The Bloody Chamber-1

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    I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimig that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mothers apartment, into the unguessable try of marriage.

    And I remember I tenderly imagined how, at this very moment, my mother would be moving slowly about the narrow bedroom I had left behind for ever, folding up and putting away all my little relics, the tumbled garments I would not need any more, the scores for which there had been no room in my trunks, the cert programmes Id abandoned; she would linger over this torn ribbon and that faded photograph with all the half-joyous, half-sorrowful emotions of a woman on her daughters wedding day. And, in the midst of my bridal triumph, I felt a pang of loss as if, whe the gold band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in being his wife.

    Are you sure, shed said when they delivered the gigantic box that held the wedding dress hed bought me, ed up in tissue paper and red ribbon like a Christmas gift of crystallised fruit. Are you sure you love him? There was a dress for her, too; black silk, with the dull, prismatic sheen of oil on water, fihan anything shed worn sihe adventurous girlhood in Indo-a, daughter of a rich tea planter. My eagle-featured indomitable mother; what other student at the servatoire could boast that her mother had outfaced a junkful of ese pirates; nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a maing tiger with her own hand and all before she was as old as I?

    "Are you sure you love him?"

    "Im sure I want to marry him," I said.

    And would say no more. She sighed, as if it was with reluce that she might at last banish the spectre of poverty from its habitual place at our meagre table. For my mother herself had gladly, sdalously, defiantly beggared herself for love; and, one fine day, her gallant soldier never returned from the wars, leaving his wife and child a legacy of tears that never quite dried, a cigar box full of medals and the antique service revolver that my mrown magnifitly etri hardship, kept always in her reticule, in case -- how I teased her -- she was surprised by footpads on her way home from the grocers shop.

    Now and then a starburst of lights spattered the drawn blinds as if the railway pany had lit up all the stations through which we passed in celebration of the bride. My satin nightdress had just been shaken from its ings; it had slipped over my young girls pointed breasts and shoulders, supple as a garment of heavy water, and now teasingly caressed me, egregious, insinuating, nudgiween my thighs as I shifted restlessly in my narrow berth. His kiss, his kiss with tongue ah in it and a rasp of beard had hio me, though with the same exquisite tact as this nightdress hed given me, of the wedding night, which would be voluptuously deferred until we lay in his great aral bed in the sea-girt, pinnacled domain that lay, still, beyond the grasp of my imagination. . . that magic place, the fairy castle whose walls were made of foam, that legendary habitation in which he had been born. To which, one day, I might bear an heir. Our destination, my destiny.

    Above the syncopated roar of the train, I could hear his even, steady breathing. Only the unig door kept me from my husband and it stood open. If I rose up on my elbow, I could see the dark, leonine shape of his head and my nostrils caught a whiff of the opulent male st of leather and spices that always apanied him and sometimes during his courtship, had been the only hint he gave me that he had e into my mothers sitting-room, for, though he was a big man, he moved as softly as if all his shoes had soles of velvet, as if his footfall turhe carpet into snow.

    He had loved to surprise me in my abstracted solitude at the piano. He would tell them not to announce him, then soundlessly open the door and softly creep up behih his bouquet of hot-house flowers or his box of marrons glaces, lay his  upon the keys and clasp his hands over my eyes as I was lost in a Debussy prelude. But the perfume of spiced leather always betrayed him; after my first shock, I was forced always to mimic surprise, so that he would not be disappointed.

    He was older than I. He was much older than I; there were streaks of pure silver in his dark mane. But his strange, heavy, almost waxen face was not lined by experience. Rather, experience seemed to have washed it perfectly smooth, like a stone on a beach whose fissures had been eroded by successive tides. And sometimes that face, in stillness when he listeo me playing, with the heavy eyelids folded over eyes that always disturbed me by their absolute absence of light, seemed to me like a mask, as if his real face, the face that truly reflected all the life he had led in the world before he met me, before, even, I was born, as though that face lay underh this mask. Or else, elsewhere. As though he had laid by the fa which he had lived for so long in order to offer my youth a fasigned by the years.

    And, elsewhere, I might see him plain. Elsewhere. But, where?

