steadily dark as a thundercloud as his patience waned and his impatience to be at naked oneness with his tasty young virgin bride increased.
But finally there was no help for it; Laurette had taken the last morsel of food and the last sip of champagne that she could stomach, and now, alas, she had to stomach the patron himself. She finally rose, her face blushing in her sweet bridal confusion, and the old fool shoved back his chair and scurried to her to take her arm with his bony fingers and to declare in his ready voice, “Lean on me, my little pigeon. I shall conduct you to the nuptial chamber myself. You will see how tenderly I will care for you, my darling Laurette. You do not know how I have waited for this moment!”
Had he let it go at that, the old fool might possibly have roused in Laurette some vague tolerance of her elderly benedict. But the habits of a lifetime are difficult to curb. And, sure enough, no sooner had they passed the threshold of the dining room, then he surreptitiously groped with thumb and forefinger and pinched her tender bottom through her skirt and petticoat and drawers. Laurette started, turned scarlet, and uttered a startled gasp of overwrought embarrassment. She gazed at her husband reproachfully, two big tears forming in those glorious soft blue eyes. The patron of Languecuisse cackled with ribald merriment: “Eh, eh, my beauty, you did not think I was so spry at my age, I trow. I will surprise you this night, my plump little pigeon. You will fall back on your pillow and beg for mercy, I promise you. I will make you forget that rascally Pierre Larrieu before the sun rises in the heavens, of that you may be certain. Come, my little beauty, come to bed!”
Laurette allowed herself to be conducted to the bridal chamber. With ill-concealed lubricity, the patron flung open the door and triumphantly pointed towards the canopied four-poster bed which rose so imposingly and menacingly before the tender eyes of this beautiful peasant virgin. “Is that bed not magnificent, my dear little Laurette?” he cackled. “There are two mattresses, and they are packed with eiderdown to cradle your lovely flesh. Come, give me a tender kiss before you disrobe, a kiss that will tell me you are mine at last, my exquisite little pigeon!”
Laurette dutifully put her hands on his shoulders, closed her eyes, and gave him a peck on the cheek, which did not at all please him. “But that is no kiss at all, you teasing little vixen,” he snorted. “Do you not know that I am your proper husband now, with every right over you? You must obey my every wish, Laurette. That is the law, and Pere Mourier will tell you your duties if you do not know it already.” With this, he crushed his thin, dry lips upon her rosy mouth, and Laurette winced and shuddered, wishing that some miracle might whisk her away from this gaudy bedchamber and take her instead to a hayrick wherein she might lie naked in the embrace of sturdy, loving Pierre Larrieu.
But it was, alas, not to be.
Laurette, realizing that the frightful hour was here at last and that no one would break in to save her, not even her adored Pierre, blushingly petitioned her elderly husband to let her disrobe in privacy. But the patron was not to be put off so deviously. “Ah no, my little pigeon,” he slyly retorted, “I will not let you get out of my sight till I have had you and properly enjoyed your maiden treasure, which is my due because you are now my bride! I know your scheme, you sweet trickster, aye, I know it well. You would slip off to your room, promising to change into your nightshift, and then I should find you fled out to the fields with this rascally bastard who would usurp all my privileges!”
“Oh, no, no, Monsieur Villiers, how can you think such a thing of me? I am a good girl, a virgin, and I am dying of shame to think that now—I—I must take off my clothes and—and let you see me. At least, send Victorine in to me to help me prepare for bed.”
“There is no need for that, my beauty,” he greedily parried her last ruse. “As your husband, I will be your maid as well. And there is no need for shame now, my little pigeon, since we are man and wife. Come, quickly, take off your gown. I am longing to see your beautiful white skin, remembering how you looked in the cask when I let you win the contest!”
“Oh, M'sieu, then I do not belong here this night at your side,” Laurette ingeniously countered, employing every resource in her power to stop the odious consummation from taking place. “I did not think my cask was as full of grapes as the others had in theirs. It was unfair, and I should not have been chosen as the winner. You should rightly wed her who squeezed out the most liters.”
“Enough of this time wasting argument, my beauty,” Claude Villiers growled. “If you will not undress by yourself, I will rip your garments from you. I am within my rights; verily, I may even thrash you with a switch if you are not a properly obedient wife to me. It is the law, Laurette.”
Laurette raised her beautiful, tear wet eyes to the ceiling and then falteringly began to remove her gown, while the scrawny bridegroom watched, rubbing his bony hands with lubricious anticipation. Beneath the gown, she wore a camisole and petticoat and drawers, as well as white clockwork stockings made secure on her lower thighs with blue satin rosette-garters. Her dainty feet were shod in little shoes with brass buckles that gleamed. Claude Villiers licked his lips and his voice cracked with feverish anticipation as he next ordered, “And now the petticoat, my pretty one.”
“Oh, please, M'sieu Villiers, I—I have never undressed before in front of a man—will you not let me go into the next room and there put on my nightdress?” Laurette stammered.
“No, my darling pet! As to a nightdress, there is nothing served by it, because it would only have to come off anyway,” he cackled. Then, his eyes narrowing suspiciously, “Do not waste any more time by arguing with me, girl! The petticoat!”
Laurette's dainty little fingers fumbled with the string that held the petticoat snugly about her slim waist and at last managed to loosen the knot; the garment fluttered down to aureole her ankles, and she stepped out of it an entrancing vision in her camisole, drawers and the snugly sheathing white clockwork stockings.
“Now the camisole,” he directed, licking his dry, thin lips again, his beady little eyes bright with the unholy glow of inordinate lust.
“Oh, s—sir,” Laurette quavered, “won't you at least put out the candles? I shall faint away of shame if I must strip all n—naked before you. I am innocent and—and afraid.”
“Which is precisely what makes you so deliciously tempting, you darling little pigeon,” Claude Villiers cackled. “Take comfort in my impatient desire for your charms, my beauty, for I would not be half so excited if I had been told that you had lain with any other man save myself.”
This statement somewhat eased Laurette's fears, for she had dreaded the possibility of Pere Mourier's informing the elderly patron of what had almost transpired between herself and Pierre Larrieu on that grassy knoll the evening after the grape-trampling contest. It gave her courage once again to formulate a chaste entreaty: “Oh, sir, it is just because I have no knowledge whatsoever of a man's desire that I beg you humbly to take pity on my tender modesty and not to force me to that which my good parents have brought me up to regard as sinful and immodest.”
“Your estimable parents have taught you well, my little pigeon. It is right that a virgin keep herself chaste for her wedding night. But look you, this hour has arrived and I, by right of the ceremony this afternoon which made us one, have the sole privilege of exposing all your luscious charms and enjoying them to the fullest. Therefore you, being my wife, must obey my smallest whims, and I now enjoin you to take off the camisole at once, without more delay!”
Laurette bit her lips and flushed hotly as the patron's eyes fixed her with a greedily lustful stare. Finally, she yielded to circumstance, and, shyly turning to one side, fumblingly took hold of the thin garment and drew it over head and shoulders, letting it fall to the floor. She thereupon covered her milky bosom with both arms, and a tremulous, wistful sob escaped her as she thought of her absent lover Pierre Larrieu, to whom she would gladly have made every conceivable sacrifice of her lovely person.
Panting with excitement at the notion that his tender young bride wore only drawers and hose, the elderly patron himself began to divest himself of his clothing, and finally stood stark naked. His bony shanks, his shrunken chest—the emaciated paps of which were hidden by patches of whitesh hair—his bony arms and the almost obscene baldness of his skull, made Laurette's sweet eyes widen in revulsion. But most of all, the sight of his dwindled, shriveled cock and the hairy-gnarled, egg-shaped balls, informed her most glaringly of his impotence as compared with the rugged young virility of the blond youth who had nearly plucked her flower of chastity.
“Come put your milky arms around my neck, my charming pigeon,” he panted, “and kiss your husband as is mete and seemly on this night of our nuptials! Your maidenly confusion is understandable and does your chastity credit, but now that we are alone with none to intrude on or endanger your sweet secrets, prepare yourself to give up all these maidenly vapors and tell yourself it is a woman's sacred duty to pleasure her rightful husband!”
