The Mother of Monsters
I was reminded of this horrible story and this horrible woman on the seafront the other day, as I stood watching—at a watering-place much frequented by the wealthy—a lady well known in Paris, a young, elegant, and charming girl, loved and respected by all who know her.
My story is now many years old, but it is impossible to forget such things.
I had been invited by a friend to make a long stay with him in a small country town. In order to do the honours of the district, he took me about all over the place; made me see the most celebrated views, the manor houses and castles, the local industries, the ruins; he showed me the monuments, the churches, the old carved doors, the trees of specially large size or uncommon shape, the oak of St. Andrew and the Roqueboise yew.
When, with exclamations of gratified enthusiasm, I had inspected all the curiosities in the district, my friend confessed, with every sign of acute distress, that there was nothing more to visit. I breathed again. I should be able, at last, to enjoy a little rest under the shade of the trees. But suddenly he exclaimed:
“Why, no, there is one more. There’s the mother of monsters.”
“And who,” I asked, “is the mother of monsters?”
He answered: “She is a horrible woman, a perfect demon, a creature who every year deliberately produces deformed, hideous, frightful children, veritable monsters, and sells them to peepshow men.
“The men who follow this ghastly trade come from time to time to discover whether she has brought forth any fresh abortion, and if they like the look of the object, they pay the mother and take it away with them.
“She has eleven of these offspring. She is rich.
“You think I’m joking, making it all up, exaggerating. No, my friend, I’m only telling you the truth, the literal truth.
“Come and see this woman. I’ll tell you afterwards how she became a monster-factory.”
He took me off to the outskirts of the town.
She lived in a nice little house by the side of the road. It was pretty and well kept. The garden was full of flowers, and smelt delicious. Anyone would have taken it for the home of a retired lawyer.
A servant showed us into a little parlour, and the wretched creature appeared.
She was about forty, tall, hard-featured, but well built, vigorous, and wealthy, the true type of robust peasantry, half animal and half woman.
She was aware of the disapproval in which she was held, and seemed to receive us with malignant humility.
“What do the gentlemen want?” she inquired.
My friend replied: “We have been told that your last child is just like any other child, and not in the least like his brothers. I wanted to verify this. Is it true?”
She gave us a sly glance of anger and answered:
“Oh, no, sir, oh dear no! He’s even uglier, mebbe, than the others. I’ve no luck, no luck at all, they’re all that way, sir, all like that, it’s something cruel; how can the good Lord be so hard on a poor woman left all alone in the world!”
She spoke rapidly, keeping her eyes lowered, with a hypocritical air, like a sacred wild beast. She softened the harsh tone of her voice, and it was amazing to hear these tearful high-pitched words issuing from that great bony body, with its coarse angular strength, made for violent gesture and wolfish howling.
“We should like to see your child,” my friend asked.
She appeared to blush. Had I perhaps been mistaken? After some moments of silence she said, in a louder voice: “What would be the use of that?”
She had raised her head, and gave us a swift, burning glance.
“Why don’t you wish to show him to us?” answered my friend. “There are many people to whom you show him. You know whom I mean.”
She started up, letting loose the full fury of her voice.
“So that’s what you’ve come for, is it? Just to insult me? Because my bairns are like animals, eh? Well, you’ll not see them, no, no, no, you shan’t. Get out of here. I know you all, the whole pack of you, bullying me about like this!”
She advanced towards us, her hands on her hips. At the brutal sound of her voice, a sort of moan, or rather a mew, a wretched lunatic screech, issued from the next room. I shivered to the marrow. We drew back before her.
In a severe tone my friend warned her:
“Have a care, She-devil”—the people all called her She-devil—“have a care, one of these days this will bring you bad luck.”
She trembled with rage, waving her arms, mad with fury, and yelling:
“Get out of here, you! What’ll bring me bad luck? Get out of here, you pack of unbelieving dogs, you!”
She almost flew at our throats; we fled, our hearts contracted with horror.
When we were outside the door, my friend asked:
“Well, you’ve seen her; what do you say to her?”
I answered: “Tell me the history of the brute.”
And this is what he told me, as we walked slowly back along the white high road, bordered on either side by the ripe corn that rippled like a quiet sea under the caress of a small gentle wind.
