Portraits in Plaster, from the Collection of Laurence HuttonHutton, Laurence
History
Portraits in Plaster, from the Collection of Laurence Hutton
Hutton, Laurence
Masks (Sculpture); Portraits
It was discovered lately that Mirabeau had again changed his quarters,
and that his present address cannot be ascertained. He was carried in
great pomp, and with many porters and in many ’busses, to the Pantheon,
in 1791; but with Marat he was “de-Pantheonized by order of the National
Convention” a year or two later. Marat’s body was thrown into a common
sewer in the Rue Montmartre; that of Mirabeau was placed, with no pomp
whatever, in the cemetery of Saint-Marcel, the criminals’
burying-ground, where, now that it is wanted once more—this time for
honorable disposal—it cannot be found. Mirabeau’s is the face of a man
perfectly satisfied with his own achievements and with his own personal
appearance. He believed, and he was courageous enough to say, that pure
physical beauty in man could only exist in a face which was pitted with
small-pox, his own being so marked! And he looks here as if his last
thought in life had been one of profound admiration for himself. An
eye-witness of his funeral said to one of his biographers that, “except
a single trace of physical suffering, one perceived with emotion the
most noble calm and the sweetest smile upon that face, which seemed
enwrapped in a living sleep, and occupied with an agreeable dream.”
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[Illustration: G. R. MIRABEAU]
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Marat and Robespierre are among the most enigmatical productions of a
very enigmatical movement. During their lives they were not very
beautiful in conduct nor very amiable in character; but the casts taken
of their faces after their uncomfortable deaths are quiet and peaceful,
and the effect they produce is one of loving rather than loathing. In
the mask of each the cerebral development is small, especially in the
region of the frontal bone; and phrenological experts who have examined
them say that their development, or lack of development, taken with
their facial traits, indicates ill-balanced minds.
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