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

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

The Man Who Laughs