He took her in his arms, where she remained limply folded like a crumpled-up scarf, and put her back to bed like a child, straightening her out, drawing the bearskin over her feet, and talking to her with comic pedantry to make her laugh:

“Aristotle says in his Problems: Why is it not helpful in love to have cold feet?”

Then he recited some of Florian’s fables:

A little monkey gathered

A nut in its green shell. . .

Suddenly they realized that they were hungry.

They threw themselves on the table laden in Gargantuan fashion, and ate like poor people in a soup kitchen, poor people with their guts hollowed out by apéritifs designed for billionaires.

The “Indian” consumed all the red meats and Ellen all the pastries, but he did not drink all the champagne, as the woman took for herself the foam of the first glass from each bottle. She bit into it as though crunching meringues.

Then she embraced her lover, so that on top of his red make-up he was coated with sugary substances all over his body.

Later they made love twice. . . They had plenty of time, it was not yet two in the afternoon.

Then they slept, and were still sleeping like the dead at eleven twenty-seven that evening.

The doctor, his head nodding, and ready to fall asleep himself, inscribed the total so far reached:

70

and put away his fountain pen.

Theophrastus’ figure had been equaled, but not surpassed.

At eleven twenty-eight Marcueil awoke, or rather that part of him that constituted the Indian had awakened before him.

Under his embrace, Ellen cried out in pain, rose, slightly staggering, one hand at her throat and the other on her genitals, her eyes ferreted about her like those of a sick man looking for his medicine, or an ether addict looking for his Lethe. . .

Then she fell back on the bed. Through her clenched teeth her breath made the same imperceptible bubbling sound that is made by crabs, creatures who, perhaps, hum what they try to remember of the Sirens’ song. . .

Her body still seeking to escape the intensity of its burning, her mouth yet found the “Indian’s” mouth. . .

And she remembered no more pain.

They had thirty minutes left before midnight, enough time for them to live once more counting what had gone before, through what had previously been considered the limits of human forces. . .

82

wrote Bathybius.

When they had finished, Ellen sat up, arranged her hair, and stared at her lover with hostile eyes.

“That wasn’t the least bit funny,” she said.

The man picked up a fan, half opened it, and then, taking a swing, slapped her face with it.

The woman jumped, drew from her hair a long, sword-shaped pin and, vengeance-bent, aimed it at Marcueil’s eyes, which were shining on a level with her own.

Marcueil allowed his force to act: his eyes protected themselves.