Chapter 9:Ecstasy:Georges Du Roy and Lily Bart:Bel Ami and House of Mirth

Cy Twombly - Leda

Cy Twombly - Leda 3

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Lily rolls over on top of me while I am now soft and still in her. She puts her face on my neck and begins to sob. Her body shakes and I know she still has unresolved tension even after all that. The stored tension of a lifetime is now leaking out in sobbing, but that will never be enough to dispel it. I hold her tightly to me. I don’t want to slip out now as I wait to get hard again. I know what I am going to do next and the thought is making me hard very fast.

I know if I don’t fix this now, she will remain voracious and insatiable for the rest of our lives. She will never be completely sated. I realize the advantages of this, but I am too experienced now to not know the negative, as I remember Madame Walter. No, a sexually crazed Lily is not what I want.

I kiss her tenderly. I am not going to comfort her. She is an adult, not a child like Suzanne. “Ah, Lily, you want more. You have held all your feelings in much too long, much too long.” I begin to caress her, to arouse her again. She is in for it now.

I move inside her slowly, carefully, deeply and dirtily. I am beginning to give her what is known in Paris as a dirty fuck.  My hand seeks her breasts, her nipples which I fondle then pinch, a little roughly. She winces. I move to her clit and rub it in circles until she begins to writhe again.  I hold her ass tight to me, then I slip one finger of my hand around her anus, closer and closer to her opening. I feel her tense. Yes, she is wondering what I am doing.  I hum in her ear and blow into it. She whimpers, then moans. Yes, she is not finished, my Lily. Well, she will be after this.

I lick my fingers and then I insert one in her anus. She startles, says, “No, no, don’t do that, Georges, please don’t do that.” She starts to move away but I hold her fast. She realizes now that I am not going to let her go, and she begins to pant in fear. What is this man she hardly knows, whom she has married, going to do to her. She is in his power, she thinks.

If she only knew.

Now I insert a second finger and move both of them around. “No! I don’t want you to do this!” she almost screams. I pay no attention to her and just hold her tighter as she pushes harder to escape. Then I still my fingers, and remove them, and hold her, then I take my other hand and put my finger inside her cunt. Slowly, carefully and she is so wet. She sighs, thinking I am obeying. I put two more fingers inside her and move them slowly and purposefully. I kiss her lips, her hair, her ear and taste her all down her neck and throat and breasts, and stomach until I reach her folds and continue. “No, no, please, no not that.” I pay no attention to her and I lick her from her clit down to her entrance and then my tongue enters her and she shivers and moans. “No, please, no,” but she doesn’t mean it.  I suck her into my mouth and she trembles. I begin to take her to the edge but not too close.

I stop and she moans, but I put my cock inside her again and she moves closer to me. Then my fingers begin to move to her ass and she stiffens, wary now. I put one, then two in and circle inside, then I scissor them and she gasps. I feel her surprise. I increase the movement of my fingers and she tries to twist away. I pull out of her, flip her over and my cock is at the entrance to her ass in seconds and I go in an inch or so. She is completely surprised and screams, “No no not that. I won’t have that!”

I whisper in her ear, “You still have all the power, Lily, only you just don’t know it right now.” If she would go completely passive and just lie there, I would immediately stop. It is not too late for that. She twists and tries to get away, but I hold her very tight.

“No, no, no, please not that, please, no, I am not that kind of woman, I am not, no, no, no, please don’t do this.” And she begins to cry.  But I am not going to stop and comfort her. I push in a little more, and I threaten, “Your tears are not going to stop me, Lily. Try something else.”

Then she really tries to get away, twist, writhe, squirm, turns and thrashes but it doesn’t work. I am ready for her. When she calms I push in a little more. So she renews her fight with me. As long as she resists I do not enter her more. But as soon as she exhausts herself and slows, I renew my efforts to get inside her ever more deeply. She is still on her stomach, her face in the pillow. Her sobbing increases, and her head thrashes back and forth.  I push a little deeper and I feel a slight relaxation of her spincter muscles. Now I know it is just barely beginning to feel pleasurable.

I push in just a little more and I feel her give. But I don’t want this. I want her resistance. I provoke her.

“It’s beginning to feel good, isn’t it, Lily. You are beginning to like it, aren’t you. I know you are going to love it!”  Now she really thrashes around. “No, no, stop! I shall throw myself overboard the first chance I get! I won’t live with a man who does this to me!” And she begins to bite and tear at the pillow in her rage.

“You still have all the power, Lily, why don’t you use it?”

Then she screams at me. Her rage is infantile rage, it goes so far back in time. Now she is no longer fighting me, she is fighting herself. This is what I want. Yes, yes, yes, this is what I want. 

