Chocolat by Joris Sprout
On a hot summer day in 1892, one of those days when the canicule strikes Paris like the blast of the depths of Hades, Gabriel des Esseintes made his way slowly along the Boulevard St Germain, his jewel encrusted tortoise at his heels, seeking, as was his wont, those pleasures, which to him were like the nectar of the Gods, but which were to others of such a nature that had his purpose been known, he might have found himself entrusted to the care the guardians of the law which in that day patrolled the streets of the great city in their never ending quest to quell the causes of social disorder among the heaving masses.
Seating himself in Les Deux Magots by the parvis of the ancient church he looked across at the Café de Flore where two jeunes filles en fleurs sipped coffee in the shade of the great hornbeams which cast their sombre shades over the convives who gathered at that early morning to watch, in the way of all French people, the world as it passed along the great thoroughfare, ploughing ruts in the road and filling the air with cries of the vendors and the incessant whinnying of the horses, both of gentry and of tradespeople, as they strove, each in his own way, to go about their daily business.
Seeing the young girls he felt within his loins that strange yearning, that indefinable sensation which he had first encountered when, with the other devotees of the small religious establishment at which he had been educated, he had first laid his eyes upon a comely demoiselle of the village.
Margueritte had been brought into the school for the avowed purpose of demonstrating to the boys the virtues of maidenly modesty; the intention being that Mademoiselle would be paraded before of the boys as a living example of the degrading effects of dissolution upon the comportment of the honest female; notwithstanding which her abrupt disrobing in the middle of matins, an act generally thought to have bee instigated by the rich, and it must be said, excessively precocious Henri de Grand'bite, had left des Esseintes in such a state of physical and emotional perturbation that a whole term of early morning cold baths had been ordered for him that he might rid himself of the lascivious thoughts which seemed from that moment to become his sole preoccupation.
Thus it was that he had entered upon his existence, devoted now that he was master of his own fortune, to the pursuit of pleasure, and to a stimulation of the senses in every way that his so richly tutored mind could imagine.
He dropped a small measure of water into his absinthe and watched the cloud swirl in the small glass as he idly picked at his dish of duck's gizzards and bull's sweetbreads upon which he breakfasted each day.
So acute were his senses, so synaesthetic his brain that such food produced in him a surge of amatory desire, and as his gaze fell upon one of the jeune filles he felt a cord develop between her most secret place and his own virile member, a cord which, charged with electricity, stimulated him in a way in which no physical contiguity in mere mortals could have emulated.
Smoothing his waxed moustache and curling the ends in the way he knew to be irresistible to the gentler sex, he rose, placed his gibbus on his head, and walking slowly, for jewel encrusted tortoises proceed but slowly, he made his way over to where sat the young ladies.
- Forgive me Mesdemoiselles, said he, may I make myself so bold as to introduce myself to you.
The girls dropped their eyes, as maidenly modesty, that arbitrator of all social intercourse of man with woman, dictated.
