The child caught cold and began to cough. This was neglected. She became seriously ill, and as she seemed more excitable since her illness we loved one another too well, in spite of the remonstrances of the doctor and with the natural consequences.
She was very ill during the winter, lingered on through the summer, and when the autumn leaves began to strew the ground, we accompanied poor little Violette to her last resting-place.
Before expiring she had taken me in her arms, saying: “My own Christian, I love you.”
I had a large glass bell placed over her grave, and underneath the Countess and myself planted some of the flowers which had given her a name. For a long time we mourned her loss. Then Florence's love on the one side, and the incidents of everyday life on the other, effaced little by little the bitter recollection of the supreme parting.
I even forgot on the anniversary of her death to go and gather the tiny flowers, the roots of which fed on the substance of my beloved little mistress.
The Countess was more faithful to the memory of poor Violette, and sometimes sent me the flowers with but one word:
“Ungrateful man!”
And now that the story of our short-lived love has come to an end, I have nothing more to do than roll up my MS., tie it up, and, happen what may, I throw it at random on the desk of some intelligent publisher who may be clever enough to catch it up.
Sweet Seventeen Sweet Seventeen: the True Story of a Daughter's Awful Whipping and its Delightful if Direful Consequence
Anonymous
What is there in the air of Paris which leads us all on to excesses of erotic appetite? Why is sensual gratification the be-all and end-all of the dwellers in the French capital, not dubbed the “Gay City” for nothing?
The atmosphere is transparently clear; the climate is relaxing. Most of the Parisian females are anaemic, and their nerves get the upper hand. Is it the same with the males, perchance in a lesser degree, so that we may diffidently put forward the hypothesis that neuropaths predominate in the population of the pretty town?
There is not the slightest doubt, be the reasons what they may, that the craving for copulation takes hold of the most frigid individuals of both sexes when once they live within the Lutetian walls.
Oliver Sandcross, born and bred in London, was a splendid example of our bold sweeping theory. Here was an English gentleman, well brought up, and a noted engineer, rather pious too-that is the extraordinary part of it all- who developed the most satyr-like tastes when he settled down in Paris, with his wife and only child, a daughter. The capricious fairy, electricity, whose secrets have only been but slightly fathomed in the last few years, had tempted staid Oliver, and he became one of the most ardent seekers after the advantages to be gained in subjugating this new force. Brilliant offers, relating to lighting and tramways, had caused him to take up his residence in Paris, where, originally wealthy, he made more money than he knew what to do with.
Soon after his arrival, his religious habits dropped away from him, and after business hours he found the greatest pleasure and delight in hunting for feminine prey among venal beauties of all ranks. He admitted every specimen to the album of his fancy, from the married woman, met with at friends' houses and received in his own, to the short-skirted, twelve-year-old flower-girl of the Boulevards. Of the intermediate stages on the rungs of the ladder of lust, it would take us too long to talk, although a classification of Paris prostitution would be a tempting task for the student of psychopathy-if indeed it were possible to establish in schematic form the odds and ends of masculine and feminine humanity which go to make up the alluring and ever-changing kaleidoscope of Paris “on the loose”.
Mr. Sandcross had tried everything in turns and nothing long, and his libidinous, almost insensate curiosity had led him to essay what new joys could be found in the depilated arms of effeminate, degenerate lads; some who had proposed themselves to the merry, rich Englishman in good society and others fresh from the workbench, selling their half-starved bodies for pocket-money. In justice to our sturdy Anglo-Saxon, we hasten to state that Socratic vice did not hold him long. His curiosity glutted, he returned to lavish his money on the petticoated little animals who are said to rule the world because their hands rock the cradle. But we think their domination arises from the fact of us men placing our sceptre in their adroit fingers.
