An extract from The Isle of Minimus by M. K. L. Murphy

….the shabby houses of La Villette and Bercy, where famous poets spilled wine across their tattered and eternally unfinished manuscripts while dashing to the floor the inmates’ tiaras and robes de chambre in acts of romantic debauchery that, when publicized, bred ratlike sycophants, who, in seeking to nest in the shadows of the poets’ fame, infested these humble brothels and brought such demand for their women and the taste of the authentic poetic life they bestowed that the poets could no longer afford to frequent them and left behind nothing more than illicit tourist traps with re-creations of famous liaisons that had supposedly taken place there, to be viewed for ten sous through peepholes beneath bronze plaques from the Historical Society on the walls reminding visitors of whatever had taken place there during the Revolution as the proprietor shoved at them oversized coffee mugs printed with crude snapshots of their women as souvenirs, keychains with the professionally-designed logo of the brothel and its slogan in English, and oversized fanny-packs that were made in China with a secret compartment for coins, the silhouette of the Eiffel Tower stitched to the front, and an X-tra Fit elastic waistband that could stretch around the tourists to secure this distended artificial gut to the tourists’ cargo shorts, stained with McDonald’s condiments and sweat, on which they wiped their fingers after shoving a cheeseburger into their cola-scented mouths and, while chewing, bellowed their disdain for whatever painting they had, out of a sense of duty, left their Holiday Inn to see as their slimy tongues flicked little specks of mashed-up meat and bread onto the work in question to, when the accumulated cheeseburger residue came to obscure a certain percentage of the painting’s surface, be cleaned by professional art restorers, lamenting, as they delicately applied their vacuums and steam-brushes, the disrespect for the museum exhibited by the tourists, of whom few were half as destructive as one notorious visitor to France named Baruch Khazâd, future Lord Minimus, of the Isle of Minimus, a dwarf no elderly restorationist or museum owner could mention without a shudder as they warned their younger colleagues to beware tourists from the Isle, especially the male dwarfs on their plastronnage, as had been Lord Khazâd when, in 1934, having learned of the tradition when he immigrated to the Isle several months earlier from Ukraine, he rampaged through Paris in a drunken frenzy, attacking with a hammer ancient sculptures from Egypt and Greece, setting fire to paintings by Titian and Manet, and committing a lewd act upon the Arc de Triomphe, by which he claimed to be symbolically defiling all of French history as the police dragged him to the commissariat, where, as he peeked over the sill of the barred window at the city, chalk-colored under the lightly-clouded afternoon sun, they threatened him with all manner of brutality should he ever return to France, then beat him with their well-worn truncheons for a few minutes before shackling him naked to the roof of a prisoner train bound for Le Havre, as was the standard punishment in France for defacing artwork, with a ticket for a cargo ship back to the Isle, to be used should he survive the inclement weather, the storm that blew in that evening and drenched him while lightning crashed all around and filled the midnight countryside with a constant, flickering illumination that gave these fields and villages the look of the land of the dead and the two other art defacers shackled to the roof with him the look of crazed skeletons that had somehow come to life and sat themselves down on a train to terrify the clochards riding the rails in the other direction, inspiring tales of the “Vagabond-Fantôme”, who, after his myth reached the locomotive vagrants of the United States, slowly acquired the accoutrements by which this sinister figure is known today, including the tall, red top hat, the shredded tuxedo, stained with the blood of his victims, the monocle that reveals to him the sins of those he sees, the black velvet gloves over his six-fingered hands, the pair of neutered jackals named Dimnah and Kalilah on silver leashes named Rhaff and Rheffyn (fashioned by the finest craftsman of Surat and a nimble-fingered prophetess of Benares), the unspayed Tasmanian she-wolf named Amazon (left to wander freely and sniff out those guilty of committing any injustice against a vagrant or other downtrodden unfortunate), and the ivory cane, shaped into a tight spiral by the bonsai-master Prysgliach Gwrachell through binding, with a modified bonsai harness for twenty years, the living tusk of an enraged bull elephant in perpetual musth out there on the rainy northwestern peninsula of the Isle of Minimus, where, after the removal of this tusk late in its life by the Isle’s sole Nazi occupier for his own collection in 1940, the elephant ceased to patrol the peninsula as its territory and disappeared into the highlands to trample sheep, terrorize milkmaids, and evade the traps of Baruch Khazâd, still as stooped as a Béraud woman from his forced train ride six years earlier but determined to capture the legendary rogue elephant and thereby impress the young women of the Isle, who were ignoring him in favor of those dashing Resistance men fighting the Occupation from the seaside caves of the west coast and the forests of the central plateau, raiding the cities with their guns and homemade bombs to blow up a statue of Adolf Hitler in Dverberg or steal a jeep and drive it into the ocean, much to the delight of the women staring at them from the windows as they marched into town and occasionally running off to join them in their camps and cook for them or even accompany them on their attacks, as most of the Isle’s women despised