It was a time two days after my love with Daphné was spent on her voluptuous quilt in her high-born room at the Place Vendôme. The summer was at its zenith in the wealthy epoch in which I lived. I was richly dressed in linen, unshaven, of a manly age, handsome of face, a body chiseled and made strong by summer sport. With purpose I walked along the lamp-lit arcades and crumbling tchotchke brocantes on the rue de Rivoli. The day had been hot and heaven’s fierce eye cooked the city like bread in a stone oven. Now was evening and a dry warmth puffed in bursts like steam from old machines. I shuffled past broken-backed Parisian laborers and weary foreign travelers snapping photographs…
Scenes of the city: A man was curing warts in the arcade. He stood on a box, beating a ladle against his cardboard medical diagram, dabbing ointments on curious passers-by. A similar inventor was selling the ‘eyeglasses-to-end-all-eyeglasses.’ This merchant leapt from crate to crate, gasping in exalted joy, singing the virtues of his holy lenses. One merely had to wear a kilo of coiled springs and transparent plates strapped to the forehead to see all there was to see in this world. A perch was set-up where a one-euro monkey was signing postcards for tourists. An old cocktail lounge near Galignani’s English bookseller had its doors wide open. It pilfered smoke from the silent clients inside, and tried to resurrect the Can-Can. All of this reminded me of a similar scene from a time long ago...
It was the old century.
I had drifted down to a foreign seaport. There, I rented a small room over a brick marketplace that looked like this very arcade in summertime, with the hot breaths of air puffing through the brocante stands and the vents in the bricks. I was of a youngish age, no more than a boy. I had come from wayfaring and had met a friendly swindler named Felix. Felix had been working on a fishing boat offshore and was docked for the summer and the two of us lived upstairs and earned money selling opium out of our room. The room was cheap and rundown but comfortable, with two mattresses on the floor, one against each wall, and a table made of planks in the center of the carpet that was always covered with pads of sketching paper, wine bottles, pipes, and ashtrays. Felix had come ashore at the end of spring with two kilos of black tar opium that he’d bought from his ship captain. He was turning a handsome profit. I paid into the share and joyously threw myself into the work – though joy is a hindrance advisable to be abandoned in such a business. Cold-handed Felix enjoyed counting profits more than feasting in revelry, and so was meant for the trade. He and I would come to part ways that autumn, as men are made for different lives; still that summer he was a loyal friend and we laughed many a pleasant night away, until came rushing the gold and bluish beams of dawn.
Summer nights we would work and play the lyre and the mandolin. We drank sweet rum and sang and made love to eager girls. A steady stream of young female university students and tourists kept the business going in the pensions near the harbor. They would stray to drink coffee and wine in the marketplace in their laughing groups; and we would catch them by their naïve hands and lead them upstairs, funneling them into our well-worn room the way recalcitrant housecats are cornered and funneled back inside the house with slow side-steps and focused eyes. We relished those girls with their wheat-fed breasts, little Pollyannas raised in northern towns with their powdered thighs, legs flavored sugary-vanilla and rubbed with the scents of inexpensive middle-class perfumes….
Other times we met and made love to the low-born castaway girls of the city – black-stockinged bartendresses and blousy tramps employed to work in drinking dens, or at the hat-check counters in strip clubs. There were shyer girls too, also itinerants, those who moved from city to city looking for a new way of life or a job on the stage. They worked pushing breakfast trays in the morning cafés, so they’d leave for work while Felix and I were still sleeping; sometimes they would return the next evening, sometimes we would never see or hear from them ever again. So many girls to tell about on that long-lost summer, adolescent gypsies with crazy eyes and dark secrets. That was the life around the marketplace. The air from the harbor nearby was salty and humid.
Downstairs in the market, night had fallen. I paced back and forth in front of the sod crates, where flourished tender poppies in the summer night air. I sniffed their scarlet blooms and hefty milking pods. It was on a night that we were to sell ten grams of the ‘black smoke’ to an bearded vagabond who claimed to live on a barge in the harbor. He was a strange, disheveled figure, and we didn’t trust him to come up to our room where we usually did business, so Felix went upstairs alone to weigh out the product and package it. We planned to exchange the money down at the wharf. Now, while I was downstairs pacing back and forth, waiting for Felix, I noticed some patrolmen had shown up. They were milling around the brocante stands casting me suspicious looks every other moment. A cold flush went up the rind of my back, a sick feeling jabbed my gut. I was more than a little paranoid. I hadn’t yet visited a jail cell in this part of the country and had wanted to remain anonymous here. I thought to cancel plans and made a few steps towards the closed door that led to the narrow stairs that went up to our room. I needed to signal to Felix, for as soon as he appeared on the street with the product, that gang of patrolmen would surely fling themselves upon us. Where was the customer hiding? I peered around the corner and saw the shady vagabond smoking a rolled cigarette quietly by a street leading down to the river.
“Where’s your barge?” I whispered to him when I reached the shadows.
He pointed down the road and continued puffing.
“Do you want some tobacco?”
I nodded and took a pinch and began to roll it.
“There are police over there.” The worry in my stomach was growing worse.
“They’re not looking at us,” said the vagabond, “They’re here for something else.”
