Catriona Byers, a first-time author from Fife in Scotland, has won the new £2000 Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Award for younger writers with an essay on Clovis Pierre, a poet and city morgue official in nineteenth-century Paris. Simon Schama presented Catriona Byers with the £2000 Award at an Elizabeth Longford Night of History on January 26 at the National Portrait Gallery. Byers is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at KCL, and her debut nonfiction book, Morgue, will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2027.
Clovis, after the first king. Born in Popincourt, son of a butcher. It is April 1837 and the brutal days and years of the revolution are a murmured memory from another life; there is a monarch on the throne once again and Paris is still old Paris, in these days, Baron Haussmann’s structural scythe slicing cleanly through dense medieval streets and scattering the poorest inhabitants out to the fringes still decades away, another revolution away. They don’t know this yet, of course, on the narrow streets of Popincourt where Clovis is born.
The early years are hazy, scratched glimpses and typeset whispers buried in municipal records and newspaper print. When he is five years old the growing family move south, somewhere along the road to Fontainebleau, then again to a small house on the rue de la Tombe-Issoire on the outskirts of the city. Underneath the cobblestones, carts filled with bones rumble through the catacombs. Clovis goes to school, learns to read and write in neat, careful script. His father sells animal skins to the captain of the fire brigade. From his bed Clovis can see executions in the square nearby, swift decapitations from Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s killing machine.
He leaves school at fifteen. He loves words, enamoured by the work of Pierre-Jean de Béranger, a man born in the muck-rubble of rue Montorgueil who rose to become the greatest chansonnier in France with carefully crafted lyrics that help bring about the downfall of a king (another king, a prior king). Clovis sees a path, a possible future far from butchery and the long, low wails of the doomed beasts tied to posts in the yard. He finds work as the secretary of Thalès Bernard, a successful poet and French scholar who has recently been awarded the prestigious prix Lambert. But there is not enough money in words, not these words, and precious little security; this is a society with almost no safety net, where ordinary individuals live their entire lives on the knife edge of ruin. Unemployment or injury or illness can rapidly transform hard-won stability into spiralling poverty. What’s a boy to do?
And so sometime in the 1860s, he joins the Prefecture of Police in an administrative role. In his early thirties he marries Marie Anna, a dressmaker, daughter of a tailor. They live together on rue Montmartre and their only child, a daughter named Jeanne Elise, is born in 1872. Clovis is an excellent administrator, diligent and careful. Before long a position becomes available, perfectly suited for a man of his abilities; this new police institution is already internationally renowned despite its infancy and requires a team of staff with steady hands and strong stomachs. Does he seek the role or is he sought? Some things cannot be known, now. But Clovis accepts this new role as the right-hand man, and after his senior Monsieur Bridoux is struck down dead by a sudden heart attack, he is promoted at the age of forty-one to the principal position, perhaps the most curious and confounding and perhaps even, among certain swathes of society, coveted occupation in the entire nineteenth-century city: the morgue keeper.
La morgue, la morgue. They say it is known to all of Paris, and further afield – the opening of the new building in 1864 is announced in newspapers across the world, reams of paper stretching from Leeds to Honolulu. By the time Clovis joins the institution it has been over sixty years since the construction of the first morgue, that gloomy echo of a Greek temple perched on the quai de la Marché-Neuf. After decades of complaint the reluctant hand of the Paris municipality was finally forced by the Baron culling the old winding thoroughfares and so here it is, a new building, a fresh start in a city accustomed to an endless cycle of destruction and renewal.
They build it low and squat and stone, deliberately unassuming. A square block flanked by two long wings on either side, occupying the entire western tip of Ile de la Cité, steady pulse of the Seine splitting at the corner and streaming by on either side. In all the paintings and postcards and photographs and lithographs of Notre-Dame from the wide-open view of the immediate west, capturing the vista from Pont de la Tournelle or Pont Sully or quai d’Orleans as the new Paris emerges in the mid-late nineteenth century, dense hum of the Haussmannised city, blurred throng of the riverside and malingerers on bridges lined up like tiny matchsticks, the morgue is always there: hidden in plain sight, crouched in shadow under the Cathedral. Once you start looking, it’s impossible not to see it – eye drawn directly to the low patch of gloom.
The new morgue is the shining beacon of a modern bureaucratic municipality: a dedicated institution for the identification, management, and processing of the rapidly growing numbers of unknown urban dead. There are offices and staff accommodation, corpse storage space, a laundry room and hygienic autopsy facilities; there’s lecture theatre for renowned medical examiners to peel apart the dead and teach classes on forensics, and a back office for police chiefs to interrogate suspects, fist gripping collar as they’re pressed over a mangled body laid bloody and bare on a marble table. And of course, the exhibition room, the beating heart, the pièce de résistance: much bigger than before, with floor to ceiling viewing windows divided by two decorative pillars, and twelve marble slabs arranged in two rows behind the glass. A partition wall is added, to shield the display from outside and keep the visitors in a circular loop, entering from one side and leaving from another. A one-way trip.
