THE MAN CALLED PAUL BUTTERBRODT filled his chair completely, which was a sofa. It was a giltwood sofa with double cane back and sides, and pale pink silk upholstery. Everything was oversized about Paul Butterbrodt—his boots, his breeches, his jacket, his cuffs, even his buttons. He had very thick hair that sat upon the top of his head like thatch. He was a very sensitive man, he cried often, at happy things as at sad. When he ate, his little fingers would stick out. He put seven lumps of sugar in his licorice water and stirred it with a long spoon, all the time kissing the air. He sometimes woke in a bad mood and on such days he spoke very little. Sometimes the wallpaper in his room disturbed him, it was of peacocks. All those eyes, from every corner, watching. He supposed, in his dark moods, that the peacocks might come to life, that there would be a terrible screeching, that he would be found on the floor scratched and pecked at, and the walls, once so colored with those birds and their staring feathers, would now be utterly blank, undecorated, they should have all flown away. Some days he did not like to be left alone, on other days he wished to see no one, and must be coaxed out at great effort.
Apart from the sofa, there were about the room, keeping him company, pieces of furniture of extraordinary delicacy and refinement, fragile, rare things, like him. There was a small writing desk of oak veneer and tulipwood, with Sèvres plaques. There was a D-shaped commode in carved walnut and two flanking side cabinets. An ebony Japanese lacquer secretary with a white marble top. There were twelve chestnut stools with needlepoint covers in two rows of six facing his sofa, which perhaps might originally have been an alcove bed. These stools were for his visitors.
Every evening, before the great unrest began, he would be seen in his excellently decorated room for six hours. Tickets were available at the door at a cost of three livres per person for a half-hour visit; elsewhere in the city Vaucanson’s mechanical duck was two livres, Nicolet’s tightrope walkers five. There were allowed to be twelve in his room at any time, but no more. The visitors were permitted to ask him questions but, typically, at least at first, they only looked. Everything he did was very novel to them. They viewed him as if he were not of their own species but some strange new animal gotten from far away, where perhaps all the natives were so excessive. As they looked at Paul Butterbrodt, the visitors considered size. They considered how some of us are very small and some not so, how some noses are grown considerable and some chins barely feature at all. Paul Butterbrodt made people think, some brains that were not accustomed to much deep thinking were jolted into activity at the sight of Paul Butterbrodt. He filled so much space, this one man, and they wondered, after a while, if that hurt him. They wondered which rooms, which doorways he would fit into, they wondered if he would fit into their familiar doorways and rooms, they wondered if he would fit into their lives. Generally they concluded that there was not room.
Since the visitors were sometimes too shy or too stunned before this titan to utter words themselves—whilst on contrary occasions they voiced rough and crude observations without a hint of shyness—he had learned to speak to them as they came in. He had discovered that for best results he should take the initiative. He greeted his visitors, no matter their looks or gestures, very graciously. Hoping it might be of interest to them, he told them about himself. And when he spoke, they considered, perhaps for the first time, what a miracle speech was, they were certainly a little impressed that this great achievement of flesh could talk, it was even shocking to them that he had a quiet, pleasant voice. His voice, they supposed, should have been as extraordinary as his body; it was disturbing to them that this great thing that had so much otherness about him should also have some sameness.
“Please do come in,” he would say, “I am very glad to see you. My name is Paul Butterbrodt, how do you do? May I tell you, if it interests, if you were wondering, that I weigh 238 kilos. Do you care for hard facts? Or shall I tell you about an aunt I had who was fond of handkerchiefs? How are you all? How good of you to come to me. Indeed, perhaps you would not mind if I told you a little of myself. I hope you won’t. Do, yes, do please sit down. Thank you so much.”
