Death, Hope, and the Paris Morgue
Hence, in accordance with this natural affection [for his own flesh], a man has during life a certain solicitude for what will become of his body after death: and he would grieve if he had a presentiment that something untoward would happen to his body.
— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologicai
My introduction to the Paris Morgue came late one night after teaching the last of four classes studying The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. In one of the final chapters of the novel, the hero, Walter Hartright, recounts his visit to the Paris Morgue where he identifies the body of the villain of the novel.ii The loud conversation of a crowd of visitors, describing the deceased, catches his attention. One student asked: “Was visiting the Paris Morgue ‘a thing’?” I replied that it was probably a question of identification of the anonymous corpse, and the large crowds described by the hero were a result of the physical peculiarities of the dead man.
The question stuck with me, however. I had always been focused on what Hartright found in the Morgue, not inquiring more deeply into what he describes as “flippant curiosity of a French mob”, or the strange elements of theater that enter into his description. The footnotes in my Penguin edition informed me that Wilkie Collins himself recounted visits to the Paris Morgue in his letters. Further digging unearthed the information that, when in Paris, Charles Dickens ventured in to see that “strange sight, which I have contemplated many a time during the last dozen years.” This struck me as an odd form of entertainment abroad. Were the novelists occupied in a memento mori project or researching forensics a la Sherlock Holmes, memorably described in A Study in Scarlet “beating the subjects in the dissecting-rooms with a stick . . . . to verify how far bruises may be produced after death”?iii
In fact, the Paris Morgue was an extremely popular tourist attraction, drawing in locals and foreign visitors by the tens of thousands. While this originally was, as I had posited to my students, a question of the identification of anonymous corpses, it rapidly changed to a public spectacle. Estimates suggest that, on busy days, up to 40,000 people might shuffle through to see the bodies on display. I use the word “display” with good reason: during open hours, morgue employees pulled back large curtains to reveal the bodies, behind glass, laid on slanted tables, with their clothes and other belongings hanging up behind them. If the collection of dead bodies was particularly numerous, the employees would lower the curtain, scramble to rearrange, and unveil a new scene to the admiring crowd. This is precisely the scene Walter Hartright describes, even to the point of noting the “great glass screen that parts the dead from the living at the Morgue”. An interesting or particularly tragic corpse attracted larger crowds. With the remodeling of the Paris Morgue in 1864, the enormous building, open all day, seven days a week, rivaled the attraction of the Notre Dame Cathedral.
The macabre interest that made the Newgate Calendar so popular during the eighteenth century, or gathered large crowds at public executions throughout the centuries, is probably at work here. At the same time, grotesque as it sounds (and certainly was), the Morgue operated with a strong emphasis on the artistic beauty of death, and the shared public experience of sensationalist grief. We can see this in the popularly reproduced death mask known as “L’Inconnue de la Seine” (The Unknown Woman of the Seine). The face of the purported drowning victim captured beauty, innocence, and tragedy together. The aestheticization of death makes it somehow less real, something staged that we look at under glass or hang upon the wall to inspire a sentimentalized reaction. In addition to this aestheticized approach to death, the Paris Morgue brings to mind questions of the decency of so-called educational displays such as Body Worlds, for-profit freak shows which present partially dissected and artificially preserved dead bodies in a range of poses, many of them undignified or obscene. Continual preservation mitigates against the eventual and proper disposal of the bodies.
On a less sensationalist level, the Morgue brings up the complicated question of research which relies on the use of cadavers. A great deal can be accomplished through the use of dead bodies. Sherlock Holmes exemplifies forensic research—shocking to his friends, but achieving valuable information for the pursuit of justice and the punishment of crime. While there is no evidence to suggest body-beating by police in the Morgue, the police reportedly utilized the scene, confronting accused criminals with the bodies of their victims, and often stunning them into confession. Beyond forensics, there are obvious advances that can be made in education and research, in fields including anatomy and biomechanical safety.
“Science and technology,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church declares, “by their very nature require unconditional respect for fundamental moral criteria. They must be at the service of the human person, of his inalienable rights, of his true and integral good, in conformity with the plan and the will of God.”iv Research which involves dead bodies must operate under a strict moral understanding, respecting the dignity of the body and the requirement of due and proper disposal. The bodies in the Paris Morgue, however strange and troubling their display undoubtedly is, were at least granted eventual and proper burial.
For a writer of Gothic novels, the reality of death and concerns about bodies (undead or otherwise), has special significance. Alfred Lord Tennyson, without anxiety about the preternatural, expressed it exquisitely in “Break, Break, Break”, as he longed “for the touch of a vanish’d hand, / And the sound of a voice that is still!” Belloc, drawing from his own deep experience of tragic loss, wrote in The Four Men:
The worst thing in the world is the passing of human affection. No man who has lost a friend need fear death . . . For the comprehension by one soul of another is something borrowed from whatever lies outside time: it is not under the conditions of time. Then if it passes, it is past – it never grows again; and we lose it as men lose a diamond, or as men lose their honor.
