Jim’s Reviews > Belle du Seigneur > Status Update

Their miserable life together. The pretentious ritual which meant that they saw each other only as miraculous lovers, priests and ministrators of their love, a love supposedly unchanged since those first heady days. The farcical game of seeing each other only as beautiful and nauseatingly noble, without blot or stain, always freshly bathed and always pretending to be driven by identical desires.

The fervor of their first night had led them here, to a dirty little cinema where he sat prosaically sucking mints, feeling sick at heart, dismally sucking mints and listening while his lovely girl, once so wild, so crazy, talked shyly about a second-rate film, visibly awkward and ill at ease, his darling morbidly self-conscious, his darling girl, and refusing to admit it.

The lord will do right to make her earth move and roughly use her during her night of love divine. For in this life there is no other truth than bareback riding. All else is tinsel and taradiddle. For a man's life lasts no longer than the blink of an eye and is followed by everlasting putrefaction, and with each day that passes you take one more step toward that hole in the ground...

The lord will do right to make her earth move and roughly use her during her night of love divine. For in this life there is no other truth than bareback riding. All else is tinsel and taradiddle. For a man's life lasts no longer than the blink of an eye and is followed by everlasting putrefaction, and with each day that passes you take one more step toward that hole in the ground....

I realize that everything I've written is intended to make me out to be intelligen and charming, to please you, kind sir. Poor, pathetic me. I feel so sorry for myself. But it doesn't matter at all, as long as you love me. But you must feel sorry for me too, for I am utterly at your mercy. I write to you too much, I love you too much.

'Let me look at you,' she said, and she drew back to see all of him, checked every feature and smiled, oh perfect teeth of youth. She must weight sixty kilos, of which forty are water, he thought. I am in love with forty kilos of water, he thought.

The attraction of cruelty is squalid, for it is the egg of power. Whoever is cruel is sexually potent, capable of making others suffer but also, so says the innermost self, of giving joy. A lord who exudes the merest whiff of brimstone attracts them, and a dangerous smile makes them feel deliciously flustered. They adore men with a satanic cut to their jib. To them, the devil himself is enticing.

"I enjoyed her company immensely." "I'm sure you did," said M. Deume. (But he hadn't at all: she was one of those forceful women, very superior, and besides she'd prattled on about music no one else had heard of. Ah, this looks like a useful wedge, just the right thickness.)

Back in her room as she stood at the foot of her bed, he found her so touching in repentance that he folded her in his arms. Feeling her breasts firm against him, he whispered in her ear. She got into bed and closed her eyes so that she would not see himtaking off his pyjamas. He turned back the bedcover, lay down beside her, and gave two sneezes. Here we go, she thought. Woof-woof time.

Now go away please because I'm about to get out of the bath and I don't want to be seen, bye-bye Eric, just between ourselves you are a bit of a fool all you can say is yes Madame, so go away, you're a silly young man. I'm going to dress gorgeously for my very own, my private pleasure.