2.8 Could It All Be So Simple?: The Mummy's Foot by Theophile Gautier (1840/1890) trans. Lafcadio Hearn

It was all a dream. Whether those words make you think of the wisdom of Biggie or the famous ending to that towering work of German Expressionism, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), I've always been fond of the multiple possibilities encased the phrase. For most of my teenage years those words were my obnoxious response to friends who feared that I might spoil a movie or television show they hadn't seen: 

"See so then Tony Soprano walks out of the room and…"

"Don't say anything I've got the episode taped!"

"Oh, it's all a dream."

Theophile Gautier (1811-1872)

That the concluding twist of a story could be the revelation that it was only (or that it was all) a dream is, at this point, so rote and hackneyed my response was always met with a raised eyebrow and a guffaw (in the light way akin to "foh.") Played on to the point of absurdity, the twist can now seem somewhat surprising, as it does in Theophile Gautier's nearly 200-year-old story "The Mummy's Foot."

The gothic tenor of this tale mixed with Gautier's opening extended description of the many items in an antique shop suggest that this story would fit in any number of horror anthologies. With its reader-addressing first person narration, "The Mummy's Foot" describes the ruptures of space and time that accompany a rich 27-year-old Frenchman who visits a "curiosity vendor" and purchases a foot to use as a paper weight.

Yep. He buys the foot of Princess Hermonthis, the daughter of a powerful Pharaoh. The merchant packages and bandages the foot up in a damask rag. He explains in a "voice strident as the crying of cat which has swallowed a fish-bone: 'Old Pharaoh will not be well pleased: he loved his daughter—the dear man.'"

This issue of Ghost Stories from 1931 included "The Mummy's Foot"

Gautier's ability to define the most minute items in the antique shop give the story a fascinating grounding. If it weren't so old, and if it didn't take another turn in the concluding pages, you might think that Gautier is delivering a morality tale about the dangers of colonial museums that display stolen objects as trinkets that deserve to be seen by all. The exoticization economy is on display here and Gautier's overflowing language suggests critique. 

But that is perhaps more my desire than the author's wish. After all, Gautier is the man credited with coining the  aesthetic doctrine "l'art pour l'art" or "art for art's sake."

Instead, "The Mummy's Foot" is a beautifully written, detail laden story ripe to be pilfered by television shows and horror films. Luis Buñuel would be at home in adapting this story and its a bizarre sense of humor that seems to skewer the silly wealth of the main character. At times the focus on details is deeply unsettling. I was reminded of the first half of Darren Aronofsky's recent film mother!, which is anchored by a feeling so familiar as to be defamiliarizing. 

After the peculiar exchange with the merchant, in which the narrator senses that antique dealer knew the pharaoh, he returns home, puts the foot on his desk and regards it: "I looked upon all who did not possess, like myself, a paper-weight so authentically Egyptian, as very ridiculous people; and it seemed to me that the proper occupation of every sensible man should consist in the mere fact of having a mummy's foot upon his desk." Was I, the addressed reader, ridiculous for not having a foot on display? Surely this is a ruse!

Or is it? The not-quite-right nature of the story continues to unfold and the supernatural, if not surreal, elements soon magnify. That night Princess Hermonthis appears in the narrator's bedroom. She is missing her foot, and though she reaches for it on the desk, she cannot grab it. It is only after the narrator pays "five louis" to resolve an old debt that she is free to return to her time with every limb and appendage intact.

This drawing accompanied "The Mummy's Foot" when printed in the Nashville Tennessean (August 20, 1911)

Of course, the narrator joins her. Having moved through space and time, having passed "through a fluid and grayish expanse" he finds himself in Egypt. There he is overcome by the ornate and gargantuan nature of "corridors, of interim bale length" which "opened into square chambers." The narrator is amazed to find himself "in a hall so vast, so enormous, so immeasurable, that the eye could not reach its limits." What is there to do but meet with Princess Hermonthis' father, the pharaoh?

And he does. Pleased to have his daughter back the Pharaoh asks the narrator what he wants in return. He asks for the love of Princess Hermonthis. As if he didn't appear smug already, he does so with the self-satisfied metaphor, suggesting that he would like "the hand of the Princess Hermonthis;—the hand seemed to me a very proper antithetic recompense for the foot." This is a terrible joke. I'm not sure if he could be any more unlikeable.

In this surreal world the Pharaoh's response is entirely appropriate. The 27-year-old narrator is far too young for the thousand-plus year old Princess Hermonthis. When the world ends the Pharaoh "will be present…with the same body and the same features I had during my lifetime" and the narrator won't even last as long as "a statute of bronze." Oh what it would mean for a human to live as long as a statue!

I'll leave some suspense as to the ending and won't say anymore. That said, if you've seen a Morgan Freeman thriller from the late 1990s/early 2000s or really any horror film ever made you will be sure to predict what happens.

As we come to the conclusion of this volume, it is fascinating to try to understand how a story like "The Mummy's Foot" fits with Peter Kyne's "The Star-Spangled Manner." Both reach for dominating the power of myth and some form of national identity. Where Gautier ever so inauspiciously points to Europe's colonial past and the power of France's history, Kyne revels in American myth.

Where the "Romance" remains I'm not sure.

FIRST LINE: “I had entered, in an idle mood, the shop of one of those curiosity-vendors, who are called march ands de bric-a-brac in that Parisian argot which is so perfectly unintelligible elsewhere in France.”

LAST LINE: “I started to find it;—but fancy my astonishment when I beheld, instead of the mummy’s foot I had purchased the evening before, the little green paste idol left in its place by the Princess Hermonthis!"

You can read “The Mummy’s Foot” at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22662

You can listen to “The Mummy’s Foot” at Librivox: https://librivox.org/short-ghost-and-horror-collection-024-by-various/

You can watch an adaptation of “The Mummy’s Foot” on an 1949 episode of Your Show Time at  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JyKB3hLx40