MUSÉE FRAGONARD D’ALFORT – PARIS, FRANCE BY LIISA LADOUCEUR
Paris’ newly opened veterinary college (“L’École Royale Vétérinaire”). He was a man of high stand- ing, already the director of the world’s first veteri- nary school in Lyon. But Fragonard had some unusual ideas about how best to study anatomy. He could have used wax replicas (popular in med- ical schools of the time). He could have simply put his real specimens in jars of formaldehyde, a slightly creepier but still acceptable procedure. In- stead, Fragonard, cousin of famed French painter Jean-Honoré, developed an original technique that showed off his flair for the dramatic. His bodies and body parts were dissected, skinned, preserved – and posed. He called them écorchés (“flayed fig- ures”). Go figure,
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Fragonard be- came famous for his écorchés, but also feared. By the
time he presented his Horseman of the Apocalypse – a flayed human corpse, ru-
ND YOU THOUGHT BODY WORLDS WAS WEIRD. Way back in 1776, a French surgeon named Honoré Fragonard went to work at
moured to be his own fiancée, on a flayed dead horse, surrounded by foetuses riding sheep – he was expelled for being a madman. Perhaps this is why the modern-day Musée
Fragonard is not in many Paris guidebooks. While the city’s crypts and catacombs, graves and gar- goyles are considered must-sees even for the squeamish, these anatomical anomalies remain a hidden gem for the macabre-inclined visitor. The place is not easy to find, either; it’s hid-
den inside the national vet school, located on the southeast side of the city, tucked far away from Paris’ more tourist-friendly centre. The smell of horse manure hits the nose as one nav- igates around the stables through treelined paths, one of which leads to the entrance of the museum, barely marked by a sign. But once up the stone staircases it’s clear that this is the right spot: there’s a full-size skeleton next to the admission desk. The 300-year-old museum, which has only been
open to the public since 1991, was renovated in 2008 but still looks like a Victorian-era cabinet of curiosities. Towering over the few visitors who make the trek are dozens of glass cases, each one stuffed with specimens of a macabre or curious nature, many accompanied by antiquated, hand- written labels. There are 4500 objects in all, so it’s well worth taking the free audio guide (available in English) to better understand the medical marvels staring back at you. Produced for tourists, it’s a se- ries of short tracks that are numbered to corre- spond to specific exhibits so you can navigate it at your own pace, plus it offers detailed information about the history of the building and the various diseases that ravaged many of the specimens. The exhibits begin fairly tame with skulls, row
upon row of them, human and animal. There are other body parts here, too, showing the evolution of veterinary sciences. It’s the insides which are most mysterious, of course. Ever seen a pre- served cow’s stomach? Funny how it looks like a
prop from an alien flick – some kind of oversized, bloated larvae. You’ll get up close and personal with genitalia of all kinds in the reproductive or- gans section, plus see veins splayed out like pretty
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foliage for your pleasure. A small dead zoo of full- sized animal skeletons and parts fill a second room. These are all fun and freakish in their own way, such as the case filled entirely with the front sections of grimacing horses’ jaws mounted in rows. You might wonder if H.R. Giger modelled the heads of his aliens after them! Then you meet the real monsters. It’s the museum’s extensive collection of med-
ical anomalies that will give you a real sense of the environment in which Fragonard was operating. Here, you’ll be confronted with animal birth defects and human diseases that transform bodies into objects of both wonder and terror. Behold the wax death mask of a former vet student inflicted with glanders – a horse, donkey and mule disease causing pus, blood and lesions to cover the face – which on rare occasion has been transferred to humans. The animals in Fragonard’s time didn’t fare too well, either, judging by the number of de- fects on display. See the six-toed rooster, the two- headed calf and...what’s this? A genuine calf Cyclops? Yes, the monstrosities section displays several
specimens normally reserved for fiction or hoaxes. It’s a very good thing if you’ve not yet heard of cyclopia, the actual, very rare, congeni- tal defect that produces human babies with only one eye. Ditto sirenomelia, the mermaid’s dis- ease. In a cloudy jar floats an infant born with a tail where its two legs should be. On and on, these freaks of nature call into question some of our treasured monster myths. What if storytellers simply ran with what nature already created, transmuting biology’s failures into tall tales? Con- fronted with these disturbing shelves of sorrow, one might flee from the cabinets into the very back section of the museum. Of course, one would be advised to know what’s behind the door first. There, in a darkened room that contrasts with
the main hall’s bright and wide open spaces, are Fragonard’s most famous creations: the écorchés. He made dozens in his lifetime, but only these remain. First up, the aforementioned Horseman of the Apocalypse, which is impres-
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