We intend to pass a month at Nice from next week onwards. Until Sunday, you can write to me here. As soon as I know my new address, I will let you know.
You say your dogs are in good health? I am happy to hear it. I send a loving caress to all, and particularly to my fat Smike.
I leave you. They are waiting for me to have tea. Au revoir. A million kisses.
LILIAN.
MADAME ARVEL TO JACKY.
Hotel Joli-Site, Monaco. February 1, 1898.
My dear Mr. S.,
I wish to thank you for your kindness, but really when I spoke about you going to see my dogs during my absence, it was only a joke, and I should never have dared to give you that trouble. I am delighted nevertheless, as I am now quite reassured about them. It is not necessary to be in Paris to have the influenza, as my mother has told you. I have had it, and severely too, although I am in the land of the sun.
We intend to remain another three weeks here; we wished to go and live at Nice, but the Carnival is shortly about to begin and it will be too noisy for Mr. Arvel.
I am pleased to hear that my pudding had such success; had I known it, I should have sent you a bigger slice, but that will be for next year.
Mr. Arvel begs me to thank you for the very interesting newspapers you sent him.
Lilian was very happy to hear you had seen Blackamoor and found him well. She charges me with her thanks, and says you must caress Smike and Sally Brass, and all the others for her.
We have magnificent weather here and yet I long to be home again; the hotel food is very bad.
We hope that on our return to Sonis, you will do us the pleasure to come and see us often, and in the meantime I pray you to accept the assurance of my good and sincere friendship.
ADELE ARVEL.
I remember visiting Sonis, reviewing the dogs, conversing with the grandmother, whose acquaintance I made for the first time, tipping the servant, hearing that Madame Arvel had the influenza, and returning to Paris, when I wrote to Nice.
I also wrote to Lilian, and gave her to understand that I was not an ordinary lover. I was not jealous, I put no check upon her liberty, nor did I venture to criticize her conduct in any way. I wished her to enjoy herself, to flirt, and do as she liked. I only wanted her love, as long as she chose to bestow it on me. I suppose I must have said that I was grieved by her long silence, and that I did not require long letters, only a line now and again to show that I was not forgotten.
Her allusions to her own frankness and stupidity I must now explain.
Before what I venture to call my first possession of her body, after a fashion, I had asked her who taught her to kiss so nicely. She frankly told me that she had carried on a strictly platonic intrigue when she was apprentice at Myrio's, with a young law-student, who she called Gaston, but more familiarly: “Baby.” He used to wait for her when she left the workroom in the evening and take the train with her to Sonis, going back to Paris alone. He had kissed her lips, she said, and that was all. She added that he was fond of talking very lewdly, and liked to tell her what he wished to do to her if he could get her in his power-“just like you,” she added.
One evening, in the railway carriage, he suddenly seized her by the two wrists and, throwing her skirts up to her waist, tried to violate her. She struggled and got away from him, when he burst out crying and begged her pardon.
He was always writing to her and I saw one of his letters. Sometimes he wrote in very free terms. I have a distinct recollection of some long story, where he said his family were forcing him to marry a rich woman, and he intended to get divorced and come back to Lilian. It appears he had arrived at Sonis one night and made his way into the garden, intending to climb up to her window, but Papa had come out with a gun, and he had jumped over the wall and escaped.
All this seemed very strange and rather rambling, but I did not cross-examine her. I think she also added that “Baby” had sent his sister to negotiate a marriage, but she had turned traitor after a visit to Mr. Arvel, who frankly confessed that he had not a penny to give Lilian, and that her husband must take her in English fashion for better or worse.
How much of this story was false or true, I know not, but I wish to make an avowal at once which will show the reader what a perverted debauchee I was.
I loved to hear Lilian tell me about her platonic lover, Gaston. Her story of the attempted rape acted upon my senses like an aphrodisiac, and I often made her repeat it.
I wanted all the details. I would ask her if he saw her sex, or only her drawers, and how high her skirts were up.
I felt that I should like to see her in the arms of a strange man, or I dreamt of causing her to be shamelessly exposed and outraged by a woman in my presence.
The idea that her mother's lover desired her, and I was sure he did, transported me with lust, and I used to watch them narrowly. I loved to see him romp with her, slap her posteriors outside her clothes, and, putting his hand a little way up her petticoats, pinch her calves.
She always used to say she would never leave her Pa, and I used to agree with her in front of him, and tell her that she could not do better than to love and obey him blindly.
I knew that she would make a wonderful instrument of pleasure if properly attuned. I came to the conclusion that she had been caressed, handled and dandled, and mauled about, ever since her early infancy by her Papa and Gaston, without counting any other male and female playmates I knew not of, and that is why she so freely accepted all my ideas, and was not surprised at my retreat in front of the fortress of her virginity.
Although she excited my sensual longings to the fullest extent, I yet felt great tenderness for her. I took an interest in her, as I could see her mother was selfish and stupid, and that Mr. Arvel, for reasons best known to himself, was not giving her proper advice. I wanted to enjoy her artificial love, which was quite an enervating novelty for me, and yet teach her honesty, and I was always thinking of her interests and her future. I could not do much for her, but I wanted her to find a worthy husband and go to him a virgin. I told her so. I made her understand that on the day of her marriage I would retire from her life, and whatever I felt I would keep to myself. She always answered that I should be her lover. I also told her that without marriage she could always tell me frankly if she tired of our connection and I would go from her without a word. I tried to put her at her ease and above all not to lure her on with false promises or lying tales.
I said I was vile, but may I not timidly plead that I was honest in my lewd way?
LILIAN TO JACKY.
Sunday evening.
(No date.) Received February 8, 1898.
My beloved,
A word in haste on this wretched paper that I find by chance and with this atrocious pen. You demanded it, so much the worse for you!
I have hardly time to breathe here.
And see, now I must leave you. They are calling me!
I kiss you all over… madly!
LILY.
I was very busy and very ill. The sharp attack of influenza I had undergone, and which I caught from my Lily, who had it still very badly, had left me weak and depressed, and I felt pains in all my joints, such as I had never experienced before.
My mistress was dreadfully, dangerously, ill. I shared her bed of agony, and her condition required that the heat of the room would be kept up over 70°F. We were at the fag-end of a disagreeable winter, and I often rose in the night to attend to her wants, and hurried into the other rooms, where the thermometer would be at freezing point.
I finished The Horn Book, and sent the manuscript to my good friend Vanderpunk.
My new chemical invention was put on the market on the ninth of February. I could scarcely stand, and it was all I could do to muffle myself up in a fur coat and go to my Lily's bedside.