Anonymous - The Autobiography of a Flea, Book 3

With this he donned his cassock, but in taking it up from where he had laid it the night before, he swung it against the chest, and I was half affrighted out of my senses, for the locket swung against the unyielding oaken coffer with a noisy thud that fairly dashed me from one end to the other inside my cramped metal prisons and all of Laurette's silken lovecurls piled upon me and very nearly suffocated me with their soft caressing mass.

“Ah, what is this?” he muttered half to himself, and forthwith put his hand into his pocket, and all at once I felt myself lifted up into the air. Oh, happy moment, that he had deigned to take notice of the touching memento which gentle golden-haired Laurette had gently bestowed upon her young niece Marisia, for now at least there sprang into my being the ray of hope that I might yet be freed.

But not, alas, at that moment. I heard him say, to himself, “Ah, I recognize this trinket! It has graced the white throat of sweet little Marisia, and so it is dear to me, and I will keep it safe upon my person as my own memento of our joyous meeting. Impressionable as the dear child is, it would not be seemly to let her pine for the bucolic days she knew at Languecuisse, for she has a destiny that brooks no recollections of the past.”

And with this, he thrust me back into the pocket of the cassock, deeper than before, whereupon I rubbed my legs together in a furious outburst of powerless rage.

How long would it be before he again deigned to notice me, I asked myself with some brief anxiety in the matter. Oh, I did not need nourishment for quite some time yet, but the day must inevitably come when the pangs of hunger would urge me to spring upon some portly man or, better still, the delicate, soft, perfumed, gently nurtured flesh of a female in the prime of life and draw sustenance to strengthen me. Was there no way to emerge from this metal dungeon, whose confines were all too limited as regards scenery and freedom of movement? I had faith, so far as mementos went, I did not need this incarceration amid the pussy-curls of sweet Laurette; I would never forget her – I could not, since her haunting intimacy had been strongly with me from that very first moment when she had taken the scissors to her dainty lovegarden and depilated herself of that sweet spring of dark golden cunny-hair in whose silken bed I had been so obliviously reposing!

The ordinary flea would, at this point, doubtless have given way to his trepidations arid, resigning himself to doom by starvation and suffocation, believed that at least if he must come to a final end, there could be no more hallowed way to die than about the person of a doughty ecclesiastic who had shown his mettle against sinners full many a time. But I am no ordinary flea, and therefore I could only be impatient with such meek resignation. No, I was destined too for great things, or I would not have been chosen out of my millions of colleagues to chronicle the foibles of man and maid and to observe how righteousness goeth before a fall (into a maiden's or even a widow's bed!)

I consoled myself with the anodyne of recalling that Marisia had several times mentioned, with nostalgic tenderness, her liaison with her young aunt Laurette. Then this tender sentiment must one day sharply restore her yearnings for those happy days when she and her aunt completed with such cunning carnal collaboration to thwart the senile lusts of old Monsieur Villiers. And when that day came, she would recall the locket and cajole Father Lawrence into restoring it to her, I was certain.

Then suddenly the hideous thought sprang into mind-what if, on reaching St. Thaddeus, it became incumbent upon Father Lawrence to don a new style of cassock, for every order has its own identifying habit? And what if the cassock in which I was tucked away were sent to be laundered as is often done by Amazonian beldames with massive biceps who wash clothing in a stream and beat it dry with great rocks which they dash pitilessly upon it with their powerful hands? Oh, that I should come to my death by being ignominiously squashed by the concussion of stone against metal brought into fatalistic conjunction by the harsh and unloving hand of a robust female after having paid poetic tribute to the gentleness of human womankind all my articulate days!

But I sternly rebuked myself for even considering this theoretical – if all too void – possibility. No, I was made of sterner stuff, else would I have perished long ago from the annoyed slap of some pompous prelate whose flaccid, obese posterior I had bitten in quest of my dinner, or the petulant fillip of the fingers of some courtesan who, finding that she had an undetermined itch in her hinder or pubic parts, did by ill luck encounter me in her gropings and so snuff out my bright golden youth. And since all fleas are necessarily fatalists, to the extent that even the most superannuated vanity which they oft borrow from the two-legged species does not delude them into believing they are or ever can be immortal, I comforted myself with the knowledge that I could not have lived so long as this and done so much and expounded so much of human fripperies and caprices unless I were fated to go on yet a little time to know the end of Father Lawrence's peregrinations and, more particularly, why destiny had decreed that I was to return nolens volens to the odious Seminary of St. Thaddeus.

During my ruminations, there had been a knock at the door and a humble seaman entered, charged by the cook at his galley to provide breakfast for the four passengers. The man had vision, whatever else may be said for him, for after Father Lawrence had taken the tray with effusive thanks, he whistled softly under his breath, and remarked in coarse French which truly smacked of the port of Marseilles, “Ma tete, si ces jolis cons-la ne sont gatees d'demeurer avec un pere qui est aussi Pere et ne peut pas les basier comme il faut,” which was a very whimsical play on words, since the translation came to “By the head of my prick, what a shame that these lovely cunts aren't wasted staying the night with a father who's also a Father and so may not fuck them as their tastiness merits.”

But Father Lawrence had ears as sharp as his own worthy hymen-rending implement, for he countered swiftly before the seaman could quit the cabin, “Les bon vintages ne gatent jamois d'attendre,” which means “Good wine only improves the more by waiting to drink it.” I heard a gasp from the seaman, who doubtless had not expected so apt a riposte, and then the cabin door banged to, and Father Lawrence, with a dulcet tone to his voice as if this interchange of bons mots had sharpened his appetite for food as well as for cunt, exclaimed, “My daughters, fall to and eat your fill while I say grace for the bounty of manna which the Lord provideth, and then let us go on deck so we may disembark among the first. I am eager to convey you safely to the coach which takes the high road to Somerset, so we may be at our ease in the good inn there. It happens I know the landlord there as I might my own brother, and he will set before us a Lucullan feast of good roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and a Stilton cheese and ale and a gooseberry tart dripping with rich juice out of its fragrant brown crust, and then, I warrant you, my daughters, you will not look ill upon our England.”

So for the next four hours of that disembarkation, I jogged along in his pocket as the coach, swaying and creaking, took the high road to Somerset. Marisia sat beside the English ecclesiastic, and when the driver took a perilous turn in the road with a noisy crack of his whip and a loud oath to his horses, Marisia swayed against Father Lawrence so suddenly that I almost felt the metal locket pinch together; had she been goodly of girth, this might well have happened and my story would have ended here upon this high road to the village of Somerset, which was halfway to London and the odious Seminary.