As a novelist, I believe this is foundational to the impulse to write. Every story, every narrative worth its salt goes back to the primal trauma of the Fall and our deep longing for the glory—glory only accessible to us through the Cross. Novels need not always visit the Paris Morgue, but the reality of death and how we deal with it remains a critical piece of the human narrative.
According to St. Augustine in De Cura pro Mortuis (On care to be had for the dead), the disposal of dead bodies is an “office of humanity”.v Indeed, burial of the dead is one of the seven corporal works of mercy. It is also an action that brings consolation to the living. Graveyards are for the living, not for the dead. Those who are disposed of an indecorous manner are not more dead than those who are buried respectfully. Proper disposal of dead bodies is, however, a sign of cultural respect, a healthy means of grieving, and a clear declaration of our hope for eternal life. This is why the Church does not approve such practices as the scattering of ashes, on earth or at sea, or enshrining them perpetually on one’s mantlepiece. God’s omnipotence is not confounded by these practices; the resurrection of the body will take place according to his will whether a great aunt’s remains became fish food or not. “The body is buried earthly and rises glorious” (1 Corinthians 15:35-37, 42-22, 52-53).
According to Augustine, the word “monument” comes from “monens mentum”—“to put in mind”. In monuments, large or small, the departed are recalled to our mind, along with our own mortality. At the moment, mortality seems very much in our minds. For me, in addition to the frequent death tallies during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the descriptions of overfull morgues in Italy and New York City, there is a personal side to this. Early this year, my grandfather died. We arrived at his house within a few hours of his death. In the days that followed and in coordination with the funeral home, family members prepared his body for burial. Children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren were able to be with his body during an extended wake. My three-year-old noted to me that the body of the man he knew “looked kinda cweepy”, and he wanted to understand why. Death renders someone familiar strangely unfamiliar. The person, as Aquinas tells us, is a composite of body and spirit. The separation of body and spirit is a violent, unnatural divorce. “The body apart from the spirit is dead”, we hear in James 2:26. A dead body looks oddly deflated, robbed of the soul, which gives it life. We know this to be a result of the Fall, and a consequence of Original Sin. As Tertullian reminds us, the word “cadaver” comes from the Latin root “cadere”, which means “to fall”.vi A dead body is still the body of fallen, sinful man.
When we look at death through the eyes of Faith, and with the assurance of Hope, we see a different picture than is shown in the more lurid elements of the Paris Morgue experience. As we bid goodbye to our beloved dead, we can truly say in hope: I will see this body again. We do not mean we will see this body again according to the monstrous ambitions of Dr. Frankenstein or the operations of those grave robbers known as “Resurrection men”. Our Faith in the Resurrection is not rooted in a trick or some bizarre, divine sleight-of-hand, but in Jesus Christ himself: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies” (John 11:25). God is no graverobber. Our Lord, in his humanity, truly died. We are particularly assured through the offices of Our Blessed Mother. The dead body of Our Lord, taken down from the Cross, was prepared for burial by the hands of his own family members. Our Blessed Mother could not have mistaken the dead body of her son for anything other than it was. In her ability to look with “eyes of mercy” upon us, even in that moment, she teaches us of the incomprehensible mercy of God himself.
The death rate of human beings is one hundred percent. We are mortal and we will die. Pandemic, war, tragedy—all of these things may make death seem more inevitable, but that is merely because they bring forcibly to mind this inescapable reality. We want there to be a story, a narrative that makes sense of our joys and our sorrows. We want more than serialized experience without a point. There is only one narrative that achieves this, of course, and it is the Narrative that turns all other stories on their heads. It is like the moment in a mystery novel, when the reader discovers that he has been looking at all of the clues backwards, and the detective steps in to reveal what really happened. The possibility of a “happy death” is really to be found in the fact that it isn’t our story, it’s “the good Lord’s story”.vii
In this way, the certainty of death is the center point both of our suffering and of the spectacular mercy of God. “For our momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17). That weighty balance between affliction and hope is one that becomes keener with each passing day. We see death, and we know that he will “make all things new” (Revelation 21:5). This November, as we visit graveyards, we do so in the assurance that we shall live with Christ. The Paris Morgue, through the Cross, is weird but powerless. “Death,” St. Paul tells us: “is swallowed up in victory.” (1 Corinthians 15:54-57).
May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.
i III.71.11, reply to objection 3.
ii Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, The Third Epoch, The Narrative by Walter Hartright, Part II.
iii Chapter 1, “Mr. Sherlock Holmes”.
iv Paragraph 2294.
v Paragraph 6.
vi In De Resurrectione Carnis, paragraph 18.
vii Thomas Joseph White, O.P., “The Weight of Eternal Glory”, on the Living for the Other Side Hillbilly Thomist album (2020). Thanks to this song, I envision the proverbial “happy death” accompanied by the wry twanging of a banjo.
