I wrap her in a violet bath towel (from Ernst Jünger’s Paris Diary: “. . . She invited me to have a cup of chocolate—I brought her a bouquet of violets”). I rub her dry, powder her armpits with a pistachio-colored puff, kiss her solid purple-brown nipple almost accidentally (“Ah, non—pas maintenant—arrète! Mais tu es un obsédé!”). We change into our evening attire—lounge dress, of course; we have absolutely no intention of going out, au diable with Lasserre and Tour d’Argent; after all, we’re not Americans, on reste à la maison: what France has to offer us is (beyond the bell-tolling of her great architecture, the lark jubilation of her painters, the radiantly spiritual gravity of her wines, the full artful piety of her cuisine) la douceur du foyer, and we enjoy the sweetness of home solemnly, this is what distinguishes us from the barbarians, from the jetting nomads, the civilized steppe-peoples who are assaulting this venerable continent like a scourge of God—we oppose them with the bulwark of an intimate knowledge, a connoisseurship, known only to the most familiar initiates, a sublime culture of specialty shopping, a trained and picky superiority. Thus culturally and politically tasked, we celebrate our sensory feasts: Madame—in her moss-green wool skirt (with a red underweave, roughly the Menzie hunting tartan), below which shine the silver buckles of her patent-leather pumps (Lobb of Paris); above she wears a lobster-colored silk blouse, a peacock-blue cashmere shawl around the shoulders (why didn’t Renoir ever paint a mulatto?)—sets a low table in front of the fireplace in the salon (the staff are not put upon in the evening; they normally prepare the table in the dining room, but tonight we feel like a petit dîner intime): heavy English silver (late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the bowls by Peter Storr), the Baccarat glasses dug up for us by Baalbeck from the collection of the Duc de Mouchy; because of the evening frost, we use the Russian service, a hard, reflecting, ice-colored porcelain with a blue, delicately bled—all but hoar-furred—Cyrillic pattern, and Madame lights the candles in the Empire girandoles; I (in my bottle-green velvet jacket, white spun-silk turtleneck, velvet pumps with embroidered monograms: Camfora of Capri, 1950) break my fingers on the new plastic ice tray. The choice of wines is taken care of, since there’s not much more than some smoked salmon and half a cold grouse from yesterday’s déjeuner (with Putzi Lambrino, Nicky Ravanelli, Marie-Christine de Brouilles, the last almost a bit too yéyé for her sixty-eight years), the problem isn’t great, and we can down our first cuttingly cold vodka (“à la tienne, ma grosse cocotte!”). It’s a pleasure to watch her toss back her head as she pours the drink down her throat, her full neck tensing, her chubby brown hand putting down the glass and reaching for the fork, and it makes me weak to see with what pleasure she pounces on the food: she skewers a piece on the fork, lifts it to the sumptuous cup-shaped blossom of her carnivorous mouth (the rich, soft flesh of smoked salmon is an especially tempting prey), the purple bulges of her lips, notched like elephant hide, spring open, peeling from the two lecherously glittering rows of teeth, which open like a trap (with the rosy reptile head of the tongue lurking in the cavern behind), the lip bulges (smooth now when stretched) gape so greedily that the gums become visible (a jagged wreath of sheer, bright flesh over the bone palisades of the teeth: the jousting collar of a cannibal heraldry), the piece of salmon hovers on the fork tines (precarious moment of predator feeding), cautiously approaching the polymorphous beast—the tongue flicks out, glues itself to the crude piece and draws it in, the teeth snap to, the lip bulges close softly and relentlessly upon the fork, which is pulled out empty.