the room. The bust of a man, skin peeled away from the skull, is mounted on a pedestal. An antelope whose flesh seems to have exploded away from its bones looks at the spectator in dumb shock; a llama, its tongue lolling, rears back in surprise. Of the 3,000 preparations of cadavers and body parts Honoré Fragonard created in his lifetime, about 50 were écorchés like the ones in this museum. Dissecting cadavers at the rate of two a week, Fragonard started to develop the techniques that would allow him to preserve and pose his écorchés. Although he never revealed his special recipe, he probably followed a technique used by other anatomists, preserving body parts by soaking them in eau-de-vie or another alcohol, mixed with pepper and herbs. While they were still supple, Fragonard injected the veins, bronchial tubes, and arteries with colored wax or tallow mixed with turpentine. They were then stretched on a frame in the desired position and left to dry.
While Fragonard was still perfecting his technique, the head of the school, an ambitious aristocrat, was quietly spreading the word that he had a madman on his staff. In the salons of Paris, rumor had it that the figure on the horse was Fragonard’s fiancée—who had succumbed to grief after her parents forbade their marriage. (A close inspection of the Horseman reveals the rumor was unfounded.) In 1771, at the age of 39, Fragonard was dismissed from the school. If he was insane—and all indications are that he remained perfectly lucid until his death at the age of 66—his brand of folly was particularly in vogue with the European upper classes. Aristocrats kept him employed creating preparations for their private cabinets of curiosités right up to the beginning of the French Revolution. (He died in 1799.)
As the initial horror of Fragonard’s creations wears off, questions arise. If this is supposed to be an anatomy lesson, why the elaborate theatricality of the poses? If, on the other hand, this is meant to be art, what kind of sculptor, using what standard of beauty, would devote his life to creating such prodigious monstrosities? Unfortunately, the only possible response to these questions lies in the silence of this neglected museum, in the works themselves. Taciturn in his lifetime, Fragonard spent his days and nights curved over cadavers, and never published a single volume to explain his techniques and motivations. When asked what he was up to in his secluded study, the anatomist’s only response was an enigmatic smile and an entreaty, one that is just as valid today: Venez et voyez. Come and see.
Taras Grescoe is a freelance writer who lives in Montreal. He is the author of Sacré Blues: An Unsentimental Journey through Quebec, and is a regular contributor to several publications including Canadian Geographic, The New York Times, Ecotraveler, The Times of London, Islands Magazine, Saveur, Hong Kong’s Discovery Magazine, and Paris Boulevard. Some readers have detected a slightly morbid streak in his choice of subject matter—bizarre museums, catastrophic floods, chefs who cook with insects—but Grescoe claims that these are the only things that can get him worked up enough to leave the house these days.
Everything in this city has a quality that defies analysis but enables you to say without any hesitation: “That is Paris”—even if it is only a milk can dangling from a door knob, or one
of those coarse brooms sweeping up the leaves at the pavement’s edge in October with a sound like the sea, or an array of tired-looking volumes in a bookseller’s box on the embankment between the pont Neuf and the pont Royal. Why this should be so I do not know, but Paris sets its seal on everything that belongs to it. The tourists are too distracted or in too much of a hurry to notice it, but the heart of the true Parisian will beat faster, if he is away from Paris, at the memory of a few pots of flowers on a windowsill, or a popular refrain whistled by a butcher’s boy as he cycles by. Show him a photograph of a baker’s shop with a child eating a croissant, or a photograph of a table or a chair on a pavement with a waiter standing beside them in his white apron, a towel under his arm, and he will think: “That is neither Toulouse nor Lyon nor Marseille, though the casual observer might be deceived. That is Paris. Good or bad, what Paris produces is Paris, be it a letter, a bit of bread, a pair of socks, or a poem. What we give the world, we have borrowed from no one; it is ours. It may be taken from us, stolen from us, but imitated?—never.”
—Julian Green, Paris, translated by J. A. Underwood
INA CARO
The Fairy Palace
Twenty-nine miles southeast of Paris lies the other Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte.
