Resurrecting Pompeii by Estelle Lazer Page A

burial to be exposed, it provided important information about the range of objects that accompanied a royal person to their grave. Also, although the young king was only a minor player in Egyptian history, the discovery of his tomb had an enormous impact on popular culture, influencing clothing, furniture, cinema and even confectionary design, as well as inspiring music. 9
The mummy in popular culture
From the time of Napoleon ’s expedition, artefacts found in Egyptian-tomb contexts inspired the arts and the design of objects used in daily life. As already discussed, this was also the case with finds from the sites destroyed by Mt Vesuvius. Well-preserved human remains have continuously exercised influenceinall mediaassociatedwithpopular culture. As with Pompeii, the macabre finds of mummies spawned numerous novels, and later, films. If anything, mummy finds in Egypt exerted greater influence on popular culture than the bodies of the victims from Pompeii. In film alone, mummies provided the inspiration for around 50 productions between 1909 and 2001. 10
The mummy in literature – Mr Gautier again
    Apart from the occasional incidental appearance of mummies in Tudor literature, such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Othello , the mummy doesn’t appear as a key character in novels until the nineteenth century. 11 Since then, there has been a plethora of mummy literature. 12
    Most notable, for the purposes of this study, is the presence of Theophile Gautier’s works in the mummy literature. Gautier was one of the pioneers of this genre. He produced two works on Egyptian mummies, The Romance of a Mummy in 1857 and a short story, The Mummy ’ s Foot , in 1863. 13 The latter obliquely refers to the practice of collecting portions of mummies as souvenirs. Like Arria Marcella , this story involves a hero with a disconcerting tendency to form attachments with portions of older, long-dead women.
    The Mummy ’ s Foot has the most obvious parallels with Arria Marcella . The story is fabulous enough to warrant gratuitous retelling: the tale opens with the protagonist idly entering a curio shop in Paris. His fancy is taken by a beautiful foot, which at first he mistakes for a fragment of a bronze statue. To his surprise, the foot is made of flesh. It transpires that it is, in fact, a portion of a mummy. And not just any mummy; it is an extremity of the Princess Hermonthis. Despite the fact that the foot is human, the hero desires to use it as a paperweight. The wizened old shopkeeper considers that a novel application, which would certainly have surprised the Princess’s father, the Pharaoh.
    Undeterred, our hero purchases the foot and takes it home wrapped in a piece of old damask. He is uncommonly delighted with his purchase and immediately puts it to use, placing it on a pile of papers. When he retires that night, he falls into a deep slumber and dreams that he is in his room. Everything appears normal until he notices his paperweight, which has started moving about and hopping amongst his papers. He is somewhat disturbed by this as he prefers ‘sedentary paperweights’. 14
    The curtains then begin to move and he hears a sound like a person hopping around on one foot. This is followed by the appearance of the singlefooted Princess Hermonthis herself. She is unable to catch her bounding loose foot until she speaks with it. The foot somehow manages to explain to her that it has been bought and no longer belongs to her unless she can repay the price of purchase. Our hero gallantly offers the princess her foot as he has no desire to cripple such a lovely individual. She is then able to reunite her severed foot to her leg. To thank our unnamed hero, she offers to present him to her father, as she is certain that he will be pleased that her foot has been restored. She also replaces his missing paperweight with a
fi
gure of Isis that she wears around her neck.
    They are transported to a vast chamber in a granite mountainside. There he