The monster makers
Theo paijmans uncovers the literary source behind 19th century fears of child abduction and torture
In 1873, several French and even one Dutch newspaper commented on the death of a man named Femorus, who, during his life, had elevated the creation of artificial monsters and abnormalities to an unsurpassed art form. It had not only been his profession, the newspapers remarked, it had also been his all-consuming passion. For a while he was content with creating rabbits with five paws, horned rats, hares with hairy spurs, double-tailed snakes and calves with two heads. Then the idea struck him to use humans for his grotesque art, with dire consequences: “In 1854 at Troyes he tried to grow the wings of a swan on the back of a two-year old child, but he was tried and convicted to a prison sentence of five years for doing so. The child did not die but today is a corporal in the 14th line. After he was released from prison, he used corpses for his experiments. He created foetuses with three legs and four arms and sold these to anatomical museums in the provinces and abroad. Finally the idea arose within him to mutilate himself and to grow a cockscomb on his forehead; as a consequence thereof he developed an abscess, due to which he died after 14 days.”
A strange story, and trying to ascertain whether there is any truth in it uncovers a world even more bizarre ; the trail might also contain the key to what caused the European missing children panics of 1869, which Fort mentioned in Lo!
A Parisian newspaper commented on Femorus’s passing, giving a clue as to the veracity of the fantastic tale: “Unless I am mistaken, this Femorus never existed outside the imagination of the reporters of l’Evenement”. If a hoax or canard, then what contemporary trend caused such an outré tale to be published? Was there some murky but genuine circumstance of which it was an echo? There is a telling allusion in the Parisian press. Introducing the strange saga of Femorus to its readers, one newspaper observed: “We have already talked, several months ago, about a maker of monsters, who conducted, right here in Paris, the horrible industry of the ‘Comprachicos’ of l’Homme Qui Rit.”
L’homme Qui Rit, translated as The Man who Laughs (filmed in 1928), isVictor Hugo’s most obscure novel. It was published in April 1869. Hugo transports the reader to 17th century England, but also introduces two elements that have haunted readers ever since. The first is Gwynplaine, the man who laughs, whose face was terribly mutilated as a boy, turning it into a clown’s mask, his mouth carved into a perpetual grin – the progenitor of Batman’s Joker and John Keel’s Grinning Man.
The second element is Hugo’s introduction of the world of the Comprachicos, to which the Parisian newspaper alluded. The word is Hugo’s invention, which he based on the Spanish for ‘child-buyers’. According to Hugo, this band of child-buyers makes its living by mutilating and disfiguring children who are then forced to beg for alms on the streets or who are exhibited as carnival freaks. At the opening of his novel, Hugo provides lengthy descriptions of the history, habits and terrible art of the Comprachicos, chilling imagery that today would not have been out of place in a lurid horror novel or high strangeness abduction story: “The Comprachicos worked on man as the Chinese work on trees. They had their secrets, as we have said; they had their tricks, which are now lost arts. A sort of fantastic stunted thing left their hands; it was ridiculous and wonderful. They could touch up a little being with such skill that its father could not have known it… Sometimes they left the spine straight and remade the face. They unmarked a child as one might unmark a pockethandkerchief. Products, destined for tumblers, had their joints dislocated in a masterly manner – you would have said they had been boned.
“Thus gymnasts were made.
“In 1854 he tried to grow the wings of a swan on the back of a two-year-old child, but was tried and convicted to a prison sentence of five years for doing so”