    In, perhaps, that castle to which the train now took us, that marvellous castle in which he had been born.

    Even when he asked me to marry him, and I said: "Yes", still he did not lose that heavy, fleshy posure of his. I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a se vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thid tensely yielding to the touch as vellum. When I said that I would marry him, not one muscle in his face stirred, but he let out a loinguished sigh. I thought: Oh! how he must want me! and it was as though the imponderable weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand, not by virtue of its viole because of its very gravity.

    He had the ring ready in a leather box lined with crimso, a fire opal the size of a pigeons egg set in a plicated circle of dark antique gold. My old nurse, who still lived with my mother and me, squi the ring askance: opals are bad luck, she said. But this opal had been his own mothers ring, and his grandmothers, and her mothers before that, given to an aor by Catherine de Medici. . . every bride that came to the castle wore it, time out of mind. And did he give it to his other wives and have it back from them? asked the old woman rudely; yet she was a snob. She hid her incredulous joy at my marital coup -- her little Marquise -- behind a fa?ade of fault-finding. But, here, she touched me. I shrugged and turned my back pettishly on her. I did not want to be reminded how he had loved other women before me, but the knowledge often teased me ihreadbare self-fidence of the small hours.

    I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world; my Marquis had been married before, more than once, and I remained a little bemused that, after those others, he should now have chosen me. Indeed was he not still in m for his last wife? Tsk, tsk, went my old nurse. And even my mother had beeant to see her girl whisked off by a man so retly bereaved. A Romanian tess, a lady of high fashion. Dead just three short months before I met him, a boating act, at his home, in Brittany. They never found her body but I rummaged through the back copies of the society magazines my old nan in a trunk under her bed and tracked down her photograph. The sharp muzzle of a pretty, witty, naughty monkey; such potent and bizarre charm, of a dark, bright, wild yet worldly thing whose natural habitat must have been some luxurious interior decorators jungle filled with potted palms and tame, squawking parakeets.

    Before that? Her face is on property; everyone painted her but the Redon engraving I liked best, The Evening Star Walking on the Rim of Night. To see her skeletal, enigmatic grace, you would hink she had been a barmaid in a café in Montmartre until Puvis de Chavannes saw her and had her expose her flat breasts and elohighs to his brush. A was the absinthe doomed her, or so they said.

    The first of all his ladies? That sumptuous diva; I had heard her sing Isolde, precociously musical child that I was, taken to the opera for a birthday treat. My first opera; I had heard her sing Isolde. With what white-hot passion had she burned from the stage! So that you could tell she would die young. We sat high up, halfway to heaven in the gods, yet she half-blinded me. And my father, still alive (oh, so long ago), took hold of my sticky little hand, to e, in the last act, yet all I heard was the glory of her voice.

    Married three times within my own brief lifetime to three different graces, now, as if to demonstrate the eclecticism of his taste, he had invited me to join this gallery of beautiful women, I, the poor widows child with my mouse-coloured hair that still bore the kinks of the plaits from which it had so retly been freed, my bony hips, my nervous, pianists fingers.

    He was rich as Croesus. The night before our wedding -- a simple affair, at the Mairie, because his tess was so retly gone -- he took my mother and me, curious ce, to see Tristan. And, do you know, my heart swelled and ached s the Liebestod that I thought I must truly love him. Yes. I did. On his arm, all eyes were upohe whispering crowd in the foyer parted like the Red Sea to let us through. My skin crisped at his touch.

    How my circumstances had ged sihe first time I heard those voluptuous chords that carry such a charge of deathly passion in them! Now, we sat in a loge, in red velvet armchairs, and a braided bewigged flunkey brought us a silver bucket of iced champagne ierval. The froth spilled over the rim of my glass and drenched my hands, I thought: My cup ruh over. And I had on a Poiret dress. He had prevailed upon my relut mother to let him buy my trousseau; what would I have goo him in, otherwise? Twice-darned underwear, faded gingham, serge skirts, hand-me-downs. So, for the opera, I wore a sinuous shift of white muslin tied with a silk string uhe breasts. And everyoared at me. And at his wedding gift.

