{"id":7057,"date":"2023-07-05T10:05:18","date_gmt":"2023-07-05T10:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/internationaldiplomat.com\/?p=7057"},"modified":"2023-07-05T10:05:18","modified_gmt":"2023-07-05T10:05:18","slug":"holmes-watson-lucens-and-a-gem-of-a-museum-by-robert-j-parsons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/?p=7057","title":{"rendered":"Holmes, Watson, Lucens and a gem of a museum by Robert J. Parsons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>Holmes, Watson, Lucens and a gem of a museum<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><em> by Robert J. Parsons<\/em><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">For the fans of Sherlock Holmes (innumerable, for he has garnered far more than any other fictional character in history), he is forever linked to Switzerland. It was here at the Reichenbach Falls in the Bernese Oberland that Holmes plunged to his death in a wrestling match with the notorious organized crime leader Professor Moriarty whom he had been tracking all the way from London. The event was recounted in a short story originally titled, \u201cThe Adventure of the Final Problem\u201d published in 1893.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">By the time of its publication, Arthur Conan Doyle had published two detective novels, introducing Sherlock Holmes and his assistant, John H. Watson, MD, in <i>A Study in Scarlet<\/i>, then amplifying the sleuth\u2019s reputation in <i>The Sign of Four<\/i>. These were followed by a dozen short stories published individually and subsequently collected in a single volume, <i>Adventures of Sherlock Holmes<\/i>. Each account of Holmes\u2019s exploits increased Doyle\u2019s reputation and added more followers to what was already becoming something of a cult of enthusiastic admirers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">In spite of the huge success of these stories, Doyle wished to move on to historical novels, work that he considered more worthy of a real writer. After ten more stories, he drafted what is now known as \u201cThe Final Problem\u201d, subjecting Holmes to what was intended to be a very honorable death. It became the eleventh and final story in Doyle\u2019s fourth Sherlock Holmes book, <i>Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Charles Higham, biographer of Holmes\u2019s creator (<i>The Adventures of Conan Doyle<\/i>), described it in some detail.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">\u201cThe climax, unhappily off stage, in which Moriarty and Holmes plunge over Reichenback Falls, clearly reveals Conan Doyle\u2019s impatience to dispose of his hero\u2026 The scene was wonderfully illustrated by Sidney Paget: horrendous cliffs, reminiscent of Gustave Dor\u00e9\u2019s chasms in his illustrations for Dante\u2019s <i>Inferno<\/i>, a suggestion of spray and black depths, and two figures poised on the brink against a Gothic crag, hearing the thunderclap of doom.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">On the ledge where the wrangle took place, there is a plaque that says (in English), \u201cAt this fearful place, Sherlock Holmes vanquished Professor Moriarty, on 4 May 1891.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">And that, as far as Conan Doyle was concerned, was that. It was time to move on to serious literary endeavors.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">However, the reading public saw it otherwise, and thereupon followed an amazing public outcry that would not calm down. In short, Conan Doyle as a writer in the new and immensely popular genre of crime fiction was already an unrivaled paragon, and, while he seemed unable to perceive this, his readers certainly could.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">So, lured by an offer of phenomenal royalties, Doyle eventually picked up his pen and produced five more books, including two novels, one of which, <i>The Hound of the Baskervilles<\/i>, is often regarded as a masterpiece of the genre.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Charles Higham points out a fortuitous twist to the story.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">\u201cThere is a curious fact here. The reason Warson is not present at the Reichenbach Falls to assist Holmes is that he has received a message asking that he come at once to the aid of lady who has been wintering at Davos, and who is hemorrhaging as a result of consumption.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">This was the unplanned opening Conan Doyle needed to resurrect Holmes by revealing that he had actually not fallen into the falls and been dashed to death but had triumphed over Moriarty and slipped away to track, clandestinely, the remaining members of his gang.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Conan Doyle\u2019s final Sherlock Holmes tally was four novels and 56 short stories, for producing most of which Conan Doyle became one of the best paid writers in history. The last one was published in 1927.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Upon his death, his children inherited his substantial estate, and his youngest son, Adrian, upon the death of his mother in 1940, became Conan Doyle\u2019s literary executor. He used (apparently unscrupulously) money from the estate to buy himself a castle \u2013 not in Scotland but in Switzerland in the beautiful Vaudois village of Lucens. And thus it was that most of the elements of his father\u2019s multitudinous collections ended up on the Continent, far from their English origin.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">In 1965, he set up the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Foundation in Switzerland. Upon his death, the castle was sold, and in 2001 the collection was moved to what is now the Sherlock Holmes Museum in Lucens, within the village about mid-way between the railroad station and the castle.