Curiosities of Literature (Vol. 1-3). Disraeli Isaac

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      THE ABSENT MAN.

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      The character of Bruyère's "Absent Man" has been translated in the Spectator, and exhibited on the theatre. It is supposed to be a fictitious character, or one highly coloured. It was well known, however, to his contemporaries, to be the Count de Brancas. The present anecdotes concerning the same person were unknown to, or forgotten by, Bruyère; and are to the full as extraordinary as those which characterise Menalcas, or the Absent Man.

      The count was reading by the fireside, but Heaven knows with what degree of attention, when the nurse brought him his infant child. He throws down the book; he takes the child in his arms. He was playing with her, when an important visitor was announced. Having forgot he had quitted his book, and that it was his child he held in his hands, he hastily flung the squalling innocent on the table.

      The count was walking in the street, and the Duke de la Rochefoucault crossed the way to speak to him.—"God bless thee, poor man!" exclaimed the count. Rochefoucault smiled, and was beginning to address him:—"Is it not enough," cried the count, interrupting him, and somewhat in a passion; "is it not enough that I have said, at first, I have nothing for you? Such lazy vagrants as you hinder a gentleman from walking the streets." Rochefoucault burst into a loud laugh, and awakening the absent man from his lethargy, he was not a little surprised, himself, that he should have taken his friend for an importunate mendicant! La Fontaine is recorded to have been one of the most absent men; and Furetière relates a most singular instance of this absence of mind. La Fontaine attended the burial of one of his friends, and some time afterwards he called to visit him. At first he was shocked at the information of his death; but recovering from his surprise, observed—"True! true! I recollect I went to his funeral."

      WAX-WORK.

      We have heard of many curious deceptions occasioned by the imitative powers of wax-work. A series of anatomical sculptures in coloured wax was projected by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, under the direction of Fontana. Twenty apartments have been filled with those curious imitations. They represent in every possible detail, and in each successive stage of denudation, the organs of sense and reproduction; the muscular, the vascular, the nervous, and the bony system. They imitate equally well the form, and more exactly the colouring, of nature than injected preparations; and they have been employed to perpetuate many transient phenomena of disease, of which no other art could have made so lively a record.61

      There is a species of wax-work, which, though it can hardly claim the honours of the fine arts, is adapted to afford much pleasure—I mean figures of wax, which may be modelled with great truth of character.

      Menage has noticed a work of this kind. In the year 1675, the Duke de Maine received a gilt cabinet, about the size of a moderate table. On the door was inscribed, "The Apartment of Wit." The inside exhibited an alcove and a long gallery. In an arm-chair was seated the figure of the duke himself, composed of wax, the resemblance the most perfect imaginable. On one side stood the Duke de la Rochefoucault, to whom he presented a paper of verses for his examination. M. de Marsillac, and Bossuet bishop of Meaux, were standing near the arm-chair. In the alcove, Madame de Thianges and Madame de la Fayette sat retired, reading a book. Boileau, the satirist, stood at the door of the gallery, hindering seven or eight bad poets from entering. Near Boileau stood Racine, who seemed to beckon to La Fontaine to come forwards. All these figures were formed of wax; and this philosophical baby-house, interesting for the personages it imitated, might induce a wish in some philosophers to play once more with one.

      There was lately an old canon at Cologne who made a collection of small wax models of characteristic figures, such as personifications of Misery, in a haggard old man with a scanty crust and a brown jug before him; or of Avarice, in a keen-looking Jew miser counting his gold: which were done with such a spirit and reality that a Flemish painter, a Hogarth or Wilkie, could hardly have worked up the feeling of the figure more impressively. "All these were done with truth and expression which I could not have imagined the wax capable of exhibiting," says the lively writer of "An Autumn near the Rhine." There is something very infantine in this taste; but I lament that it is very rarely gratified by such close copiers of nature as was this old canon of Cologne.