He arched his back. I wanted to watch his pleasure and know I was causing it. I wanted him to know what he did to me. “When I paint you,” I said, “when I get here . . .” I bent to kiss between his legs and inhaled. I could smell the deepest part of the forest. Pleasure throbbed inside of me. This was where I wanted to be, here with Julien. With him unable to look away from me. With him willing to be swallowed up by me.
“When I get here . . . ,” I whispered into his flesh, “I will have to stop so I can do this . . .” And then I took him into my mouth. His head was thrown back. He was lost to me. Lost in the pleasure. All around me was the dark scent of him. The air was ripe with it.
I raised myself off the rug. I would give him his pleasure, but first, I would do something I had never done before. I would claim my own. I pulled up my skirt and swayed above him.
“Hold back for me, Julien. Yes?” I whispered. “I promise you more than you’ve ever felt if you can just hold back.” I reached down, in between his legs, and squeezed him in a way sure to prevent release. How had I known? My husband had surely never told me. Before that moment I’d never even wondered at such a thing.
I lowered myself down on him slowly. All of the world centered on that one amazing sensation. It was all colors and sounds and smells, all that had been denied me for so very long. It didn’t matter if Julien was betrothed to someone else; it would only be a matter of time before he would be mine and I would be his. The feelings coursing through me were the ones I was due. This was where I belonged. On the tip of him, on the edge of this exquisite madness.
He moaned.
“Not yet,” I whispered as I rode him.
The pleasure . . . how could I ever give up this pleasure? I was supposed to be here, to have this. Supposed to be with this man beneath me, in me, giving and taking and taking and giving.
I lifted myself up so we were no longer touching. He was panting and ready. “Don’t stop,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
But still I held back, swaying above him.
“Will you come with me?” I asked him the same question I had asked before all this began. “Yes?” I was offering what he wanted in exchange for what I wanted. “Yes?” I lowered myself just enough so that we were touching, but barely. Enough so that I could feel the heat of him.
“Please,” he begged as he tried to push up, but I held back.
“Yes?”
“Yes, Sandrine, yes,” he said, and I wasn’t sure in that moment what pleased me more, the physical explosion or knowing that he was going to go with me to Dujols’s.
Chapter 22
Dr. Blanche, the alienist, had a private asylum in Passy. It was quite a ride from the house on rue des Saints-Pères. As I traveled there the next morning, I was apprehensive. Even though my grandmother’s doctor had assured me otherwise, I anticipated a home for the insane: disgusting and dirty and frightening. Especially since the building was the domicile of the Princess de Lamballe during the revolution and the scene of her gruesome end. Certainly it had been renovated since then. After all, Guy de Maupassant had spent the last two years of his life at Dr. Blanche’s. Others like Theo van Gogh, the artist’s brother, and the writer Gérard de Nerval had also been residents for a time. And yet I was still nervous.
As we got closer, the fashionable neighborhood suggested the clinic was not the horror I’d imagined, and when we pulled up to a beautiful eighteenth-century mansion surrounded by gardens, I was quite surprised.
I entered through grand front doors and was led from the elegant front hall to the doctor’s office, I was pleased. Lined with book-filled shelves, it was a warm, welcoming room with tall windows looking out onto the park. Despite the chilly air, the parade of nurses strolling past with patients soothed me.
The doctor introduced himself. He was a man of about seventy-two or -three. Robust and quite healthy-looking, with intelligent eyes and a wide forehead.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you, but your grandmother is not as well as I had hoped she would be by now,” the doctor said, shattering my becalmed state. “She is not yet showing any signs of improving. I wouldn’t allow the visit except I’m hoping that if she sees you are all right, it might help us in our effort. You are all right, aren’t you?”
For a moment he examined me as if it might be possible to see my mental health on my face.
“I most certainly am. Except for worrying about her, that is.”
“Is there any reason at all that you know of that would cause your grandmother to believe you are in mortal danger?”
“No, nothing that I can think of.”
“Well, she told me quite a tale about you and why she believes you are in danger.”
I didn’t realize I was clenching and unclenching my hands until I saw the doctor staring at my actions. What was I frightened of? What could Grand-mère have told him? About my husband bankrupting my father? About Papa’s suicide? About my running away from Benjamin and taking an assumed name so he couldn’t find me? Taking art lessons? Even wearing comfortable clothes to paint in?
“Your grandmother told me that you are possessed by a demon.”
I laughed, but from the expression on the doctor’s face I grasped that had been a mistake. He appeared disturbed by my response.
“Do you find that funny?”
“I find it absurd, don’t you?”
“She believes it. And she told me her cousin Rabbi Jacob Richter believed it, too. She said she took you to him, and he performed an exorcism on you in a mikvah, and that he not only saw the ghost who haunts you but that the ghost killed him on the spot. She also believes she saw the ghost in your bedroom.”
“Yes, she believes those things. But more to the point, do you believe in ghosts, Doctor? I cannot allow her to reside in any asylum run by someone who would fuel her deranged fantasies.”
“No, Mademoiselle Verlaine, I don’t, but at the same time I do very much believe the mind needs a seed to grow a story like this. I would venture a guess that something very real is in fact wrong and that your grandmother has lost perspective on it. Can you tell me more about the days leading up to her breakdown as well as the inciting incident?”
“I’d like to see her first,” I said. Tired of the conversation, I wanted to bring it to a close.
“And you will. But in order to treat her, it’s imperative that I understand the patient’s frame of mind before the onset of the episode. Can you indulge me and fill me in a bit on what happened in the days leading up to her hysteria?”
“There were three deaths close together. Too much death. Too much talk of dying. First there was my father, then her uncle the doctor, and then Cousin Jacob. It left my grandmother emotionally distraught.”
“And that day? What happened that day?”
“It was very strange. We were going to go to Cousin Jacob’s funeral together, but then Grand-mère had a fit about my hat, insisting I change it to a more sedate one. While I was doing that, she locked me in my bedroom, like a child, and went to the funeral without me.”
“Do you know why she did that?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“She didn’t explain?”
“She didn’t.”
“And when she returned?”
“She came upstairs to see me.”
“What were you doing when she entered your room?”
“Reading,” I lied.
“What book?”
I searched for a title and came up with that one book, the only book I had read in the last month. The Picture of Dorian Gray.
“She told me you were painting on the walls and that the mural was pornographic.”
“She is a courtesan well-versed in the ways of the world and she used that word?” I asked.
“I believe she did.”
I tried to picture those paintings on the pale yellow walls . . . to see them as someone would if they were to enter the room unprepared. Even someone as comfortable with sexual conduct and sexual pleasures as my grandmother. The sexual liaisons between the painter and his muse were erotic and arousing, but pornographic? I shook my head.
“What is it?” the doctor asked.
“I . . . I’m afraid I don’t paint. Oh, the occasional watercolor when I was in finishing school. But murals?” I laughed.