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by kjlouden
, West Virginia
May 2, 2004
The museum is housed in part of the former public hospital, where the writer’s father was director and surgeon and where the family occupied the lovely eighteenth-century house, the wing where successive surgeons lived. The family’s apartment is separated from the ward by only a glass door--and this is where the author spent his childhood! Today, medical curiosities, anatomy texts, and a nineteenth-century copy of Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson" are displayed, and we are reminded that the young Gustave grew up with an unusual dose of reality! But fantasy and superstition are also in evidence: a phrenology display with skull; a craniology study with the real skulls of famous criminals (including de Sade), proving that some folks are "born bad" (a nineteenth-century concept, now discredited); and the bucket of Franz Mesmer, who pretended to be able to heal with a "magnetic fluid" magically transferred from the bucket.
Cartoons and caricatures are displayed. One, published in 1869, is of Flaubert conducting an autopsy of his heroine Emma Bovary. A large series of these demonstrates what a great stir the novel caused. (Flaubert was imprisoned for something like "offending public decency.") These were both funny and enlightening, as they revealed the French finally making fun of themselves for their own prudery! There are also serious portraits and busts of family and friends and an ink drawing of the father of the modern short story, Guy de Maupassant, a friend of the writer.
There is much more, altogether eleven rooms, most of them medical in nature. One room is set up as an apothecary with old "remedies" displayed in Rouen faience, which is alluring, even in this setting. Other rooms deal with infant mortality, outdated birthing methods and midwives, and revolutions in medicine in the Nineteenth Century.
We exited to the garden and enjoyed the display of 100 medicinal plants, all labelled. We agreed that a guided tour with question-and-answer session would have been a better approach to education on this major literary figure. I have pieced together a perspective on the mind of Flaubert from my own observations in Musee Flaubert, but I would have liked a more intense presentation, more like the guided tour of Hemingway’s house in Key West.
We arrived at 1:15 and had to go find coffee for forty-five minutes, since the museum is closed from noon until 2:00 p.m. It is a little walk from the other sites in the center of the old town.
From journal Rouen, My Favorite City in France