This second dancer was far more agile. He bent like a sapling but the beauty was all in his body—none flowed from his mind, which he kept from us, guarded, behind a mask of boyish innocence, and I did not blame him.

We were early and there were fewer than thirty men in the room, and only one spectator had gravitated to the stools hugging the catwalk: a dignified old man in a good wool coat and a cravat—his gin-and-tonic at hand. He had the air of a man who frequented the opera, had a Persian cat at home, and came to the bar in a fit of reminiscence about what it had been to be young and splendid in body—he had not fallen into despair because he had not succumbed to any fallen idea of himself, but remained glorious. Perhaps he read a lot, or was an academic, respected and perhaps once loved but bereaved of that lost and cherished and good love. He had fallen on solitary times yet did not seem to mind. He did not mind being the only man who had pulled a stool up close to the dancer, and he did not appear to lust so much as reminisce. I had the impression that if one were to check his pulse, it would not have quickened: it would indicate nothing but a slightly melancholic reverie.

The third dancer was the first one returned, this time with no underpants, his cock at a kind of half-mast that appeared sustained with the help of a metal object, part of which I perceived glinting behind his testicles. I have seen similar contraptions at Smithfield market on beef cattle waiting to be bought and killed.

“That contraption,” I told Sophie, “reminds me of the failure of all cosmetic falsehood.”

“Stop putting on airs.”

Even in that first September, Sophie knew all about my five months of dissipation in London after Mother forbade me to marry Eliza. Sophie also knew of my whores and my opium and my syphilis. I’d told her about the night I nearly died in the Thames after renting myself to the poisonous descendant of the first Baron of Wigmore. She knew I’d woken more than a few mornings in face-paint and a stythe of civet and musk. But I do not think Sophie understood how the cock-ring on the dancer disturbed me. Its constant violence produced only half an effect: his cock bobbing halfhearted as a forced hyacinth in a cruel April gale.

Sophie had already brought me, on a previous occasion, to a place on Boulevard Saint-Laurent, similar to Stock Bar save that women licked the pole, crawling up and down it pretending themselves in heat. I had felt little then, and I did not feel more now.