    His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like araordinarily precious slit throat. After the Terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos whod escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound. And his grandmother, taken with the notion, had her ribbon made up in rubies; such a gesture of luxurious defiahat night at the opera es bae even now. . . the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels rouhroat, bright as arterial blood.

    I saw him watg me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a oisseur iing horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, iing cuts on the slab. Id never seen, or else had never aowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer al avarice of it; and it was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glang away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my i and fined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.

    The  day, we were married.

    The train slowed, shuddered to a halt. Lights; k of metal; a voice declaring the name of an unknown, o-be-visited station; silence of the night; the rhythm of his breathing, that I should sleep with, now, for the rest of my life. And I could not sleep. I stealthily sat up, raised the blind a little and huddled against the cold window that misted over with the warmth of my breathing, gazing out at the dark platform towards those regles of domestic lamp light that promised warmth, pany, a supper of sausages hissing in a pan oove for the station master, his children tucked up in bed asleep in the brick house with the painted shutters. . . all the paraphernalia of the everyday world from which I, with my stunning marriage, had exiled myself.

    Inte, into exile; I se, I k -- that, heh, I would always be lonely. Yet that art of the already familiar weight of the fire opal that glimmered like a gypsys magic ball, so that I could not take my eyes off it when I played the piano. This ring, the bloody bandage of rubies, the wardrobe of clothes from Poiret and Worth, his st of Russiaher -- all had spired to seduce me so utterly that I could not say I felt one siwinge ret for the world of tartines and maman that now receded from me as if drawn away on a string, like a childs toy, as the train began to throb again as if in delighted anticipation of the dista would take me.

    The first grey streamers of the dawn now flew in the sky and an eldritch half-light seeped into the railway carriage. I heard no ge in his breathing but my heighteed seold me he was awake and gazing at me. A huge man, an enormous man, and his eyes, dark and motionless as those eyes the a Egyptians painted upon their sarcophagi, fixed upon me. I felt a certain tension i of my stomach, to be so watched in such silence. A match struck. He was igniting a Romeo y Julieta fat as a babys arm.

    "Soon," he said in his resonant voice that was like the tolling of a bell and I felt, all at once, a sharp premonition of dread that lasted only as long as the match flared and I could see his white, broad face as if it were h, disembodied, above the sheets, illuminated from below like a grotesque ival head. Then the flame died, the cigar glowed and filled the partment with a remembered fragrahat made me think of my father, how he would hug me in a warm fug of Havana, when I was a little girl, before he kissed me a me and died.

    As soon as my husband handed me down from the high step of the train, I smelled the amniotic salinity o<bdi>?９9ｌiｂ?</bdi>f the o. It was November; the trees, stunted by the Atlantic gales, were bare and the lonely halt was deserted but for his leather-gaitered chauffeur waiting meekly beside the sleek black motor car. It was cold; I drew my furs about me, a  of white and black, broad stripes of ermine and sable, with a collar from which my head rose like the calyx of a wildflower. (I swear to you, I had never been vain until I met him.) The bell ged; the straining trai its leash a us at that lonely wayside halt where only he and I had desded. Oh, the wonder of it; how all that might of iron and steam had paused only to suit his veniehe richest man in France.

    &quot;Madame.&quot;

    The chauffeur eyed me; was he paring me, invidiously, to the tess, the artists model, the opera singer? I hid behind my furs as if they were a system of soft shields. My husband liked me to wear my opal over my kid glove, a showy, theatrical trick -- but the moment the ironic chauffeur glimpsed its simmering flash he smiled, as though it roof positive I was his masters wife. And we drove towards the widening dawn, that now streaked half the sky with a wintry bouquet of pink of roses, e of tiger-lilies, as if my husband had ordered me a sky from the florist. The day broke around me like a cool dream.

    Sea; sand; a sky that melts into the sea -- a landscape of misty pastels with a look about it of being tinuously on the point of melting. A landscape with all the deliquest harmonies of Debussy, of the etudes I played for him, the reverie Id been playing that afternoon in the salon of the princess where Id first met him, among the tea-cups and the little cakes, I, the orphan, hired out of charity to give them their digestive of music.

