When Roxanne died, her estate passed to her son, Charles-Marie Gianettini, who later testified that the Abbé Vignali’s Napoleonic possessions were painstakingly and honorably safeguarded at the family home, and in 1916 he gave a complete list of the relics in a notarized affidavit. The Abbé Vignali’s collection was later sold to Maggs Brothers, a book dealer in London. The penis, which the French gracefully referred to as “a mummified tendon,” went along with it.
In 1924 the A. S. W. Rosenbach Company, a reputable book dealer in Philadelphia, purchased the Vignali collection from Maggs Brothers for the sum of four hundred pounds. (Vignali’s nephew, Charles-Marie Gianettini, was alive and ninety-six years old at the time.) The penis wasn’t the type of item normally associated with the venerable firm, but owing to both its historical interest and its whimsicality, such a relic was probably hard to resist.
In their biography of Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach, Edwin Wolf II and John F. Fleming wrote about Rosenbach’s ownership of the Vignalis’ Napoleonic relics: “But what gave spice to the collection . . . was an unpleasant looking piece of desiccated tissue, politely described as a ‘mummified tendon taken from Napoleon’s body during the postmortem.’ The authenticity of the remarkable object had been confirmed by the publication in the Revue des Deux Mondes of a memoir by Saint-Denis in which he expressly stated that he and Vignali took away small pieces of Napoleon’s corpse during the autopsy.” And of Dr. Rosenbach’s willingness to share with others this piece of Napoleon, his biographers added, “Few so intimate portions of a man’s anatomy have ever been displayed to so many.”
In 1927 Napoleon’s penis was exhibited at the Museum of French Arts in New York City. One newspaper described it as a “shriveled eel.”
In November 1944 the Abbé Vignali collection was sold by Rosenbach to Donald Hyde of Somerville, New Jersey. The collection was sold by Hyde’s widow, Mary, in 1969 through Rosenbach’s successor and biographer, John F. Fleming, to Bruce Gimelson, a private dealer in Philadelphia. Gimelson put the Abbé Vignali collection (including the penis) up for auction by Christie, Manson & Woods in London on October 29, 1969. For the auction Christie printed a “Catalogue of Printed Books, Manuscripts and the Celebrated Vignali Collection of Napoleon Relics removed from Saint Helena.” After a discussion of property left by Napoleon in his will, the catalog states, “There remained a number of objects not dealt with under the will which were divided between Vignali and his companions. It is Vignali’s share of these objects which forms the celebrated Vignali Collection.” There followed descriptions of many of the objects in the Vignali collection. Here is how the catalog described the penis: “a small dried-up object, genteelly described as a mummified tendon, taken from his body during the post-mortem. (The authenticity of the macabre relic has been confirmed by the publication in the Revue des [Deux] Moudes . . .)”
The Christie, Manson & Woods auction never took place. It was halted when Gimelson objected to the collection being broken up; the Abbé Vignali collection, having been intact for so many years, had a charming history to it, Gimelson maintained, and he wanted to preserve it. Gimelson tried to market the collection himself, but his price could not be met. (Gimelson had hoped the French government would take an interest, but it didn’t turn out that way.) Coming to the realization that it made financial sense to break up the collection, Gimelson auctioned it off in 1977 at the Hotel Drouot in Paris. The majority of it went to the Musée des Invalides, and the sale brought approximately one hundred thousand dollars.
Napoleon’s penis was purchased by Dr. John K. Lattimer, a leading American urologist and medical school professor (he served as president of both the American Urological Association and Societé International d’Urologie) whose interest in unusual artifacts had led him to acquire such relics as Hermann Goering’s suicide capsule container, Adolf Hitler’s hair, and the nooses used to hang two of the conspirators for the murder of President Lincoln, Mary Surratt and Lewis Powell. One of Lattimer’s reasons for purchasing the penis was to cut off small pieces of it to analyze and thus settle the debate about whether Napoleon was poisoned by arsenic or mercury. He has yet to do this but has plans to conduct these toxological tests, as well as make a DNA profile so there will be a reference point against which to compare other Napoleon specimens.
Another reason why John Lattimer purchased Napoleon’s penis was to keep it out of unscrupulous hands. He felt it should be afforded both privacy and dignity.
It is doubtful the penis was ever preserved in chemicals; it was most probably air-dried. Today Napoleon’s penis is stored in its original glass casket in a morocco leather box bearing his crest.
During his exile on Saint Helena, when the world seemed to have forgotten him and those who had risen to elevated stations because of their previous association with him didn’t even so much as inquire about his welfare, Napoleon reflected upon his many accomplishments. He believed he had rid France of anarchy and stabilized its government, enacted his nation’s most effective code of laws, and always acted with the noblest ambition. His achievements were undeniable, and he hoped they would be recognized, aware that history might cast him off as a tyrannical dictator. “For all the attempts at curtailment, suppression and mutilation,” he wrote, “it will be hard to make me disappear completely.”
With his penis putatively surviving the ages, one imagines he could hardly have appreciated how prophetic that statement was.
LOCATION: College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, New York, New York.*
Footnote
*This has not been designated the permanent repository of Napoleon’s penis by its owner, Dr. John K. Lattimer, who may place it at any location he wishes at any time.
