The next illustration—banal or confused to the cursory glance of the naked eye, but rich in lazy detail under the patient scrutiny of the magnifying glass—purports to show the distinguished but highly unorthodox French philatelist André (‘Dédé’) Levieux (1956-2003), cozily ensconced one midwinter’s evening in a dilapidated bottle-green leather wing-chair, a cigarette snoozing between two nicotine-stained fingers while snow falls dreamily outside the window, and tranquilly perusing what are technically but somewhat tediously known as the quadrille-ruled white cartridge leaves of a leather-bound springback album housing what is in all probability a recently acquired portion of his eclectic and taxonomically perverse collection, an idiosyncratic sample of postal history that ranges from the queer perforation of an overprinted Tasmanian penny pink to the aberrant cancellation obliterating the tireless toil of a bare-torsoed Cuban cane-cutter; from the millimetric marmoreal effigies of bewhiskered generals and austere heads-of-state long since consigned to oblivion, to the frozen heroics of Communist speedskaters and tête-bêche Olympic bobsledders; from the self-referentiality of a stylized 1955 ten-pfennig West German carrier pigeon to the self-abnegation of a 1957 five-franc Belgian nurse (the snowy folds of her immaculately starched uniform are tucked tight at the bodice to reveal a surprisingly ample bosom which, despite its infinitesimal delineation, can still provoke a pang in certain amateurs) preserved for posterity as she dutifully stoops to bandage the leprous limb of a pitiable wild-eyed Congolese native in a Leopoldville lazaret, this ‘inch-square pageant’ (to quote Adam Snow’s Par Avion) emitting that unmistakeable aroma of colonial nostalgia familiar to many philatelists and certainly to Dédé Levieux who, entranced since solitary poliomeyelitic childhood by malarial swamps, pith helmets, rubber trees and sturdy smiling indigenes, casts a lingering and appreciative gaze upon the specimen at hand, no doubt mentally commemorating the fact—known to only a scarce handful of specialists—that just nine months after the taking of the photograph on which the lithographic engraving for the issue was based, the nurse depicted—a certain Marcelle Broodthaers, sturdy Flemish-speaking native of canal-crossed Bruges—was, along with two young compatriots, brutally and repeatedly profaned and violated before being dismembered and finally eaten by troops loyal to the charismatic Congolese rebel leader Herbert Obango, troops who, without the slightest compunction and evidently performing under the influence of hallucinogenic herbs or whatnot, stormed the Red Cross dispensary of the colonial capital and proceeded to assuage their bestial urges, thereby provoking the first symptom of a paroxysm of violence that eventually led to the relinquishing of Belgian sovereignty and the establishment of an independent state, a long and cruel process that forms, as it were, an invisible watermark underwriting the surface of what is to many merely another picturesque and inoffensive postage stamp.