Melville's Tour de France
; or, what was Ahab doing in an ancient Roman bathhouse?
One of the more rewarding aspects of re-reading a book like Moby-Dick is the time and patience that it allows to dwell on a single reference among the hundreds (or maybe thousands) strewn throughout the book. Unconcerned with the direction or pacing on a second, third, or thirteenth read, you can instead marvel at how easily Melville calls up an obscure work of art, a fragment of history, or piece of arcane mythology, despite his formal education barely extending past elementary school.
Melville was not just an autodidact but a sponge who soaked up knowledge, letting it pour out in every line to both clarify and augment his meaning. Everything is like everything else, and by the way that reminds me and so on and so on until the very last lines, with Ishmael slowly revolving in the watery vortex “like another Ixion” — a murderous king in Greek mythology who was bound to a fiery wheel for eternity.
Deep into Chapter 41, Melville offers one such reference that might easily be overwhelmed by the surrounding text but which deserves to be explored more fully, not just for its plain meaning but also for the way it demonstrates how Melville wove his personal joy of learning and experiences into his writing. It’s well-understood that many of his novels were loosely-fictionalized from his own adventures, but I think it’s less appreciated how even many of the obscure references peppered throughout also derived from his own life.
Into Ahab’s Unconscious
After hinting several times at it several times, Ishmael finally recounts Ahab’s initial, disastrous battle with Moby Dick in Chapter 41. But much like the scene at the end of the book in which he’s killed, the entire sequence in which Ahab loses his (right) leg comprises just three sentences:
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.
The psychic damage done to Ahab, however, is explored at much greater length, approaching something like psychoanalysis long before the term or practice even existed. Melville/Ishmael lingers on Ahab’s slow descent into madness after being dismembered, explaining how he didn’t go mad in the moments after the injury but rather on the voyage back to Nantucket. Rounding Cape Horn, Ahab’s “torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.” His crew is relieved when they reach the tropics, believing that his madness had subsided. In truth, Ahab’s “hidden self raved on… transfigured into some still subtler form,” only now with a “thousand fold more potency.”
This is the psychological context surrounding the particular reference I want to investigate, in which Melville compares Ahab’s outward, apparent condition to the “spiked Hotel de Cluny” and his “larger, darker, deeper part” to its underground lair, “those vast Roman halls of Thermes.”
Here’s the passage in full:
This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted…. Winding far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand—however grand and wonderful, now quit it;—and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic towers of man’s upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages.
Readers would be forgiven for not pausing too long on this strange picture, perhaps briefly imagining some ancient Roman architecture or statues before moving on. After all, it comes shortly after the unforgettable line about Ahab’s hatred being like a mortar and “burst[ing] his hot heart’s shell upon it.” It’s easy to read on still slightly in shock. But linger on this comparison with Ishmael for a moment. How is Ahab’s “darker, deeper part” like a captive king beneath spiked towers? Where is this hotel? What is Melville talking about? (An evergreen question!)
The Hôtel de Cluny
First, let’s look at this Hôtel de Cluny that so encapsulates Ahab’s psyche. Now more commonly referred to as the Museum de Cluny (officially the National Museum of the Middle Ages), the structure is not in Rome but in Paris’ Latin Quarter, less than a kilometer southwest of Notre-Dame.
The museum is actually made up of two separate but adjoining structures: the ruins of an ancient Roman thermal bathhouse, and a medieval mansion built more than 1,000 years later.
The thermal baths, also known as the Palais de Thermes, is estimated to have been built late in the 3rd century A.D. when Paris was still known as Lutetia. The historical context, in short, is that the area was originally settled by the Gallic tribe known as the Parisii (from which the name Paris derives), who were conquered by the Romans in 52 B.C. The Romans soon after built a city around the Seine, including the usual slate of buildings and public utilities common to Roman cities of that period — including a bathhouse.
