Following that first contact and conquest, Duncan offered up a marvelous spectacle to an unsuspecting potential audience of students, teachers, administrators, and five different orders of monks, none of whom would have sanctioned the holiness of lust between teacher and student if they’d been awake to see it. For more than two years, Duncan slunk, sneaked, crept, crawled, climbed, and slithered past various obstacles to be with his beloved. The logistics of these lust-driven maneuvers were perhaps as complex as Duncan’s perilous wanderings belowground, and almost as dangerous. If caught, Duncan would be fired and barred from teaching elsewhere in the city.

Having already exhausted the careers of respectable historian and pseudonymous writer-for-hire, I would have thought Duncan would be wary of ruining a third. And in a way, I guess he was—he took great care to be precise. His meticulousness took the form of a map to guide him in his strategic penetrations of Sabon’s room. Each method of penetration had elements to recommend it. Some involved the excitement of speed, while others, in their lengthy explorations, yielded pleasures of a different kind. All, however, flirted with discovery; there would never be any safe way to enter Sabon’s room. “Neither in the morning nor the night,” Duncan wrote with a kind of unintentional poetry, “neither at noon nor at sunset.” (Bonmot thought it showed a new level of devotion to the Academy, the way I would often trade the comforts of my apartment for a sad barren room on the premises.)

Complicating matters, Academy rules dictated that all students change rooms every semester, presumably to make trysts more difficult, although two or three girls got pregnant every year anyway. Therefore, Duncan had to readjust his perambulations every six months or so.

Duncan used three routes to Sabon’s room during her sixth semester at the school. These routes constitute “love letters” in the purest sense of the term. Indeed, in his madness, in his missives to Sabon he even gave them names: