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By Root 1323 0

a Roman ephebe, this pretty, fair-haired, neutered boy, stricken in his virility since youth, became a strapping girl in this young woman’s inquisitive arms. He seemed to have been born and raised for perverse sensual pleasure. Renée relished her dominance, bending this creature of still-dubious sexuality to her passion. From this her desire derived constant astonishment, her senses unending surprise, a bizarre sensation of uneasiness and acute pleasure. He bewildered her. Her doubts revived each time she returned to his fine skin, his plump neck, his sighs and swoons. She experienced an hour of completeness. Maxime, by revealing a new thrill to her, completed her extravagant outfits, her prodigious luxury, her unbridled existence. He invested her flesh with the note of excess that sounded in everything else in her life. He was a lover suited to the fashions and follies of the age. This pretty youth, whose jackets showed off his slender shape; this boy who ought to have been a girl and who strolled the boulevards with his hair parted in the middle, with chuckling laughter and bored smiles, became in Renée’s hands one of those decadent deviants that can at times consume the flesh and derange the intelligence in nations gone rotten.

It was chiefly in the conservatory, moreover, that Renée played the man. The ardent night they spent there was followed by several others. The hothouse joined them in their lovemaking, burned with the heat of their passion. Through the oppressive air, by the white light of the moon, they took in the strangeness of the world around them, as the plants seemed vaguely to move about and embrace one another. The black bearskin filled the entire width of the path. At their feet mist rose from the root-choked pool as the pink stars of the water lilies opened on its surface as upon a virgin’s breast and the bushy tornelia drooped like the hair of swooning water nymphs. Around them, meanwhile, the palms and the giant bamboo of India rose toward the arched roof, where they bowed their heads and mingled their leaves like weary lovers unsteady on their feet. Lower down, the ferns, pterids, and alsophila were like sprightly ladies, their broad skirts trimmed with regular flounces, who stood silent and motionless along the path awaiting love. Beside them, the twisted, red-stained leaves of begonia and the spiky white leaves of caladium created a vague medley of hues ranging from the pallor of death to the color of a bruise, puzzling the lovers, who at times thought they could make out round shapes like hips and knees pressed hard against the earth by the brutality of sanguinary caresses. And the banana trees, bending under the weight of their fruit, spoke to them of the rich fertility of the soil, while the Abyssinian euphorbia, whose tapering stems—prickly, misshapen, and covered with horrid excrescences they glimpsed through the darkness—oozed sap, as if their procreative exuberance could not be contained. The deeper they peered into the recesses of the conservatory, the more the obscurity became charged with an ever more frenetic riot of stems and foliage. On the racks they could no longer distinguish the maranta, as soft as velvet, from the gloxinia, with its purple bells, or the dracaena, which resembled strips of polished old lacquer. The living plants danced in a circle, pursuing one another with unrequited tenderness. In the four corners, where curtains of vines created bowers, their carnal fantasies grew even wilder, and the supple shoots of vanilla, of Indian berries, of quisqualis and bauhinia turned into the interminable arms of lovers who remained out of sight while madly extending their embrace, drawing countless dispersed pleasures unto themselves. Those endless arms drooped wearily, knotted themselves in a spasm of love, sought one another out, and entwined each other like a pack of wild creatures in rut. The whole conservatory was in rut, the whole patch of virgin forest ablaze with the foliage and blossoms of the tropics.

Their senses warped, Maxime and Renée felt themselves caught up in