The girl had once been a servant on a farm, a splendid worker, well-behaved and careful. She was not known to have a lover, and was not suspected of any weakness.
She fell, as they all do, one harvest night among the heaps of corn, under a stormy sky, when the still, heavy air is hot like a furnace, and the brown bodies of the lads and girls are drenched with sweat.
Feeling soon after that she was pregnant, she was tormented with shame and fear. Desirous at all costs of hiding her misfortune, she forcibly compressed her belly by a method she invented, a horrible corset made of wood and ropes. The more the growing child swelled her body, the more she tightened the instrument of torture, suffering agony, but bearing her pain with courage, always smiling and active, letting no one see or suspect anything.
She crippled the little creature inside her, held tightly in that terrible machine; she crushed him, deformed him, made a monster of him. The skull was squeezed almost flat and ran to a point, with the two great eyes jutting right out from the forehead. The limbs, crushed against the body, were twisted like the stem of a vine, and grew to an inordinate length, with the fingers and toes like spiders’ legs.
The trunk remained quite small and round like a nut.
She gave birth to it in the open fields one spring morning.
When the women weeders, who had run to her help, saw the beast which was appearing, they fled shrieking. And the story ran round the neighbourhood that she had brought a demon into the world. It was then that she got the name “She-Devil.”
She lost her place. She lived on charity, and perhaps on secret love, for she was a fine-looking girl, and not all men are afraid of hell.
She brought up her monster, which, by the way, she hated with a savage hatred, and which she would perhaps have strangled had not the curé, foreseeing the likelihood of such a crime, terrified her with threats of the law.
At last one day some passing showmen heard tell of the frightful abortion, and asked to see it, intending to take it away if they liked it. They did like it, and paid the mother five hundred francs down for it. Ashamed at first, she did not want to let them see a beast of this sort; but when she discovered that it was worth money, that these people wanted it, she began to bargain, to dispute it penny by penny, inflaming them with the tale of her child’s deformities, raising her prices with peasant tenacity.
In order not to be cheated, she made a contract with them. And they agreed to pay her four hundred francs a year as well, as though they had taken this beast into their service.
The unhoped-for good fortune crazed the mother, and after that she never lost the desire to give birth to another phenomenon, so that she would have a fixed income like the upper classes.
As she was very fertile, she succeeded in her ambition, and apparently became expert at varying the shapes of her monsters according to the pressure they were made to undergo during the period of her pregnancy.
She had them long and short, some like crabs and others like lizards. Several died, whereat she was deeply distressed.
The law attempted to intervene, but nothing could be proved. So she was left to manufacture her marvels in peace.
She now has eleven of them alive, which bring her in from five to six thousand francs, year in and year out. One only is not yet placed, the one she would not show us. But she will not keep it long, for she is known now to all the circus proprietors in the world, who come from time to time to see whether she has anything new.
She even arranges auctions between them, when the creature in question is worth it.
My friend was silent. A profound disgust surged in my heart, a furious anger, and regret that I had not strangled the brute when I had her in my hands.
“Then who is the father?” I asked.
“Nobody knows,” he replied. “He or they have a certain modesty. He, or they, remain concealed. Perhaps they share in the spoils.”
I had thought no more of that far-off adventure until the other day, at a fashionable watering-place, when I saw a charming elegant lady, the most skilful of coquettes, surrounded by several men who have the highest regard for her.
I walked along the front, arm in arm with my friend, the local doctor. Ten minutes later I noticed a nurse looking after three children who were rolling about on the sand.
A pathetic little pair of crutches lay on the ground. Then I saw that the three children were deformed, hunchbacked and lame; hideous little creatures.
The doctor said to me: “Those are the offspring of the charming lady you met just now.”
I felt a profound pity for her and for them.
“The poor mother!” I cried. “How does she still manage to laugh?”
“Don’t pity her, my dear fellow,” replied my friend. “It’s the poor children who are to be pitied. That’s the result of keeping the figure graceful right up to the last day. Those monsters are manufactured by corsets. She knows perfectly well that she’s risking her life at that game. What does she care, so long as she remains pretty and seductive?”
And I remembered the other, the peasant woman, the She-Devil, who sold hers.