The Slender Poe Anthology (22 page)

First published in
The Dollar Newspaper
of Philadelphia (1844), it appeared a year later in New York's
Broadway Journal
during Poe's editorship, which began in March 1845 and continued until the Journal fell victim to financial problems nine months later in the first week of January 1846. To help fill up the weekly issues without paying any fees, Poe reprinted some 40 of his tales and a number of his poems.

Poe is often at his best as a writer of enclosures; in this tale he makes real the waking up inside a coffin; it doesn't get much more enclosed than that. At the time, the subject of premature burial was popular and sold copy.

I can't remember who said, “Memory is the only way to keep the dead alive,” but if Poe had been able to take a further step—to bring the dead back alive—perhaps that might've been his preference. In a sense, he does just that with the anecdote about Bossuet, the poor Parisian journalist who unburies the undead love of his life and restores her to health.

THE PREMATURE BURIAL

There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but
which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.
These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish to offend or
to disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the severity and
majesty of Truth sanctify and sustain them. We thrill, for example, with
the most intense of “pleasurable pain” over the accounts of the Passage
of the Beresina, of the Earthquake at Lisbon, of the Plague at London,
of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or of the stifling of the hundred
and twenty-three prisoners in the Black Hole at Calcutta. But in these
accounts it is the fact
—
it is the reality
—
it is the history which
excites. As inventions, we should regard them with simple abhorrence.

I have mentioned some few of the more prominent and august calamities
on record; but in these it is the extent, not less than the character
of the calamity, which so vividly impresses the fancy. I need not remind
the reader that, from the long and weird catalogue of human miseries,
I might have selected many individual instances more replete with
essential suffering than any of these vast generalities of disaster.
The true wretchedness, indeed
—
the ultimate woe
—
is particular, not
diffuse. That the ghastly extremes of agony are endured by man the unit,
and never by man the mass
—
for this let us thank a merciful God!

To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these
extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has
frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those
who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best
shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other
begins? We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations
of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these
cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called. They are only
temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism. A certain period
elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the
magic pinions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not for ever
loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken. But where, meantime, was
the soul?

Apart, however, from the inevitable conclusion,
a priori
that such
causes must produce such effects
—
that the well-known occurrence of
such cases of suspended animation must naturally give rise, now and
then, to premature interments
—
apart from this consideration, we have
the direct testimony of medical and ordinary experience to prove that a
vast number of such interments have actually taken place. I might refer
at once, if necessary to a hundred well authenticated instances. One of
very remarkable character, and of which the circumstances may be fresh
in the memory of some of my readers, occurred, not very long ago, in the
neighboring city of Baltimore, where it occasioned a painful, intense,
and widely-extended excitement. The wife of one of the most respectable
citizens
—
a lawyer of eminence and a member of Congress
—
was seized with
a sudden and unaccountable illness, which completely baffled the skill
of her physicians. After much suffering she died, or was supposed to
die. No one suspected, indeed, or had reason to suspect, that she was
not actually dead. She presented all the ordinary appearances of death.
The face assumed the usual pinched and sunken outline. The lips were of
the usual marble pallor. The eyes were lustreless. There was no warmth.
Pulsation had ceased. For three days the body was preserved unburied,
during which it had acquired a stony rigidity. The funeral, in short,
was hastened, on account of the rapid advance of what was supposed to be
decomposition.

The lady was deposited in her family vault, which, for three subsequent
years, was undisturbed. At the expiration of this term it was opened
for the reception of a sarcophagus;
—
but, alas! how fearful a shock
awaited the husband, who, personally, threw open the door! As its
portals swung outwardly back, some white-apparelled object fell rattling
within his arms. It was the skeleton of his wife in her yet unmoulded
shroud.

