I've marked up a further six images today; they were all fairly busy ones, with some linking between them, and took longer than I expected. I have nine to go.

Working through the images, marking up objects, people and other bits and pieces, I'm beginning to put together the basics of the Lustucru story. This is how it seems to work:

Lustucru nowadays seems to mean a fool or a buffoon, but the figure of Lustucru in these images is not like that. He's basically the Opérateur Céphalique; working in what looks like a blacksmith's shop, with appropriate tools (furnace, bellows, anvil, hammer, tongs, and file), he and his assistants remove and replace the heads of women, who are brought in by their husbands to be "improved". A cruder version of this workshop appears in Jean Tangous.

Outside the shop, ships bring a cargo of new heads up the river; these are unloaded and brought into the workshop by other workers. The shop appears to advertise itself by hanging out the decapitated heads of women, and by a sign showing a decapitated body.

This "normal" state of affairs -- men having their women "fixed" to tame their natures -- is inverted in L'invention des femmes (1) and (2), where the women force their men to undergo operations which similarly render them more malleable and cooperative. Interestingly, these operations do not involve actual decapitation; instead, a (male) surgeon seems to perform more delicate work on the patient's skull, using a knife. Following the operation, these men wear the symbol "A", as a "marque de bon mari".

However, in several engravings, typified in La grande destruction de Lustucru par les femmes fortes, and also shown in the two Massacre de Lustucru pictures (here and here), the women take direct revenge on Lustucru and his assistants. They invade his workshop and attack the men, subjecting them to the same decapitation, throwing their heads into the furnace, and dragging Lustucru's body down to the riverside. They also set fire to the ships which bring heads to the workshop.

In both the Massacre pictures, there are male bystanders who mildly regret what is happening, and provide a link to the Confrerie des Martyrs; one says that "la confrerie des Martirs sera plus grande" as a result of the massacre.