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URSUS and Homo were fast friends. Ursus was a
A man, Homo a wolf. Their dispositions tallied. It
was the man who had christened the wolf: probably he
had also chosen his own name. Having found Ursus fit
for himself, he had found Homo fit for the beast. Man
and wolf turned their partnership to account at fairs, at
village fetes, at the corners of streets where passers-by
throng, and out of the need which people seem to feel
everywhere to listen to idle gossip, and to buy quack
medicine. The wolf, gentle and courteously subordinate,
diverted the crowd. It is a pleasant thing to behold the
tameness of animals. Our greatest delight is to see all the
varieties of domestication parade before us. This it is
which collects so many folks on the road of royal
processions.
Ursus and Promo went about from cross-road to
cross-road, from the High Street of Aberystwith to the High
Street of Jedburgh, from country-side to country-side,
from shire to shire, from town to town. One market
exhausted, they went on to another. Ursus lived in a small
van upon wheels, which Homo was civilised enough to draw
by day and guard by night. On bad roads, up hills, and
where there were too many ruts, or there was too much
mud, the man buckled the trace round his neck and pulled
fraternally, side by side with the wolf. They had thus
grown old together. They encamped at haphazard on a
common, m the glade of a wood, on the waste patch of
grass where roads intersect, at the outskirts of villages,
at the gates of towns, in market-places, in public walks,
on the borders of parks, before the entrances of churches.
When the cart drew up on a fair green, when the gossips
ran up open-mouthed and the curious made a circle round
the pair, Ursus harangued and Homo approved. Homo,
with a bowl in his mouth, politely made a collection among
the audience. They gained their livelihood. The wolf
was lettered, likewise the man. The wolf had been trained
by the man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers
wolfish arts, which swelled the receipts. ``Above all things,
do not degenerate into a man,'' his friend would say to him.
Never did the wolf bite: the man did now and then.
At least, to bite was the intent of Ursus. He was a
misanthrope, and to italicise his misanthropy he had made
himself a juggler. To live, also; for the stomach has
to be consulted. Moreover, this juggler-misanthrope,
whether to add to the complexity of his being or to perfect
it, was a doctor. To be a doctor is little: Ursus was a
ventriloquist. You heard him speak without his moving
his lips. He counterfeited, so as to deceive you, any one's
accent or pronunciation. He imitated voices so exactly
that you believed you heard the people themselves. A11
alone he simulated the murmur of the crowd, and this gave
him a right to the title of Engastrimythos, which he took.
He reproduced all sorts of cries of birds, as of the thrush,
the wren, the pipit lark, otherwise called the gray cheeper,
and the ring ousel, all travelers like himself: so that at
times, when the fancy struck him, he made you aware
either of a public thoroughfare filled with the uproar of
men, or of a meadow loud with the voices of beasts-at
one time stormy as a multitude, at another fresh and
serene as the dawn. Such gifts, although rare, exist. In
the last century a man called Touzel, who imitated the
mingled utterances of men and animals, and who
counterfeited all the cries of beasts, was attached to the person
of Buffoon-to serve as a menagerie.
Ursus was sagacious, contradictory, odd, and inclined
to the singular expositions which we term fables. He
had the appearance of believing in them, and this
impudence was a part of his humour. He read people's hands,
Opened books at random and drew conclusions, told
fortunes, taught that it is perilous to meet a black mare, still
more perilous, as you start for a journey, to hear yourself
accosted by one who knows not whither you are going;
and he called himself a dealer in superstitions. He used
to say: ``There is one difference between me and the
Archbishop of Canterbury: I avow what I am.'' Hence
it was that the archbishop, justly indignant, had him one
day before him; but Ursus cleverly disarmed his grace
by reciting a sermon he had composed upon Christmas
Day, which the delighted archbishop learned by heart, and
delivered from the pulpit as his own. In consideration
thereof the archbishop pardoned Ursus.
As a doctor, Ursus wrought cures by some means or
other. He made use of aromatics; he was versed in
simples; he made the most of the immense power which
lies in a heap of neglected plants, such as the hazel, the
catkin, the white alder, the white briony, the mealy-tree,
the traveler's joy, the buckthorn. He treated phthisis
with the sundew; at opportune moments he would use
the leaves of the spurge, which plucked at the bottom are
a purgative and plucked at the top, an emetic. He cured
sore throat by means of the vegetable excrescence called
Jew's ear. He knew the rush which cures the ox and the
mint which cures the horse. He was well acquainted with
the beauties and virtues of the herb mandragora, which,
as every one knows, is of both sexes. He had many
recipes. He cured burns with the salamander wool, of
which, according to Pliny, Nero had a napkin. Ursus
possessed a retort and a flask; he effected transmutations;
he sold panaceas. It was said of him that he had once
been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the
honour to take him for a madman, but had set him free
on discovering that he was only a poet. This story was
probably not true; we have all to submit to some such
legend about us.
The fact is, Ursus was a bit of a savant, a man of taste,
and an old Latin poet. He was learned in two forms;
he Hippocratised and he Pindarised. He could have vied
in bombast with Rapin and Vida. He could have
composed Jesuit tragedies in a style not less triumphant than
that of Father Bouhours. It followed from his familiarity
with the venerable rhythms and metres of the ancients,
that he had peculiar figures of speech, and a whole family
of classical metaphors. He would say of a mother
followed by her two daughters, There is a dactyl; of a father
preceded by his two sons, There is an anapæst; and of a
little child walking between its grandmother and
grandfather, There is an amphimacer. So much knowledge
could only end in starvation. The school of Salerno says,
``Eat little and often.'' Ursus ate little and seldom, thus
obeying one-half the precept and disobeying the other;
but this was the fault of the public, who did not always
Hock to him, and who did not often buy.
Ursus was wont to say: ``The expectoration of a
sentence is a relief. The wolf is comforted by its howl, the
sheep by its wool, the forest by its finch, woman by her
love, and the philosopher by his epiphonema.'' Ursus at
a pinch composed comedies, which, in recital, he all but
acted; this helped to sell the drugs. Among other works,
he had composed a heroic pastoral in honour of Sir Hugh
Middleton, who in 1608 brought a river to London. The
river was lying peacefully in Hertfordshire, twenty miles
from London: the knight came and took possession of it.
He brought a brigade of six hundred men, armed with
shovels and pickaxes; set to breaking up the ground,
scooping it out in one place, raising it in another-now
thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep; made wooden
aqueducts high in air; and at different points constructed
eight hundred bridges of stone, bricks, and timber. One
fine morning the river entered London, which was short
of water. Ursus transformed all these vulgar details into
a fine Eclogue between the Thames and the New River,
in which the former invited the latter to come to him,
and offered her his bed, saying, ``I am too old to please
women, but I am rich enough to pay them''-an ingenious
and gallant conceit to indicate how Sir Hugh Middleton
had completed the work at his own expense.
Ursus was great in soliloquy. Of a disposition at once
unsociable and talkative, desiring to see no one, yet
wishing to converse with some one, he got out of the difficulty
by talking to himself. Any one who has lived a solitary
life knows how deeply seated monologue is in one's nature.
Speech imprisoned frets to find a vent. To harangue
space is an outlet. To speak out aloud when alone is as
it were to have a dialogue with the divinity which is
within. It was, as is well known, a custom of Socrates;
he declaimed to himself. Luther did the same. Ursus
took after those great men. He had the hermaphrodite
faculty of being his own audience. He questioned himself,
answered himself, praised himself, blamed himself. You
heard him in the street soliloquising in his van. The
passers-by, who have their own way of appreciating clever
people, used to say: He is an idiot. As we have just
observed, he abused himself at times; but there were times
also when he rendered himself justice. One day, in one
of these allocations addressed to himself, he was heard
to cry out, ``I have studied vegetation in all its
mysteries-in the stalk, in the bud, in the sepal, in the stamen, in the
carpet, in the mule, in the spore, in the theca, and in the
apothecium. I have thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy,
and chymosy; that is to say, the formation of colours, of
smell, and of taste.'' There was something fatuous,
doubtless, in this certificate which Ursus gave to Ursus; but let
those who have not thoroughly sifted chromatics osmosy,
and chymosy cast the first stone at him.
Fortunately Ursus had never gone into the Low
Countries; there they would certainly have weighed him, to
ascertain whether he was of the normal weight, above or
below which a man is a sorcerer. In Holland this weight
was sagely fixed by law. Nothing was simpler or more
ingenious. It was a clear test. They put you in a scale,
and the evidence was conclusive if you broke the
equilibrium. Too heavy, you were hanged; too light, you were
burned. To this day the scales in which sorcerers were
weighed may be seen at Oudewater, but they are now
used for weighing cheeses; how religion has degenerated!
Ursus would certainly have had a crow to pluck with those
scales. In his travels he kept away from Holland, and
he did well. Indeed, we believed that he used never to
leave the United Kingdom.
However this may have been, he was very poor and
morose, and having made the acquaintance of Homo in a
wood, a taste for a wandering life had come over him.
He had taken the wolf into partnership, and with him had
gone forth on the highways, living in the open air the
great life of chance. He had a great deal of industry and
of reserve, and great skill in everything connected with
healing operations, restoring the sick to health, and in
working wonders peculiar to himself. He was considered
a clever mountebank and a good doctor. As may be
imagined, he passed for a wizard as well-not much indeed,
only a little, for it was unwholesome in those days to be
considered a friend of the devil. To tell the truth, Ursus,
by his passion for pharmacy and his love of plants, laid
himself open to suspicion, seeing that he often went to
gather herbs in rough thickets where grew Lucifer's
salads, and where, as has been proved by the Counselor de
l'Ancre, there is a risk of meeting in the evening mist a
man who comes out of the earth, ``blind of the right eye
barefooted, without a cloak, and a sword by his side.'' But
for the matter of that, Ursus, although eccentric in manner
and disposition, was too good a fellow to invoke or disperse
hail, to make faces appear, to kill a man with the torment
of excessive dancing, to suggest dreams fair or foul and
full of terror, and to cause the birth of cocks with four
wings. He had no such mischievous tricks. He was
incapable of certain abominations, such as, for instance,
speaking German, Hebrew, or Greek without having
learned them, which is a sign of unpardonable
wickedness, or of a natural infirmity proceeding from a morbid
humour. If Ursus spoke Latin, it was because he knew
it. He would never have allowed himself to speak Syriac,
which he did not know. Besides, it is asserted that Syriac
is the language spoken in the midnight meetings at which
uncanny people worship the devil. In medicine he justly
preferred Galen to Cardan; Cardan, although a learned
man, being but an earthworm to Galen.
To sum up, Ursus was not one of those persons who
live in fear of the police. His van was long enough and
wide enough to allow of his lying down in it on a box
containing his not very sumptuous apparel. He owned
a lantern, several wigs, and some utensils suspended from
nails, among which were musical instruments. He
possessed, besides, a bearskin with which he covered himself
on his days of grand performance. He called this
putting on full-dress. He used to say, ``I have two skins
this is the real one,'' pointing to the bearskin.
The little house on wheels belonged to himself and to
the wolf. Besides this house, his retort, and his wolf,
he had a flute and a violoncello on which he played
prettily. He concocted his own elixirs. His visits yielded
him enough to sup on sometimes. In the top of his van
was a hole, through which passed the pipe of a cast-iron
stove; so close to his bed as to scorch the wood of it. The
stove had two compartments; in one of them Ursus cooked
his chemicals, and in the other his potatoes. At night
the wolf slept under the van, amicably secured by a chain.
