Dear demented Man,
The assignation you suggest, as Manet delivered it, is a violation of my every vow. Howsoever sugar-sweet the rewards of ribaldry, we should not indulge them, but continue on our Platonic path to where our grand Idealizations can readily replace with classical colonnades the rank and reedy hutch to be built of a few seedy memories, however actual. Do you not agree? You held to the case at my last Sunday salon, and defended your tender point against all comers. Would you now self-defenestrate simply to leap into my lap, howsoever snowy, the way my bonnie Lonnie does? His curly hairs get everywhere, and I must paddle him back to his doggy pillow with a pestilential punctuality. Do you wish to feel the heat of my hand upon you so? When we should stride as equals to the very clouds….
And yet….
This Thursday, my lady’s maid and my hovering hubby will both be away by 8p.m.–she to her elderly daddy, he to the gambling tables at Monte Carlo. I shall leave the window (third from the left) unlatched–the windows that overlook the sculpted hedges of the Tulieres–you know, the ones you remarked upon last Sunday, of Abelard and Heloise–with that uppity vine entangling their leafy thighs…. 8 p.m. Do not fail me!
Yours in this, and in wish,
Mme. Sabatier
P.S. My husband is a clod.
P.P.S. Your language is divine. When you said “I am not I–I am an Idea,” I blushed everywhere.
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