Oliver Sandcross confessed to forty-seven years of age when he first came to live in France, a few years ago, and he was a fine specimen of a fifty-year-old rake. He was fair, bald, with a florid complexion and a brown beard rapidly getting white; not too tall; very stout; fine eyes, and a fleshy mouth moist with lechery and full of real sound teeth. In fact, the type of an arthritic, healthy, athletic voluptuary, full of energetic lewdness, with only room in his brain for two hobbies: electricity, with which he obtained gold, and voluptuousness which led him to scatter the yellow coins broadcast.
There was nothing to check him in his lustful career. Moral scruples he had none, remorse and repentance had been left on the threshold of the last church he had frequented, and his wife, luckily for him, never troubled him. She was a pure-minded English gentlewoman, very pretty, and full of love for her husband. She swore by him, adored him, tended him, and he comprised the whole world for her. There was plenty of jealousy in her composition, but it had never been aroused, because nothing could shake her faith in her Oliver. He was the soul of honour in her eyes, incapable of telling a lie or doing a mean action. Had Mrs. Sandcross found her lord in the arms of another woman, she would have turned away from the disgusting sight, merely marvelling at the wonderful resemblance to her husband of the man she had seen. Her good, kind female friends, following the promptings of Christian duty, had tried to perform the mischievous operation known “as opening her eyes”. They had all signally failed, for the simple reason that this confiding helpmate did not really understand their perfidious innuendoes. One and all came to the ultimate conclusion that Mrs. Sandcross was either a born fool, or else she shut her eyes to her husband's “goings-on', and therefore they left her to enjoy a life of felicity in her fool's paradise. She was indeed a most happy woman, bathing in daily delight between the attentions of her kind husband, who was generous to a fault, careful, and thoughtful; grateful at not being troubled by the woman who bore his name and looked after his household, and the unceasing devotion of her handsome daughter.
No lovelier creature, no more perfect picture of a graceful English virgin could have been seen than Fanny Sandcross, the petted offspring of a lewd father and an indulgent mother. Miss Sandcross was tall-too tall, said hypercritical observers-overtopping her father by an inch or two. But what perfection of form; firm bust; tiny waist; swelling hips; massive spherical posteriors; wee feet and hands; satin, fair skin; masses of auburn hair; a tip-tilted, thoroughly Anglo-Saxon nose; with rose-leaf nostrils palpitating at the least emotion; a small mouth with pulpy red lips, and her father's perfect dentition. Her eyes would have been nearly sufficient to cause her to be adored even were her other charms less overpowering. They were blue, grey, or violet; according to the light, or the ideas of colour of the person who looked at her, but we should say they were of the last-named rare hue. Shaded with long lashes and surmounted by arched brows, they were full of ever-changing expression, but what dominated was a look of almost babyish curiosity. She seemed always as if just born to the world and its mysteries; as if interrogating her interlocutor and begging him to tell her something more; some fact that he might be hiding from her. Fanny gave the impression of perfect innocence and purity, and her portrait when she was fifteen would have formed a model embodiment of unspoiled girlhood.
It is far from wonderful for a maid to conduct herself with all the artlessness of a sweet angelic creature as yet unsullied by the least polluting contact; guarded by vigilant parents from surroundings calculated to tarnish the mirror of her virtue, but what was miraculous in the case of the beautiful Miss Sandcross was that she knew everything that a young girl of fifteen should not know. The more her terrible precocious insight into the secrets of sex increased, the more artless was her bearing. Some ancient Puritan strain must have caused her naturally to be able to touch pitch with an outward semblance of undefiled sinlessness which we may mention at once never left her all her life.
When we say her cognizance of forbidden subjects was peculiar and extensive, it must be understood that she was fully enlightened on all womanly mysteries, and there was no vice of venery which she could not catalogue, but her comprehension of the lascivious list of the hidden vices of humanity was far from being categorically formulated in her budding brain. What she knew, she had heard about and read about, but it had not yet taken a real shape in her mind. She was like a young lad revelling in the perusal of military history and bloody battles, but quite unable to realize the horrors of warfare and its saddening results.
This young damsel had been initiated in a very simple manner. When she came to Paris with her parents, she was fourteen and fresh from an English select academy for young ladies. Her mother, wrapped up in her husband