Homo's hair was black, that of Ursus, gray; Ursus was
fifty, unless, indeed, he was sixty. He accepted his
destiny to such an extent that, as we have just seen, he ate
potatoes, the trash on which at that time they fed pigs
and convicts. He ate them indignant, but resigned. He
was not tall-he was long. He was bent and melancholy.
The bowed frame of an old man is the settlement in the
architecture of life. Nature had formed him for
sadness. He found it difficult to smile, and he had never
been able to weep, so that he was deprived of the
consolation of tears as well as of the palliative of joy. An
old man is a thinking ruin; and such a ruin was Ursus.
He had the loquacity of a charlatan, the leanness of a
prophet, the irascibility of a charged mine: such was
Ursus. In his youth he had been a philosopher in the
house of a lord.
This was 180 years ago, when men were more like
wolves than they are now.
Not so very much, though.
HOMO was no ordinary wolf. From his appetite for
medlars and potatoes he might have been taken for a
prairie wolf; from his dark hide, for a lycaon; and from
his howl, prolonged into a bark, for a dog of Chili. But
no one has as yet observed the eyeball of a dog of Chili
sufficiently to enable us to determine whether he be not a
fox; and Homo was a real wolf. He was five feet long,
which is a fine length for a wolf, even in Lithuania, he
was very strong; he looked at you askance, which was not
his fault; he had a soft tongue, with which he occasionally
licked Ursus; he had a narrow brush of short bristles on
his backbone, and he was lean with the wholesome leanness
of a forest life. Before he knew Ursus and had a
carriage to draw, he thought nothing of doing his fifty miles
a night. Ursus, meeting him in a thicket near a stream
of running water, had conceived a high opinion of him
from seeing the skill and sagacity with which he fished
out crayfish, and welcomed him as an honest and genuine
Koupara wolf, of the kind called crab-eater.
As a beast of burden, Ursus preferred Homo to a
donkey. He would have felt repugnance to having his
hut drawn by an ass; he thought too highly of the ass for
that. Moreover, he had observed that the ass, a
four-legged thinker, little understood by men, has a habit of
cocking his ears uneasily when philosophers talk nonsense.
In life the ass is a third person between our thoughts and
ourselves, and acts as a restraint. As a friend, Ursus
preferred Homo to a dog, considering that the love of a
wolf is more rare.
Hence it was that Homo sufficed for Ursus. Homo
was for Ursus more than a companion, he was an
analogue. Ursus used to pat the wolf's empty ribs, saying:
``I have found the second volume of myself!'' Again he
said, ``When I am dead, any one wishing to know me need
only study Homo. I shall leave a true copy behind me.''
The English law, not very lenient to beasts of the
forest, might have picked a quarrel with the wolf, and have
put him to trouble for his assurance in going freely about
the towns: but Homo took advantage of the immunity
granted by a statute of Edward IV to servants: ``Every
servant in attendance on his master is free to come and
go.'' Besides, a certain relaxation of the law had resulted
with regard to wolves, in consequence of its being the
fashion of the ladies of the Court, under the later Stuarts,
to have, instead of dogs, little wolves, called adives, about
the size of cats, which were brought from Asia at great
cost.
Ursus had communicated to Homo a portion of his
talents: such as to stand upright, to restrain his rage into
sulkiness, to growl instead of howling, etc.; and on his
part, the wolf had taught the man what he knew-to do
without a roof, without bread and fire, to prefer hunger
in the woods to slavery in a palace.
The van, hut, and vehicle in one, which traversed so
many different roads without, however, leaving Great
Britain, had four wheels, with shaft for the wolf and a
splinter-bar for the man. The splinter-bar came into use
when the roads were bad. The van was strong, although
it was built of light boards like a dovecot. In front there
was a glass door with a little balcony used for orations,
which had something of the character of the platform
tempered by an air of the pulpit. At the back there was
a door with a practicable panel. By lowering the three
steps which turned on a hinge below the door, access was
gained to the hut, which at night was securely fastened
with bolt and lock. Rain and snow had fallen plentifully
on it; it had been painted, but of what colour it was
difficult to say, change of season being to vans what changes
of reign are to courtiers. In front, outside, was a
board-a kind of frontispiece, on which the following
inscription might once have been deciphered; it was in black
letters on a white ground, but by degrees the characters had
become confused and blurred:
``By friction gold loses every year a fourteen-hundredth
part of its bulk. This is what is called the Wear. Hence
it follows that on fourteen hundred millions of gold in
circulation throughout the world, one million is lost
annually. This million dissolves into dust, flies away, floats
about, is reduced to atoms, charges, drugs, weighs down
consciences, amalgamates with the souls of the rich whom
it renders proud, and with those of the poor whom it
renders brutish.''
The inscription, rubbed and blotted by the rain and by
kindness of nature, was fortunately illegible, for it is
possible that its philosophy concerning the inhalation of
gold, at the same time both enigmatical and lucid, might
not have been to the taste of the sheriffs, the
provost-marshals, and other big-wigs of the law. English
legislation did not trifle in those days. It did not take much
to make a man a felon. The magistrates were ferocious
by tradition, and cruelty was a matter of routine. The
judges of assize increased and multiplied. Jefferies had
become a breed.
IN the interior of the van there were two other
inscriptions. Above the box, on a whitewashed plank, a hand
had written in ink as follows:
II II
III III
``The Baron, peer of England, wears a cap with six pearls. The coronet begins with the rank of Viscount. The Viscount wears a coronet of which the pearls are without number. The Earl a coronet with the pearls upon points, mingled with strawberry leaves placed low between. The Marquis, one with pearls and leaves on the same level. The Duke, one with strawberry leaves alone-no pearls. The Royal Duke, a circlet of crosses and fleurs-de-lis. The Prince of Wales, crown like that of the King, but unclosed.
``The Duke is a most high and most puissant prince, the Marquis and Earl most noble and puissant lord, the Viscount noble and puissant lord, the Baron a trusty lord. The Duke is his Grace; the other Peers their Lordships. Most honourable is higher than right honourable.
``Lords who are peers are lords in their own right. Lords who are not peers are lords by courtesy:-there are no real lords, excepting such as are peers.
``The House of Lords is a chamber and a court, Concilium et Curia, legislature and court of justice. The Commons, who are the people, when ordered to the bar of the Lords, humbly present themselves bareheaded before the peers, who remain covered. The Commons send up their bills by forty members, who present the bill with three low bows. The Lords send their bills to the Commons by a mere clerk. In case of disagreement, the two Houses confer in the Painted Chamber, the Peers seated and covered, the Commons standing and bareheaded.
``Peers go to Parliament in their coaches in file; the Commons do not. Some peers go to Westminster in open four-wheeled chariots. The use of these and of coaches emblazoned with coats-of-arms and coronets is allowed only to peers, and forms a portion of their dignity.
``Barons have the same rank as bishops. To be a baron peer of England, it is necessary to be in possession of a tenure from the king per Baroniam integram, by full barony. The full barony consists of thirteen knights' fees and one-third part, each knight's fee being of the value of 20£ sterling, which makes in all 400 marks. The head of a barony (Caput baroniæ) is a castle disposed by inheritance, as England herself-that is to say, descending to daughters if there be no sons, and in that case going to the eldest daughter, cæteris filiabus aliundè satisfactis.2
``Barons have the degree of lord: in Saxon, laford; dominus in high Latin; Lordus in low Latin. The eldest and younger sons of viscounts and barons are the first esquires in the kingdom. The eldest sons of peers take precedence of knights of the garter. The younger sons do not. The eldest son of a viscount comes after all barons, and precedes all baronets. Every daughter of a peer is a Lady. Other English girls are plain Mistress.
``All judges rank below peers. The sergeant wears a lambskin tippet; the judge one of patchwork, de minuto vario, made up of a variety of little white furs, always excepting ermine. Ermine is reserved for peers and the king.
``A lord never takes an oath, either to the crown or the law. His word suffices; he says, Upon my honour.
``By a law of Edward the Sixth, peers have the privilege of committing manslaughter. A peer who kills a man without premeditation is not prosecuted.
``The persons of peers are inviolable.
``A peer can not be held in durance, save in the Tower of London.
``A writ of supplicavit can not be granted against a peer.
``A peer sent for by the king has the right to kill one or two deer in the royal park.
``A peer holds in his castle a baron's court of justice.
``It is unworthy of a peer to walk the street in a cloak, followed by two footmen. He should only show himself attended by a great train of gentlemen of his household.
``A peer can be amerced only by his peers, and never to any greater amount than five pounds, excepting in the case of a duke, who can be amerced ten.
``A peer may retain six aliens born, any other Englishman but four.
``A peer can have wine custom-free; an earl eight tons.
``A peer is alone exempt from presenting himself before the sheriff of the circuit.
``A peer can not be assessed toward the militia.
``When it pleases a peer he raises a regiment and gives it to the king; thus have done their graces the Dukes of Athol, Hamilton, and Northumberland.
``A peer can hold only of a peer.
``In a civil cause he can demand the adjournment of the case, if there be not at least one knight on the jury.
``A peer nominates his own chaplains. A baron appoints three chaplains; a viscount four; an earl and a marquis five; a duke six.
``A peer can not be put to the rack, even for high treason. A peer can not be branded on the hand. A peer is a clerk, though he knows not how to read. In law he knows.
``A duke has a right to a canopy, or cloth of state, in all places where the king is not present; a viscount may have one in his house; a baron has a cover of assay, which may be held uncler his cup while he drinks. A baroness has the right to have her train borne by a man in the presence of a viscountess.
``Eighty-six tables, with five hundred dishes, are served every day in the royal palace at each meal.3
``If a plebeian strike a lord, his hand is cut off.
``A lord is very nearly a king.
``The king is very nearly a god.
``The earth is a lordship.
``The English address God as my lord!''
Opposite this writing was written a second one, in the same fashion, which ran thus:-
SATISFACTION WHICH MUST SUFFICE THOSE WHO HAVE NOTHING
``Henry Auverquerque, Earl of Grantham, who sits in the House of Lords between the Earl of Jersey and the Earl of Greenwich, has a hundred thousand a year. To his lordship belongs the palace of Grantham Terrace, built all of marble and famous for what is called the labyrinth of passages-a curiosity which contains the scarlet corridor in marble of Sarancolin, the brown corridor in lumachel of Astracan, the white corridor in marble of Lani, the black corridor in marble of Alabanda, the gray corridor in marble of Staremma, the yellow corridor in marble of Hesse, the green corridor in marble of the Tyrol, the red corridor, half cherry spotted marble of Bohemia, half lumachel of Cordova, the blue corridor in turquin of Genoa, the violet in granite of Catalonia, the mourning-hued corridor veined black and white in slate of Murviedro, the pink corridor in cipolin of the Alps, the pearl corridor in lumachel of Nonetta, and the corridor of all colours, called the courtiers' corridor, in motley.
``Richard Lowther, Viscount Lonsdale, owns Lowther in Westmoreland, which has a magnificent approach, and a flight of entrance steps which seem to invite the ingress of kings.
``Richard, Earl of Scarborough, Viscount and Baron Lumley of Lumley Castle, Viscount Lumley of Waterford in Ireland, and Lord Lieutenant and Vice-Admiral of the county of Northumberland and of Durham, both city and country, owns the double castleward of old and new Sandbeck, where you admire a superb railing, in the form of a semicircle, surrounding the basin of a matchless fountain. He has, besides, his castle of Lumley.
