An Egyptian Prince in Paris

Ali Ismail was not born an Egyptian prince, but in his travels in Paris he found that, for all intents and purposes, he had become one.

"Look! An Egyptian prince!" A young woman pointed at Ali on his first day in Paris, and just like that, he had become Prince Ali. No more Ali the historian, no more Ali the merchant's son. He was royalty now. And why not? For all those who stopped to stare at him, who pointed and gawked at his turban and robe, he may as well have been a prince. At first, he smiled to himself, amused at the sincerity of his audience's delusion. Back home in Alexandria, Ali had held no more distinction than any other man of his class, but here in the anonymity of Paris, his very presence seemed to confer on him an aura of royalty. It would have been comical had it not been so unnerving.

He had come to Paris in the summer of 1860 to see the great city for himself and write a log of his travels, but he found that everywhere he went, he was the one being seen. He felt their stares consuming him with sincere, wide-eyed curiosity, with greed, with lust. When he walked down the wide boulevards, when he visited the museums and exhibitions, even just stopping for a drink at a coffeehouse--everywhere he went, he could not escape the feeling of being on display. It was a rousing sensation. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. His limbs tingled as each expression of amusement from an onlooker reminded him that he had a body, and that his body was marked as immutably different from the Parisians' bodies by its brown skin and foreign clothing.

On his third day visiting Paris, Ali found himself face to face with an Ancient Egyptian sarcophagus in the Musee du Louvre. The painted pharaoh's face looked at him, and Ali looked back at it. After three days of feeling like a walking museum exhibit himself, he thought he could sympathize with the ancient pagan king. Three millennia of rest, only to be disturbed for the entertainment of crowds of eager Parisian voyeurs. Ali's brow furrowed as two young men came to stand next to him, their eyes directed not at the pharaoh but at Ali himself, as if he were the ancient sarcophagus on display. They seemed unaware, or perhaps simply unbothered, that Ali's own eyes, unlike the blank eyes of the painted sarcophagus, could stare back at them. Ali stared the two men down, saying nothing, until they went away. He continued eyeing the sarcophagus.

He wished that he could simply look at the displays the way the Europeans did! They could invest themselves wholeheartedly in the pleasure of looking, without seeming to worry about being on display themselves. He envied the position of those naive men who had stared at him, with their hubristic assumption that there was nothing curious or foreign about their own bodies. Well, on that count they were wrong: from Ali's perspective, there was plenty about them that was worth ogling, from their silly, contrived gestures to their ridiculous hats. Yes, if he had no other power, he could at least stare back at his voyeurs, remind them, perhaps, of their own visibility.

A woman's voice behind Ali interrupted his brooding. "Your cousin?"

He gave a start and began to narrow his eyes at the comment, but he registered the curve around her lips, the mirth in her eyes, and realized that it had been a joke.

"Ah yes," he smiled back, "a friend of mine back in Egypt."

"It almost seems a shame to disturb his slumber," the woman remarked. Ali took in the sight of his new companion. She was pretty in a cultivated way, as if she had taken great care to perfect each of her features. The curve of her lips, her steady, corseted posture, the silk trimming of her wide hoop skirt that almost grazed the ground but not quite--this seemed to be a lady for whom perfection was a vocation. He studied her face, noting its uniform paleness save two perfect dabs of rouge on her cheeks, framed on either side by two symmetrical ringlets of brown hair. Back at home, such meticulous attention to the aesthetic perfection of the body would be construed as vanity in a woman, but in Paris it seemed to be the norm.

"A shame indeed," Ali agreed.

The lady folded her hands in front of her and stood next to Ali, looking at the sarcophagus. "What is it like living in a country with such ancient glory?" She asked.

"And what about our contemporary glory?" Ali responded, irked by the question. "What do you think we've been doing for the past two thousand years? Sitting around, waiting for you to dig up our pyramids?"

"I'm sorry," the woman said. "I didn't mean to offend." She looked down at the floor and back at Ali. "Are you really an Egyptian prince?" She asked, almost in spite of herself, as if she could not hold the question in. "I heard others talking..."

Ali gave her a significant look. "What do you think?"

She looked back at him sheepishly. "You can't believe everything you hear."

Ali gave a small bow and extended his hand. "Ali Ismail," he introduced himself. "I am a historian from Alexandria. As far as I know, I am not a prince."

She took his hand. "Emmeline Gauguin," she said. "As far as I know, neither am I."

