Whispers of the Flesh Read Free Page A

there.”
    The priest sent this report to the Bishop of Clermont (under the
Ancien Régime
), who transferred it to the Archbishop of Bourges, who dismissed the matter, having judged the young woman, sight unseen, to have been bereft of reason. It is worth noting that it had been, and still is, the long-standing practice of the seigneurs of Grotte Cachée to make frequent and generous donations of land and monies to the Church.
    The second of these documents was an age-worn, velvet-bound book titled
Una Durata di Piacere
, being an erotic memoir by a Venetian nobleman named Domenico Vitturi, which was privately published under a nom de plume for the author’s intimate friends in 1665. Several chapters thereof concern a number of visits to Grotte Cachée by Vitturi and favored courtesans for the express purpose of training them to pleasure men in unorthodox and sinful ways.
    This instruction was carried out most zealously by two men fictitiously named Éric and Isaac, who schooled the courtesans in extraordinarily obscene forms of sexual congress. They were taught to employ various objects, devices, furnishings, and even implements of torture, for the purpose of exciting lust in themselves and their bed partners. They became adept at such debaucheries as sapphotism,
le vice anglais,
ménage à trois, the use of bindings, blindfolds, and gags, and other practices of an even more debased nature.
    A notable aspect of these depictions of fornication, many of which Vitturi viewed sub rosa as it were, from a secret hiding place, was the prowess of the two trainers, which strikes one as exceeding the natural abilities of the mortal male. By Vitturi’s account, Éric could perform the act of copulation a dozen or more times in brisk succession. Isaac, while possessed of a more conventional, though still remarkable, sexual vigor, boasted a generative organ described as being quite literally
“come il penis dello stallion.”
Furthermore, one of the courtesans claimed that Isaac possessed “a tail, slightly pointed ears, and a pair of very small, horn-like protrusions on his head, his hair effectively concealing the latter two peculiarities.”
    This book was brought to the attention of high personages at the Vatican, who handed the matter over to the Archbishop of Bourges, who declared that Vitturi’s reminiscences were simply too fantastical to warrant investigation.
    The third document in Archbishop Bélanger’s possession was the letter that prompted this investigation, which was sent this past June from a Mrs. L____ in New York City to an old friend summering at her family’s château in Lyon. (In case this letter should fall into the wrong hands, I shall refrain from using the actual names of the parties involved, as they are prominent in New York and London society.) It was this letter, retrieved by a laundress from a hidden pocket in a skirt belonging to the recipient, which made its way to the Archbishop, who being of a more inquisitive humour than his predecessors, resolved to prove or disprove with finality the existence of diabolical beings at Grotte Cachée.
    Upon greeting her friend with the curious salutation, “From one little red fox to another,” Mrs. L____ proceeds to reminisce about a “slave auction” they had attended at Château de la Grotte Cachée twelve years ago. Having been “sold” to dissolute libertines for one week’s sexual servitude, they were locked into collars and cuffs of gilded steel, led about by leashes, and made to engage in activities of the most appalling degradation.
    Mrs. L____, being currently “bound in marital monotony” to a much older gentleman, makes casual reference to alleviating her tedium through sexual affairs with other men. On those rare occasions when her husband comes to her bed, she manages to feign interest in the act by recollecting (in language that I blush to reiterate, doing so only in deference to your Lordship’s directive) “that game of blindman’s