    And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening on to the green and purple, eva departures of the o, cut off by the tide from land for half a day. . . that castle, at home her on the land nor oer, a mysterious, amphibious place, travening the materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rod waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!

    The tide was low; at this hour, so early in the m, the causeway rose up out of the sea. As the car turned on to the wet cobbles between the slow margins of water, he reached out for my hand that had his sultry, witg ring on it, pressed my fingers, kissed my palm with extraordinary tenderness. His face was as still as ever Id seen it, still as a pond iced thickly over, yet his lips, that always looked sely red and naked between the black fringes of his beard, now curved a little. He smiled; he weled his bride home.

    No room, no corridor that did not rustle with the sound of the sea and all the ceilings, the walls on which his aors iern regalia of rank lined up with their dark eyes and white faces, were stippled with refracted light from the waves which were always in motion; that luminous murmurous castle of which I was the chatelaine, I, the little music student whose mother had sold all her jewellery, even her wedding ring, to pay the fees at the servatoire.

    First of all, there was the small ordeal of my initial interview with the housekeeper, who kept this extraordinary mae, this anchored, castellated o liner, in smooth running order no matter who stood on the bridge; how tenuous, I thought, might be my authority here! She had a bland, pale, impassive, dislikeable face beh the impeccably starched white linen headdress of the region. Her greeting, correct but lifeless, chilled me; daydreaming, I dared presume too muy status. . . briefly wondered how I might install my old nurse, so much loved, however cosily inpetent, in her place. Ill-sidered schemings! He told me this one had been his foster mother; was bound to his family imost feudal plicity, &quot;as much a part of the house as I am, my dear.&quot; Now her thin lips offered me a proud little smile. She would be my ally as long as I was his. And with that, I must be tent.

    But, here it would be easy to be tent. Iurret suite he had given me for my very own, I could gaze out over the tumultuous Atlantid imagine myself the Queen of the Sea. There was a Bechstein for me in the musi and, on the wall, another wedding present -- an early Flemish primitive of Saint Cecilia at her celestial an. In the prim charm of this saint, with her plump, sallow cheeks and kled brown hair, I saw myself as I could have wished to be. I warmed to a loviivity I had not hitherto suspected in him. Then he led me up a delicate spiral staircase to my bedroom; before she discreetly vahe housekeeper set him chug with some, I dare say, lewd blessing for newlyweds in her native Breton. That I did not uand. That he, smiling, refused to interpret.

    And there lay the grand, hereditary matrimonial bed, itself the size, almost, of my little room at home, with the gargoyles carved on its surfaces of ebony, vermilion lacquer, gold leaf; and its white gauze curtains, billowing in the sea breeze. Our bed. And surrounded by so many mirrors! Mirrors on the walls, in stately frames of torted gold, that reflected more white lilies than Id ever seen in my life before. Hed filled the room with them, to greet the bride, the young bride. The young bride, who had bee that multitude of girls I saw in the mirrors, identical in their chiavy blue tailor-mades, for travelling, madame, or walking. A maid had dealt with the furs. Heh, a maid would deal with everything.

    &quot;See,&quot; he said, gesturing towards those elegant girls. &quot;I have acquired a whole harem for myself!&quot;

    I found that I was trembling. My breath came quickly. I could not meet his eye and turned my head away, out of pride, out of shyness, and watched a dozen husbands approach me in a dozen mirrors and slowly, methodically, teasingly, unfastetons of my jacket and slip it from my shoulders. Enough! No; more! Off es the skirt; ahe blouse of apricot lihat ore than the dress I had for first union. The play of the waves outside in the cold sun glittered on his monocle; his movements seemed to me deliberately coarse, vulgar. The blood rushed to my face again, and stayed there.

    A, you see, I guessed it might be so -- that we should have a formal disrobing of the bride, a ritual from the brothel. Sheltered as my life had been, how could I have failed, even in the world of prim bohemia in which I lived, to have heard hints of his world?

