The dispersal of Voltaire's remains

“The dead, the poor dead have great pain,” said Baudelaire.

It is certain that they would be much more peaceful if, after them, they did not leave the living. Voltaire is here to prove it to us. Rarely has a body been more dissected, divided, dispersed than his by the fanatical and fairly inept zeal of his admirers.

We know that Voltaire, arriving in Paris on February 10, 1778, stayed with the Marquis Charles de Villette, 1, rue de Beaune, at the corner of the Quai des Théatins (today, Quai Voltaire), No. 27. But soon, this old man of eighty-four, exhausted by work and triumphs, died on May 30, 1778, at eleven o'clock in the evening. That same night, the autopsy and embalming were carried out by Rose de Lépinoy, surgeon, and Mitouart, apothecary rue de Beaune.

The corpse, relieved, as we will see later, of the heart and brain, was wrapped in a dressing gown, wearing a night cap and, supported by a servant, it was transported at night, by car. , at the abbey of Scellières, in Champagne, of which Abbot Vincent Mignot, nephew of Voltaire, was the holder. It was necessary to hasten to bury the body before the clergy, informed, could issue a ban against the burial in holy ground.

Simply wrapped in a shroud and in an ordinary wooden coffin, he was quickly buried behind the abbey. When the diocesan bishop was informed, but too late, he could only dismiss the prior who had given the authorization.

Voltaire slept in peace for thirteen years, until the day the Revolution, wanting to glorify its great precursors, decided to seek him out in his countryside. On May 9, at three o'clock in the afternoon, the body was exhumed in the presence of some official government representatives. In a blackened and decomposed shroud was found a dried-up corpse almost reduced to a skeleton. The commune of Romilly, where the abbey of Scellières was located, requested the head and right arm, as symbols of the thoughts and writings of the great writer. Fortunately, the Assembly had the good taste to refuse, and after various stages, the body arrived in Paris on July 10, 1791.

On Tuesday the 12th, in a theatrical “apotheosis” in the antique style, the coffin was transferred to the Pantheon. It was claimed that the coffin was violated in 1814 and the body thrown into the rubbish to avenge the Ancien Régime. No verification was made at that time, despite violent controversies, and it was only at the end of the last century that the coffin was reopened in the presence of Victorien Sardou, Berthelot, G. Lenotre, etc. A skeleton was found which we concluded was, in all likelihood, that of Voltaire.

Coffin violated in 1814, as some have claimed, and, subsequently, another skeleton put in its place and which was found at the last check, these are many subtle complications.

Let us not forget to point out that, during the exhumation of Scellières, on May 9, 1791, one of the spectators grabbed the heel bone or, to speak Latin, the calcaneum. It is currently kept in the natural history cabinet of Mr. Mandronnet, owner in Chicheroi, near Troyes.
In addition, the first metatarsal bone (in other words a toe) was collected by Doctor Bouquet. It is today at the Troyes Museum.

Finally, Baron Denon had a tooth in his collection of relics, which later belonged to the Desaix family. But let's return to the night of the autopsy, May 30 to 31, 1778.

The Marquis de Villette, Voltaie's guest and present at the operation, appropriated the heart, and having embalmed it and enclosed it in a silver-gilt heart, he kept it despite the family's complaints.

When the marquis died on July 9, 1793, the relic passed into the hands of his wife, who moved to Vaugirard, cul-de-sac Férou. The Marquise having died in her turn, very old, around 1825 or 1830, the heart became the property of her son, Voltaire-Villette, who, dying in 1865, bequeathed it with his goods to Mgr de Dreux-Brézé, bishop de Moulins and trustee of the Count of Chambord.

But the Court of Amiens annulled the will in favor of MM. of Roissy and Varicourt, natural heirs, who donated the heart to the government.

The relic was placed in 1865 in the National Library, where it is still preserved today in the base of the original casting of Houdon's seated Voltaire. We will not dwell on all these facts recently published by the newspapers.

But back to the autopsy again. Prince Baratnisky, Russian ambassador, wrote in a dispatch the next day: “The young surgeon who performed this operation was astonished at the quantity of brains. He expressed his surprise and admiration in this regard and could not tire of looking at this phenomenon with forbidden eyes. He even asked permission to keep the cerebellum, wishing to treasure some of the remains of this great man..."

