Singular Amours

by Edmond Thiaudière

“Get away, you old joker!” I said to my concierge. And I went upstairs at a run.

  I went into my apartment, whistling a tune from Thérèsa cheerfully. As was my habit, I put my hat down on the writing-desk, my cane in the corner of the fireplace and my overcoat on the bed. Then I darted a glance at the mirror.

  Immediately, I uttered a cry of horror. Unless I was also seeing things, like my concierge, unless I had gone mad, like the corrector of Nature, it appeared to me that I definitely no longer had my habitual face.

  Whereas before, it had measured about ten inches high by about five wide, it must presently have measured the opposite: five high by ten wide: one of those ridiculous and odious faces that certain distorting mirrors show you.

  Although I had also proved a hundred times over that that one was accurate, I looked sideways at the one on my dressing-table, and then yet another.

  Always the same head!

  Then I tried to squeeze it with both hands on the sides, in order to make it resume its original shape.

  Vain efforts!

  I had an equal desire to laugh and to weep: to laugh because my present head was reminiscent of that of a notary of my acquaintance; to weep because I thought that it was even worse than his.

  With that, there were three curt raps on my door.

  Great God! I knew those three little raps. And when I heard them, my heart ordinary skipped a beat. But where was I going to hide my head, for I no longer dared show it to the lady of my dreams, as people used to say—or the lady of my expenses, as one says nowadays?

  Well, yes!

  I would show it to her, in order to judge as a last resort whether I had or had not been metamorphosed.

  I opened my door and my arms.

  She gazed, nonplussed.

  “Pardon me, Monsieur, I’ve made a mistake...”

  “Alas, no, you’re not mistaken, angel of my life! It’s really me, your friend. Don’t you recognize my voice? Enter without fear. Nothing has changed here apart from my head; and then, believe me, it’s only a transitory head that I have here…I can give myself any head you like; you only have to choose. Look, here’s the card of the animal who will render me a handsome fellow.”

  MR. JOHN BREAD

  American Sculptor

  124 Rue de Vaugirard

  She remained petrified. Then, suddenly: “No, it’s not possible that that’s you. Adieu, Monsieur!”

  And there she goes, descending the stairs four at a time. I shout over the banister: “Rose, Rosa! What would you like my new head to look like? Reply to me, I implore you…it won’t cost Mr. Bread any more. Would you like me to have a turned-up nose or a cleft chin? Do you like that sort of thing? Would you like my wayward little beard to be reassembled into a moustache, and an imposing imperiale? Rosa…!”

  But Rosa was already far away.

  I began to rage against Mr. Bread, who was the cause of the fact that I was about to spend a detestable evening, when I could have promised myself a charming one.

  It was too late to go in search of the accursed American sculptor, who was probably not at home anyway. Sufficiently edified as to the reality of the change that had been operated in me, I did not judge it appropriate to show my horrible head to anyone else. So I deprived myself of dining, as I had the habit of doing, with a few of my friends, and I went to dine on my own in a restaurant where no one knew me, and then I went home to bed.

  The next morning, at nine o’clock, I climbed into a cab and had myself taken to the Rue de Vaugirard.

  As I went into the concierge’s lodge to ask for Mr. Bread, I was amazed to find two pairs of living Greek statues there dressed in the French style—which is to say, Monsieur the Concierge père, Madame la Concierge, Monsieur le Concierge fils, and Mademoiselle la Concierge; in a word. Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra., all cast from the same mold, all very beautiful…too beautiful.

  “Monsieur,” Clytemnestra said to me, “has doubtless come to have his face arranged by Mr. Beard. Oh, he’s a clever man Mr. Bread! To prove it, the tenant on the third was even uglier than Monsieur, if that’s possible, and now he’s as handsome as us.”

  “And the other tenants?” I said

  “The other tenants? The same thing,” replied Clytemnestra.

  “You’re all similar in the house, then?” I said.

  “Oh, my God yes! Isn’t that so, Monsieur Pipelet?” she said to Agamemnon.