Fittingly for our investigation, it’s believe that the bath complex was specifically built by the Nautes, a powerful guild of shipowners and traders who had accumulated their wealth from controlling trade on the Seine. Although there’s no records to prove it, one key piece of evidence is that the bases of the vault ceiling are stone carvings of “bows of large fat-bellied ships loaded with weapons.”
When it was completed around the beginning of the 3rd century A.D., the bath complex comprised half a dozen buildings spread out over nearly 70,000 square feet. A winding path would lead patrons through the buildings in stages, entering through a courtyard lined with shops before undressing in the changing rooms. Next, they would warm up in a large, open-air exercise area before moving on to the balmy tepidarium and caldriuma, which were heated by large furnaces. Finally, the circuit ended with a descent into the partially underground frigidarium, a massive, unheated chamber with cold baths, beneath vaulted ceilings nearly 50 feet high.
Not long after the bath complex was completed, however, the city suffered a series of invasions by Germanic tribes. The Romans were forced to abandon everything they had built on the Left Bank and repositioned the center of the city on the the Île de la Cité, the small island where Notre-Dame now stands. As part of the move, they were forced to dismantle buildings like the forum and amphitheater in order to reuse the stone. In the end, little was left of the original bath complex, though for some reason the frigidarium was left largely in tact.
Jumping ahead in time by about a thousand years, the Left Bank slowly started coming back to life after the founding of the University of Paris (La Sorbonne) in 1253. Another 100 years later, the ruins of the baths and the surrounding land were purchased by the Abbot of the Cluny monastery located in Burgundy, about 300 kilometers southeast of Paris. The Abbot erected several buildings on the site, including a chapel, a college, and a residence where he could stay when visiting the city. Hence the name: the Hôtel de Cluny.
The original residence was torn down and rebuilt late in the 15th century by Abbot Jacque d’Amboise, whose wealthy family was known for its patronage of the arts. The new mansion, backed up against ruins of the old bath house, apparently “fitted better his taste for ostentation” according to one book about the building, with a steep slate roof and carved dormer windows bearing the family’s red-and-gold crest. The building also featured several spiral staircases, a porticoed gallery, and a hanging garden that floated above the frigidarium.
Melville’s description of the building as being “spiked” is easily understood with a glance at the exterior.
The Hôtel remained the Parisian home of Cluny’s abbots until the 16th century, and thereafter was used intermittently as a residence by several notable figures, including Mary Tudor (sister of Henry VIII), Scotland’s King James V (father of Mary, Queen of Scots), and several 17th-century papal nuncios. As the now-centuries old buildings increasingly fell into various states of disrepair, the spaces were put to less religious and/or regal purposes. The tower was used by an astronomer as an observatory; the chapel was used as a printing press by the Queen’s official printer; and, following the French Revolution when whole complex was declared national property, the chapel became a dissection room for a Parisian physician.
The Museum de Cluny
By the early 1800s, the deterioration of the complex began to concern historians and “antiquarians” who worked to preserve ancient relics of the city like the bathhouse. Ancient Roman stonework and engravings were also periodically discovered around Paris, including the Pillar of the Boatmen, a limestone column sculpted in honor of Jupiter and other gods, dating to the 1st century A.D. Like the baths, the pillar is also believed to have been created by the Nautes, the guild of wealthy sailors.
Finally — and I promise we’re getting back to Melville momentarily — in 1832, an archeologist and art collector named Alexandre Du Sommerard bought the Hôtel de Cluny mansion to house his large collection of Medieval and Renaissance art. The mansion provided an ideal setting for the collection, which included ivories such as the Crowning of Otto II and of Theophano, the Embriachi altarpiece from the Carthusian monastery in Champmol, Limoges enamels, and an entire room of artifacts belonging to King François I (1491-1547).