Ali smiled. It was refreshing, after three days of being looked at and talked about, to have someone to talk to instead. "What brings you to the Louvre, Madame Gauguin? Or is it Mademoiselle?"

"Madame, but you can call me Emmeline. My husband is a curator here," she told him.

"You must know quite a lot about the museum, then," he conjectured.

"I consider myself something of an expert." The dainty curve of Emmeline's lips widened. Ali was intrigued by this woman. He could not quite figure her out. She seemed curious about him, but with none of the voyeuristic naivete that most of his Parisian spectators had directed at him. There was a freshness behind her eyes, a kind of discernment, an eagerness for knowledge. Ali found it quite striking.

He decided to pursue a conversation with her. "Would you like to give me a tour of the museum?" He asked.

"I'd be delighted to show you around," she assented.

Emmeline led Ali through the museum with the confident mastery of someone who had walked its halls many times before. As they wandered from the Ancient Egyptian hall to the Renaissance hall, she explained the European paintings to Ali--how painting had progressed since the Middle Ages with the invention of perspective, how artists nowadays were close to perfecting the naturalistic portrayal of the human figure. He tried to see these paintings through her eyes, but coming as he did from a culture that forbade the visual representation of human figures, he could not escape the feeling that there was something idolatrous in the lush details of Titian and Raphael. How unabashedly these artists brought to life every lusty detail of the human figure! How casually the pearly textured legs and chests and faces were displayed!

"You know," he commented, "the mathematics that made the painting of perspective possible were invented in the Islamic world."

"Why didn't the Arabs invent perspective painting, then?" Emmeline countered.

"Because we did not have the presumption," Ali responded, "to imitate God's creation."

As she walked, the bustle of Emmeline's skirt bobbed up and down in a steady rhythm. Ali found his eyes drawn toward the movement of her figure, the subtle dance of her walking. She walked, it seemed to Ali, as if the whole world were watching. Her posture was erect, her skirt rustled faintly, her hips swayed back and forth just enough to be noticeable. Ali found her performance captivating. Perhaps, he thought, with years of experience walking in Paris, I might begin to walk as she does, as if I were everywhere on display.

And indeed, in this moment, it seemed as if they really were everywhere on display. If Ali had received stares before, his new companion only amplified the attention. Emmeline met their gaze, offering each a polite nod of her head. "I'm not used to being this conspicuous," she told Ali.

"Nor I," he said.

The two stopped in the middle of the crowded Rococo hall. People milled about, chatting, many of them staring and pointing at the pair, but none spoke to them directly. In the midst of the hum and chatter, Emmeline sided up closer to Ali and said in a low voice, "You know, if you'd like to look at the museum in privacy, I can show you around tonight after hours." She almost whispered it to him, grinning mischievously as she said the words.

The words registered in Ali's body with a flush of excitement. Was she really asking him what he thought she was asking him? Even with his limited fluency in European customs, he could understand the implication of Emmeline's offer. A man and a woman, alone together in a museum. His eyes flicked up and down her figure, lingering on the curves of her breasts, her lips, her corseted waist. For a minute, he could not believe his luck, that this beautiful woman would offer herself to him, so easily and so casually.

But he stopped himself. "Your husband?" He said, raising his eyebrows.

She met his gaze. "My husband will be otherwise engaged," she said flatly. "He will not miss me."

Ali understood, at least as much as he needed to. The rules of matrimony in Europe were no less stringent than those in the Islamic world, but all rules had their exceptions. He almost laughed to himself at the ease of this encounter. But who was he to turn down Emmeline's request, made so openly and sincerely? "Alright," he grinned. "I think I'd enjoy a bit of privacy with you."

***

The grand museum glowed pale in the moonlight when Emmeline let Ali in through the back door that night. She whispered a welcome and offered him an affectionate squeeze of her hand, then led him through the dark hallways to the hall of Ancient Greek and Roman sculptures. The stone bodies of gods and heroes welcomed them. Larger-than-life men with lithe muscles stood, taut and erect, poised to throw javelins and ride ancient chariots; women with supple bodies reclined, recumbent, or stood contrapposto. Everywhere the aesthetic perfection of the human form was displayed, everywhere its subtle curvature incarnated in the stone.

"There is something so wickedly sensuous about these sculptures," Ali whispered. "Such pagan ecstasy."

Emmeline concurred. "Dangerously so, I think. That's why they keep them locked inside this fortress."

