Mighty Morphin Historical Objects
			It was Theodore Villenave who brought the Late-Eighteenth Century novelist and playwrite, Alexander Dumas, to his mansion, his home museum, occupied by his father, the "Elder Villenave": it was the elder Villenave, it seems, who was responsible for the museum contents and collections. Collecting's pursuit--Dubreton understands it as a mania-- created most probably a range of museum items for visitors, and with that range, a group of sensory patterns. Manifest in barricades of books interspersed throughout the mansion, along with engravings and other papers, the patterns were symptomatic of a methodological pursuit which was underlied by philosophical doubt. Villenave's doubt could be said to have Cartesian elements just for the reason that he lived in the period before 1850, after 1850 being a period when astronomy and biology would replace physics and chemistry as sciences found in literature101--where physics and chemistry were the sciences of Descartes. Compared to Victorian times, The Elder Villenave does not, with his doubt, show a sense of struggle that, scientists (or fact collectors) did in the nineteenth century: the character Henry Knight, in Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) struggles to complete his experiment that faultingly goes against the capriciousness of nature. He is working on a cliff and realizes the extant of his struggle, when he catches a glimpse of a trilobite (a fossil) trapped in the side of the cliff102. Buried in 'History and in dust' the elder Villenave had no such experience that would diminish his objectivity, that would make him remark about the insignificance of humans in the face of geologic and evolutionary forces (given the thought on evolution in 1827). He gave not even a smile103 to assert that an indoor setting gives a museum its primacy because it seals out destructive forces like stormy weather. A cave mocks an interior in this function, but not being able to prevent rotting agents it has varied caverns and arrangements of stalagmites instead of books. Francis Power Cobbe gives a description of a Cave in Adelsberg, Europe which shows a commonness between Villenave's museum, and itself, a somewhat naturally occurring museum. The primary aspect on view in the cave of Adelsberg is darkness, but this does not mean that Cobbe does not speculate with insight, as when she remarks that humans' 'works grow into stone and lie buried beside the mammoth and the ichthyosaur.' She knew Darwin personally but the commonness lies still in the totality of evolutionary forces played on by her imagination, as imagistic of almost a culture of death or dread originating seemingly from nowhere, stalled in its being, and made impenetrable through humans' devices. For Villenave he would enjoy the desertion of the cavern, its being a large ruin with space used analogously to the quantity of collected items as if collected by a sole archeologist. For Cobbe, she would enjoy a tour made out of her passages at Adelsberg for the Adelsberg cave--this would be highly philosophical--given the intensity of doubt in her description.			.29. Dubreton, J. Lucas. The Fourth Musketeer: The Life of Alexander Dumas. Trans. Maida Castelhun Darnton. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1928. '...Theodore Villenave, had invited him to take tea that day with his father, who lived at 82, rue de Vaugirard, a little mansion that had been turned into a museum. In the salon, by the side of a bronze urn which had contained the heart of Bayard, Alexander admired a portrait of Anne Boleyn... 30. Cobbe, Frances Power. Life of Frances Power Cobbe by herself in two volumes. New York: Haughton, Mifflin and Company, 1894. p. 6. As half my life is connected with this dear old place, I hope the reader will be able to imagine it as it was in my youth, bright and smiling and yet dignified; bosomed among its old trees and with the green, wide-spreading park opened out before the noble granite perron of the hall door. 101. Haynes, Roslynn. From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. pp. 106-07. ' Whereas physics and chemistry had been the sciences featuring most prominently in literature before the 1850s, they were replaced in the latter half of the century by astronomy and biology.' 102. ibid. p. 122 This (a personal struggle for existence) is emphasized by his visual confrontation with the fossil of a trilobite embedded in the cliff, the victim of just such a struggle as his own.' 103. Dubreton, J. Lucas. The Fourth Musketeer: The Life of Alexander Dumas. Trans. Maida Castelhun Darnton. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1928. p. 37. 'His countenance, crowned b white hair carefully put up in curlpapers was suspicious, without a smile...'