He had been an eating prodigy since he was a baby, he had had a little sister who had not lasted, she had withered away, she was like a twist of sugar paper, so easily crumpled. Some things do not last. His parents, being Viennese confectioners, sugared him through his childhood and early adulthood. What years those were of limeelderflower marzipan, of hazel krokant, of chamomile chocolate, how years later he would close his eyes and try very hard to recall the particular pleasure of a nougat waffle or rum bonfect, how he would love to place in his mouth a chocolate cat’s tongue and as it dissolved feel the shades and tastes of his departed youth. The fatter he was the happier his parents were, the only way to keep him safe, they thought, was to endlessly feed him, but when the father had been blinded by an exploding vat of molasses and when his mother slipped on iced cherries and broke her head open upon the flagstones, poor Paul had fallen into new company. His girth being commented upon wherever he went, he at last came to the attention of traveling showmen.
“What do I have to do?” he asked.
“Eat,” they said, “just eat. A good deal of eating.”
Tearfully, he left his homeland forever. He toured then, he visited Prague, Lyon, Milan, Vilna, Riga, he had even seen the Coliseum of Rome—indeed he had been positioned in a tent outside it. He was not always well cared for, sometimes his clothes were not changed, but always he was fed. Paul would say, rubbing his eyes with his pudgy fists, “I am always very hungry, I am never full. The more I travel from home, the hungrier I feel. Nothing, no amount, can ever satisfy. When shall the hungry feeling leave?”
He arrived one afternoon in Paris, and even upon the Boulevard du Temple, where the entertainers are based. Suffering from indigestion and a running sore upon his left leg after toppling from his booth onto a wooden stake, hot and shivery as he was, a new showman had successfully bargained for him, and he changed hands. This new man, Monsieur Tallier, shaped like an owl with thick eyebrows and round head, was not unkind. He kept also two albinos from Guadeloupe, young, wide-eyed men who stuck to their own company, whom Paul Butterbrodt saw very rarely. Tallier was a soothing presence, he was very encouraging and complimentary. He touched Paul very lightly on his thigh, inquiring daily into how he felt. Slowly, many mouthfuls later, he was brought back to health and full girth by kindness, by gentleness, and by taking him on outings to other boulevard attractions. It was during one such excursion that Paul Butterbrodt saw something he had never thought possible before, something that moved him very deeply.
The rhinoceros that lived upon the boulevard very quickly became his very favorite excursion. For that leathery, wrinkled creature, Paul Butterbrodt grew a great attachment. From the very beginning, from the intensity of its smell before he had even entered the beast’s tent—for no amount of fresh juniper, thyme, or rosemary could extinguish the potent, musky aroma of the creature—Paul felt a great shifting inside him. He did not know that such a thing ever could be. He came back every day. He brought small gifts with him—some oats, some fruit, some pastries. The keeper, an overdressed, overscented creature, was very happy for this man to feed his rhinoceros for free. Paul Butterbrodt took to singing the beast some songs he had learned as a child back in Vienna, such as the “Song of the Three Holy Kings” and “I’m Not Tired, I’m Not Sleepy,” and soon it seemed to him the animal reacted particularly when he appeared. In his turn, he heard the many noises of the rhinoceros. Paul Butterbrodt would say the great gray monster had a vocal range of considerable variety and mystery. Sometimes Louis, for that was the rhino’s name, let out a high screech as of an animal a tenth of its size. Sometimes he made deafening noises similar to the sawing of wood—sounds that filled the tent and could be a little frightening, for you felt your very soul was being cut into. Sometimes he made a very deep gurgling noise that sounded as if it came from the bottom of a well, a distant booming of a beautiful voice caught deep within. “A strange melancholic singing,” Paul called it. “Listen, Louis is singing back to me. It is such a song, a song of distant lands.”
