[BGB] collect me nots

[Jim Barbaro]

From the New York Times

May 17, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor

Collect-Me-Nots

By JUDITH PASCOE

Correction Appended

Iowa City

THE owner of Napoleon’s penis died last Thursday 
in Englewood, N.J. John K. Lattimer, who’d been a 
Columbia University professor and a collector of 
military (and some macabre) relics, also 
possessed Lincoln’s blood-stained collar and 
Hermann Göring’s cyanide ampoule. But the penis, 
which supposedly had been severed by a priest who 
administered last rites to Napoleon and 
overstepped clerical boundaries, stood out 
(sorry) from the professor’s collection of 
medieval armor, Civil War rifles and Hitler 
drawings.

The chances that Napoleon’s penis would be 
excised so that it could become a souvenir were 
improved by his having lived and died at a moment 
when the physical remains of celebrities held a 
strong attraction. Shakespeare didn’t become 
Shakespeare until the dawn of the romantic 
period, when his biography was written, his plays 
annotated and his belongings sought out and 
preserved. Trees that stood outside the bard’s 
former homes were felled to provide Shakespearean 
lumber for tea chests and tobacco stoppers.

After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, his 
possessions toured England. His carriage, filled 
with enticing contents like a gold tongue 
scraper, a flesh brush, “Cashimeer small-clothes” 
and a chocolate pot, drew crowds and inspired the 
poet Byron to covet a replica. When Napoleon 
died, the trees that lined his grave site at St. 
Helena were slivered into souvenirs.

The belief that objects are imbued with a lasting 
essence of their owners, taken to its logical 
extreme, led to the mind-set that caused Mary 
Shelley to keep her husband’s heart, dried to a 
powder, in her desk drawer. Of course, relic 
collecting long predates the romantic period; 
medieval pilgrims sought out fragments of the 
True Cross. In the aftermath of the Reformation, 
religious relics that had been ejected from 
monasteries joined secular collections that 
freely intermingled belemnites with saints’ 
finger bones. When Keats died, his hair took on 
the numinous appeal of a religious artifact.

Napoleon’s penis was not the only Napoleonic body 
part that became grist for the relic mill. Two 
pieces of Napoleon’s intestine, acquired by the 
Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of 
England in 1841, provoked a long-simmering debate 
beginning in 1883. That year, Sir James Paget 
called the specimens’ authenticity into question, 
contrasting their seemingly cancerous protrusions 
to the sound tissue Napoleon’s doctor had earlier 
described. In 1960, the dispute continued in The 
Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of 
England, long after the intestine pieces had been 
destroyed during a World War II air raid.

Dr. Lattimer, a urologist, could claim a 
professional interest in Napoleon’s genitalia. 
Not so its previous owner, the Philadelphia 
bookseller and collector A. S. W. Rosenbach, who 
took a “Rabelaisian delight” in the relic, 
according to his biographer, Edwin Wolf. When 
Rosenbach put the penis on display at the Museum 
of French Art in New York, visitors peered into a 
vitrine to see something that looked like a 
maltreated shoelace, or a shriveled eel.

Whether the object prized by Dr. Lattimer was 
actually once attached to Napoleon may never be 
resolved. Some historians doubt that the priest 
could have managed the organ heist when so many 
people were passing in and out of the emperor’s 
death chamber. Others suggest he may have removed 
only a partial sample. If enough people believe 
in a possibly spurious penis, does it become real?

The pathos of Napoleon’s penis — bandied about 
over the decades, barely recognizable as a human 
body part — conjures up the seamier side of the 
collecting impulse. If, as Freud suggested, the 
collector is a sexually maladjusted misanthrope, 
then the emperor’s phallus is a collector’s 
object nonpareil, the epitome of male potency and 
dominance. The ranks of Napoleon enthusiasts, it 
should be noted, include many alpha males: Bill 
Gates, Newt Gingrich, Stanley Kubrick, Winston 
Churchill, Augusto Pinochet. Nevertheless, the 
Freudian paradigm has never accounted for women 
collectors, nor does it explain the appeal of 
collections for artists like Lisa Milroy, whose 
paintings of cabinet handles or shoes, arrayed in 
series, animate these common objects.

It’s time to let Napoleon’s penis rest in peace. 
Museums are quietly de-accessioning the human 
remains of indigenous peoples so that body parts 
can be given proper burial rites. Napoleon’s 
penis, too, should be allowed to go home and 
rejoin the rest of his captivating body.

Judith Pascoe, a professor of English at the 
University of Iowa, is the author of “The 
Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History 
of Romantic Collectors.”

Correction: May 18, 2007

An Op-Ed article yesterday, about collecting 
relics, misstated Napoleon’s fate at Waterloo. He 
formally surrendered a month after the battle; he 
was not captured there.
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