    He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke -- but do not imagine much finesse about it; this artichoke was no particular treat for the diner nor was he yet in any greedy haste. He approached his familiar treat with a weary appetite. And when nothing but my scarlet, palpitating core remained, I saw, in the mirror, the living image of ag by Rops from the colle he had shown me when agemeted us to be aloogether. . . the child with her sticklike limbs, naked but for her button boots, her gloves, shielding her face with her hand as though her face were the last repository of her modesty; and the old, monocled lecher who examined her, limb by limb. He in his London tail; she, bare as a lamb ost praphic of all frontations. And so my purchaser uned his bargain. And, as at the opera, when I had first seen my flesh in his eyes, I was aghast to feel myself stirring.

    At once he closed my legs like a book and I saw again the rare movement of his lips that meant he smiled.

    Not yet. Later. Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure, my little love.

    And I began to shudder, like a racehorse before a race, yet also with a kind of fear, for I felt both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance I could not stifle for his white, heavy flesh that had too mu on with the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom i glass jars, those uakers lilies with the heavy pollen that powders your fingers as if you had dipped them in turmeric. The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.

    This se from a voluptuarys life was notly terminated. It turns out he has busio attend to; his estates, his panies -- even on your honeymoon? Even then, said the red lips that kissed me before he left me aloh my bewildered senses -- a wet, silken brush from his beard; a hint of the poiip of the tongue. Disgruntled, I ed a negligee of antique lace arouo sip the little breakfast of hot chocolate the maid brought me; after that, si was a sed nature to me, there was o go but the musi and soon I settled down at my piano.

    Yet only a series of subtle discords flowed from beh my fingers: Bout of tune. . . only a little out of tune; but Id been blessed with perfect pitd could not bear to play any more. Sea breezes are bad for pianos; we shall need a resident piano-tuner on the premises if Im to tih my studies! I flung down the lid in a little fury of disappoi; what should I do now, how shall I pass the long, sea-lit hours until my husband beds me?

    I shivered to think of that.

    His library seemed the source of his habitual odour of Russiaher. Row upon row of calf-bound volumes, brown and olive, with gilt lettering on their spihe octavo in brilliant scarlet morocco. A deep-buttoned leather sofa to ree on. A le, carved like a spread eagle that held open upon it aion of Huysmanss Là-bas, from some over-exquisite private press; it had been bound like a missal, in brass, with gems of class. The rugs on the floor, deep pulsing blues of heaven and red of the hearts dearest blood, came from Isfahan and Bokhara; the dark panelling gleamed; there was the lulling music of the sea and a fire of apple logs. The flames flickered along the spines ihe glass-fronted case that held books still crisp and new. Eliphas Levy; the name meant nothing to me. I squi a title or two: The Initiation, The Key of Mysteries, The Secret of Pandoras Box, and yawned. Nothing, here, to detain a seventeen-year-old girl waiting for her first embrace. I should have liked, best of all, a novel in yelloer; I wao curl up on the rug before the blazing fire, lose myself in a cheap novel, munch sticky liqueur chocolates. If I rang for them, a maid would brihe chocolates.

    heless, I opehe doors of the bookcase idly to browse. And I think I knew, I knew by some tingle of the fiips, even before I opehat slim volume with no title at all on the spine, what I should find inside. When he showed me the Rops, newly bought, dearly prized, had he not hihat he was a oisseur of such things? Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her t a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the kails of the cat were about to desd, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like a scimitar he held. The picture had a caption &quot;Reproof of curiosity.&quot; My mother, with all the precision of her etricity, had told me what it was that lovers did; I was i but not he Adventures of Eulalie at the Harem of the Grand Turk had been printed, acc to the flyleaf, in Amsterdam in 1748, a rare collectors piece. Had some aht it back himself from that northern city? Or had my husband bought it for himself, from one of those dusty little bookshops on the Left Bank where an old man peers at you through spectacles an inch thick, daring you to i his wares. . . I turhe pages iicipation of fear; the print was rusty. Here was aeel engraving: &quot;Immolation of the wives of the Sultan&quot;. I knew enough for what I saw in that book to make me gasp.

    There u intensification of the odour of leather that suffused his library; his shadow fell across the massacre.

    &quot;My little nun has found the prayerbooks, has she?&quot; he demanded, with a ixture of mockery and relish; then, seeing my painful, furious bewilderment, he laughed at me aloud, snatched the book from my hands and put it down on the sofa.

