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PARTISAN REVIEW
vated, wearing pumps, his calves bulging in silk stockings, had for–
merly had the ring to himself and dazzled the audience with his wit
and elegance . But he had been foolish enough to want to find a foil,
to set off his beauty and eclat, and the hilarious, vulgar August, with
his tippler's face - invented for this purpose - had gradually sup–
planted him. Lucien extended this development by turning his over–
refined partner into his thing, his whipping boy. And yet nothing
was too splendid for Bob. The dwarf dressed him in a platinum wig,
he added cascades of ribbons, embroidery, lace, swansdown , to his
costume. Finally, carried away by the logic of his number, he imag–
ined the grotesque marriage , to the strains of Mendelssohn's Wed–
ding March, of this enormous girl decked out in snowy white, to the
minute red toad who kept jumping up at her dress , croaking. At the
end of the number he leaped up like a dog, circled his partner's waist
with his short legs, and in this fashion she carried him off into the
wings, to thunderous applause .
This final leap disturbed Lucien deeply, because it reminded
him painfully and voluptuously of the stranglehold that had killed
Edith Watson . Were not Bob and he united by their love for the for–
mer singer? Lucien used to speak of her to Bob in the evenings, and
then , obsessed by her memory, he finally confused her with his com–
panion, and as it was even more important to him to subjugate and
humiliate the stilt-walkers than to take their wives away from them ,
it happened one night , then every night, that he climbed into the
side-berth of the mobile home in which his former rival slept , and
possessed him like a female .
Later, the imperial theme, first sketched out in Bob's crimson
bathrobe , once again took possession of him. Nothing was more in
keeping with the clown tradition than to develop the August - the
name itself suggested it - into a parody of a Roman emperor. Lucien
draped himself in a red tunic that left his crooked, muscular thighs
naked. He wore a necklet and a crown of roses. He was no longer
the August, he was Nero, gag-Nero, as he was one day called by
d'Urbino, who was always on the lookout for slogans and texts for
his playbills. As for Bob, he quite naturally became Agrippina . The
fact that Nero had had his mother murdered, after having taken her
as his first mistress seemed a good omen to Lucien (Lucius Nero)
who, not having found his place among decent, everyday models,
was always willing to find inspiration in the grandiose turpitudes of
Antiquity .
It
pleased him that his life should have taken the form of a