The collection quickly attracted large crowds, who were taken at how perfectly it fit in the period-appropriate mansion. The writer Prosper Mérimée commented after a visit: “He did the honors of the house with an exquisite manner, and… gave lessons in practical archaeology that stirred interest and were not forgotten.” Before long, Du Sommerard’s contemporaries began a campaign to make the collection a permanent feature of the Left Bank.
Meanwhile, the City of Paris installed its own collection of ancient stonework and sculptures — including the Pillar of the Boatmen — inside the ruins of the adjacent bathhouse. When Du Sommerard died in 1842, the city decided to acquire the mansion and the entire collection of art it contained. The Musée du Cluny, which at last united the ancient baths and the medieval mansion, officially opened its doors in March 1844.
Melville in Europe
Five years later, Herman Melville was on a grand tour of Europe. From early November 1849 through the end of December (plus several weeks at sea on both ends), the 30-year-old Melville was on a mission to find an English publisher for his novel White-Jacket. Not one to squander the opportunity to travel, he left himself ample time to explore London and the continent.
After three weeks in London, Melville boarded a ferry at the London Bridge, crossing the English Channel and arriving in Boulougne. The next day he took a train to Paris and took a room for the night at Le Meurice on Rue de Rivoli, a luxurious hotel then and still to this day, located opposite the Tuileries Garden and the Louvre. “Dined at table d’hôte at a little after 5 p.m. Splendid table – French dishes – ate I know not what.” (Perhaps too rich for his blood, the next night he found a room across the Seine in the Latin Quarter.)
Once settled in Paris, Melville continued his grand tour, making many of the same stops a tourist would today: the Louvre, the Sorbonne, Place de la Bastille, and Notre Dame. The Hôtel de Cluny was also on his list of things to see, though his first attempt at visiting was thwarted when he found the museum closed for the day (also a typical 21st century tourist experience in Paris). Instead, he and a friend walked around the Père Lachaise cemetery, tried — and failed — to get tickets to the opera, and, feeling defeated, split a bottle of Bordeaux. Plus ça change…
It wasn’t for another several days that Melville tried again to see the Hotel de Cluny, this time following a stop at the Sorbonne’s Museum Depuytren, a collection of oddities such as abnormal anatomical specimens. Melville recorded in his journal that he saw there “Rows of cracked skulls. Skeletons & things without a name.” (Already, we can see the imagery of the captive Ahab starting to form.)
The Hôtel de Cluny was just a few blocks away, and Melville, this time alone, took in both the mansion and what remained of the “old Roman palace of Thermes.” He recorded the visit in the same clipped half sentences and bursts of thought he uses throughout the journal:
Thence to the Hotel de Cluny. A most unique collection. The house is just the house I should like to live in. Glorious old cabinets—ebony, ivory carving.—Beautiful chapel. Tapestry, old keys. Leda & the Swan. Descended into the vaults of the old Roman palace of Thermes. Baths, &c.
Though Melville perhaps dedicates more space in his journal to this experience than other museum trips, the impression that it left on him seems to have come primarily from the collection of art and artifacts in the mansion: the cabinets full of carvings, the tapestries, and so on. Here, for example, is an example of one of those “glorious old cabinets” full of ivory and ebony carvings he might have seen.
Although there’s no note of it in his journal, he might have been particularly interested in the museum’s collection of forty whalebone (!) plaquettes (a type of small decorative relief) which once decorated a Mozarabic casket.
Melville also seems to have been drawn to this furniture panel in the collection depicting Leda and the Swan:
Stepping far back in time, he then “descended into the vaults of the old Roman palace of Thermes. Baths, &c.” At the time that Melville visited, only the subterranean frigidarium with it’s vaulted ceiling would have been in anything like its original condition. Check out this video for a better perspective on the vast scale of the room as it looks today:
Even at the time, though, it would have been home to a variety of ancient sculptures dating from the Roman period.
