Mutants (20 page)

P
YCNODYSOSTOSIS
(
PUTATIVE
). H
ENRI
T
OULOUSE
-L
AUTREC
(1864–1901).

Lautrec is thought to have been afflicted by a variety of osteopetrosis called pycnodysostosis. It is caused by a deficiency in the enzyme that osteoclasts use to dissolve the protein matrix of bones. During adulthood the activity of this enzyme is partially repressed by hormones, and it is the declining levels of estrogen in post-menopausal women – and hence the unwarranted activity of the enzyme – that causes osteoporosis. Lautrec was diagnosed with pycnodysostosis in 1962 by two French physicians, Pierre Maroteaux and Maurice Lamy, but their claim has not gone unchallenged. Lautrec’s most recent biographer, Julia Frey, concedes that at least some of his symptoms are consistent with the disorder, but points out that others are not. Where pycnodysostosis patients typically have soft heads – rather in the manner of the boneless Cape Malays – there does not seem to be any evidence that Lautrec’s head was anything but solid.

Whatever his disorder, it seems that he shared it with several other members of his family. By the time Henri Marie Raymond, Comte de Toulouse-Lautrec-Montfa, was born in 1864 his family, though still rich, was quite inbred. The Napoleonic abolition of primogeniture had prompted an already much-reduced French nobility to keep what wealth remained in their families by the simple expedient of not marrying out of them. Henri’s parents were first cousins, as were his aunt and uncle: between them they produced sixteen children,
of whom four including Henri were dwarfed, the other three far more severely than he. Indeed, it is likely that at least some surviving members of that noble house still carry the mutation, though it is not likely to be expressed if they have discontinued their consanguineous habits.

Lautrec himself had no doubts about the ultimate cause of his malady. One night, in one of his favourite haunts, Montmartre’s Irish and American Bar, two women were arguing about a pitiful dog whose legs shook from hip dysplasia. The dog’s owner conceded that the animal wasn’t handsome, but insisted nevertheless that it was pure-bred. ‘Are you kidding, that dog has a pedigree? Have you taken a look at his ugly fur and his twisted feet?’ laughed her friend. ‘He makes you feel sorry for him.’ ‘You obviously don’t know anything about it,’ said the dog’s owner, and turned to Henri who was sitting next to her. ‘Tell her, Monsieur, that my dog can perfectly well be ugly and still be pedigreed.’ Henri, getting down from his high barstool and standing up to his full four feet eleven inches, saluted her with a charcoal-stained hand and murmured, ‘You’re telling me.’

[O
N GROWTH
]

F
rom the walls of the Prado, the Louvre and the National Gallery they stare balefully at us. As depicted by Velazquez, Argenti, Bronzino, Carracci, Van Dyck and another dozen now forgotten painters, the court dwarfs stand clad in rich and elaborate dress, miniature daggers at their sides, surrounded by the other possessions of rich and powerful men. In one painting, a princeling stands next to a dwarf, the better to display the boy’s youthful elegance. In another, a dwarf is placed next to a glossy, pedigreed hound. The man’s shoulders are level with the dog’s withers.

‘Towards the end of the seventeenth century,’ wrote Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, ‘it was necessary to dream up amusements of a special sort for the leisure of princes and it was to dwarfs that fell the sad privilege of serving as the toys of the
world’s grandees.’ But the court dwarfs were older than that. Most of the paintings that depict them date from a century earlier. Catherine de Medici (1519–89) had set the fashion. In the hope of breeding a race of miniature humans she had arranged a marriage between a pair of dwarfs. A few years later, the Electress of Brandenburg tried the same thing, but both couples proved childless. Peter the Great took the amusement to its extreme. In 1701 he staged a wedding between two dwarfs to which he invited not only his courtiers, but also the ambassadors of all the foreign powers posted to his capital. He also ordered all dwarfs within two hundred miles to attend. A dozen small men and women rode into the capital on the back of a single horse, trailed by a jeering mob. At court some of the dwarfs, perceiving that they were there to be ridiculed, refused to take part in the fun. Peter made them serve the others.

P
YGMY DEPICTED WITH ACHONDROPLASIA
. A
TTIC RED-FIGURE RHYTON C
.480
BC
.

