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.
The Orphan
Mademoiselle Source had adopted the boy under very sad circumstances. At the time, she was thirty-six years old, and her deformity (when a little girl she had slipped from her nurse’s knee into the fire, and her face had been horribly burnt and was a terrible sight) had determined her not to marry, for she did not want to be married for her money.
A neighbour, who was with child when she became a widow, died in her confinement, leaving no money at all. Mademoiselle Source looked after the baby, put it out to nurse, brought it up, sent it to school, and then took the boy home when he was fourteen that she might have someone to love her in the empty house, someone to look after her and to sweeten her old age.
She lived on a little country estate four miles from Rennes, and had given up keeping a servant, because her expenses had more than doubled since she had adopted the orphan, her income of three thousand francs not being sufficient for three people.
She did her own cooking