She holds up her closed hand. “See this. This is your heart!” she screams. “I am going to dash it on the rocks, throw it into the sea, grind it under my feet, spit on it. I am going to put it in my mouth and tear it to shreds with my teeth, then swallow it and defecate it out, then smear it into the dirt!” And she begins sobbing again. She tears more at the pillow until the feathers start floating out, flying about the room. She is demented now.

“No, you are not. Because I won’t let you,” I say.

I push in deeper but I am barely halfway into her so I go in even deeper, but slower. I have no wish to hurt her.  She twists and twists, so I place my teeth at the nape of her neck and bite carefully. She senses the primal impulse of this, that I could snap her neck, kill her, and then fuck her still warm body. I could throw her overboard and it would be assumed she had jumped. This she knows intuitively. And she knows I am going to get my way with her.

She tries to get up by rising on her knees and I allow this, just a little, as I sink deeper into her. She moans and tries to crawl away, but she doesn’t stand a chance. “Try something else, Lily,” I taunt.

“Oh, you beast, you monster! I should have known! Why didn’t I know! Why did I say yes! I am in your power as I feared!"

“No you are not,” I say. “You are not.”

Now she is violent. She has renewed strength as she fights for her life, because that is exactly what she is fighting for. She thinks she cannot live with a filthy disgrace like this. She screams, she pounds the bed, she grabs the pillow bringing it up and tears at it again and now more feathers fly. She twists her neck to bite me and catches my arm. Her teeth sink in and she bites as hard as she can. Blood runs out of her mouth, down my arm, all over the sheets. I laugh at her. She grabs at the pillow with her upraised hands and tears at it more, shredding it with her hands.  The feathers float all over the room now in clouds that fall on us, in our hair, our eyes, our mouths, all over our bodies. My dear god in heaven, she has become Cathy to my Heathcliff. What have I done! She is my darling Lily, but she doesn’t know it yet. She will though.

I go deeper, and she is so hoarse from screaming, she can’t catch her breath. “I am strangling, I am strangling!” She hopes I will believe her and stop. Not a chance. Now I am fully in at last and she feels it. She knows it with all her being. She howls. I pull out a little then thrust in again, harder. “You dirty bastard,” she cries. I will kill you for this. I will kill you. I will murder you. I will wait for my chance and kill you. I won’t kill myself, I will kill you. You will never touch me again. I will be on my guard all the time.!”

I move inside her and she has given way. Now I put my fingers into her cunt. One, then two, then three and I twist them around and my thumb fingers her clit. I am still holding her tight with my other hand and bloody arm. “Feel me inside you Lily,” I say. I curl my fingers up towards her clit on the inside and I push hard with my thumb. She gasps and begins to pant. I stop and move her back from the edge. “Oh!” she screams. “I hate you I hate you I hate you!”

I speed my thrusting inside her ass, pulling her tight against me each time. “I love you ,” I say. “I love you.” She shrieks and screams blasphemies at me.

I keep increasing the deepness and speed of my thrusting, the movement of my fingers, playing her and then finally, finally she gives up and meets my thrusts, pants like a dog, and howls like a cat in heat on the back fence, rising up on her knees and arching her back and throwing her head back. She is magnificent. Now she is fully animal, all her civilized nuances gone to dust. She has become my Cathy completely. She screams in passion and puts her hands on her breasts and squeezes her nipples. She reaches behind her head and putting her hands around my neck, she pulls me in as close as she can.  She twists and turns but not to get away, to increase her pleasure. She cares nothing for me now. She is completely out of control with Dionysian ecstasy. She is gone. Absolutely gone. I completely let go in her, pumping my semen deep into her rectum, and take her over the edge.

She convulses and screams incoherently, her voice a mish-mash of jumbled words and sounds and animal noises. She convulses with a grand mal seizure. I put my hand in her mouth so she won't bloody her tongue. Her entire body shakes and trembles and I have to hold her tight. Her bladder lets go and then her bowels as she urinates and we are lying in a primal soupy stinking mess of filthy feathers and gruel.

And then finally she is complete and sinks down on the bed, turning up to look at me. Her face is washed clean, newborn, her eyes open wide and luminous like an infant’s eyes. She keeps staring at me. For the second time since I have met her, she is speechless.

I say,“I thought I loved you before, but I could not have. What I feel for you now is so much more than that, that I don’t have words for it. All I can say is I love you, I love you, all day and all night long. Come”, I say, and I pick her up to carry her into another room to wash her. I wash her the way you wash a bloody newborn calf or foal, wrapped in membrane, all bloody and covered with shit.