The history of the rhinoceros was well known. Louis had been taken from faraway Africa when only seven months old. He was to be presented to Louis XV from the Comte de Palet, who had hoped by this gift to return to court and to favor with his king, whom he had insulted by letting drop a careless remark about Madame de Pompadour. But Louis XV, unbeknownst to the crew of the Dufferin just set sail from the Côte d’Ivoire, bound for Bordeaux, had just been given a different rhinoceros by Monsieur Chevalier, the French governor of Chandernagor. When a second rhinoceros was offered, the king refused to accept. How many rhinoceroses did he need in his palace menagerie? Besides, it was said that the king did not like the beast, it seemed a caricature of himself, the Bourbon conk was mimicked in the creature’s large snout, its stockiness, its lack of grace too painfully reminded the king of his own thickening body, of his own mortality. He would not accept de Palet’s gift: One rhino was a splendid thing, two rhinos were a mockery. The Comte de Palet, his hopes of commissions in African diamond mines buried, his dreams of marble all broken, had staked his future and his fortune on the beast and regarding the animal now he saw how absurd and ugly, how preposterous and misshapen those hopes had been. For the rest of his life, in his dreams, in his waking moments, rotting away in his family’s sole surviving property in Normandy, little more than a piggery with a turret, he saw horned monsters everywhere. He died of heart failure brought on by terror, in the middle of the night, hiding in a cupboard. The spurned rhinoceros was bought by a boulevard entertainer and was named after the monarch he was intended for. So Louis grew up upon the boulevard, and came, after a time, to be visited every day by a considerable man with sweet gifts. It seemed to Paul that he and Louis understood one another very well. When he felt he could get close, he looked into an eye of the great beast, and he swore he could see Louis smiling at him. Sometimes, later on, when he offered the sweet things, Paul found he was able to touch a little piece of rhino skin, it was not as hard as he had thought, it was the surface, he said, of a beautiful map.
“Do you like odd-toed ungulates?” he would ask his visitors, and when the visitor looked confused, he would say authoritatively, “An odd-toed ungulate is a rhinoceros. A horned cow. The upper lip of a rhinoceros is semi-prehensile! There is a rhinoceros upon the boulevard only a few minutes’ walk from here. I cost very nearly as much to keep as the rhinoceros of the boulevard. The rhinoceros consumes twenty livres’ worth of bread, and fourteen buckets, each, of water and of beer every single day. Whereas I have two roast chickens, some veal or mutton, ten livres’ worth of bread, three bottles of wine, and five pints of beer. I am taken to him, once a day, we have a regular appointment with each other. He and I. We are great friends, we shouldn’t like a day to go by without seeing each other. We are the twin highlights of the boulevard.”
But then came the great terrifying changes in the country, and nothing for a long while was certain. From the very start, Paul Butterbrodt was inconvenienced. On the fourteenth of July 1789, the boulevard was closed, shutters were latched, doors were locked. Paul stayed in all day listening to the loud report of cannons, watching, he believed, the peacocks’ feathers rustling. Later he heard, very nearby, shouting and screaming. He hoped very much that Louis was all right. He could not visit him the entire day. He fretted so.
He found him the next day a little startled, needing some comfort. He bought a cone of almond and pistachio cream, it seemed, he thought, to help. Throughout the following weeks and months, Paul was able to bring less extravagant gifts than he liked, sometimes he came with lettuces, sometimes potatoes, a beetroot, a melon, some apples, some days-old bread, some straw, only straw. By then there were fewer objects in his room. One by one they had been taken away and sold—the writing desk, the commode, the secretary. Soon the twelve stools were no longer filled every evening. People across the city were finding different entertainment. Some of the stools were sold off. Monsieur Tallier, Paul’s manager, was worried for his future. He was not so kind as he used to be, he spent less time with Paul, and could be short-tempered. Soon there were only three stools in the room. Then one day Paul Butterbrodt had to fend for himself, the man who fed him was no longer there, he had left the city without a word, taking his albinos with him; the albinos were cheaper than Paul, though there were two of them. What hungry days followed. Paul had some savings with which he was able to keep his own room, for a while he remained open for visitors in the evenings, but very few came. The peacock wallpaper fell away in places. By then Paul Butterbrodt was no longer the impressive spectacle of former days. It depressed him that he weighed now only 180 kilos, at his peak he had been 238, the times had reduced him, he could no longer be fed so much. His days were filled with hunger, from the moment he woke up his hunger would be beside him, wherever he went his hunger followed, when he slept his hunger shifted against him, grinding its teeth, but that mounting pain was often lessened by a visit to Louis, where he sat, his stomach making furious grumbles. He was so much thinner a Paul Butterbrodt than he had used to be that people no longer stopped at the sight of him. He was becoming an ordinary-looking fellow, he did not stick out so much, his clothes billowed about him. He looked big still, certainly very large, but no longer improbable.
