Today’s Macabre Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
At the end of the 19th century, Paris’s morgue sat perched just behind Notre Dame cathedral, on the edge of the island in the Seine, l’Ile de la Cité. Two-thirds of the corpses dealt with by the morgue would have been fished out of the Seine – suicides, accidental drownings or murders. The morgue attendants would carefully study the dead person’s clothes, scars and wounds – often caused after they had hit the water, by a boat or by the hooks used to fish them out. Then the bodies would be displayed on 12 black marble slabs propped up in the morgue window for the public to view and decide whether they recognised any of them. This macabre showcase became one of the most popular pieces of entertainment in Paris. Locals and tourists peered in at the forsaken departed souls. People of all ages, including children, would visit the famous window of the dead – Émile Zola, in his 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin, described gangs of boys, aged from 12 to 15, “who ran the length of the window, only stopping in front of the female corpses.”
Earlier, in the 18th century, families would traditionally float a plank of wood on the river, bearing blessed bread and a candle for the dead. But nothing disturbed and captured the imagination like suicide – especially that of a beautiful young woman who might have taken her life because of a broken heart. When the British director Peter Greenaway made an eerie documentary, Les Morts de la Seine, retelling the tales of 23 drownings between 1795 and 1801, he learned that young women made up the biggest proportion of apparent suicides, appearing to favour drowning, while men opted for hanging. The true stories he recreated included bizarre findings, such as a naked woman in her 70s, dredged from the Seine clasping two leeks in her left hand.
Culled from: The Guardian