LONDON BRIDGE
DATE: 1831.
WHAT IT IS: The bridge that spanned the Thames River in London, England, for nearly 140 years.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The bridge has five elliptical arches and is made of granite. It is 952 feet long and 35 feet wide.
When the fourth London Bridge opened in 1831, it continued the heritage of a structure that had provided a vital transportation route throughout much of England’s past. But it seemed unlikely that the new bridge would ever be able to match the notoriety of its predecessors. Armies had defended kingdoms from hostile invaders by hurling stones and shooting arrows from atop their towers; knights had jousted on their spans. Shakespeare even wrote verses about the famous London Bridge that presided during his lifetime, the same bridge upon which the severed heads of traitors to the English crown had been prominently displayed, impaled on pikes planted in its stones.
Yet this latest monument would eventually attain a genuine distinction of its own: it is the only major bridge ever to be dismantled, transported across the ocean to another continent, and reconstructed block by block exactly as it was in its original setting.
London Bridge has a long history, much of it marked by strife and misfortune. No one knows for sure when the first bridge was built over the Thames. Legend has it that the Romans erected one about A.D. 43, but among the many treasure heaps of Roman artifacts found near the Thames, no evidence of any kind of bridge from that period has ever been found.
A timber bridge was in existence about A.D. 944, and although this is not thought to be the first such structure over the Thames—earlier bridges having been destroyed by flood, fire, and other natural disasters—it is generally regarded as the first London Bridge.
In A.D. 994, the people of London successfully defended the city from an attack launched by King Sweyn of Denmark. One reason the Londoners triumphed, according to historian John Stow’s 1598 Survey of London, was that the enemy soldiers “were drowned in the river Thames because in their hasty rage they took no heed of the bridge.” Ten years earlier, angry citizens had thrown a woman from the bridge to drown in the Thames for allegedly performing black magic by inserting pins into a nobleman’s image.
Around the end of the first millennium, London Bridge was sacrifi
ced to help England’s King Ethelred the Unready, who had been exiled to France, regain his realm. England at the time was held primarily by Danes. When Ethelred secretly entered his homeland to form a militia, he encountered another old enemy, King Olaf of Norway. But Olaf was now eager to help fellow Christians, having recently converted to the faith. The two kings put together a fleet; its ships had scaffoldings specially designed to enable the warriors to reach up with their swords and strike the Danes fighting on top of London Bridge. The canny Danes outwitted this ingenious tactic by deluging the attackers with a stream of stones hurled from the bridge, and defeat for Ethelred’s troops seemed inevitable. But in a brilliant strategic stroke, the remaining men, waiting until the tide was strong, approached the timber structure, tied ropes from their vessels around the bridge’s beams, and with all their power rowed on, tearing down the bridge and emptying the Danes into the river. The timber bridge was eventually reconstructed, but it was ravaged by fire in 1136, and yet another was thrown up to replace it.
Soon thereafter, Londoners recognized the need for a bridge of greater durability and wider carriageway. In 1176, while the latest timber bridge was still intact, work began close by on a stone bridge. A priest named Peter Colechurch designed it, but he did not live to see his vision become reality; it took more than three decades to finish. It was a magnificent structure, more than twenty feet wide and nine hundred feet long, sixty feet above the river at the center, supported by twenty arches. This third London Bridge was so sturdy that buildings and homes were erected on it. It was to endure for almost six and a half centuries.
London’s medieval bridge was the scene of many royal occasions, but it was also beset by disaster. Fires at both ends in July 1212 caused thousands of people on the bridge to die. No sooner was it repaired than ice blocks floating down the Thames destroyed five arches, putting it temporarily out of commission.
Beginning around 1305, a brutal practice was instituted by Edward I, the king of England, and continued by his successors, for which London Bridge was the main showcase: the display of the severed heads of those who refused to recognize the king as head of both the country and the church. These so-called traitors were executed and decapitated; often more than a dozen decaying heads glared down balefully from the tops of pikes mounted on the roof of the arched Stone Gate House at the Southwark end of the bridge.
The English kings of this period had sunken into a state of savagery. At one point Sir William Wallace, a Scottish nationalist, was in the habit of leading vicious raids against the English. An assault against a count at Scone drew the wrath of King Edward, who gathered a massive army and crushed the Scots. Sir Wallace fled but was later betrayed by a countryman, Sir John Menteith, who captured him and delivered him in shackles to London. He was tried, pronounced guilty, and hanged, and his head set upon a pole on London Bridge. But Edward also ordered his body cut into quarters and the sections displayed throughout the country as an example of what punishment to expect for treacherous behavior. The crowns of numerous other “traitors” through the years were exhibited on the stone bridge, including that of the great statesman Sir Thomas More.
In 1437 a stone gate with a tower on it at the Southwark end fell, bringing down with it several arches. London’s Great Fire of 1666, which ravaged most of the city, spread to the bridge and destroyed many of the houses on it.