``Robert Darcy, Earl of Holderness, has his domain of Holderness, with baronial towers, and large gardens laid out in French fashion, where he drives in his coach-and-six, preceded by two outriders, as becomes a peer of England.
``Charles Beauelerc, Duke of St. Albans, Earl of Burford, Baron Hedington, Grand Falconer of England, has an abode at Windsor, regal even by the side of the king's.
``Charles Bodville Robartes, Baron Robartes of Truro, Viscount Bodmin, and Earl of Radnor, owns Wimpole in Cambridgeshire, which is as three palaces in one, having three façades, one bowed and two triangular. The approach is by an avenue of trees four deep.
``The most noble and most puissant Lord Philip, Baron Herbert of Cardiff, Earl of Montgomery and of Pembroke, Ross of Kendall, Parr, Fitzhugh, Marmion, St. Quentin, and Herbert of Shurland, Warden of the Stannaries in the counties of Cornwall and Devon, hereditary visitor of Jesus College, possesses the wonderful gardens at Wilton, where there are two sheaf-like fountains, finer than those of his most Christian Majesty King Louis XIV at Versailles.
``Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset, owns Somerset House on the Thames, which is equal to the Villa Pamphili at Rome. On the chimney-piece are seen two porcelain vases of the dynasty of the Yuens, which are worth half a million in French money.
``In Yorkshire, Arthur, Lord Ingram, Viscount Ire in, has Temple Newsam, which is entered under a triumphal arch, and which has large wide roofs resembling Moorish terraces.
``Robert, Lord Ferrers of Chartly, Bourchier and Louvaine, has Staunton Harold in Leicestershire, of which the park is geometrically planned in the shape of a temple with a façade, and in front of the piece of water is the great church with the square belfry, which belongs to his lordship.
``In the county of Northampton, Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, member of His Majesty's Privy Council, possesses Althorp, at the entrance of which is a railing with four columns surmounted by groups in marble.
``Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, has, in Surrey, New Park, rendered magnificent by its sculptured pinnacles, its circular lawn belted by trees, and its woodland, at the extremity of which is a little mountain, artistically rounded, and surmounted by a large oak, which can be seen from afar.
``Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, possesses Bretby Hall in Derbyshire, with a splendid clock tower, falconries, warrens, and very fine sheets of water, long, square, and oval, one of which is shaped like a mirror, and has two jets, which throw the water to a great height.
``Charles Cornwallis, Baron Cornwallis of Eye, owns Broome Hall, a palace of the fourteenth century.
``The most noble Algernon Capel, Viscount Maiden, Earl of Essex, has Cashiobury in Hertfordshire, a seat which has the shape of a capital H. and which rejoices sportsmen with its abundance of game.
``Charles, Lord Ossulston, owns Darnley in Middlesex, approached by Italian gardens.
``James Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, has, seven leagues from London, Hatfield House, with its four lordly pavilions, its belfry in the centre, and its grand courtyard of black and white slabs, like that of St. Germain. This palace, which has a frontage 272 feet in length, was built in the reign of James I by the Lord High Treasurer of England, the great-grandfather of the present earl. To be seen there is the bed of one of the Countesses of Salisbury; it is of inestimable value and made entirely of Brazilian wood, which is a panacea against the bites of serpents, and which is called milhombres-that is to say, a thousand men. On this bed is inscribed, Honi soit qui mal y pense.
``Edward Rich, Earl of Warwick and Holland, is owner of Warwick Castle, where whole oaks are burned in the fireplaces.
``In the parish of Sevenoaks, Charles Sackville, Baron Buckhurst, Baron Cranfield, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, is owner of Knowle, which is as large as a town and is composed of three palaces standing parallel one behind the other, like ranks of infantry. There are six covered flights of steps on the principal frontage, and a gate under a keep with four towers.
``Thomas Thynne, Baron Thynne of Warminster, and Viscount Weymouth, possesses Longleat, in which there are as many chimneys, cupolas, pinnacles, pepper-boxes, pavilions, and turrets, as at Chambord, in France, which belongs to the king.
``Henry Howard, Earl of Suffolk, owns, twelve leagues from London, the palace of Audley End in Essex, which in grandeur and dignity scarcely yields the palm to the Escorial of the King of Spain.
``In Bedfordshire, Wrest House and Park, which is a whole district, inclosed by ditches, walls, woodlands, rivers, and hills, belongs to Henry, Marquis of Kent.
``Hampton Court, in Herefordshire, with its strong embattled keep, and its gardens bounded by a piece of water which divides them from the forest, belongs to Thomas, Lord Coningsby.
``Grimsthorp, in Lincolnshire, with its long façade intersected by turrets in pale, its park, its fish-ponds, its pheasantries, its sheepfolds, its lawns, its grounds planted with rows of trees, its groves, its walks, its shrubberies, its flower-beds and borders, formed in square and lozenge-shape, and resembling great carpets; its race-courses, and the majestic sweep for carnages to turn in at the entrance of the house-belongs to Robert, Earl Lindsey, hereditary lord of the forest of Waltham.
``Up Park, in Sussex, a square house, with two symmetrical belfried pavilions on each side of the great courtyard, belongs to the Right Honourable Forde, Baron Grey of Werke, Viscount Glendale and Earl of Tankerville.
``Newnham Paddox, in Warwickshire, which has two quadrangular fish-ponds and a gabled archway with a large window of four panes, belongs to the Earl of Denbigh, who is also Count von Rheinfelden, in Germany.
``Wytham Abbey, in Berkshire, with its French garden in which there are four curiously trimmed arbours, and its great embattled towers, supported by two bastions, belongs to Montague, Earl of Abingdon, who also owns Rycote, of which he is Baron, and the principal door of which bears the device Virtus ariete fortior.
``William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, has six dwelling-places, of which Chatsworth (two-storied, and of the finest order of Grecian architecture) is one.
``The Viscount of Kinalmeaky, who is Earl of Cork, in Ireland, is owner of Burlington House, Piccadilly, with its extensive gardens, reaching to the fields outside London; he is also owner of Chiswick, where there are nine magnificent lodges; he also owns Londesborough, Hellish is a new house by the side of an old palace.
``The Duke of Beaufort owns Chelsea, which contains two Gothic buildings, and a Florentine one; he has also Badminton, in Gloucestershire, a residence from which a number of avenues branch out like rays from a star. The most noble and puissant Prince Henry, Duke of Beaufort, is also Marquis and Earl of Worcester, Earl of Glamorgan, Viscount Grosmont, and Baron Herbert of Chepstow, Ragland, and Crower, Baron Beaufort of Caldecott Castle, and Baron de Bottetourt.
``John Holles, Duke of Newcastle, and Marquis of Clare, owns Bolsover, with its majestic square keeps; his also is Haughton, in Nottinghamshire, where a round pyramid, made to imitate the Tower of Babel, stands in the centre of a basin of water.
``William, Earl of Craven, Viscount Uffington, and Baron Craven of Hamstead Marshall, owns Combe Abbey in Warwickshire, where is to be seen the finest water-jet in England, and in Berkshire two baronies, Hamstead Marshall, on the façade of which are five Gothic lanterns sunk in the wall, and Ashdown Park, which is a country seat situate at the point of intersection of cross-roads in a forest.
``Linnæus, Lord Clancharlie, Baron Clancharlie and Hunkerville, Marquis of Corleone in Sicily, derives his title from the castle of Clancharlie, built in 912 by Edward the Elder, as a defence against the Danes. Besides Hunkerville House, in London, which is a palace, he has Corleone Lodge at Windsor, which is another, and eight castlewards, one at Burton-on-Trent, with a royalty on the carriage of plaster of Paris; then Grumdaith Humble, Moricambe, Trewardraith, Hell-Kesters (where there is a miraculous well ), Phillinmore, with its turf bogs, Reculver, near the ancient city Vagniac, Vinecaunton, on the Moel-eulle Mountain; besides nineteen boroughs and villages with reeves, and the whole of Penneth chase, all of which brings his lordship 40,000£ a year.
``The 172 peers enjoying their dignities under James II possess among them altogether a revenue of 1,272,000£ sterling a year, which is the eleventh part of the revenue of England.''
In the margin, opposite the last name (that of Linnæus, Lord Clancharlie), there was a note in the handwriting of Ursus: Rebel; in exile; houses, lands, and chattels sequestrated. It is well.
URSUS admired Homo. One admires one's like. It is
a law.
To be always raging inwardly and grumbling
outwardly was the normal condition of Ursus. He was the
malcontent of creation. By nature he was a man ever in
opposition. He took the world unkindly; he gave his
satisfecit to no one and to nothing. The bee did not atone,
by its honey-making, for its sting; a full-blown rose did
not absolve the sun for yellow fever and black vomit. It
is probable that in secret Ursus criticised Providence a
good deal. ``Evidently,'' he would say, ``the devil works
by a spring, and the wrong that God does is having let go
the trigger.'' He approved of none but princes, and he
had his own peculiar way of expressing his approbation.
One day, when James II made a gift to the Virgin in a
Catholic chapel in Ireland of a massive gold lamp, Ursus,
passing that way with Homo, who was more indifferent to
such things, broke out in admiration before the crowd, and
exclaimed-Ït is certain that the blessed Virgin wants a
lamp much more than those barefooted children there
require shoes.''
Such proofs of his loyalty, and such evidences of his
respect for established powers, probably contributed in no
small degree to make the magistrates tolerate his
vagabond life and his low alliance with a wolf. Sometimes of
an evening, through the weakness of friendship, he
allowed Homo to stretch his limbs and wander at liberty
about the caravan. The wolf was incapable of an abuse
of confidence, and behaved in society, that is to say among
men, with the discretion of a poodle. All the same, if
bad-tempered officials had to be dealt with, difficulties
might have arisen; so Ursus kept the honest wolf chained
up as much as possible.
From a political point of view his writing about gold,
not very intelligible in itself, and now become
undecipherable, was but a smear, and gave no handle to the
enemy. Even after the time of James II, and under the
``respectable'' reign of William and Mary, his caravan
might have been seen peacefully going; its rounds of the
little English country towns. He traveled freely from
one end of Great Britain to the other, selling his philtres
and phials, and sustaining, with the assistance of his wolf,
his quack mummeries; and he passed with ease through
the meshes of the nets which the police at that period had
spread all over England in order to sift wandering gangs,
and especially to stop the progress of the Comprachicos.
This was right enough. Ursus belonged to no gang.
Ursus lived with tarsus, a tête-à-tète, into which the wolf
gently thrust his nose. If Ursus could have had his way,
he would have been a Caribee; that being impossible, he
preferred to be alone. The solitary man is a modified
savage, accepted by civilisation. He wanders most, is
most alone; hence his continual change of place. To
remain anywhere long suffocated him with the sense of being
tamed. He passed his life in passing on his way. The
sight of towns increased his taste for brambles, thickets,
thorns, and holes in the rock. His home was the forest.
He did not feel himself much' out of his element in the
murmur of crowded streets, which is like enough to the
bluster of trees. The crowd to some extent satisfies our
taste for the desert. What he disliked in his van was its
having a door and windows, and thus resembling a house.
He would have realised his ideal had he been able to put a
cave on four wheels and travel in a den.
He did not smile, as we have already said, but he used
to laugh; sometimes, indeed frequently, a bitter laugh.
There is consent in a smile, while a laugh is often a refusal.