A careful investigation rendered it evident that she had revived within
two days after her entombment; that her struggles within the coffin had
caused it to fall from a ledge, or shelf to the floor, where it was so
broken as to permit her escape. A lamp which had been accidentally
left, full of oil, within the tomb, was found empty; it might have been
exhausted, however, by evaporation. On the uttermost of the steps which
led down into the dread chamber was a large fragment of the coffin,
with which, it seemed, that she had endeavored to arrest attention by
striking the iron door. While thus occupied, she probably swooned, or
possibly died, through sheer terror; and, in failing, her shroud became
entangled in some iron
—
work which projected interiorly. Thus she
remained, and thus she rotted, erect.

In the year 1810, a case of living inhumation happened in France,
attended with circumstances which go far to warrant the assertion that
truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction. The heroine of the story was a
Mademoiselle Victorine Lafourcade, a young girl of illustrious family,
of wealth, and of great personal beauty. Among her numerous suitors was
Julien Bossuet, a poor
litterateur
, or journalist of Paris. His talents
and general amiability had recommended him to the notice of the heiress,
by whom he seems to have been truly beloved; but her pride of birth
decided her, finally, to reject him, and to wed a Monsieur Renelle, a
banker and a diplomatist of some eminence. After marriage, however, this
gentleman neglected, and, perhaps, even more positively ill-treated her.
Having passed with him some wretched years, she died,
—
at least her
condition so closely resembled death as to deceive every one who saw
her. She was buried
—
not in a vault, but in an ordinary grave in the
village of her nativity. Filled with despair, and still inflamed by the
memory of a profound attachment, the lover journeys from the capital to
the remote province in which the village lies, with the romantic purpose
of disinterring the corpse, and possessing himself of its luxuriant
tresses. He reaches the grave. At midnight he unearths the coffin, opens
it, and is in the act of detaching the hair, when he is arrested by the
unclosing of the beloved eyes. In fact, the lady had been buried
alive. Vitality had not altogether departed, and she was aroused by
the caresses of her lover from the lethargy which had been mistaken
for death. He bore her frantically to his lodgings in the village. He
employed certain powerful restoratives suggested by no little medical
learning. In fine, she revived. She recognized her preserver. She
remained with him until, by slow degrees, she fully recovered her
original health. Her woman's heart was not adamant, and this last
lesson of love sufficed to soften it. She bestowed it upon Bossuet.
She returned no more to her husband, but, concealing from him her
resurrection, fled with her lover to America. Twenty years afterward,
the two returned to France, in the persuasion that time had so greatly
altered the lady's appearance that her friends would be unable to
recognize her. They were mistaken, however, for, at the first meeting,
Monsieur Renelle did actually recognize and make claim to his wife.
This claim she resisted, and a judicial tribunal sustained her in her
resistance, deciding that the peculiar circumstances, with the long
lapse of years, had extinguished, not only equitably, but legally, the
authority of the husband.

The
Chirurgical Journal
of Leipsic
—
a periodical of high authority
and merit, which some American bookseller would do well to translate
and republish, records in a late number a very distressing event of the
character in question.

An officer of artillery, a man of gigantic stature and of robust
health, being thrown from an unmanageable horse, received a very severe
contusion upon the head, which rendered him insensible at once; the
skull was slightly fractured, but no immediate danger was apprehended.
Trepanning was accomplished successfully. He was bled, and many other of
the ordinary means of relief were adopted. Gradually, however, he fell
into a more and more hopeless state of stupor, and, finally, it was
thought that he died.

The weather was warm, and he was buried with indecent haste in one of
the public cemeteries. His funeral took place on Thursday. On the Sunday
following, the grounds of the cemetery were, as usual, much thronged
with visiters, and about noon an intense excitement was created by
the declaration of a peasant that, while sitting upon the grave of
the officer, he had distinctly felt a commotion of the earth, as if
occasioned by some one struggling beneath. At first little attention was
paid to the man's asseveration; but his evident terror, and the dogged
obstinacy with which he persisted in his story, had at length their
natural effect upon the crowd. Spades were hurriedly procured, and the
grave, which was shamefully shallow, was in a few minutes so far thrown
open that the head of its occupant appeared. He was then seemingly dead;
but he sat nearly erect within his coffin, the lid of which, in his
furious struggles, he had partially uplifted.

