which opens the gates of happiness is so frequently linked with unpleasant happenings. For instance: a poor stranger who feels completely secure in my bedroom gets caned so unmercifully that he breaks his arm. Because I am afraid that I will be held responsible for this tragic incident I flee to my neighbor, the canon of the cathedral, who brings me to the home of Madame Thomas. But that is not the last of it. Aside from the ill luck I just mentioned, I hear the next day that the dealer in simony was killed by the fragments of his own church and buried under the ruins. And because of this unexpected death I gain a place of refuge without any strings attached thanks to my new landlady.
The confusing emotions caused by my present situation released a flood of tears from which Madame Thomas assumed I mourned the dear departed. Thereupon we cried together for a few minutes. But then the good woman, who was a natural enemy of woe and sorrow, tried to console me. And she was more successful with her quaint suggestions than any doctor would have been with all the pathos of Christian morality.
“Come on now, Mademoiselle, keep your chin up,” she said. “Now you have to use your head. Even if we keep moaning and groaning till the Day of Judgment, it will do absolutely no good. God's will happens. And after all, we are still very much alive. It is his own fault that he is dead now. Yes, yes, I really mean that. What in the devil was the use of it to take this morning to go to an early mass. He does that at the most only four times a year and he had to pick the day that the cathedral collapsed. They would have sung the mass just as beautifully without him hanging around. That's what the singers are paid for. It is just like my cousin Michaut always says, 'You cannot trust death.' The very moment we think about it the least, it hits us. If we had told the dear departed yesterday, 'Dear canon, you don't have to squeeze and touch that beautiful goose we are going to eat tomorrow because you won't be invited to the meal!' he would have sworn upon his honor that no matter what happened he was going to have his share. You see, that's how easy it is to make a mistake. It is truly a pity, because the goose would successfully grace the table of a queen. Yes, yes, let us keep a happy heart. All the trouble in the world that we make for ourselves does not help us to pay a single penny of our debts. And — just between you and me — you haven't lost much. He was one who could talk girls into doing almost anything and he would promise more butter than bread. And then it would not bother his conscience at all to let the poor things wait till they were green in the face, after he had used and scolded them. And one of his greatest mistakes was that he always thought about his belly. He was drunk most of the time and owed everybody in the neighborhood money. You see, it does not even help to bring him back when I tell you the truth about him. Truly, he wasn't even worth the price of a sucked-out egg.”
Madame Thomas proved to me with her eulogy for the old gentleman that our servants are but spies who make themselves judges of our morals and who are the more dangerous because they lack the power of discrimination and never see our good deeds. They are twice as malicious if they are unable to find our weaknesses and imperfections. She gave me a very long speech and everything in it was exactly the opposite from what she had to say about Brother Alexis. It is true that his way of life was such as to earn the panegyric of any female connoisseur. I just say this because I have enough imagination to fancy his ability and I have often regretted that so much talent was rendered almost inactive since it was forced to slumber under the modest rags and tatters of a mendicant monk.
CHAPTER NINE. BROTHER ALEXIS
To avoid being accused that my account is rambling and not written down in proper order, let us wait till this slovenly lewd monk pay's his next visit to Madame Thomas before I tell you my story about him. But the evil is never that bad; let's allow him to come in while our dear landlady is turning the goose with which she is going to feed him.
You will be able to imagine that I saw a tall, erect, muscular, heavy-boned man with a full beard and a fresh, rosy complexion. His lively, penetrating eyes were fiery and their mischievous twinkle caused a tickling sensation slightly lower than my heart which could not be remedied by a thorough scratching with my fingernails. Madame Thomas told him about my sordid history. On his way to the house he had already heard about the untimely passing of our canon, but he too, like us, succeeded in quickly finding solace. The rascal did not limit his trade to collecting alms. He had discovered the secret of making himself profitably useful to society and even more so to his monastery. He serviced both sexes. No one understood better than he how to instigate tender meetings, clear away obstacles, divert the watchfulness of Argus eyes, cuckold jealous husbands, allow liberties to those young ones f whom he was supposed to take care and free fearful turtledoves from the tyrannical lordship of their fathers and mothers. In short, Alexis was the king among matchmakers and panderers and was therefore held in high esteem by gallant society.
