Tableaux Vivants

THE CONVENTS A LA MODE

It was the Regency, then. No, it was the Empire only, the Low Empire, small epoch of little cynics to lying senses and a trembling heart. Strange epoch in which strange modes were introduced! One took one's daughter to church and one's mistress to the brothel.

This is what Therese de Charnac, whose slave and plaything I was at that time, said to me. She related to me that her dearest friend had been conducted last night to Saint-Vigor. She added, “It is the mode!”

She was tall, a brunette, moderately thin, this Therese, admirably made for wearing men's clothes. I gave her a suit of mine, and put on her trousers myself. En route for the Convent of Saint-Vigor, and whip up, coachy!

“Good!” murmured the nuns, on seeing her enter, “another tribade!”

“You hear them!” I said to Therese.

“They deceive themselves,” she said. “Tribade! Not yet!”

There reigned in this room, brilliantly lit up, a strong odour of iris mingled with perspiration, of musk and semen. Otherwise the place was furnished and hung with red velvet. Nothing could have been colder or more banal. Not even an erotic image on the walls. One would have said it was the boudoir of a notary.

The servant cried, “All ladies to the saloon!”

The ladies came in from all sides. One saw them enter by every door, in yellow dresses, red dresses, blue dresses. Corsages open even to the waist, and allowing the throat to be exposed and protrude itself, petticoats fastened by a single thread, ready to fall at any moment. Venus, obscene Venus, emerged quite naked from this wave of velvets, laces, and silks-naked, quite naked, absolutely stark naked.

Therese seated herself, trembling and confused in spite of her natural hardihood, at the end of a sofa. The cynical troop came wheeling round her.

“Good day, pretty lad.”

“Make your choice, my fine man.”

“See! I know who you are; I will lick thee, I will suck thee. Oh! we are accustomed to amuse the ladies of the Court!”

“Make your choice!” cried the servant.

“Come, my man,” said a stout girl who loved a joke, “you are just what I want. How much do I ask? A sovereign and ten inches! This gallant ought to be mounted as a horse!”

But a tall and strong ribald whore, who wore, why one knows not, a Swiss costume, with floating tresses, and who was called Gretchen, came and sat on Therese's knees, and passing her hand over the pantaloons of the fair one with a comical gravity, cried out, “It stands!” Then there were cries, shouts, laughter, and stamping of feet throughout the room.

“Gretchen, let him do thee in front of us!”

“In the greyhound style, in the greyhound style!”

“It stands! It stands!”

And the servant repeated, “Make your choice!” in a voice of thunder.

At a sign which I gave them, Gretchen the Swiss and one of her companions, who was called Ida, carried Mile, de Charnac away. I followed them. Therese murmured I know not what unintelligible protestations; I said to her, “It is the mode!”

In the room which we entered was a great bed entirely surrounded by looking-glasses. Gretchen set herself to the task of stripping off the trousers of her fair visitor, whose teeth chattered as if she had been led to the place of execution, notwithstanding that the fingers of the adroit Swiss were already tickling her.

Ida said to me, “Give us your little present.”

I placed four sovereigns on the mantlepiece. And as this girl was pressing round me, I showed her Therese entirely stripped of trousers and drawers.

“Everything for her!” I cried.

Speedily I beheld all three of them naked. The mirrors which surrounded the bed reflected these three interlaced bodies. The two prostitutes of the people held embraced between them the prostitute of the fashionable world. They placed her at the edge of the bed. Ida, kneeling in front of her and holding her two legs on her shoulders, conveyed the fire of her kisses to her anus. Her tongue wriggled in the path of sodomy.

Gretchen the Swiss was lying across the bed, and sucking Therese's breasts. Her mouth glided along and descended, lapping this brown skin. She opened with two fingers the gate, not of sodomy but of nature, and seized her clitoris between her lips. Therese cried out, writhed, and called to me.

“Enjoy, you little whore,” I said to her. “Enjoy till you burst, till you give up the ghost. Be licked! It is the mode!”

It was the fashion at Court at that time. They said that the Queen had a sacred troop of maids of honour whose most intimate and profound charms had no secrets for her. They said that, armed with a dildo, she had had the first fruits of them all. What remained was for the Dignitaries of the Empire.

All this Mile, de Charnac knew well.

“Haven't you a dildo here?” she sighed in a dying voice.

Gretchen sprang to a wardrobe, in which she opened a drawer. Dildoes-there were ten, there were twenty! The Swiss assured me that they were only used for the ladies of the Court. This made me say, “Have they the pox?”

But already the Swiss was armed with a magnificent article, which she had fastened to her waist, and darting on the bed, she threw down Mile, de Charnac panting under her.

These women of high rank have, as the saying goes, eyes bigger than their bellies. They must, then, have very big eyes? Doubtless. But it is also true that the artificial member of Gretchen the Swiss was enormous!

It entered nevertheless. Ida directed it with art. Gretchen thrust with measured movements.

“My friends, you are ripping me open-you are assassinating me! Ah, I am-I am quite full!”

We heard something like a cracking. Then she uttered a terrible cry.

“Do not complain,” I said to her, “it is the mode.”

Long after, very long after, until an advanced hour of the night were these games a la mode prolonged. The last stroke of the concluding part was the most piquant. In truth, they gave me the honour of taking part in it, in this manner.

Represent to yourself your servant stretched horizontally along the bed; Mile, de Charnac, or the prostitute of the fashionable world, was at the side, threaded by Gretchen after the fashion of beasts. Ida, squatted under her, licked her sweetly, and the great lady herself, throwing herself on me, sucked me with fury. Then raising herself, her eyes troubled, reeling, and giddy, “Dress me again, and let us go home,” she said to me.

When we were once more in the carriage, I began to contemplate her with admiration, as a person worthy of her rank by her luxury.

“Are you contented?” I asked her.

She raised her shoulders slightly, “Bah!” she said to me, “it is the mode!”