The exhibition room is a microcosm of the city, reflecting Paris back to itself through the glass wall. The way ordinary people live and die, the homeless, the rag-pickers, the labourers, the laundresses, domestic servants and shopworkers and tradesmen and petty criminals. But there’s everyone else, too – foreigners, bank clerks, bailiffs, artists, aristocrats, courtesans, the broad sweep of society positioned like statues in the unpredictable, ever-changing tableau, transcending class and gender and age and status, haunting spectres of life interrupted.
This new morgue will become unfathomably famous, the free public display of corpses once again transforming a practical institution into one of the most notorious attractions in the world. By the end of the nineteenth century over one thousand dead Parisians are brought here every year, found in the streets and the river, at construction sites and quarries, in hotels and apartments, in back alleys, under bridges, behind train stations. By the end of the century over one million people will pass through the doors each year to look at them, laid out upon the marble slabs, seven days a week, dusk until dawn. On the busiest days, when the latest unidentified victim of a violent crime has been announced in grisly detail by the press, the crowd can easily exceed forty thousand people. Queues occasionally stretch all the way onto Île Saint-Louis, prompting a thriving business in food and drink carts selling waffles and hot chestnuts and flavoured ice to the eager waiting public.
They visit in their millions from the surrounding neighbourhoods, from the suburbs, from other cities, from other countries, from other continents. They read about it in guidebooks, in novels, in illustrated magazines; it’s featured endlessly in national and international newspapers, headlines from Manchester to Melbourne regularly reporting on lurid tales of murder, suicide, and accidental death in the city of light. The tabloids of London and New York even send special correspondents to cover the most dark and debauched crimes. It’s the birthplace of the modern true crime genre, a world-renowned hub for forensic medicine, a testing ground for modern policing; a tourist attraction, a literary inspiration, a creative muse; a moral corrective, a social experiment and the original model for modern morgues around the world.
And behind the scenes, ruling over this kingdom of the dead, there is Clovis Pierre.
What does it do to a man, all this time among the dead? Across the Atlantic at the New York morgue, the innovative new addition to Bellevue based directly on the Paris model, morgue keeper Albert Napoleon White exploits his position to run an illegal cadaver racket. Dark twin at the mirror-image institution, distorted through the glass; selling the dead in their thousands to endless doctors eager for another cadaver. Five, ten, fifteen dollars a pop, a quarter-century of dealings, dies a rich man. In the American press they talk about the pressures of the job, years before Albert’s illegal dealings come to light; corruption and hard hearts and flickers of abuse, cruel medical students and corpses propped up and shot against the wall of the dead house.
But Clovis is a cheerful man, coded for sentimentality. He once found pea blossom seeds in the pocket of a drowned man and scattered them on the patch of grass outside his rooms, creating a tiny garden full of flowers under his window. He never loses his love of words, strolling through the morgue humming verses under his breath. On the rare evenings when he isn’t tending to the bodies of the unknown he can often be found performing his poems and ballads in the lively music halls of the city under the alias of Abel Cepak, channelling his experiences with the dead into something manageable, something tangible. At night, he returns home to the quiet of the morgue, where only thin stone walls separate him from his silent charges. He is gentle and joyful; tactful and discreet. The call him a bon vivant.
But it’s a heavy job, requires a man of muscle; the weight of their bodies, their coffins, their clothes. Pockets full of rocks and woollen coats wet from the river. I imagine him broad shouldered and stocky, sinewy arms hidden under shirt sleeves. Steady hands, son of a butcher. His handwriting is clear, gentle flourishes of bureaucratic calligraphy across the pages of the leather-bound morgue books. It’s a tragic job, requires a rare man capable of holding sorrow without becoming hardened; silent witness to the worst we do to one another, the senseless losses that scar indiscriminately. How easy it would be for him to succumb, sink into the dark tar pits hidden in a human heart but instead he innovates, he creates; oversees the introduction of refrigeration technology, changes the policies around clothing, develops a system for managing morgue photography years before Alphonse Bertillon’s new police protocols. He loves the building and he loves the work, in his way. His poems about the morgue are mischievous, witty and philosophical. He calls it ‘my house’. He writes about pigeons and suicides, alcoholism and Englishmen; street child visitors and tragic lovers and the bodies of unclaimed men and women pulled from the Seine. They call him the poet of the morgue.
Can you see his face? I’ve never found a photograph, descriptions few and far between; nothing but a simple line sketch in the opening pages of a book, thick black drooping moustache and a neat nose. He slips into the shadows, back pressed against those rough stone walls. Pulls the strings behind the scenes and lets the dead and the grieving and the simply curious take centre stage, filling up that voluminous exhibition room from morning until night, hands leaving smeared prints on the glass as they peer through to the world beyond. The curtains close, the curtains open; another body appears on the slabs. The years roll by, tens of thousands of dead Parisians under his careful care; returned to family and friends and loved ones or returned to the earth, municipal pine coffins shoulder to shoulder in the communal graves at Ivry. Murder, accident, suicide, sudden death, unexplained; every day is different, every day is the same, as Paris changes irrevocably on the other side of the walls.
