2b. She writes of Francine: "Francine --named, perhaps, after the France so dear to her famous father, and perhaps (as crueler writers wrote), after the Francini brothers who built the grottos and the automata--sunk like a stone into the Seine. They wrote in history books how her father's trunks, called back from Sweden, had capsized. They wrote how they had had to fish out his posthumous writings, and hang, like fluttering laundry, the precious pages of his MAN that proved the human body a machine. They drew up the trunk with their ropes and hooks and didn't see her under there, the porcelain eyes and lips, the dollish braids, her rotting white frock knotted up in kelp. "They spoke, in malicious whispers, about Francine in her little packing case, just like Hadaly a hundred and some years later, only this time it was an unnatural father who carried a replica of his child around with him on his voyages back and forth between Holland and France, bundled up in a box, filled up with springs and pistons and other proofs that robots can be made to lisp like little girls. |