His great business was to hate the human race. He was
implacable in that hate. Having made it clear that human
life is a dreadful thing; having observed the superposition
of evils, kings on the people, war on kings, the plague on
war, famine on the plague, folly on everything, having
proved a certain measure of chastisement in the mere fact
of existence, having recognised that death is a deliverance,
when they brought him a sick man he cured him; he had
cordials and beverages to prolong the lives of the old. He
put lame cripples on their legs again, and hurled this
sarcasm at them, ``There, you are on your paws once more,
may you walk along in this valley of tears!'' When he saw
a poor man dying of hunger, he gave him all the pence he
had about him, growling out, ``Live on, you wretch! eat!
last a long time! It is not I who would shorten your
penal servitude.'' After which, he would rub his hands
and say, ``I do men all the harm I can.''
Through the little window at the back, passers-by could
read on the ceiling of the van these words, written within,
but visible from without, inscribed with charcoal, in big
letters-
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, unheard of 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 everything 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 find here and there in the dark confusion
of English laws the impress of this horrible truth, like
the footprint of a savage in a forest.
Comprachicos, the same as Comprapequeños, is a
compound Spanish word signifying Child-buyers.
The Comprachicos traded in children. They bought
and 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; and kings too. 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 at
times worthy of the attention of the philosopher.
What are we sketching 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.
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 those times. It was a century very Byzantine in tone.
It combined corrupt simplicity with delicate ferocity; a
curious variety of civilisation. A tiger with a simper.
Madame de Sevigne minces on the subject of the fagot
and the wheel. That 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
features. The artificial production of teratological cases
had its rules. It was quite a science; what one can
imagine as the antithesis of orthopedy. Where God had
put a look, their art put a squint; where God had made
harmony, they made discord; 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 debased animals as well; 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 masterpiece 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 of 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 toilet Cardinal Pole witnessed, had her
stockings put on by an orang-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 IV, 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, wrote
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 Great
The dwarf of the Elector Palatine, Perkeo, whose
elegy-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 heinous the
law of whose existence was hideously simple: it
them to suffer, and commanded them to amuse.
permitted
THE manufacture of monsters was practiced on a large
scale, and comprised various branches.
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.
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. We 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 made 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 in
childhood undergone 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 91. Is. 6d. annually.4
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.
These fashions have passed away; but not so much,
perhaps, as one might imagine. Nowadays, courtiers slightly
modify their intonation in clucking to please their
masters. More than one picks up from the ground-we will
not say from the mud-what he eats.
It is very fortunate that kings can not err. Hence their
contradictions never perplex us. In approving always,
one is sure to be always right-which is pleasant. Louis
XIV would not have liked to see at Versailles either an
officer acting the cock, or a prince acting the turkey.
That which raised the royal and imperial dignity in
England and Russia would have seemed to Louis the Great
incompatible with the crown of St. Louis. We know
what his displeasure was when Madame Henriette forgot
herself so far as to see a hen in a dream-which was,
indeed, a grave breach of good manners in a lady of the
Court. When one is of the court, one should not dream
of the courtyard. Bossuet, it may be remembered, was
nearly as scandalised as Louis XIV
THE commerce in children in the 17th century, as we
have explained, was connected with a trade. The
Comprachicos engaged in the commerce and carried on the
trade. They bought children, worked a little on the raw
material, and resold them afterward.
The venders were of all kinds: from the wretched
father, getting rid of his family, to the master, utilising
his stud of slaves. The sale of men was a simple matter.
In our own time we have had fighting to maintain this
right. Remember that it is less than a century ago since
the Elector of Hesse sold his subjects to the King of
England, who required men to be killed in America.
Kings went to the Elector of Hesse as we go to the
butcher to buy meat. The Elector had food for powder
in stock, and hung up his subjects in his shop. Come
buy, it is for sale. In England, under Jeffreys, after
the tragical episode of Monmouth, there were many lords
and gentlemen beheaded and quartered. Those who were
executed left wives and daughters, widows and orphans,
whom James II gave to the queen, his wife. The queen
sold these ladies to William Penn. Very likely the king
had so much per cent on the transaction. The
extraordinary thing is not that James II should have sold women,
but that William Penn should have bought them. The
Penn purchase is excused, or explained, by the fact that,
having a desert to sow with men, he needed women as
farming implements.
Her Gracious Majesty made a good business out of
these ladies. The young sold dear. We may imagine,
with the uneasy feeling which a complicated scandal
arouses, that probably some old duchesses were thrown
in cheap.
The Comprachicos were also called the Cheylas, a
Hindoo word, which conveys the image of harrying a nest.
For a long time the Comprachicos only partially
concealed themselves. There is sometimes in the social order
a favouring shadow thrown over iniquitous trades, in which
they thrive. In our own day we have seen an association
of the kind in Spain, under the direction of the ruffian
Ramon Selles, last from 1834 to 1866, and hold three
provinces under terror for thirty years-Valencia,
Alicante, and Murcia.
Under the Stuarts, the Comprachicos were by no means
in bad odour at court. On occasions they were used for
reasons of state. For James II they were almost an
instrumentum regni. It was a time when families which
were refractory or in the way were dismembered; when
a descent was cut short; when heirs were suddenly
suppressed. At times one branch was defrauded to the profit
of another. The Comprachicos had a genius for
disfiguration which recommended them to state policy. To
disfigure is better than to kill. There was, indeed, the Iron
Mask, but that was a mighty measure. Europe could
not be peopled with iron masks, while deformed tumblers
ran about the streets without creating any surprise.
Besides, the iron mask is removable; not so the mask of flesh.
You are masked forever by your own flesh-what can be
more ingenious? The Comprachicos worked on man as
the Chinese work on trees. They had their secrets, as we
have said; they had tricks which are now lost arts. A
sort of fantastic stunted thing left their hands; it was
ridiculous and wonderful. They would touch up a little
being with such skill that its father could not have known
it. Et que méconnaîtrait l' æil même de son père, as
Racine says in bad French. Sometimes they left the spine
straight and remade the face. They unmarked a child
as one might unmark a pocket-handkerchief. Products,
destined for tumblers, had their joints dislocated in a
masterly manner-you would have said they had been
boned. Thus gymnasts were made.
Not only did the Comprachicos take away his face from
the child, they also took away his memory. At least they
took away all they could of it; the child had no
consciousness of the mutilation to which he had been subjected.
This frightful surgery left its traces on his countenance,
but not on his mind. The most he could recall was that
one day he had been seized by men, that next he had fallen
asleep, and then that he had been cured. Cured of what?
he did not know. Of burnings by sulphur and incisions
by the iron he remembered nothing. The Comprachicos
deadened the little patient by means of a stupefying
powder which was thought to be magical, and suppressed
all pain. This powder has been known from time
immemorial in China, and is still employed there in the present
day. The Chinese have been beforehand with us in all
our inventions-printing, artillery, aerostation,
chloroform. Only the discovery which in Europe at once tales
life and birth, and becomes a prodigy and a wonder,
remains a chrysalis in China, and is preserved in a
death-like state. China is a museum of embryos.
Since we are in China, let us remain there a moment
to note a peculiarity. In China, from time immemorial,
they have possessed a certain refinement of industry and
art. It is the art of molding a living man. They take
a child two or three years old, put him in a porcelain vase,
more or less grotesque, which is made without top or
bottom, to allow egress for the head and feet. During the
day the vase is set upright, and at night is laid down to
allow the child to sleep. Thus the child thickens without
growing taller, filling up with his compressed flesh and
distorted bones the reliefs in the vase. This
development in a bottle continues many years. After a certain
time it becomes irreparable. When they consider that
this is accomplished, and the monster made, they break
the vase. The child comes out-and, behold, there is a
man in the shape of a mug!
This is convenient; by ordering your dwarf betimes you
are able to have it of any shape you wish.
JAMES II tolerated the Comprachicos for the good
reason that he made use of them; at least it happened that
he did so more than once. We do not always disdain to
use what we despise. This low trade, an excellent
expedient sometimes for the higher one which is called state
policy, was willingly left in a miserable state, but was not
persecuted. There was no surveillance, but a certain
amount of attention. Thus much might be useful-the
law closed one eye, the king opened the other.
Sometimes the king went so far as to avow his
complicity. These are audacities of monarchical terrorism.
The disfigured one was marked with the fleur-de-lis; they
took from him the mark of God, they put on him the
mark of the king. Jacob Astley, knight and baronet,
lord of Melton Constable, in the county of Norfolk, had
in his family a child who had been sold, and upon whose
forehead the dealer had imprinted a fleur-de-lis with a
hot iron. In certain cases, in which it was held desirable
to register for some reason the royal origin of the new
position made for the child, they used such means.
England has always done us the honour to utilise, for her
personal service, the fleur-de-lis.
The Comprachicos, allowing for the shade which
divides a trade from a fanaticism, were analogous to the
Stranglers of India. They lived among themselves in
gangs, and to facilitate their progress, affected somewhat
of the Merry-Andrew. They encamped here and there,
but they were grave and religious, bearing no affinity to
other nomads, and incapable of theft. The people for
a long time wrongly confounded them with the Moors
of Spain and the Moors of China. The Moors of Spain
were coiners, the Moors of China were thieves. There
was nothing of the sort about the Comprachicos; they
were honest folk. Whatever you may think of them,
they were sometimes sincerely scrupulous. They pushed
open a door, entered, bargained for a child, paid, and
departed. All was done with propriety.
They were of all countries. Under the name of
Comprachicos fraternised English, French, Castilians,
Germans, Italians. A unity of idea, a unity of superstition,
the pursuit of the same calling, matte such fusions. In
this fraternity of vagabonds, those of the Mediterranean
seaboard represented the East, those of the Atlantic
seaboard the West. Many Basques conversed with many
Irishmen. The Basque and the Irishman understand
each other, they speak the old Punic jargon; add to this
the intimate relations of Catholic Ireland with Catholic
Spain-relations such that they terminated by bringing
to the gallows in London one almost King of Ireland, the
Celtic Lord de Brany; from which resulted the conquest
of the county of Leitrim.
The Comprachicos were rather a fellowship than a tribe
rather a residuum than a fellowship. It was all the
riff-raff of the universe, having for their trade a crime. It
was a sort of harlequin people, all composed of rags.
To recruit a man was to sew on a tatter.
To wander was the Comprachicos' law of existence-to
appear and disappear. What is barely tolerated can not
take root. Even in the kingdoms where their business
supplied the courts, and, on occasions, served as an
auxiliary to the royal power, they were now and then
suddenly ill-treated. Kings made use of their art, and sent
the artists to the galleys. These inconsistencies belong
to the ebb and flow of royal caprice. ``For such is our
pleasure.''
A rolling stone and a roving trade gather no moss. The
Comprachicos were poor. They might have said what
the lean and ragged witch observed, when she saw them
setting fire to the stake, ``Lejell n'en vaut pas la
chandelle.'' It is possible, nay probable (their chiefs
remaining unknown), that the wholesale contractors in the trade
were rich. After the lapse of two centuries, it would be
difficult to throw any light on this point.
It was, as we have said, a fellowship. It had its laws,
its oaths, its formulæ-it had almost its cabala. Any
one nowadays wishing to know all about the
Comprachicos need only go into Biscaya or Galicia; there were many
Basques among them; and it is in those mountains that
one hears their history. To this day the Comprachicos
are spoken of at Oyarzun, at Urbistondo, at Leso, at
Astigarraga. Aguardate niño, que voy llamar al
Comprachicos-Take care, child, or I'll call the
Comprachicos-is the cry with which mothers frighten their children
in that country.