  There, I thought. In that, this Monsieur Bread, who is no longer only a man, for sure, shows that he isn’t entirely a God, for a God varies is creations infinitely, and he doesn’t appear to emerge from the Greek type. Well, I don’t want his Greek. I have no desire for him to make a Menelaus of me.”

  And in thinking that, I ran at Mr. Bread’s door. A young woman came to open it, brunette, pale skinned, of medium height, with very pure and noble features...

  “Is Mr. Bread here, Madame?”

  “Yes, Monsieur.” And she added, with a malicious smile: “You’re probably the person he encountered yesterday in the Rue Blanche.”

  “I am that person, unfortunately, Madame.”

  “It’s certain,” she said, bursting into laughter, “that your present face…but you’ll see; it will be the simplest thing for my husband to make you another.”

  Madame Bread showed me into the studio; then I heard her say to husband, in a neighboring room: “John, the man you encountered yesterday in the Rue Blanche is here.”

  “Aha!” said Mr. Bread. “I’ll be there in a moment!”

  Mr. Bread’s studio was no different from others, except that the art that was exercised there was very strange. One saw a few plaster casts of celebrated statues that antiquity has transmitted to us, including Praxiteles’ Faun, the Apollo of the Belvedere, the Venus of the Capitol, the Callipygian Venus of the Museum of Naples, the Antinous, the Discobolos of the Braccia Nuovo at the Vatican, and a few moderns after Canova.

  I was admiring those masterpieces, which I had already admired in Italy, when Mr. Bread came in, dressed in the simplest manner, like an honest fellow; you would never have taken him for a magician. You might have thought that he was an old notary coming to cast a glance over his junior clerks.

  “Well,” he said, with a mocking expression, “was I right to give you my name and address? What would you have done without that, capricious youth? You would have kept an impossible head for your entire life.”

  “It wasn’t necessary,” I replied, “to commence by rendering it impossible, for, before being manipulated by you, it was still presentable.”

  “Then you hold it against me? Think, then, that I’ll make you one that will cause all those of women to turn around.”

  “A Greek head, no?”

  “Yes, everything that there is of the most Greek, and I’ll arrange you a body to match.”

  “No, thank you,” I said, “I prefer to remain as Nature intended me to be. If I become as handsome as you desire, I’ll no longer recognize myself. But explain to me why you, who have this extraordinary power to embellish people, retain your own ugliness?”

  “Alas, it’s because I can embellish everyone except myself.”

  That dolorous exclamation of Mr. Bread’s motivated certain philosophical reflections on my part that would take too long to report here, which I shall leave it to the perspicacious reader to make in his turn—who will feel very sorry for Mr. Beard, because I divine that he is particularly sympathetic.

  He said to me: “Look, there’s no man in the world to whom it would be more agreeable for me to give what I cannot give myself: beauty. Let yourself go. I’ll warm the stove sufficiently for you to undress, and you can stand on that red velvet cushion. If, at the end of half an hour—I’m only asking you for half a hour—you don’t resemble Praxiteles’ Faun, which you see here...then my name’s not John Bread!”

  “No, no,” I said, “only put my face back the way it was, I beg you.”

  “That’s a very simple thing; I only have pulled
it a little lengthwise. Let’s stand in front of that mirror, and you can stop me when it returns to its former shape, because I no longer remember the exact length.

  In less time that it takes the most expeditious dentist to pull out a tooth, Mr. Beard reestablished my face.

  I thanked him effusively; I told him that he was the most astonishing man I had ever encountered, that I was perfectly convinced of his extraordinary power, and that I would even experience a real pleasure in watching him operate.

  “You can certainly do that,” he said. “You’ll have that spectacle, and perhaps then you’ll decide on your own account. Oh, if there were a means for me to become beautiful myself, I can guarantee that I wouldn’t have to be begged!”

  Then, opening the studio door, he called: “Jenny! Jenny!”

  The exceedingly beautiful person who had come to open the door to me, and who was none other than Madame Bread, as you know, appeared then, and said to me with a entirely Parisian ease: “Well, Monsieur, you’re already much better, but you still have a margin to cross in order to became a handsome man, and I hope that you’re not going to leave it there.”

