I wander aimlessly now and always go astray. Vainly, I search for any support. Nothing is solid, everything escapes me, everything deceives me …. If anything is certain upon earth, it is our pain. Suffering is real and pleasures are nothing but imaginary.
No exact date can be placed on the letter from which these lines are taken, but it seems likely, as Géricault also writes of the “terrible difficulties” into which he has “rashly thrown himself,” that it was written during the bewildering months after the discovery of Alexandrine’s pregnancy.1 Apart from his self-reproach, there would have been a feeling of helplessness at not being able to be with and console his beloved as her condition became increasingly evident.
While the pregnancy remained invisible, and seven months to the day before Alexandrine gave birth to Géricault’s child, her husband, either by a cruel irony or by way of reaffirming and consolidating their marriage, added his wife’s maiden name to his own; henceforth he would be known as Jean-Baptiste Caruel de St. Martin, to which, in 1819, he would add the title of baron. Preoccupied by business, over fifty, and already blessed with two male heirs, we can guess that sexual relations between Jean-Baptiste and his wife were rare or nonexistent, otherwise there would have been an obvious, if deceitful, solution to Alexandrine’s dilemma. How culpable and forlorn she must have felt disclosing her condition to her generous husband, how awkward before her two children. Whether confined in the Château of Grand-Chesnay or sequestered in the depths of the country, how alone she must have felt without the comforting presence of her nephew. Would she have dared to admit the identity of the father? Would such a treacherous relationship prove more or less insulting to her husband than some chance dalliance?
As there is no record of subsequent visits made by Géricault, either to the Château of Grand-Chesnay or to the Caruel’s Parisian establishments, it does suggest a permanent rupture, signaling the fact that the painter was indeed known to have been Alexandrine’s lover. In light of the pregnancy, Caruel, the astute businessman, could not have failed to consider the intense relationship between his wife and nephew that had developed over the previous years and reflect upon its possible consequence. It was certainly not uncommon for women in upper-middle-class families, often married to much older men, to help a younger male in the advancement of a career, such intimate collaboration often plunging the pair into an emotional relationship that led to the young man’s initiation into the pleasures of sex.
During the early part of the pregnancy, the Medusa scandal was once again in the news with the February 28 publication of Corréard and Savigny’s entirely reworked second edition of The Shipwreck of the Frigate, the Medusa. With the addition of Brédif’s notes and some further observations on West Africa, it was a much amplified text, embellished by a plan of the raft drawn by Corréard and a portrait of King Zaide somewhat surprisingly providing a frontispiece. The short, four-month interval between the first two editions suggests that the public’s appetite was keen, and Corréard’s name placed before Savigny’s on the title page established the fact that the text had, by this second edition, become Corréard’s baby.2
At five a.m. on August 21, 1818, a son was born to Alexandrine-Modeste Caruel at the house of the celebrated obstetrician Dr. Danyau, at 14 rue Pavée Saint André des Arts. In violation of Article 312 of the civil code declaring that any child born into a marriage, even one sired by a third party, was legally considered to be the husband’s, the boy was taken away and registered as being “of unknown parents” at the town hall of what had been at that time the Eleventh Arrondissement.
Such declarations of anonymity were not uncommon; with the thirty thousand or so abandoned children and the seventy thousand illegitimate births registered in Paris each year, about one in three children was the fruit of an extramarital liaison. It was Dr. Danyau who registered the infant at the town hall and, seemingly under instruction from the father, gave him the name Georges-Hippolyte—Georges, in honor of Géricault’s father, who had been consoling in a time of crisis, and Hippolyte, a Greek name meaning, “I release the horses.” The unrecognized Georges-Hippolyte was first cared for by Danyau and then was sent to a nurse at the home of a Monsieur Dubois in Normandy, where he spent his childhood.3
As the pregnancy was coming to its term, Géricault had begun work on some studies to help him bring before the salon, some as yet unchosen moment from the Medusa saga. To capitalize on the interest generated by the enlarged second edition of The Shipwreck, Henri Savigny, in May 1818, published his Observations on the Effects of Hunger and Thirst Experienced After the Wreck of the King’s Frigate, the Medusa, in 1816. This was a study of calenture, the delirium and fever that attacks sailors in the tropics. Although Savigny presented the work as a thesis at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, it was hardly an original piece. It copied whole passages from a study of the phenomenon that had been published by Fournier de Pescay in 1812 and it added little to Pescay’s more recently published work on the subject of March 1818.4 Savigny’s thesis was, however, useful to Géricault who, from the outset, craved facts about the catastrophe and assembled a file full of related documents. There were the first two editions of The Ship-wreck and clippings from the newspapers, to which he added Savigny’s treatise on calenture. The painter supplemented these printed sources by securing interviews with certain survivors of the raft and by making a series of gruesome anatomical studies.5 There was a modernity in his profound factual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with his subject, and such a depth of research had, at the same time, a palliative effect; Géricault was somewhat distracted from his own misfortunes through immersion in this horrific shipwreck. At last, a subject of sufficient size and pertinence had presented itself to him and it could not have come at a more welcome moment.
