by Edward Carey
They were such different people, the ones going out of the Monkey House, from the ones coming back. Jacques brought me a souvenir. It was a doll, not particularly well made, roughly in the shape of a man but without arms, only dangling legs. It wore no clothes and had no face drawn onto its head, no hair either. It was made of simple cloth in a single color, stuffed with dried corn. It came with a piece of looped string tied around the neck. Jacques told me that dolls like this one were always sold at the hangings, for people to hold and dangle in the direction of the scaffold. When the body fell and twitched and writhed, his movements matched those of the dolls held by strings in people’s hands, the legs of the dying man like the cloth legs of the hanging dolls, kicked and pitched, desperately seeking land.
“Charles Lesquillier!” proclaimed Jacques. “Stole bread!”
Curtius was crying as I took his coat. “Stopped! Right before me. As I watched.”
The widow was in a haze of reminiscence. “I have not seen a hanging since I went with Henri. We used to go together. In happier days.”
Edmond was shaking, and even paler than usual. He stumbled rather in the hall, and then dropped down to the ground. The widow screamed. Jacques carried him upstairs; a doctor was called for. When I, barefoot, braved the stairs that night, the widow was asleep in a chair by his bed, but Edmond was awake and looking at me. I saw he was crying. But I could not speak to him, only, fearfully, return kitchenward.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Our first murderer.
The dispossessed were everywhere about Paris. They were daily growing in number, said Mercier, with no one to help them. Our neighbor Monsieur Pillet, of the chess café, lost his job and his house and his chess pieces. Many others followed. The widow wrote down the names of casualties, a list of those who had failed, and pinned it up in the workshop.
PERSON
BUSINESS
FATE
Marchand, Pierre
café for speakers of Latin
bailiffs, prison
Roland, Michel
pies
burned, hospital, death
Arlin, Georgette
silhouettes
beggary, madhouse
Dixmier, Alain, Hortense
conjurers
suicide, first him then her
Pillet, Alain
chess café
choked on bishop
As Edmond recovered from the hanging, he was not allowed downstairs but kept in his room around soft objects. I think that, having seen that death, he had felt a little of it enter into him, a crumb of it somehow inhaled, and he must thoroughly fight it off. I had horrible notions he would die too.
One murder followed upon another. It was as if we had picked up a new language to which we’d previously been deaf. Now that we spoke murder, we heard it everywhere. And there, as if conjured by our conversations, was suddenly an enormous new one, a black new history with so much marrow in its bone. In our house it was of course Jacques who let this story in: the unpleasant history of Antoine-François Desrues.
“He poisoned with arsenic!” crowed Jacques. “Arsenic in drinking chocolate! First a mother drank it, down she goes! Bang on the floor! He pulled her old body into a trunk and buried her in a rented cellar. What a fellow! What days we live in! And that’s not it yet. For then the mother’s son comes calling and out comes the chocolate again and down goes the son. Bang on the floor! And this time he’s put in the type of trunk they call a coffin and buried in a false grave. And then? The father comes and guess, guess?”
“Chocolate? Bang on the floor?”
“No, no, Marie, no, I’m sorry, but no. When the father comes he brings the police too, and it must be that Desrues did not have enough chocolate for all of them, and they, suspicious, sent out posters all over the walls of Paris, and the landlady of the rented cellar recognized Desrues’ likeness, and she screamed and she screamed. And then they dug up the cellar, and what do you think, Marie?”
A body, decomposing.
Hearing the noise, Doctor Curtius came in, and Jacques told the story again, and Curtius called in the widow, and she, all disgust, listened too. I heard them later, raised voices in the workshop.
“You never discriminate,” the widow was saying. “We cannot have just any head.”
“But I am very interested in this head. I should so like to see it. There must be something new about it—something I’ve never seen before.”
“Please, Doctor, let me decide which heads we cast.”
“I wish it! Widow Picot, just this once. I must have this head.”
“We do the fine people, the beautiful and the brilliant.”
“Just this once.”
The next day, Curtius and the widow left together. I counted to one hundred and rushed up the stairs. Edmond was in his room, his body under the covers, his head resting on the pillows. I thought he was asleep at first, but then I saw his eyes were open and his mouth too. He was keeping very still.
“Edmond,” I whispered.
He just lay there, so pale.
“Edmond!” I said.
Edmond blinked.
“He’s dead,” Edmond whispered. “I saw him die. It was such a shock. The poor hanging man. I can’t get him out of my head. I close my eyes and there he is.”
“You mustn’t think of it.”
“I think of nothing else.”
I kissed him on the cheek. I felt I should do it. It was not something I had planned upon, but it just happened, and then in a rush I was back to my duties. He was looking better, I thought, a little color in his cheeks after the kiss, no longer the pale calico of before.
My master and the widow walked to the Conciergerie, where the murderer Desrues was being held, and they returned with permission, for a fee, to visit Desrues in his cell, to make a cast of him.
“But can it be right?” the widow asked.
“We see so many businesses going down,” my master said. “Think how many will come.”
“But it is as if we celebrate what he did.”