While I am cleaning her I tell her, “I had to do that. When you were torturing me in New York I had fantasies of doing that to you, humiliating you, dominating you, revenging myself on you. But that was before I loved you. I only wanted to marry you, to have you, to keep you, to make you mine. That’s not love. And then you began your siege of my heart. I was furious."

“You upped the stakes at each turn. Every time I called your cards, you would up the stakes again. I couldn’t win. I could never win. And I began to understand that that was the reason you had never married. You always had an obstacle ready. Always. But what did you want? I had everything you wanted and needed. Why did you keep distracting me, pushing me away, putting beautiful young girls in my path to seduce me. Why? What did you want? I didn’t know. But tonight I found out. Sex finds us out."

“You wanted ecstasy. And none of the men around you could even come close to giving you that. None of them were passionately experienced and brutal enough. And you didn’t even know that that was what you wanted. You just knew that any particular person couldn’t give you what you didn’t know you wanted. There’s a becoming famous doctor in Vienna who treats patients in a different way. He also asks, “What do women want?” He doesn’t know. But I do, because I have always studied women, listened to them. They know things.”

“Only one writer has really written about this with clear insight. She was a very young girl living in a parsonage. She never married, had no experience with friends, just living at home with her father, sisters and brother, walking on the moor with her dogs. She knew in her imagination, and she wrote it. I don’t think you have read Wuthering Heights, but you will. I have it at home. It’s how I learned English.

“And you will know that I am your Heathcliff and you are my Cathy. And when you read this book, you will know me and yourself. I just had to do what I did to allow you to know. You see, few people want to experience ecstasy. Some want to get close and run. Others want nothing to do with it. Most who do go mad. It is dangerous, terribly dangerous, but I know I can protect you. I knew that you did and you didn’t, but that you would never be who you could be, if you kept yearning for what you didn’t know.

“Now you are completely different, changed. Like St. Teresa in her passion. Everything you experience now will be the same and it will be different. You will still be my beautiful perfect Lily, and yet you will not be the same.”

That’s what she is. She has just been born again, my Lily, my perfect Lily. And I clean her, wash her hair, dry her with towels and then I wash myself without letting go of her.  I pick her up and we go to her room and her virginal clean bed and I place her on the sheets, cover her and climb in beside her and hold her in my arms, carefully, tenderly, for she is truly, newly born.

“Sleep, my darling, sleep now. Go to sleep. I will watch over your dreams. You will be safe.” The ship gently rocks on the waves and she is warm and lulled, and she sinks down into slumber.

And I love her beyond belief.

Chapter 1: Du Roy Wants a Wife:Georges Du Roy and Lily Bart - Bel Ami and House of MIrth

Robert Pattinson As Georges DuRoy

Suzanne has been gone almost three years now. My son is growing up and Madame Walter is not the best influence for him. I live in the Walter mansion and she still has not said a word to me unless it is about my son. I have employed nursemaids but they do not satisfy my aspirations for my son, so I have continued looking, until I finally understood that no one is going to be perfect for him. This presents me with a problem, because I do not wish to marry again. I am content with Clo and others with no one making demands on me.

Suzanne was so lovely and fun. We had barely gotten to really know each other when she became pregnant. Her mother insisted on her being much more confined than I wished and I was furious, as I knew the real reason. She had her convinced that sex would be harmful and Suzanne was fearful with me after that. We were just learning each other. I still saw Clo, of course, but I did not have the same desire for her as I had had before my marriage to Suzanne. It was a trying time for Suzanne and me, but I thought that after the child was born, things would improve.

Only she died in childbirth. I was left with an infant and, not exactly a broken heart, but a sense of real loss for what might have been. After two years I began to think about what I might do to find a mother for my son and a wife for myself. Young women were no longer acceptable to me as I could not see them as mothers. In bed I knew they would be ardent, for a while anyway, and that was agreeable to me. What I really wanted was someone who could preside over my life as I lived it with calm and tact, who would be good for my son and compatible with me. But she had to be beautiful. And she had to have integrity. I did not wish another highly polished cocotte like Madeleine. I no longer needed to marry wealth as I now had the millions from Suzanne’s death and my son was the legal heir to the Walter fortune. Strange how things twist and turn according to fate.

With my melancholy I read more to console myself and I began to see different possibilities beyond my journalistic career. My confidence in my writing had grown as my understanding grew. I began to write short stories, to publish them and I was trying to work on a novel with not much luck. I needed the atmosphere my own wife could provide.  I was never the kind of man who can be content living alone indefinitely.

