Frank González-Crussí
Chicago, Illinois, United States

Camille Flammarion (1842–1925) was a French astronomer who acquired immense popularity as a writer (Fig. 1). Today, his surname brings to mind a major French publishing house (founded by his brother Ernest), but in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, the word “Flammarion” evoked Camille’s extraordinary celebrity as a writer of scientific divulgation. That he pursued this avocation with greater energy than is commonly granted to a subordinate occupation, is well attested by his remarkable production of over sixty books for the general public, in addition to his numerous works for the specialized literature of his profession, astronomy.

Flammarion’s emotive prose and lyricism were in perfect harmony with the predominant taste of his time. Romanticism was at its apogee. Some of the most illustrious artists linked to this artistic movement were contemporaneous with the astronomer. Thus, the painters Eugene Delacroix and Caspar David Friedrich and the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred de Musset, John Keats, Lord Byron, and William Wordsworth lived in the same epoch as Flammarion.

The themes and attitudes dear to Romantic artists, such as sensibility exaltation and mystical sentiment, were—incongruous as this may seem today in a scientist’s productions—quite conspicuous in Camille Flammarion’s oeuvre. On the other hand, the contemplation of infinite space, the numberless stars, and the overwhelming vastness of the universe are likely to elicit the kind of emotions that Romanticism prized most highly. Blaise Pascal said that the thought of space without end and the absolute silence reigning therein frightened him, making him feel “what a man would feel who wakes up in a desert, to which he had been transported while asleep.” Paul Valéry (1875–1945) wondered that Pascal, a profoundly religious thinker, should have derived fright and displeasure from the contemplation of a star-studded night.¹ For most religions placed the Divine Omnipotence high up in the sky, at an extreme altitude, “as if they had discovered God’s mark in the order that rules the stars.” Wrote Valéry:

It is toward Heaven that the hands are tended; it is thither that the eyes go seeking refuge… it is from its height that certain words fell, and that certain trumpet-calls shall be heard.²

Flammarion’s books were a blend of scientific concepts, poetical tropes, mystical allusions, and fanciful depictions of imaginary beings inhabiting remote celestial bodies. A beautiful engraving by an unknown artist in one of his books captures the spirit of his writing: a traveler looks at the firmament and discovers the splendid mystical reality that exists “beyond” what astronomers view (Fig. 2). The resulting literary compound—“poetical astronomy” or “astronomical lyricism”—had many fans. Among them was the Countess of Saint-Ange, a twenty-eight-year-old beauty married to a French aristocrat of that name, her elder by many years. She was an intelligent, cultivated, and nervous young woman of much fineness of feeling and delicacy of perception. She pressed her husband to invite the famous author to spend a few days at their chateau in the Jura region of eastern France, where they were preparing a reception. Flammarion came, elating the countess.

On the day of the reception, she wore a party dress that left her shoulders and back uncovered. The terseness, brilliance, and unblemished whiteness of her skin was the object of general admiration; all eyes converged on the unstained candor of that silky surface mantling the young lady’s gracile upper body.

The countess and the astronomer-writer talked for a long time in tête-å-tête. The lady had many questions about the numberless fires that resplended in the firmament above, and Flammarion certainly had much to descant on this and other celestial wonders. He might have poured out words of galanterie along with terms of astronomy. But the crude fact is, galanterie was out of place; for the fair hostess, although young and attractive, felt an intimation of her own approaching destruction. Her much-vaunted epidermal whiteness was the pallor of disease, and her delicacy of demeanor a sign of her incipient detachment from the things of this world. Tuberculosis, or “consumption” as it was then called, was ravaging her internal organs. She knew it, and she also knew that medicine had no cure for this disease.

Therefore, the conversation probably turned to the existence of the soul, its possible survival after the body has perished, and the conceivability of establishing a communication with the souls of the departed. Flammarion had authored several volumes on death’s mystery, in one declaring: “The body is but the organic vesture of the Spirit: it passes, it changes, it crumbles: the Spirit remains.”³ Spiritism, telepathy, apparitions, and sundry “paranormal phenomena” were undergoing a great vogue in European society. Flammarion endeavored (unsuccessfully, it must be said) to afford scientific proof that “death is life’s door”—Mors janua vitae—not its annihilation; that individual souls have a real existence, outlive the organism, and may manifest after death.