So long as Louis the rhinoceros survived, Paul felt he could himself continue. He dreamed of the pair of them living together in some peaceful, rural landscape. He told Louis of these dreams and it seemed to him that Louis listened very carefully. They should have no worries, there would be no threat, those days would not be hungry days anymore. But by then, it could no longer be denied, there was something very wrong with Louis. Paul’s poor friend was beginning to have foot problems. A sloughing of his hooves, they had a certain softness and flakiness about them, bits hung off. Louis no longer made the deep singing well sound, he barked rather, and made hoarse squeaks that could be heard from one end of the boulevard to the other, from the Temple to the remains of the Bastille, very nearly demolished. “I am,” said Paul, before that building, holding his tummy, “a ruined castle myself.”
At night back in his room at the end of the day he took off his own shoes and regarded his own feet, he stroked them and carefully washed them in some vinegar, all the time thinking of Louis.
On the day when King Louis XVI, grandson to the king who refused a second rhinoceros, was apprehended at a small village called Varennes, attempting to flee the country, Paul detected swellings on Louis’s forelegs and neck.
Then there were cannons firing at the Tuileries Palace and people shot in the gardens and the palace stormed, and people hacked people to morsels, screaming servants plunged from high floors. In the morning there were thick clouds of flies.
Then there were skin ulcers. Small blisters around Louis’s eyes and ears, under his belly also. Flies in his pen too. Paul looked into one of the rhinoceros’s eyes, Louis was not smiling now but appeared to have a fog about him, he wondered what his friend was thinking, the beast was such a mystery in those days, so hard to read.
By the time France had declared war against Austria, and the king and his family had been imprisoned in the Temple, just a few minutes’ walk from the rhino’s pen, Paul noted with distress that Louis had difficulty breathing. Meanwhile Paul’s own body was changing, it reduced, it thinned out, his skin hung loose in places, there were many more wrinkles than before, there were stretch marks all about him. He had more skin than he needed. But despite it all, despite the dangerous times, and the deaths that occurred almost daily on the streets, Paul was in those days healthier than he had been before. No one came to visit him in his room anymore, he was forced to abandon it, he cried at leaving the peacocks on the paper. He rented a room of sparse, ordinary furniture from a family on the Rue du Bac, it had plain whitewashed walls, but every day, without fail, he took the journey across the river to see his friend on the boulevard.
With this new family, Paul Butterbrodt entered a period of comparative domestic happiness. The family treated him as any other human creature and made no fuss. At first he was offended, but in time he grew used to it. The family were haberdashers and had found in those new days a business making tricolor cockades. From time to time Paul was invited to earn a little money, or reduce his rent, by working beside them. In the family there was a maiden aunt, a root of a woman in her late thirties with some hair on her upper lip and deep, dark eyes. There were many moles on her skin. She sat next to Paul while he worked on the ribbons, she liked to listen to the stories of his tour around European cities, such stories as other members of the family called unpatriotic. She would be entranced by his description of the sweet things his parents had made, the rest of the family warned against such subjects and even, when Paul insisted on sharing these histories, shouted and threatened to report him. The maiden aunt, Charlotte she was called, said she would take it upon herself to make Paul a good citizen. They sometimes sat together on a bench by the Île Saint-Louis looking at the Seine, Charlotte tutoring Paul on what was appropriate.
Everyday she said to him, “Citizen Butterbrodt, what are you thinking now?”
She worried for him and told him so, she gave him extra food. The extra food that she gave him was in fact her own meager rations, she was starving herself for Paul. That extra food Paul in his turn brought to Louis.
