The Man with the Broken Ear

What if a man died in 1813, was mummified by accident, and woke up nearly fifty years later looking exactly like he did at twenty-four? That's the audacious premise of Edmond About's 1862 comic masterpiece. Leon Renault returns from the Russian Urals with two things: a fortune and an ancient Egyptian mummy he believes is merely a curiosity. The catch: the mummy is actually Colonel Fougas, a Napoleonic-era officer preserved by a freak accident of chemistry. When the eccentric Professor Meiser successfully reanimates him, Fougas emerges into a France he no longer recognizes, industrialized, bourgeois, strange. The satire cuts deep: Fougas mocks the timid new France while Clementine, Leon's fiancée, develops an inexplicable passion for the resurrected colonel. About weaves a farce that is also a sharp critique of Second Empire France, asking what happens when the dead return to find everything they've built reduced to commerce and cowardice. It's absurd, bitingly funny, and surprisingly poignant about memory, identity, and what we owe to the past.