How does he know what they are here for? And what is that tap-tapple-tap, I heard footsteps coming around the corner. It was Felix, he was shuffling fast. I motioned for the vagabond to follow us and met pace with Felix. The three of us headed off in direction of the harbor.
There were even more patrolman down by the docks. They surveyed us carefully as we stepped across the planks, passing the roped up boats. A new policeman seemed to appear with every turn. My paranoia was now paramount.
“This way. My barge is over here.”
“No, we’re not going there,” we told the vagabond. “Let’s just sit on the edge of the docks a minute.”
“Look at the moon!” I said as I sat myself down, letting my legs dangle over the black waters, “One would say it is swollen. It is like a green apple, that moon!”
“It is just a moon,” said the shrew-faced vagabond. Who was this character, I wondered. Just another dirty bum living on a garbage-boat in the harbor? A creature like this would be cooperating with the police. Ten grams costs no great sum, but where has he scored the money to buy it? Look at the way he was dressed! I scanned over my shoulder. People could be seen coming down the docks – shades with flapping holsters. I thought to nudge Felix and suggest we stop the deal and cut-out, but in the end we went through with it. I grabbed the old bills from the vagabond’s grimy hand while we three sat down on the docks with our legs hanging over. If anyone approaches, I thought, I’m going to leap in the harbor and swim beneath the boards, straight back to the sand. Felix handed the vagabond the opium wrapped up in brown paper and the vagabond tucked it into his jacket. He mumbled some parting words and we nodded as we stood up and walked away, off down the docks past the patrolmen. I didn’t look to see if they were watching us but listened to hear for their footsteps, should they start a pursuit. I was a great runner on foot, then as now. Aye, no man could outrun me on two legs! So fast was I in the footrace, that I almost yearned for the chance to prove my speed against pursuing police; but happy was my stomach that we were not pursued. I was flushed with relief as we quietly left the docks in direction of the marketplace. We had a good stack of cash now, Felix and I, and we went quickly up to the room to count it and put it away. That night, we invited two short, dark-haired Swedish girls, one from Stockholm, the other from Göteborg, to come up to our room. We had met them eating in a café the same evening. All of us smoked opium and drank together; we sang and played the mandolin, and I made love to the taller of the two. Such a fragrant recollection!
That was all years ago, long before I had traveled to Paris, back in the days when I swindled fools and drifted around—an airy youth in canvas traveling trousers; brown ramblin’ boots, they lasted long, made of African leather. These days, I would stroll in summer linens, stitched by Europe’s finest tailors—the greatest couturiers of Paris and Milan fashioned my evening suits. A famous English shoemaker sent me these shoes: c.i.f. London . . . Aye, these were empirical times!
Yes, now was a more handsome age. The plentiful money adorning my pockets was crisp from the treasury, not brown and crumpled as sorry bills gets from passing through the soiled hands of vagabonding harbor-rats and opium peddlers. Now it was night in Paris and I was walking in fine clothes beneath an ivory-laced portico knowing all luxuries were mine. “Great life!” I cried, “How you lay yourself before me like an ardent lover!”
As I lined the gates of the palace of the Louvre, I was startled by a sudden gust of very cool wind that caught up in the overhead trees and swooshed upon my face. So strange was it, in this month of summer, that I stopped momentarily thinking about all that might arrive at this private midsummer feast in the gardens of the Louvre whereto I was headed, and focused on the qualities of the autumnal odors that had accompanied such a untimely breeze. My eyes watched the way the leaves in the trees overhead were flapping moistly on dark branches, and my memory cast back to a time a few cold autumns before…
Oh memory, speak of the beautiful Anne, with whom I spent one amorous night in blistery autumn…
Autumn, that wild season when rural men rack orchard trees with sticks and weep with the desire to kiss faraway Demeter’s supple breasts, to set lips to her travel-swollen eyes. They seek goddesses, but I desired only Anne. The two of us had planned to meet after twilight in the Jardin du Luxembourg. She had just performed onstage for the first time at the Comedie Française, and I had watched the performance and when we met hours later in the gardens, she was still wearing the red silk costume feathers in her hair. It was cold, so she also wore a coat. She looked so beautiful with her pale face and those red feathers in her auburn hair and her elegant well-cut peacoat of black wool. How slow we walked, our eyes fastened to each other’s. Weaving between the sodden mounds in Autumn rain, we sought no umbrella, nor did we brush the moist leaves that clung to the wool of our shoulders. With wet fingers, we coursed each other’s blue-veined wrists splotched dark with night – glory to the season of Autumn!
“I will leave France as soon as I get the money from my brother,” she told me after we had kissed on the stones in the damp and misty park. “I can accomplish greater things as an actress in Italy.” Certainly, she is living there now – in Rome, or Napoli.
I would write her a letter, I thought. ‘To Anne…’ I would begin, with her perfect neck and the good-smelling small of her back. Such prose I would draft beneath this fine portico. I would sing in the letter of the perfect love we had made in the blue of little-morning in that apartment overlooking the shady-lanes of the Luxembourg Gardens. The balcony was near to us and the door was open, and we could hear the birds and the sounds of automobiles beginning the day. She had cried and her aching voice reached to the low shelf of clouds in the coal-stained sky. Such love I would remind her of in this poetic letter! I would hurl such a letter by post. I would let it flutter over the rooftops of Florence, and wind down near the Tyrrhenian Sea.
