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As I looked at the terrible mutilation, I could but recall the hideous fascination that overcame Josiane, the heroine of Hugo's great novel, "The Man Who Laughs," when she first caught sight of Gwynplaine's mouth slit from ear to ear by the Comprachicos. The outrage on the Warden was not so grotesque, but the effect was the same. I moved along the corridor and stood before the beasts.
We may imagine, with the uneasy feeling which a complicated scandal arouses, that probably some old duchesses were thrown in cheap. The Comprachicos were also called the Cheylas, a Hindu word, which conveys the image of harrying a nest. For a long time the Comprachicos only partially concealed themselves.
Any one nowadays wishing to know all about the Comprachicos need only go into Biscaya or Galicia; there were many Basques among them, and it is in those mountains that one hears their history. To this day the Comprachicos are spoken of at Oyarzun, at Urbistondo, at Leso, at Astigarraga.
You are masked for ever by your own flesh what can be more ingenious? The Comprachicos worked on man as the Chinese work on trees. They had their secrets, as we have said; they had tricks which are now lost arts. A sort of fantastic stunted thing left their hands; it was ridiculous and wonderful. They would touch up a little being with such skill that its father could not have known it.
As for us, we do not confound a battue with a persecution. The Comprachicos, we insist, had nothing in common with the gipsies. The gipsies were a nation; the Comprachicos were a compound of all nations the lees of a horrible vessel full of filthy waters.
England has always done us the honour to utilize, for her personal service, the fleur-de-lis. The Comprachicos, allowing for the shade which divides a trade from a fanaticism, were analogous to the Stranglers of India. They lived among themselves in gangs, and to facilitate their progress, affected somewhat of the merry-andrew.
The Comprachicos were rather a fellowship than a tribe; rather a residuum than a fellowship. It was all the riffraff of the universe, having for their trade a crime. It was a sort of harlequin people, all composed of rags. To recruit a man was to sew on a tatter. To wander was the Comprachicos' law of existence to appear and disappear. What is barely tolerated cannot take root.
Finally, their religions differ the gipsies were Pagans, the Comprachicos were Christians, and more than that, good Christians, as became an association which, although a mixture of all nations, owed its birth to Spain, a devout land.
His name, however, was to be read on a large placard in front of the Green Box, which offered the crowd the following narrative composed by Ursus: "Here is to be seen Gwynplaine, deserted at the age of ten, on the night of the 29th of January, 1690, by the villainous Comprachicos, on the coast of Portland.
It is true that these Hungarians were schismatics, to the extent of celebrating the Assumption on the 29th August, which is an abomination. James II., a devout man, who persecuted the Jews and trampled out the gipsies, was a good prince to the Comprachicos. We have seen why. The Comprachicos were buyers of the human wares in which he was dealer. They excelled in disappearances.
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