  I bowed without making any reply, preoccupied with the motive for which Mr. Bread had summoned his wife into the studio.

  There was a brief dialogue between them in English, of which, in my quality as an ignorant Frenchman, I did not understand anything. Then Madame Bread went to the stove, but a few logs in it, took off her ankle-boots and stockings, stood on the red cushion and unfastened her dress in the simplest and most natural fashion.

  I opened my eyes wide, and could not believe them.

  “My wife,” Mr. Bread said to me, has given her consent for me to repeat on her, before you, a double experiment that I have carried out several times before, for the edification of the incredulous. I told you yesterday, I believe, that Nature had afflicted Mrs. Bread with a rather grave deformity, and that it is to me that she owes being a very beautiful woman today—beautiful enough that she can stand comparison, as you can convince yourself, with the Venus of the Capitol. Well, in a first experiment I am going to restore her former deformity, and then, in a second, return her present beauty.”

  And Mr. Bread extended his hand toward his wife, who, deprived of her final garment, with her arms directed like those of the Venus of the Capitol and her gaze placid, delivered her exquisite form to my admiration.

  Then he moved the Venus of the Capitol next to Madame Bread and said to me: “Now, compare and judge!”

  It was marvelous!

  The plaster appeared to have been modeled on Madame Bread herself. And I wondered by what privilege I, a poor poet, was seeing united in a living form those perfections, which the greatest sculptors in antiquity, in order to bring them together in their work had borrowed from twenty women.

  I reported to Mr. Bread the impression that I felt.

  Madame Bread smiled.

  “Alas,” she said, “my coquetry is about to be submitted to a rude proof, for the magnificence that you are admiring, Monsieur, I shall shortly loose, and I shall become quite frightful.”

  “Are you ready?” her husband asked.

  “Whenever you please, John,” she replied, tenderly.

  Then Mr. Bread, placing one hand on her right shoulder and the other on the left, caused the vertebral column to deviate; then he staved in the rib-cage in such a way that a hump was manifest in the left shoulder—a hump that increased considerably to the prejudice of the arms and the inferior limbs, which he stripped of their harmonious amplitude and reduced to a state of rickety thinness.

  The polished, seemingly marmoreal surfaces of that beautiful body were distended and creased.

  It was pitiful to see.

  There remained the face.

  Mr. Bread caused it to swell by grasping its undulating fabric at the neck; he changed the curvature of the jaw; he magnified and deformed the nose and the ears; he altered the eyes in a singular manner; finally, he kneaded the forehead and cranium in such a manner as to give them an entirely new aspect.

  Poor Madame Bread!

  His task complete, Mr. Bread said to me: “You see what Madame Bread was before I took it into my head to transform her.”

  “My love,” said Madame Bread, in an entirely new voice, “Don’t weary Monsieur too much with such a disagreeable spectacle.”

  “I confess, Madame,” I said, “that the preceding one was much more to my taste, especially when I think that if Monsieur Bread, by a fatality that it is necessary to anticipate, were to die suddenly, you would remain thus deformed. I shudder at the thought.”

  “But that’s true, what you’re saying!” cried Madame Bread. “And I never thought of that! You hear me John—it’s necessary not to do this experiment again.”

  “Good, good…,” said Mr. Bread. “Turn toward me.” He added: “You’ve seen enough. I can operate in the contrary direction.”

  “I beg you to do so,” I said. “It’s necessary not to let Madame languish.”

  And immediately, he set to work to model his wife after the Venus of the Capitol, with a marvelous surety of hand and promptitude.

  During that second operation, which lasted for a quarter of an hour at the most, and in which Madame Bread’s beautiful forms reappeared one by one, the sculptor, the elaborated work and I chatted in a tone of the most perfect intimacy.

  “Oh, Madame,” I said to the elaborated work, “if I were your husband and I had Mr. Bread’s talent, I would want all the world to see you hunchbacked, but when we were alone and our door was securely bolted, then I would render you splendidly beautiful. That’s not an advice I’m giving Mr. Bread, for I’d lose too much if he were to follow it.”

