by Edward Carey
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 went 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 capacious 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.
That night there was a quiet knocking on the door.
“Hello, Marie.”
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me. It’s Edmond. May I be with you a little?”
“Come in, close the door.”
“Thank you.”
“Edmond, you were wonderful today with the visitors.”
“I was?”
“Certainly.”
“Marie, I don’t want to be married.”
“No, you mustn’t be. You must stay here with me.”
He stayed a whole half hour. He showed me his doll Edmond, quite distressed now in his trauma. I wished he would put it away; it was as if it were another person come between us, stopping our privacy. When at last he did pocket the beloved thing, though, it was only to get up and leave.
The visit from the cotton wholesaler was only the first of several horrors that Edmond was put through. There was the daughter of a dressmaker who found Edmond “ridiculous,” and the child of a barber-surgeon who wondered if “he was all there.” None found him desirable, but rather strangely absent and unappealing. They were blind and foolish and undeserving people, and I was giddy with gratitude and relief for it. So they left him there. But his mother was not finished upon the hunt yet.
Edmond and I were an essential part of the great itching house, its engine perhaps. We came together that last summer as if we knew that our time was running out, that we must discover while it was still possible. Nightly there was a creaking on the stairs. The night was ours, and we were to be found in it.
He would arrive at night, while Jacques was sleeping.
“Look at you,” I said. “What a sight!”
“Here I am.”
We would look, and we would talk.
“I’m five foot, five inches and an eighth inch,” he said.
“My head’s about at your heart, isn’t it. Let’s have a listen! There! That’s the sound of Edmond. What noise you make.” We talked, we held hands, then he left again.
The house itself itched. With the great progress in business, the widow and my master were able to purchase the Monkey House for themselves. And once purchased they set about redecorating it. The walls of the ground floor were covered in crimson paper.
“Each time I come home,” Curtius said, “I feel I am entering the vast
body of some titan, that the red walls are the walls of the chambers of a colossal human trunk.”
Curtius and the widow bought objects to decorate the hall, purchased from a theatrical prop maker. There was a great clock which was actually only a piece of wood shaped like a clock, with a clock’s face painted upon it, so that it always told the same time. There were matching elaborate chests of drawers made of painted board; these had not one functioning drawer between them, but they looked real enough. There were wooden plinths painted to look like marble. At night, when Jacques was snoring, Edmond and I would go into the hall and drift together from new object to new object, pretending we were wealthy Paris people, that we had come into our own kingdom. In the large room you felt you were in a magnificent palace, though the windows looked out not on elegant gardens, but on the mud of the boulevard, and Doctor Graham’s house across the way.
“Thomas-Charles Ticre of the printworks,” said the widow to Edmond at breakfast, “has a daughter. Cornélie. We might think about that. What a future that would be. What a solid future.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Our latest great heads.
We acquired two more doctors. The Place Louis-le-Grand, a place I had never visited, was where Doctor Franz Anton Mesmer, recently fled from Vienna, set up his clinic in February 1778. He soon had many patients. He cured, a leaflet delivered to me from Edmond explained, everything from paralysis to constipation, from impotence to the vapors, from bunions to herpes, from sties to cataracts, from gallstones to gangrene, from epilepsy to dropsy, from hysteria to hiccoughs, from sterility to incontinence. He was a miracle man; he placed his hands on people’s bodies and they felt a strange power coming over them. I came to know Doctor Mesmer, not in person, but in wax. He had a very flat face with almost no profile at all, as if it had been grown facedown in a skillet.