If Melville saw the Pillar of the Boatmen, which has been housed in the frigidarium since the museum opened, or the prow-shaped bases of the vaulted ceiling, he made no mention of them either in his journal or in Moby-Dick. Nor does he indicate in either that he was aware of the connection of the baths to the Nautes, his sea-faring ancestors.
That said, the stone antiquities stored in the frigidarium may have provided inspiration for the rest of the description of Ahab’s captive mental state. Recall again the passage from Chapter 41 which uses the imagery of torsos, broken thrones, and “entablatures of ages.” The original collection of sculptures held in the frigidarium which Melville might have seen included several column heads from the Saint-Germain-des-Prés abbey, and fragments of statues from Notre-Dame — many of them literally torsos — which were destroyed during the French Revolution and rediscovered in 1839.
The other piece of ancient imagery Melville uses is the Caryatid of ancient Greece, “a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.” (The Caryatid’s male counterpart, the Atlas or Telamon, is perhaps more familiar today). Melville might have encountered an authentic Caryatid from the Erechtheion in Athens not at the Musée de Cluny but during one of his multiple visits to the British Museum on this trip. The seven-and-a-half foot sculpture had been on display at the museum for several decades after being purloined by Lord Elgin, and in fact is still there to this day.
With the weight of the ancients bearing on his mind, Melvilles extended his tour of the continent with a short train trip from Paris to Brussels and then to Cologne, before retracing his route back to London. Almost as an afterthought, he finalized the sale of White Jacket to Richard Bentley and spent a last few days visiting museums, buying books, and dining with friends around town. Though he had reason — and invitation — to extend his trip to travel farther eastward, Melville made up his mind that not only could he not afford it, but missed his wife Lizzie and infant son Malcolm too much to stay. Like Ishmael, his ship left on Christmas Day.
Ahab’s psycho-archaeology
Late in the novel, just before the first day’s chase of Moby Dick, Starbuck finds Ahab staring pensively into the sea and tries to convince him one last time to abandon his vengeful quest. Ahab’s reply instead seems to corroborate Ishmael’s earlier musings about his captivity, bound to fate, and the weight of the “piled entablatures of ages” that weighed on him.
Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.
Ahab’s psychological and metaphysical burden have been the subject of countless analyses of his character, with particular emphasis on the Hotel de Cluny passage as a kind of Rosetta Stone, to use another ancient stone object as metaphor. Though there are too many to account for here, it’s worth sampling a few if only to give proper due to the extent that Melville went to provide an explanation for Ahab’s mad quest, which I find is too often flattened into a one-dimensional “hatred” or “insanity.”
Take for example, this excerpt from Joseph Adamson’s Melville, Shame, and the Evil Eye: A Psychoanalytic Reading, which interprets the Hôtel de Cluny passage as positioning Ahab as the “legitimate scion” of a humiliated race, defeated and mocked by the gods. Per Adamson, Ahab believes that the humiliation of the human race is his personal burden to bear and avenge. The connection is underlined by situating Ahab specifically among the ruins of the ancients, who understood themselves more clearly to be subject to the will of the gods.
This archetypal progenitor, man's "root of grandeur," this "antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes," is portrayed as some great titanic king, who at the dawn of the ages was hurled down in ignominy and buried deep beneath the earth; frozen in shame, turned to stone, he has been left to nurse his grievance–that "old State-secret"–in an eternity of exile.... Ahab is the legitimate scion of this humiliated race: as the “serene, exasperating sunlight" smiles on him in the shame and fury of his defeat, surrounded by the sinking limbs of his torn and scattered comrades, he too is mocked by the "great gods" who mock this "captive king."
Adamson’s interpretation also brings to mind Ishmael’s earlier diagnosis of Ahab as a surrogate — maybe even a savior — for the human race in its competition with the gods, having “piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.”
Robert Midler, whose book Exiled Royalties takes its title from this passage, keys in on a critical meaning of the imagery as it relates to Ahab's internal conflict; namely, that his "deepest impulse” is toward the knowledge of “the origin and mystery of his own being.”
