When this last Biba poster by James Wedge was printed in 1974, Anna Wintour —who could honourably be my mom— was fifteen and worked for Biba. I bought it on eBay, long later, as a farfetched token of my childhood amidst the piles of expired magazines from my mother’s press counter in the family bistro in Ivry, a blue-collar suburb at the confluence of the rivers Seine and Marne, on the leeward side of Paris.
Whatever pushed me downstream to the rich quarters where I now dwell, I have allusively recounted to my beloved bosom buddy Sarah von Kettelær in the collective yarn they spun about Katherine Sophie after that one sought to waste her life in Berlin, and collapsed under the assumed guilt of having killed her brother in an auto accident. Sarah and the whole team had exfiltrated Kate from the madhouse she had wound up in, brought her to a two-day cure with Dr Schubert and drove her back home to Paris, in that house we live in.
As for myself, after the pathetic dissolution of my family, I wish not to retell here, and the destruction of the neighbourhood I had grown in, I could afford myself a convenient little bedsit in eastern Paris and attend an applied arts school. To my schoolmates, I was what they called a shilly stick you never know how to handle. My uncle’s abuse had lasted too long before I devised the manner to kill him, and the sole resilience cure I gleaned haphazardly in women’s magazines and the inspiring books they advised to. Otherly, I realised I could, however, somewhat charm the teachers inasmuch to earn attention in their teaching, without breaching roles. I revelled in the cursus and found it easier to bear with the reputation of being an introverted lesbian.
After three years and my diploma, on the recommendation of one of my teachers, I was hired in a small structure doing hi-end art restoration, and eventually, we were called to help the teams of Gauthier Renart in an otherworldly old hotel on the Quai d’Anjou, on the dreamlike Ile Saint Louis. That is where Sarah von Kettelær debunked me out of my stained overalls and all the workman’s armour as I was lovingly scouring the crud off a masterful bronze and crystal lighting sculpture on the ceiling of what had been the grand salon of a top-notch German brothel until the last world war.
Under the guise of a well-meaning privileged damsel, Sarah von Kettelær is a voracious polyamourous and it did not take her long to see me naked, however without causing me angst. Gauthier mocked her massive crush but he couldn’t prove her wrong; besides, he appreciated my work all over the richly ornate venue. In her selfless manner, albeit she knew I would be hers forever now that she had broken my shell, Sarah sussed I had also caught the eye of the place’s owner, the young baron Lauritz von Speck, aka baron 901, after the car he drove. With lustful flair, she manoeuvred ever so softly to bring me into Lauritz’s bed and play me to let be done.
As I kept my word to the deal for the truly rewarding work in Lauritz’s hotel, Gauthier, true to his name, sniffed out what had changed in my allover behaviour and secretly came to libertine terms with Lauritz to have a bite of my blooming virtue, so to speak, and Sarah called me a dignified courtesan, and, like her, I remained so. When he re-opened Speck’s as a club, Lauritz would have liked me to run the operation, but I preferred the invitation to stay in the lustful little republic on rue de L’ Universié where he could shag whoever he liked.
I met Camille, a long-time mistress of Sarah’s who had lived under her antique roof in her Beaux-Arts days, and on a hunch, she sent me to work with her art restorer Cyprien Mérindol who taught me the tiniest magics of the trade and the music of Bach. He never attempted to touch me, even though I had become a damn easy lay in my spare time.
Then, Hugo Decharny, The mighty landlord of the rue de L’Universté fortress, upon the incite of Camille’s, offered me an up-to-date, spacious groundfloor workshop, in which I could revive my cubbyhole manie, this time with a grand luxurious bed, air control, and a spacious Italian shower. Meanwhile, Cyprien took inspiration in the many girls who visited me for one reason or another, to beg them to pose for his pencil, should they even fall asleep on the crimson velvet couch. He would no more touch art antiquity, only conseling me in all mastery.
Lauritz brought all the pretty orphans he fished out of Europe’s filthy sewers around the hip watering spots. Still a faithful knight at my feet, he had fostered his hunting instincts to the better good of stranded runaways he lodged in a convenient and pretty hencote in the heart of the island. Everybody knew he was thus peopling his own pleasure house, but the orphans would retort it was nobody’s business, and they had their passports and health certificates. They chose their clients, ate refined meals, and the bedrooms were sumptuous. They didn’t tell of some gratuities in kind they more or less owed to the personnel, but even that, I could have gone with, in all perversity.