Géricault was drawn to several episodes on the raft: the mutiny of the soldiers and sailors against their leaders; the cannibalism; the sighting of the Argus; the approach of its lifeboat; and the moment of rescue. The actual abandoning of the raft proved unsuitable because of the complex problem of realizing a striking compositional drama with a glut of 147 people crushed onto a small platform. Such a throng would confuse and compromise the impact of personal suffering, which could be better expressed through the sparse incident attaching to a much smaller group. A similar excess of incident, albeit cunningly disposed, is apparent in an advanced sketch for the Mutiny, which also provides ample proof that Géricault was keen to make maximum use of Corréard and Savigny’s account: the broaching of the barrels, the jettisoning of the casks, the ropes used to keep people from being washed away, the leader at the base of the mast repelling a hatchet attack, the axe-wielding mutineer who was plunged into the sea, the vulnerable stern, and the supplication of the frightened souls on board. Géricault soon came to understand, however, that the writhing turbulence of this scene also worked against the most profound message that could be extracted from the catastrophe.
A small seascape produced around this time reflects the artist’s preoccupation with cataclysm. This gloomy marine disaster was Géricault’s The Deluge, which reveals, in the foreground of the somber scene, scattered people hopelessly clinging to the small, barren rocks of a reef. A black block of cloud filling the top third of the canvas, bearing down on the shipwrecked victims like the wrath of God, perhaps expresses the plight of its tormented maker.
Géricault took himself out of circulation in order to work. He installed himself at No. 232 faubourg du Roule on the outskirts of Paris with the sole purpose of focusing on the Medusa. The list of welcome visitors was short: his close freiend Dedreux-Dorcy, his pupil Jamar, his disciples Montfort and Leroux, and those survivors of the raft whose brains he wished to pick. Géricault shaved off his hair so as to strengthen his resolve not to enter society. He slept in a room off the studio and his meals were brought to him. Most important, he had chosen a location only a short walk from the Beaujon hospital where he could go to observe human suffering and from which he would obtain severed body parts for private study.6
The hospital near Géricault’s new and temporary work space had been founded in 1784 by Nicolas Beaujon as a hospice for orphans and the poor of the parish. Becoming a hospital in 1795, it slowly grew until, by 1816, the authorities crammed 140 beds into a space originally intended for 80. During the Allied occupation at the beginning of the restoration, typhus resulted in a death rate of nearly one in every four patients, but conditions began to improve in 1818, when the hospital was provided with facilities for washing laundry and supplying water to each floor. Although the mortality rate was in decline, there remained a sufficient supply of dismembered limbs and dead bodies for student study.
Géricault’s interest in corpses and human fragments was not merely anatomical but also pathological; the Medusa project compelled him to observe the effects of deprivation and violence and he made arrangements with the interns and nurses at the Beaujon to allow him to follow the phases of suffering on site as well as to provide him with amputated limbs for studio study.7 Because exhumation and dissection were, from October 1813, forbidden outside the Faculty of Medicine, Géricault may have had to come by his limbs and heads in a roundabout way. It is quite possible that Henri Savigny, through his medical connections, was instrumental in helping the painter obtain some of the amputated limbs.
The conditions that Géricault encountered on his visits to the dissecting theater would give him some insight into the state of the raft after the carnage of the mutinies. Hector Berlioz, who at that time was a young medical student, vividly described the scene.
This human charnel house, scattered members, grimacing heads, skulls half open, the bloody cesspool in which we trod, the revolting odour … filled me with such fright that, jumping through the window of the amphitheatre, I escaped as fast as I could and ran panting to my place, as if death and its dreadful cortège were hot on my heels.8
Unlike Berlioz, Géricault felt compelled to accept such pursuit, inviting death into his studio.
