“Me? Haven't the least idea. In fact, I'm curious to know how you're going to be able to construct anything at all out of a whore, a clown, and a schoolgirl. You three must have good imaginations!”
“We're not so clever. We just do scenes like in a revue, one after the other.”
That was more like it. Not for you, I suppose, but for me. When you're getting ready to deflower a young girl it's better not to wear out your faculties in advance. I therefore let the three girls split up their roles and even dole one out to their mother although she had no costume. But Ricette, who could not hold herself in, and was hopping from one foot to another like a young girl who needs to take a piss, insisted that her act be the curtain raiser. This upset the whole order of things but did not seem to shock anyone. Ah! How easy it is to run a theatre!
“Sir,” she said to me, “I've come to dine privately with you, but only on the condition that you behave yourself.”
“Why do you want me to behave myself?”
“Because I'm a little tight.”
“But not enough.”
“And because I'm a virgin.”
“Too much. Show it to me. God! What an unfortunate infirmity! How long have you been like this?”
“Ah! Good sir! Ever since birth.”
“Do you suffer?”
“Horribly. It burns me constantly.”
“Are you taking any treatment for it?”
“Oh, yes! Massages. With the end of my finger.”
Despite the laughter from her sisters, Ricette remained sober-faced and serious. She added, softly:
“Four times a day.”
“And nothing else?”
“Oh, yes. But I can't tell you. It's a secret we little girls keep to ourselves.”
“I won't tell a soul!”
“Cross your heart?”
“I swear to you on the perfections of your patron saint, Saint Mauricette.”
“That's not worth anything. She's not on the calendar. I was given a Christian education, sir. I know the three theological virtues and history up to Moses. But Saint Mauricette, since she doesn't exist, has nothing to do with the thing I sit on! And it's not she who will punish me if you give away my secret… Oh! How my head reels! Wonder what I drank to cause that? Can you tell that I'm drunk, sir?”
“No, no. But what is your secret?”
“Mama told me… that to calm down their cherries… without losing them, young girls should… Whew! It's hot in here!.. should massage themselves from behind at the same time that they massage themselves from the front.”
“From behind? But where?”
She showed her teeth ferociously but good-naturedly, a look that seemed to say, “Ah? You don't get it?” Then, with her natural facility for improvisation, she took up once more her role of innocent and continued:
“Mama made me a clown costume with an inch long buttonhole right between my thighs so that I have room for my finger and a little removable panel in the back. You see?”
“But what good does that do?”
“She told me when I was getting dressed, 'Remember to be good now, show that you've been brought up properly, don't say any bad words, but when you see that he's getting a hard-on, you take his prick, you stick some butter into your asshole, and you open your buttocks saying to him that it's the first time you've ever done it. Then you say that it's shameful to do things like that, that you don't even dare confess it at church, and that you'd throw yourself in the river if your mother ever found out about it.' You understand?”
“Is that all she said?”
“No. When she was kissing me good-bye at the door, she said, 'Be sure to finger yourself when he's cornholing you and don't ask him where in the bordello you can shit out the come. But wash yourself out, my child, from your ass to your mouth. Discharge into your slip, puke into the piano, piss into the carafe, earn your fifty francs with your asshole, and above all don't say any bad words.' Don't you understand yet?”
“Less and less. It's your modest nature, miss. You seem to have some difficulty in explaining these things clearly…”
I was becoming twice as malicious and three times as odious, for Mauricette had been playing her role extremely well. And as happy and gay as was her heart and soul, I saw that she was on the brink of flying into a rage. I barely had time enough to say to her while touching her forehead lightly, “Ah! Now I understand!”
“Miracle of Saint Mauricette!” she sighed patiently.
“This little flap of cloth… can I lift it?”
“You still trying to be funny?”
“And see what's underneath, like the little girls at La Rochelle do?”
But we had finished. With my lips on hers I prevented her from replying. My wisecracks were less funny than her act, and I had only prolonged them so that I might draw her out to greater length. I was afraid that at the first contact of our bodies she would put an end to her act, but the love of the stage in young girls is almost as strong as their love of sensual pleasure. For several minutes more, therefore, Ricette kept up her role of beginner alone with a man in a private dining room.
“You see, sir,” she said, “the difference there is between vice and virtue. The shameless women who dance nude wear nothing but a small cloth in front over their sex. While the virgins who give themselves to be cornholed have a little panel that lifts up from the rear and are otherwise completely dressed.” She began laughing uproariously.
“I don't know the secrets that young girls keep too well and I'm afraid that I won't…”
“No, no, kind sir. Let me do it. Mama taught me one thing if nothing else: 'If your customer is a shit, let him cornhole you!'“
She laughed even more this time, but I was fed up. I don't like that kind of joke and she only objected in vain to me that a virgin has the right to be indulged in a few eccentricities while she is being sodomised. Ricette received, for the principle of the thing, two or three little slaps that she well merited. And then… (I forgot to mention one small detail: the room was enormous. Teresa, Charlotte, and Lili were grouped together at the far end of the divan, and we were playing a good distance from them, as in a real theatre. So that Mauricette could speak to me in a low voice without being heard by the other.)… She stopped laughing, turned her head, and said to me ardently but in a low voice, “Is that what you call a slap? Your dick hurts me more than your hand did. Do it again.”
“Certainly not!”
“Yes. Listen to what I'm going to say. I'm going to speak in a very low voice. Remember what you did to Mama without wanting to? Grab me by the hairs, they won't see anything. They'll just think you're beating me off… No, not those hairs there… lower… around the lips… yes, there… pull… pull them… pull them, damn it!.. What the hell are you waiting for? Pull! I'm going to come…”
And she grabbed my hand to make me pull out the hair like a handful of weeds.
The intermission only lasted a minute. To give us a little time to rest up, Lili in her schoolgirl outfit went up to Charlotte dressed like a whore and said with a suspicions air, “You're already sick? I thought your brother's prick had a funny taste this morning.”
When Charlotte's emotions rose to the surface she could retain neither hilarity nor tears. Surprised by this unexpected opening sentence, she laughed behind her hand before replying. Then the scene began, but on a completely different level than Mauricette's. Between she and her two sisters stretched out the long distance from the boarding school to the primary school. Occasionally, Lili could leap the gap, carried by her natural instinct for fantasy; however, Charlotte spoke only the language of obscene and sentimental realism. The role that she had accepted, had in fact demanded, hardly resembled those famous types of Bruant. It was, on the other hand, that of the weary, faint-hearted girl who is used to submitting to all manner of humilities and injuries and (almost a saint without realizing it) who accuses herself first of all as the cause of her troubles.