Were all the court dwarfs unhappy, degraded creatures stripped of all human dignity? Geoffroy, writing in 1832, thought so. So had Buffon fifty years earlier. Joseph Boruwlaski, however, would not have agreed. For him, being small was a gift, an opportunity. It had lifted him out of obscurity. His
Memoirs
take up the tale:

The Boruwlaskis were poor. Joseph was only nine years old when his father died, leaving the family destitute. Eighteenth-century rural Poland was, however, a profoundly feudal society in which patronage counted for all; Boruwlaski’s mother had a patron, a young local noblewoman, the Staorina de Caorliz. Charmed by the young Joseph, she prevailed upon his mother to send the boy to live with her so that he could be educated. Boruwlaski thrived in his new home. By his early teens he was only 61 centimetres (two feet) tall, but he had acquired graces that would not have shamed the most noble of Polish youths. Things became a bit difficult for Boruwlaski when the Staorina got married and had a child, but even then he had an eye for a good thing. He became the protege of another, even wealthier, aristocratic woman, the Comtesse de Humiecka. It was the making of him. For the Comtesse was not one to linger in the obscurity of provincial Poland; she had a yen for travel and for society. Bundling Boruwlaski into a carriage, she set out to conquer the courts of Europe.

Vienna, 1754. ‘What,’ asked Marie-Theresa, ‘is the most remarkable thing in this room?’ Boruwlaski gazed about the rococo splendours of the Schönbrunn, but knew the answer. ‘The most remarkable thing in this room is the sight of a little man in the lap of a great woman.’ Her Imperial Majesty, Empress of all Austria and Hungary, was delighted. In Munich, Prince Kaunitz offered Boruwlaski a pension for life. In
Lunéville the exiled Stanislaus, King of the Poles, professed himself delighted by his conversation – so much more interesting than that of his own court dwarf, an unhappy youth by the name of Bébé. The Comte de Treffan was also there, making notes for his article
Nain
in the
Encyclopédic
In Paris Boruwlaski stayed with the Duc d’Orléans; at The Hague he had an audience with the Prince Stadholder. At Versailles the teenage Marie Antoinette gave him a diamond ring from her very own finger.

P
ITUITARY DWARFISM
. J
OSEPH
B
ORUWLASKI
(1739–1837).

Ten brilliant years passed in this manner. And then Boruwlaski fell in love. He paid his court to an actress. She rejected him with scorn. Years later he would write: ‘If I can upbraid nature with having refused me a body like that of other
men, she has made me ample amends, by endowing me with a sensibility which, it is true, displayed itself rather late, but, even in my constitutional warmth, spread a taint of happiness, the remembrance of which I enjoy with gratitude and a feeling heart.’ But by then he could reflect on his youthful passion with calm. For he had long won the heart of another, a dark-eyed young noblewoman named Isalina Borboutin. She too had laughed at him, toyed with him, treated him like a child. But he persisted. He wrote to her, often and passionately. He petitioned the King of Poland for a pension so that he could support her. He was given one and a title as well: she relented.

Boruwlaski was a product of the French Enlightenment. In his
Memoirs
we hear the humane, rational, questing voice of the
Encyclopédistes
. ‘It was easy,’ he writes,

This is fascinating and rather strange. Most people stop growing some time between the ages of seventeen and twenty. But Boruwlaski, small though he was, continued to grow throughout his twenties. It also took him a while to discover the charms of women: ‘At age twenty-five I was like any lad of fifteen.’ He was evidently a late bloomer.

Joseph Boruwlaski died in his sleep on 5 December 1837 in the quiet English cathedral town of Durham. He had had a happy life, a rich life. Born into obscurity, he had achieved dizzying social heights. Famed for his conversation and his skill with the violin, he had known most of the crowned heads of Europe. Ennobled by the King of the Poles, he had also won the patronage of the Prince of Wales. He could call the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire his friends. He was an ornament of Durham; its council paid him merely to live there. He had married a noble beauty, raised a family and, when he died at the distinguished age of ninety-eight, had outlived nearly all his contemporaries. It was a graceful end to a remarkable life. For Joseph, le Comte
de Boruwlaski, was not merely any Continental aristocrat exiled from his homeland. He was the last of the court dwarfs.

PERFECTION IN PROPORTION

Why was Boruwlaski so small? The delay in puberty points to a possible explanation. So do several portraits in oil, half a dozen engravings, and a full-sized bronze that stands even now in the foyer of Durham City Hall. They all show that le Comte was perfectly proportioned in his smallness. True, his proportions were not quite those of a full-sized adult; they are rather closer to those of a child of the same size. But there is no sign of bone disorders such as achondroplasia or pycnodysostosis that cause limbs to grow stubby or bent. It is a kind of smallness that speaks of a failure in one of the most powerful and far-reaching molecular devices that regulate the size we are.