Ishmael's "nobler, sadder souls" — "exiled royalties" — are a spiritual aristocracy descended from the "captive king" and marked by a consciousness of divine disinheritance.... Throughout Moby-Dick the questions that preoccupy Ahab–questions of meaning, order, cosmic purpose, divine existence and character, and eternal life—are clothed in intellectual language, yet Ahab's deepest impulse is not toward knowledge of reality but toward knowledge of "the old State-secret," the origin and mystery of his own being. Ultimately, it is not even knowledge that Ahab seeks so much as acknowledgement. Like his ancestral archetype, the captive king whose spiritual exile he shares, Ahab craves recognition that he is heaven-born and, if not heaven-destined, then at least, by nature and bearing, heaven-worthy. For this he requires a gesture of kinship from the source…. If God will not condescend to him by word or sign, Ahab will extort the sign, if only by forcing God to kill him.
Finally, Cesare Casarino approaches the Hotel de Cluny passage from a psychoanalytic perspective in Modernity at Sea, drawing a direct (and astonishing) parallel between Ishmael’s “psycho-archaeology of Ahab” and Sigmund Freud’s theory of the mind in Civilization and Its Discontents, published eighty years after Moby-Dick. Casarino writes:
In what is one of the more delirious visions of this delirious book, we are led down a spatio-temporal passageway that links medieval Paris directly to ancient Rome, and at the end of our descent we are brought face to face with the unconscious…. Anticipating those memorable pages in which Sigmund Freud will resort to Rome's millennial and highly stratified architectural topography for representing how the psychic past is forever preserved and is always virtually retrievable if one is able to go "back far enough”
Indeed, like Melville, Freud used the example of Ancient Rome as a “psychical entity” to describe the archaeology of the unconscious mind, in which the historical record of one’s mental development is always present.
In mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish… everything is somehow preserved and in suitable circumstances (when, for instance, regression goes back far enough) it can once more be brought to light. Let us try to grasp what this assumption involves by taking an analogy from another field…. It is hardly necessary to remark that all these remains of ancient Rome are found dovetailed into the jumble of a great metropolis which has grown up in the last few centuries since the Renaissance. There is certainly not a little that is ancient still buried in the soil of the city or beneath its modern buildings. […]
Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past — an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.
Whatever Melville meant to suggest by placing Ahab among the archaeological ruins of Ancient Rome, I find it remarkable to be able to trace his steps through the Museum de Cluny and see the very objects that he saw, and which would become central to defining Ahab’s character and motivations. Although his visit barely rated a few short lines in his journal, the museum’s art, architecture, and history remained vivid in his memory and became key to explaining Ahab’s inscrutable psychology. And to think he might have given up after it was closed on his first attempt.
The museum, by the way, reopened in 2022 after several years of renovations, now with its entrance on 28 rue Du Sommerard. If you want to walk in Melville’s footsteps it looks like a steal at 12€, particularly compared to dinner at the Michelin-starred Restaurant le Meurice (where he once ate “I know not what”), starting at 350€ a person.
Additional References
In addition the hyperlinked sources throughout, I relied heavily on the following:
Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent by Herman (ed. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Harvard University Press, 1948)
“Creation of the Museum,” Musée de Cluny: Musée national du Moyen Âge
“The Chapel of L'Hôtel de Cluny,” Musée de Cluny: Musée national du Moyen Âge
Musée de Cluny: Guide (Alain Erlande-Brandenburg et al., 1990)
The Cluny Museum (Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, 1983)
Musée National de Moyen Age: The Cluny Thermae (Élisabeth Antoine et al., 2003)
Herman Melville: A Biography, Hershel Parker
Really enjoying your Moby insights. What stuff you know😊
Great article. I was re-reading chapter 41 today, so perfect timing on your post! All the photos and the video are helpful. The chapter certainly takes a deep dive into Ahab's psyche.