After thirty years of service in the police, and fifteen years as the morgue keeper, Clovis finally retires in 1893. His colleagues throw him a party, there in the back rooms of the building he occupied for so long. His house. They give him a gilded Chinese vase, decorated with two bronze lions and raised on ebony feet. They pin a medal of honour from the Minister of the Interior to his chest. He retires to the commune of Grand-Montrouge, not far from the south Paris streets of his childhood although the city he was born into has transformed beyond recognition by then, swollen borders swallowing surrounding suburbs and absorbing them into the modern metropolis. He becomes a local councillor, once again pulling strings behind the scenes, helping shape the community while shunning the glare of the spotlight. He publishes a book of poems at last, collecting his words and songs and writings about the morgue in a single volume entitled Les Gaités de la Morgue. Nine years after his retirement he dies. It is 1902, sunrise on a new century. He is buried quietly in the cemetery at Montrouge, a hushed crowd of mourners following his coffin.
Within a year of his retirement the pea blossom garden is overgrown, gone to seed under the eye of his successor, Monsieur Gaud. Just over a decade later the Prefect of Police will finally formally end the public display of the dead at the Paris morgue. After the First World War its functions are transferred to the new Medico-Legal Institute, and the building is razed, and then, slowly, suddenly – whoosh! Any trace of the morgue is gone, buried, almost-forgotten, nothing but a weatherbeaten old plaque by a memorial garden. Odd relic from another era, let bygones be bygones. The dead have long disappeared into their communal plots, nothing but scraps left behind in morgue registers and press clippings. Clovis, too, disappears from view, a man who diligently recorded thousands of names, arms stretched out to catch the dead as they fell through the cracks but who touched the record so briefly himself, leaving his own life lost to the whims of the archive; tiny glimmers caught in the frail spiderwebs of administrative effluvia. A building long gone and a poetry book a century out of print.
Who do we remember? Who do we forget? All these fragmented scraps of humanity that are lost, records that never even existed to begin with, lives that were so full and momentous to the individual that are swallowed whole by the endless narratives we repeat of deposed monarchs and failed coups and public figures remaking the world in their own image. You know the story of Paris, everyone knows the story of Paris: the full swell of the nineteenth century, the birth of modern life.
There are empires, restorations, revolutions, republics; kings and emperors and governments who rise and fall, coups d’état and barricaded boulevards and Communards lined up and shot against the cemetery walls. Army at the gates, city under starving siege. Street rats licked clean and zoo animals from the Jardin des Plantes served up as haute cuisine in west Paris restaurants (elephant consommé at Voisin, bear thighs at Noel-Peters). New theatres and opera houses, dioramas, silent spinning monochrome scenes in cinemas, the ballet, blurred light of impressionism, peasant scenes of realism, the Moulin Rouge, department stores, electric streetlamps, snippets of every language mingling in pavilions as tens of millions pour in for the World Fair. Stolen treasures from Ancient Egypt installed at the Louvre. An obelisk. A cholera epidemic. Train pitching through the wall of Gare du Montparnasse. Dozens dead in the Meudon railway disaster. Hundreds killed in a fire at the Bazar de la Charité. Thousands massacred at the hands of the government. Hundreds of thousands sent to foreign wars, protecting and expanding the colonial grasp of France. Paris stretching, stretching, population rising from half a million to a million to over two million, surrounding hillside communes and country lanes pulled into the teaming mass of the capital of the nineteenth century.
And amidst the glory and chaos and decadence and despair are all the ordinary, individual lives; the enormity of daily joys and quotidian tragedies. A birth, a marriage, a death. Falling in love, falling apart. New job, new city, new friends, trip to the theatre, picnic on the weekend, cheap novel, bad day, fight with the missus, sisterly scrap, letter home, birthday dress. Flowers in the window. Cigarette in the cold, pinched between red-raw fingers, aching back pressed against a brick wall. Getting along, trying to make it work, trying to forget war, trying to forget fear; living with your pain and your shame and your regrets and trying to transform them into something new, another life, a better life. What it is to be human, to be alive only once.
Every person who passed through the morgue had an entire complex existence. A story to tell, a world that died with them; unfinished lives in unmarked graves, untold stories in unnamed tombs. And recording them, writing them, immortalising them; helping them be found, be named and be claimed, or be carried to the earth with dignity even if only to a pauper pit in Ivry with no headstone and no mourners, was Clovis Pierre. Clovis, after the first king. Ruling over the underworld, the marginal world, the fringe world that hums just beneath the surface. The caretaker of the unknown dead, a man who ensured that even if they died alone in wretched circumstances, in violence or pain or unimaginable grief, they were not alone in the end; brought into his house, where he sits in the office and records the glimpses of their brief existence – their names, their clothes, their addresses – in looping script in large, leather bound books that have outlived everyone, nestled in the stacks of an archive in the northern suburbs of Paris. Clovis Pierre, the morgue keeper.
The poet of the morgue.
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