But the hall of ancient sculptures was not their final destination. Emmeline led Ali through a small side door into a dark storage room, where she lit an oil lamp. The transition was immediate. While the great hall of sculptures had awed Ali with its magnificence, the storage room impressed upon him its intimacy. Between the cluttered shelves lay a wooden table with a white cloth on top, and next to the table there was only a few feet of room for Ali and Emmeline to stand. By necessity, they stood close to each other, taking each other in. Ali's eyes wandered from the fresh, refined face of his companion to the hodge podge of cast off bits and pieces that cohabitated the shelves on the walls. A stone sculpture's shoulder lay, disfigured, on the dusty shelf; next to it, a shrunken mummy's hand.

"Who was he, I wonder?" He asked, gesturing to the mummy's hand.

"Victim of a mummy unwrapping party, I guess," Emmeline said offhand.

"A what?"

"Oh you don't know? They're all the rage nowadays. A rich man will buy a mummy, have one brought over from Egypt, then invite all his friends to watch him unwrap it. I'm told it's quite thrilling. Dancing with death."

Something about the imagined scene made Ali's skin crawl. He could not help but imagine himself as the mummy in the scenario, splayed out on a cold table, waiting helplessly for a crowd of Europeans to strip him of his last vestiges of dignity. He was surprised at the indignation he felt on behalf of that ancient and foreign hand. Why? After all, what connection did he claim to those ancient people, other than occupying the same ground in which they had been buried? But he thought of the smug curiosity that the Parisians had directed at him since the day he had arrived, their aloof spectatorship, and he saw that he and the mummy were not so different in their eyes. Curiosities to be consumed by greedy eyes then cast off once the novelty had worn away--that was all they were.

"What's wrong?" Emmeline sensed Ali's distress.

Ali turned his eyes back toward her and tried to articulate his thoughts. "It's...like being invaded." She nodded understandingly. Something in her eyes told him that she did understand, or that at least she was trying to. "It is being invaded," he reminded himself, thinking of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt seventy years earlier. "How would you like it," he continued, "if a group of men laid you out on a table and unwrapped you, just like that?"

A curious look came over Emmeline's eyes, as if she were imagining the scene herself. Her eyes, however, expressed none of the disdain that Ali felt must be written all over his own face; in fact, they showed amusement, pleasure even. "I would feel quite taken, Monsieur," she said finally. She took a step toward him so that her body inches away from his. "Quite...thoroughly penetrated," she said pointedly.

Emmeline stared up at Ali, unblinking. Her pale breasts rose and fell in the dim lamplight. Her cheeks blazed with eager tenderness. Here it was, explicitly, her offer to him. To undo her, unravel her like a European unwrapping a mummy, and expose the fallibility of her flesh underneath. Ali understood that it was not just sex but power that Emmeline was offering him. She was giving him the power to spectate. She was offering Ali an opportunity to play the European in the scene, and offering herself up as the object of his gaze. Ali's fingers tingled as he considered the offer. They grazed the fine fabric of her skirt, and he felt a power emanating through them--a power to unwrap, to expose, to make his own.

"Unwrap me, Ali," she told him softly.

Ali smiled. "Lie down on the table," he told her. She did so, lifting her bustling skirts up, then smoothing them out over the table. Ali looked down at her, feeling the sense of power grow within him as his eyes perused every detail of her body--the black lace of her wide collar, the patterned silk of her dress as it gathered around her figure, the deep sincerity in her eyes. Yes, he thought. He could see the appeal of spectatorship, could intuit the enticing erotics of gazing. He ran a finger over the contours of her face, feeling the curve of her nose, the neatness of her eyebrows, the lines of her cheekbones. She looked up at him eagerly, but something in Ali (a selfish impulse, or perhaps simply a dominant one) wanted to reserve all of the looking for himself. He found a loose strip of cloth from one of the shelves and brought it to Emmeline's eyes.

"May I?" He asked. She nodded, smiling. Ali tied the blindfold around her eyes.

She breathed in and out, settling into the loss of her sight. "I feel so vulnerable," she commented. There was no fear in her voice, no discomfort, only a tremor of excitement. "You could do anything you like to me."

Yes, Ali thought, I could do anything I wanted. And what he wanted to do was to take his time. He stood over Emmeline for several long minutes, observing her, savoring the anticipation he saw in her tensed body. She said nothing as she waited for him, but he could see impatience written on her body--in her quickening breath, in the way she clasped and unclasped her hands. It made him feel powerful to make her wait for him. She had wanted him to unwrap her, Ali thought, and he would oblige her, but he wanted to do it in his own time.

