The Passion of Mademoiselle S. (23 page)

WEDNESDAY MORNING, FIVE O'CLOCK

Charles,
is this the end, must I give you up for all eternity? Must I strike you out of my life having loved you so tenderly?

We confronted each other yesterday. We exchanged some very hard words, and I had to give way to avoid an outburst in public, but you can well imagine what I was thinking as I came home!

I wonder what all this means, and I am waiting for a clear and faithful explanation from you; the one you gave me does not appear to me to express the truth.

And what do you mean by forbidding me to telephone you any more? I have never given my name at your office, and was even extremely surprised anyone knew it. But that need not change anything, for it strikes me they have grown quite accustomed to taking my messages these last two years. And the letters and
pneus
do not go unnoticed either.

No, there is some reason behind this. I know you have changeable moods, but, really, I should like to know where we stand, and whether we shall continue to be what we were up until barely a week ago.

My darling, if you have found another mistress who is more expert than I am, or some huge cock you can use at your will to bugger you, I still love you enough to make way for the lucky, happy bastard who will take my place to serve your greatest enjoyment and his own, but I do feel that having lavished you with my attentions for two years (or nearly), I have a right to some consideration from you, and that you should not take your leave of me in some Métro carriage.

You treated me most peculiarly this evening, admit it. And I was quite devastated when I alighted. I was perhaps not very pleasant, I confess, but that really is no reason to hurt me.

So then, to summarize, I shall wait for a reply to this letter, some word from you to set things straight.

I cannot believe that two years of memories like ours can vanish as if in a burst of anger. I would have preferred our quarrel to vanish in a burst of passion. So, Charles, our love is all down to you. I shall not try to stir any arousal in you that might influence your decision. You must look only to your heart for the answer, which I hope is the same as mine, for, despite my outward sulkiness, you could tell there was only one thing I wanted: to take you in my arms and press my lips to yours.

We are stupid to batter each other like this, and all for a letter that was never written. Oh, go on then, I shall write the wretched letter for you, if you like, for your every caress raises great tides of desire in me, and I should so like to describe them, but you will not hear them this evening, for you are unkind.

But understand this, Charles, I love you and I always suffer when I think everything could be over between us, and my name no longer sounds the same in your heart. And yet my lips have lost none of their skill, and oh, if you were beside me! But no, I cannot tell you such things this evening. I am too sad.

So I shall not telephone again, I shall wait. Do not take too long, I need to know, to know everything.

Simone

FRIDAY EVENING, ELEVEN O'CLOCK

My dearly loved darling,

This will be a sad missive, for my heart is filled with despair as I write. That certainly was not the sort of farewell I wanted between us on the eve of such a long separation, and the quick, cold kiss we exchanged in full view on the street was a far cry from the kisses that have so often been on our lips.

And when I saw how eager you were to leave me, I had to face the facts: We must stop deluding ourselves and each other. A crack has appeared in our love. Which of us made it? We shall never know but it does not matter.

I am not writing to you reproachfully, my darling, but asking for you to be honest. In the name of everything we have had between us, in the memory of all our wonderful times, I beg you to tell me where we now stand. As I sit here now, I do not actually know whether I shall see you again, for you have shown so little tenderness, so little enthusiasm the last few weeks that I am convinced it is all over between us. When we parted I was hoping for some word from you that might have given me new hope, but you said nothing, nothing but wishing me well for my journey. You did not even ask for my address.

So, you see, whatever I do, whatever I say to persuade you, nothing can reassure me, and I am leaving without having mended this little crack. But do you think that a love like ours is worth repairing? Is it already too late to heal the pain you have inflicted on me? The future depends on you alone, Charles. I ask this of your heart: Think it over. See whether you have some affection or desire left for me. I do not believe you do, and that is why I am asking you to give me your answer.

If you have decided to put the last period at the end of our story and if you felt uncomfortable admitting it out loud, please have the generosity to say it in writing. If there is to be nothing left between us, I need to know straightaway. It would be cruel to leave me still hoping if your mind is now emptied of thoughts of me. Far from you, I can try to heal and forget. It will be a painful wound but I would rather suffer than live in doubt. Spare me this torturous ordeal, Charles, and tell me the truth. Don't leave me here with this little thought hammering constantly inside my head. I would rather know and know immediately. If you seek out other loves, my dear little god, do still remember that I loved you passionately and I gave you two beautiful years of my life, the wildest and most heartfelt years. I subjected my body to torture for you, you cannot already have forgotten all the passions I satisfied. I meekly accepted your desires, whatever they might have been, and I never shied away from anything to give you greater pleasure. That deserves remembering every now and then.

Oh, I still love you so much, my dear treasure, and the terrible thought that I have lost you drives me mad. Never again touching your skin with my hands or my lips, dear Lottie, never again kissing your warm lips, never again stroking your magnificent body…Can you really turn your back so quickly on all our ecstasies, all my attentions? Remember how soft my lips felt on your skin, remember my mouth ardently pumping your hard, proud prick and harvesting the last drop of your come from the very depths of your balls. Oh yes, I loved sucking your cock, my treasure, and eating your ass, and I also liked offering up my rump for you to beat furiously or penetrate brazenly with your beautiful prick hardened by my skillful tongue as it trailed from the head down to the balls. I can just picture your ramrod. Right now I can see such clear images of you. I can see the head of your prick straining toward my lips, your fingers tensed around it, guiding it toward my mouth, and I think I can still hear you saying, “Here, little bitch, suck me, suck my prick. Oh yes, it's good, darling, again, again.” Oh, he stiffened so much in my mouth, that great cock of yours, and oh, the streams of come you released down my throat! But I don't want to remind your unfaithful heart of all these things if you have decided to forget them. You know I shall never stop picturing our couplings and imagining new ones for us. The days are over when you used to delight in these suggestive writings. Perhaps you are reading others' now?

