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'oeil 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 takes life and birth, and becomes a

prodigy and a wonder, remains a chrysalis in China, and is preserved in

a deathlike state. China is a museum of embryos.

The Man Who Laughs