It was a beautifully sunny day in April 1985 and l’Ecole Merveilleux des Enfants Tres Bon made a daytrip to a farm near the picturesque village of Muret, in order that the children pet the lambs, calves and chicks. Babette was only 6 years old at the time and had led a very sheltered life with a delightful nuclear family: parents Raconteur and Chanteuse and her unfortunate brother Thierry (later Sensitive Moonhead, see Strange Proportion no. 1, Mercy Issue no. 26). The only emotions she had been familiar with to that point were joy and love, and love was all that Babette felt on that ominous day.

After having frolicked with the sprightly lambs and cuddled the cute calves, the children were led to the chicken pen, where the chicks had hatched only one week previous. When it was Babettes turn to pet a chick she was completely overcome by the beauty in all things living. As she felt the soft fragility of the tiny new life in her palm, her feelings of awe became overwhelming, far too intense for a child as young and innocent as Babette.

As her tiny hands tried to express the landslide of love that was welling up in her little golden heart, she put too much pressure on the delicate hatchling in her care until it lay lifeless in her hands. Unprepared for lifes greatest irony[1], Babette descended into the murky depths of mortification. Ostracised by her peers, she immediately started to actually shrink, at an alarming rate, into her impressive head of hair: her sense of shame prompting her body to hide its love away.

Mortifying Actual Diminution (MAD) is a syndrome unique to Babette and treatment for her peculiar and extreme form of guilt and penitence has been hard to come by. After numerous and often dubious treatments; repeated viewings of Its a Wonderful Life, mammoth and sustained doses of MDMA coupled with amounts of growth hormone that would turn a flea into the size of a hippo, to name but a few dwindle inhibiting experiments, Babette remained a pint-sized love phobic.

Distraught and desperate, having already lost one child to profound welt-smärtz, Raconteur and Chanteuse Content launched a global appeal to help their beloved daughter. Help was soon to arrive in the form of Dr Holden Caulfield, and his groundbreaking work at the Raskolnikov Centre for Self-reproach. Under his care Babettes size has stabilised at three apples high and although she is still more than reticent in sharing her love, Babette has gained an understanding of her limits of affection and is currently conducting an international university tour entitled The Greatest Irony and How to Curb Your Love.

April 2009.