*The members of the Archambeau family also appear in Gallows & Galleries
THE LIFE CYCLE OF ARCHAMBEAU
Phillipe had been entertaining him with miniature reproductions of certain saucy artworks almost all evening. Raphael had been mostly unimpressed & distracted. Although, he HAD felt drawn to the small oil painting titled Le Concert Champêtre which had been copied from the original painting from the master 'da Cadore,' Tiziano Vecellio.
The image, which was set in a pastoral landscape, was of a pair of women, completely nude, keeping company with a pair of seated, fully-dressed musicians. It intrigued him. The men were seemingly ignoring the luscious, ripe flesh of the women, who appeared to be entirely at ease regardless of their public nudity. He knew that had he been a young man between such lovely, warm, voluptuous morsels he would have fallen upon them like a hungry wolf.
His cock had twitched once, lacklusterly, as he gazed at the painting, & he crossed his legs. As boys, Phillipe & he had dabbled in a tender, exploratory & mutually enjoyable experiment with each other. Mostly they touched each other but sometimes, Phillipe would even allow Raphael to take his cock in his lips.
He still remembered the taste of his oldest friend's member in his mouth, & still remembered the look on Phillipe's face as he'd held his seed on his tongue before spitting & wiping it out. It was the simple, innocent foray into lust that many a young man quietly participated in as their bodies approached adulthood. It was common, though almost never spoken about.
Phillipe had outgrown that desire when he'd been able to satisfy himself with the softer pleasures of women & Raphael had felt cast aside for a while. Returned to the cage of platonic friendship. Not that Raphael didn't also enjoy the wet, deep suffocation of a woman's quim, her breasts & mouth. Even now his desires burned as those of a younger man. It's just that his desires weren't always limited only to the fairer sex & his aged body no longer cooperated.
In their middle years his favourite nights had been when he & Phillipe had shared a whore, he'd always allowed his friend to take the first ride & had enjoyed the sight of the man's naked body, his member firm & proud as he rocked himself back & forth into the soft offering. He had revelled in the taste, smell & sensation of the man's slippery discharge coating the interior of the whore's cunt as he took her afterwards. His first thrusts would be slow as he tried to draw out that secret pleasure.
When he sought out the discrete boy whores (alone, never with Phillipe) he'd often imagined himself sodomising his old friend when he thrust his cock in their skinny asses, it had been something they'd never tried & now he felt grief over the missed chance. He sighed, remembering the first time he himself had enjoyed receiving a dick in that hole behind him. It had been fairly late in life, when in his early 30s his father had sent him abroad to England, where he'd suffered dreadfully at the vulgarity of the English people, the filth of their streets & general ignorance.
Finally, after several days travelling through the hellish isle, he'd delivered the missives he'd been charged with to the overstuffed acquaintance of his father. Sir Nicholas Bacon's home however was a welcome, clean & quiet reprieve from the uncouth rabble he'd travelled amongst & he was especially delighted, when he was introduced to Bacon's youngest, Francis. He more than made up for the inedibility of the local cooking, their harsh accents, the insufferable weather.
Francis was rumoured to be physically weakened, even frail, but intellectually, Raphael found the pale, thoughtful boy both stimulating & erudite. He'd seduced the boy, or so he thought, into meeting with him late that night within the guest chambers where he'd been roomed. The boy had tiptoed by candlelight to him & they'd devoured each other with wet kisses & grasping hands.
He was to learn that the 19 year old had in fact seduced HIM & whatever the truth of his state of health, Francis had easily bent the older man over & taken him like a woman. Raphael had found himself biting his pillow in ecstasy as the young man pumped him full several times over the same late night. The next morning he'd sat gingerly upon the padded chair for breakfast, his asshole feeling loosened & sore by the night's exercise. He'd happily continued to secretly accept the boy's firm member until he was regrettably, tragically, called back to France by his father & wife.
His rut upon his wife had been frenzied when he returned to France, still aflame from the newly discovered pleasures of his diversion to England. Even Nicole had commented on her husband's passionate reclaiming of her body, he had been hornier than usual, which was saying a lot, as the fires always burned hot in his humours. He was known to be insatiable to his wife, & even by the mistresses whom his wife had accepted to assist in handling his manly & unquenchable needs. Although neither knew how frequently he visited the whores & harlots in the city.
Nor did they know of his activities with the men who worked their fields, or attended to their animals. Or his father's accountant who would often suck his engorged pin when they could find a stolen moment alone in the family estate or offices. Or his secret yearning for Phillipe, his oldest friend, his second cousin, close as a brother who had seemed to spark that forbidden lust in his heart.