Charlotte had always been the dependable person in the family. She was the one who looked after her parents when they became ill and useless, she was the one who never asked for anything for herself but kept quiet and serious and practical. The rest of the family came to Charlotte not with their secrets, never with their longings, but when they wanted something fixed, or when they had an illness, or when they had run out of money. She perhaps kept her money close to herself, hoarded it a little, but who could blame her, how else could she protect herself when the ailing elderly years came? No, if she was a little tight, she could hardly be blamed for that. Charlotte was simply Charlotte, a woman of no surprises, who had over the thirty-seven years of her life grown a little strange looking. A little bumpy here, a little hairy where hair did not generally grow on females, along the jaw line, on the upper lip, down her arms, private, soft hairs of a long-endured loneliness. She was just Charlotte, she never required thinking of very much, she took up little space. The world could change, France could turn itself upside down, but Charlotte, save for a little hair growth, or a sprouting of moles, would always remain Charlotte. Only then, quite suddenly, she wasn’t. There was in the house this newer Charlotte, louder than before, asking for things, giving opinions. Even demanding. Ever since the new tenant had come to the house, Charlotte had become difficult. She had moods that she had never had before, she laughed. The other members of her family did not recall hearing that laugh before, what an oddly alarming noise it was, at first they could not tell where it was coming from. She cried, this new Charlotte, the old Charlotte did not cry, Charlotte was a dry husk, but there she was shedding wetness. Charlotte, in late 1791, had become a little moist.
Charlotte was often now not at her desk or in her tiny room, often she went out. She spent money. She went out with Paul Butterbrodt, sometimes even when there was much work to be done. Once, at her insistence, she had gone with Paul to visit the rhinoceros. Paul was very uncomfortable at the idea and put off the day as long as he could, but the woman would not let the matter drop. So she came along. Barely noticeably, she shook her head at Louis, Paul supposed she wanted to tidy him up, but she was thinking, “What a thing to love. That creature, so far from home, is ridiculous on Paris streets. It will die soon, surely it will die soon, for such a thing cannot live long, and then I will comfort him.”
Louis in his turn was very restless, he struck the floor with his hurting hooves, he stayed in the corner, and would not be encouraged out of it. No, the visit had not been a success. Paul would not take her along another time, though she often asked, he did not like her sitting with Louis, it was not right, she did not belong there. So Charlotte stayed home and waited for him. Whenever Paul came back from Louis, Charlotte always found him distant and moody. Only after an hour or two did his looks soften, then, with her gentle encouragement, he might tell her again the story of his life, and, on rare miraculous moments, he might pick up her creased clawlike hand and pat it, with great and undoubted fondness. Once, oh once, he even kissed it. Paul Butterbrodt considered, looking at this gnawn woman, that if his hunger were to take human shape, and he felt the pain to be a person in its own right, then this woman was what his hunger should look like. And, indeed, sitting next to her he did feel a little fuller.
Throughout December of 1792 Paul, still feeding the unhappy creature, noted in his friend a terrible increased buildup of oral plaque. Struggling to help in any way he could, he gave Louis his own bed blankets, and, in turn, Charlotte gave Paul one of hers. On the twenty-first of January, 1793, while so many people had congregated on the Place de la Révolution, formerly the Place Louis XV, while the Rue Saint-Antoine was lined with soldiers, while drums were beaten, when suddenly there came a great deafening cheer, a roar that sounded as if it were made by some single creature of immense proportions bellowing at the earth, Paul was with Louis. Paul heard the crowd’s exclamation at the beheading of Louis XVI while he sat in tears not for the king, but for his ungulate friend, who in reaction to the unusual wave of noise passed a profuse and watery diarrhea.
There followed a period of terrible respiratory problems, the sound of Louis’s labored breathing was hard for Paul to bear, and then Charlotte waited long hours for Paul to come home. Paul too was suffering from a cold, he let his own nose drip, he did not look after himself, Charlotte often told him so, wrapping her shawl around his neck. The great creature on the boulevard, its skin hanging down, seemed to be suffocating under its own weight.