At last, Ali reached down and undid the tight bun of Emmeline's dark brown hair. He ran his hands through it, spreading it out over the table. He ran his hand over her dress, taking in the curve of her waist and the outlines of her legs under the layers of fabric. He grasped the flesh of her breasts, feeling the way that her stiff undergarments modified their shape. His fingers began to undo the buttons on the front of her dress, beginning at her chest and continuing down her torso. As he peeled away the silk from her torso, he saw her breath quicken, the rise and fall of her breasts showing her excitement. He examined the stiff, pleated fabric of her corset with curiosity. Now that he saw it plainly, he could not help but think how contrived it made her body look. He wanted it off of her, to see her flesh in its pure, vulnerable, and unaugmented form.

"I must put this in my travelogue," he joked. "How curiously these Europeans wrap their women."

Emmeline laughed up at him through the blindfold. "I'm sure it will make an intriguing chapter!"

Ali pulled her arms out of her dress, then pulled the whole dress off her body, leaving only the corset and crinoline underskirts. Then he made her lie on her side, and he began to undo the tight laces of her corset down her back. The flesh of her back realigned itself as he loosened the garment. She let out a sigh, of relief perhaps, as Ali slid the corset over her shoulders. Now there were only the layers of her skirt and her undershirt to unwrap, and Ali did so, slowly, savoring each gradient of dress on the path to nakedness. He felt as if he were peeling away her facades--revealing the instruments that lent her body its perfection and stripping them away.

Finally, he slid her white pleated bloomers down her legs, and she was naked. Thoroughly and utterly exposed. She looked smaller without the billowing skirt, more vulnerable. Her hand and shoulders were tense with anticipation as she waited, blindfolded, for Ali's next move. Her breasts had fallen into their natural shape, drooping and full, nipples erect. He squeezed them with his hands, then traveled down her body to grasp the plump flesh of her stomach, her hips, and her thighs. Each curve of her body, each fleshy imperfection, he took in with a decisive squeeze, wanting to feel every bit of her body, to know it absolutely. He ran his fingers thoughtfully through the hair around her genitals, noticing the moisture that swelled between her legs.

"I want to watch you do something thoroughly undignified," he told her.

"And what is that, Monsieur?"

"I want to watch you have an orgasm."

Emmeline grinned and feigned shock. "Monsieur!"

"We all do it, don't we? Or do white women not have orgasms?" He joked.

"We do, but never in polite company!"

"Well, then it's a good thing there's no polite company here. Only a curious historian from a faraway land who wants to see an orgasm before he leaves Paris."

Emmeline laughed. "Okay, then," she said.

"Good. Very good. Give me something good to put in my travelogue." Ali took hold of her legs and spread them apart from each other. With two fingers, he spread her labia apart so that the topography of her genitals was exposed. There they were, moist and pink, deep and vulnerable. They welcomed him with a sweet and salty scent. He ran a finger over them and was surprised by the immediacy of Emmeline's reaction, the sharp intake of breath that escaped her as his finger grazed her clitoris. "Show me how you do it," he entreated. Obligingly, she brought her hand down to her genitals and began to rub up and down the sides of her clitoris. Ali watched, intrigued. As Emmeline rubbed, her hips began to move in a steady pulse, as if of their own accord. She let out a labored sigh, and her body gave a slight tremor. Her rubbing accelerated, and so did the movement of her hips, moving to a deep-seated inaudible rhythm. Her muscles tightened, then relaxed, then tightened again, quivering.

Ali rested his hands on her thighs and brought his head down close to her genitals, not wanting to miss a single detail of her performance. She fingered herself as if she had done the motion many times before, so many times that she did not have to think about how she was rubbing herself. Her rhythm was organic. All the muscles in her body seemed to move in tune with each other, all gyrating to the same beat, all emitting the same tremor of anticipation as the orgasm came further and further into her grasp. He could feel it begin to overtake her by the feel of her thighs as they tensed in readiness for the impending release. She shook with exertion, her breath caught in her throat, and at last, the much-anticipated orgasm rent through her body. It shook her from her core to her fingertips, erupting out of her mouth in a great, seismic gasp. She shuddered and moaned and sighed. The moisture in her nether regions swelled and glimmered. Then, as soon as the seizure had passed through her, it dissipated. Her muscles relaxed. She panted with exertion, and her mouth broke out into a smile.