    &quot;Have the nasty pictures scared Baby? Baby mustnt play with grownups toys until shes learned how to hahem, must she?&quot;

    Then he kissed me. And with, this time, ice. He kissed me and laid his hand imperatively upon my breast, beh the sheath of a lace. I stumbled on the winding stair that led to the bedroom, to the carved, gilded bed on which he had been ceived, I stammered foolishly: Weve not taken lun yet; and, besides, it is broad daylight. . .

    All the better to see you.

    He made me put on my choker, the family heirloom of one woman who had escaped the blade. With trembling fingers, I fastehe thing about my neck. It was cold as id chilled me. He twined my hair into a rope and lifted it off my shoulders so that he could the better kiss the downy furrows below my ears; that made me shudder. And he kissed those blazing rubies, too. He kissed them before he kissed my mouth. Rapt, he intoned: &quot;Of her apparel she retains/Only her sonorous jewellery.&quot;

    A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside.

    I was brought to my senses by the i shrilling of the telephone. He lay beside me, felled like an oak, breathing stertorously, as if he had been fighting with me. In the course of that one-sided struggle, I had seen his deathly posure shatter like a porcelain vase flung against a wall; I had heard him shriek and blaspheme at the asm; I had bled. And perhaps I had seen his face without its mask; and perhaps I had not. Yet I had been infinitely dishevelled by the loss of my virginity.

    I gathered myself together, reached into the cloisonne cupboard beside the bed that cealed the telephone and addressed the mouthpiece. His agent in New York. Urgent.

    I shook him awake and rolled over on my side, cradling my spent body in my arms. His voice buzzed like a hive of distant bees. My husband. My husband, who, with so much love, filled my bedroom with lilies until it looked like an embalming parlour. Those som lilies, that wave their heavy heads, distributing their lush, i inse remi of pampered flesh.

    When hed finished with the agent, he turo me and stroked the ruby necklace that bit into my neck, but with such tenderness now, that I ceased fling and he caressed my breasts. My dear one, my little love, my child, did it hurt her? Hes so sorry for it, such impetuousness, he could not help himself; you see, he loves her so. . . and this lovers recitative of his brought my tears in a flood. I g to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could e for suffering it. For a while, he murmured to me in a voice Id never heard before, a voice like the soft solations of the sea. But then he unwound the tendrils of my hair from the buttons of his smoking jacket, kissed my cheek briskly and told me the agent from New York had called with such urgent busihat he must leave as soon as the tide was low enough. Leave the castle? Leave France! And would be away for at least six weeks.

    &quot;But it is our honeymoon!&quot;

    A deal, aerprise of hazard and volving several millions, lay in the balance, he said. He drew away from me into that waxworks stillness of his; I was only a little girl, I did not uand. And, he said unspoken to my wounded vanity, I have had too manybbr></abbr> honeymoons to find them in the least pressing itments. I know quite well that this child Ive bought with a handful of coloured stones and the pelts of dead beasts wont run away. But, after hed called his Paris agent to book a passage for the States  day -- just oiny call, my little one -- we should have time for diogether.

    And I had to be tent with that.

    A Mexi dish of pheasant with hazelnuts and chocolate; salad; white, voluptuous cheese; a sorbet of muscat grapes and Asti spumante. A celebration  exploded festively. And then acrid black coffee in precious little cups so fi shadowed the birds with which they were painted. I had treau, he had a the library, with the purple velvet curtains drawn against the night, where he took me to per his knee in a leather armchair beside the flickering log fire. He had made me ge into the chaste little Poiret shift of white muslin; he seemed especially fond of it, my breasts showed through the flimsy stuff, he said, like little soft white doves that sleep, eae, with a pink eye open. But he would not let me take off my ruby choker, although it was growing very unfortable, nor fasten up my desding hair, the sign of a virginity so retly ruptured that still remained a wounded preseween us. He twined his fingers in my hair until I winced; I said, I remember, very little.

