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152 THE CRIMINAL HAND On 30 August 1832, Nicolas Theodore Frédéric Benoît became the first convicted parricide in Paris to be spared the poing coupé: amputation of the right hand immediately before execution by guillotine. Nineteen years of age, this son of a respected magistrate in the Ardennes had his toilette performed at the central asylum -prison at Bicêtre. The accoutrements of the old regime remained for this shy, mild-mannered, slightly built double murderer and pederast. His head was shaved, his clothes and shoes removed, his feet clamped in irons, a large white shroud placed over him, his head hooded in black. At 7 a.m., earlier than usual, a closed carriage left for the newly erected scaffold in a distant faubourg to the south of the city. There, half an hour later, the executioner and his assistants wrestled Benoît onto the platform—he refused to go quietly—and strapped him to the weighplank . The presiding officer read his sentence according to the provisions laid out in the not-yet-four-month-old penal code. The blade fell. As executions go, Benoît’s was noisy but unspectacular. However, for liberal commentators who had gathered there, a correspondent for Gazette des tribunaux among them, such haste betrayed the newly mythologized “dark side” of Paris: the dens of male prostitution, orgies, and vice that had come to light during Benoît’s trial. The scene probably brought to mind less fortunate parricides, such as Angélique-Catherine Darcy, who had her hand and then head struck off in October 1828 by the same executioner on duty that morning, Henri Sanson. Victor Hugo, for one, was unimpressed by the new style of execution adopted in February 1832 for the sixty-four-year-old assassin Philippe-Marie 6 Franz Liszt, Metapianism, and the Cultural History of the Hand O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands, Lest we remember still that we have none. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus Franz Liszt, Metapianism, and the Hand 153 Desandrieux, the first person to be guillotined since the 1830 revolution. “They no longer dare after July to behead on the place de Grève,” Hugo complained in his May preface to Dernier Jour d’un condamné, “because they are afraid, because they are cowardly, this is what they do. . . . [They] put him in a basket on two wheels, shuttered on all sides, padlocked and bolted; then, with a gendarme before and a gendarme behind, with hardly a sound and with no crowd in attendance, they delivered this parcel to the deserted barrière Saint-Jacques. It was . . . barely daylight . . . . Swiftly they drew the man from the basket, and, giving him no time to draw breath, furtively, slyly, shamefacedly they took off his head. This is what they call a public and solemn act of high justice.”1 • • • Less than a month later, on 24 September 1832, a short story under the title “La Main de gloire (histoire macaronique)” appeared in the Parisian biweekly Le Cabinet de lecture. Its author was a close acquaintance of Hugo, Gérard de Nerval, a medical student who, instead of attending classes, fostered a reputation as the most ill-behaved poet in the city. Rumor had it that he could be found walking his pet lobster through the gardens of the Palais Royal on a blue silk ribbon. “Why is a pet lobster any more absurd than a cat, dog, gazelle, lion or any other creature,” Théophile Gautier had Nerval explain in a later survey of the period. “Lobsters are quiet and serious; they neither bark nor bite, and they know the deepest secrets of the sea.”2 “La Main de gloire” revels in such bourgeois disobedience. It recounts the tale of Eustache Bouteroue, a seventeenth-century Parisian clothier-apprentice, in a historical narrative Nerval concocted from a hodgepodge of early manuscript sources. Set in 1609, the story concerns what modern neuroscience would call “anarchic hand syndrome” (to my knowledge, it is the first example of the nowfamiliar genre of hand-gone-mad stories). In an ill-advised dispute over his brideto -be, Eustache engages her jealous nephew, a soldier and expert swordsman, to a duel at dusk on the Pré-aux-Clercs. Knowing he has no chance to win by natural means, Eustache resorts to the occult: he consults a “skilful rogue” and fortuneteller at a stall on the Pont Neuf. The wily chiromancer, exploiting the situation, engages him in an impossible contract. In...

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