Intellectual gymnastics, the tight-lipped playfulness of a strange imagination, sonatas for the piccolomuch that is merely sterile grotesquery occasionally individual .
It lacks his usual slavering interest in gore, grotesquery and sadismthough there is one signature episode in which a man is tortured by being doused in blood and dunked in .
Last week sad-eyed President Albert Lebrun brooded over the grotesquery presented by two children of Catillon.