You wanted to experience a man's brutal touch, to suck a cock, to be sucked by a man. I gave you that ultimate sensation. Is that what you now hold against me, and did I upset you in any way? If I did, my darling love, you know it was to please you. I was faithful to you throughout the two years of our affair, and I never stopped loving you for one moment.

Well, I shall stop now. I should like to ask you, as a final favor, not to leave me with this uncertainty. Write back whenever you like, whenever you can and whatever you want. I am waiting for your decision and I shall accept it without faltering if your heart has stopped beating in time with mine.

My dear little god, this letter was necessary. If I have spoken the truth, it will be the last letter you receive from me and we shall forget each other. If I am wrong, wrong again, you must tell me, and tell me what I should do.

Goodbye, my dear treasure. Forgive me, forget the difficult times. Think only of my mouth on your cock, my lips on your ass, my cock between your buttocks, my filthy little Lottie.

Are you no longer my Lottie? Are you no longer my Charles? Am I no longer your beautiful bitch with her firm ass and her skillful mouth, which was so good at making you come? Oh, there is so much I could say if you still wanted my love!

I shall stop by the post office on Monday or Tuesday. I hope you will have told me your decision.

I shall kiss your big dark eyes one last time, and your adorable mouth, because I love you with all my heart, and my heart is still full of you.

Your Simone

Like any reader finishing this book after sharing in Simone's torments and empathizing with her despair, I, having discovered these letters, couldn't help but wonder about Charles's sudden disappearance, which brought the correspondence to an abrupt end.

Like Simone, I then wondered whether he had gone off with the “beautiful bastard” whom she had so generously—and fatefully—found for him, as if trying to hasten a breakup that she had long known was inevitable.

That's not my interpretation of the ellipsis we have instead of the words “the end” on the last page of this story. I have lived with Simone for nearly a year, as I tried to organize her letters, gathering together all the jumbled pages and patiently attempting to put them in chronological order, and I feel I came close to her, almost a hundred years after her extraordinary, doomed love affair. I often pictured her reading back through a letter at random, pulling out a single page, then another, and shedding tears. In fact, particularly in the last letters, entire lines are partly erased, very probably by her tears.

The work didn't give me a retrospective gift of sight, but I do feel that the process of organizing the letters brought me genuinely close to both protagonists. Of course, Charles appears only through Simone's writing, but we see enough of him to get to know him intimately (and, in my case, to form a fairly low opinion of him).

Eventually he had had enough of the relationship. Simone's love was a burden to him; her expectations, her resentments, her passionate declarations, her pain, the sacrifices she made, and even her libido, which delighted him at first, now all began to suffocate him. But he didn't have the courage to end the relationship, and he let himself be led on by his desire and the thrill of the new pleasures Simone offered, while hating her for his own weakness.

There is talk of a whole night in each other's arms: Charles promised this in 1929, and it is the only full night mentioned in the whole two-year affair, which was typified by furtive and mostly infrequent trysts. Some letters refer to this night as an imminent event, but not one describes it, and I doubt Charles ever actually granted Simone this pleasure. In the last few months he saw her only occasionally, he avoided her, and there were more and more arguments following their time together. So he continued the relationship with a weariness punctuated by occasional flashes of desire, because Simone was not merely in love: Her passion made her skillful, and the more she felt he was slipping away, the more she fired him up with new fantasies, to the extent that she was the one who showed him he had a taste for men.

The only point, then, where fiction comes into this book is the end. Like me, the reader can interpret at will and give free rein to his or her imagination.

My view is that Charles couldn't bear the reflection of himself that he saw in this daring pursuit of his own ultimate cravings; and, now that he had decided to abandon Simone, he felt more comfortable convincing himself these extremes were not his fantasies but hers alone. He could therefore reject what in 1930 was an unenviable prospect: acknowledging his own homosexual tendencies, which his besotted mistress had revealed to him in spite of himself.

Simone is the heroine of this love story, and Charles is merely a secondary character. Nearly a century later, even when Simone's passion has long since been buried with her, and Charles himself has been reduced to dust, Simone remains sublime and her suffering still haunts us. Perhaps that's why I was so peculiarly affected when I found the trunk in which the satchel was hidden under those empty jars and wads of old newspaper: The emotional charge was still there and still radiated an energy after decades of lying forgotten in a cellar. I would have liked to console her, to take her in my arms and tell her that her young lover wasn't worth so much torment, and that disappointment in love is always insignificant if we can only view it with the benefit of hindsight. I can just offer a pointless comforting hug to a fleeting ghost, but I do hope her story will touch readers, and that this will retrieve our heroine from obscurity and give her a whole new life.

In the end, it doesn't really matter why Charles disappeared abruptly from Simone's life. What remains and what matters is the wonderful illustration Simone gives us of the eternal nature of woman and of an element of self-sacrifice that goes beyond the appetite for sexual possession and gratification described in these letters, and is integral to the way women have loved, do love now, and will continue to love.