The Comprachicos, like the Zigeuner and the Gypsies,
had appointed places for periodical meetings. From tinge
to time their leaders conferred together. In the
seventeenth century they had four principal points of
rendezvous. One in Spain, the pass of Pancorbo; one in
Germany, the glade called the Wicked Woman, near
Diekirsch, where there are two enigmatic bas-reliefs,
representing a woman with a head and a man without one;
one in France, the hill where was the colossal statue of
Massue-la-Promesse in the old sacred wood of Borvo
Tomona, near Bourbonne les Bains; one in England,
behind the garden wall of William Challoner, Squire of
Gisborough in Cleveland, Yorkshire, behind the square
tower and the great wing which is entered by an arched
door.
THE laws against vagabonds have always been very
rigorous in England. England, in her Gothic
legislation, seemed to be inspired with this principle, Homo
errans fera errante pejor. One of the special statutes
classifies the man without a home as ``more dangerous than
the asp, dragon, lynx, or basilisk'' (atrocior aspide,
dracone, lynce, et basilico) . For a long time England
troubled herself as much concerning the gypsies, of whom
she wished to be rid, as about the wolves of which she
had been cleared. In that the Englishman differed from
the Irishman, who prayed to the saints for the health of
the wolf, and called him my godfather.
English law, nevertheless, in the same way as (we have
just seen) it tolerated the wolf, tamed, domesticated, and
become in some sort a dog, tolerated the regular
vagabond, become In some sort a subject. It did not trouble
itself about either the mountebank or the traveling barber,
or the quack doctor, or the pedler, or the open-air scholar,
as long as they had a trade to live by. Further than this
and with these exceptions, the description of freedom
which exists in the wanderer terrified the law. A tramp
was a possible public enemy. That modern thing, the
lounger, was then unknown; that ancient thing, the
vagrant, was alone understood. A suspicious appearance,
that indescribable something which all understand and
none can define, was sufficient reason that society should
take a man by the collar. ``Where do you live? How
do you get your living?'' And if he could not answer,
harsh penalties awaited him. Iron and fire were in the
noble: the law practiced the cauterisation of vagrancy.
Hence, throughout English territory, a veritable ``loi
des suspects'' was applicable to vagrants (who, it must be
owned, readily became malefactors), and particularly to
gypsies whose expulsion has erroneously been compared
to the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors from Spain,
and the Protestants from France. As for us, we do
not confound a battue with a persecution.
The Comprachicos, we insist, had nothing in common
with the gypsies. The gypsies were a nation; the
Comprachicos were a compound of all nations-the lees of a
horrible vessel full of filthy waters. The Comprachicos
had not, like the gypsies, an idiom of their own; their
jargon was a promiscuous collection of idioms: all
languages were mixed together in their language; they spoke
a medley. Like the gypsies, they had come to be a
people winding through the peoples; but their common tie
was association, not race. At all epochs in history one
finds in the vast liquid mass which constitutes humanity
some of these streams of venomous men exuding poison
around them. The gypsies were a tribe; the
Comprachicos a freemasonry-a masonry having not a noble aim,
but a hideous handicraft. Finally, their religions
differ-the gypsies were Pagans, the Comprachicos were
Christians, and, more than that, good Christians, as became
an association which, although a mixture of all nations,
owed its birth to Spain, a devout land.
They were more than Christians, they were Catholics;
they were more than Catholics, they were Romans, and
so touchy in their faith, and so pure, that they refused
to associate with the Hungarian nomads of the comitate
of Pesth, commanded and led by an old man, having for
sceptre a wand with a silver ball, surmounted by the
double-headed Austrian eagle. It is true that these
Hugarians were schismatics to the extent of celebrating the
Assumption on the 29th August, which is an
abomination.
In England, so long as the Stuarts reigned, the
confederation of the Comprachicos was (for motives of which
we have already given you a glimpse), to a certain extent,
protected. James II, a devout man, who persecuted the
Jews and trampled out the gypsies, was a good prince
to the Comprachicos. We have seen why. The
Comprachicos were buyers of the human wares in which he
was dealer. They excelled in disappearances.
Disappearances are occasionally necessary for the good of the
State. An inconvenient heir of tender age whom they
took and handled lost his shape. This facilitated
confiscation; the transfer of titles to favourites was simplified.
The Comprachicos were, moreover, very discreet, and very
taciturn. They bound themselves to silence and kept
their word, which is necessary in affairs of state. There
was scarcely an example of their having betrayed the
secrets of the king. This was, it is true, for their
interest; and, if the king had lost confidence in them, they
would have been in great danger. They were thus of
use in a political point of view. Moreover, these artists
furnished singers for the Holy Father. The
Comprachicos were useful for the Miserere of Allegri. They were
particularly devoted to Mary. All this pleased the
papistry of the Stuarts. James II could not be hostile to
holy men who pushed their devotion to the Virgin to the
extent of manufacturing eunuchs. In 1688 there was a
change of dynasty in England. Orange supplanted
Stuart. William III replaced James II.
James II went away to die in exile, miracles were
performed on his tomb, and his relics cured the Bishop of
Autun of fistula-a worthy recompense of the Christian
virtues of the prince.
William, having neither the same ideas nor the same
practices as James, was severe to the Comprachicos. He
did his best to crush out the vermin.
A statute of the early part of William and Mary's
reign hit the association of child-buyers hard. It was
as the blow of a club to the Comprachicos, who were
from that time pulverised. By the terms of this statute,
those of the fellowship taken and duly convicted were to
be branded with a red-hot iron, imprinting R on the
shoulder, signifying rogue; on the left hand T. signifying
thief; and on the right hand M, signifying manslayer.
The chiefs, ``supposed to be rich, although beggars in
appearance,'' were to be punished in the
collistrigium-that is, the pillory, and branded on the forehead with a
P. besides having their goods confiscated, and the trees in
their woods rooted up. Those who did not inform against
the Comprachicos were to be punished by confiscation and
imprisonment for life, as for the crime of misprision.
As for the women found among these men, they were to
suffer the cucking-stool-this is a tumbrel, the name of
which is composed of the French word coquine, and the
German Stahl. English law being endowed with a strange
longevity, this punishment still exists in English
legislation for quarrelsome women. The cucking-stool is
suspended over a river or a pond, the woman seated on it.
The chair is allowed to drop into the water, and then
pulled out. This dipping of the woman is repeated three
times, ``to cool her anger,'' says the commentator,
Chamberlayne.
AN obstinate north wind blew without ceasing over
the mainland of Europe, and yet more roughly over
England, during all the month of December, 1689, and
all the month of January, 1690. Hence the disastrous
cold weather, which caused that winter to be noted as
``memorable to the poor,'' on the margin of the old Bible
in the Presbyterian chapel of the Non-jurors in London.
Thanks to the lasting qualities of the old monarchical
parchment employed in official registers, long lists of
poor persons, found dead of famine and cold, are still
legible in many local repositories, particularly in the
archives of the Liberty of the Clink, in the borough of
Southwark, of Pie Powder Court (which signifies Dusty
Feet Court), and in those of Whitechapel Court, held in
the village of Stepney by the bailiff of the Lord of the
Manor. The Thames was frozen over-a thing which
does not happen once in a century, as the ice forms on
it with difficulty owing to the action of the sea. Coaches
rolled over the frozen river, and a fair was held with booths,
bear-baiting, and bull-baiting. An ox was roasted whole
on the ice. This thick ice lasted two months. The hard
year 1690 surpassed in severity even the famous winters
at the beginning of the seventeenth century, so minutely
observed by Dr. Gideon Delane, the same who was, in
his quality of apothecary to King James, honoured by the
city of London with a bust and a pedestal.
One evening, toward the close of one of the most bitter
days of the month of January, 1690, something unusual
was going on in one of the numerous inhospitable bights
of the bay of Portland, which caused the sea-gulls and wild
geese to scream and circle round its mouth, not daring
to re-enter.
In this creek, the most dangerous of all which line the
bay during the continuance of certain winds, and
consequently the most lonely-convenient by reason of its
very danger for ships in hiding-a little vessel, almost
touching the cliff, so deep was the water, was moored to
a point of rock. We are wrong in saying, The night
falls; we should say the night rises, for it is from the
earth that obscurity comes. It was already night at the
bottom of the cliff; it was still day at top. Any one
approaching the vessel's moorings would have recognised a
Biscayan hooker.
The sun, concealed all day by the mist, had just set.
There was beginning to be felt that deep and sombrous
melancholy which might be called anxiety for the absent
sun. With no wind from the sea, the water of the creek
was calm.
This was, especially in winter, a lucky exception.
Almost all the Portland creeks have sand-bars; and in heavy
weather the sea becomes very rough, and, to pass in safety,
much skill and practice are necessary. These little ports
(ports more in appearance than fact) are of small
advantage. They are hazardous to enter, fearful to leave.
On this evening, for a wonder, there was no danger.
The Biscay hooker is of an ancient model, now fallen
into disuse. This kind of hooker, which has done service
even in the navy, was stoutly built in its hull; a boat in
size, a ship in strength. It figured in the Armada.
Sometimes the war-hooker attained to a high tonnage; thus the
``Great Griffin,'' bearing a captain's flag, and commanded
by Lopez de Medina, measured six hundred and fifty
good tons, and carried forty guns. But the merchant
and contraband hookers were very feeble specimens.
Sea-folk held them at their true value, and esteemed the model
a very sorry one. The rigging of the hooker was made
of hemp, sometimes with wire inside, which was probably
intended as a means, however unscientific, of obtaining
indications, in the case of magnetic tension. The
lightness of this rigging did not exclude the use of heavy
tackle, the cabrias of the Spanish galleon, and the cameli
of the Roman triremes. The helm was very long, which
gives the advantage of a long arm of leverage, but the
disadvantage of a small arc of effort. Two wheels in
two pulleys at the end of the rudder corrected this defect
and compensated, to some extent, for the loss of strength.
The compass was well housed in a case perfectly square,
and well-balanced by its two copper frames placed
horizontally, one in the other, on little bolts, as in Cardan's lamps.
There was science and cunning in the construction of the
hooker, but it was ignorant science and barbarous
cunning. The hooker was primitive, just like the praam and
the canoe; was kindred to the praam in stability and to
the canoe in swiftness, and, like all vessels born of the
instinct of the pirate and fisherman, it had remarkable
sea qualities; it was equally well suited to land-locked and
to open waters. Its system of sails, complicated in stays,
and very peculiar, allowed of its navigating trimly in the
close bays of Asturias ( which are little more than
inclosed basins, as Pasages, for instance), and also freely
out at sea. It could sail round a lake, and sail round the
world-a strange craft with two objects, good for a pond
and good for a storm. The hooker is among vessels what
the wagtail is among birds, one of the smallest and one
of the boldest. The wagtail, perching on a reed, scarcely
bends it, and, flying away, crosses the ocean.
These Biscay hookers, even to the poorest, were gilt
and painted. Tattooing is part of the genius of those
charming people, savages to some degree. The sublime
colouring of their mountains, variegated by snows and
meadows, reveals to them the rugged shell which
ornament possesses in itself. They are poverty-stricken and
magnificent; they put coats-of-arms on their cottages:
they have huge asses, which they bedizen with bells, and
huge oxen, on which they put head-dresses of feathers.
