‘My dear Madame Sylvie, I fancy I must have landed upon the isle of Cythera. I have never seen such beauties and you are the queen of them all.’ He bent to kiss her hand before shaking off his heavy coat and handing it to Wm. ‘Would you be so good as to put it in the first carriage, the one in front of the door. Though the air is damp, your house is so warm and welcoming, madame.’
‘This is, er, Mr S. He is a valued client.’
‘Oh my dear sir, a thousand apologies. I had understood that the house was to be closed tonight.’
‘Indeed, monsieur, I gave the strictest instructions, but Mr S called quite unexpectedly.’
‘Ha, did he now? Well, he could not have come to a better place.’
Monsieur R came up to Wm very close and examined him as intently as if he were inspecting a miniature with a view to purchase. He did not seem much put out by Wm’s intrusion on his private party and the more he surveyed him, the better he appeared to like what he saw. ‘You are a fine fellow, sir. The ladies must hang around your neck.’
‘Well, I don’t know about that.’
‘You are English, no, American?’
‘American.’
‘I like that. A republican. I too am a republican, though I scarcely dare confess it in this house, eh, Madame Sylvie. Our hostess is a devout monarchist. She has been known to wait on Her Most Christian Majesty, at the hospital, am I not right?’
‘You must not tease me, monsieur.’
‘Oh, but I must, teasing is my métier.’
As they bantered on, Wm in turn looked closer at Monsieur R. He was a pretty fine fellow himself, in his late forties perhaps and run to flesh only a little, with a quick bright look and full lips that seemed to bubble as he talked. But when he paused for thought, as he did now, something harder, cruel even, came into his features and his face seemed to sag a little, like the face of an old comedian coming off the bright stage into the dark wings.
‘You are a disappointed man, sir, don’t deny it. You come here expecting all the elixirs of pleasure and you find the house closed at my orders. I cannot be the agent of your disappointment. You must come with us, Mr S. We shall explore the alphabet together and a good deal else besides.’
‘B-but—’
‘No buts, m’sieu. I insist. Pleasure must be shared, don’t you think, or it is but sad sport.’
‘You are too kind, I—’
‘The kindness will be all yours if you fall in with my desire. Come, ladies, en voiture, we are off to the island of love.’
He clapped his hands and shooed the girls towards the door, bussing and patting them as they passed, accepting Wm’s mumbled thanks with a dismissive wave.
They tumbled into the two coaches waiting outside. With a guilty start Wm remembered his faithful horse, but before he had managed to mention it he saw the little maid unhitching the animal and leading it off through the archway to the side of the house. ‘There is no better stabling in Marly than ours, monsieur. Your horse will pass as pleasant a night as I trust we shall.’
Wm found himself seated next to Madame Sylvie with Monsieur R and the darkest of the girls opposite. He could feel the warm bulge of Sylvie’s flesh against his own and the dark girl negligently rubbed her silky calf between his legs as the carriage began to rumble down the street towards the gates into the forest.
He abandoned himself to the moment and did not worry about the likely expense of this excursion or even its destination, still less about what Mr Jefferson would think.
They were deep in the forest now and the leaves deadened the sound of the wheels, and they could hear the other girls laughing in the carriage behind as they passed under the great trees. Wm began trying to work out which direction they were headed in – it was certainly not the road he had come on – but there were so many avenues criss-crossing one another that he soon gave up the attempt and let his body jog in time with the vibrations. He greedily drank down the white wine that Monsieur R uncorked from a gilt tantalus under his seat. It tasted of gooseberries and he enquired the name of the vineyard, which he resolved to pass on to Mr Jefferson who was halfway to acquiring one of the finest cellars in Paris. He wondered what TJ would say if he should add to the details of its provenance – a small property in the Sauvignon country belonging to a cousin of Monsieur R’s – that it tasted even better if you were drinking it rolling along at night in a coach seated beside a brothel keeper with one of her girls rubbing against your legs and a mysterious voluptuary opposite. Even Madame Sylvie had condescended to stroke his thigh now, while the dark girl was leaning across Monsieur R, but he could not see exactly what she was doing, for her extravagant black tresses blotted out the view and the carriage was in darkness anyhow because the trees blotted out the moonlight.