Despite his untamable virility in bed, his wife, Nicole had struggled to bear a child to full term. They'd all but given up until she'd finally borne a daughter who survived, small & purple, a caul covering her face. She hadn't breathed when she was extracted from his wife's womb. Hadn't cried for several minutes until the midwife had slapped her three times. Her mother had doted upon the girl, & Christened her 'Delphine'.
As she grew it became obvious the girl was touched, mentally deficient, almost entirely dumb, & unable to take her place in polite society, even with all the wealth & status of the Archambeau family name. The child masturbated herself almost constantly, even after being strapped & beaten to try & train her out of it. She rubbed her cunt against furniture, always with her hand in her undergarments.
Even with her hands bound behind her, servants would find her rubbing herself against the corner of chairs, or on the bannisters of staircases. Raphael had been bitterly disappointed that he had (as far as he knew) no male heir & only an unmarriageable & ruined daughter. His favourite mistress, Guillemette, was also rumoured to destroy his seed with unguents & douches of acidic tinctures.
Now he was old, & he was left with naught but memories of his days as a lover. He struggled to maintain even a temporary firmness over his withered organ which lay shrunken & useless against his leg. For years he'd been frustrated, ill-tempered & resentful of the young men around him who could still plow the fields of women & men to their heart's desires should they wish it. It had been worse, of late, due to the arrival of the fascinating stranger in his province.
The man, he learned, was called James Harris, was thought to be English perhaps, although when he'd spoken to him, Raphael had been less certain of his provenance. His accent was unplaceable. & he had something of the arab about him, or the moor, or the mysterious Oriental, but also the Frenchman, the Englishman, the noble. He couldn't put his finger on it. Even alone, when he tried to sketch the stranger's features from memory he struggled to recall his details.
His skin had been the colour of caramel, had it not? Or was he as pale as the flesh of a fish? No, that wasn't it, was it rich, bronzed, like the copper of a pipe? Pink like a girl's cheeks? & his eyes? What colour were the man's eyes? He seemed both incredibly unusually rare, exotic, eerie & unnatural, & yet, whenever they spoke he seemed ordinary, almost mundane in his commonplace. He was an enigma.
Regardless of his slippery appearance, something about him both attracted & unnerved Raphael. He was obsessed with the young man. & WAS he young? He could never recall. When he was standing, talking to the man, he'd felt the remnants of his long lost lust, felt ghostly twists & twitches in his gut & balls.
He dreamed of the man kneeling in front of him, taking his member deeply into his mouth, looking up at him with his stormy eyes, grinning at him with needle-sharp teeth, with ancient goat-eyes. He'd wake, shivering & covered in his own spent seed. Infuriated that his only erection had been wasted in his sleep, his orgasm on his bed covers & not within a soft, warm lover. Frustrated that he only had a vague, uneasy memory of the dream that raised his member from its death-like slumber.
Even now, idly rubbing his lips with a blade of grass he'd plucked as he sat on the stone steps of the family castle, thinking about the strange man, he found himself feeling that leftover tickle as his prick reminded him of his lost days as a lothario. There was something so magnetic, so sexual about the man Harris, that even imagining him he felt he could almost smell his pungent sweat, & the smell of his dick.
It felt to Raphael, that the WORLD was heaving with sex that morning. As if all of nature was pulsing & wet with a furious & unchecked madness, a perversity, a need. The crickets seemed to be singing triumphantly of fucking, the boughs of trees, swaying in the wind like phalluses, like hanging breasts or dangling labia, the earth full of moisture, ready for plumbing, ready for a hard & fearless dicking.
He imagined the foxes, the marmots & voles of the forest, entwined in ecstasy, knotted together in a pulsating pile, an orgy of creatures as they dipped their genitals into each other & bit each other's necks, the flowers of plants spewing pollen, the streams of water around them. Even the cold, old castle seemed to stretch itself open, like fingers in a cunt, like the gaping moistened receptacle of a male whore. A dragonfly landed on his arm & he observed it for a moment before it flew away.
He'd watched, jealously, enviously, as Harris had taken every man & woman at the auberges & lodging houses in the area to his room, wherever that was. He'd taken them one at a time, sometimes two or three at a time. He'd watched the next morning as those men & women stumbled out from the corners & walls of edifices & gardens, a glazed, entranced look on their face as they reacclimated to their lives, their wives & husbands, their duties.
