it to my honesty as a historiographer to say that things did not stop there, and that the next day, Petrus returned to Nanzen with crimson cheeks and a furtive gaze. Roselyne, for all her youth, was not unskilled, and she led him to her room with a disarming, natural ease. There, delightfully candid, she kissed him, long and gently. Her lips had a taste of Mercurey wine and nothing seemed more desirable to Petrus than this serving girl with her ample forms and mischievous gaze. When she undressed and revealed her lovely, heavy, slightly pendulous breasts, he understood that it was her imperfections that were kindling his desire. Her milky skin, round thighs, plump belly, soft shoulders—all characteristics which, in the mists would have been inconceivable and shocking—filled him with lust, and when she placed her hand in his beard this lust became dizzying. When she tore off his clothes and drew him onto the bed and made him collapse on top of her, the exquisite softness of her offered body almost made him swoon with pleasure. As she was giving herself to him and for the first time he was delighting in intimacy with the opposite sex, he thought: right, this is not the time to falter. And, leaning over her face, seeing the delicate texture of her skin, the sweat beading at her temples, the charming flaw of her nose that was slightly off-center, he thought again: I love her smell. Roselyne smelled of the rose perfume she used every morning, but also the sweat of a long day’s work, and this mixture of refinement and nature pleased Petrus, and broke all the elfin rules governing desire.
Now he was standing, dying a thousand deaths, before the highest authorities of his world.
“We shall have to find a way to preserve your privacy,” said the Head of the Council, who was trying hard not to laugh (which so surprised Petrus that he blushed all the deeper).
“A bit more discretion would do your quest no harm,” said the guardian (who was having a very good time as well), “and you have emptied two innocent pillows of their feathers.”
There was, in fact, a moment when Roselyne, naked as a worm, had stood up on the bed and, laughing hysterically, had tossed all the duck feathers in the air, above her lovely tousled head.
“I am sorry,” said Petrus, who was thinking of jumping out the window.
“We must agree to a signal to help us anticipate the nature of your activities,” said the guardian.
They agreed, and Petrus went on with his explorations interspersed with wine and comely young women.
He was in the habit of saying he was traveling on business, and if anyone asked him, what sort of business, he would simply say, family business, because family business is family business, after all, and anyone who tries to stick their nose in it is simply a boor. But the gentlemen he met at the winemakers’ did not refrain from divulging their identities and positions, and Petrus learned all about the enterprises and professions on the planet, as well as the splendors of a species he’d learned to love despite all their vanities. One day, when he was at a winemaker friend’s, somewhere in the Côte-d’Or, he met a writer for the first time. He was impressed by his bearing, his mustache and his little beard, but surprised by what he heard him saying when he entered the cellar where the great man was drinking and joking with a few others. It sounded like they were exchanging dirty jokes, one after the other, and so on for a good while, and Petrus was disappointed not to hear the writer telling proper stories. Then he forgot his frustration and began to laugh heartily himself. There were a few unforgettable witticisms—of all the sexual aberrations, the worst is chastity, Christianity did a lot for love by making it a sin—with, toward the end, a more serious conversation where Petrus was on his own to put his questions to the writer.
“Have you been to war?” he asked.
“I wasn’t at the front,” the writer replied, “but I have written about war and I will continue to do so, particularly because the one that is coming will be even more terrible and deadly than the previous ones.”
“The one that is coming?”
“There is always a war coming. Always a civilization dying, which the next civilization will refer to as barbarian.”
“If everything is doomed, what can we do?” asked Petrus.