So happy was I to be dreaming of Anne. It was all spoiled, however, when I came close to the entrance of the palace that was nearest the Jardin du Carrousel where the soirée was to be held. I was stopped by two young minettes who eagerly wanted my services. They were short chubby parisiennes, who had otherwise pretty faces in the French fashion: soft and sciurine cheeks, squirrel-like girls with beaked noses. They hovered in clouds of familiar Lolita Lempicka perfume—I admit there were nights I’d slept in such fumes, embracing girls of tender age, flavors of ivy and adolescent anis, sweet sugar pouring from unbundled hair. These particular girls were dressed like they’d come in from the middle-class suburbs for the occasion. Their outfits seemed chosen and fitted with great effort: black satin, cotton-weave dresses brushing against thick pale ankles, dropping into tall high heels—heels that clicked awkwardly as they saw me approaching the velvet ropes. They ran up to me with their dangling handbags…
“S’il vous plait, monsieur! Can you help us get into this party?” This they cried and stole glances back to the entrance of the palace where stood two doormen by they ropes. “Take us into the party?” they pleaded.
“I’m not going to any party. I’m just having dinner with a friend.” With that, I walked past the minettes and greeted the men guarding the door. One was the familiar Josiah – a stately black African with limbs of steel.
“Comment vas-tu, Aleksandre! You’re coming to the party?” Josiah greeted me smiling, and our hands clasped joyfully.
“I didn’t know it was a party. I thought it was a dinner.” With that I passed the velvet ropes and entered into the hall.
In the anteroom, people were trading coats for tickets. I passed into a large salon where I saw the guests had assembled. Men and ladies drank aperitifs and chatted. I immediately spotted by a girl whom I knew intimately. She was the bronze-limbed Aurélie, beautiful dark-haired girl of twenty-two. We had spent a week together making love back in the spring and then she had left to travel to Polynesia with her family and I hadn’t seen her since. She quickly clung to me and kissed me and I smelled that familiar scent and tasted that familiar flavor of her lips and I could feel by the way she embraced me that she wanted to take things from where they left off and that it was desired that I remain with her, faithful by her side throughout the evening and perhaps the next morning. I still, however, needed to find my friend Giovanni whom I had come to see. I was told he was in a private salon playing drafts with the host of the party. I took a glass of champagne from a servant and went down the hall.
“Mon cher ami!” Giovanni stood from the gaming table to embrace me. The other players remained seated.
“Bon soir, mon vieux!”
Amusing story about my friend: Giovanni, marchese di Roccaverdina, hailing from Rome. He was the grandson of the last Romanov Princess. She had gone into exile after the revolution and her son married a French woman and moved to Italy. Giovanni was exceptionally short, blond and strong, with the heavy chest of Ajax. Upon his jacket dangled medals. His hair was carefully combed. He drank cognac through glistening teeth. Giovanni and I had traveled together, once upon a time. For two weeks we shared the springs at Baden-Baden. Now we met only rarely, at the occasional Parisian soirée. We took pleasure in drink when together, and when drunk, Giovanni would brag to all present that he had once had the pleasure of going to bed with one of my women after our trip to Germany. He praised her amorous games and detailed her flesh as the cards were dealt.
“Such stories!” I would laugh and throw my head back. “Let me remind you, my dear Giovanni, that I once lived for a month in a hotel in St. Petersburg with one of your own women: pale Polinichka. She draped herself across me under lavish sheets in our fine room on the Nevsky Prospekt. For a week she bled and for a month she swooned. I remember I had lied to her. I told the dear fawn that I would marry her. She was a baroness if I recall. Nobel but frail. Oh, those were heroic times!”
“I believe it! I believe it!” the other gentleman in the room would laugh.
“Maybe so! Maybe so!” Giovanni would howl in happy words. We sporting men would all then swallow a long snifter of brandy and continue at our cards.
Now was a new night. We were in a lavish rococo salon overlooking the dark Jardin du Carrousel. I had just joined the table where Giovanni was playing drafts with the son of the patron of the feast. The patron’s son was a minet called Marcel de Puispeu, and he had the pallor of a split potato. His features were fine and his eyes were narrow, crowding close to a small beak of a nose. His hair was dry and fluffed in the modern fashion popular among fin-de-race minets from Passy and Neuilly-sur-Seine. The two played drafts and Marcel laughed with a shrill voice whenever he moved a piece. I sat myself at the gaming table and was introduced to Marcel and I politely thanked him for the feast – after all he was the host and his father was the sponsor.
“Do you know my lineage?” Marcel chimed at me.
“No.”
“I am a descendent of the Countess Dembowska. Do you know who she was? She was the unrequited beloved of the great writer Stendhal. He loved her but she was too good for him and refused him. Such is my lineage . . . too good for Stendhal!”
As the youth told his bragging tales, my thoughts drifted to Stendhal’s Scenes from a Parisian Salon. A vivid image came to my mind of the young Octave gazing on the mountains of the Morea while taking a mixture of opium and digitalis, to end his life for love, the way so many characters had done and would continue to do. Giovanni stirred me from my imagination with an anxious voice…
“Did you see Sarah when you arrived?”