The carriage took a sharp turn uphill, jolting over a stony track and shaking the passengers upright and out of their compromising positions. Then it stopped and with an even sharper jolt turned out of the road. Immediately in front of them there was a rocky wall, composed of gigantic boulders. For an instant it seemed as if the coachman had taken leave of his senses and meant to dash them against the wall. But in another instant the carriage had somehow passed through an aperture in the wall – a close thing, the ladies cried out and he could hear the wheels scraping against the rock – and they were out the other side. Instead of the high trees they now found themselves in a grotto, at least it seemed like a grotto from the tumble of great stones covered with moss and ferns that surrounded them. But the weird thing was the flickering light that played over the place. He twisted his head to see where the light was coming from, and on top of the rocks he saw an extraordinary apparition.
It was the figure of a satyr, horned and goat-legged, leaping along the crest bearing a burning torch. Then, following Madame Sylvie’s pointing finger, he looked across to the other window and there was another of these eerie creatures with its torch casting erratic light over the dripping cave.
‘Oh, how dreadful,’ the dark girl exclaimed.
Monsieur R said nothing but tapped the glass behind him and the coachman drove on through a narrow defile and out into the woods again. Almost immediately the trees began to thin out and the moonlight straggled through the branches. What was that odd shape just coming into view? At first he thought it might turn out to be merely the gable end of a woodman’s cottage, but then there was no doubt of it, there in the middle of Marly forest there reared up a stone pyramid, like the funereal monuments of ancient Egypt. What pharaoh had chosen to be entombed here so far from home? Wm could not be sure of the size of the pyramid, the moonlight was deceitful, and he looked back to enquire particulars of Monsieur R but that gentleman was lying back in his seat with his eyes closed and his bubbly lips agape while the dark girl busied herself in his lap.
Wm turned back to the window, but the pyramid had passed out of view and they were emerging into a rolling park, which dipped down to a lake or stream in the distance with the moon shimmering on its drowsy waters. This seemingly tranquil scene began to restore Wm’s nerves somewhat and he was about to turn back to Madame Sylvie to remark on the pyramid and the strange creatures in the grotto when an even stranger apparition rose up in front of his eyes.
It was a broken column of white stone shining with eerie brightness under the light of the moon. At first glance it might resemble one of those fragments of antiquity that littered the classical pavements of old Europe, but in no time Wm realised that this was like no broken column he had seen in the engravings of Signor Piranesi or the capriccios of Hubert Robert. For a start, it was fully fifty feet high and twenty feet broad, larger in height and circumference than any column he had ever met with. The building of which it appeared to be the sole remain must have been unimaginably vast, the Parthenon would be no bigger than a cowshed beside it. The walls of the column were fluted in the Greek style, but no Greek pillar had ever had windows let into it, and such bizarre windows, ovals and lozenges, nothing classical about them at all, and there
were great cracks and fissures striating the gleaming surface as though an earthquake had struck it. And was there not something horrid about its proportions? The straight lines did not seem to be quite straight and the curves did not seem to be regularly curved. At first he fancied that the whole column was leaning one way, then he thought it was leaning the other, or perhaps backwards. What earthquake could have wrought such damage and who could have built such a looming monstrosity in the first place? It was without a doubt the oddest structure he had ever seen, if indeed he had really seen it and the thing was not a phantasm of the night. He stared back at it until it was lost to view, for the carriage was now descending the gentle slope into the park, or what he thought must be a park, though it was hard to be sure of anything in this landscape of nightmares.
In the distance he espied the vestiges of yet another ruined building, presumably destroyed by the same earthquake that had shattered the enormous white broken column. He had an impression of Gothic tracery, a pointed arch perhaps, but by now he was too jangled up to make anything of an exact survey.