    The maid will have ged our sheets already,&quot; he said. &quot;We do not hang the bloody sheets out of the window to prove to the whole of Brittany you are a virgin, not in these civilised times. But I should tell you it would have been the first time in all my married lives I could have shown my ied tenants such a flag.&quot;

    Then I realised, with a shock of surprise, how it must have been my innoce that captivated him -- the silent music, he said, of my unknowingness, like La Tenasse des audiences au clair de lune played upon a piano with keys of ether. You must remember how ill at ease I was in that luxurious place, how unease had been my stant panion during the whole length of my courtship by this grave satyr who now gently martyrised my hair. To know that my y gave him some pleasure made me take heart. Ce! I shall act the fine lady to the manner born one day, if only by virtue of default.

    Then, slowly yet teasingly, as if he were giving a child a great mysterious treat, he took out a bunch of keys from some interior hidey-hole in his jacket -- key after key, a key, he said, for every lo the house. Keys of all kinds -- huge, ahings of black iron; others slender, delicate, almost baroque; wafer-thin Yale keys for safes and boxes. And, during his abse was I who must take care of them all.

    I eyed the heavy bunch with circumspe. Until that moment, I had not given a sihought to the practical aspearriage with a great house, great wealth, a great man, whose key ring was as crowded as that of a prison warder. Here were the clumsy and archaic keys for the dungeons, for dungeons we had iy although they had been verted into cellars for his wihe dusty bottles inhabited in racks all those deep holes of pain in the ro which the castle was built. There are the keys to the kits, this is the key to the picture gallery, a treasure house filled by five turies of avid collectors -- ah! he foresaw I would spend hours there.

    He had amply indulged his taste for the Symbolists, he told me with a glint of greed. There was Moreaus great portrait of his first wife, the famous Sacrificial Victim with the imprint of the lacelike s on her pellucid skin. Did I know the story of the painting of that picture? How, wheook off her clothes for him for the first time, she fresh from her bar in Montmartre, she had robed herself involuntarily in a blush that reddened her breasts, her shoulders, her arms, her whole body? He had thought of that story, of that dear girl, when first he had undressed me. . . Ensor, the great Ensor, his monolithivas: The Foolish Virgins. two or three late Gauguins, his special favourite the one of the tranced brown girl in the deserted house which was called: Out of the Night We e, Into the Night We Go. And, besides the additions he had made himself, his marvellous iance of Watteaus, Poussins and a pair of very special Fragonards, issioned for a litious aor who, it was said, had posed for the masters brush himself with his own two daughters. . . He broke off his catalogue of treasures abruptly.

    Your thin white face, cherie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a oisseur could detect.

    A log fell in the fire, instigating a shower of sparks; the opal on my finger spurted green flame. I felt so giddy as if I were on the edge of a precipice; I was afraid, not so much of him, of his monstrous presence, heavy as if he had been gifted at birth with more specific gravity than the rest of us, the presehat, even when I thought myself most in love with him, always subtly oppressed me. . . No. I was not afraid of him; but of myself. I seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar shapes. I hardly reised myself from his description of me a, a -- might there not be a grain of beastly truth in them? And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innoce, he sensed a rare talent for corruption.

    Here is the key to the a et -- dont laugh, my darling; theres a kings ransom in Sevres in that closet, and a queens ransom in Limoges. And a key to the locked, barred room where five geions of plate are kept.

    Keys, keys, keys. He would trust me with the keys to his office, although I was only a baby; and the keys to his safes, where he kept the jewels I should wear, he promised me, wheuro Paris. Such jewels! Why, I would be able to ge my earrings and necklaces three times a day, just as the Empress Josephine used to ge her underwear. He doubted, he said, with that hollow, knog sound that served him for a chuckle, I would be quite so ied in his share certificates although they, of course, were worth infinitely more.

    Outside our firelit privacy, I could hear the sound of the tide drawing back from the pebbles of the foreshore; it was nearly time for him to leave me. One single key remained unated for on the ring and he hesitated over it; for a moment, I thought he was going to unfasten it from its brothers, slip it bato his pocket and take it away with him.

    &quot;What is that key?&quot; I demanded, for his chaffing had made me bold. &quot;The key to your heart? Give it me!&quot;

    He dahe key tantalisingly above my head, out of reay straining fingers; those bare red lips of his cracked sidelong in a smile.

