He stood staring up at the painting. It showed a gloriously naked woman sitting on a rock. One breast was obscured by her arm, which was held up to her brown tousled hair. The other, round and ripe, was fully on display. Her thighs were pushed together just about hiding anything more intimate whilst showing off the roundness of her hip quite beautifully.
She was looking away from the viewer with a soft thoughtful expression. Her skin was pale but glowed with an inner life. Her flesh seemed soft and inviting. The whole effect was dreamy and ethereal but also warm and sensual.
He had never seen the original before but was familiar enough with the picture. It had haunted his adolescent imagination.
He had first discovered it as a boy, flicking in a desultory manner through a book of impressionist prints of his parents' one wet weekend. He hadn't been interested in art at all and had only picked it up due to a lack of anything better on offer. Nothing had really held his attention until he came to this one picture. He had no idea that art could be so exciting.
He was in a room with his parents and so had had to pretend that he wasn't interested and had kept turning the pages. Even though he'd only seen it for a minute he couldn't get the image of such gorgeousness out of his mind. The idea that this nymph was contained in a book in his otherwise dull and respectable middle class home was intoxicating. He had felt something new and unexpected stirring within him, something exciting and disturbing and dangerous.
That night, once his parents had gone to bed, and without really knowing what he was doing, he had sneaked downstairs, taking the book and locked himself away in the bathroom with it. He had fumbled though the pages with trembling hands until he found the right one and then opened it out in front of him. He stared in disbelief and wonder at the beauty in the painting. He didn't know what he wanted. He just wanted to look at her as long as possible, to breathe her, exalt in her loveliness. So it was with some surprise that he found his hard cock in his hand and an unexpected heat building in his thighs.
As he came, he felt dizzy and light headed, overcome by the picture and the new sensations. He felt lost in a dream of the woman's breasts and hair and soft thighs.
Now, thirty years later, he was finally standing before the original and felt nothing. Unlike his younger self he could appreciate the art, the mastery, the technique but twenty years of sexual adventure had left him numb to the sensuous mysteries. He felt old.
As he pondered the wearying effects of time upon his sensibility, he heard an unexpectedly soft moan exclaimed nearby. He turned to see a young woman standing next to him, gazing at the painting with the same rapt adoration his teenage self would have given it.
"Elle est belle, non?" he murmured.
The woman just nodded and then said, in English, "God, Renoir makes me wet."
The words were like a jolt to his system, sending a current directly to his groin.
He turned to look at her properly, unaccountably excited and keen to probe further but without giving anything away.
"I know just what you mean."
She turned to face him, "God. Did I just say that out loud?"
She was young, twenty two or twenty three, either at or just finished university. She was also very tall, over six feet, with long blonde hair in loose ringlets. She wore a very short dark wool skirt exposing her long, creamy smooth legs. A long, light summer coat was lightly tied at her waist over her cream blouse. A beret was perched on her head.
There was something artlessly naive about her dress that he found quite disarming. Her accent proclaimed her to be clearly English and her wardrobe such a parody of French style that it could have been almost insulting and yet, instead, it was quite delightful.
Her coat was wide open at her chest but pulled tight around her slender waist. Her legs were long, smooth and pale. Her knees turned slightly in on each other, like a charmingly awkward baby deer. Her blouse was pulled tight across her chest showing off her breasts which were small and pointy. He could just see the pink of her nipples indenting through the cream shirt; she wasn't wearing a bra.
She was something fresh and lovely, youth and vitality glowed through every pore of her skin.
"You should never be ashamed of being moved by beauty, mademoiselle, and she is such a beauty"
He turned to look at the painting again, the softness of her breast and her thighs, the langour in her eyes before turning back to look at the blushing Englishwoman standing next to him, looking gauche but not abashed.
"Yes, she is, isn't she?" and she turned to look at the painting again and for a while they both stood there looking at the firm smooth body of a young woman who had sat naked for the great artist in the warmth of a Provencal summer over a hundred years ago.
"I'm not a lesbian."
"Mademoiselle, these things aren't important."
"Of course, but well, I'm not and, well, it might have sounded like I was, well, a little turned on by her."
Hearing her soft voice talking about getting turned on was definitely having an effect on him. He couldn't help but think of her moistening between her legs beneath that skirt.
"Do not distress yourself. A beauty like this is so sensual, so," he paused, "delicious, that it would be churlish to deny its power, whatever your sexuality."
She turned to look at him. Her blue eyes looked wild and aroused, the skin on her cheek as soft and radiant as the naked bather in the canvass frame above them.
"I'm so glad you agree."
She held out her hand, which he noticed was clad in a white lace glove, for him to shake, in the English fashion.
Instead he took it in his hands, and bent to kiss it. "Charmant," he breathed, as his lips grazed the white lace on her hand.
She giggled, as he kissed her. For him though, the experience was more disturbing. His heart had pounded as he took hers. Her natural scent was intoxicating. He didn't show it but he was ill at ease.
He was an old roue with a thousand tricks to bed an ingenue like this young lady, and he had no doubt he wanted to bed her. But sex had gone from a pleasure to an addiction, from being the most vital part of life to something dully and doggedly pursued without pleasure or anticipation.
There was something about this girl though, a freshness, a sense of possibility, that reminded him of sex in the meadows in the summers of his youth, of times spent rolling in the grass with Celine or with Marie in her parents' bed, old loves now as withered as he was.
The surest way to lose that feeling would be to ensnare this precious creature in his hunter's net. To catch her would be to lose her, to possess her to crush her. It left him unsure how to proceed. How to have her without having her? The only way was to let her have him and that meant placing himself in her hands. As soon as he began to play this as a game he would lose, and that made planning a next move quite difficult.
Fortunately she was happy to talk, asking him questions. They wandered the gallery together quite naturally. She asked and he answered. He knew the Musee D'Orsay well so could easily answer most of her questions.