Their coaches, which you can hear grinding the wheels
two leagues off., are illuminated, carved, and hung with
ribbons. A cobbler has a bas-relief on his door; it is only
St. Crispin, and an old shoe; but it is in stone. They
trim their leathern jackets with lace. They do not mend
their rags, hut they embroider them. Vivacity profound
and superb! The Basques are like the Greeks, children
of the sun; while the Valencian drapes himself, bare and
sad, in his russet woolen rug, with a hole to pass his head
through, the natives of Galicia and Biscay have the
delight of fine linen shirts, bleached in the dew. Their
thresholds and their windows teem with faces fair and
fresh, laughing under garlands of maize; a joyous and
proud serenity shines out in their ingenious arts, in their
trades, in their customs, in the dress of their maidens, in
their songs. The mountain, that colossal ruin, is all aglow
in Biscay: the sun's rays go in and out of every break.
The wild Jaïzquivel is full of Idylls. Biscay is Pyrenean
grace as Savoy is Alpine grace. The dangerous
bays-the neighbours of St. Sebastian Leso, and
Fontarabia-with storms, with clouds, with spray flying over the capes,
with the rages of the waves and the winds, with terror,
with uproar, mingle boat-women crowned with roses. He
who has seen the Basque country wishes to see it again.
It is the blessed land. Two harvests a year; villages
resonant and gay; a stately poverty; all Sunday the sound
of guitars, dancing, castanets, love-making; houses clean
and bright; storks in the belfries.
Let us return to Portland-that rugged mountain in
the sea.
The peninsula of Portland, looked at geometrically,
presents the appearance of a bird's head, of which the
bill is turned toward the ocean, the back of the head
toward Weymouth; the isthmus is its neck.
Portland, greatly to the sacrifice of its wildness, exists
now but for trade. The coasts of Portland were
discovered by quarrymen and plasterers toward the middle
of the seventeenth century. Since that period what is
called Roman cement has been made of the Portland
stone-a useful industry, enriching the district, and
disfiguring the bay. Two hundred years ago these coasts were
eaten away as a cliff, to-day, as a quarry. The pick bites
meanly, the wave grandly; hence a diminution of beauty.
To the magnificent ravages of the ocean have succeeded
the measured strokes of men. These measured strokes
have worked away the creek where the Biscay hooker was
moored. To find any vestige of the little anchorage, now
destroyed, the eastern side of the peninsula should be
searched, toward the point beyond Folly Pier and Dirdle
Pier, beyond Wakeham even, between the place called
Church Hope and the place called Southwell.
The creek, walled in on all sides by precipices higher
than its width, was minute by minute becoming more
overshadowed by evening. The misty gloom, usual at
twilight, became thicker; it was like a growth of darkness
at the bottom of a well. The opening of the creek
seaward, a narrow passage, traced on the almost night-black
interior a pallid rift where the waves were moving. You
must have been quite close to perceive the hooker moored
to the rocks, and, as it were, hidden by the great cloaks
of shadow. A plank, thrown from on board on to a low
and level projection of the cliff, the only point on which
a landing could be made, placed the vessel in
communication with the land. Dark figures were crossing and
recrossing each other on this tottering gangway, and in the
shadow some people were embarking.
It was less cold in the creek than out at sea, thanks to
the screen of rock rising over the north of the basin, which
did not, however, prevent the people from shivering. They
were hurrying. The effect of the twilight defined the
forms as though they had been punched out with a tool.
Certain indentations in their clothes were visible, and
showed that they belonged to the class called in England
The Ragged.
The twisting of the pathway could be distinguished
vaguely in the relief of the cliff. A girl who lets her
stay-lace hang down trailing over the back of an
armchair describes, without being conscious of it, most of
the paths of cliffs and mountains. The pathway of this
creek, full of knots and angles, almost perpendicular, and
better adapted for goats than men, terminated on the
platform where the plank was placed. The pathways of
cliffs ordinarily imply a not very inviting declivity; they
offer themselves less as a road than as a fall; they sink
rather than incline. This one-probably some
ramification of a road on the plain above-was disagreeable to
look at, so vertical was it. From underneath you saw it
gain by zigzag the higher layer of the cliff, where it
passed out through deep passages on to the high plateau
by a cutting in the rock; and the passengers for whom
the vessel was waiting in the creek must have come by
this path.
Excepting the movement of embarkation which was
being made in the creek, a movement visibly scared and
uneasy, all around was solitude; no step, no noise, no
breath was heard. At the other side of the roads, at the
entrance of Ringstead Bay, you could just perceive a
flotilla of shark-fishing boats, which were evidently out of
their reckoning. These polar boats had been driven from
Danish into English waters by the whims of the sea.
Northerly winds play these tricks on fishermen. They
had just taken refuge in the anchorage of Portland-a
sign of bad weather expected and danger out at sea.
They were engaged in casting anchor. The chief boat,
placed in front after the old manner of Norwegian
flotillas, all her rigging standing out in black, above the
white level of the sea; and in front might be perceived
the hook-iron, loaded with all kinds of hooks and
harpoons, destined for the Greenland shark, the dogfish, and
the spinous shark, as well as the nets to pick up the
sunfish.
Except a few other craft, all swept into the same
corner, the eye met nothing living on the vast horizon of
Portland. Not a house, not a ship. The coast in those
days was not inhabited, and the roads, at that season, were
not safe.
Whatever may have been the appearance of the weather,
the beings who were going to sail away in the Biscayan
urea, pressed on the hour of departure all the same. They
formed a busy and confused group in rapid movement
on the shore. To distinguish one from another was
difficult; impossible to tell whether they were old or young.
The indistinctness of evening intermixed and blurred
them; the mask of shadow was over their faces. They
were sketches in the night. There were eight of them,
and there were seemingly among them one or two women,
hard to recognise under the rags and tatters in which the
group was attired-clothes which were no longer man's
or woman's. Rags have no sex
A smaller shadow, flitting to and fro among the larger
ones, indicated either a dwarf or a child.
It was a child.
THIS is what an observer close at hand might have
noted.
All wore long cloaks, torn and patched, but covering
them, and at need concealing them up to the eyes; useful
alike against the north wind and curiosity. They moved
with ease under these cloaks. The greater number wore
a handkerchief rolled round the head, a sort of rudiment
which marks the commencement of the turban in Spain.
This headdress was nothing unusual in England. At
that time the South was in fashion in the North; per.
haps this was connected with the fact that the North was
beating the South. It conquered and admired. After
the defeat of the Armada, Castilian was considered in the
halls of Elizabeth to be elegant court talk. To speak
English in the palace of the Queen of England was held
almost an impropriety. Partially to adopt the manners
of those upon whom we impose our laws is the habit of
the conquering barbarian toward conquered civilisation.
The Tartar contemplates and imitates the Chinese. It
was thus Castilian fashions penetrated into England; in
return, English interests crept into Spain.
One of the men in the group embarking appeared to be
a chief. He had sandals on his feet, and was bedizened
with gold lace tatters and a tinsel waistcoat shining
under his cloak like the belly of a fish. Another pulled down
over his face a huge piece of felt, cut like a sombrero;
this felt had no hole for a pipe, thus indicating the wearer
to be a man of letters.
On the principle that a man's vest is a child's cloak, the
child was wrapped over his rags in a sailor's jacket, which
descended to his knees.
By his height you would have guessed him to be a boy
of ten or eleven; his feet were bare.
The crew of the hooker was composed of a captain and
two sailors.
The hooker had apparently come from Spain, and was
about to return thither. She was beyond a doubt
engaged in a stealthy service from one coast to the
other.
The persons embarking in her whispered among
themselves.
The whispering interchanged by these creatures was of
composite sound-now a word of Spanish, then of
German, then of French, then of Gaelic, at times of Basque.
It was either a patois or a slang. They appeared to be
of all nations, and yet of the same band.
The motley group appeared to be a company of
comrades, perhaps a gang of accomplices.
The crew was probably of their brotherhood.
Community of object was visible in the embarkation.
Had there been a little more light, and if you could
have looked at them attentively, you might have perceived
on these people rosaries and scapulars half-hidden under
their rags; one of the semi-women mingling in the group
had a rosary almost equal for the size of its beads to that
of a dervish, and easy to recognise for an Irish one made
at Llanymthefry, which is also called Llanandriffy.
You might also have observed, had it not been so dark,
a figure of Our Lady and Child carved and gilt on the
bow of the hooker. It was probably that of the Basque
Notre Dame, a sort of Panagia of the old Cantabri.
Under this image, which occupied the position of a
figurehead, was a lantern, which at this moment was not
lighted-an excess of caution which implied an extreme desire
of concealment. This lantern was evidently for two
purposes. When alight, it burned before the Virgin, and
at the same time illumined the sea, a beacon doing duty
as a taper.
Under the bowsprit the cut-water, long, curved, and
sharp, came out in front like the horn of a crescent. At
the top of the cut-water, and at the feet of the Virgin,
a kneeling angel, with folded wings, leaned her back
against the stem, and looked through a spyglass at the
horizon. The angel was gilded like Our Lady. In the
cut-water were holes and openings to let the waves pass
through, which afforded an opportunity for gilding and
arabesques.
Under the figure of the Virgin was written in gilt
capitals, the word ``Matutina''-the name of the vessel, not to
be read just now on account of the darkness.
Amid the confusion of departure there were thrown
down in disorder, at the foot of the cliff, the goods which
the voyagers were to take with them, and which, by means
of a plank serving as a bridge across, were being passed
rapidly from the shore to the boat. Bags of biscuit, a
cask of stock-fish, a case of portable soup, three
barrels-one of fresh water, one of malt, one of tar-four or
five bottles of ale, an old portmanteau buckled up by
straps, trunks, boxes, a ball of tow for torches and
signals. Such was the lading. These ragged people had
valises, which seemed to indicate a roving life.
Wandering rascals are obliged to own something; at times they
would prefer to fly away like birds, but they can not do
so without abandoning the means of earning a livelihood.
They of necessity possess boxes of tools and instruments
of labour, whatever their errant trade may be. Those of
whom we speak were dragging their baggage with them,
often an encumbrance.
It could not have been easy to bring these movables to
the bottom of the cliff. This, however, revealed the
intention of a definite departure.
No time was lost; there was one continued passing to
and fro from the shore to the vessel, and from the vessel
to the shore; each one took his share of the work; one
carried a bag, another a chest. Those amid the promiscuous
company, who were possibly or probably women, worked
like the rest. They overloaded the child.
It was doubtful if the child's father or mother were in
the group; no sign of life was vouchsafed him. They
made him work, nothing more. He appeared not a child
in a family, but a slave in a tribe. He waited on every
one, and no one spoke to him.
However, he made haste, and, like the others of this
mysterious troop, he seemed to have but one
thought-to embark as quickly as possible. Did he know why?
probably not, he hurried mechanically because he saw the
others hurry.
The hooker was decked. The stowing of the lading in
the hold was quickly finished, and the moment to pill ok
arrived. The last case had been carried over the
gang-way, and nothing was left to embark but the men. The
two objects among the group who seemed women were
already on board; six, the child among them, were still on
the low platform of the cliff. A movement of departure
was made in the vessel, the captain seized the helm, a sailor
took up an axe to cut the hawser; to cut is an evidence of
haste; when there is time it is unknotted.
