This feat is the realization of the highest ambition of those carpet acrobats whom you have so often seen grouped in an apotheosis in one of those human pyramids which rise in a second through the strength of the gymnasts’ biceps, and which fall to pieces like fireworks, in rockets of somersaults.
We cannot leave the circus floor without allusion to a series of individuals who exhibit themselves by the side of the genuine acrobats in performances of a special kind.
These are the contortionists, the india-rubber women—all those who were formerly known by the more general name of boneless acrobats. These boneless or dislocated performers are more numerous in the world than one would imagine. [p247]
Ballet-dancers are all dislocated, for their feet, legs, and loins have been disarticulated to obtain beautiful points; the naturalist quadrille-dancers from Mabille, who are now seen at the café concerts, are also dislocated.
There are some naturally disarticulated men. All Parisians will remember in their youth, a beggar who was celebrated as the “humpback of the Pont d’Austerlitz.” This mountebank caused his hump to pass from his back to his chest as he liked. The vertebral column turned without any effort from back to front, and from front to back again. He was found drowned one day between two coal boats, and his skeleton is still shown in the Museum.
But he was an exception. One must begin early in order to manufacture a dislocated man like the “man in the ball.”
A wooden ball, about one yard in diameter, is rolled into the arena. This huge sphere ascends an inclined plane, and rolls from right to left upon it, then descends and recommences the ascension like a living being. And truly, for it suddenly opens and a dislocated man appears, who, without any semblance of fatigue, bows to the astonished audience. [p248]