The carriage was slowing now and he could hear the coachman shouting, ‘Whoa there, my beauties, enough now.’
Monsieur R sat up and shook himself. ‘Here we are, my beauties, welcome, a thousand welcomes.’
They stepped down into a blaze of light from two flaming torches and Wm wondered whether the satyrs had been running behind them all the way from the grotto, but as his eyes blinked in the dazzle he discerned that the torchbearers here were not satyrs but two Chinamen in long brocade coats and pointed scarlet hats. And behind them there was a Chinese palace with its own lights blazing, so exquisite and ornate and improbable that the only possible explanation was that he really had fallen asleep after all the gooseberry wine and was now in the middle of a hallucination.
‘Come in, come in, it is damp out here,’ said Monsieur R, chivvying his guests down the steps of the coach. In fact, it was only the dank night air that convinced Wm that he was still in the Ile-de-France and not in some perverted fairyland.
They wandered wondering under the tasselled eaves of this dreamland palace and through its cascading hangings and brocaded pelmets into a large salon painted with an infinity of birds and flowers and Chinamen tittupping over little wooden bridges and up snowcapped mountains and through little gardens that had no flowers but only queer-shaped rocks in them.
On the long table at the end of the salon there was a huge supper laid out: lobsters and crayfish and oysters on silver dishes, and turkey and swan and guinea fowl and wild boar glazed with the most enticing sauces, and beyond them castles of spun sugar and trianons of ice cream.
‘Always feed them first, be sure to give ’em oysters too. There’s no aphrodisiac like a bellyful of oysters,’ Monsieur R whispered into his ear. Wm suddenly wondered whether taking up his invitation – well, being swept along by it – was really such a good idea. At any rate the girls needed no encouragement to attack the feast and they were soon crunching and munching everything in sight. Even so, Wm was conscious of an irritable impatience afflicting his host. Monsieur R’s thumbs were twitching and his geniality was fraying.
‘Come along, ladies, come along,’ Wm could hear him muttering, though it could not have been more than half an hour since they had stepped out of the coach. Monsieur R himself scarcely ate at all and took only a couple of sips from the glass that was handed to him by one of the tiny Chinese servants.
Wm ate and drank little more. He was in too confused a state, bewildered by what he had seen so far and apprehensive of what might be to come.
A brusque gesture from Monsieur R. Then from somewhere there came a tinkling of bells. The girls, whether forewarned or not, seemed to recognise this as a signal and they put down their plates and glasses with an untidy clatter and turned towards Monsieur R with expectant looks, one or two still wiping the last skeins of sugar from their lips.
‘Now, my dears, it is time to take ship for the island of love. If you would kindly wait here a moment while your captain prepares himself.’
Monsieur R walked off with little excited steps towards a latticed bamboo staircase and disappeared up it.
Silence fell among his guests. Then the girls resumed their chatter and a couple of them sneaked back to the supper table to finish their wine or scrabble up a few last delicacies. But they had not long to wait. From above their heads there came the sound of a tinny gong. The tiny servants – they were a good six inches shorter than Wm who was after all no giant – scurried to form a line leading to the stairs and with little birdlike gestures they beckoned the guests to ascend.
Wm followed the rest of them up the bamboo stairs. They came into a smaller room, a library to judge by the bookshelves that lined the walls. But there was no sort of desk, only three or four low divans arranged in a circle. Monsieur R stood in front of the marble fireplace. He had discarded the clothes he had travelled in and was now dressed in a Chinese brocade robe that came down to his knees. His legs and arms were bare. Without any preliminaries he said in a hoarse urgent voice, ‘Now, ladies, to horse!’
He took the dark girl over to the nearest divan and motioned her to kneel on it. Then, as she was settling herself in this position, he clicked his fingers at the next girl, a blonde with a round surprised face: ‘You, over there, the same.’ Then he flung up the skirts of the dark girl and gazed at her bottom, which was bare. ‘You, the same please.’ The surprised-looking girl who had by now clambered on the next divan and had to twist her neck to follow Monsieur R’s instructions, slowly hoisted her skirts. ‘Those drawers. Madame Sylvie, did I not give instructions about the drawers?’
