There were stones from Pegu, Bohemia, Arabia, and the Rue de la Paix, blue beryls and dull jasper, zircons, jargoons, jacinths, pale chrysolites and tourmalines, and some so rare that Anselmus de Boot had omitted to mention them.

  Delicious temptations that would have made the most virtuous meditate a little!

  Perruzi however, had not yet produced his greatest treasure, keeping it to the last – perhaps a little loath to part with so precious a jewel. Be that as it may, the entreaties of the Count – who flattered the old creature outrageously – prevailed, and, vowing that it was impossible to deny so noble a patron, he bowed with obsequious flattery, and excusing himself for a moment returned with a necklet of jet crystals. Handling it lovingly, he held it up to the light and allowed it to trickle in glittering cascades through his fingers, its thousand facets reflecting the features of his visitors in the most grotesque manner.

  Of course Count Fanny bought it.

  Already he could see the sombre depths of its impenetrable beauty reflecting the baptismal purity of Lucy’s throat and breast.

  CHAPTER IV

  It was night time, long past the hour of Vespers and when all save the moths, night birds, and Roués are at rest and even lovers turn upon their sides and smoothing the crumpled pillows pretend for a while to sleep. Count Fanny had prepared a surprise.

  Lucy had wandered far into that mysterious land of enchantments where nymphs and driads play in perfumed shades, and loves are steadfast, and day dreams at length come true.

  As she knelt before her prie-Dieu at her devotions, she had folded her little hands and asked for a benediction upon her happiness, unconscious of the quaint paradox in which she called for a blessing from the Virgin upon her approaching abandonment, and she slept now, her joy finding repletion in the approbation of the Benign mother.

  Happy, in the awakening consciousness of love’s first embrace, her dreams formed themselves into visions of strange and fantastic ideals, unimaginable refinements of fidelity and impossible renunciations. Hers was the curiously unreal and almost stainless passion of early youth which soon becomes merged in the finer instincts of that pure eroticism, which seeks expression only in romantic loves, curious excursions, passionate experiences, exquisite infidelities, and Lucy was very happy.

  A wonderful moonlight streamed through the open casement bathing her in its cold caresses, making her little breasts as pale as leaves of Eucharist lilies and casting upon the walls grotesque and mischievous shadows.

  The moths saw her as they flickered by and became in a moment so amorous that they could find pleasure only in fanning her with their wings and desired the stars no longer.

  The scent of summer flowers floated in through the window, sweeter far than anything that came from ‘Houbigant’, and all those night noises so infinitely softer than silence itself passed to and fro in the warm air.

  Down in the wood a Love-bird was singing of beautiful and impossible things.

  Lucy must have been sleeping for a long time when of a sudden she stirred, a little restless, as those will who sleeping lightly dream of joy. A fresh enchantment had stolen into her dreams, and the fairies seemed to be ringing the Canterbury-bells and Aralda blossoms in the garden below.

  Presently she awoke and at first was frightened to hear the sound of music at so late an hour. She called to Frou-Frou, her spaniel, who nestled closer, and whined in wonderful felicity.

  She listened for a moment to the loving serenade and, with that curious instinct that marches hand in hand with love, soon divined its purport; of course it made her very happy to think that Count Fanny should have flattered her with so amorous an attention. She tried to think of some little thing in which she could please him, and performing only the most hasty of toilets, hurried to the window.

  I should be sorry to pry too closely into the secrets of courtship or to profane lightly the solitude in which it has ever been the privilege of lovers to indulge, but Mrs Birchman who wasn’t the least jealous, declared afterwards that Lucy made ‘quite the most discreet Juliet to Count Fanny’s Romeo’! Mrs Birchman had read Shakespeare, though of course only in the bowdlerized editions.

  It was a romantic scene! Count Fanny had studied voice production under Marchesi and could get G in the upper octave without clearing his throat.

  The musicians played a mysterious accompaniment in soft invisible tones. Erotion was there and Sganarelle, playing upon the castanets, and of course Sporus – the Count’s chief page; the young Marquis Piere Isabella de Pironelle, who laughed immoderately; ‘Little Albert’ who tapped a triangle and the diminutive Pantagruel who was preoccupied with a tuning fork absorbed in an abortive attempt to find absolute pitch.