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The main part of the museum is a big rectangular room whose walls are covered with William Morris wall paper and whose center is dominated by a gigantic mahogany table from Conan Doyle\u2019s grandfather\u2019s house, a residence that saw a long parade of some of the most prominent figures of the time. Around the edge of the table top are 22 small silver plates of about eight by four centimeters with engraved on them the names of distinguished persons who had dined at the table.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Among them one finds George Bernard Shaw, Walter Scott, Benjamin Disraeli, William Gilette, Rudyard Kipling, William Thackery, Charles Dickens and Count Gabriel d\u2019Orsay.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The walls are covered by photos from both the professional and personal life of Conan Doyle along with a vast panoply of artifacts. Among these, there is a mixture throughout of both Holmes and Conan Doyle, and at times it is easy to imagine Holmes as much a former living person as his creator.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Of particular note is the large portrait of Joseph Bell, a professor at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, under whom Conan Doyle had studied medicine. Bell\u2019s meticulous approach to examination and diagnosis inspired Holmes\u2019s \u201cscience of deduction and analysis\u201d in pursuing his cases, and Conan Doyle himself later admitted to Bell that he was the person on whom Holmes was based.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">There have been so many attempts at translating Holmes into film (virtually all highly unsatisfactory for those who know the Holmes corpus well \u2013 and many do) that there is no single living person who has ever been able to create in the pubic mind a definitive face for Sherlock Holmes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">However, almost from the start, the stories were brilliantly illustrated by Sidney Paget, and it is his pen and ink depictions of Holmes and Watson that have ever since stood as the \u201cdefinitive\u201d portrayal of the two. The museum offers a dozen or more post cards reproducing in high quality some of these famous illustrations.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Beyond the main room, a door leads to a dark passage one side of which is covered mostly in glass. The museum attendant sets in motion a visit of the room on the other side of the glass, with spot lights coming on and off focused on the various points being described by a recorded voice.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The room is a \u201cfaithful\u201d rendition of Holmes\u2019s and Watson\u2019s digs at 221B Baker Street in London, painstakingly constituted from hundreds of details in the stories for the 1951 Festival of Britain and reproduced here. It is very much representative of its time and place: Victorian England, when interior decor seemed to require that one cram as much as possible into a room, then cram some more. The hundreds of objects therein are right in line with this. (Today we would call it \u201cclutter\u201d.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">As was common at the time, such \u201crooms\u201d (the sitting room and bedrooms) were overseen by a virtuous landlady who provided meals and afternoon tea (the tea tray is unavoidably visible on the center table). In the stories, the landlady, Mrs Hudson, makes repeated cameo appearances, adding an element of both continuity and realism.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The museum is open on Saturday and Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m. Visits on other days may be arranged at least 48 hours in advance by phoning 076 583-61-33 for which a flat fee of CHF 40 is charged. Group visits \u2013 including children \u2013 are welcome. No credit cards accepted, but euros bills are. There is a small boutique with a considerable selection of items, including the post cards with Sidney Paget\u2019s illustrations.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"Standard\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><a style=\"color: #000000;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.lucens.ch\/sherlockholmes\"><span style=\"text-decoration: none;\">Mus\u00e9e Sherlock Holmes &#8211; Lucens<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Sherlock Holmes Museum<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #000000;\">rue des Greniers 7, Lucens \u00b7 +41 <span class=\"nowrap\">21 906 73 33<\/span><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-7066 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/internationaldiplomat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/id-juillet2023-holmes-watson-bob-parsons.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"550\" height=\"550\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Holmes, Watson, Lucens and a gem of a museum by Robert J. Parsons For the fans of Sherlock Holmes (innumerable, for he has garnered far more than any other fictional character in history), he is forever linked to Switzerland. It was here at the Reichenbach Falls in the Bernese Oberland that Holmes plunged to his<br \/><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/12h71.com\/?p=7057\">+ Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7067,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[533,539,2080,560],"tags":[4869,4882,1554,4897,1808,4909],"class_list":["post-7057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-english","category-movie","category-poetry-and-literature","tag-holmes","tag-lucens","tag-musee","tag-parsons","tag-robert","tag-sherlock"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}