“No, no, we are shocked by it. More than anyone else. We are the ones who are most outraged by it! That is why we must look it in the face, dear Widow. I feel we must.”
“But does a murderer belong with our other heads? It’s as if we are saying there’s no difference between them.”
“He’ll look different.”
“How?”
Curtius paused. Then stirred. Looked away and back again.
“The great men in our hall, Widow—politicians, writers, philosophers—they are men of the mind. We show their heads. Desrues is a murderer. His mind lost control, allowed his body to murder. So here is what I propose: We’ll do all of him! Every bit of him, full length, not a bust but the whole vicious man. This time we say, this is exactly how he looked, and how he walked among us!”
The widow said nothing. I went back to sweeping. But early that evening, they all went out again. I was to stay behind again to guard the house. Even Edmond was to go, to give him courage, to toughen him up. The widow insisted he was not like his father, really, not so vulnerable. It was only this once, she said. How thin he was, how uncertain upon his feet.
“Don’t take him,” I said. “He looks ill.”
“And when do servants make orders?” asked the widow.
“I just thought.”
“Don’t think. Your thoughts are not necessary.”
When they came back, Jacques was almost dancing with wonder. My master w
ent directly to the workshop, the widow, shaking and sweating, to her bed, and Edmond, white and miserable, came to the kitchen to tell me what had happened.
“He was in tears when we saw him. He cried the entire time, which caused problems with the plaster mold. He kept saying, ‘They’re going to kill me, they’re going to kill me.’ Jacques pinned him still so that Doctor Curtius could place the plaster over his face. When Curtius took the dried plaster away, he said, ‘Will it be like that? Will everything suddenly go dark?’ When we left his cell, he said, ‘Our Father which art in Heaven. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!’ Oh God, Marie, I measured him! Oh God, Marie, there is death everywhere!”
I kissed him again on the cheek. He stood very still. He did not run away. I put his hand in mine. His ears reddened just for a moment and then paled once more. He could not shake Desrues from his mind. His mother called out to him—as if she always knew when he was near me—and away he went. But there was something else. Before he retreated, he leaned forward, and I felt a moth flutter by my face and go away again. Edmond had kissed me. I held my cheek afterward, till Jacques laughed at me; in the night I thought of it over and over. No one had done that to me before.
I did not see our Desrues until he had been cast, not until Curtius had finished and called us all to come and witness. Antoine-François Desrues was a puny man, with a pale, uneven face. It was not an exceptional face after all. It was an everyday sort, such as would not be out of place on any Parisian street. But then, after a while, it did seem a murdering head after all, a very terrible physiognomy.
“This could lead,” my master mused, “to a greater understanding of people! At the very least, it will prove forever that such a man could exist. We’ll trap barbarity in wax!”
The real Antoine-François Desrues was placed in a white robe, given a white hat like a bishop’s and a crucifix. His limbs were smashed with a sledgehammer and then what was left of the sorry man was burned alive. Jacques went, and when he returned he told me all about it.
The wax Desrues was the first full-length wax figure that was made. He was presented standing up, bent slightly forward, offering in his hands a porcelain cup and saucer. Word of his arrival brought many people. People who were not interested in Rousseau and Diderot came to see Desrues; to them he seemed wonderfully horrible.
In this manner, the House of Curtius went into the business of murderers. The widow nailed a length of rope to the floor, dividing the hall in two. She kept the better visages to one side, and sequestered Desrues on the other. Once the business had started with murderers, it was very hard for it to stop. Jacques spoke ceaselessly of bodies found incomplete down backstreets. Edmond screamed in the night, until the widow went in to comfort him.
One morning, as I laid out their breakfast, the widow wondered aloud: “If we invite murderers into our home, what does that make us?”
“Brave?” offered my master.
“It is a terrible hunger, yours, Doctor Curtius.”
“I do thank you for allowing Desrues. You do note how our business progresses? You are a very fine woman, you see,” said Curtius, and in a rare, rash gesture he touched her arm.
“I am a widow in mourning,” she reminded him. “That’s my husband atop the stairs.”
Desrues increased the profit of the Cabinet, it could not be denied. The widow, scratching her bonnet, herself reluctantly nodded, but she turned the dummy of her dead husband to face away from the ground floor, where the murderers were. For once Desrues’ earning potential was proven, indeed other villains joined him. Curtius was taken with his murderers: he had cast the body parts of hanged men back in Berne, but he had never had such a comprehension of personalities before. They affected him greatly; he rubbed and rubbed his neck until his skin was raw. He studied the ways these people had killed; sometimes, he told me, he felt as though he’d not only died all those deaths but also committed them. They were too strong, perhaps, those murderous heads—they led him into the insides of people. He was like a child at a well, holding on to the rim of the neck of a vast decapitated body, looking down into the depths, terrified but yearning to see more, craning himself ever farther forward into the bloody depths, at risk of losing his balance and tumbling inside. If he should fall in, he might never get out again.
In the early mornings I mingled with the late murderers in the hall, sweeping around them, getting them ready for the next viewing. The very latest people.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
On itching.
