''Chacun d'eux portait sur son dos une e ´norme Chimère'' [Each one of them carried on his back an enormous Chimera] —Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris, bk. VI Until the end of the seventeenth century, the monstrous body had a mythological function: A sign from irate gods, the monster (Kapler 1980) is not malformed like Oedipus's twisted foot/fate, it is a prodigious creature whose corporeal forma...