III.
The manufacture of monsters was practised on a large scale, andcomprised 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, incapableof reproduction. Scarcely human beings, they were useful tovoluptuousness and to religion. The seraglio and the Sistine Chapelutilized the same species of monsters; fierce in the former case, mildin the latter.
They knew how to produce things in those days which are not producednow; they had talents which we lack, and it is not without reason thatsome good folk cry out that the decline has come. We no longer know howto sculpture living human flesh; this is consequent on the loss of theart of torture. Men were once virtuosi in that respect, but are so nolonger; the art has become so simplified that it will soon disappearaltogether. In cutting the limbs of living men, in opening their belliesand in dragging out their entrails, phenomena were grasped on the momentand discoveries made. We are obliged to renounce these experiments now,and are thus deprived of the progress which surgery made by aid of theexecutioner.
The vivisection of former days was not limited to the manufacture ofphenomena for the market-place, of buffoons for the palace (a species ofaugmentative of the courtier), and eunuchs for sultans and popes. Itabounded in varieties. One of its triumphs was the manufacture of cocksfor the king of England.
It was the custom, in the palace of the kings of England, to have a sortof watchman, who crowed like a cock. This watcher, awake while allothers slept, ranged the palace, and raised from hour to hour the cry ofthe farmyard, repeating it as often as was necessary, and thus supplyinga clock. This man, promoted to be cock, had in childhood undergone theoperation of the pharynx, which was part of the art described by Dr.Conquest. Under Charles II. the salivation inseparable to the operationhaving disgusted the Duchess of Portsmouth, the appointment was indeedpreserved, so that the splendour of the crown should not be tarnished,but they got an unmutilated man to represent the cock. A retired officerwas generally selected for this honourable employment. Under James II.the functionary was named William Sampson, Cock, and received for hiscrow L9, 2s. 6d. annually.
The memoirs of Catherine II. inform us that at St. Petersburg, scarcelya hundred years since, whenever the czar or czarina was displeased witha Russian prince, he was forced to squat down in the great antechamberof 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 foodfrom the floor.
These fashions have passed away; but not so much, perhaps, as one mightimagine. Nowadays, courtiers slightly modify their intonation inclucking to please their masters. More than one picks up from theground--we will not say from the mud--what he eats.
It is very fortunate that kings cannot err. Hence their contradictionsnever perplex us. In approving always, one is sure to be alwaysright--which is pleasant. Louis XIV. would not have liked to see atVersailles either an officer acting the cock, or a prince acting theturkey. That which raised the royal and imperial dignity in England andRussia would have seemed to Louis the Great incompatible with the crownof St. Louis. We know what his displeasure was when Madame Henrietteforgot herself so far as to see a hen in a dream--which was, indeed, agrave breach of good manners in a lady of the court. When one is of thecourt, one should not dream of the courtyard. Bossuet, it may beremembered, was nearly as scandalized as Louis XIV.