``Andamos,'' said, in a low voice, he who appeared chief
of the six, and who had the spangles on his tatters. The
child rushed toward the plank in order to be the first to
pass. As he placed his foot on it, two of the men
hurried by, at the risk of throwing him into the water, got
in before him, and passed on; the fourth drove him back
with his fist and followed the third; the fifth, who was the
chief, bounded into rather than entered the vessel, and,
as he jumped in, kicked back the plank, which fell into the
sea, a stroke of the hatchet cut the moorings, the helm was
put up, the vessel left the shore, and the child remained
on land.
THE child remained motionless on the rock, with his
eyes fixed; no calling out; no appeal. Though this
was unexpected by him, he spoke not a word. The same
silence reigned in the vessel. No cry from the child to
the men-no farewell from the men to the child. There
was on both sides a mute acceptance of the widening
distance between them. It was like a separation of ghosts
on the banks of the Styx. The child, as if nailed to the
rock, which the high tide was beginning to bathe, watched
the departing bark. It seemed as if he realised his position.
What did he realise?-Darkness.
A moment later, the hooker gained the neck of the
creek and entered it. Against the clear sky the
mast-head was visible, rising above the split blocks between
which the strait wound as between two walls. The truck
wandered to the summit of the rocks and appeared to run
into them. Then it was seen no more-all was over-the
bark had gained the sea.
The child watched its disappearance-he was astounded
but dreamy. His stupefaction was complicated by a sense
of the dark reality of existence. It seemed as if there
were experience in this dawning being. Did he,
perchance, already exercise judgment? Experience coming
too early constructs, sometimes, in the obscure depths
of a child's mind, some dangerous balance-we know not
what-in which the poor little soul weighs God.
Feeling himself innocent, he yielded. There was no
complaint-the irreproachable does not reproach.
His rough expulsion drew from him no sign-he
suffered a sort of internal stiffening. The child did not
bow under this sudden blow of fate, which seemed to put
an end to his existence ere it had well begun; he received
the thunderstroke standing.
It would have been evident to any one who could have
seen his astonishment unmixed with dejection, that, in
the group which abandoned him, there was nothing which
loved him, nothing which he loved.
Brooding, he forgot the cold. Suddenly the wave
wetted his feet-the tide was flowing; a gust passed
through his hair-the north wind was rising. He
shivered. There came over him, from head to foot, the
shudder of awakening.
He cast his eyes about him.
He was alone.
Up to this day there had never existed for him any
other men than those who were now in the hooker. Those
men had just stolen away.
Let us add what seems a strange thing to state. Those
men, the only ones he knew, were unknown to him.
He could not have said who they were. His childhood
had been passed among them, without his having the
consciousness of being of them. He was in juxtaposition
to them, nothing more.
He had just been-forgotten-by them.
He had no money about him, no shoes to his feet, scarcely
a garment to his body, not even a piece of bread in his
pocket.
It was winter-it was night. It would be necessary
to walk several leagues before a human habitation could
be reached.
He did not know where he was.
He knew nothing, unless it was that those who had
come with him to the brink of the sea had gone away
without him.
He felt himself put outside the pale of life.
He felt that man failed him.
He was ten years old.
The child was in a desert, between depths where he saw
the night rising and depths were he heard the waves
murmur.
He stretched his little thin arms and yawned.
Then, suddenly, as one who makes up his mind, bold,
and throwing off his numbness-with the agility of a
squirrel-or perhaps of an acrobat-he turned his back
on the creek, and set himself to climb up the cliff. He
escaladed the path, left it, returned to it, quick and
venturous. He was hurrying landward, just as though he
had a destination marked out; nevertheless he was going
nowhere.
He hastened without an object-a fugitive before Fate.
To climb is the function of a man; to clamber is that
of an animal-he did both. As the slopes of Portland
face southward, there was scarcely any snow on the path
the intensity of cold had, however, frozen that snow into
dust very troublesome to the walker. The child freed
himself of it. His man's jacket, which was too big for him,
complicated matters, and got in his way. Now and then
on an overhanging crag or in a declivity he came upon a
little ice, which caused him to slip down. Then, after
hanging some moments over the precipice, he would catch
hold of a dry branch or projecting stone. Once he came
on a vein of slate, which suddenly gave way under him,
letting him down with it. Crumbling slate is
treacherous. For some seconds the child slid like a tile on a roof;
he rolled to the extreme edge of the decline; a tuft of
grass which he clutched at the right moment saved him.
He was as mute in sight of the abyss as he had been in
sight of the men; he gathered himself up and reascended
silently. The slope was steep; so he had to tack in
ascending. The precipice grew in the darkness; the vertical
rock had no ending. It receded before the child in the
distance of its height. As the child ascended, so seemed
the summit to ascend. While he clambered he looked up
at the dark entablature, placed like a barrier, between
heaven and him. At last he reached the top.
He jumped on the level ground, or rather landed, for
he rose from the precipice.
Scarcely was he on the cliff when he began to shiver.
He felt in his face that bite of the night, the north wind.
The bitter northwester was blowing; he tightened his rough
sailor's jacket about his chest.
It was a good coat, called in ship language a sou'wester,
because that sort of stuff allows little of the southwesterly
rain to penetrate.
The child, having gained the tableland, stopped, placed
his feet firmly on the frozen ground and looked about him.
Behind him was the sea; in front the land; above, the
sky-but a sky without stars; an opaque mist masked the
zenith.
On reaching the summit of the rocky wall he found
himself turned toward the land, and looked at it
attentively. It lay before him as far as the sky-line, flat,
frozen, and covered with snow. Some tufts of heather
shivered in the wind. No roads were visible. Nothing,
not even a shepherd's cot. Here and there, pale, spiral
vortices might be seen, which were whirls of fine snow,
snatched from the ground by the wind and blown away.
Successive undulations of ground become suddenly misty
rolled themselves into the horizon. The great dull plains
were lost under the white fog. Deep silence. It spread
like infinity, and was hush as the tomb.
The child turned again toward the sea.
The sea, like the land, was white, the one with snow,
the other with foam. There is nothing so melancholy as
the light produced by this double whiteness.
Certain lights of night are very clearly cut in their
hardness; the sea was like steel, the cliff like ebony. From
the height where the child was, the bay of Portland
appeared almost like a geographical map, pale, in a
semi-circle of hills. There was something dreamlike in that
nocturnal landscape-a wan disk belted by a dark crescent.
The moon sometimes has a similar appearance. From
cape to cape, along the whole coast, not a single spark
indicating a hearth with a fire, not a lighted window, not
an inhabited house, was to be seen. As in heaven so on
earth, no light. Not a lamp below, not a star above. Here
and there came sudden risings in the great expanse of
waters in the gulf as the wind disarranged and wrinkled
the vast sheet. The hooker was still visible in the bay
as she fled.
It was a black triangle gliding over the livid waters.
Far away the waste of waters stirred confusedly in the
ominous clare-obscure of immensity. The ``Matutina'' was
making quick way. She seemed to grow smaller every
minute. Nothing appears so rapid as the flight of a
vessel melting into the distance of ocean.
Suddenly she lit the lantern at her prow. Probably
the darkness falling round her made those on board Unix
easy, and the pilot thought it necessary to throw light on
the waves. This luminous point, a spark seen from afar,
clung like a corpse light to the high and long black form.
You would have said it was a shroud raised up and
moving in the middle of the sea, under which some one
wandered with a star in his hand.
A storm threatened in the air: the child took no account
of it, but a sailor would have trembled. It was that
moment of preliminary anxiety when it seems as though the
elements are changing into persons, and one is about to
witness the mysterious transfiguration of the wind into
the wind-god. The sea becomes Ocean: its power reveals
itself as Will: that which one takes for a thing, is a soul.
It will become visible. Hence the terror. The soul
of man fears to be thus confronted with the soul of
nature.
Chaos was about to appear. The wind rolling back
the fog, and making a stage of the clouds behind, set the
scene for that fearful drama of wave and winter, which is
called a Snowstorm. Vessels putting back hove in sight.
For some minutes past the roads had no longer been
deserted. Every instant troubled barks hastening toward
an anchorage appeared from behind the capes; some were
doubling Portland Pill, the others St. Albans head. From
afar ships were running in. It was a race for refuge.
Southward the darkness thickened, and clouds, full of
night, bordered on the sea. The weight of the tempest
hanging overhead made a dreary lull on the waves. It
certainly was no time to sail. Yet the hooker had sailed.
She had made the south of the cape. She was already
out of the gulf and in the open sea. Suddenly there came
a gust of wind. The ``Matutina,'' which was still clearly in
sight, made all sail, as if resolved to profit by the
hurricane. It was the nor'wester, a wind sullen and angry.
Its weight was felt instantly. The hooker, caught
broadside on, staggered, but recovering held her course to sea.
This indicated a flight rather than a voyage, less fear of
sea than of land, and greater heed of pursuit from man
than from wind.
The hooker, passing through every degree of
diminution, sank into the horizon. The little star which she
carried into shadow paled. More and more the hooker
became amalgamated with the night, then disappeared.
This time for good and all.
At least the child seemed to understand it so; he ceased
to look at the sea. His eyes turned hack upon the plains,
the wastes, the hills, toward the space where it might not
be impossible to meet something living.
Into this unknown he set out.
WHAT kind of band was it which had left the child
behind in its flight?
Were those fugitives Comprachicos?
We have already seen the account of the measures taken
by William III, and passed by Parliament against the
malefactors, male and female, called Comprachicos,
otherwise Comprapequeños, otherwise Cheylas.
There are laws which disperse. The law acting against
the Comprachicos determined, not only the Comprachicos,
but vagabonds of all sorts, on a general flight.
It was the devil take the hindmost. The greater
number of the Comprachicos returned to Spain; many of
them, as we have said, being Basques.
The law for the protection of children had at first this
strange result: it caused many children to be abandoned.
The immediate effect of the penal statute was to
produce a crowd of children, found, or rather lost. Nothing
is easier to understand. Every wandering gang
containing a child was liable to suspicion. The mere fact of the
child's presence was in itself a denunciation.
``They are very likely Comprachicos.'' Such was the
first idea of the sheriff, of the bailiff, of the constable,
hence arrest and inquiry. People simply unfortunate,
reduced to wander and to beg, were seized with a terror
of being taken for Comprachicos, although they were
nothing of the kind. But the weak have grave
misgivings of possible errors in Justice. Besides, these
vagabond families are very easily scared. The accusation
against the Comprachicos was that they traded in other
people's children. But the promiscuousness caused by
poverty and indigence is such that at times it might have
been difficult for a father and mother to prove a child
their own.
How came you by this child? how were they to prove
that they held it from God? The child became a
peril-they got rid of it. To fly unencumbered was easier; the
parents resolved to lose it-now in a wood, now on a
strand, now down a well.
Children were found drowned in cisterns.
Let us add that, in imitation of England, all Europe
henceforth hunted down the Comprachicos. The impulse
of pursuit was given. There is nothing like belling the
cat. From this time forward the desire to seize them
made rivalry and emulation among the police of all
countries, and the alguazil was not less keenly watchful than
the constable.
One could still read, twenty-three years ago, on a stone
of the gate of Otero, an untranslatable inscription-the
words of the code, outraging property. In it, however,
the shade of difference which existed between the buyers
and the stealers of children is very strongly marked. Here
is part of the inscription in somewhat rough Castilian:
Aqui quedan las orejas de los Comprachicos, y las bolsas
de los robaniños, mientras que se van ellos al trabajo de
mar. You see the confiscation of ears, etc., did not
prevent the owners going to the galleys. Whence followed
a general rout among all vagabonds. They started
frightened; they arrived trembling. On every shore in Europe
their furtive advent was watched. Impossible for such
a band to embark with a child, since to embark with one
was dangerous.