“Poor Giovanni’s in love!” Marcel laughed with joy, “He’s a romantic!”
“I didn’t see her,” I told him, “but I didn’t look at all the guests. I came straight in to see you.”
“I would say she’s in Mykonos, playing on the beach,” chirped Marcel, “It is the season. I’ll soon be there myself with my beautiful fiancée, Lara. Do you know her?” He turned to me with curled lips, “Lara de Causans. She is my fiancée”
“She’s my second-cousin,” said Giovanni.
Just then some unknown person at the game table blurted out, “I’ve never been to Mykonos!” This young man remained nameless for the entire evening.
“You’re lucky your girl is here tonight.” Giovanni bowed his head sorrowfully, lamenting his missing Sarah.
I pitied my great friend Giovanni at this moment. I thought to myself, ‘Nowhere is there a romantic monogamist like Giovanni. Like any man, he brags from time to time about nocturnal conquests; yet at heart, he wants to love one woman simply and purely.’ I recalled that time he saved a girl’s life on the coast of Malta. She was accidentally drowning and Giovanni dived in and saved her. And because he had saved her life, he thought romantic love with her would be the most suitable thing, for then the circumstances of his having saved her would make the union more strong and profound and their relationship would have nothing banal in its foundations. And he tried to love her romantically, although she was a feeble creature of only sixteen years, cross-eyed, with a cleft-lip and waxy hair. She was ugly but he sat at her bedside while she was recovering and he tried to love her but in the end he couldn’t. Then he met her older sister who was quite pretty and had no cleft-lip. Giovanni then fell in love with the sister, thinking that marrying the sister of the girl whose life he’d saved would also be immensely poetic, but in the end the sister went mad and was sent to work on a farm in Bucharest. Such was his luck at times!
“The thing about women,” Marcel piped out, “is that they are everywhere. There are flocks of them out in the hall right now. Take a few. Serve yourself! Ah, you are too romantic, Giovanni! You will ruin your life with such romance!”
“Marcel, you are right. I will go out after this game and find the most beautiful girl in the place and dance with her and take her away.” Giovanni swelled his chest at this idea and smiled.
“Oh no! That would be impossible! For the most beautiful girl here is my sweet fiancée, Lara, and she is going away with me, tonight!”
“Well,” said Giovanni, “if you are leaving this party tonight with the most beautiful girl, I’m going to another party on another side of town. There, I might find a wife…”
“A wife?” coughed some older gentleman who was seated in an armchair by the game table, who up until now had spoken not a word. “Best to keep out of that mess! Bachelorhood is the best, young men. I tell you, quitting a relationship is like quitting smoking. Not long after you do it, you will be surprised to find yourself walking one day down a sun-washed street with the sudden realization that you have no constraints on your person, and you will tremble with euphoria! Monogamy is just the thing for surrendering to another person your power to decide if and when you are happy.”
“Completely wrong!” chirped the minet, “Monogamy is fine when it is with the most beautiful girl at the party. Your philosophies have not had eyes to set on my love, beautiful Lara de Causans. Of course, monogamy is sour if you put your faith in one like Mademoiselle Sarah, on the other hand. Do that, Giovanni and you will ruin your life! . . . It is funny,” Marcel added then after a moment of pause, turning to me specifically, “We all here try desperately to ruin our lives, and I am the only one who fails at it. I fail miserably!” With this he placed a losing piece on the draft board.
“Yes, but you are learning,” I smirked. “Giovanni will steal your king.”
“Thank you, Aleksandre!” smiled pleasant Giovanni. “You’re a good friend.”
“So where do you come from?” Marcel asked me, feigning a voice of interest.
“The desert,” I lied.
“Really!” Marcel then began to tell of his father’s collection of old classic automobiles, swords and motorcycles. He had invested millions in these treasures, I was told, and glad of such news. Now the game was over and Giovanni asked me to go out to the terrace with him.
Out on the terrace, lanterns were lit and summer gnats swarmed around their flames. The stones stairs led down to the immaculate gardens of the Louvre. One saw handsome couples strolling between the prim hedges. The moon shone like a thick silver coin.
“I have been in Rome,” Giovanni chimed gaily, “Opening a new hotel. You’ll have to come see it. The money went quick though, I don’t know how I’m going to manage until it gets off the ground.” Then Giovanni’s tone turned grim. “Please Aleksandre, do me a service. If Sarah comes tonight. Will you ask her how she feels about me? But be discreet.”
“I am your faithful and discreet friend,” I replied and sipped my cognac. We felt the warm summer air on our faces as our eyes surveyed the garden. From the nearby terrace, separated from ours by a hedge, ladies voices could be heard giggling. They were interrupted by cello strings, and then the ladies clapped and began to hurry in to dance.
“Let’s go inside.”
Back in the gaming room, the young plain-faced Marcel de Puispeu was still at the drafts. He had begun a new game with the nameless man, and was eagerly stacking money on the table. Giovanni walked up and set a hand on his shoulder.
“Come, Marcel, the ladies want to dance.”
