Four times at least he was escorted to the
frontier as a dangerous and undesirable foreigner, but he was
always brought back as the Fall of Icarus (attributed to Pincini,
Andreas, early Twentieth Century). And then one day, at an
anarchist congress at Genoa, a fellow-worker, in the heat of
debate, broke a phial full of corrosive liquid over his back. The
red shirt that he was wearing mitigated the effects, but the
Icarus was ruined beyond recognition. His assailant was severly
reprimanded for assaulting a fellow-anarchist and received seven
years' imprisonment for defacing a national art treasure. As soon
as he was able to leave the hospital Henri Deplis was put across
the frontier as an undesirable alien.
"In the quieter streets of Paris, especially in the neighbourhood
of the Ministry of Fine Arts, you may sometimes meet a depressed,
anxious-looking man, who, if you pass him the time of day, will
answer you with a slight Luxemburgian accent. He nurses the
illusion that he is one of the lost arms of the Venus de Milo, and
hopes that the French Government may be persuaded to buy him. On
all other subjects I believe he is tolerably sane.
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