  “Truly? How egotistical you men are; you would like a woman only to please you, and you would find it quite natural if she were to disgust others...much obliged!”

  We discussed jealousy.

  Mr. Bread smiled. One might have thought that he was a complete stranger to the passions of the human heart, who only envisaged amour from the point of view of plastic sensation. He possessed at his discretion an admirably beautiful woman, who owed her beauty to him. That was sufficient for him. As for questions of knowing whether she was faithful to him, whether she loved him exclusively, whether she dissimulated with him, he saw them romantically and did not even ask them. In any case, he was of the opinion that a well-equilibrated beauty produced as natural fruits a moderate temperament and good instincts.

  In that regard, I remember that he said to me: “Have you noticed the radical difference that exists between the voice of my deformed wife and the voice of my beautiful wife? Yes, you have, haven’t you? Well, in the same way, and with more reason, the structure of the cranium varying from one state to the other in the most notable fashion, the appetites must necessarily change. They are no longer the same. They are much better when my wife is beautiful than they are when she is deformed.”

  “You believe in Gall’s theory?”4

  “Do I believe it? Every day, I apply it and I verify it.”

  “How is that?”

  Mr. Bread winked at me, and made a little signal with his finger indicating that he did not want to talk about that in front of his wife, and then he changed the subject.

  At that moment, Madame Bread, having recovered her beauty from head to toe, was in the process of getting dressed.

  As soon as she had fastened the last clasp, her husband said: Now, my dear Jenny, Monsieur and I thank you. You can return to your chores.”

  “Monsieur,” she said to me, making a gracious curtsey, “I hope that you will take my place on the red cushion, and that you will leave here as handsome as Endymion.”

  “My word, no, Madame! That’s evidently an absurd idea; I’ll remain as I am; otherwise, no one would recognize me any longer.”

  She withdrew.

  “How do you apply and verify Gall’s theory every day?” I asked the American sculptor.

  “My wife’s gone; I can tel
l you. You know that Gall divides the fundamental drives, penchants and sentiments into twenty-seven categories, all palpable on a human cranium?”

  “Yes,” I said, a little presumptuously.

  “Well,” he continued, “Since I can mold the human cranium to my whim, you’ll understand that it’s very easy for me to develop or depress the prominences corresponding to those categories. I can just as easily enable you to show them sooner or later. There’s one prominence that I modify almost daily in my wife without her knowledge: it’s the first in Gall’s classification—you know, the one situated behind the neck...5 Sometimes I depress it, sometimes I develop it, When I leave for a journey, as you’ll understand, I never fail to nullify it...”

  “I’d very much like to know your secret, Mr. Bread,” I said, laughing, “But you’re not, it seems to me, as much a stranger to the passions of the soul as I had supposed, and I observe that jealousy bites you exactly like anyone else.”

  “Bah!” said Mr. Bread. “Let’s not talk about jealousy.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I know a little woman who isn’t pretty, but who is charming. Until now her imperfections have pleased me. Thus, she has a tooth in the front of her mouth a tooth slightly corroded by a white spot of decay, which is for me a focal point, an attraction. She has slight freckles on her face which I would be very sorry to see disappear. She has one overly slender hand of which I’m madly fond. All that is not in the least Greek, and yet all that delights me. If l bring you that little woman, I don’t want you won’t change anything about her—except, without her suspecting the why and the how, you might palpate her cranium, and if you find there, as I dread, regrettable bumps, you could destroy them; if it lacks desirable ones, you could bring them out.”

  “Very gladly,” said Mr. Bread. “But let’s see…give me a summary of her character; you’ll make my work much easier, for I’ll be able to go straight to the bumps to remake. Do you think she’s devoted?”

  “I rather think she’s egotistical.”

  Good! That’s because the bump of amity, classified by Gall as number three, is depressed. I’ll raise it, and henceforth, your little woman will be take devotion to the sublime. Has she the instinct of self-defense?