On the thirtieth of July, 1793, Paul Butterbrodt early in the afternoon lumbered happily off to the boulevard, it was a pleasant sunny day, with pollen in the air, he went as usual to his greatest friend in the world. But his friend was not there. He found only traces about the pen, thick puddles in the straw. A portion of the pen’s fencing was badly dented. There was a terrible new smell.
Louis’s keeper, no longer so pleasant smelling in those days, was not present, in fact he was getting himself considerably drunk at Café Robert around the corner and would not return to his property until he was certain that Paul was no longer there. A stable boy had been left all on his own to deliver the news.
“Where’s Louis?” Paul asked.
“He’s gone, Citizen.”
“When will he be back?”
“He shan’t be, Citizen.”
“I must go to him. Tell me, quickly now, where he is? Is he very ill? Oh, poor Louis!”
“Well, he’s not well, Citizen. I’m afraid, no, he’s not.”
“But where is he, boy?”
“He’s all over the place, Citizen. Poor fellow. He’s not in one location, but, sorry to say, many. He’s come apart.”
“Speak plainly, oh tell me! Tell me!”
“I hate to tell you, but I fear I must be the one, I must do it, they said. I was given extra for it, though I’d just the same not have the food. He’s dead, sir, all dead. This morning it happened. Just here. They were quick about it, but he is big, and not easy to get to. That skin is very thick.”
“LOUIS!”
“I am so sorry, sir. I am.”
“LOUIS! LOUIS!”
“Please sit down, sir, gather yourself. You’ve had a shock.”
“LOUIS! LOUIS! LOUIS!”
“You are so miserable, aren’t you?”
“It is all too much to bear! Too much altogether!”
“We knew you’d take it bad.”
“Oh! God!”
“Steady, steady!”
“I am burst.”
“Please, please now, it had to be done.”
“Had to? Had to? Why did it have to?”
“He wasn’t making any money.”
“Money! Oh! Money!”
“He was costing, you see, rather than making.”
“Where, please, I beg you, tell me, where is he now?”
“I was trying to say before. He’s, how to put it, not all together. He’s in different places. He’s been sold, sir, to different people. Believe me, sir, I am sorry. Meat, sir.”
“MEAT!”
“They’re calling it horse, sir. I should’ve said.”
Paul, trying to catch his breath, reading the signs properly in the soiled hay now, looking with hopeless eyes, understanding the smears, reading the history in all the mess, could be heard wailing up and down the Boulevard du Temple, bawling, inconsolable. Huge bellowing sounds he made, more animal than human. He quietened after a while and sat on one of the old boulevard benches and would not be distracted by anyone, he just sat there in a stupor, looking ahead vaguely. After a half hour he stood up, and proceeded to march up and down the boulevard, repeating the same sentence over and over.
“Louis!” he cried. “Louis! Louis!”
Paul shouted his message, pausing only to fill his great lungs. People tried to shut him up, he wouldn’t even look at them, he marched on, pounding the boulevard floor.
“Louis! Louis! Louis!”
Then everyone left him alone. Only Charlotte, who had been fetched by the stable boy, wept beside him, begging him to come home. He shrugged her off, to her entreaties he only replied, “Louis! Louis! Louis!”
They arrested him, only when Paul’s wrists had been bound did he quieten a little. They took him to the prison of La Force, and there, until his trial and even until he was put on the slide beneath the guillotine blade, he was heard muttering to himself only ever the same word over and over. When he saw among the crowd a wraith of a woman, with moles and some little hairs on her top lip, a skeleton in a greasy dress, tears in her eyes, just before the final moment, he said only, “Louis. Louis. Louis.”
When it was over, and the crowd dispersed, the woman stayed there, she stayed through the day, seemingly unable to move, people knocked into her, she did not appear to feel them. At last from deep inside her came a sound she had never made before, nor one she would ever make again. A strange broken scratch of a noise.