On Wed, 29 Jul 2015 01:23:29 -0700, Ceri Houlbrook <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hello everyone,

An acquaintance of mine was hoping that someone could shed some light on the following extract:

"In demolishing a house recently, for the purpose of widening the Rue Guy Lussac, near the Pantheon, the workmen discovered in one of the chimney jambs a cavity in which was the skeleton of an infant of about a year old. The bones reposed on a layer of eggs, still entire, to the number of more than 60, and near the hand was a little leather ball, which had formerly been white. The heat had partly calcined the bones of the legs, and the eggs had been dried till the centres were not larger than a pea. The infant appears to have been in this receptacle for some 25 or 30 years, which besides had been made and closed up by some practised hand, as there were no external signs of any derangement. Conjecture is quite baffled as to the reasons for such a singular tomb, and for the accompanying eggs. Towards 1804 the house was inhabited by a religious community, but in the year 1807 it became a furnished lodging-house."

Southland [NZ] Times, Issue 546, 22 August 1866, Page 3

Has anyone ever come across anything similar?

A few comments/questions:

1.) Looking at the dates in the article suggests that the infant was immurred around 1836 to 1841

(25-30 years earlier than 1866).

2.) The building is probably located in the 5th arrondissment of Paris (Rue Guy Lussac, Pantheon).

3.) The 5th arrondissment (Latin Quarter) was probably ethnically and culturally diverse during the

4.) Does the building mentioned still exist? Is there any way to discover what building might have

contained this singular tomb? And who might have resided there during the period in question?

5.) I tend to consider this entombment (to the degree that it may be an occult act) as idiosyncratic

more than a shared custom, since we don't have multiple reports of infants immurred on beds of

eggs in Paris chimneys. And nothing in the report suggests any occult motives or significance.

Musing Another Paris Mystery Rose,

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