THERE MAY BE MORE BEAUTIFUL PLACES THAN VAUX-LE-VICOMTE, but I haven’t seen them. It is today, as the king’s mistress exclaimed when she saw it for the first time over three hundred years ago, a “veritable fairy palace.” It is a palace that was built with an extravagance that astounded a very extravagant king.
While both Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles were built to impress—and they do—and both palaces were designed by the same team of artists, Vaux is to Versailles as an artist’s sketch is to a ponderous finished oil painting. Vaux is human in scale, “of superb and elegant proportions,” while Versailles is intentionally overwhelming. In addition to possessing that sense of grandeur and splendor associated with the Age of Louis XIV, Vaux is filled with life and with a sensuous vitality I have found nowhere else.
Seen from the gardens, this domed Baroque palace, which seems to float upon the square reflecting pool, is a gem. And walking inside the château is, for me, like walking inside a many-faceted jewel. Its rooms are elaborately ornamented in a form of decoration first hinted at in Fontainebleau: a breathtaking combination of stucco, gilding, and painting. The subjects are mythological in an idealized, rational, classical landscape. In the Room of the Muses, where Molière’s plays were performed for Nicolas Fouquet, and Voltaire’s performed a generation later, eight muses luxuriously recline in pairs at the corners of the ceiling. Clio, the Muse of History, with Prudence and Fidelity at her side, occupies the center, holding a key: meaning that the past is the key to the future. Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, draped in blue velvet, holds a smiling mask in her hand, and a garland of red flowers flows from her hair; above her, an eagle holds a banner with Fouquet’s motto (“Quo non ascendum”—“How high shall I not climb?”) in his beak. Euterpe, the Muse of Music, is playing the flute. Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance, is holding a lute; Calliope, the Muse of Oratory, a book; Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, a compass and a globe. The goddess of night, dressed in a film of black, is drawn through the clouds by two black horses. The carvings, unable to contain their joy at being at Vaux, seem to burst out of the Baroque frames created to hold them.
Notably unfinished is the domed grand salon, far more Roman and Imperial than the rest of the château. On its ceiling, now an empty sky, Le Brun was to have painted symbolic pictures of Fouquet’s accomplishments.
The gardens at Vaux and those at Versailles were both designed by Le Nôtre, and both were based on the principles of geometry, perspective, illusion, and control of nature by man. As is the case with all Le Nôtre’s gardens, they were designed so as not to interfere with the view of the palace, but to enhance it and to harmonize with it. The major differences between the gardens at Vaux and at Versailles are the scale and the thematic treatments. The scale is much grander at Versailles. At Vaux, the park, with its statues of mythological Greek gods, succeeds in creating what the ancient Greeks once envisioned: the Elysian Fields, the pagan paradise that only those favored by the gods could enter. At Versailles, on the other hand, the central theme compares Louis XIV to Apollo, the Sun God, around whom the universe is in orbit.
Visiting Vaux the first time, after having just seen Le Nôtre’s gardens at Dampierre and Sceaux, I understood the theme and variations of his designs. Nearest the château on either side of the central allée are two long parterres with intricate swirling designs, which are laid out on the landscape like two elegantly woven oriental carpets. The central allée leads from the center of the château terrace into the distance, to a huge statue of the Farnese Hercules, the Greek hero who could not be defeated. Along the way are green parterres crossed by gravel paths and by canals—first two small canals and then the Grand Canal. Each difference in gradation creates illusion and surprise. Carefully pruned shrubs look more carved than real. Rather than colorful flowers, there are graceful plumes of water spouting from a multitude of elaborate fountains. The gardens must be seen when the fountains are in operation, and they are best seen when you look back at the château from the Hercules statue, which stands in the center of a long, sweeping vista bordered by forests on both sides. (It takes about a half hour to walk from the château to the statue.) When Louis XIV walked from the palace to the canal, he passed through crystal walls of water, spouting from a hundred jets, such as those seen today at Sceaux. A 17th-century visitor to Vaux commented, “The air was filled with the sounds of a thousand fountains falling into marvelously fashioned basins, as if it were the throne of Neptune.” From the Farnese Hercules you can see the cascades, invisible from the château, where Madame de Sévigné liked to bathe beneath the watchful eyes of the Greek river gods, who recline in hidden grottoes. As I stood here, with the pagan gods in careful attendance, it did appear, as my little book on gardens suggested, that I was in an earthly paradise, and I wished with all my heart to be swimming where Madame de Sévigné swam.
