Ampliare

The collection of porcelain flasks was brought from France just for this drugstore, as well as the beautiful small containers in different colors.

Matanzas, a city that harbors a spiritual wealth that deservedly earned it the nickname of Cuba's Athens, treasures numerous natural beauties and a cultural background embracing all the thoughts and the poetry the town's rivers have dragged throughout history. Matanzas wakes up to a new day and opens up the doors of what truly symbolizes one of its greatest emblems: Dr. Triolet's French Boutique.

A group of guide-led tourists waits for the moment to discover the gems this former drugstore possesses inside. This establishment, that has outlived the passage of time, is a must-see for those eager to know the city or for travelers who are just passing by town.

Today, I set out to tour its halls and listen to the story of Dr. Triolet's French Boutique, the only one of its kind under the sun, that today houses the world's most sought-after pharmaceutical museum.

The drugstore was opened on January 1, 1882 in the former Arms Square of the city of Matanzas by pharmaceutical doctors Juan Fermin Figueroa and Ernesto Triolet Teliebre. Two powerful sentiments served as underpinnings for this facility: friendship and love. The former bound the drugstore's founders until death did them apart; the latter managed to enhance and preserve this work for forever more.

The Figueroa and Triolet families were not only knit together by ties of friendship. Mr. Figueroa's sister, Maria Justa –who unfortunately died at an early age- married Dr. Ernesto Triolet, who had come from France invited by his friend to settle down in town. After his wife's death, Mr. Triolet tied the knot again with Figueroa's daughter, Maria de los Dolores, the first Cuban woman ever to graduate as pharmaceutical doctor in New York (1886).

In his second marriage, the Frenchman begot a family of artists and scientists, let alone that he helped strengthen and expand a cultural and scientific valuable work: the French boutique. This is a place where time is standing still and the presence of the drugstore's founders can be felt up in the air. Many stories recounting ghostly appearances that waft through the museum seem to prove this assertion right.

As a man of science, Mr. Triolet was a workaholic. His talent, carefulness and dedication, his attention to each and every detail, made the boutique become one of the country's most talked-about drugstores for the quality and originality of its products.

Besides being a great father and husband, Mr. Triolet was also a hardworking researcher who always remained posted on the latest scientific breakthroughs of his time. His magnificent personal library makes this point.

On the other hand, he manufactured his own line of products –some of them patented by Triolet himself. He took some of those pharmaceuticals to the Paris World Exposition in 1900 where he won the bronze medal. Some of the award-winning products were a Compound Coffee syrup, the tri-digestive elixir, fever-reducing vegetable pills and the ferruginous wine, among many others. But Mr. Triolet didn't make it back to Cuba; he passed away in France on December 19, 1900, as a result of a strong pulmonary condition.

The boutique closed up shop on January 16, 1964 and reopened as a museum a few months later on Mayday. Ernesto Triolet Figueroa, the couple's youngest child, took care of the boutique until his demise in 1975. Thanks to his dedication and the work of his mother, the drugstore was passed on to people who have preserved it through the years with the same love and keenness.

At the Pharmaceutical Museum, formerly known as Dr. Triolet's French Boutique, medications are no longer made. However, the immense amount of scientific information harbored behind its walls makes the place a reference center for those who delve into natural therapies and remedies. This is the place to look up scientific information in books published in the 19th century and the first half of 20th century, and skim through logbooks of odd medical recipes, compiled in 55 volumes, that keep tabs on a million and a half formulas made all at the boutique and prescribed by famous physicians in Matanzas like Madam, Cuni, Font and Carnot. It's worth getting a word in edgeways right now and say those dusty formulas contain the basic ingredients of lots of medications currently manufactured by famous Cuban pharmaceutical labs like Labiofam and others linked to green medicine.

TIME STANDS STILL I start touring the museum's halls, but first I stop in front of the facade and my eyes alight on an outside on-duty lamp that's been there, right in the same place, since the opening of the boutique. Today, that lamp is part of the legends –could they be more than that?- that cast their spell over the old drugstore. Some people say the lamp goes on every once in a while to remind passers-by the boutique will be open for the night.

Right at the threshold, I feel that peculiar ambience up in the air that takes me back in time to the opening of the drugstore. A phone booth, the benches for the messengers and a 150-drawer labeler treasuring over a million stickers used for medication labels are still standing here. The place appears to have the spirits of its founders ingrained in everything around. Each object and flask remain in a superb state of conservation and they seem to be alive. Could the ghost-and-elf stories about the place be the cause of this sensation?

