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# Cholera aboard the Melpomene at Toulon in 1833 in Giono's novel and Vernet's painting
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-marselskom-muzee-iziashchnykh-iskusstv-khranitsia-kartina-orasa-verne-kholera-na-bortu-melpomeny-napisannaia-v-1835-g-dlia-sanitarnogo-upravleniia-kotoroe-sobiralo-kollektsiiu-na-temu/
- Published: 2023-11-26T13:36:14.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:37:24.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Art, Books, Museums

In the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille hangs Horace Vernet's "Cholera on Board the Melpomene", painted in 1835 for the Board of Health, which had been assembling a collection on the theme of epidemics for its council chamber since the 1730s.

The events aboard the cholera-stricken Melpomene, which arrived at Toulon in July 1833, held the attention of the whole country and in the end became the subject of a scandalous legal inquiry.

In "The Horseman on the Roof" (filmed in 1995) Jean Giono described the plague ship as crammed with contagion like a fiery cauldron, and compared it to a bomb capable of blowing the kingdom apart, like a bloody grenade, in five seconds.

And if in the novel we find disconcerting physiological details of the disease and become witnesses to a lesson in forensic medicine seen through the eyes of a state inspector, then Vernet's canvas, completed right after the events aboard the Melpomene that had shaken the country, several years before the novel was written on the same subject, shows the tragedy from a different side.

In the picture a sailor, most likely infected, is lifting the corpse of his comrade out of the hold. Behind him is a man dying or already dead. A clerk in a straw hat, leaning on a cannon, records the number of dead. Two officers support an exhausted ship's boy. The gun deck has become an infirmary. The dead sailor is depicted in the pose of Mantegna's Christ, with crossed legs, and with one of his comrades mournfully holding him.

In the sketch for the painting we do not see the sailor beside the dead man; in his place stand a grieving woman and a young man, probably the dead man's family. The other figures and the setting are the same.

The ship Melpomene really existed and did indeed bring the bacillus to Europe, having made the journey from Brest to Algiers and spent three months in Lisbon, gripped by cholera. Eighteen sailors died on board. The captain led the crew ashore, and the vessel left the city, leaving 45 infected sailors in hospital. During the passage between Lisbon and Toulon, 59 new infections and 7 deaths were recorded.

In France the ship was put into quarantine, and after 2 months it was decided to sink it temporarily for disinfection.

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_10514@26-11-2023_16-36-14.jpg)

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_10515@26-11-2023_16-36-14.jpg)