    &quot;Ah, no,&quot; he said. &quot;Not the key to my heart. Rather, the key to my enfer.&quot;

    He left it on the ring, fastehe ring together, shook it musically, like a carillon. Then threw the keys in a jingling heap in my lap. I could feel the etal chilling my thighs through my thin muslin frock. He bent over me to drop a beard-masked kiss on my forehead.

    &quot;Every man must have o, even if only one, from his wife,&quot; he said. &quot;Promise me this, my whey-faced piano-player; promise me youll use all the keys on the ring except that last little one I showed you. Play with anything you find, jewels, silver plate; make toy boats of my share certificates, if it pleases you, ahem sailing off to America after me. All is yours, everywhere is open to you -- except the lock that this single key fits. Yet all it is is the key to a little room at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room, at the end of a dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs that would get into your hair and frighten you if you vehere. Oh, and youd find it such a dull little room! But you must promise me, if you love me, to leave it well alo is only a private study, a hideaway, a &quot;den&quot;, as the English say, where I  go sometimes, on those infreque iable occasions when the yoke of marriage seems to weigh too heavily on my shoulders. There I  go, you uand, to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless.&quot;

    There was a little thin starlight in the courtyard as, ed in my furs, I saw him to his car. His last words were, that he had telephohe mainland and taken a piano-tuner on to the staff; this man would arrive to take up his duties the  day. He pressed me to his via breast, once, and then drove away.

    I had drowsed away that afternoon and now I could not sleep. I lay tossing and turning in his aral bed until another day-break discoloured the dozen mirrors that were iridest with the refles of the sea. The perfume of the lilies weighed on my senses; when I thought that, heh, I would always share these sheets with a man whose skin, as theirs did, taihat toad-like, clammy hint of moisture, I felt a vague desolation that within me, now my female wound had healed, there had awoken a certain queasy craving like the cravings nant women for the taste of coal or chalk or tainted food, for the renewal of his caresses. Had he not hio me, in his flesh as in his speed looks, of the thousand, thousand baroque interses of flesh upon flesh? I lay in our wide bed apanied by, a sleepless panion, my dark newborn curiosity.

    I lay in bed alone. And I longed for him. And he disgusted me. Were there jewels enough in all his safes to repense me for this predit? Did all that castle hold enough riches to repense me for the pany of the libertih whom I must share it? And recisely, was the nature of my desirous dread for this mysterious being who, to show his mastery over me, had abandoned me on my wedding night?

    Then I sat straight up in bed, uhe sardonic masks of the gargoyles carved above me, riven by a wild surmise. Might he have left me, not for Wall Street but for an importunate mistress tucked away God knows where who knew how to pleasure him far better than a girl whose fingers had been exercised, hitherto, only by the practice of scales and arpeggios? And, slowly, soothed, I sank ba to the heaping pillows; I aowledged that the jealous scare Id just given myself was not unmixed with a little tincture of relief.

    At last I drifted into slumber, as daylight filled the room and chased bad dreams away. But the last thing I remembered, before I slept, was the tall jar of lilies beside the bed, how the thick glass distorted their fat stems so they looked like arms, dismembered arms, drifting drowned into greenish water.

    Coffee and croissants to sole this bridal, solitary waking. Delicious. Hooo, in a se of b on a glass saucer. The maid squeezed the aromatic juice from an e into a chilled goblet while I watched her as I lay on the lazy midday bed of the rich. Yet nothing, this m, gave me more than a fleeting pleasure except to hear that the piano-tuner had been at work already. When the maid told me that, I sprang out of bed and pulled on my old serge skirt and flannel blouse, e of a student, in which I felt far more at ease with myself than in any of my fine new clothes.

    After my three hours of practice, I called the piano-tuner in, to thank him. He was blind, of course; but young, with a gentle mouth and grey eyes that fixed upohough they could not see me. He was a blacksmiths son from the village across the causeway; a chorister in the church whom the good priest had taught a trade so that he could make a living. All most satisfactory. Yes. He thought he would be happy here. And if, he added shyly, he might sometimes be allowed to hear me play. . . for, you see, he loved music. Yes. Of course, I said. Certainly. He seemed to know that I had smiled.

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