02 – Cecile’s Cubbyhole – The Bateaux Mouches on the walls.
Sarah’s windows and mine overlook a tidy inner yard with a Wisteria vine grappling to Hugo’s high stained glass windows on the first floor. But when our idyl started, Lauritz rented this furnished flat overlooking the river to the north in which he revelled with us two, and Sarah insisted we keep the lights low so she could fancy flying in the hovering lights of the night boats bathing the facades. Later, in Lauritz’s private flat at Speck’s, the seasonal branches and stained glass windows projected silver cavalcades around the decor, all the most when we had sucked on certain Californian gummies.
Squadrons of uncompromising plumbers and decorators under Gauthier’s eye had updated the libertine club to the nines, and it didn’t take long for the clique of migrating wealthy patrons to be tipped off.
Isidore Deroit – Panorama des incendies de Paris en 1871Serendipitous crucifixion.
In art school, I had successively three photography teachers with different flavours of the doxa hype, and I let only the middle one strip off my clothes and my modesty. Thankfully, meanwhile, battalions of nerds had already sowed the revolution of no-karma image-grabbing, so I moneyed my laisser-faire for an honest Japanese camera and I asked a not-too-smelly classmate to install Photoshop on my laptop. I began roaming the streets with my silvery fetish box, gleaning some decisive moments in city colours. I had stolen old issues of Aperture Magazine from the school’s refuse and fallen for the work of Gordon Parks and Saul Leiter, and I did not care for darkroom shenanigans. When the school bought an inkjet printer, I participated in a show curated by my shagster teacher, and I was called literary. One night, I downloaded the film “The Woodmans”, and I was torn to tears. Sarah, Lauritz, and all the menagerie made me a tough brat in expensive attire, and Cyprien would hone his well-tempered pencils while I disrobed the pretty salvaged orphans. He remained a total mystery, while his drawings breathed of sensuality and sold brilliantly in Camille’s gallery. Anyhow, under the star of Bach, he passed on to me a whole heap of safe recipes for scrubbing and restoring the treasures Camille and Hugo had the knack to ferret out.
Monsu Desiderio – Jeroboam In The Pagan Temple.
Given where and how I had grown up, with bouts of anorexia that earned me mere mockery by my soak father, it was no surprise that I found myself comfortable with Sarah’s teetotaler’s regime; she smelled of a madeleine in some tea, the buddleïa in the waste ground. I felt vindicated when Lauritz took me on bedazzling jaunts in an helicopter or a private jet to Capri. I grew a fondness for extraneous lovemaking on a grand scale, and Sarah coached me to take that as a due. Like the Russian courtesans in the magazines, I was pampered head to toes and laser smooth in every crease. I let him worship me in my cubbyhole, I shared his happazard crushes, I became the princely mistress and it fit me. About Camille, Sarah had recounted how she had been sent to Hugo’s doorstep as an underage tramp, and she hadn’t been a beginner. Fearing some trap, but enthralled for good, he had made her spin her yarn long before he dared see more than he bare feet. Her ordeal had been so much direr than mine, as it is told elsewhere. She had lived upstairs at Hugo’s, long before Kate and Sarah remodeled th flat at Hugo’s expense, and she caught up with her scholar education all the way up to a doctorate in art history, what a considered jailbait needs to run a posh gallery in prime real estate. Unexpectedly, she had been called on in New York by the only left uncle she had who was dieing. Adlaï Stern had justly fled the nazi plague before her own grand parents were trapped to their death and her mother hidden away in the French countryside by a righteous among the nations family. Howbeit both her parents died an ugly death before she was thirteen. Adlaï had built a sound fortune on his intuitions as to the upcoming cyberworld. He wanted to hold her beating blood in her hand before passing. She had brought back his ashes. She recalled having patronised Melchior, a potent connection to Hugo’s, whose pervasive influence encompassed also the New York financial platform. He had befriended Adlaï, and he liked her all the more that he had known her as a tramp. Together, they created Seven Streams incorporated, and tweaked some manner to run it between the 60 Hudson fortress and the heavenly block on Paris’ left bank. After she had bought two dwellings in New York, she remained in her gallery’s auspicious house, under her mentors’ wing. Not renouncing her all-times walks of life, she underhandedly funded her own adult club Fortunat’s in an historic house across from Notre Dame.
Precious indecency – Advertising for Diana Slip 1930.
Other than the pits of debauchery she patronised as a dedicated member of the modern Hellfire Club, Sarah took me to Florence, where she knew some higher-ups at the Uffizi and the Opificcio Delle Pietre Dure, and how. We had a magnificent view and a mellow climate. We cried our hearts out in the Botticelli high room. We measured our garçonne anatomies to those of Venus. At the end of a harassing course in bliss, Sarah offered me an hour of room massage by a burly exotic professional before we went out to dine with Dottore Flavio Di Lucca. We joined him in an executive suite inside the Uffizi building. I could palpably tell he had known Sarah closely before. She had made me wear a black silk velvet tank dress short enough to show my knickers and some skin above my black stockings lace trim at every move; she wore a deep purplish blue silk doupion shirtdress with sapphire cabochon buttons. She introduced me as some intern with benefits and a genuine interest in art, just as I has seen her sell me to Lauritz. I was beginning to fully grasp there would be two manners to acquire my accreditations in the trade. I had already secured a prestigious and convenient address, enough money to wear Gianni Capodimonte bespoke or refitted vintage. He spoke French better than I, as we wandered through the deserted museum, my dress upon his shoulder, fully aware of the show I was putting for the security cameras. At our Hotel’s restaurant, we had a saraband of our taste’s antipasti, he was obviously raring to climb upstairs with us. It was still the days when I sensed the delicious thrill of being sold for vice. Lauritz craved me doing so just like Sarah. Il Dottore had not drunk either, he had breath for both of us; he smelled of Zegna emblematic iris, as he told Sarah, sniffing him as he skewered me through like the Condottiere.
