And what was Palmes planning?

A little light anatomizing - this sort of thing:


The body of such an infamous criminal as Turpin must have been an object of some medical curiosity, and the seat of his courage and persistent recidivism sought in the gory mystery of his internal organs.

But whatever Mr. Palmes had in mind, it's unlikely that he would have done anything as ambitious as Honoré Fragonard.

Fragonard spent nine years in the 1760s preparing his écorchés: elaborate anatomical teaching models, made by flaying and injecting wax, dyes and stiffening agents into prepared dehydrated human and animal corpses.

The unsettling (and to me, rather beautiful) results, which can be seen in the Museé Fragonard, Maisons-Alfort, fall somewhere between sculpture and dissection. If he had taken his knife to Turpin and produced something like his Cavalier (horseman) below, I might almost have approved: