I’m well concealed here from my piglets and Nadine: isolated in the dense, close square of the walls of this room, deep in the narrow-chested, box-like structure of the shabby hotel, whose fire walls stick to the half-timber gables of the houses behind: former stables converted into petit bourgeois homes, presumably; their yards—with mangy geranium window boxes, atrophying jasmine bushes, and oleander saplings in weathered tubs—preserve the defoliating poetry of the horse-and-buggy world, the autumn efflorescence of mankind, already preparing for its journey of no return.

From the wallpaper’s sharp floral pattern (once a playground for bedbugs, repeated in the bedcover and the slipcover of the upholstered chair), a thousand round eyes peer at me—wondering whether I can muster the patience to remain by myself . . . they too steal away when I glance up to catch them unawares, and all I see are insignificant roses badly printed on bad paper and cheap cretonne in the tight-meshed tangle of their thorny twigs. (And no prince will break through them to stagger back in disappointment upon finding me here instead of Sleeping Beauty.)

Here, I am finally at home: nestling in my murderer’s den like a fetus in its swollen womb, lovingly depicted by Professor Leblanc’s freckled hand: a ghastly little creature cozily curled up for the somersault of life from the mouth of the womb into the crouched burial position of Stone Age people, woeful little legs drawn up to its blistered forehead, webbed little fists furiously clenched against its blind pug face . . .

In general, there’s a lot of homey secrecy here, in Leblanc’s terms: the brutal iron coat hook on the door (clinical white enamel) is waiting for cattle to slaughter, as if a halved woman were hanging from it, meticulously prepared by the professor’s artistic, carrot-haired hand:

Gaia’s splendidly fleshy, exotic leg (slightly bent at the knee, the foot in the high-heeled shoe of society whores), testifying to the humanity of the fallow anatomy above it:

over the massive thigh (in the evening-shadow tones of the shiny mulatto skin, pouring, as if smoked, from the tender, mucus-glistening constriction of the silk stocking), the elegant arc of the abdominal-wall cross section curves into the intensely downy parabola summit of the vagina, tipping inwardly into the blossom pistil of the uterus—

“Et je vous assure, mon cher ami: c’est pareil chez les noires comme chez les blanches—d’ailleurs, ne me dites pas que vous avez senti la moindre différence”—

over it, the concave red-white-red stripes of the rib cage—

“Et voyez-vous: l’intérieur du thorax est tout à fait—mais tout à fait égal chez les unes comme chez les autres: bien entendu à l’extérieur il y a quand même des variantes . . .”

and from the throat, as if blown by the pipe of an art-glass blower: a wolf-toothed grin, forcing its way like cigarette smoke through the labyrinth of the frontal sinus and nasal cavity.