A case of curiosities Read Online Free

trade of eunuch-making. The boy was modified in a room not far from the gates of the Forbidden City. After the excision, the operator applied a paste of peppercorns and covered the wound with paper soaked in cold water. For this service he was paid, if one believes Jamie-son, the equivalent of eight dollars and sixty-four cents. Simultaneously, in Vienna, Herr Doktor Alfred Dreilich, working in his cabinet near the Stock im Eisen, removed the testicles of Heinrich Liitz, a youth who was to become a castrato celebrated for the fioritura in his renditions of Handel's operatic arias. And closer to Tournay, also in that year, a prize goat of the Golay brothers was made a ridgeling with a swift swipe of Matthew Rochat's meat cleaver.
    Did Claude suffer similar severance? The answer is an emphatic: No!
    The surgeon Staemphli came to remove a very small growth sprouting between the middle and the ring finger of Claude's right hand. It was neither a cyst nor a carbuncle, not a canker or a cancer, though it had been called all these names, and a dozen others besides. What it was was a humble mole. In itself, this would not have attracted Adolphe Staemphli. But when the surgeon learned that the mole bore a resemblance to the face of Louis XVI, that it often turned a royal scarlet (further tribute to the reigning monarch of France), and that it displayed an almost sculptural quality — when Adolphe Staemphli learned all of this, he decided he must investigate.
    Claude had grown to appreciate the mole and did not want it removed. It was a source of special interest even in a region that had no shortage of medical oddities, and thus it carried all sorts of privileges. Whenever "the King would visit," Claude was guaranteed a plate of salted peas and a pitcher of licorice water at the Red Dog. He would squeeze his anomaly into a royal likeness and match it to the profile on a proffered coin of the realm. To boost his earnings, he told of the tremendous discomfort he endured coaxing out the King. The deception caught up with him. News of the pain traveled to the kitchens of the mansion house, whose talkative scullion, Catherine Kinderklapper, informed her master of the agony suffered by the Page boy and his royal canker. Because of the Abbe's appreciation of Madame Page's talents, he arranged for the visit from the surgeon who now observed the mole.
    Staemphli briefly considered using a raspatory—the tool that resembled a wood file—to remove the corrupted flesh, but this would have proved inelegant. He selected instead a delicate piece of specialized surgical equipment that looked like a miniature hacksaw. He shoved the hand into the snow, checked the leather bit in Claude's mouth, and bowed for momentary prayer. Removing the hand from the bucket, he immediately cut asunder, employing the methods of Sabourin, a fellow surgeon of Geneva. The movements were quick, and the hand was soon returned to the bucket, where it reddened the once-white snow. As the blood drained, the surgeon neatened things up on the table. He again pulled the hand from the bucket and wrapped it in a complicated, almost artful ball of bandaging.
    During all of this, Claude's body was motionless, his vision dulled by the brownish cake. His imagination, lively in ordinary circumstances, now raced. He observed the dried wildflow-ers and mushroom strings hanging from the rafters. They began to sway and then dance. He soon felt himself running through a multicolored field of borage, flax, and speedwell, of mint and betony, of green nettle and purple sage. He saw himself chased by the firedogs he had drawn earlier in the evening, only now they were slavering. The last thing Claude observed before falling profoundly into sleep was the surgeon holding the card that had been knocked to the floor: The Grim Reaper had a drop of blood covering his scythe.

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