A scarce contemporary French engraving, entitled “Henri IV. Exhumé,” represents the king as standing upright in an open coffin, against one of the great stone pillars in the vaults of St. Denis. The body is wrapped in strips of cloth, like an Egyptian mummy, but the head and shoulders are entirely exposed. A long inscription, at the bottom of the print, explains that “on this occasion a plaster cast was taken of the face—on a moulé sur la nature même le plâtre—from which to-day artists make their portraits of the great sovereign. The drawing upon which this engraving is based was executed by an eyewitness, and it shows the exact and marvellous state of preservation in which the body of the founder of the Bourbons was discovered. There was an effort made by the National Assembly to preserve this precious relic; but, alas, it was too late.” The original mask of Henry is now in the Library of Ste. Geneviève, in Paris.
Charles XII. of Sweden was a soldier and little else. He knew no such word as fear. He was haughty and inflexible. He never thought of consulting the happiness of his people. He ascended the throne of a nation rich, powerful, and happy; he died king of a country which was ruined, wretched, and defenceless. Whether or not he was killed by one of his own soldiers, history has never been able to determine. He was shot in the head at the siege of Frederickshald, in Norway, in 1718; and when his body was exhumed and examined, a hundred and fifty years later, “the centre of his forehead was found to be disfigured by a depression corresponding with a fracture of that part of the skull.” The fatal missile had passed entirely through the King’s head from left to right in a downward direction; and in the cast in my collection the indentures, particularly the larger one on the right temple, are clearly perceptible. An engraving of this death-mask, dated 1823, contains the legend that it was “made four hours after he was shot, and was taken from the original cast preserved in the University Library at Cambridge, by Angelica Clarke.”
CHARLES XII. OF SWEDEN
The copy of this cast in the British Museum is from the Christy collection. Henry Christy is known to have been in Stockholm at the time of the sale of the effects of Baestrom, the Swedish sculptor, and he is believed to have purchased it then and there. It contains more of the top and back of the head than the cast here reproduced, and it bears, very unmistakably, evidences of the bullet wounds in the temples. This cast, the wax mask of Cromwell mentioned above, and a cast of the face of James II. of England, are the only things of the kind the British Museum possesses.
Lavater wrote with unbounded enthusiasm of the impression made upon him by the face of Frederick the Great, whom he once saw in life. “Of all the physiognomies I have ever examined,” he said, “there is not a single one which bears so strongly as this does the impress of its high destiny. The forehead, which forms almost a straight and continued line with the nose, announces impatience against the human race, and communicates the expression of it to the cheeks and lips,” etc. And Mr. Fowler, who knew Frederick only by his portraits, ascribed to him fine temperament, intense mentality, great clearness and sharpness of thought, with a tendency to scholarship, and especially to languages, and with immense acquisitiveness.
Carlyle wrote: “All next day the body [of Frederick] lay in state in the Palace; thousands crowding, from Berlin and the other environs, to see the face for the last time. Wasted, worn, but beautiful in death, with the thin gray hair parted into locks and slightly powdered. And at eight in the evening, Friday, 18th [of August, 1786], he was borne to the Garrison-kirche of Potsdam, and laid beside his father in the vault behind the pulpit there.”
The original of this cast of Frederick the Great is in the Hohenzollern Museum in Berlin, and of course is authentic. My own copy I brought from Berlin some ten years ago, with the consent of the authorities of the Museum.