Sitting beside him on folded legs, she was entirely nude, this beauty of pearlescent snow and ivory inlaid with silver and, child-like, was perfectly unconscious of her lack of clothing in comparison to the attired man. The wondrous woman in all her naked innocence enflamed his cheeks and his private nether region, and, moved by a chivalric impulsion, the young aristocrat, gathered this second creation of Eve into his arms, wrapping her graceful figure into the red velvet of his opera cloak. As it was still cold, he draped himself in a cape that matched the scheme of his page's uniform--black velour lined with beige silk. Hand in hand, they rose to their feet, walked out of the glade, and happened upon his Orlov trotter grazing near a clump of thistles. Together they rode from the Bois de Boulogne to Normandy, the viscount's vigorous charger galloping on the springy ground obscured by the myriad forget-me-nots. She sat in front of him as he held the reins, from time to time lowering his face to her head to bask in the floral fragrance of her lovely hair; and in turn, she tilted her neck back to whisper into his ready ear of the spell cast upon her.

Four years ago, she had been the only daughter of a domineering and willful duke who wanted her to marry a certain half cousin of hers. She refused, deciding, instead, to become a petulant, little member of the demimonde, stationing herself in a grand hôtel in Montmartre where she cooly burned ten thousand francs in her fireplace in the winter to enjoy the sparks the flames made with such lavish kindling or, wrapped in nothing but leopard skins, ate golden caviar of the sterlet and drank blue amber, the rarest from the Baltic coast, dissolved in her mint wine. She aspired to go to Cairo in Egypt, to become another Cleopatra, after hearing about the queen's barge and the treasures in the pyramids from a traveling gypsy who had fashioned himself an unparalleled illusionist from the forest of Fontainebleau. To that end, she attached herself to a certain violin player, a former count, in the magician's train and night after night had reduced the virtuoso to an impoverished, consumptive ghost of a man who, having seen his Stratavari thrown into the Seine during one of her terrible fits, acquainted the efficient end of a revolver with his temple by the pink-orange advent of dawn. She in turn was rendered into the beast in whose furs she delighted by the vengeful Monsieur la Fée, the master of tricks.

During her imprisonment in the body of a feline she slowly learned to renounce her licentious ways and was left to wait for an honorable, chaste, and compassionate man who, from the purity of his soul, would cause her to weep, a sign which the illusionist deemed the very pinnacle of devotion of one being for another. This viscount had done it and revealed the supple, warm flesh from the cast-off fur.

The story of Beau et Bête ends here, but in case there is a lingering curiosity about the future of the two protagonists or of the lives of the other personae in this most remarkable of tales, let it be said that the viscount wed the daughter of the duke in her Norman château. He assumed the title of her deceased father, she the feminine counter. The marriage was celebrated in high style, guests coming in from all over the northern provinces to watch the fair couple waltz in the center of their ballroom from whose chandelier hung flower baskets of forget-me-nots which adorned the other chambers, from the salon to the crush-room to the supper tables of wine and cake. He was in one of his elegant affairs of black velvet with diamond cufflinks at his wrists and Brussels laced ruffled at his collar--impeccable, immaculate, imperial; she was in a shoulderless, golden-Champagne gown of brocade and lustrous taffeta, her arms sheathed in yellow-amber, opera gloves, a glittering tiara at her forehead. As in another cotillion long ago, A lily of the valley--pearly moist petals and tawny stamens--was at her breast, and, seeing the curving outline of its interior darkened to a gray-ivory, he had the sudden urge to close the gap between them, to move his hand at the small of her back lower down, and to apply the blade of his ornamental dagger to the flimsy material of her gown. And he did, when everyone had left, on the Persian rug by the fireplace where they had talked late into the evening about the tides and sailing to Indo-China. Becoming as the first children of God, they indulged in that night of love about which he had dreamed and for which she had ached whenever she kept her forelimbs on the armrests, caught up in the animation of their dialogue.

Their union, so intimate and longed for, produced a pretty little child who wore kid leather gloves to protect the fingers from the crystalline string of an Afghani kite of painted silk and streaming taffeta ribbons which flew under cerulean skies in the Avenue des Acacias in the Bois de Boulogne not too far from the fateful spot where the viscount and count, his brother, dueled. The black spaniel, Geneviève, who still liked to roam by the banks of the Seine, was brought into their home, a welcome retreat from the Paris streets, to feast on all the Madeira and macaroons the duke was pleased to feed her. The intelligent dog yapped at the child's feet, and together they tumbled and rolled between the two chaise-longue of the salon while master and mistress took their coffee and candied citron, he occasionally running a sleek hand through his golden hair, she sometimes placing her forearms on the rests to capture every word of her charming conversationalist whenever their talk grew especially interesting. Within their château it was always spring with a perfusion of voluptuous blue forget-me-nots growing in the courtyard or else in a morning bouquet or evening boutonniere. The countess with the poetry of trouvères in her eyes still hosted her soirées that were the talk and envy of Saint-Germain, every now and then inviting la Fée to perform his cat-o-nine-tails trick with the three cats and Venetian mirror for yet another captive audience. As for the count, her son, he had fled France the day of the matter with the revolvers and sailed to the Louisiana. There, he kept his inamorata, a gracious mulattress who possessed dark Creole eyes and hair in a cottage along the river in the Garden district where, during the day, he was a sharpshooter at the fencing academy and taught the sons of plantation owners how to cock a pistol and aim so surely that they would never miss. He never knew how many killers he had made under his instruction, for during the hour of the duel, in the deep of night, he repaired to the small dwelling on the banquette to sleep in the arms of one who smelled of magnolias and seemed to be a spirit of the cappuccino served at the cafe.