He was forthwith conveyed to the nearest hospital, and there pronounced
to be still living, although in an asphytic condition. After some hours
he revived, recognized individuals of his acquaintance, and, in broken
sentences spoke of his agonies in the grave.

From what he related, it was clear that he must have been conscious
of life for more than an hour, while inhumed, before lapsing into
insensibility. The grave was carelessly and loosely filled with an
exceedingly porous soil; and thus some air was necessarily admitted.
He heard the footsteps of the crowd overhead, and endeavored to make
himself heard in turn. It was the tumult within the grounds of the
cemetery, he said, which appeared to awaken him from a deep sleep, but
no sooner was he awake than he became fully aware of the awful horrors
of his position.

This patient, it is recorded, was doing well and seemed to be in a fair
way of ultimate recovery, but fell a victim to the quackeries of medical
experiment. The galvanic battery was applied, and he suddenly expired in
one of those ecstatic paroxysms which, occasionally, it superinduces.

The mention of the galvanic battery, nevertheless, recalls to my memory
a well known and very extraordinary case in point, where its action
proved the means of restoring to animation a young attorney of London,
who had been interred for two days. This occurred in 1831, and created,
at the time, a very profound sensation wherever it was made the subject
of converse.

The patient, Mr. Edward Stapleton, had died, apparently of typhus fever,
accompanied with some anomalous symptoms which had excited the curiosity
of his medical attendants. Upon his seeming decease, his friends were
requested to sanction a
post-mortem
examination, but declined to permit
it. As often happens, when such refusals are made, the practitioners
resolved to disinter the body and dissect it at leisure, in private.
Arrangements were easily effected with some of the numerous corps of
body-snatchers, with which London abounds; and, upon the third night
after the funeral, the supposed corpse was unearthed from a grave eight
feet deep, and deposited in the opening chamber of one of the private
hospitals.

An incision of some extent had been actually made in the abdomen,
when the fresh and undecayed appearance of the subject suggested an
application of the battery. One experiment succeeded another, and the
customary effects supervened, with nothing to characterize them in any
respect, except, upon one or two occasions, a more than ordinary degree
of life-likeness in the convulsive action.

It grew late. The day was about to dawn; and it was thought expedient,
at length, to proceed at once to the dissection. A student, however, was
especially desirous of testing a theory of his own, and insisted upon
applying the battery to one of the pectoral muscles. A rough gash was
made, and a wire hastily brought in contact, when the patient, with a
hurried but quite unconvulsive movement, arose from the table, stepped
into the middle of the floor, gazed about him uneasily for a few
seconds, and then
—
spoke. What he said was unintelligible, but words
were uttered; the syllabification was distinct. Having spoken, he fell
heavily to the floor.

For some moments all were paralyzed with awe
—
but the urgency of the
case soon restored them their presence of mind. It was seen that Mr.
Stapleton was alive, although in a swoon. Upon exhibition of ether he
revived and was rapidly restored to health, and to the society of his
friends
—
from whom, however, all knowledge of his resuscitation was
withheld, until a relapse was no longer to be apprehended. Their
wonder
—
their rapturous astonishment
—
may be conceived.

The most thrilling peculiarity of this incident, nevertheless, is
involved in what Mr. S. himself asserts. He declares that at no period
was he altogether insensible
—
that, dully and confusedly, he was aware
of everything which happened to him, from the moment in which he was
pronounced
dead
by his physicians, to that in which he fell swooning to
the floor of the hospital. “I am alive,” were the uncomprehended words
which, upon recognizing the locality of the dissecting-room, he had
endeavored, in his extremity, to utter.