JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin.In 1829, the writerJulesJanin published his novel L'Ane mort et la femme guillotinee, the story of a peasant girl, Henriette, who comes to Paris to seek her fortune, but instead finds poverty, corruption, and death. From one bleak episode to another, we follow Henriette's social and moral disintegration as she moves from prostitution to crime, and from the brothel to the prison. Found guilty of murder, Henriette is condemned to death and executed at the guillotine of the Place de Grbve. Her decapitated body, bribed out of the executioner and furtively interred, will be stolen from its grave and sold for medical dissection. It will end, brutally carved up into pieces-arms, legs, feet, torso-tossed out in the garbage cans of the Ecole de Medecine.Janin had conceived his novel as a take-off on horror literature, le genre noir, then at the height of fashion.2 French translations of eighteenth-century classics by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Horace Walpole, and Ann Radcliffe, as well as of more recent productions including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Polidori's The Vampire (1819), and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), were devoured hot off the press. There was even a French exponent of the genre, the vicomte Victor d'Arlincourt, whose novels were printed and reprinted by the thousands throughout the 1820s. Yet while essentially a fantastic extravaganza in the morbid genre, L'Ane mort still portrayed with unrelenting accuracy the dismal urban realities of industrial Paris and conveyed the helplessness of the individual in the grip of an implacable social mechanism.3 Critics agree, in fact, that in the end and despite its declared parodic scope Janin's novel contained an earnest social message (Janin himself dubbed it a "parodie serieuse"), and strove "to arrive at certain bitter truths by means of an exaggeration of the methods of the horrorschool. His book is a satire on society and on the human heart ..,"4 It is with this dual character ofJanin's novel in mind that I would like to examine some of the most astonishing images of French Romanticism, the paintings of severed heads and limbs by Janin's contemporary, Theodore Gericault (Figs. 1-3, and 5). Traditionally these paintings-five in all-and a few drawings, have been seen as preparatory studies for Gericault's monumental Raft of the Medusa (Salon of 1819), whose livid and haggard shipwrecked sailors they certainly prefigure.5 G6ricault, we are told, frequented the morgues and dissection amphitheaters of the nearby hospitals, Beau-