according to Root, the famous chef César Ritz promptly invented a new recipe—elephant trunk, with sauce chasseur.
When we scattered our coins on the table for the bill, he sighed and allowed as how Herol Egan had just made twenty-five dollars writing an English-language brochure for a brothel on the rue de Louvois. He could dig up similar work for us, Root said, if we wanted. I shook my head. He patted my shoulder and left for a party at the Hôtel Lisbonne.
It was past ten o'clock when I reached the rue du Dragon. In my room, despite the cold, I opened my window and watched the long Paris night settle in. The sky was filled with snow, not falling exactly, but gently riding up and down on the back of the wind. The golden dome of the Invalides was barely visible. A few blocks away I could hear the trucks starting up the grade on the boulevard Raspail, making the same low growl as the tigers in the zoo. Here and there in windows behind the drifting snow I could see a few flickering pinpoints of Edisonian lights.
I closed the window and sat down in the chair that Elsie Short had used and made my mind work back and forth, like a man excavating a tree stump. Then I pulled out my little spiral notebook.
Two-Page Summary of "Vaucanson's Duck and the 'Bleeding Man.'" Page Four.
After the Shitting Duck came the infamous Bleeding Man Project.
Louis XV had assumed the throne in 1710 when he was five years old. He was an orphan, lonely, as kings usually are, and plagued, like Vaucanson, by inexplicable and untreatable illnesses. As he grew older he studied anatomy with a royal tutor and performed all kinds of surgical experiments on dogs and cats. When he was twenty-nine he was taken to see an exhibit of Vaucanson's automates—taken at the instigation of his Controller-General, a man named Jean Baptiste Bertin. The king was instantly fascinated and demanded to meet the inventor. A year
later, following a royal order, Bertin, as front man, hired Vaucanson to reform the national silk industry in Lyon.
But there were other, secret royal instructions as well.
Vaucanson was given a large amount of money to build—in seclusion, in confidence, in total secrecy, especially from the Church—a complete and functioning human being, which the king could use for medical study and experiment.
This "Bleeding Man" was long thought to be mere blasphemous rumor, the work of Vaucanson's many enemies. In fact, exactly one year ago Elsie Short, Ph.D., had come across evidence that this royal secret really existed. She had found in the special collections of Columbia University a previously unknown entry in the proceedings of the Lyon Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was the record of a conversation during which Vaucanson, evidently drunk, described to the Director of the Academy his project for an Homme Saignant—a "Bleeding Man." This was to be an automate, Vaucanson said, like his celebrated Flute Player. But this time he planned to build a full-sized model of the human body—no flute. It was to be shaped in semi-transparent wax, with visible intestines, a heart, a stomach, and rubber veins and arteries through which real human blood could flow. A man, anatomically correct and complete to the last detail. Or as close to completeness as eighteenth-century science could manage. When finished, the Bleeding Man would be able to catch a fever, eat, excrete, move his arms—in short, "enjoy all the functions of an animal economy," just as in Le Cat's and Vaucanson's early dream.
But toward the end of his life Louis XV began to suffer from prolonged and terrifying bouts of dizziness. For weeks at a time he could scarcely stand or walk.
And after a disabling fall, Vaucanson himself started
to experience the same symptoms. (They probably both suffered from Menière's Disease, an affliction of the inner ear that destroys the sense of balance.) As a result, the king changed his goal.
When we scattered our coins on the table for the bill, he sighed and allowed as how Herol Egan had just made twenty-five dollars writing an English-language brochure for a brothel on the rue de Louvois. He could dig up similar work for us, Root said, if we wanted. I shook my head. He patted my shoulder and left for a party at the Hôtel Lisbonne.
It was past ten o'clock when I reached the rue du Dragon. In my room, despite the cold, I opened my window and watched the long Paris night settle in. The sky was filled with snow, not falling exactly, but gently riding up and down on the back of the wind. The golden dome of the Invalides was barely visible. A few blocks away I could hear the trucks starting up the grade on the boulevard Raspail, making the same low growl as the tigers in the zoo. Here and there in windows behind the drifting snow I could see a few flickering pinpoints of Edisonian lights.
I closed the window and sat down in the chair that Elsie Short had used and made my mind work back and forth, like a man excavating a tree stump. Then I pulled out my little spiral notebook.
Two-Page Summary of "Vaucanson's Duck and the 'Bleeding Man.'" Page Four.
After the Shitting Duck came the infamous Bleeding Man Project.
Louis XV had assumed the throne in 1710 when he was five years old. He was an orphan, lonely, as kings usually are, and plagued, like Vaucanson, by inexplicable and untreatable illnesses. As he grew older he studied anatomy with a royal tutor and performed all kinds of surgical experiments on dogs and cats. When he was twenty-nine he was taken to see an exhibit of Vaucanson's automates—taken at the instigation of his Controller-General, a man named Jean Baptiste Bertin. The king was instantly fascinated and demanded to meet the inventor. A year
later, following a royal order, Bertin, as front man, hired Vaucanson to reform the national silk industry in Lyon.
But there were other, secret royal instructions as well.
Vaucanson was given a large amount of money to build—in seclusion, in confidence, in total secrecy, especially from the Church—a complete and functioning human being, which the king could use for medical study and experiment.
This "Bleeding Man" was long thought to be mere blasphemous rumor, the work of Vaucanson's many enemies. In fact, exactly one year ago Elsie Short, Ph.D., had come across evidence that this royal secret really existed. She had found in the special collections of Columbia University a previously unknown entry in the proceedings of the Lyon Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was the record of a conversation during which Vaucanson, evidently drunk, described to the Director of the Academy his project for an Homme Saignant—a "Bleeding Man." This was to be an automate, Vaucanson said, like his celebrated Flute Player. But this time he planned to build a full-sized model of the human body—no flute. It was to be shaped in semi-transparent wax, with visible intestines, a heart, a stomach, and rubber veins and arteries through which real human blood could flow. A man, anatomically correct and complete to the last detail. Or as close to completeness as eighteenth-century science could manage. When finished, the Bleeding Man would be able to catch a fever, eat, excrete, move his arms—in short, "enjoy all the functions of an animal economy," just as in Le Cat's and Vaucanson's early dream.
But toward the end of his life Louis XV began to suffer from prolonged and terrifying bouts of dizziness. For weeks at a time he could scarcely stand or walk.
And after a disabling fall, Vaucanson himself started
to experience the same symptoms. (They probably both suffered from Menière's Disease, an affliction of the inner ear that destroys the sense of balance.) As a result, the king changed his goal.
Similar Books
![The Sextet Presents… By Male Order [In Days of Olde] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)](https://fs.ageofbook.com/617035/thumbs/152x264/the-sextet-presents-by-male-order-in-days-of-olde-siren-publishing-menage-everlasting.png)
