The dwarf of the Elector Palatine, Perkeo, whose effigy--or
ghost--springs from a magical box in the cave of Heidelberg, was a
remarkable specimen of this science, very varied in its applications. It
fashioned beings the law of whose existence was hideously simple: it
permitted them to suffer, and commanded them to amuse.




III.


The manufacture of monsters was practised 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
utilized 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