Camilla was, it goes without saying, more subtle than Sharon. She conducted an altogether classier campaign. She never descended to mathematical persuasion, for example, multiplying the 120 days of Sodom by the number of times she had failed to achieve satisfactory orgasm and leaving me in no doubt as to the magnitude therefore of the debt I still owed her. She never made any reference to the coincidence of our birthdays – except once, when she told me that de Sade was very short, shorter even than Hardy, and wondered whether it was my opinion that such was the fate of all people born on June 2, Something-other-and-40. She never organized things so that I would find myself helpless but well-dressed in a room with a regressive hypnotherapist, either, despite Harry Vilbert’s presence in our lives. And I’m certain that it never once crossed her mind to sit a photograph of de Sade (Camilla could have found one had she wanted) next to one of mine in a pretty frame on her bedside table. But just like Sharon she took to leaving apposite quotations on scraps of paper in conspicuous places – L’émotion de la volupté n’est autre sur notre âme qu’une espèce de vibration produite, au moyen des secousses que l’imagination enflammée par le souvenir d’un objet lubrique, to take one instance, showed up one morning sellotaped to my shaving mirror; le besoin du mal est le premier mobile de nos caprices fell out of a packet of breakfast cereal. Sharon-like also, she opened up correspondences with some notable international Sadeians (I put my foot down, by the way, when she proposed that one of us, preferably her, take up an invitation to a weekend conference in a château outside Nantes), and left copies of the novels where I would either have to pick them up or break my neck falling over them. Les Crimes de l’amour was kept permanently, with its spine facing out, under the bottom left leg of Camilla’s bed (the side I entered from), where it served to correct the picturesque slope of the bedroom floor; Aline et Valcour, ou le Roman Philosophique – Écrit à la Bastille un an avant la Révolution de la France, et orné de seize gravures originaux doubled as our only coffee table book and indeed our only coffee table when we moved into the Sheep Pen; and I don’t know how many contes et fabliaux, how many lettres et cahiers personnels, ended up open under my nose, having been used as trays to carry coffee and biscuits, or as coasters to stop me putting a dripping wine glass directly on to one of the seize gravures originaux. I was particularly shocked one afternoon, when I was helping Camilla to re-hang her bedroom curtains and needed something to stand on, to discover that I’d been handed a limited edition of a German translation of what was still Camilla’s favourite – Die hundertzwanzig Tage von Sodom, oder die Schule der Ausschweifung. If she’s now reading him in German, I thought, then it’s serious.