Anonymous: Tableaux Vivants

How will you have your little jewel treated to-day, Duchess? Shall I simply make the tip of my agile tongue frisk about this fresh clitoris perfumed with violet water? Do you wish me to take it between my lips, where I shall roll it like a crisp almond made by a confectioner a la mode? I will make it feel the shuddering touch of my teeth ready to devour this sensitive flesh. Or would you prefer this libertine tongue to entirely enter your slit? Will you hold open the red lips yourself, and whilst my finger is gently rubbing the button of love, it will seek a rose-drop at the bottom of the chalice?”

“None of these,” my mistress said to me. “Simply recite your poem on our Mother Eve, and relate to me your old amours.”

I am a poet, you see, my dear lady reader. I am also a man without prejudices. You will see this equally, very soon. I am called Richard de la Brulaye. Twenty-eight years old, rich, a handsome cavalier, a sharp blade and one who knows his way about, ready to love many women and caress all those whom I do not love and who are good-looking.

At your service and always ready-I close this parenthesis.

Seated at the feet of my Duchess, my head on her knees, I commenced the chant which she had desired to hear.

It is said that the Spirit of Evil in ancient time appeared to our Mother Eve in the form of a serpent.

Do not believe it. Satan never chooses to take any other form than the human one, because it is under this form he can do most ill. He presented himself, then, to our mother under the form of a beautiful young man.

That which he presented to her was not an apple, it was a gland.

Eve found this fruit of love polished, sweet, and shining. Beyond this, it seemed enormous to her. And she judged it superior in every respect to that of Adam, who was too fond of sleeping in the grass, and whose virile embellishments were always a little dirty.

Satan perceived without any trouble the impression which he had produced on this naive soul. Accordingly he abused it.

He raised the gland to Eve's face and said to her, “Kiss it.”

She did so, and her lips, guided by nature, proved so skilful that the juice sprang from it.

Then she recognised that this precious object had no less flavour than charm. This, with her usual ingenuousness, she unhesitatingly confessed to her seducer, who said to her, “Wait a little.”

It would not be worth while being the Devil if one had not diabolical vigour.

Satan threw our mother down on the greensward and did her in the grocer fashion.

He turned her over and did her in the greyhound fashion.

He begged her to lie on him, and this time she did him in the street-boy manner.

After which, not being yet satisfied, he turned her over for the second time and did her a la Grecque.

In her backside, Madame, if it do not displease you, as at Sodom. Eve cried out a little, but found it good.

Thus she had tasted the gland in all manners, and sucked up with her every mouth the divine liquor which issues from it.

As this history is difficult to relate to children, they tell them that this gland was an apple.

It was nevertheless a gland.

My Duchess listened to me, laughing.

“That is an amusing fancy,” she said to me. “Now, let us go on to your good stories. I wish to enjoy through my ears until to-morrow.”

She made me sit in front of her; I had my two hands under her petticoats. The Duchess held between her rosy fingers the hero of the little poem which I had just recited, His Highness My Gland, in an exalted attitude.

I commenced about ten o'clock in the evening the tales you are going to read. Day broke whilst I was still speaking.

But listen!

Ladies, I tell you truthfully, clitorsation is a means of enjoyment more efficacious than agreeable. I am firmly of opinion that it was invented to triumph over the resistance of nature. The first person who tickled a clitoris was an unfortunate futterer.

There are disinherited creatures to whom heaven has refused the gift of pleasure. The warmest kisses, the liveliest embraces, cannot give warmth to these living lumps of marble; the finger is the last resource; no woman can resist a learned forefinger.

But those to whom this operation is necessary enjoy in the same manner as they give birth. In their pangs the lover's fingers rake into their gulf, seeking the rebellious clitoris, touching it, pressing it, furiously rubbing it. And she, “You — you are flaying me!”

And she writhes in a nervous paroxysm. The pleasure tears her like the lightning rends the cloud; it is no more lasting than the lightning.

There are clitorises, on the contrary, which you need but graze to give them life. Clitorisation is truly a touchstone; and if the mare quivers under the first touches of the finger which caresses her, use discretion and art. If she has never been touched before-

Ah! It is a delicate operation tickling a virgin. There, experience is everything. You tickle at a venture. A sigh, a start, ought to warn you that the crisis is near. Sometimes the ingenue shrinks away: “You go-you go too fast!”

A man of wit, who was also a great libertine, was accustomed to say, “God has done me the favour to give me slow fingers!”

Lightness alone does not suffice; you must in addition touch exactly. The clitoris flees, you have to seize it. You have probably never clitorised any of your mistresses without her having said to you in the course of the work, “It isn't there.”

How clumsy men are! Women know much better how to take hold of it. This is what justifies Lesbos.

Still, even when two women render to each other the eminent service of tickling one another, the business is not perfect. The most accomplished tribade sometimes touches on one side.

One is best clitorised by oneself only.

“It is not there!” said Valentine to me. The scene of our rendezvous was, to say the least of it, strange. It was a barred window, onto the sill of which Valentine had climbed. And I had hoisted myself up as well as I could to the top of a large stone. I had passed my hand through the iron bars. Needless to say it was night.

Not the slightest means of exchanging a kiss. Nothing but this sterile titillation which I could not even apply with a sure finger.

Thus I could not awaken even a symptom of pleasure in Valentine. However, she returned my caresses. Stretching her hand through the bars in her turn, she followed the lessons which I had taught her, with a playful movement. The result was prompt. My semen fell on the ground. “This is what they call plucking a goose,” said I to Valentine.

And yet to think that it only depended upon myself to enter this house, to find in it an opportunity of holding this pretty girl quite naked in my arms, of warming this living statue! Yes- but it would be necessary to kiss her mother.

One always has to kiss the mother! It is a hard necessity. Although Madame de Meissiat was well into her fifties, she was still all aflame-true Greekfire, which, once fastened to anything, never ceases biting and cannot be extinguished. She had sworn that she would possess me, that she would hold me buried in the ocean of her aged flesh. And Valentine knew it!

But this night, having in vain waited for any pleasure from my clumsy touchings through the iron bars, not having felt anything, and hoping everything from a long kiss and a real embrace taken without constraint, she said to me, “Richard, it would cost you very little to make yourself amiable to my mother!”