“Oh, M'sieu, then I do not belong here this night at your side,” Laurette ingeniously countered, employing every resource in her power to stop the odious consummation from taking place. “I did not think my cask was as full of grapes as the others had in theirs. It was unfair, and I should not have been chosen as the winner. You should rightly wed her who squeezed out the most liters.”
“Enough of this time wasting argument, my beauty,” Claude Villiers growled. “If you will not undress by yourself, I will rip your garments from you. I am within my rights; verily, I may even thrash you with a switch if you are not a properly obedient wife to me. It is the law, Laurette.”
Laurette raised her beautiful, tear wet eyes to the ceiling and then falteringly began to remove her gown, while the scrawny bridegroom watched, rubbing his bony hands with lubricious anticipation. Beneath the gown, she wore a camisole and petticoat and drawers, as well as white clockwork stockings made secure on her lower thighs with blue satin rosette-garters. Her dainty feet were shod in little shoes with brass buckles that gleamed. Claude Villiers licked his lips and his voice cracked with feverish anticipation as he next ordered, “And now the petticoat, my pretty one.”
“Oh, please, M'sieu Villiers, I—I have never undressed before in front of a man—will you not let me go into the next room and there put on my nightdress?” Laurette stammered.
“No, my darling pet! As to a nightdress, there is nothing served by it, because it would only have to come off anyway,” he cackled. Then, his eyes narrowing suspiciously, “Do not waste any more time by arguing with me, girl! The petticoat!”
Laurette's dainty little fingers fumbled with the string that held the petticoat snugly about her slim waist and at last managed to loosen the knot; the garment fluttered down to aureole her ankles, and she stepped out of it an entrancing vision in her camisole, drawers and the snugly sheathing white clockwork stockings.
“Now the camisole,” he directed, licking his dry, thin lips again, his beady little eyes bright with the unholy glow of inordinate lust.
“Oh, s—sir,” Laurette quavered, “won't you at least put out the candles? I shall faint away of shame if I must strip all n—naked before you. I am innocent and—and afraid.”
“Which is precisely what makes you so deliciously tempting, you darling little pigeon,” Claude Villiers cackled. “Take comfort in my impatient desire for your charms, my beauty, for I would not be half so excited if I had been told that you had lain with any other man save myself.”
This statement somewhat eased Laurette's fears, for she had dreaded the possibility of Pere Mourier's informing the elderly patron of what had almost transpired between herself and Pierre Larrieu on that grassy knoll the evening after the grape-trampling contest. It gave her courage once again to formulate a chaste entreaty: “Oh, sir, it is just because I have no knowledge whatsoever of a man's desire that I beg you humbly to take pity on my tender modesty and not to force me to that which my good parents have brought me up to regard as sinful and immodest.”
“Your estimable parents have taught you well, my little pigeon. It is right that a virgin keep herself chaste for her wedding night. But look you, this hour has arrived and I, by right of the ceremony this afternoon which made us one, have the sole privilege of exposing all your luscious charms and enjoying them to the fullest. Therefore you, being my wife, must obey my smallest whims, and I now enjoin you to take off the camisole at once, without more delay!”
Laurette bit her lips and flushed hotly as the patron's eyes fixed her with a greedily lustful stare. Finally, she yielded to circumstance, and, shyly turning to one side, fumblingly took hold of the thin garment and drew it over head and shoulders, letting it fall to the floor. She thereupon covered her milky bosom with both arms, and a tremulous, wistful sob escaped her as she thought of her absent lover Pierre Larrieu, to whom she would gladly have made every conceivable sacrifice of her lovely person.
Panting with excitement at the notion that his tender young bride wore only drawers and hose, the elderly patron himself began to divest himself of his clothing, and finally stood stark naked. His bony shanks, his shrunken chest—the emaciated paps of which were hidden by patches of whitesh hair—his bony arms and the almost obscene baldness of his skull, made Laurette's sweet eyes widen in revulsion. But most of all, the sight of his dwindled, shriveled cock and the hairy-gnarled, egg-shaped balls, informed her most glaringly of his impotence as compared with the rugged young virility of the blond youth who had nearly plucked her flower of chastity.
“Come put your milky arms around my neck, my charming pigeon,” he panted, “and kiss your husband as is mete and seemly on this night of our nuptials! Your maidenly confusion is understandable and does your chastity credit, but now that we are alone with none to intrude on or endanger your sweet secrets, prepare yourself to give up all these maidenly vapors and tell yourself it is a woman's sacred duty to pleasure her rightful husband!”
I pitied Laurette with all my heart as I watched her timidly approach the grotesquely naked, grinning old vintner. As her rounded, milky arms hesitantly wound themselves about his withered neck, I caught sight of the glorious firm rondures of her virgin bosom, the soft coral darts of her sweet nipples. To think that such charms must be sacrificed upon so unworthy an altar was odious indeed; Monsieur Claude Villiers was old enough to be, not Laurette's father, but her grandfather. It was, this intended mating, somewhat akin to incest. And even as her milky teaties shudderingly pressed against his shrunken chest, his dwindled cock seemed to pay not the least tribute to such voluptuous young beauty.
“How soft and sweet you are, my beautiful pigeon,” he panted as his hands tremblingly roved over her bare, smooth satiny white back and thence to the succulent hemisphere of her enticing virgin backside, which I had already seen naked under the scourge of Pere Mourier. “You can't know how I've longed to see and feel your nakedness, Laurette! When the good father told me that you were taken with a seizure the night of the contest, I grieved in my dire loneliness. I felt such a loss that I very nearly summoned that bold jade, the Widow Desiree, to console me. So would I have done had I not been told by your good father confessor that he had only just that day engaged her as his own housekeeper.”
I liked this old man less and less after that bragging speech of his, which was in the worst possible taste. I comprehended his motive, however; he was fearful for his own lack of cocksmanship, and now, confronted by so voluptuous a beauty, was desirous of impressing on her innocent mind the belief that he was a vaunted lover to whose bedchamber would come the most passionate wenches in Languecuisse. I vowed to myself to protect Laurette's tender maidenhead to the utmost, so far as it was within my tiny powers.
“S—sir,” Laurette quavered, “please I—let me go this first night. I… I promise I will try my best to be a faithful wife to you, but I am so lonely and despondent at being separated from my dear parents that I cannot find it in my heart to grant you that which you desire of me.”
Monsieur Claude Villiers sniggered at this poetic and poignant declaration. His bony fingers had by now taken hold of the poutingly rounded hemispheres of Laurette's resilient, virgin backside, and he was in no way desirous of relinquishing his fair prize. “Nay, nay, my sweet pigeon, I will be both father and mother to you tonight. And somewhat more, eh, eh, eh!” Then, his face flushed and hardening with angry desire, he commended, “Now I wish to see you without your drawers on, my beauty! All that you possess is now mine, to see, to feel, to caress as I desire! Be quick now!”