In 1816, the French naval ship The Medusa set out to repossess the colony of Senegal. Commanded by an incompetent captain, she ran aground off the West African coast. While 250 passengers escaped on lifeboats, the rest – 146 men and one woman – were herded on to a raft and abandoned.

The raft carried those who survived to the frontiers of human experience. Crazed, parched and starved, they slaughtered mutineers, ate their dead companions and killed the weakest. Two weeks later, when the raft was rescued, there were 15 survivors.

Among them were Alexandre Corréard, a geographical engineer, and Henri Savigny, a surgeon, who together wrote a bestselling account of their ordeal. As the furore surrounding the shipwreck grew, the artist Géricault was in the midst of his own scandal – he had been having an affair with his uncle’s young wife and she was now pregnant. Knowing he could never see her again, he began work on The Raft of the Medusa in 1818.

Corréard was both a model and adviser, and visited Géricault at his studio, where the artist used rotting body parts for his sketches. When the painting went on show in Paris in 1819 it caused a sensation. But at the height of his fame, Géricault contracted tuberculosis. He died on January 26, 1824, at the age of 32, never having met his son, who was raised by a nurse in Normandy.

An agitated young man with a recently shaved skull and piercing eyes emerged through a portico that fronted the hospital and turned into the chilly shadow of the street. In this bitter winter of 1819 he had a newfound sense of determination – a resolve formed not a moment too soon: although only 27, this striking figure would, within the space of five years, be dead.

He had chosen to install himself in a working-class, north-western suburb of Paris, close to the Hôpital Beaujon. The quarter was tainted by the bloodshed of a revolution and, more recently, by the debris of an empire overthrown. Mutilation was commonplace. Injured soldiers and amputees formed a macabre and lengthening procession that had dragged itself about the city since Napoleon’s first conquests.

Although the muslin parcel that he hugged in his arms was cumbersome, the young man quickened his pace. If it seemed like madness to parade in broad daylight with a severed head clutched closely to one’s breast, it was nothing to the folly of the world into which Théodore Géricault had plunged. His new friend, Alexandre Corréard, had promised to call. Corréard had been on board The Medusa. He had survived the infamous ordeal on the raft and had privileged information to impart.

The severed head was already putrid, but the stench that greeted Géricault as he climbed the stairs to his lodgings was emetic. It was fortunate that he was living an almost reclusive existence, for the stink was overpowering as he opened his front door and beheld the carnage. Arranged lovingly, like delicacies on a small table, were the amputated arms and legs of some unfortunate person.

Corréard burst into the room. He showed no sign of shock at the butchery and neither did the reek of rotting flesh upset him. Corréard had, three years before, over a period of days floating between life and death, eaten from the hacked-off limbs of dead companions. Since then, such sights had racked his dreams, but somehow these scraps, arranged for purposes of research, seemed acceptable. Over the past few weeks, his host, Géricault, had been living with putrefaction as fragments of bodies had decomposed all about him, helping the artist to approach the horror precipitated by the wreck of The Medusa.

The Medusa had been driven on to a sandbank by its inept captain, a relic from the ancient regime who had been appointed leader of the expedition in recompense for past political services. Corréard, as a member of that ill-fated expedition, had been the victim of an avoidable shipwreck and a misconceived rescue plan. Adding insult to injury, when Corréard had sought compensation, he had been spurned by an indifferent government. Outraged, he had embarked on the very modern tactic of turning himself into a kind of celebrity by publicising his misfortune. To this end, Corréard had written The Shipwreck of the Frigate, the Medusa – a bestseller – and was visiting this stinking room to elaborate on certain visual details that were absent from his text. He was here to help create an image, to act as an adviser to this disturbed young artist, who was deep in a painting with which he sought to make his name.

So gripping was the indictment of the French leadership in Corréard’s book that it had been translated into English, German and Dutch, with an Italian translation forthcoming. The work, in its second French edition, had become more politicised in scope. Host and visitor began to talk, exploring the labyrinth of issues that led out from that supreme act of cowardice, the release and cutting of the ropes that were supposed to tow the raft of The Medusa to safety.

The period between the breaking of the Medusa story and the publication of Savigny’s and Corréard’s book, with its upsetting, in-depth revelations, had been a difficult time for Géricault. In early 1818, as a result of the calamitous twist in his secret relationship, he developed an even deeper engagement with suffering, which would, in one way or another, transform him into someone who, for the rest of his short existence, would wrestle with questions of life and death. Géricault was facing the inevitable loss of his loved one, along with the probable loss of his child.

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