  Monsieur Beau de Monde with little febrile hands performed the elegant offices of clacqueur. Sometimes Erotion and Sganarelle would join in a chorus, but their voices came thin and shrill – like the singing of hermaphrodites heard through glass – and not trained at all.

  Somewhere in the Elysian depths behind the open casement a parrot, from time to time, muttered quaint lubricities.

  Lucy was extremely sorry when they all drove away; it unsettled her very much and filled her with an instinctive longing for the grace of vanished things. She recalled romantic legends which she had read of medival chivalry and of inconsequent singers of Provençal song, of Raymond de Miraval who had loved the Lady of Azalais, of Bertolomi Corgi the Venetian, and in the extravagance of her passion she pictured Count Fanny as the hero of a hundred romances, mystical and real. She felt restless and feverish with the intoxication of love, and she lay and indulged her thoughts, fugitive images of other lovers drifting across the fleeting phantasmagoria of her meditations. She thought of Marianna Alcaforado, of Giovanni Boccacio’s ‘ninth day’ and of Lucius and Photis from the ‘Golden Ass’ of Apuleius.

  Lucy had certainly the most surprising knowledge!

  Other loves visited her in her dreams but now they were misshapen and unreal, phantoms distorted by excess of passion, dwarfs made mad by the scent of flowers, and moths that lived in adultery with the stars.

  Lucy was pleased when she awoke and escaped such preposterous intrusions. Alceste was soon in attendance with her chocolate and was bubbling with a hundred little confidences, and the two girls laughed and joked together till it was time for the toilet to be performed.

  Of course Lucy wore her Sunday frock.

  CHAPTER V

  Count Fanny came early. He made a charming lover – pluperfect and full of surprises. He brought Lucy some beads, bijouterie, and sweetmeats emblazoned with endearing mottoes, paid her a hundred little attentions, and flattered her in loving innuendoes.

  They flirted together for a long time and indulged in the most unbridled amatory follies, though of course nothing in the nature of a liberty was permitted. Very different to the precipitous courtship of the Friar Albert and some of the lovers about whom Count Fanny told the most curious stories

  in the evening they were all to go to the Grand Ballet. They arrived late and Mrs Birchman was quite cross when she heard that they had missed the vaudevilles and marionettes.

  ‘How silly of us,’ she said peevishly, however, she was a good natured old creature really, and her resentment soon vanished in a display of excessive fondness.

  The box had been embellished especially for the Royal party, and resembled a decorative piece by Boucher.

  There were garnishments of real flowers, and the flags, floating gonfalons, rich tiffanies, and tinsels, contrasted pleasantly enough with an effect of Arcadian simplicity produced by festoons of real roses and poppies cut from plush.

  Mrs Birchman was quite happy now and hardly looked at the dancing at all, but flirted in the most outrageous manner with Erotion. She allowed her bodice to slip aside with studied carelessness and display the ample zones of her bosom, brushed him with her tresses, sighed and panted in the most amorous way, and brought about slight but voluptuous contacts. When the music dropped, fragments of their endearments and fond speeches could be overheard such as ‘My little mousie’, ‘Pussy’, ‘Tulip’, ‘ Mon cher petit coco en sucre’, or ‘Snippy thing’. They also engaged in such refinements of dumb rhetoric as paddling each others palms, little nods and becks, and made significant gestures with their feet and hands that, in others less virtuous, might have been mistaken for harbingers of even greater happiness.

  Lucy was quite absorbed in the novelty of her surroundings, and innocently asked a hundred indiscreet questions which it required all Count Fanny’s ingenuity to answer. The Count, it was noticed, flushed from time to time during the evening and was attacked by fits of sudden perspiration, and indeed displayed all those symptoms of love which we find so eloquently classified in Struthius’ ‘Doctrine of Pulses’.

  Moll surveyed the ‘house’ with wanton frankness, while Seraphina and Minette, her two favourites, held each other’s hands in the dark recesses of the box. As the evening progressed they grew more fond and laughed together nervously. The rest of the company behaved appropriately enough.