After the first formal courtesies had been exchanged, Madame Thomas left us alone to go prepare the main course of our first meal.
She had hardly gone downstairs when Alexis kissed me heartily upon the mouth and threw me upon the bed without any further ado. Though I deemed his behavior as strange as it was unexpected, the desire I felt for him and the curiosity to see what he had hidden under his cowl made me resist just enough to fire his passions and to avoid being thought of by him as a common street whore. After he had put me down in the proper position, he raised his soutane and took out a beautiful, gorgeous tool… an instrument which seemed more befitting to furnish the trousers of a king than the revolting and filthy fly of a poor foot soldier in the army of the Holy St. Francis. Aah, Madame Thomas, how many women would love to take thy place and buy old hats at such a price! The queen of passionate love, the adorable Cytherea herself would have gladly sacrificed both Mars and Adonis to acquire such a precious instrument. It seemed to me as if Priapus and all his followers penetrated deeply into my body. The stinging pain caused by this eternally adorable monstrosity would have made me scream out loud were it not that I feared to alarm the entire neighborhood. But this small evil was soon forgotten when I started to drown in an enormous wave of voluptuous pleasure. How could I ever describe the delicious convulsions, the intoxicating palpitations and the glorious ecstasies I underwent. Our powers of description are always too weak to depict what we feel so strongly. Is it surprising that it seems as if the very soul has been destroyed and we exist only with our senses?
I would have gladly run the risk of dying during this passionate embrace had it not been for the rough voice of Madame Thomas talking to her dog which forced us to separate. I do not believe that it was very difficult for her to guess what had transpired. Our excitement had not yet been released; our flushed faces and the rumpled bed were silent witnesses against us. But she nevertheless pretended that nothing had happened. And when the goose appeared upon the table, every one of us started to gorge himself. Between the courses of fruit and cheese, Brother Alexis took a bologna sausage and a bottle of aquavit out of his beggar's pouch, a gift from a well-meaning girl. Madame Thomas, who was a lover of these victuals, drank more than two-thirds of the bottle, which brought her into such a good mood that her eyes rolled around in her head as if she were a rutting pussy screaming for the passionate attentions of a tomcat. She was sliding up and down on her chair as if she had a bundle of thistles bound against her derriere. It seemed that the spirits of aquavit affected her that way. She jerked back and forth partly out of desire for tenderness and partly out of fury. She kissed the monk: she squeezed him; she almost licked him off; she bit him and tickled him. Finally I took pity upon the poor woman and I retired into a small side room whose walls consisted of thin boards, with cracks as wide as my fingers, that had been pasted over with thin paper. Through a small opening which I made I could watch the couple going into full action.
As the dear reader may remember, I described Madame Thomas as a heavy, contented woman who had fattened herself with her superb cooking, and therefore he should not be in the least disturbed when I tell him about the posture Brother Alexis forced her to take. The dear lady had such an enormous belly that it was absolutely impossible to enter her from the front. Even the rigs of the famous donkey stallions of Mirebalais in Bretagne could never have reached her from that position. She leaned both her elbows upon the mattress, pressed her pug nose into the pillows and presented her enormous behind to the pleasure of the venerable monk. The knave threw her skirt, underskirts and chemise way over her shoulders and unveiled the twin globes of her lower back that not only stood out because of their enormous size but also because of their snow-white color. When the angelic aspergillum, still slightly disarranged, reached the enormous cleft which it had mounted so often from below, it suddenly jumped with incredible strength through the heavy brush which obscured the inner part of said derriere and disappeared between the bushes.