the Isle’s Nazi for helping himself to food from their kitchens and groping them and their sisters or daughters in front of their subservient husbands and fathers, though not all these women shied away from his advances, and some actually made a great deal of money entertaining the Nazi in his private villa atop Bach Hill, overlooking the derelict Nouvelle-Chomedey harbor, sent there each night through the intervention of Khazâd, who used his familiarity with the Isle’s major brothel in Dverberg to secretly act as the Nazi’s “intermediary” in these matters in exchange for permission to hunt the rogue elephant, which he knew would give him the prestige to turn a few admiring eyes away from the Resistance godelureaux and toward himself, securing, through his marriage to one of the wealthier girls of the capital city, the necessary support to be named the next Lord Minimus once the Nazis, having completed their invasion of Britain and, succeeding in delivering peace to all Europe, sufficiently confident in their authority to allow the return of certain local customs they had felt it necessary to suppress during the conflict, reinstated that ancient title, which had languished, dormant, ever since the previous Lord Minimus, Carolino Gogoni, died under mysterious circumstances the day after the Nazi parachuted onto the Isle and received, despite the protestations of the Seneschal and part of the Minimal Council, Lord Gogoni’s immediate surrender, shocking this rookie paratrooper, who had undergone six months of training in anti-dwarf combat techniques in preparation for this invasion, expecting to meet heavy resistance from the famously nationalistic inhabitants, many of whom, instead, flocked to greet him and carry his luggage to the Bach Hill estate, where, after tea and boules infestées with the friendlier elders of the Council, he was led down to Lord Gogoni’s barely-seaworthy houseboat, moored in the harbor, and was formally presented, at high tide, with the Instrument of Surrender, signed by Lord Gogoni with one hundred different pens at a table set up on the houseboat’s roof, sheltered from the dismal weather by two menservants holding vast umbrella-lamps, which were printed in elaborate floral designs that threw spidery shadows across the Nazi’s face and made him appear far older when he stuck his pen in the mouth of one of the potted Venus flytraps that lined the roof and leaned back in his chair to brood on the sound of the foghorns guiding out of the harbor the boat evacuating to England a handful of families who had decided against the exercise of their patriotic duty to remain on the Isle during the Occupation while Lord Gogoni continued to pick out his name one penstroke at a time and hand off each pen as it was used to one of the many supporters filling the lower decks and spilling up the stairs, reaching out their hands as Lord Gogoni distractedly held out to them each used pen, each piece of history that would find an honored place in the home of every lucky recipient, who, years later, would, presumably, gesture to the pen on its marble dais in each of their heirloom salons and tell their grandchildren about that beautiful, sunny day they were there on Lord Gogoni’s houseboat to witness the Isle become one of the first members of the glorious Nazi empire that had now raised the swastika over every country and struck Communism, Jewery, and all other depravities from the face of the Earth, clearing the way for the Isle of Minimus to take its place at the head of human achievement, first among all nations in the eternal Reich promised by this Nazi, who sighed with boredom as he provoked the aloof flytraps and shifted uncomfortably in his tiny chair, shivering in the cold mist that blew up off the water and slowly soaked everyone on the roof, including the menservants with their umbrella-lamps, which had begun to leak water into their light bulbs and flicker ominously overhead, the dwarf octet that had, in lieu of their traditional Minimal instruments, taken up, out of respect for their German visitor, gigantic sousaphones, from which they struggled to force some semblance of Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, and the excited crowd on the stairs, who jostled and tittered with looks of dumb joy on faces dripping with rain and seawater, then gave a raucous cheer as the Nazi was at last handed the document and welcomed by Lord Gogoni to accompany him to a celebration that night in the ancient Roman fortifications overlooking the heavily polluted Dormitory Fjord on the north end of the Isle, where, in the first century AD, the Roman tactician Flavius Phallosius Maximus had drowned after his banishment from Rome for his shocking habit of wearing embroidered sleeves and a primitive wool cravat known as a polemical, which, according to dwarf legend, when it washed ashore some time later near the dwarf settlement now known as Hudson-sur-la-Manche, was interpreted to be a message from the Gods, its ornate floral pattern a strange foreign language that only the mad shaman who then ruled over the western coast of the Isle claimed to be able to decipher, the same mad shaman many dwarf historians believe to be the basis for the myth of the Nain Rouge, but who is, otherwise, poorly remembered (since he almost certainly did not exist), known mainly for sequestering himself for one month in an unidentified cave in the central hills to translate this mysterious text, which, when he at last read it aloud in translation to an assembly of dwarfs from all over the Isle, was found to be a hymn to this shaman’s greatness, a prophecy revealing that, once he, in all his magnificence, had impregnated every woman on the Isle, giants would be forever barred from approaching its shores, and the dwarfs would at last have a homeland free of foreign domination, fulfilling the dream they all shared, even