‘It was cold, monsieur,’ said the fair girl, at the same time taking down her drawers, which now hung limp and white at her ankles.
‘Now Monsieur S, let us start together and see who reaches the winning post first.’
Their host undid the brocade loops on his coat, which revealed that he was naked underneath and aroused. He advanced on the dark girl and began thrusting in a deliberate passionless rhythm. He might have been at a gymnastic exercise. There was nothing for it. After all, what else had Wm rung the bell at the house with the green dolphin for in the first place? He unbuttoned the flap of his breeches and was relieved that he was upstanding to a respectable extent. He advanced on the girl with the surprised face, wondering whether he ought at least to enquire her name before engaging, but she saved him the trouble: ‘I am Amélie, m’sieu,’ she said. ‘I was in the other coach’ – as though to reassure him that she was not some impostor who had strayed in without an invitation.
‘You are very pretty, Amélie,’ he said, staring at her sallow buttocks for a moment before he started. Without meaning to, he found himself pumping pretty well in time with Monsieur R, as though they were two pistons in the same engine. This methodical in-and-out motion engendered a certain mental detachment from the matter in hand. The same seemed to apply to Monsieur R.
‘You are a university man, Monsieur S?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Harvard, I assume.’
‘No, William and Mary. It is in Virginia.’
‘I know it of course. And what did you study there?’
‘Moral philosophy, political science, political economy too, it is a very popular subject now.’
‘An excellent choice. I too am an economist, you know – not so fast, please, my dear – Turgot spoke warmly of my analysis of the net product. Ah, ah, not so fast, I tell you. I was one of the physiocrats, we are out of the fashion now but … that’s enough.’
Monsieur R abruptly interrupted his analysis of the ups and downs of the physiocrats and disengaged, holding his glistening member with care as though it might break if he let go of it, and turned towards another of the divans where a third girl had already taken up her station, lying on her back this time. Wm continued at what he was doing, unsure what was expected of him, until he was interrupted by a muffled bellow from his host: ‘For God’s sake, s
ir. We have to give all the ladies a turn.’
Obediently Wm followed his host’s example, moving on to the next divan. Madame Sylvie, he noticed, did not seem to be included in the tour but merely followed in their wake, caressing those girls who were not for the moment engaged, like a cook who must keep all the dishes on the hob regularly stirred or they will spoil. He himself was going at it as hard as he knew how, but he was not so distracted in his frenzy as to be oblivious of a prospect which he found decidedly unsavoury, viz., that in the next round he must start pounding in Monsieur R’s leavings. And he was devoutly relieved – well, devoutly was perhaps not the mot juste – when there was an anguished yelp from the next divan and Monsieur R expired on top of the fifth girl whom he had only just broached. His brocade coat settled over him like a counterpane. Wm could just see the face of the fifth girl trying to extricate herself from being smothered flat. He himself carried on but making every effort to finish off as quickly as possible, not fancying the idea of Monsieur R exercising what no doubt was the host’s privilege of standing voyeur. Which was precisely what happened.
‘My God, sir, I admire your stamina,’ gasped Monsieur R. ‘They instruct you well at Harvard.’
‘William and Mary.’
‘Quite so. Half a dozen times a night, that was the way it used to be, but now, pouf.’
‘You are magnificent, sir.’
‘You really think so? Well, I cannot deny that I have had some distinguished compliments in my time. You have heard no doubt of Madame de –’ And he whispered a name which Wm failed to catch and thought it impolite to ask to have repeated.
They were sitting side by side now on one of the divans. The sweat was pouring off Monsieur R and his face was as red as a turkey’s wattle. Wm had taken off his shirt and breeches and his body was sticking to the itchy brocade of Monsieur R’s robe. The girls were sitting all tumbled together on one of the other divans, while Madame Sylvie reclined alone sipping meditatively from a tall Murano glass, which one of the tiny servants must have brought her while they were at it.
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