In a painful paroxysm of effort, Marcueil snapped the straps holding his forearms and raised his hands to his head. His crown – probably owing to its faulty construction, with which Elson later bitterly reproached Arthur Gough – its glass plate not being sufficiently thick, or else too easily fusible – his crown collapsed inward, then folded in two.

Drops of molten glass flowed like tears down the Supermale’s cheeks.

On contact with the floor, several exploded violently, like Prince Rupert’s drops.

We know that glass, when liquefied and tempered under certain conditions – here by the acidulated water of the contact sponges – resolves into explosive drops.

The three hidden spectators distinctly saw the crown totter, and, like a pair of incandescent jaws, sink its teeth into the man’s temples. Marcueil howled and sprang forward, bursting his remaining bonds and tearing out the electrodes, whose ends were sputtering behind him.

Marcueil bounded down the stairs. . . The three men understood how lamentably tragic can be a dog with a pot tied to its tail.

When they reached the steps, all they could see was a grimacing, pain-racked silhouette rushing at superhuman speed down the driveway, then grasping the gate with a grip of steel, with no other purpose than to flee or to struggle, twisting two of the square bars of the monumental grille.

Meanwhile, in the vestibule, the broken wires writhed and hissed, electrocuting a servant who had tried to run past them, and setting fire to an arras which was consumed without a flame, with sullen slowness, seemingly swallowed up by a vast red lip.

And André Marcueil’s body, stark naked, and gilded in spots with reddish gold, remained wrapped around the bars – or the bars remained wrapped around it. . .

There the Supermale died, twisted into the ironwork.

Ellen Elson is cured, and married.

She imposed only one condition before she accepted a husband: that he be capable of containing his love within the prudent bounds of human capacities. . .

Finding him was. . . “just a game.”

She found an adroit jeweler to set, in the place of a pearl in a ring that she faithfully wears, one of the solid tears of the Supermale.

Notes

[←1]

Grove Press, 1965

[←2]

In English in the original.

[←3]

In Le Sage’s picaresque romance Gil Blas (written between 1715 and 1735), Doctor Sangrado was a quack physician who had two universal remedies – hot water and blood-letting.”

[←4]

Sebastian Kneipp (1821-97), a Bavarian priest and healer, was the inventor of a method of hydrotherapy.

[←5]

In English in the original.