We make a pause at the first hall, the heart of the boutique. When the drugstore was operational, this was the area to cater to customers. Busts of Galen and Hippocrates preside over the place, plus a centerpiece with the image of the Purest Virgin of Conception carved in the finest Carrara marble. Her presence was necessary to keep the establishment blessed and protected.

The collection of porcelain flasks was brought from France just for the drugstore, as well as the breathtaking small containers filled with distilled water in a variety of colors. The counter is now decked out with a beautiful marble-and-bronze scale used in the past for small purchases, escorted by the foundational grail, made of Sevres porcelain and with the photographs of the founders stamped on it.

We get to the “rear boutique,” whose middle ground is dominated by the huge one-piece dispenser table made of ironwood and designed by the owner himself. An array of old-timed gems are arranged on that table: clay or bronze pill holders, scaled cups, porcelain and glass mortars, presses, moulds for ovules, suppositories and gel caps, plus a labeler and a lazy Susan for holding medication flasks. The table is outfitted with drawers everywhere that keep lids, caps, measurers and old bottles tidy.

The last room of the drugstore is the herb storage, teeming with imported plants that were used to squeeze active ingredients off them, and a pharmaceutical library with books on medicine and botany, highly valuable scientific texts and the best Spanish, American and French drug-making techniques of the 19th century.

The museum has three storage areas, a small balcony in the rear boutique, a warehouse and the so-called patent keeper of prestigious labs. Other products obtained here were powders, ointments, tinctures, essences and syrups, all in display together with medical instruments the owners used to sell to physicians, clinics and hospital. Some of those instruments include oxygen generators, ECG equipment, sterilizers and a gorgeous collection of French pacifiers that reveals good taste and originality.

The laboratory used to be the boutique's heart and soul. According to our guide, it always ran on wood. All the instruments, made of copper and bronze, are excellently well preserved: alembics, percolators, leaching utensils, pots, jars and funnels. There are also mortars made of different materials and in several sizes, plus a collection of lidded schooners containing wine, syrups and essences.

The walls of the inner patio are equipped with shelves full of flasks of different colors since medications used to be stored depending on their own photosensitivity. A curious detail is the building itself. Its construction style has prevented hurricanes' gusting winds and pouring rain from knocking down the shelves in the patio, something that seems hard to cotton on to.

Once you've toured the boutique, you can't wait to hear the stories of ghosts and elf that play such a major role in keeping the old drugstore shrouded in mystery. So I head for the house of Dr. Ercilio Vento Canosa, a famed physician from Matanzas who's also a great researcher, writer and current president of Cuba's Speleology Society. Besides, he's my friend and I know he'll live up to my expectations. Interview with Dr. Vento

“I think of all the city's museums, this is the one that keeps a higher level of structural integrity. It also recreates the exact ambience of what the place actually was in the past because those who have worked here through the years have gone all out to keep everything just like that. That allows things to hold on to their own spirits and their own origins.” This exceptional state of conservation stirs up –Dr. Vento believes- some rumors and expressions linked to poltergeist apparitions.

All throughout its history, the French Boutique has seemingly been the setting of apparitions and mysterious phenomena quite a number of people have given credit to, even the drugstore employees recall hearing Dr. Triolet's cane thumping on the upper floor; steps climbing the creaky stairs; the porcelain vase with the faces of Dr. Triolet and his wife on both sides of it spinning in both directions; a little girl running back and forth, a girl who was a member of the family that died too young; medicine flasks whose stickers were glued in one position and later on they turn up in another; the bells of a clock that hasn't run for many years; the excellent description of the drugstore made by a new worker to a group of visitors. This man hadn't been aware of any information about the place and at the end of the tour, he couldn't recall what had really happened to him.

Yet no other story is spookier than what the museum curator and several employees claim to have witnessed. The image of the Purest Virgin of the Conception was placed inside a glass case from day one of the boutique and it remained there for years. Due to some refurbishment works that were going on inside the boutique, the workers took out the image to wash it. After the image had been cleaned and right when they were putting it back inside the glass case, all people there –including the museum curator- saw a blue light that beamed out of the virgin and spread briefly around the place. This vision made one of the bricklayers shout: “I won't ever put my feet back in here again!”

Reality? Legend? Mentally induced phenomena? The fact of the matter is the origin is unimportant when the essence of a man's great deed is what really counts and inspires such findings, either esoteric or spirit-enriching one. These men, the creators, “the ones who don't let things just happen, but rather force things to happen,” are the real heroes who go down in the history books.