Chapter One Hundred and Twenty
Their first outing in their new attire was to the art group. Annette had been used to painting various degradations of the male species, so today’s object, which Master Bergamaschi had arranged to be rendered, posed something of a challenge: a woman, and a living, unmutilated one at that.
Genevra, the night before, had, after exasperating negotiations with Sniggly, succeeded in extracting the duchess from her suite long enough to buy her a drink, and another, get her drunk, and persuade her to pose nude for the art group the following day.
So it was, when the students arrived, they came across the sight of Marie-Adélaïde, Duchess of Loon and scion of noble antiquity, stood on a plinth, naked and masturbating.
O! Reader! The shame! And yet—the duchess revelled in the aristocratic indignity of her lewdness. This unprecedented transgression of all bounds of propriety thrilled her more than all the gazebo buffets, shuttlecocks and Danubian cruises in the world. She relished the exhibition of the commonness of the imperfections of her flesh: her humble breasts; her drooping belly; her large, unpretentious rear; her unshaven, unostentatious pudendum; and her rather large feet. If in doing this, she soiled her pristine aristocratic reputation, so be it; if the closely kept secret of her insatiable vices had now breached the wall of her estate, so much the better. If she were a walnut, who had been trapped her whole life within the confines of expected patrician behaviour, then she was now a walnut who’d broken through her shell. If her life had been hermetically sealed for the prevention of noxious air seeping through, she now danced serenely through the miasma. As her humiliation swelled through her veins, her past came roaring back, deafening her to all else:
Born to a debauched father and debauched mother, neither of whom was sober enough to have any real hand in her rearing, Marie-Adélaïde was raised by her governess, who was the only person she ever loved. While her parents destroyed their bodies on their dissolute escapades, their daughter read books and envied the commoners their freedoms. Her parents died; her governess died; she grew up on her estate, and never sought, nor found, love, contenting herself with momentarily satisfying her congenital, inordinate sensual cravings through the exploitation of her servants. She travelled around the Continent, now, with her footman, receiving with politeness, then refusing out of hand, offers of marriage from high-ranking members of the noblest families in Europe, none of whom bothered to try to get to know her. Through it all, she had no regrets, save never having experienced a loving family, nor, indeed, love in any form, save the most sordid; but, having long ago concluded that her existence was pointless, she saw no blame to be attached, and stifled any suggestion from within that a point might have been found had she tried looking for it.
Now, wobbling atop her plinth, upon the crowning of her ecstasy, she resolved to take her degradation, which had heretofore been restricted to her small circle of servants at her estate, on the road, to the big time, on tour to the most prestigious opera houses of the world—a Godiva for the modern era, reliving this humiliation nightly, unpicking the armour of her reputation scale by scale, until she should grow so inured that she would no longer know honour from dishonour, and could die a famous whore, her rotting teeth retaining a saucy grin when her only spectators would be worms.