Rose de Lépinoy, in her report to the Faculty of Medicine, said that the brain was very large.

But witnesses and historians constantly confuse brain and cerebellum. The brain, which was very large, was not dissected. Mitouart hardened it in boiling alcohol and then preserved it in spirits of wine.

What happened to this brain? We absolutely ignore it. Because it is the cerebellum that Mitouart later preserved. He also requested a certificate and, upon his death, transmitted it to his son, a very well-known doctor.

He offered it to the Minister of the Interior, François de Neufchâteau, in a letter dated 24 Ventôse Year VII (March 14, 1799):
"I want to talk about Vollaire; at his death, my father, who was his apothecary and who was responsible for his embalming, took, with the permission of the late Marquis de Villette, the cerebellum of this great man. It was preserved in the spirit of wine and since that time, it has remained intact through the care I took of it. If, as physiologists have thought, it is in this part of man that the seat is of genius, I believe that this anatomical piece, in relation to the subject to which it belonged, can have some value and must be one of the main ornaments of the Natural History Museum. As the cerebellum is in some way ignored in my home , I propose to offer it to the Republic; each French person will then have before their eyes the remains of this great man, whose writings enlightened our century..."

Milouart, we see, says he has the cerebellum in his possession; A valuable doctor, he must have been knowledgeable about such a simple distinction, and the big brain was therefore lost at the autopsy.

François de Neufchâteau was one of Vollaire's former friends and admirers. Also, the Moniteur of 27 Germinal year VII published the minister's response, who eagerly accepted. But... things stopped there.

Regrets and retraction from Milouart?... Refusal or indifference from the government? We do not know, but the fact remains that the cerebellum remained with its owner. In 1799, Mitouart even exhibited it at a meeting of the Philomathic Society where it was noted that it had over time transformed into a fatty substance and that its volume had diminished. As an experiment, we even brought a fragment close to a candle to see it flame!... And some writers with symbolist pens took the opportunity to talk about the last sparks of this brilliant cerebellum!...

The Consulate replaced the Directory, then came the Empire and the Restoration. Doctor Mitouart stood still... The moment would have been poorly chosen under Napoleon or Louis XVIII to celebrate the spirits of the great free thinker. Finally, Charles But, for the second time, the government dropped the matter.

A few years later, Mitouart died, bequeathing the anatomical piece to his nephew Verdier. In 1858, he offered it to the Academy, but the unfortunate cerebellum suffered a third refusal, "for lack of a reliquary to receive this unexpected deposit"...

In turn, Verdier died and the relic passed to Miss Virginie Milouart, the doctor's granddaughter. She lived, with the cerebellum, successively at 10, rue du Bouloi, 20, rue des Petites-Ecuries, finally 23, rue des Bons-Enfants, where she died, very probably in 1870.

The cerebellum became the property of Mr. Labrosse-Torcher, an old employee of the Mitouart pharmacy, rue Coquillière. (The shop was demolished in the opening of the rue du Louvre, which does not simplify the search.) But he too died soon, without heirs, and his few pieces of furniture were sold at auction at the Auction House. Hoping to be happier than my predecessors, I tried to find the successful bidder.

Mr. Lecourt, secretary at the Hôtel Drouot, with a kindness and patience for which I would like to thank here, reviewed more than forty thousand sales, but in vain. Despite this considerable work, no trace of sale has been found after Labrosse-Torcher's death. It is very likely that the pharmacy employee's poor furniture had to be sold in haste, without entry in the Hotel registers. Besides, it is doubtful whether the cerebellum was put up for sale. An anatomical part swimming in a bottle of alcohol is an object that is difficult to sell.

Certainly left in the dead man's home, thrown away who knows where, it is a poor wreck definitively lost. Above all, Voltaire feared being thrown into the trash, like Adrienne Lecouvreur, by the resentment of the clergy. He escaped, but at what cost, we saw him... Dissected, scattered into seven pieces lost or labeled in display cases, the one who had spent his long life in feverish agitation, the one whose work had killed the sleep, couldn't even sleep peacefully.

This is indeed the "disjecti membra poetæ" that Horace speaks to us about, and Baudelaire was, alas, right to say: "The dead, the poor dead, have great pain..."

Em.P.