ANOTHER PRELIMINARY CHAPTER. THE COMPRACHICOS. I. WHO now knows the word Comprachicos, and who knows its meaning? The Comprachicos, or Comprapequeños, were a hideous and nondescript association of wanderers, famous in the 17th century, forgotten in the 18th, and unknown in the 19th. The Comprachicos are like the "succession powder," an ancient social characteristic detail. They are part of old human ugliness. To the great eye of history, which sees all collectively, the Comprachicos belong to the colossal fact of slavery. Joseph sold by his brethren is a chapter in their story. The Comprachicos have left their traces in the penal laws of Spain and England. You may find here and there in the dark confusion of English laws the impress of this horrible truth, as one finds the foot-print of a savage in a forest. Comprachicos, the same as Comprapequeños, is a compound Spanish word signifying Child-merchants. The Comprachicos traded in children. They bought them and they sold them. They did not steal them. The kidnapping of children is another branch of industry. And what did they make of these children? Monsters. Why monsters ? To laugh at. The populace must needs laugh. Kings also. The mountebank is wanted in the streets; the jester at the Louvre. The one is called a Clown, the other a Fool. The efforts of man to procure himself pleasure are sometimes worthy of the attention of the philosopher. What do we sketch in these few preliminary pages? A chapter in the most terrible of books; a book which might be entitled-The Farming of the unhappy by the happy. II. A CHILD destined to be a plaything for men-such a thing has existed; such a thing exists even now. In simple and savage times such a thing constituted an especial trade. The 17th century, called the great century, was of these times. It was a century very Byzantine in tone. It combined corrupt simplicity with delicate ferocity; a curious variety of civilization. A tiger making pretty mowes. Madame de Sevigné minces on the subject of the faggot and the wheel. This century traded a good deal in children. Flattering historians have concealed the sore, but have divulged the remedy, Vincent de Paul. In order that a human toy should succeed, he must be taken early. The dwarf must be fashioned when young. We play with childhood. But a well formed child is not very amusing; a hunchback is better fun. Hence grew an art. There were trainers who took a man and made him an abortion; they took a face and made a muzzle; they stunted growth; they kneaded the face. The artificial production of teratological cases had its rules. It was quite a science; what one can imagine as the antithesis of orthopedy. There where God had put a look, this art put a squint. There where God had made harmony, they made discord. There where God had made the perfect picture, they re-established the sketch; and, in the eyes of connoisseurs, it was the sketch which was perfect. They also debased animals they invented piebald horses. Turenne rode a piebald horse. In our own days do they not dye dogs blue and green? Nature is our canvas. Man has always wished to add something to God's work. Man retouches creation, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The Court buffoon was nothing but an attempt to lead back man to the monkey. It was a progress the wrong way. A master-piece in retrogression. At the same time they tried to make a man of the monkey. Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland and Countess of Southampton, had a marmoset for a page. Frances Sutton, Baroness Dudley, eighth peeress in the bench of barons, had tea served by a baboon clad in gold brocade, which her ladyship called My Black. Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, used to go and take her seat in Parliament in a coach with armorial bearings, behind which stood, their muzzles stuck up in the air, three Cape monkeys in grand livery. A Duchess of Medina-Celi, whose toilette Cardinal Pole witnessed, had her stockings put on by an ourang-outang. These monkeys raised in the scale were a counterpoise to men brutalised and bestialised. This promiscuousness of man and beast, desired by the great, was especially prominent in the case of the dwarf and the dog. The dwarf never quitted the dog, which was always bigger than himself. The dog was the pair of the dwarf; it was as if they were coupled with a collar. This juxtaposition is authenticated by a mass of domestic records; notably by the portrait of Jeffrey Hudson, dwarf of Henrietta, of France, daughter of Henri Quatre, and wife of Charles I. To degrade man tends to deform him. The suppression of his state was completed by disfigurement. Certain vivisectors of that period succeeded marvellously well in effacing from the human face the divine effigy. Doctor Conquest, member of the Amen-street College, and judicial visitor of the chemists' shops of London, has written a book in Latin on this pseudo-surgery, the processes of which he describes. If we are to believe Justus of Carrickfergus, the inventor of this branch of surgery was a monk named Avonmore; an Irish word signifying the Great River. The dwarf of the Elector Palatine, Perkeo, whose effigy-or ghost -springs from a magical box in the cave of Heidelberg, was a remarkable specimen of this science, very varied in its applications. It fashioned beings, the law of whose existence was hideously simple, it permitted them to suffer, and commanded them to amuse. III. THE fabrication of monsters was practised on a large scale, and comprised various species. The Sultan required them, so did the Pope; the one to guard his women, the other to say his prayers. These were of a peculiar kind, incapable of reproduction. Scarcely human beings, they were useful to voluptuousness and to religion. The seraglio and the Sistine Chapel utilised the same species of monsters; fierce in the former case, mild in the latter. We They knew how to produce things in those days which are not produced now; they had talents which we lack, and it is not without reason that some good folk cry out that the decline has come. no longer know how to sculpture living human flesh; this is consequent on the loss of the art of torture. Men were once virtuosi in that respect, but are so no longer; the art has become so simplified that it will soon disappear altogether. In cutting the limbs of living men, in opening their bellies and in dragging out their entrails, phenomena were grasped on the moment and discoveries made. We are obliged to renounce these experiments now, and are thus deprived of the progress which surgery makes by aid of the executioner. The vivisection of former days was not limited to the manufacture of phenomena for the market-place, of buffoons for the palace (a species of augmentative of the courtier), and eunuchs for sultans and popes. It abounded in varieties. One of its triumphs was the manufacture of cocks for the king of England. It was the custom, in the palace of the kings of England, to have a sort of watchman, who crowed like a cock. This watcher, awake while all others slept, ranged the palace, and raised from hour to hour the cry of the farmyard, repeating it as often as was necessary, and thus supplying a clock. This man, promoted to be cock, had undergone in childhood the operation of the pharynx, which was part of the art described by Dr. Conquest. Under Charles II. the salivation, inseparable to the operation, having disgusted the Duchess of Portsmouth, the appointment was indeed preserved, so that the splendour of the crown should not be tarnished, but they got an unmutilated man to represent the cock. A retired officer was generally selected for this honourable employment. Under James II. the functionary was named William Sampson, Cock, and received for his crow 97. 2s. 6d. annually." The memoirs of Catherine II. inform us that at St. Petersburg, scarcely a hundred years since, whenever the czar or czarina was displeased with a Russian prince, he was forced to squat down in the great ante-chamber of the palace, and to remain in that posture a certain number of days, mewing like a cat, or clucking like a sitting hen, and pecking his food from the floor. ■ M. Victor Hugo refers the reader to Chamberlayne's work on "The Present State of England," chapter xiii., where will be found "A List of His Majesties Household Officers and Servants attending in the several offices below stairs, under the command of his Grace James Duke of Ormond, Lord Steward, together with their respective salaries." From this list it may be enough to quote the last five entries. "Sir Edward Villers, Knight Marshall Six under Marshalls William Sampson, Cock Four Grooms Purveyours of Longcarts Henry Rainsford, Porter at St. James's . . £26 00 100 00 00 09 02 об 10 13 04 And in case anyone should imagine that Cock is a misprint for Cook, let it be observed that the officers of the king's kitchen are given in a different part of the same chapter, and that the wages of the meanest of them was double what the gallant Cock obtained. Here is the list : |