The custom of keeping dwarfs as retainers to ornament the homes of princes, and to provide amusement—which was much in fashion in the old days of the Roman Empire—has survived at most Courts until a comparatively recent period. According to Suetonius, Augustus, in order to forget the cares of State, would play with his dwarfs for nuts, and laugh at their childish prattle, whilst for his special amusement Domitian kept a band of dwarf gladiators.

Charles IX. of France and his mother had a strong partiality for dwarfs, and in 1573 three were sent to him by the Emperor of Germany; and the same year a large sum was paid for bringing some dwarfs from Poland for the King: one of these, Majoski, being given to the Queen-mother, and an entry in her accounts tells how thirty livres were paid for “little disbursements for the said Majoski, as well as clothes, books, pens, paper, and ink.” It may be remembered how the famous dwarf, Joseph Boruwlaski—who at fifteen years of age was only twenty-five inches high—was presented to the Empress Maria Theresa by the Countess Humiecka, who took him on her lap and kissed him.{240} She then asked him what struck him as most curious at Vienna, to which he replied, “that which he then beheld.” “And what is that?” inquired her Majesty.

“To see so little a man on the lap of so great a woman,” answered Boruwlaski. He then besought the permission of the Empress to kiss her hand, whereupon she took from the finger of Marie Antoinette, then a child, a ring, and put it on his finger.

Afterwards Boruwlaski visited Luneville, where he was introduced to Stanislaus Leczinski, the dethroned King of Poland, who kept a dwarf, nicknamed Bébé, a native of France, his real name being Nicholas Feny, or Ferry. Bébé quickly became jealous of Boruwlaski, and on the first opportunity tried to push him into the fire. But the noise occasioned by the scuffle brought the King on the scene, who ordered Bébé to have corporal punishment, and never to appear in his presence again. Boruwlaski won the favour of Stanislaus II., who for a time took him under his protection, and eventually visited this country, when he was introduced to the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV.; and on May 23, 1782, he was presented by the Countess of Egremont to the King and Queen and the junior members of the royal family.

When King Christian II. of Denmark fell into the hands of his enemy Frederick I., he was imprisoned with his dwarf in the castle of S?ndeborg in Holstein. Having entered his gloomy cell with
[Image unavailable.]

{241}

the sole companion of his misery, the door was at once walled up; but after a time the King, according to one account, induced his dwarf to counterfeit sickness, and to solicit his removal from prison, when, if he should be successful, he was to try and make his escape from the Danish dominions to the Court of the Electress. The dwarf feigned illness and was liberated, but was recaptured on his attempting to leave the Danish territory.

Peter the Great kept a dwarf whom he used to call his puppet; and in 1710 he celebrated a marriage of two dwarfs at St. Petersburg with great ceremony, when he invited all his courtiers and the foreign ambassadors, and ordered that all dwarfs residing within 200 miles of his capital should be present. But some would not consent to come for fear of ridicule, an act of disobedience which Peter punished by compelling them to wait on the rest at dinner. For this miniature company “everything provided was suitable in size. A low table held small plates, dishes, glasses, and other necessary articles, diminished to the standard of the guests”—the banquet being followed by a dance, opened with a minuet by the bridegroom, who was three feet two inches high.[109]

Marie Anne, wife of Philip IV. of Spain, having laughed once at the eccentric antics of a dwarf clown, was sternly reproved for her bad taste in so doing, upon which she sensibly replied that they should take the clown away if they did not mean her to laugh—so austere was Spanish etiquette.{242}

A favourite dwarf of Charles V. of Spain was Corneille, a portrait of whom, by Francesco Torbido, in the Louvre at Paris, represents him dressed as a knight, with his left hand resting on the back of a large dog; and Velasquez has painted some dwarfs which were once attached to the Spanish Court, “where the most ugly of such deformities were most valued.”[110] At Madrid there is a painting by this artist representing the Infanta Margarita with her two dwarfs, Maria Borbola and Nicolasico Pertusano, who are teasing a good-natured dog. Some years ago a dwarf named Don Francisco Hidalgo held his levees in the Cosmorama Rooms, Regent Street, having previously for eighteen years, it was stated, been attached to the Court of Madrid, in the reign of Ferdinand VII.

The first wife of Joachim Frederick, Elector of Brandenburg, assembled together a number of dwarfs of both sexes, in order to marry them with a view of multiplying their species—an experiment said to have been practised also by Catherine de Medicis, but in each case the attempt was fruitless. And at the castle of Ambras, in the Tyrol, was a wooden image............