“[H]e had read in a Chinese book about the customs of a foreign people whose heads could fly up to the trees to seize their prey, always attached by a red thread, and afterward returned to fit themselves into the bloody collar. But if a certain wind blew the thread would break and the head would fly away beyond the seas.”

—Alfred Jarry, Les jours et les nuits, 1897. Quoted in The Banquet Years: The Arts in France, 1885–1918, by Roger Shattuck.