Under the Stuarts, the Comprachicos were by no means in bad odour at court.  On occasions they were used for reasons of state.  For James II. they were almost an instrumentum regni.  It was a time when families, which were refractory or in the way, were dismembered; when a descent was cut short; when heirs were suddenly suppressed.  At times one branch was defrauded to the profit of another.  The Comprachicos had a genius for disfiguration which recommended them to state policy.  To disfigure is better than to kill.  There was, indeed, the Iron Mask, but that was a mighty measure.  Europe could not be peopled with iron masks, while deformed tumblers ran about the streets without creating any surprise.  Besides, the iron mask is removable; not so the mask of flesh.  You are masked for ever by your own flesh—­what can be more ingenious?  The Comprachicos worked on man as the Chinese work on trees.  They had their 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 meconnaitrait l’oeil meme de son pere, 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.