s condition. It was frightful. The trunk, which had been
covered by the solution, was greatly swollen; while on the contrary, the
head, which had been left outside the bath, had shrunk remarkably, and
the muscles of the face had contracted in the most hideous manner, the
wide-open eyes starting out of their sockets. After the body had
remained eight days in the corrosive sublimate, which it was necessary to
renew, since the emanations from the interior of the corpse had
decomposed the solution, it was put into a cask made for the purpose, and
filled with the same liquid; and it was in this cask that it was carried
from Schoenbrunn to Strasburg. In this last place it was taken out of
the strange coffin, dried in a net, and wrapped in the Egyptian style;
that is, surrounded with bandages, with the face uncovered. M. Larrey
and M. de Gassicourt confided this honorable task to M. Fortin, a young
chemist major, who in 1807 had by his indefatigable courage and
perseverance saved from certain death nine hundred sick, abandoned,
without physicians or surgeons, in a hospital near Dantzic, and nearly
all suffering from an infectious malady. In the month of March, 1810
(what follows is an extract from the letter of M. Fortin to his master
and friend M. Cadet de Gassicourt), the Duchess of Montebello, in passing
through Strasburg, wished to see again the husband she loved so tenderly.

"Thanks to you and M. Larrey (it is M. Fortin who speaks), the embalming
of the marshal has succeeded perfectly. When I drew the body from the
cask I found it in a state of perfect preservation. I arranged a net in
a lower hall of the mayor's residence, in which I dried it by means of a
stove, the heat being carefully regulated. I then had a very handsome
coffin made of hard wood well oiled; and the marshal wrapped in bandages,
his face uncovered, was placed in an open coffin near that of General
Saint-Hilaire in a subterranean vault, of which I have the key. A
sentinel watches there day and night. M. Wangen de Gueroldseck, mayor of
Strasburg, has given me every assistance in my work.

"This was the state of affairs when, an hour after her Majesty the
Empress's arrival, Madame, the Duchess of Montebello, who accompanied her
as lady of honor, sent M. Cretu, her cousin at whose house she was to
visit, to seek me. I came in answer to her orders; and the duchess
questioned and complimented me on the honorable mission with which I was
charged, and then ex