In the August 1898 issue of La Revue de Revues, some of the latest and most astonishing discoveries in the field of science were revealed to a wider public: in between a ‘marvelous’ technique for ‘[t]he liquefaction of air’ and a surprising apparatus for measuring thought (‘[t]he machine to measure thought’), a long article described a recent breakthrough on ‘[t]he survival of the body’. This was anatomist Efisio Marini's system for turning human flesh into stone. What the article dubbed a ‘transformation of the human body into marble’ involved the total mineralisation of a dead body so as to preserve its structure and morphological characteristics intact. The dead were transformed into statues, but the wonder of Marini's secret for petrification was its reversibility: by plunging the marbled ‘pieces’ into a special, regenerating fluid, the body's tissues surprisingly regained their ‘volume, freshness, elasticity and normal colour’. Stone was turned back into flesh. The whole process could, of course, be repeated indefinitely, giving a sense that those bodies were not dead at all. Rather, they shifted between inanimate and animate states, leaving viewers in ‘enchanted’ suspension as to whether they were looking at embodied humans, marble artefacts or the puzzling objets d’artthat readers could see for themselves in the photographs accompanying the article.