The city also provided Géricault with an extensive site in which to study human misery. Pre-Hausmann Paris remained a densely packed warren of pest-ridden streets in which ordure, offal, and assorted rubbish were scattered by scavenging dogs, splattered by cart wheels, and further mired by the horses that circulated through the entrails of the city.9 An anonymous English visitor noted that the “climate of the French metropolis is bad, unpleasant and unhealthy. It is subject to frequent and sudden falls of rain” so that the city was known, even by the French themselves, as the “chamberpot of France.” This situation was compounded by the
injudicious manner in which the drains are laid on for conveying the rain-water and filth of every description, which gradually amasses, from the roofs and gutters of the houses, and which, instead of being carried down, as in England, to the ground, project from the house to the distance of three or four feet, and consequently inundate the passenger who walks under them.
These dense, unhealthy spaces were littered with amputees, men whose lives had been saved by the celebrated seventeen-second disarticulations of Dominique Larrey on countless Napoleonic battlefields, cripples who now mooched an uneasy and impoverished existence in the capital. In these fetid streets, Géricault walked among the physical remains of rejection and disease and produced, during 1818–19, poignant and provocative lithographs that formed an elegy for the Napoleonic adventure: The Retreat from Russia, The Cart of the Wounded, and The Swiss Sentry at the Louvre. As with the artist’s work on the Medusa, all of these explore different forms of betrayal, attest to the burgeoning of Géricault’s political consciousness, and disclose the morbidity of his mood. His familiarity with the city’s streets, his trips to the nearby Beaujon as well as to the Bicêtre hospital, and the morgue, all contributed to his researches for The Raft of the Medusa.10
Only a stone’s throw from where Georges-Hippolyte was born, on the south bank of the Ile de la Cité near the Pont-Neuf, was a gaunt, freestanding rectangular structure, the Paris morgue. Inside the building bodies were laid out for display and fashionable visitors would come to spectate on the transitoriness of life or gloat over the wages of sin.
The morgue was just opposite the Académie Suisse, an informal studio where many of Géricault’s friends came to draw. On the testimony of the regulars, it seems that Géricault worked across the road in the morgue for long hours, on and off, over a period of a year. The function of the morgue was to receive the unidentified cadavers that came under the jurisdiction of the police. Inside, the clothes they had been wearing when found were hung above the anonymous corpses in order to offer some aid to identification. Stillborn babies and miscarriages were displayed for a period of three days, during which they could be reclaimed by relatives, a mortifying sight, perhaps, for one who had so recently been forced to give up his son to an anonymous nurse.11
On occasion, Géricault’s friends Charles-Émile Champmartin and Alexandre Colin joined the artist in his noxious studio to paint severed limbs and heads. In Anatomical Fragments, now in Montpellier, Géricault presents a tangle of limbs that recalls the human debris strewn about the raft. An intimation of cannibalism is suggested by the section cut above the shoulder like a choice offering on a butcher’s block. The cut of the joint is presented as something potentially edible and lit in a manner that recalls Dutch still lifes that celebrate a brace of pheasants or a rib of beef. Delacroix, sounding the romantic artist’s understanding of what Géricault was all about, called these studies “the best argument for Beauty as it ought to be understood,” revealing as they do the transfiguration by art of what was odious in nature.12
After a two-day period of rigor mortis, which sets in six to twelve hours after death, the effect of the stiffening lactic acid wears off and the body softens and putrefies. Géricault kept cadavers and fragments for weeks and his closest friends, along with those few visitors who had not been on the raft, became afraid of infection.13 By contrast, Géricault did not hesitate to handle these toxic fragments and touching and smelling death brought him closer to the world of those abandoned by Chaumareys and Schmaltz. If he was not about to eat the flesh that he brought home, the artist was prey to its odors, and the sense of smell accounts for much of what we “taste.” Géricault felt the flesh becoming limp, he smelt the putrefaction, he all but tasted the meat. If not directly related to his sketches for the Medusa project, for which he used live models, we can attribute to these paintings and drawings of severed limbs the role of stimuli in his living with the raft.14
Installed in the new studio, skin-headed after discarding the thick locks of an earlier, happier self, Géricault set to work. Gone was the soft, blushing, elegant figure. Lebrun would no longer come upon an embarrassed, vain young dandy with hair in curling papers. The shaving of his head, a practical preparation for settling down to work undisturbed, was also perhaps an impetuous act of purification, a renouncing of sex.
Deprived of love, Géricault became a man of compassion. He dedicated himself to painting the cruelties of modern life. Amid the acrid relics littering his studio at St. Philippe du Roule, Géricault set out on his own short and fatal voyage. In the wake of separation and loss, he seemed to be saying, “I’ll sorrow with the sorrowful, I’ll repent among the dead. I will set myself adrift on a difficult sea.”