I decided I didn’t want a French woman. My tastes had changed.  I wanted an English woman or an American one. I had a working knowledge of English, but after reading Madame Bovary I read some of the English women writers and then I read Wuthering Heights and I saw myself in Heathcliff. This had never happened to me before. I had not been a student at all when young. I had to make my way in the world as best I could. I knew Heathcliff so deeply and also the part of him that was wounded. But I had never loved like Heathcliff, and I was not looking for that, but as a character he intrigued me and I gained in self-knowledge knowing that we were so close. I had escaped his fate as Suzanne was more courageous than Cathy, but then she was so young and the young are often like that.

I think I wanted an English speaking woman because I was so infatuated with Emily Bronte. I decided that if I married an English speaking woman that the language would be a barrier between us. So I worked on fluency with Emily Bronte. She is a genius with language and her imagination is unrivaled. Was it wise of me to absorb her so completely? I didn’t know, but no other writer had captured me like this girl I would have loved to know.

But an American woman was more of a decided challenge to me. We French have such a love affair with the New World. And then at an event I met the Duchess of Beltshire and her companion Lady Skiddaw. As she was my dinner partner, she began to tell me of a most remarkable woman she had been recently reacquainted with at Monte Carlo.

“You know Georges, I may call you that may I not, well, I will anyway whether or no, it is time you remarried. I have heard your young wife died almost three years ago now and your young son must need a mother’s care and supervision. I have recently come back from the Riviera and I again met a most remarkable young woman there. I tried to get her to accompany myself and Lady Skiddaw back to the continent, but she felt it was imperative that she return to America. Why, I don’t know. She is astonishingly beautiful and has such amazing social graces she makes it such a pleasure to be with her. She is fun, gracious, considerate, has exquisite taste, really just perfect.

"But she is unmarried, and no one really understands exactly why. Ten years ago at Aix an Italian Prince, Prince Virigliano, rich and the real thing, was determined to marry her. As the marriage papers were being drawn up his good-looking stepson arrived and Lily, that’s her name, Lily Bart, apparently flirted with him and the two men argued openly. A scandal irrupted. Everyone began looking at her so queerly. Her horrible aunt, Mrs. Peniston, with whom she lives, felt a little ill, and thinking it was the food or climate or some such stupid thing, decided she would return home with her ward. Lily’s parents are dead and she has no money of her own, but is desired by the best people in New York City because of her beauty, her grace and her infallible tact.

"The Crown Princess of Macedonia was so taken with her when she stopped for a week at Monte Carlo she invited her to stay with her at Cimiez, wishing to bring Lily into her traveling entourage. Bertha Dorset had invited her to cruise the Mediterranean with a party of friends on her yacht the Sabrina, to occupy her husband while she dallied with a young poet. She was so jealous of Lily’s success everywhere she set sail for Monaco and the Casino at Monte Carlo, bringing Lily with her. It was there that I met her again. Bertha Dorset just did not understand that it is Lily's beauty that does it, that attracts everyone to her.  And she cannot transfer it to the people who invite her to social gatherings and voyages, so they blame her. Her face is so beautiful that it opens endless doors for her, but it also creates terrible destruction for her. Men want her and women are livid with jealousy. It's both a gift from the gods and a terrible curse.

"A Mrs. Fisher who knows her has discussed her with me. I have heard other stories too of course. A very suitable match becomes infatuated with her, and she seems ready to accept him, but then she oversleeps, goes on a picnic, etc. and the whole thing is ruined. My acquaintance Mrs. Fisher says she thinks it is because Lily despises the things she is trying for. She is twenty-nine now and more beautiful than she ever was. All of her friends’ husbands are infatuated with her, but she is lovely and polite and chaste, wanting nothing to do with them in the way they wish. She has a friend in Lawrence Selden, but he is an attorney with no assets, wealth, inherited or otherwise. He is not a possibility for Lily. She is poor, but as she often chides, she is a very expensive woman.

"I think you must meet her. She is perfect for you, and you, of course, are perfect for her. You are a Baron, exceptionally wealthy, an accomplished journalist, a writer, widowed and definitely looking for a wife and a mother for your very young son. You are not under the influence of anyone else, family or otherwise," and here the Duchess winks, "and I daresay you are experienced. You will know how to get her to say yes very quickly. I am going to New York City very soon, and I can arrange for you to meet her. The rest will be up to you naturally, but you will know how to proceed.

The Duchess winks again at me. She is known to be a liberal uninhibited person as she travels around the world of the privileged. They seek her company and pout when she tosses them off as bores. Obviously this Lily Bart does not bore her at all. In fact she is still quite taken with her. And I am intrigued to meet this American Cinderella, who does not sit by the fire in rags, but is always exquisitely dressed, sought by royalty and wealth, and looking for a husband. A husband who can offer her what I can offer. What could be more perfect.

"My gracious thanks to you. I think I shall take your advice. When are you sailing? We shall go together?" I take her hand and kiss it lingeringly.