“Ladies always want to dance,” replied Marcel, keeping his narrow eyes on the table. Giovanni and I left the room and walked through the main hall. There the cello sounds and sensual hums of violins were wrapping themselves around each other the way a young girl wraps hair into braids. The dancing had begun. I went to the table to take a glass of champagne. An old society lady heavy in pearls greeted me and said the party would move out to the gardens after some dancing. Apparently tables were laid in the Jardin du Carrousel and a feast of magnificent means was to be unveiled at the striking of midnight, delights never before enjoyed in the capital. I was glad of that and crossed the gilded hall to find Aurélie for a dance.
“Hello my pretty one,” I said to her and clasped her bronze-colored hand.
“Hello my pretty, where did you go?”
“We were gambling,” I replied. And the two of us danced.
“What a small tummy you have,” I said after we’d stopped, caressing her waist as one caresses a jewel on a ring. “You know Aurélie, I am going to package this tummy in a postal box and tape it with strapping-tape. And I will mail it off to the high-peaked Alps. And after those mountain people have enjoyed your little belly for a month, having fed it with the cheeses of mountain ewes to make it plump and full, I will come like a robber with a mask in the night and steal it for myself.”
“It is making noises, my tummy. All there is in it is a cup of chocolate and the white of an egg.” As she was saying this, I was working hard to devour other parts of her body, with fine discreet nibbles as one must use when amongst other in high society. Just then the music was interrupted by the chiming of a spoon on crystal. The old patron wanted to make an announcement.
“Messieurs, Dames…” the patron began, “It is my pleasure to introduce you all to a man of high esteem.” All the guests looked around to see whom the patron was referring to. All eyes settled then when the patron spread his arms to welcome in an old man with wild white hair and a German nose.
“This is the celebrated scientist and inventor, Doctor Hermann Schliemann,” said the patron, and everyone clapped. We didn’t know why we were clapping but it was a pleasure to do so and soon we were relieved to hear an explanation about Doctor Schliemann’s work. It seems he had invented a method of placing a series of lenses that allows one’s vision to magnify seven thousand times as it spirals any which way, so that far-off objects hidden by walls can be seen in monumental form. A drop of water dispelling from the faucet in the maid’s water-closet, for example, would be seen as a tidal wave by someone who places an eye to a lens in, say, the garden. Or a flea than jumps onto the sofa in the library would be seen as a leaping lion to someone peering the lens in the garage. Sound too was magnified, though how this was done wasn’t revealed.
“What is the reason for such an invention?” asked the guests.
It was explained…
A little girl, Marie, who is very young and so tucked in to bed now, lives across from this palace with her father, the Grand Duke So-and-so. Marie loves fireworks in the garden. She loves their bright flashes of light that fill the eyes and their loud pops of sound, like thunder. She would always ask her daddy, “I want to watch the fireworks in the garden tonight!” Whereupon he would usually have to respond, “No, my little Marie. I’m afraid it is not possible. For tonight is not…” La Fête de la Bastille, for example; “nor is it any other date on which fireworks are ignited.” And Marie would cry and cry.
There came a day when the Grand Duke was visiting with a friend, who happened to be this scientist and inventor, Hermann Schliemann. Schliemann overheard the Duke’s quarrels with his little girl and got the bright idea to invent this machine. “This way,” said Doctor Schliemann when he first unveiled the device to the Duke, “when your daughter wants fireworks, she can sit in the dining room and press her eyes to the lens, and you can go up on the roof and stand in a certain place and strike a match, and that match’s light and sound will be magnified seven-thousand times, so that it will appear as an intense powder blast. It will pop and roar like cannons firing. It will be greater than any fireworks show on earth, your simple striking of the match. This way your little girl can have a fireworks show every night!”
“What a fine thing!” chimed Aurélie with laughter, clapping her hands as the other guests did. I took her wrist and stroked it and put my lips to her blushing mouth and kissed her well, caressing her bronze-tinted cheeks. We were told the celebrated scientist would demonstrate his invention, but that it would take some time to set up the lenses. People began to talk amongst themselves. The music started up once again and we all danced. I twirled Aurélie around many times and she seemed never to tire from such acrobatics and I didn’t either. Finally her girl friends came up to tell her some giggling news and I went to help myself to some thankful champagne.
As Aurélie was occupied with her friends and Giovanni was talking to the brother of the evening’s patron, who was the uncle of his missing beloved, Sarah, I decided to drink a private glass while entertaining private thoughts, walking around the palace rooms. Downstairs there was a door that led out to the gardens and, as the air outside felt fresh and clean, I exited the palace for the dark yard.
It was a place across the way from the area where cotton-clothed tables were set out on wide lawns in anticipation of the midnight feast. Separated by a hedge, where I stood in the garden was secluded, though large. There were no tables here attended to by servants laying spoons. There was but an empty patch of dark-stemmed grass whose points were tipped by the light of the moon. Such are the patches of midsummer grass that nymphs and naiads so cherish; though I saw no sparkling stream nor fountain’s plume. But on the edge of the patch, appealing trees with leafy bowers, dark underneath, also silver-capped, grew from random crests on the graceful hilly lawn.
It was then I heard a quiet feminine voice inquiring of herself in the night. Just as I circled around a tree in search of the source of that voice, a treacherous cloud covered the moon and the whole garden was cast into darkness. I looked up at the midnight sky and watched as the wind pulled the cloud gently across the shiny surface of the moon, removing it like a marriage veil, and brightness again fluttered in my eyes.