  The curtain rose upon a scene of great felicity in a grotto of the Venus Meretrix and disclosed the Goddess surrounded by her favourites, Hermione, Doto, Hermaphroditus, Priapus, Anteros, Erato, Laomcdia, Spio, and the rest. The stage presented a dishevelled appearance, and was strewn with the tokens of a banquet beside of which the lascivious feast of Tremalcion must have been quite a paltry affair.

  Everybody was drunk, with wine, with pleasure, and with love, and dwarfs and satyrs wearing masks fought and struggled with huge half emptied vats – spilling the wine over their clothes – drank from excessive goblets, and committed a hundred absurdities in their efforts to clear away the débris of the feast. Half-nude girls with blonde wigs of long fibrous hair, like seaweed, were preparing for the first figure, while cupids wearing black stockings and carrying Dio mio! not arrows but birches, danced around their divine mistress singing songs of love. All about her, her creatures lolled in conventional attitudes of ease, and shouted, laughed, swore, clapped their hands, blew kisses, threw the dice, and hiccoughed or gave way to obscene talk, fond caresses, and boisterous laughter in the prosecution of their amours.

  Boys dressed as doves, as peacocks, as beasts, as insects, and as fishes, footed it in the ring and immolated flowers and fruit upon the altar of love. Huge toads blew out their flanks and roared with drunken laughter, cupids thrashed each other with their birches, frogs and griffins embraced together and danced in mincing measure, creeping things played upon the castanets, while goats, with inverted horns, ravaged birds of impossible plumage and dragged them yelling into the dark recesses of the cave.

  It was altogether an astonishing display and of course everybody clapped their hands, shouted encouragements, threw favours, and in fact rendered the claque quite an unnecessary affair.

  When the corps de ballet advanced it was soon seen that all the former glories of the Alhambra were to be surpassed, and it would be idle for me to even attempt an adequate description. The magnificence of the scene surpassed all at which the ‘Arabian Nights’ have ever hinted, made the immoderate inventions of Commodus to dispel ennui seem very bourgeois indeed, and even vied with those curious exhibitions which may be seen sometimes at ‘La Festa’ on the hill.

  A pretty sight indeed!

  The wave-like motions of the dancers produced a peculiar effect of colour, dyes and stuffs, somewhat crude and garish in themselves, mingling together with delightful congruity. The legs of the girls were stained blue, yellow, pink, and three shades of green and vibrated with mechanical regularity, every motion being multiplied a thousand times in mirrors placed at angles upon the walls and ceiling. There were girls in pink trunks with blue tights, and in pink tights with blue trunks, in long black stockings, in trunks trimmed with beads, with tinsel, and with feathers.

  There were false busts, bow-legs, stencilled eyebrows, and wigs of all colours, imaginary and real, purple, straw and washing. One creature had a Bavarian chin and hair that was fluffy, like feathers, and not brushed at all, enormous plumpers, and tights that had been torn, and mended only in the most careless manner. Of course she was in the back row and received the smallest salary.

  La Tintoretta looked like a goddess and danced quite like a real person. Salome was not more seductive! The Genée herself must look to her laurels!

  As the evening progressed the fun became more furious; grease paint melted and ran in little furrows down the face and breast, eye-black, and rouge from the lips, striped the visages in the most grotesque manner, making them almost unsavoury, dishevelled wigs became misplaced, in some cases completely hiding the faces of their owners in damp, sticky curls, or even rolling headless and unheeded on the floor, tights split with the noise of cannon, ungartered hose behaved with the utmost indiscretion, paddings, that had slipped sideways, distorted the figures and adorned them with many an impossible and laughable prominence, and the whole house became filled with a subtle, and not unpleasant odour of mingled patchouli, perspiration, and musk.

  Everybody in Count Fanny’s party was delighted with the performance though it was naively agreed that the curtain fell not a moment too soon!

  As they passed out they caught sight of Violet, behind the buffet, looking pretty and piquant as ever, and serving the Roués, with impartial good nature, with syrups that shone and glistened with a hundred bright colours. One old creature grew quite loving, and gave her some bonbons in lieu of kisses. Lucy could not help admiring all the smart women who walked about so boldly, laughing, talking, and sipping their cordials and aphrodisiacs with the utmost good fellowship. What pretty clothes they wore!

  ‘Aye, Madame, and broidered throughout with a coronet on every corner I dare swear,’ volunteered Monsieur Beau de Monde, who always displayed a nice fastidiousness alike in his wine, in his women, and the mode of his address.

