The Martian: A Novel

“It is a wondrous thing, the human foot”

— George Du Maurier

“And, ach! what a beautiful skeleton you will make! And very soon, too, because you do not smile on your madly loving Svengali. You burn his letters without reading them! You shall have a nice little mahogany glass case all to yourself in the museum of the École de Médecine, and Svengali shall come in his new fur-lined coat, smoking his big cigar of the Havana, and push the dirty carabins* out of the way, and look through the holes of your eyes into your stupid empty skull, and up the nostrils of your high, bony sounding-board of a nose without either a tip or a lip to it, and into the roof of your big mouth, with your thirty-two big English teeth, and between your big ribs into your big chest, where the big leather lungs used to be, and say, “Ach! what a pity she had no more music in her than a big tom-cat!” And then he will look all down your bones to your poor crumbling feet, and say, “Ach! what a fool she was not to answer Svengali’s letters!””

— George Du Maurier

“But you are not listening, sapperment! great big she-fool that you are”

— George Du Maurier

“Ought one ever to play at make-believe with a full-grown man for any consideration whatever”

— George Du Maurier

“No such magnificent or seductive apparition has ever been seen before or since on any stage or platform”

— George Du Maurier