By the time the third murderer was cast, other people had been modeled besides, people who delighted the widow: two aeronautical brothers of genius called Montgolfier, who could, they said—though I never saw it— rise up in the sky in great silken balloons. A pockmarked composer called Gluck. Another, his rival, lean and handsome Piccinni. What people I kept company with!
Jacques helped with a few basic tasks in the workshop, hauling the sacks of plaster dust, sawing wood for armatures, but he was never allowed close to the models. He was clumsy, he was too rough, he upset things. Objects were terrified of Jacques. Without meaning to, he would shatter glass and porcelain; he didn’t mean anything by it; there was nothing to be done about it. He made people cry. But Jacques wanted to get closer to his murderers. One night I awoke to terrible screams and moans—not a monkey, but a similar horrifying sound, as if those noises were echoing years later. We found Jacques upstairs in the workshop with his feet in a large pail of plaster. Hoping to prove his ingeniousness to Curtius by casting his own feet, he had mixed the plaster himself, but when he slipped his feet into a great iron bucket of the stuff, it had trapped them. Plaster on living flesh must be used in small layers; place a foot into a deep container, and it will hold your foot prisoner till it scorches and cooks it. Jacques couldn’t get his feet out, and neither could I, nor my master, nor even the widow, and all Edmond could do was cry, “Do something! Do something!” The pain was terrible, the widow gave him brandy, I held his hands, he screamed and screamed. By the time Curtius had chipped away and freed his feet, the plaster was growing cold. Jacques would never allow the wounds to heal properly, picking at them and scratching them. He would hobble for the rest of his life.
“Plaster,” said Curtius to Jacques in his pain (what music it was to me to hear his lessons again!), “knows nothing about life. It is a dead substance. When light shines upon it, all it knows is sterility. It reveals facts without personality. It can show pores, it can show wrinkles, it can copy—but never with character. When mixed with water, the plaster powder becomes gypsum, and for a moment the combination of water and plaster makes heat, but there is no passion in this heat. It is hot, yes, but a hot nothing. There’s no comprehension of flesh with it. Wax, on the other hand, is fleshy. Wax is skin.”
The Monkey House up and down suffered from itches. Jacques’ feet itched, but that was barely the start of it. An itch racked Curtius’ whole body, and he scratched at it, he clawed at his skin, bruising and cutting at it, blaming the exquisite agony on so many murderers. When Jacques itched, we all knew about it; he could not be controlled. He would sit on the floor and rock back and forth, or absently scratch as he stared out the window at the boulevard. Even the widow could be found on occasion furiously patting at her head, sometimes rubbing hard at it with a butter knife.
Sometimes I heard my master at night, on the landing, visiting the dummy of Henri Picot. Perhaps once a month, in those clandestine hours, he would take a pair of small scissors, of the type called toupet, from the widow’s tools, and sever a stitch on the dummy, seldom enough that the widow never noticed. After a while the back came away, the neck fell down, and beneath the object a small pile of sawdust and chips grew, augmented by droppings from a slew of tiny slashes, waiting to be swept up. One day Widow Picot, who had not looked at her husband’s shape since turning it around, suddenly remembered him again, and with a heave of passion and renewed grief, gathered his replica in her capacio
us embrace. She repaired her husband, patched him up, bound him tightly with her love, recalling as she did so the troughs and the small gradients of her dear dead. After several days he was back at his station, more Henri than ever. And my master miserable.
And other itches were afoot. I itched. And Edmond did too, I knew he did.
“You are a certain age now, Edmond,” the widow observed one morning at the breakfast table. “Seventeen. Beyond childhood. New things will happen to you. New beginnings. Different people, new measurements.”
“What new people, Mother?”
“I want you, Edmond, to grow up. And there’s something else you might think about, that someone of your age and quality should consider.”
“What, Mother?”
“The getting of a wife,” she said, pausing to marvel. “Edmond with the women!”
But at present it was Edmond without the women, for when he was marshaled into proximity with his opposite sex, with the single exception of myself, Edmond became a dead shop doll. Like me, he had his very own vanishing system. In such circumstances, he magicked his insides into sawdust and hempwaste, until the only blood left in him was concentrated in his ears; he made himself over into nobody at all. Movement only resurfaced after the woman had gone away, after several minutes of standing quite alone waiting for life to return, blood flowing slowly from his ears back into his body, soaking all that hempwaste until it became lungs and liver, bladder and bowels once more.
The first of Edmond’s potential wives was the daughter of a cotton wholesaler. A ruddy-faced thing, she had tiny eyes like swine and visible white eyelashes and smelled of urine. Her father was a huffing, puffing sort of oink, her mother a potbellied sow. Their sty was doing well, and the mother wished to combine business with pigness. The girl sat beside Edmond as directed and looked hard at him, but Edmond never moved. The parents spoke to Edmond, but he never made a sound, so they got a little puffy about that, and the girl began to look unhappy, her almost-white hair growing greasy before my eyes. Finally she took hold of Edmond’s hand. As she held it, though, her white face went whiter and a little whiter, she whined a bit, and then she gave the hand back. They never returned.