When I looked back down at the silver-coated garden, I saw coming around the tree a young woman in a white dress, carrying a white rose on a long stem. She wore jeweled sandals and wore her dark hair back in ribbons, streams of it fell down over her ivory-white face. One forearm was pressed against her full, well-formed breasts; so round, like summer fruit, my eyes fell on the shadows made by that dress. The flimsy petals of her white rose pressed languidly against the side of her nose as she paced slowly around the midsummer night tree. Apparently deep in introspection, she occasionally muttered undiscoverable words aloud in a light womanly voice. I then dashed upon her place.
As a way of making play, I smiled widely and said to the girl…
“Mademoiselle, your rose is wilted.”
I expected her thoughtful countenance to return my playful words with a smile or a laugh, but instead, the girl looked up at me with serious eyes. She then looked down at the rose, then back at me. She held the flower out, saying softly, in a flat tone, with no joy in her voice…
“Here, you can have it.” And handed it to me.
How beautiful she was!, this young girl, strolling on moonlit night by herself in a quiet garden. Not even a night bird danced in the trees. Not even a leaf fell when the noiseless wind blew. Even the giant moon, of all things, was silent. Looking at her, I entertained a thought that was so peculiar, so out of character for me, that I still cannot believe it was I who thought it. Looking at her, I told myself, ‘If I were to ever sleep beside this girl, and take every naked curve of her body in the palms of my hands as my groin ventures to the nest of her womb, then I would need no more from this life and would be able to die right then and there, with no regrets, in pure happiness. For no better thing could come in the future after such lovemaking. Let me lie upon her on a holy night and then I can die ecstatic, wanting nothing more…’ Such were my thoughts and so strange that it was I who thought them!
“You have a lot of confidence giving me this single rose,” I smiled to her, as I accepted the gift, “No woman has ever tried to win my favor with fewer than a dozen roses at a time.” To this she finally grinned. “I have rich expectations,” I added.
“As do I.” She circled around me, as I crept slowly around the tree. The rose, I took, and breaking its long stem, I slipped it in my linen jacket to make a buttonhole.
“I wear a wilted flower nicer than you,” I teased, “If it blooms again, I’ll give it back, for a healthy rose would look fairer on you than on me.”
“I don’t want it back,” she told me. I looked at the rose in my buttonhole and wondered what had inspired me to claim it wilted. It was in fine shape – full, with tender white petals, slightly blushing, like the cheeks of dancing winter maidens.
“Why are you alone in this garden?” I asked her.
“My date wanted me to dance with him in the hall, but I wanted to come out here alone.”
“I can see why. This is a much more beautiful place to dance. The moon has been your date these last few moments, I believe, and the sweet streamers of wind have been your violin strings, weaving in and around you, around the branches; while the limbs of the trees are the arms of your lover whom you have not found, but who comes behind you in surprise while you are dreaming and mumbling aloud, and…” with that, I stole across the path to the tree close to the girl and brushed my palm against her bare arm. “…he touches you softly.” It was an innocent gesture, but the caress of my hand on her arm was felt by us both and the feeling resonated throughout our bodies.
She turned to me…
“Who are you here with?”
“Here with?” I asked, “At the party tonight? . . . I am here with no one.”
“No one?”
“I am an outlaw who has come alone, silently through the shadows. I am a thief who comes often on summer nights into palace gardens to steal young noble women who wear white dresses and carry white roses.”
To this she smiled and her pupils dilated, filling with her tiger-brown eyes with watery black. She dashed away then, and I came around the tree, we met up on the other side. Her breast heaved in her dress the way the bosom of a partridge heaves when it has fallen on a trail in the woods and struggles for life. I stood two centimeters from her and purposely let the wind press the sleeve of my jacket against her wrist. I watched her eyes for a moment and then let my gaze fall down to her tender lips.
“If you have come to steal me,” she warned, “I’d better alert my protector. His father owns a large collection of guns and swords…”
“Guns and swords?” I wondered aloud, “…and motorcycles!” Was her date to this feast the feast’s host himself? The feeble lad with whom I’d gambled with Giovanni in the gaming room? He was not even a man, but just a boy.
“Marcel, do you know him?” she said as a way to test and taunt me.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said with unflinching eyes. As I spoke I ran one finger across the soft flesh of her neck. “Or wait… Wasn’t he the one playing drafts with us a little while ago? My good friend Giovanni stole his king.”
“And now you want to steal his queen,” she smiled, the clever girl.
“What I want is beside the point. What I shall do is something else.” And with that, she was mine. I drew forth and felt the first touch of her willing lips on mine, and then drawing away so as to taunt, but not for too long, so as to fade the feeling of the touch, I came back again and pressed my lips hard to hers and felt her fresh tongue soft against mine. My right hand stroked the nape of her neck and my left held very firmly her small waist, the gentle bone of her hip. We lapped each other’s mouths like thirsty animals coming to drink at the edge of a stream, like nymphs and naiads splashing water with playful hands in a wading spring, so our tongues splashed one another’s happy mouths. We ended the embrace and gripped each other tight. After a moment, we fell into joyful private introspection and walked arm-in-arm along the grassy knolls, between the garden trees.