  ‘They must be Duchesses,’ exclaimed Lucy, but Mrs Birchman, with a maturer knowledge, thought that at any rate some of them were only Countesses in their own right.

  CHAPTER VI

  I feel that I should be accused of cruelty were I to refrain any longer from telling you about the ordering of the trousseau.

  I should have shrunk altogether from touching upon a matter, more delicate even, if that were possible, than the very fabrics out of which the delicious garments were engendered, were it not that in doing so I should have laid myself open to the reproaches of a hundred lovers less fortunate than Count Fanny. I must, however, beg for an indulgence in case I should be guilty of any slight indiscretion or betrayal. To proceed, Mrs Birchman, Lucy, and Moll sallied forth together to complete the sacred work.

  The three girls were in the best of spirits and overflowing with confidences, secrets, and suggestions. They laughed and chatted together over innocent little scandals and indulged in short, but quite the most wayward, quarrels.

  Their first visit was to Madame Troutrou to see the latest modes, lingerie, and foll-lolls and to hear the news of the town. The old gossip smiled lovingly upon the three girls, and regaled them with thinly veiled accounts of the latest indiscretions as she handed them a piece of lace, or toyed with a sample of hose. Moll recalled a former visit upon a similar happy occasion and grew quite sentimental as she turned over the delicate tissues or tested the quality of a silk. Nor is it to be wondered at that Lucy, on beholding of a sudden such an assortment of damasks, embroideries, velvets, cambrics, masks, bargains, fans, ribbands, chevelures and transformations, gave way to astonished ejaculations of delight and pleasure. ‘Oh my!’ ‘So!’ ‘Lala!’

  ‘Gracious!’ she exclaimed in a breath, while Madame Troutrou patted her hands and sought to calm her with verbose platitudes.

  Ah, surely no moths had ever feasted upon more delicious stuffs! The divine Chevalier de Lorraine of the regency can hardly have dreamed of such transparent refinements of linon.

  Lucy chose quite a number of pretty things including a rich fan which had little slits, whose sides were sewn with lashes, and through which the eyes might peer in the most coquettish manner. Mrs Birchman, who was happy in the consciousness of new satinette, pronounced this to be ‘the real thing, the pick of the basket, and quite a bargain’.

  The first choice fell upon a chemisette, so light and frail, that it was in reality nought but an excuse for the most delicious broidery and inviting trimming.

  Then came some cache-corsets, cut en rouleaux and concealing nothing.

  A chemise, which was an exact model of the one worn by Marie of Cleves, and which so ravished Henri III at the wedding of Marguerite of Valois.

  A pair of the most indiscreet drawers in the world, and a pair with insertions of real lace, and broidered with the most inquisitive cupids!

  Nightdresses that were mere cobwebs and surely were thrice blessed.

  A petticoat, double sewn, and ruched à la Madame de Pompadour.

  A profusion of socks, laces, delicious gloves, sewn with garlands of flowers and scented with musk, or painted with blue veins and made to look like real hands; and the rest that it would be imprudent to mention.

  ‘And now to the Burlington arcade to buy shoes,’ said Lucy, when the resources of Madame Troutrou had been entirely exhausted, graciously consenting to be lipp’d by the fat old thing who wished her a thousand happy experiences. Afterwards the dresses had to be selected and these were all very handsome, but of course quiet, and in the best of taste – not at all like the rather bizarre costumes of the fast women who trade in love, in pleasure, and in joy.

  Of course they visited the parfumeries and indulged in all manner of mingled fragrances, cunning fards, and rare oils. Some of the scents were made from real flowers, others from mysterious unnatural blossoms, whose odours were full of the intoxications of desire. There was jasmine, full of intangible charm, refined and delicate as a Schubert melody; Geranium, curiously reminiscent of withered loves; unblended Ambergris, that had the power to excite the most anæmic virgins; Civet; Saffron; Benzoin; Stephanotis; Kiss-me-quick; Frangipanni; Cul-me-to-you; Bouquet des Amours; Peau d’Espagne; Fleur d’Amour; Jicky; Bouquet Largillerie; Jardin de mon Curé; and Bosom-Caresser.