Turning Danger into Performance - In the Fever of Derailment

They met between rows of shelves crammed with folios, in the basement level of the Palais Soliman. Corinne was studying medieval heresies. Adrian found that sexy. He loved the system; she loved the fever of derailment. He had seen it coming. He was already on her menu, even though Nana was waiting for him at home. Corinne wanted Adrian, whatever the cost. She already imagined herself and Adrian as the couple of the age. More on that shortly.

The setting of their encounter was an imposing 18th-century structure in the classical pavilion style, with monumental Doric columns. The architect’s name was Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart. Corinne found men attractive who knew such things. She would have preferred to meet Adrian in the inaccessible, long-secret department of forbidden books, the notorious L’Enfer of the French National Library. Corinne knew the collection of confiscated masterpieces, immoral writings, and blasphemous drawings from more than hearsay alone. As she pondered how to make her favorite forget both himself and his fiancée Nana, her gaze fell upon a goatskin-bound volume lying within reach on the table. It contained engravings and etchings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. The book illustrated the genre of lust and seduction in the boudoir — those frivolous gallant scenes with which Fragonard had once surpassed even Boucher, Madame de Pompadour’s court painter. These were his famous sepia-washed illustrations for La Fontaine’s Contes: vignettes showing swirling skirts, bare breasts, and clandestine couplings half-obscured by screens of Chinese silk.

The nymph in the boudoir, in Boucher’s style, was a Rococo sensation.

Corinne opened the volume and practically offered herself as though posing for a graceful boudoir scene. Her breasts entered the picture. Soundlessly she whispered: I glow, I burn. You have to touch me. And Adrian — a Swiss from Ticino, born in Cannobio on the western shore of Lago Maggiore — obeyed the unmasked lust of the Brussels-born Corinne. The affair, for him at that moment little more than a potential high-noon stand, but for Corinne the beginning of everything, did not start with a kiss. Reflexively she turned in his arms and thrust her backside toward him. She wanted to create facts, afraid the moment might be squandered in flirtation and harmlessness. Hardly had Adrian first praised the split moon of Corinne’s body with his hands when she pulled the fabric away from beneath his fingers. The gesture was unmistakable. Adrian responded to its invitation. He admitted to himself that he had never before seen such a beautiful ass. No further encouragement was required.

But the world did not pause. Adrian had barely positioned himself when the archivist Baudelaire entered the room. He was known as an insignificant descendant of the poet. It was impossible to tell what he wanted. In any case, he paid Corinne and Adrian no attention at first. Obliviously, he interrupted something that in truth had not yet even begun. Corinne’s disappointment surged violently into anger. It was supposed to happen at last. The act had to be completed. Corinne wanted to unlock Adrian for herself. She reached between her legs and touched Adrian’s sex while the archivist, inconspicuously gray with age, gave no sign of intent. Was he merely passing time among the folios? Escaping an audit? Annoyed by the lovebirds? Did he recognize the tableau vivant in its by no means frozen state?

Now there were three of them, trapped in an arrangement of little shame and much lust. Adrian held Corinne’s hips in position, and Corinne did not relinquish him either. She gripped him tightly in manic fixation.

Baudelaire, meanwhile, was by no means as blind as he appeared. He was sharp. Without a word, he integrated himself into the scene as a parasitic masturbator. The old fool pursued his own pleasure without hesitation. Corinne and Adrian froze into a living sculpture while the beneficiary shamelessly let his seed rain down onto the oak herringbone floorboards. An astonishing amount, incidentally. Then he departed without a word of farewell.

*

He sat at his desk while Nana lay smoking on the office divan. To the others in their circle, Adrian and Nana were as good as married. That matched Nana’s perspective, whereas Adrian resisted the assessment with a kind of latency buffer. Whenever Adrian spoke of “sovereignty in voluntary downfall,” it fit nothing in his orderly life with Nana. But nobody noticed.

In a note he would later remove from the correspondence reserved for posterity, Corinne wrote: “You’re only waiting for me to suffocate so you can quote my death in your next essay on the sublime.” Adrian smiled at the intensity of the metaphor and typed it out.

Nana had already figured it out. In their shared everyday life she remained in the serving position, though deeply unsettled that Adrian had found a new object for his blunt, almost janitorial desire.

Adrian consumed his portion of power without feeling guilty. In her stubborn way, Nana fought for “her man.” She had strategic sex with him and tried to keep his fantasies anchored in their games together.