Hathor had once told Georgiana that Homo meant a human being in the biological sense, or rather, one made of "flesh and blood."
Georgiana had never known why the French Ministry of Magic had been located in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Now she remembered that, within that seemingly ordinary residential district, stood Delacroix's former home. At the Louvre Museum, he had a painting called The Raft of the Medusa, and the raft was covered with "flesh and blood."
The work had been completed in 1819 and depicted an incident from 1816. A French warship had run into trouble off Africa's west coast, while the aristocratic officers aboard abandoned the crew.
After Napoleon had been imprisoned on Elba, he escaped back to France. Louis XVIII sent troops to intercept him, but the soldiers all defected, and the "Corsican Monster" returned to Paris once more.
Under Britain's "custom of the sea," sailors driven to desperate circumstances would eat their own kind. Much like what had happened in Queen v. Dudley and Stephens, cannibalism for survival had been considered understandable and forgivable by the public at the time.
So had the sailors on The Raft of the Medusa followed the "custom of the sea"? Or would they rather starve to death than eat human flesh to survive?
They had placed the corpses on the raft, where they would eventually rot, yet they still had to bring their companions' bodies back for burial, just as the greeks had demanded of the generals who won their battles?
The Venetians had hidden St. Mark's body among pork. The Ottoman navy inspecting the ship had refused, out of faith, to touch those "unclean" foods.
For people in the twentieth century, fasting was simply not a thing. As a result, despite all the research into Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, they