To lose the child was much simpler of accomplishment.
And this child, of whom we have caught a glimpse in
the shadow of the solitudes of Portland, by whom had he
been cast away?
To all appearance by Comprachicos.
IT might be about seven o'clock in the evening. The
wind was now diminishing, a sign, however, of a
violent recurrence impending. The child was on the
table-land at the extreme south point of Portland.
Portland is a peninsula; but the child did not know
what a peninsula was, and was ignorant even of the name
of Portland. He knew but one thing, which is, that one
can walk until one drops down. An idea is a guide; he
had no idea. They had brought him there, and left him
there. They and there. These two enigmas represented
his doom. They were humankind. There was the
universe. For him in all creation there was absolutely no
other basis to rest on but the little piece of ground where
he placed his heel, ground hard and cold to his naked feet.
In the great twilight world, open on all sides, what was
there for the child? Nothing.
He walked toward this Nothing. Around him was the
vastness of human desertion.
He crossed the first plateau diagonally, then a second,
then a third. At the extremity of each plateau the child
came upon a break in the ground. The slope was
sometimes steep, but always short; the high, bare plains of
Portland resemble great flagstones overlapping each other.
The south side seems to enter under the protruding slab.
the north side rises over the next one; these made ascents,
which the child stepped over nimbly. From time to time
he stopped, and seemed to hold counsel with himself.
The night was becoming very dark. His radius of sight
was contracting. He now only saw a few steps before
him.
All of a sudden he stopped, listened for an instant, and,
with an almost imperceptible nod of satisfaction, turned
quickly and directed his steps toward an eminence of
moderate height, which he dimly perceived on his right,
at the point of the plain nearest the cliff. There was on
the eminence a shape which in the mist looked like a tree.
The child had just heard a noise in this direction, which
was the noise neither of the wind nor of the sea, nor was
it the cry of animals. He thought that some one was
there, and in a few strides he was at the foot of the hillock.
In truth, some one was there.
That which had been indistinct on the top of the
eminence was now visible. It was something like a great
arm thrust straight out of the ground; at the upper
extremity of the arm a sort of forefinger, supported from
beneath by the thumb, pointed out horizontally; the arm,
the thumb, and the forefinger drew a square against the
sky. At the point of juncture of this peculiar finger and
this peculiar thumb there was a line, from which hung
something black and shapeless. The line moving in the
wind sounded like a chain. This was the noise the child
had heard. Seen closely, the line was that which the noise
indicated, a chain-a single chain cable.
By that mysterious law of amalgamation which
throughout nature causes appearances to exaggerate realities, the
place, the hour, the mist, the mournful sea, the cloudy
turmoils on the distant horizon, added to the effect of
this figure, and made it seem enormous.
The mass linked to the chain presented the appearance
of a scabbard. It was swaddled like a child, and long
like a man. There was a round thing at its summit, about
which the end of the chain was rolled. The scabbard was
riven asunder at the lower end, and shreds of flesh hung
out between the rents.
A feeble breeze stirred the chain, and that which hung
to it swayed gently. The passive mass obeyed the vague
motions of space. It was an object to inspire
indescribable dread. Horror, which disproportions everything,
blurred its dimensions while retaining its shape. It was
a condensation of darkness, which had a defined form.
Night was above and within the spectre; it was a prey of
ghastly exaggeration. Twilight and moonrise, stars
setting behind the cliff, floating things in space, the clouds,
winds from all quarters, had ended by penetrating into
the composition of this visible nothing. The species of
log hanging in the wind partook of the impersonality
diffused far over sea and sky, and the darkness completed
this phase of the thing which had once been a man.
It was that which is no longer.
To be nought, yet a remainder! Such a thing is
beyond the power of language to express. To exist no more,
yet to persist; to be in the abyss, yet out of it; to
reappear above death as if indissoluble. There is a certain
amount of impossibility mixed with such reality. Thence
comes the inexpressible. This being-was it a being? This
black witness was a remainder, and an awful
remainder-a remainder of what? Of nature first, and then of
society. Nought, and yet total.
The lawless inclemency of the weather held it at its
will; the deep oblivion of solitude environed it; it was
given up to unknown chances; it was without defence
against the darkness, which did with it what it willed.
It was forever the patient; it submitted; the hurricane
(that ghastly conflict of winds) was upon it.
The spectre was given over to pillage. It underwent
the horrible outrage of rotting in the open air; it was an
outlaw of the tomb. There was no peace for it even in
annihilation: in the summer it fell away into dust, in the
winter into mud. Death should be veiled, the grave should
have its reserve. :Here was neither veil nor reserve: but
cynically avowed putrefaction. It is effrontery in death
to display its work, it offends all the calmness of shadow
when it does its task outside its laboratory, the grave.
This dead being had been stripped. To strip one
already stripped-relentless act! His marrow was no longer
in his bones; his entrails were no longer in his body; his
voice was no longer in his throat. A corpse is a pocket
which death turns inside out and empties. If he ever had
a Me, where was the Me? There still, perchance, and this
was fearful to think of. Something wandering about
something in chains-can one imagine a more mournful
lineament in the darkness?
Realities exist here below which serve as issues to the
unknown, which seem to facilitate the egress of
speculation, and at which hypothesis snatches. Conjecture has
its compelle intrare. In passing by certain places and
before certain objects one can not help stopping-a prey to
dreams into the realms of which the mind enters. In the
invisible there are dark portals ajar. No one could have
met this dead man without meditating.
In the vastness of dispersion he was wearing silently
away. He had had blood which had been drunk, skin
which had been eaten, flesh which had been stolen.
Nothing had passed him by without taking somewhat from him.
December had borrowed cold of him; midnight, horror;
the iron, rust; the plague, miasma; the flowers, perfume.
His slow disintegration was a toll paid to all-a toll of
the corpse to the storm, to the rain, to the dews to the
reptiles, to the birds. All the dark hands of night had rifled
the dead.
He was, indeed, an inexpressibly strange tenant, a
tenant of the darkness. He was on a plain and on a hill,
and he was not. He was palpable, yet vanished. He was
a shadow accruing to the night. After the disappearance
of day into the vast of silent obscurity, he became in
lugubrious accord with all around him. By his mere
presence he increased the gloom of the tempest and the calm
of stars. The unutterable which is in the desert was
condensed in him. Waif of an unknown fate, he
commingled with all the wild secrets of the night. There was in
his mystery a vague reverberation of all enigmas.
About him life seemed sinking to its lowest depths.
Certainty and confidence appeared to diminish in his
environs. The shiver of the brushwood and the grass, a
desolate melancholy, an anxiety in which a conscience
seemed to lurk, appropriated with tragic force the whole
landscape to that black figure suspended by the chain.
The presence of a spectre in the horizon is an aggravation
of solitude.
He was a Sign. Having unappeasable winds around
him, he was implacable. Perpetual shuddering made him
terrible. Fearful to say, he seemed to be a centre in
space, with something immense leaning on him. Who
can tell? Perhaps that equity, half seen and set at
defiance, which transcends human justice. There was in
his unburied continuance the vengeance of men and his
own vengeance. He was a testimony in the twilight and
the waste. He was in himself a disquieting substance,
since we tremble before the substance which is the ruined
habitation of the soul. For dead matter to trouble us,
it must once have been tenanted by spirit. He denounced
the law of earth to the law of heaven. Placed there by
man, he there awaited God. Above him floated, blended
with all the vague distortions of the cloud and the wave,
boundless dreams of shadow.
Who could tell what sinister mysteries lurked behind
this phantom? The illimitable circumscribed by naught,
nor tree, nor roof, nor passer-by, was around the dead
man. When the unchangeable broods over us, when
heaven, the abyss, the life, grave, and eternity appear
patent, then it is we feel that all is inaccessible, all is
forbidden, all is sealed. When infinity opens to us, terrible
indeed is the closing of the gate behind.
THE child was before this thing, dumb, wondering,
and with eyes fixed.
To a man it would have been a gibbet; to the child it
was an apparition.
Where a man would have seen a corpse the child saw a
spectre.
Besides, he did not understand.
The attractions of the obscure are manifold. There
was one on the summit of that hill. The child took a
step, then another; he ascended, wishing all the while to
descend; and approached, wishing all the while to retreat.
Bold, yet trembling, he went close up to survey the
spectre.
When he got close under the gibbet, he looked up and
examined it.
The spectre was tarred; here and there it shone. The
child distinguished the face. It was coated over with
pitch; and this mask, which appeared viscous and sticky,
varied its aspect with the night shadows. The child saw
the mouth, which was a hole; the nose, which was a hole;
the eyes, which were holes. The body was wrapped, and
apparently corded up, in coarse canvas, soaked in naphtha.
The canvas was mouldy and torn. A knee protruded
through it. A rent disclosed the ribs; partly corpse, partly
skeleton. The face was the colour of earth; slugs,
wandering over it, had traced across it vague ribbons of silver. The
canvas, glued to the bones, showed in relief like the robe
of a statue. The skull, cracked and fractured, gaped like
a rotten fruit. The teeth were still human, for they
retained a laugh. The remains of a cry seemed to murmur
in the open mouth. There were a few hairs of beard on
the cheek. The inclined head had an air of attention.
Some repairs had recently been done; the face had been
tarred afresh, as well as the ribs and the knee which
protruded from the canvas. The feet hung out below.
Just underneath, in the grass, were two shoes, which
snow and rain had rendered shapeless. These shoes had
fallen from the dead man.
The barefooted child looked at the shoes.
The wind, which had become more and more restless,
was now and then interrupted by those pauses which
foretell the approach of a storm. For the last few minutes
it had altogether ceased to blow. The corpse no longer
stirred; the chain was as motionless as a plumb line.
Like all newcomers into life, and, taking into account
the peculiar influences of his fate, the child no doubt felt
within him that awakening of ideas characteristic of early
years, which endeavours to open the brain and which
resembles the pecking of the young bird in the egg. But
all there was in his little consciousness just then was
resolved into stupor. Excess of sensation has the effect of
too much oil, and ends by putting out thought. A man
would have put himself questions; the child put himself
none; he only looked.
The tar gave the face a wet appearance; drops of pitch,
congealed in what had once been the eyes, produced the
effect of tears. However, thanks to the pitch, the ravage
of death, if not annulled, was visibly slackened and
reduced to the least possible decay. That which was before
the child was a thing of which care was taken; the man
was evidently precious. They had not cared to keep him
alive, but they cared to keep him dead.
The gibbet was old, worm-eaten, although strong, and
had been in use many years.
It was an immemorial custom in England to tar
smugglers. They were hanged on the seaboard, coated over
with pitch and left swinging. Examples must be made
in public, and tarred examples last longest. The tar was
mercy; by renewing it they were spared making too many
fresh examples. They placed gibbets from point to point
along the coast, as nowadays they do beacons. The ha
II II
III III
IV IV
V V
VI VI
Part 1
BOOK 3
NIGHT NOT SO BLACK AS MAN
I PORTLAND BILL
II LEFT ALONE
III ALONE
IV QUESTIONS
V THE TREE OF HUMAN INVENTION
VI STRUGGLE BETWEEN DEATH AND NIGHT