Tradition has it that the countess told the astronomer that one day she would make him a gift that he could not refuse without her feeling offended. He, of course, accepted without knowing the nature of the gift, for galanterie oblige. The reception came to an end, the astronomer went home, and he heard no more of his gentle admirer.

About a year later, a messenger delivered a package at Flammarion’s domicile. His wife received it. Curious, she plunged a hand into the box and withdrew it immediately, seized by an unexplainable sudden sense of disgust upon touching a soft, elastic, cold material. It was the skin of the countess. An accompanying letter, written by the countess’ physician, said:

Dear master,

I fulfill the wish of a dead woman who loved you strangely. She made me swear that I would give you, the day after her death, the skin of her shoulders which you had so much admired on ‘the evening of your farewells,’ and her desire was that you should bind, with this skin, the first copy of the first book of your authorship which is published after her death. I am transmitting to you, dear master, this relic, just as I swore I would do. I remain your devoted friend, etc.⁴

Flammarion later commented: “I had, in effect, admired her superb shoulders on the ‘evening of our farewells’. Now I had them right there, on my dining-room table. What to do with them?” For a moment, he thought about returning the package to the sender. But he decided to fulfill the last wish of a woman whose remembrance was agreeable to him. He sent the skin to an expert tanner, who rendered it “of a superb grain, white, inalterable”; with it, he bound a copy of his book Earth and Heaven (Terre et Ciel), which had just been published.

The macabre anecdote was recounted by Camille Flammarion during an interview.⁵ Its peculiar admixture of eroticism and lugubriousness offered a temptation for storytellers, who diffused it widely.⁶ Today we know that that dozens of books bound in human skin exist in libraries or private collections. A pompous terminology designates this practice: “anthropodermic bibliopegy” (from Greek anthropos, man or human, and derma, skin; plus biblion, book, and pegia, from pegnynai, to fasten).

Ethical quandaries complicate this practice. Is it acceptable to trivialize human remains by turning them into objects of daily use? What would you do if, like Camille Flammarion, you received the skin of a cherished being with the explicit injunction to use it in book binding? Assuming you abided by it, what book would you use?

The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, Scotland possesses a book bound in the skin of the assassin William Burke, an infamous “body snatcher” who, together with his accomplice William Hare, committed at least sixteen murders in 1828, in order to supply “fresh anatomical subjects” (at about £7, 10s each!) to a renowned anatomist, who dissected them in his demonstrations. Apparently, in times past, the law sanctioned, or at least tolerated, “anthropodermic bibliopegy” as a strange way to cover the memory of executed criminals with an extra layer of infamy.

References

1. Paul Valéry: “Sur Une Pensée.” Variété : Études Littéraires. In: Œuvres, Vol. I. Paris: Gallimard, Collection La Pléiade, 1957, 461.
2. Ibid., 467.
3. “Le corps n’est qu’un vêtement organique de l’Esprit ; il passe, il change, il se désagrège : l’Esprit demeure.” Sentence placed in epigraphy on the title page of C. Flammarion’s book “La Mort”. Paris: Librairie des Sciences Physiques, 1923.
4. Monsieur N. “Les reliures en peau humaine (3): Les épaules de la comtesse, ou la singulière aventure de Camille Flammarion.” La Porte Ouverte blog, March 7, 2018. https://laporteouverte.me/2018/03/07/les-reliures-en-peau-humaine-3-les-epaules-de-la-comtesse-ou-la-singuliere-aventure-de-camille-flammarion
5. “La peau de la Comtesse.” Newspaper Le Temps, vol. 33, no. 11559, January 16, 1893.
6. “La peau de la Comtesse” in Le Figaro, vol. 39, 3ème série, no. 16, January 16, 1893; “Cuir humain” in Le Gaulois, vol. 27, 3ème série, no. 3709, January 16, 1893; “Le Voeu d’une morte,” in Gil Blas, vol. 15, no. 4809, January 17, 1893.