on the northeast coast, among the pirate dwarfs who had supposedly rejected the culture of the western half of the Isle, though few, according to the legend, even in the shaman’s own village of Dverberg, went so far as to allow him to impregnate their wives and daughters, adopting the view, instead, that this mysterious text should be read as an allegory expressing the gods’ wish that the Isle be united under a single ruler, that dwarfs should procreate as often as possible in order to give the Isle a greater number of soldiers to defend its shores, and that giants defiled the land with their presence, brought to it a curse through the stamping of their heavy feet and the bellowing of their brutish voices, the establishment of alien customs unsuited to dwarf life, and the worship of tall gods that held dwarfs in contempt and would never answer their prayers, never accept their sacrificed goats and lambs, and never cease to help giants oppress dwarfs everywhere, which constituted a worldview that served to guide the Resistance in their five years of struggle against the Nazis, to support them in their darkest hours, forming the infrastructure of their faith that to expel this invader would bring the Isle peace, comforting them there in those frigid little rooms somewhere up in the hills as, each evening, the setting sun seemed to drag down with it all their hopes for the future, as the earth cast skyward its limitless shadow and vague shouts from the Marcellaville concentration camp echoed over the land to mix with the sound of the bombs exploding in the cafés and the wail of emergency sirens of ambulances carrying the collaborators and other victims off to the hospital where, when the Isle was at last liberated in October of 1945, the procuretrix of the Dverberg brothel, the only person, besides the Nazi, who could identify Baruch Khazâd as the one arranging the Nazi’s entertainments, as Khazâd never spoke directly to the inmates themselves face-to-face when dealing with these matters, was brought with a gunshot wound to the head and expired immediately upon arrival, prompting the Nazi, as he shared one last dinner on the veranda of his Bach Hill estate alone with young Khazâd, to joke coarsely about the “skilled aim” of this future Lord Minimus, a joke Khazâd seemed to find in poor taste, surprising the Nazi, as he had never found Khazâd to take exception to any joke, no matter how vile, no matter how scatological, racist, misogynistic, blasphemous, or antinanoidic, not even the one about the young female dwarf whose nymphomania leads her to embark on an expedition into the heart of darkest Africa, where she meets a dissolute priest whose priapismic escapades have convinced the local populace of his godhood, a witticism with a punchline so revolting that it caused Serge Gainsbourg to double over in helpless laughter when Lord Khazâd shared it with him between takes during the filming of the scene in which Anna Karina hops from petal to petal on a giant cannabis leaf painted across an empty concrete lot with Gainsbourg in the center while chanting “il m’aime, un peu, beaucoup, à la folie, pas du tout”, changing her expression drastically on each petal representing each bit of amatory prognostication from the universe, cheering on the “beaucoup” petal, waving her arms and shouting with joy on the “à la folie” petal, and finally collapsing with despair on the “pas du tout” petal, causing Karina to narrowly escape the assassin’s bullet, which zips past harmlessly into the ground, and Gainsbourg to look up from his copy of Prophetic Dreams of Abraham Lincoln 1850–1860, part of a one-hundred-volume series entitled Prophetic Dreams of the American Presidents by Sigmund Freud, and shout with annoyance at Alec Guinness, revealed (with a gong sound) as the camera pans to the right to be standing nearby with, in his leather-gloved hands, an enormous gun Gainsbourg takes from him in a choppily-edited martial arts sequence, followed by a scene in which Gainsbourg ties this inscrutable Japanese agent to the statue of the Coq Gaulois standing in front of the French pavilion and pummels him in the rain in the foreground, out of focus on the left half of the frame while, in focus on the right, Karina and Bardot dance beneath their parapluies in their cuissardes à talons hauts to the rhythm of Gainsbourg’s hit song “Bondage spécial” (he also composed the film’s main theme, “Soixante-Neuf, agent provocatif”, which he famously sang with Bardot in what some called an “obscene spectacle” at the 1968 Venice Film Festival, where the film tied for the Leone d’oro) until Guinness admits that he is in league with a sinister alliance consisting of Anglophone Canadian Peter Sellers, Soviet Commissar Marcello Mastroianni, CIA spy Lee Hazlewood, MI6 agent Michael Caine, turncoat agent of the Office québécois de la langue française Steve McQueen, and the evil supercomputer voiced by Marlon Brando, assembled together by an unknown puppet master for the purpose of exterminating the French language, a revelation that so outrages Gainsbourg that, when, in the next scene, he makes his videophone report to le général de Gaulle from his place in Habitat 67, he implores le Général to grant him authorization for Method Extreme Hostility, authorization to openly wage a campaign of total obliteration with a maximum of violence against any and every opponent of the French language encountered by the agent without making the slightest effort to disguise his actions and without any concern for the diplomatic repercussions, something, le Général tells him, a regretful look on his face on the black-and-white telescreen, he could never do, since approval for Method Extreme Hostility could only come from a unanimous vote of the Académie française, and they had not granted such approval since the conflict in Algérie ended five years earlier…