The story of Vaux-le-Vicomte is inseparable from the story of the great party its creator, Nicolas Fouquet, gave there—the party he gave for Louis XIV which so angered the king that he imprisoned the host for the rest of his life.
Every damn thing is your own fault if you are any good.
—Ernest Hemingway
Fouquet was one of the most unscrupulous, and perhaps the most ambitious, of all Louis XIV’s unscrupulous and ambitious ministers. Born in 1615, the descendant of a long line of wealthy judges, he was sent to study with the Jesuits, but his father, soon realizing that his second son was ill-suited for the priesthood, purchased for him, when Nicolas was only sixteen, the position of avocat at the Parliament of Paris. From that time on, thanks to the nimbleness of his mind and his boundless energy, his rise was unmarred by setbacks of any kind. At eighteen he was conseiller to the Parliament of Metz; at twenty-one, maître des requêtes. At thirty-five he purchased the post of procureur général, the chief prosecuting officer of the Parliament of Paris. At thirty-six he married Marie-Madeleine Jeannin de Castille, whose immense dowry was added to his growing fortune. Serving as an official in the royal army, he became the cardinal’s protégé; when Mazarin was sent into exile during the Fronde, Fouquet protected the cardinal’s interests and property until he returned to power in 1653. Mazarin rewarded Fouquet with the post of superintendent of finances, recommending him to the young king by saying, “If they could get women and building out of his head, great things might be done with him.”
The great things Fouquet did, however, were at least as much in his own behalf as in the king’s. As superintendent of finances, he paid the government’s bills partly by borrowing on his own credit, but in the process hopelessly intermingled the public purse with his own; he successfully kept the royal armies outfitted and provisioned and the royal coffers filled, but more successfully, and fraudulently, filled his own. His
position as procureur général (attorney general) shielded him from investigation, as did Mazarin’s favor. Fouquet, noted Louis’s mistress Athénaïs de Montespan, was,
envied by a thousand, provoked indeed a certain amount of spite; yet all such vain efforts...to slander him troubled him but little. My lord the Cardinal was his support, and so long as the main column stood firm, M. Fouquet, lavish of gifts to his protector, had really nothing to fear.
But eventually even Mazarin became alarmed at the extent to which Fouquet was diverting the nation’s taxes. About to launch an inquiry into Fouquet’s activities, however, the aging cardinal realized that the investigation would reveal the immense gifts his protégé had made to him—and he let Fouquet off with a warning.
But Fouquet was much more than a financier. He was also a remarkable patron of the arts, a man of superb taste, possessing an uncanny ability to recognize and inspire great talent—in both young and old—in all the arts. He seems to have thought of himself as a 17th-century Maecenas, the ancient Roman patron of the arts who, like himself, was both an adviser to a great ruler (Maecenas to the emperor Augustus) and the most renowned literary patron of his day (among Maecenas’s protégés were Horace and Virgil). Comparing the Age of Louis XIV to the Age of Augustus was not uncommon—and there are indeed similarities. It wasn’t merely that Voltaire, writing less than a generation later, compared the Grand Siècle to the Augustan Age, or that, as a 20th-century historian of Louis’s reign wrote, “Not since Augustus had any monarchy been so adorned with great writers, painters, sculptors, and architects.” The people who lived during France’s Golden Age saw themselves as the embodiment of all that was to be admired in the ancient world. Louis XIV certainly saw himself as a modern Augustus, and so did artists of his age. In the statue of Louis by Girardon at Vaux, the king is dressed as a Roman emperor, as he is in the painting by Mignard, and the statue in the Venus Drawing Room and the carved medallion in the War Room at Versailles. Louis considered the wall of the Roman Theater of Orange, the one containing the statue of Augustus, “the finest wall in my kingdom.” When he tore down the medieval walls surrounding Paris, he built at the entrance to the city a series of triumphal arches, such as Augustus had built at the entrances to Roman cities.
Travelers' Tales Paris Page 16