“So you are here with Giovanni,” she issued forth.
“Your cousin, Giovanni.”
“How do you know he is my cousin?”
“This is a palace full of cousins.”
We walked a little while. I maneuvered her far from the hedge beyond guests were beginning to leave the palace to sit at the banquet tables.
“Still, you know who I am?”
“Lara de Causans.”
“You are right. So it seems I have a reputation at your gambling table.”
“ I believe your reputation travels beyond there, my fair Lara.”
“Oh?”
“Your name courses the servants lips and floods the imaginations of tired children as they drift into dreams.”
“So can I know who you are?”
“A thief in the night.”
As I said this, a white-jacketed servant exited the palace doors to the secluded garden where we were and approached us two. Lara quickly dropped my hands and I let her free herself for the moment.
“What is it?” she asked the servant with suspicion.
“For Monsieur,” said the servant, handing me an envelope. He bowed and took leave. Lara watched with great interest as I tore the envelope. I suspected it to be a note from my host, the minet. ‘He has noted my disappearance as well as the disappearance of his lady of the evening. People were wondering and he felt dishonored, and, relishing as he does his father’s gun collection, he decided to challenge me to a duel. A formal request sealed in an envelope and delivered by a servant. A bold lad, he is! . . . I hope his tiny frame deceives one and he is a good enough shot to tuck me in bed like a proper Pushkin. He had better be a master, or else I will blast the coward into his family’s tomb at Père Lachaise!’
So were my thoughts as I grew heated in spirits, hoping for such a chance to scrap with the boy. I tore the envelope open and unfolded the card inside. It was penned in neat cursive and read…

My Dear Aleksandre,
Because I am your friend and trust you, I will not get angry or suspect there is more to this than what appears on the surface. I am not a jealous person and I know that you have very good reasons for doing what you do, and that if I don’t understand some of your actions, I should better just smile and realize that the motivations for such actions are veiled from me. I say this not because I enjoy being wounded, but because I enjoy your sensual friendship so much that I can overlook your quirks that sometimes drive me mad.
While you were helping yourself to champagne and I was talking to my girl friends, the scientist was setting up his lenses for a demonstration. When he was done, he allowed us all to take a peek. I was in line right behind my girl friends and was eager to look to see what was making them blush so much as they dried their moist hands on the hems of their dresses. Well! You can imagine how I felt when I looked and saw a giant image before me of you kissing another girl with unbelievable passion! Those lenses really are capable of a great deal! That scientist really deserves all the attention he gets. One could see you and this girl were outside in the garden someplace, and so much you were magnified! I could see the texture of your lips and the beads of saliva string like bridges between you as you mashed your mouths together. There was sound too! I don’t know how sound comes through lenses, but this scientist thought of everything. I could hear her passionate gasps and your groans. I thought I was hearing a wolf eat hapless prey in the wilderness. Your little whispers between kisses were as a lion’s roaring in a jungle. The kisses themselves were giant waves crashing on a beach. The girls gasps were the cries of feral birds! Never had I seen such passion, except for that time back in spring when it was you and I who engaged in such games. I just hope that you are happy with how things have turned out. I won’t go out into the gardens yet but am waiting for you to leave for if I see you with this girl I might not be so nice and tactful as I was behind the scientist’s lenses. Good night, Aleksandre. I am happy to remain always,
Your special friend,
Aurélie

How poetic she is!’ I thought, reading that letter. So they all had seen us through that clever lens: guests and host alike—seen me with the beautiful Lara, prize of the host of the banquet. And his father, the royal owner of the palace and sponsor of the event, that old man had paid for the chocolate I tasted on his son’s girlfriend’s lips. He had paid for the champagne that coursed my veins, igniting in me the desire to go out in the garden where I found my prey, walking around with his son’s flower in her hand.
“My flower!” I exclaimed to Lara as I noticed my buttonhole had fallen out, while I tucked the note from Aurélie in my jacket pocket.
“You don’t need that flower,” she said. Then looking curiously at me, “What was the letter all about? . . . What do you mean which one? The one you just tucked in your pocket!”
Just then, someone interrupted us by calling Lara’s name from across the hedge by the tables. It was Marcel, the minet. ‘Now I get my duel!’ I rejoiced, ‘Just like Pushkin!’ But before I could turn to address the hedge, Lara had taken my hand firmly and was leading me off in the other direction. “Come,” she said, “this way leads out to the street.”
“I’ll hail a taxi,” I told her.
“I have a Vespa. But I only have one helmet.”
We stood out front near the rue de Rivoli, in front of a slender cream-colored Vespa.
“I will drive. I don’t need a helmet.” I was feeling very drunk and merry.
“No, let’s take a taxi,” she begged, “I already had an accident once. If we crashed and you died because you weren’t wearing a helmet, it would be my fault and I would be messed up forever.” Her slender hand tugged at my shoulder as she nagged about the helmet, but I didn’t care. I wanted to ride the motorscooter and not sit in some slow-rolling taxi-cab. All the while, as she muttered praises of prudent behavior and spoke sharply against dangerous bare-headed escapades, I strapped the helmet to her pretty head and kissed the mouth that sat between the ear-guards and placed the pretty girl on the back of the Vespa, then ignited the engine with me on the front, and we were off… soaring at reckless speed through the winding Parisian streets.
