and squeezes them to get them to sting. Anxious, uncomfortably tickled by their touch, Dieumercie cannot stop himself from recoiling instinctively; when the insects react, they thrust their stingers into his glans. The effect is immediate, intense burning, disproportionate swelling. Monsieur Bonacieux begins to howl as he jumps up and down. His penis looks like a butcher’s joke, a microphone made of bratwurst, ending in a big ball of calf liver. Each time he looks down upon this horror, he starts howling even louder. Frightened by this result, Carmen moves around him as best she can to observe his transformation. She still wants to believe.
“It has to work, doudou. Calm down, the pain will pass . . .”
Dieumercie is so disoriented that he is waving his arms wildly, trying to fight off a cloud. Suddenly, Carmen’s thighs start to itch; she thinks, for a second, that Dieumercie’s burning is contagious, she sticks her hand under her dress to scratch, then starts to writhe just like her husband. Now they are both yelling. Wakened from their torpor, the other bees have flown out of the jar and seem determined to avenge their companions’ deaths.
I Survived the Terror of Russian Sex
After lunch, Canterel easily secured permission to visit his daughter. Clawdia accompanied him to the girl’s apartment and left him alone with her for a quarter of an hour.
The girl was laid out on a sofa bed, her head resting on a fat pillow, her arms beside her body beneath the sheets. Two belts, one across her chest, the other across the middle of her thighs, kept her secured. Canterel took her hand and said her name several times, as if to wake her gently, watching her face, on the lookout for the least sign of a reaction. She must have looked more like Clawdia than him; he recognized the thick set of her eyebrows, her almond eyes, even the four beauty marks that formed a southern cross on her left cheek. But her gauntness, her skin tinged the color of germinated grain, the too pronounced tilt of her neck, the lace bonnet, knotted under her chin, from which transparent blonde locks peeked out, the claw-like stiffness of her fingers . . . it all indicated a slow death. He imagined the movements and rubdowns necessary to stave off bedsores, the nourishing enemas, the manipulations of basic hygiene that all resulted from this, and reflected in turn that it was foolish to have brought this poor child to a place where it would be so difficult to care for her.
He planted a kiss on her forehead and left the compartment, feeling helpless, as if her immobility were contagious.
Madame Chauchat was waiting for him in the passageway.
“How’s the happy father?” she asked, looking out at a bleak landscape of wastelands and abandoned factories. “Not so easy, is it?”
“You shouldn’t have,” he said, after a period of reflection that went on slightly too long.
“Shouldn’t have what? Left you alone, while I was married and pregnant with your child? Spared you the droning of a little girl who was intelligent, but hypersensitive, temperamental, and prone to morbid sulking? My late husband worshipped her, he passed his whimsies on to her . . . Spared you the tragedy of her illness, her indefinite distance?”
Canterel looked at her, and for the first time since they had come back into each other’s lives, managed to fix on that thrilling green light in her eyes.
“You shouldn’t have,” he insisted, reaching out his hands in such a way that she could have grabbed them and brought them to her. “You know very well you shouldn’t have . . .”
He turned around and left.
Holmes and Grimod had become railway sponges. From the moment they had left Martial to his paternal obligations, the two of them had been wandering through the train with an easy-going porosity that attracted all kinds of encounters. There is hardly any place that speaks to the smallness of the world so well as the corridors of a train, and our two comrades rubbed up against a number of individuals whose existence they had until then merely imagined, like the savages who were said to populate remote islands.
Our readers must follow us into these cars and let themselves be dragged—in sympathy, or friendship, we hope—through the series of chats that brought these men to dinner.
Between Vladimir and Nizhny Novgorod, Holmes spent some time in the company of a Haitian priest who claimed to be raising funds for his martyred bit of island from the tartar chief of Ulan Bator. It seemed to Holmes that Brother Célestin, as he had introduced himself with commendable sobriety, was drinking too many fine vintages for a man driven by such a noble cause, and that whatever money he might bring back from Mongolia would hardly cover his travel expenses.
For his part, Grimod had to endure the pompous chitchat of a merchant from Manchester who was transporting sixteen cases of anal probes meant for the dignitaries of the “yellow chamber,” which was his personal nickname for the Chinese People’s Congress. Just from a man’s excrement, he swore, it was possible to learn whether he had ever gone beyond the borders of England: it takes 45 cm3 of an Englishman’s urine to kill a one-kilo rabbit, but only 30 cm3 of a Frenchman’s, and even less if he’s from the Bas-Rhin. During their conversation, he decided to call out to two German officers who were laughing loudly, drunk on vodka.
“You there, if you were lucky enough to be English, imagine how much happier you’d be!”
“England was founded by barbarians,” replied one of the Germans, sounding hostile, “and among those barbarians were your ancestors: the Angles!”
Grimod left him in the unhappy situation he had gotten himself into.
In the next car, he made the acquaintance of Achille Fournier, the humble designer of the national bicolored hat of the Sixth Republic. This young man was walking around with a large, shabby leather satchel overflowing with all the patents that he was going broke trying to maintain to protect his inventions. He was proud of them, and brandished them like weapons from the first moments of their meeting. Grimod was given the rights to a patent “to change the face of the world a little using long range siphons,” to “an aquarium that automatically supplies live flies,” and to “pigs suspended from the ceiling or raised in some other way, in order to nourish and then slaughter swine without letting those unclean animals ever touch the floor,” a system that was meant to respect Talmudic taboos and that would secure his fortune among Jewish communities.
“Had I the necessary funds,” he confided, “I would make a bicycle that runs on grain alcohol, which would prevent the friction caused by pedaling, which is very overstimulating, especially for the fair sex, who have sensitive membranes and delicate pelvises. I would ventilate the Chamber of Deputies using disc wheels, I would replace all bridges with tunnels, I would drain Lake Geneva to provide arable land for Turkish immigrants in Switzerland! But, oh well, I’m from Marseille, I’m only thirty, so I’m wrong.”
In his defense, he was born in Vitrolles, and he augmented his Southern exuberance with the nervous irritability shared by all young provincial poets.
After Brother Célestin, Holmes was kept quite busy with Prince Sergei Svechin, the official waltzer to the Empress of Luxembourg and grand champagne-uncorker before the Lord. The gentleman was nearly two meters tall, a height ungraciously close to his royal partner’s. Helped along by some Dom Pérignon, Holmes managed to get from him a blurred impression and three axioms that plunged him into the depths of long-term bewilderment. These were that the empress was nothing more than a pleasure machine, a jubilant
