Sometimes the corpses soften and decompose rapidly, leaving an unbearable odour.
On June 15, 1794, lightning killed a lady in a ballroom at Fribourg. The corpse rapidly gave forth a curious odour of putrefaction. The doctor could hardly examine it without fainting. The inhabitants of the house were obliged to go away thirty-six hours after the death, the odour was so penetrating. It was with difficulty that they were able to put the fetid corpse into a coffin. It fell to pieces.
The flabbiness often observed in the bodies of people who are struck is due, no doubt, to the fact that in the case of enormous discharge, the stiffness of a dead body develops so quickly, and is of such a short duration, that it may escape observation.
Numbers of experiments made on animals justify this hypothesis.
Nevertheless, in the majority of cases, bodies which have been struck decompose rapidly, which explains quite naturally the softness of bodies killed by lightning.
The colouration of these presents numerous varieties; sometimes the face is of a corpse-like paleness, at others it preserves its natural colour.
In many cases, the face is livid, red, violet, violet-bronze, black, yellow, and even covered over with brown or blue spots.
The colouration of the face may be extended over all or nearly all the body.
The eight reapers who were killed under an oak, quoted by Cardan in our first example, were quite black.
That the subtle fluid accumulated in great masses in the clouds should kill a man, deprive him of movement, annihilate his faculties, or slightly wound him—this ought not to astonish us when we contemplate the marvellous results and the prodigies of strength accomplished by the much more feeble electricity of our laboratories.