For nearly 650 years, the stone bridge over the Thames linked London to the district of Southwark. Near the end of its existence, London Bridge was in a continual state of disrepair, sometimes said to be falling down (although the famous children’s ditty actually referred to one of the previous London Bridges). Two temporary timber bridges were built, the second after the first was destroyed by fire, while repairs were being made to the stone bridge. But in the early nineteenth century, the stone structure, which also needed arches of a wider span, was finally deemed too dangerous.
A number of engineers presented plans for a new bridge; the plan proposed by architect John Rennie was selected. On June 15, 1825, some one hundred feet west of the decrepit stone monument, work began on Rennie’s bridge. It was built of granite quarried in Devon, Scotland, and Cornwall, in addition to stones cannibalized from its predecessor. Six years later, in August 1831, the new bridge was completed and dedicated in a festive ceremony. Boats lined the Thames as King William IV and Queen Adelaide arrived in a royal barge to commence the proceedings. Later, thousands gathered on top of the bridge for a sumptuous feast.
When the fourth London Bridge opened on August 1, 1831, the king of England led a cavalcade of celebrants across the bridge as boats filled the Thames River below. Here, in a later photo, strollers and people in horse-drawn carriages cross the bridge.
As London’s growth continued to explode into the twentieth century, the new bridge also proved insufficient. In the late 1960s, city planners realized a new one had to be built. Not only was the structure sorely inadequate for the vastly increased amount of traffic, but the bridge was gradually sinking into the Thames at a rate of about an inch every seven years.
By a quirk of fate, the needs of two different parties came into play: one needing to get rid of the old to make way for the new, and the other to make way for the new by way of the old. To help finance the costs of building the new bridge without raising taxes, the city of London decided to sell the old bridge. For an American real estate developer who wanted to build a new town on a tract of land in the western United States, this was pure serendipity.
The entrepreneur was Robert P. McCulloch, Sr., an oil magnate who in 1963 had successfully bid on the largest parcel of federal property ever sold to a private individual. For seventy-five dollars an acre, he purchased 16,630 acres of barren Arizona desert. Then he heard that the London Bridge was for sale, and he had a brainstorm: What better way to attract people to a desert town and develop a thriving tourist industry than by importing none other than the celebrated London Bridge?
McCulloch’s engineer, C. V. Woods, thought McCulloch had rocks in his head. He couldn’t be serious about bringing the London Bridge to the American West! But McCulloch was in dead earnest, tendering an offer to the city of London of $2.46 million. McCulloch wasn’t the highest bidder, but the city fathers, perhaps in a fit of sentimentality or preservationist fervor, awarded the bridge to him. Whereas the other bidders simply wanted to dismantle the bridge for its granite, McCulloch wanted to reconstruct the bridge as it originally was, over water.
John Rennie’s London Bridge was carefully dismantled, the stones numbered to enable the bridge to be precisely reconstructed. The pieces were shipped by way of the Panama Canal to Long Beach, California. Trucks brought the stones to McCulloch’s tract of desert in Arizona, and in September 1968, after all five arches had arrived, reconstruction began. It was like building the world’s largest jigsaw puzzle. Bulldozers piled sand from the surrounding desert under the arches to support them while the concrete was drying. Under the bridge a channel was dredged, into which water was diverted from a nearby lake.
The London Bridge today in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
It took just over two years to build the bridge, which opened on October 10, 1971. With shipping, labor, and other fees, the total cost to reconstruct the London Bridge eventually came to $7.5 million. But McCulloch’s gamble paid off; land buyers flocked to obtain lots.
In one respect, McCulloch saved a bundle. Because the ten thousand tons of granite blocks were more than one hundred years old, the savvy developer imported them as antiques, paying not one cent in tariffs.
LOCATION: Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
JEREMY BENTHAM: A
PHILOSOPHER FOR THE AGES
DATE: 1832.
WHAT IT IS: An effigy of the famous Englishman.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The figure is stuffed and dressed, and sitting composedly on a chair in its original booth, which is made of wood with a glass front. (This booth is enclosed in another case.)
Jeremy Bentham, renowned nineteent
h-century English philosopher, had this rather, well, unusual philosophy. It called for people to put their bodies to good use after they died and indeed, Bentham made clear, what good uses they could put them to! Corpses—or “Auto-Icons,” as he called them—could replace stone or marble monuments in churches, or, with copal varnish used to weatherproof them, they could alternate with trees leading to country estates. Of course it would be the decision of their owners whether to use full-body Auto-Icons or Auto-Icons of just the head, but, hey, those who were to become Auto-Icons had no need to fret. At least they’d be getting out there!
Now it would probably be safe to say that for most people, the thought of having their body on public display after they died—for the viewing pleasure of others—would be depressing, if not outright repugnant. Did Bentham mean to follow his own philosophy?
In his will Jeremy Bentham directed that when it appeared his life had come to an end, his physician—who should first ascertain “by appropriate experiment” that no life remained in his body—should dress the deceased’s skeleton in one of his black suits, place it on a chair in the manner he was accustomed to sit in life, place his staff in his hand, and have the whole configuration installed in a glass case with an engraved plate for both scientific illustration and public view. A celebrated figure in his time, Bentham probably realized his Auto-Icon would draw attention.
Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain Page 21