What they earned wasn’t even enough to heat the house. The savants, puzzling over what they found, were also continually uncovering the children. Was there one heart or two? The stethoscope gave conflicting results. They were fascinated by the differences between the children. Christina was a delight – healthy, vigorous, with a voracious appetite; Ritta, by contrast, was weak, querulous and cyanotic. When one fell asleep the other would usually do so as well, but occasionally one slept soundly while the other demanded food. Continually exposed to chills, Ritta became bronchitic. The physicians noted that sickness, too, demonstrated the dual and yet intertwined nature of the girls, for even as Ritta gasped for air, her sister lay at her side unaffected and content. But three minutes after Ritta died, Christina gave a cry and her hand, which was in her mother’s, went limp. It was 23 November 1829, and the afterlife of ‘Ritta-Christina, the two-headed girl’ had begun.
The men from the Académie Royale de Médecine were on hand within hours. They wanted a cast of the body. Deputations of anatomists followed; they wanted the body itself. How they got it is a murky affair, but within days the dissection of l’enfant bicéphale was announced. In the vast amphitheatre of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, Ritta and Christina were laid out in state on a wooden trestle table. The anatomists jostled for space around them. Baron Georges Cuvier, France’s greatest anatomist – ‘the French Aristotle’ – was there. So was Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, connoisseur of abnormality, who in a few years would lay the foundation of teratology. And then there was Étienne Reynaud Augustin Serres, the brilliant young physician from the Hôpital de la Pitié, who would make his reputation by anatomising the girls in a three-hundred-page monograph.
Beyond the walls of the museum, Paris was enthralled. The Courier Français intimated that the medical men had connived at the death of the sisters; they replied that the magistrates who had let the family sink to such miserable depths were to blame. The journalist and critic Jules Janin published a three-thousand-word j’accuse in which he excoriated the anatomists for taking the scalpel to the poetic mystery that was Ritta and Christina: ‘You despoil this beautiful corpse, you bring this monster to the level of ordinary men, and when all is done, you have only the shade of a corpse.’ And then he suggested that the girls would be a fine subject for a novel.
The first cut exposed the ribcage. United by a single sternum, the ribs embraced both sisters, yet were attached to two quite distinct vertebral columns that curved gracefully down to the common pelvis. There were two hearts, but they were contained within a single pericardium, and Ritta’s was profoundly deformed: the intra-auricular valves were perforated and she had two superior vena cavas, one of which opened into the left ventricle, the other into the right – the likely cause of her cyanosis. Had it not been for this imperfection, lamented Serres, and had the children lived under more favourable circumstances, they would surely have survived to adulthood. Two oesophagi led to two stomachs, and two colons, which then joined to a common rectum. Each child had a uterus, ovaries and fallopian tubes, but only one set of reproductive organs was connected to the vagina, the other being small and underdeveloped. Most remarkably of all, where Christina’s heart, stomach and liver were quite normally oriented, Ritta’s were transposed relative to her sister’s, so that the viscera of the two girls formed mirror-images of each other. The anatomists finished their work, and then boiled the skeleton for display.
A PAIR OF LONG-CASE CLOCKS
The oldest known depiction of a pair of conjoined twins is a statue excavated from a Neolithic shrine in Anatolia. Carved from white marble, it depicts a pair of dumpy middle-aged women joined at the hip. Three thousand years after this statue was carved, Australian Aborigines inscribed a memorial to a dicephalus (two heads, one body) conjoined twin on a rock that lies near what are now the outskirts of Sydney. Another two thousand years (we are now at 700 bc), and the conjoined Molionides brothers appear in Greek geometric art. Eurytos and Cteatos by name, one is said to be the son of a god, Poseidon, the other of a mortal, King Actor. Discordant paternity notwithstanding, they have a common trunk and four arms, each of which brandishes a spear. In a Kentish parish, loaves of bread in the shape of two women locked together side by side are distributed to the poor every Easter Monday, a tradition, it is said, that dates from around the time of the Norman conquest and that commemorates a bequest made by a pair of conjoined twins who once lived there.
By the sixteenth century, conjoined twins crop up in the monster-and-marvel anthologies with the monotonous regularity with which they now appear in British tabloids or the New York Post. Ambroise Paré described no fewer than thirteen, among them two girls joined back to back, two sisters joined at the forehead, two boys who shared a head and two infants who shared a heart. In 1560 Pierre Boaistuau gave an illuminated manuscript of his Histoires prodigieuses to Elizabeth I of England. Amid the plates of demonic creatures, wild men and fallen monarchs, is one devoted to two young women standing in a field on a single pair of legs, flaming red hair falling over their shoulders, looking very much like a pair of Botticelli Venuses who have somehow become entangled in each other.
For the allegory-mongers, conjoined twins signified political union. Boaistuau notes that another pair of Italian conjoined twins were born on the very day that the warring city-states of Genoa and Venice had finally declared a truce – no coincidence there. Montaigne, however, will have none of it. In his Essays (c.1580) he describes a pair of conjoined twins that he encountered as they were being carted about the French countryside by their parents. He considers the idea that the children’s joined torsos and multiple limbs might be a comment on the ability of the King to unify the various factions of his realm under the rule of law, but then rejects it. He continues, ‘Those whom we call monsters are not so with God, who in the immensity of his work seeth the infinite forms therein contained.’ Conjoined twins did not reflect God’s opinion about the course of earthly affairs. They were signs of His omnipotence.
By the early eighteenth century, this humanist impulse – the same impulse that caused Sir Thomas Browne to write so tenderly about deformity – had arrived at its logical conclusion. In 1706 Joseph-Guichard Duverney, surgeon and anatomist at the Jardin du Roi in Paris, the very place where Ritta and Christina had been laid open, dissected another pair of twins who were joined at the hips. Impressed by the perfection of the join, Duverney concluded that they were without doubt a testament to the ‘the richness of the Mechanics of the Creator’, who had clearly designed them so. After all, since God was responsible for the form of the embryo, He must also be responsible if it all went wrong. Indeed, deformed infants were not really the result of embryos gone wrong – they were part of His plan. Bodies, said Duverney, were like clocks. To suppose that conjoined twins could fit together so nicely without God’s intervention was as absurd as supposing that you could take two long-case clocks, crash them into each other, and expect their parts to fuse into one harmonious and working whole.