n 1867 or in 1868 that an unknown young Englishman came
to Etretat and bought a little but hidden under great trees. It was said
that he lived there, always alone, in a strange manner; and he aroused
the inimical surprise of the natives, for the inhabitants were sullen and
foolishly malicious, as they always are in little towns.

They declared that this whimsical Englishman ate nothing but boiled.
roasted or stewed monkey; that he would see no one; that he talked to
himself hours at a time and many other surprising things that made people
think that he was different from other men. They were surprised that he
should live alone with a monkey. Had it been a cat or a dog they would
have said nothing. But a monkey! Was that not frightful? What savage
tastes the man must have!

I knew this young man only from seeing him in the streets. He was short,
plump, without being fat, mild-looking, and he wore a little blond
mustache, which was almost invisible.

Chance brought us together. This savage had amiable and pleasing manners,
but he was one of those strange Englishmen that one meets here and there
throughout the world.

Endowed with remarkable intelligence, he seemed to live in a fantastic
dream, as Edgar Poe must have lived. He had translated into English a
volume of strange Icelandic legends, which I ardently desired to see
translated into French. He loved the supernatural, the dismal and
grewsome, but he spoke of the most marvellous things with a calmness that
was typically English, to which his gentle and quiet voice gave a
semblance of reality that was maddening.

Full of a haughty disdain for the world, with its conventions, prejudices
and code of morality, he had nailed to his house a name that was boldly
impudent. The keeper of a lonely inn who should write on his door:
"Travellers murdered here!" could not make a more sinister jest. I never
had entered his dwelling, when one day I received an invitation to
luncheon, following an accident that had occurred to one of his friends,
who had been almost drowned and whom I had attempted to rescue.

Although I was unable to reach the man until he had already been rescued,
I received the hearty thanks of the two Englishmen, and the following day
I called upon them.

The friend was a man about thirty years old. He bore an enormous head on
a child's body--a body without chest or shoulders. An immense
forehead, which seemed to have engulfed the rest of the man, expanded