Stranger bedfellows

(Thanks to The Old Leather Man, by Dan W. DeLuca, for the above picture and most of the information.)
What do the Leather Man, unwashed wanderer, and Hughette Clark, millionaire recluse, have in common? Depending on how you look at it, very little or a very significant characteristic.
The Leather Man’s name, birthplace and date of birth are unknown. He died, alone in a cave, in March of 1889, wearing the same oft-patched leather garment he had worn through all his wanderings. He was approximately 50 years old.
Hughette Clark was born in 1906, the daughter of the 67 year old, William Clark and the 28 year old Anna La Chapelle, formerly William Clark’s ward. Huguette spent almost her entire life in the rarefied air of Upper East Side mansions. She died in Manhattan’s Beth Israel hospital at the age of 104, still worth millions.
The Leather Man ate cured meat, windfall apples, dandelion greens, nuts and berries. He chewed tobacco he found discarded at railroad stations and post offices.
Huguette Clark’s favorite lunch was saltines with sardines.
Starting in 1856 – when he first entered the general consciousness – the Leather Man walked alone on country roads and railway beds, and slept in caves and in abandoned cabins. His journeys took him through Connecticut and New York and sometimes to the Berkshires. Then in 1883 he began to walk what would become his famous and reliable circuit: every 34 days he completed 365 miles through Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess and Columbia counties in New York and Fairfield, Litchfield, Hartford and Middlesex counties in Connecticut. Local towns folk and town papers often took note of his passing through, but he rarely spoke or interacted with others.
After her brief unconsummated marriage in 1929, Huguette moved back into the family’s Fifth Avenue mansion and lived there with her mother and a chorus line of servants. Surrounded by her exquisite dollhouses and their perfectly dressed occupants, she occupied herself by painting, playing the harp and watching the “Flintstones”. (What about those animated cave folks did Huguette find so compelling? Was it the bone barrette in Pebbles’s hair? Or was it the prehistoric approximation of a 1950’s suburban foursome, in which the husbands act like cavemen and the wives are delicate flowers with some actual common sense?) In the late 1980’s Huguette, under as assumed name, moved into a NY hospital suite. She brought her French dolls with her into seclusion. She never left the hospital again.

Apparently, the preeminent wish of both Huguette Clark and the Leather Man was to be left alone, to live alone and unknown, and to die that same way.

And since I am trying to keep the hagiography to a minimum, I won’t mention that both Huguette and the Leather Man surely have more in common with the eremites, stylites (pole-sitters), and peregrinating ascetics of early Christianity, than with most of their 19th, 20th and 21st century peers.

St Anthony Abbott,in the Desert, by Zurburan

A long time ago, at the dawn on the Internet era, there was a very funny cartoon in the New Yorker featuring a dog at a computer and the caption: On the Internet no one knows you’re a dog.
Today I would amend that: On the internet (and providing you turn off the video monitor) no one knows your face is evidencing a weird and disconcerting allergic reaction to some as yet unidentified aspect of the universe, with blotches, bloating and itching. On the Internet you can still look like that 1985 picture of you in a red bathing suit reclining near a Costa Rican waterfall.
Over here, across the Internet, my face is prickly and puffy and none of the normal remedies (Benadryl, eye of Newt, bee stings, St Ulphia’s Cream, arnica) are doing any good. I have no idea why my face is doing this, but when I think about it too much – and I am thinking about far too much – I cannot help but think this is the outer manifestation of my inner prickliness and puffiness. I must mend my ways, but what ways shall I mend?
I checked out the patron saints of skin rashes and skin diseases, and they are a good bunch.
St Anthony the Abbott, anchorite of Egypt, (251-356). The rational for his patronage goes thus: In art he is generally represented with a bell, a book, and pig by his side. Originally the pig denoted the Devil, with whom Anthony had many tussles as he prayed out there in the desert, and Anthony always got the better of the Evil One. But the meaning changed in the 12th century when the Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony used to allow the poor people to graze their pigs gratis upon the monastery’s acorns. And since skin diseases were often treated with poultices of pork fat, to alleviate itchiness and reduce inflammation, the connection was made between St Anthony and skin disease. For extra credit, here is a good word to know: tantony. A tantony pig is the runt of the litter, named for the saint.
Yet another confusing aspect of Saint Anthony the Abbott, is that he is not the St Anthony I thought he was. St Anthony was my beloved grandmother, Bonne Maman’s favorite saint; she invoked him almost hourly to find lost objects. But the Anthony of Lost Objects is not the Anthony of Egypt, which confused me as a child since she had lived in Egypt for so long. The Anthony she prayed to never left Italy.
Anthony the Abbot died at the respectable age of 105, and Butler informs us that not one tooth “was lost or loosened.”
Pisanello’s Madonna with St Anthony Abbott and St George. The pig at St Anthony’s side looks more like a boar to me, but what do I know?

Saint George is another patron of skin diseases, but I think we dealt with him, and his dragon slaughter, yesterday.
So we shall move on to St Marculf, the renowned missionary to those pagan Gauls. There is no mention of intimacy with skin rashes in his lifetime (Unless you count the Miracle of Snail Slime). But later French kings, otherwise known for their clean living, found that touching St Marculf’s relics, particularly the ulna bones, could cure their scrofula, also known as The King’s Evil. (Scrofula is a kind of TB with some very unattractive symptoms; it is the root of the excellent adjective, Scrofulous.)
St Peregrine Laziosi (1260 – 1345) was so anti-church in his youth that during a demonstration he hit the papal nuncio (later to be St Philip Benizi); Philip turned the other cheek and Bam! – Peregrine was converted. In order to do atone for his misdeeds, he spent 30 years working in silence, solitude and standing. The only time he spoke was to preach. We don’t know whether or not it was on account of the constant standing, but Peregrine did develop cancer of the foot. The night before his scheduled amputation, he had a vision of Jesus touching the diseased area, and in the morning he was cured.
The only patron saint I would have guessed is St Roch (1295-1327), because he is often represented lifting his robes to display his plague-ulcerated leg, with his faithful dog by his side.
Roch contracted the plague while ministering to the afflicted and then went into the forest to die. He survived because a dog brought him food and gave him solace. Unfortunately, when Roch recovered and returned to Montpelier, he was arrested as a spy and jailed for 5 years. It is not said what happened to the dog while Roch languished in prison. We do know that an angel brought Roch food while he was incarcerated, but he still died. Draw your own conclusions.
St Roch with his dog

As my sainted mother would say when confronted with a sumptuous dessert tray: “L’embarras du choix.”