MICHEL TOURNIER
173
Lucien was a virgin . His awareness of his infirmity had stifled
the cries of his nascent puberty. He discovered love that day, and his
abandon of his clerk's clothing and especially of his built-up shoes,
and his acceptance of his dwarf category were in his mind in–
separable from this dazzling revelation. As for Edith - who was only
getting a divorce because of the inadequacy of her too-handsome
husband - she was enchanted to discover that such a small, mis–
shapen body should be so fantastically equipped, and so delightfully
efficacious .
This was the beginning of a liaison whose passion was entirely
physical and to which Lucien's infirmity added a slightly shameful,
sophisticated piquancy for her , and a pathetic tension mixed with
anguish for him . They were both agreed to throw a veil of absolute
secrecy over their relationship. Apart from the fact that Edith wouldn't
have had the courage to display such a strange lover to the world, he
had explained to her that it was of paramount importance to her
divo rce for her conduct to appear irreproachable until the case came
to court.
From then on, Lucien led a double life . To all appearances he
was still a small man, dressed in somber clothes and built-up shoes,
whom his colleagues saw every day pen pushing at his big desk, but
at certain irregular capricious hours - determined by coded tele–
phone messages - he disappeared into the block by the Bois de Bou–
logne , went up to the duplex apartment to which he had a key and
there , metamorphosed into an imperial dwarf, willful, swaggering,
desirous, and desired, he subjected the big blonde with the sophisti–
cated accent, whose drug he was, to the law of pleasure. His em–
brace sent her into ecstasies, and her love song, which usually began
with guttural trills, and rapturous flourishes, extending over three
octaves, always culminated in a volley of affectionate, obscene
abuse. She would call her lover my bauble, my lounge lizard, my
ass-scratcher, my dildo .... After the storm she would make him a
speech from which it emerged that he was nothing but a penis with
organs around it, a walking penis, and, now calling him my pen–
dant , my lubricity belt, she pretended to be going about her business
in the house while carrying him around, clinging to her flank , the
way female monkeys carry their young.
He let her say and do what she liked, and, while being bounced
up and down by his "dwarf-carrier" as he called her in retaliation,
he would amuse himself watching her breasts wobbling above his