Lights flew by our cruising vessel as Lara gripped tightly my waist. The alcohol bubbled in my tingling windswept head as we rode along. Lara’s chin pressed hard to my shoulder, we soared past the Place de la Concorde, up the Champs-Elysées, around the Arc de Triomphe. I thought of my friend Giovanni with the stolen king, as I sailed along with my stolen queen. Such a beautiful sensation pressed against me. She soon urged me to slow with tight gripping hands and crooned into my ear questions of where I thought we were driving to.
“I know where we are going,” I said, and increased the speed.
“No, go slow. You can drive my Vespa but only if I get to choose where to go.”
So be it, girl! I sped up again and flew on her directions down the Avenue Victor Hugo towards the great midnight abyss of the Bois de Boulogne, I felt her beautiful arms taking support around my waist and her breasts pressed against my back and that sudden and most bizarre thought came once again into my head: a thought whose nature was so foreign to those of the musings that tend to flock about the gallery of my mind; yet the spirit of the champagne and this girl wrapped around me and the romance of the wind exhaling warmly on my mouth as we sped down the avenue made me think once again that… ‘If the night shall permit me to sleep with this girl, to feel her naked skin unbound and wet, lying wildly beneath my grip, I shall wish to die then and cease to breathe. As I pass into the chaos of the dead, I will reflect that my life was the happiest and most fulfilling a mortal or a god can live. Let me make love to this woman and die in the cradle of her hips.’ …Such was the eccentric thought tramping across the rummy surface of my mind!
Soon we came to a château. There was a garden cottage adjoining the Jardin de Bagatelle. We parked the Vespa and royal Lara led me down a dark path into her stone palace and we lit a lamp and kissed. On a dry bed I draped her body and unclothed her and she appeared before me naked and wild, just as she had been in my vision on the avenue. I knew now she would give herself to me fully. I pulled the last strap from her clothes and slid her panties down her slender thighs and felt the wetness seep across the surface of her skin while I went deep inside and listened to the sounds escape her mouth.
I have a memory of being a tender child once, so many years back. I was a quiet observer alone in the world. It was daytime, in autumn, and I was walking down the leaf-littered road near the house where I lived. The sky was dark with heavy clouds. I stood so small in comparison to the sturdy oaks and the high-leafed maples, and I heard from over the tops of the trees a loud thundering sound in a long stream that had no beginning or end. The sky erupted with this furious shaking noise and I thought at first it was an airplane, though I knew it wasn’t. It was too loud to be an airplane; and unlike thunder, it poured into the center of the sky from every direction. Was it the voice of God, or Nature, or the celestial guts the world? . . . incomprehensible. For many moments that stormless sky rumbled over my head and I watched and listened without moving. I was a fragile child, in awe of this life that was new to me. Just as it was then, that rumbling sound, loud and long; so was the rumbling sound now, many years later, streaming from the wet and open mouth of the beautiful Lara as I made love to her. With her neck bent far backwards, her throat trembling, her hair was a nest of flames on the pillow.
After we lay sweaty and beaten, a heap of beautiful flesh. I draped myself across her and laughed with delight, for now my thoughts had not changed. Although the lovemaking was finished, there was not that shudder of emptiness that often follows sexual climax, that sober and hollow regret. Now, just as before, I was triumphant. I knew I would greet Apollo’s arrow of man’s sudden death with a joyful and satisfied heart, should one fly and pierce my breast. My life had been one glorious moment after another culminating in this intense realization of perfection. I swam in dreamless sleep and when I woke up I felt sweet Lara wrapped around me.
It was early morning when she roused me the second time. She wanted to stay in the bed in her little château and sleep with me all the day, but she couldn’t, she said. She had a family brunch that she was late for and so she had to leave. I was groggy. I knew I’d only slept an hour or two. Lara took a pen as we got dressed and scrawled the address on a scrap of paper of where I could find her again, should I want to find her again. I stuffed the paper scrap in the pocket of my wrinkled trousers and buttoned last night’s wrinkled shirt and yawned. Out in the garden I kissed her casually on the corner of her mouth and watched her speed off on her Vespa. I then walked off through the Bois de Boulogne in search of a café where I could take a coffee. The crisp morning sun fell on my head and my hair grew towards it as do flowers.
In a café in the sixteenth arrondissement, a cripple was at the brass counter plunking burnished coins aside a frothy-green perroquet with smoky fingers. One could see a patch of blue sky through the window and the gate of a sunny garden outside. I ordered a coffee and took the newspaper from the bar and began to read. I was too distracted by all my recollections to concentrate on the paper. In my pocket I found the scrap with the address of some bureau or other where I could go meet Lara again, should I wish to. Another paper would lead me to gentle Aurélie. All these scraps of paper dangling in my clothes! The sun beamed into the café and fell warm upon my cheek. I took the newspaper in my hand again and leafed through the pages. I could just throw these scraps away! …Such were my thoughts, tired as I was. Folly was seated atop the pillars of thought in my head, pillars constructed from my midsummer adventures, and a happy lack of sleep. A joy to be alive, I’ll throw them away and go talk to the birds in the park. °