The Fan-Maker's Inquisition Read Online Free PDF Page B

fronted with glass; each one contained a spanking green scarab, and all were perfect specimens. I had a silk waistcoat made up to match with an obelisk embroidered on each side, a sphinx at the heart. I called it “My Enigma.”
    I had another—this one striped gold and pink with a tender green lining. The buttons were Chinese—pink jade carved to resemble naked ladies. This one I named “the China Peach.” A fellow would be beheaded in a trice if he walked about dressed like that now .
    These days , ma verte, I have the imagination of a peasant. If a hag tumbled out of her haystack and onto my chamber pot offering me three wishes, I fear I would be as foolish as the beggar who wished for sausage. You know what happens next:
    The fool’s wife, a shrew and a scold, cries: “You pope’s pink arsehole! You knight of the Order of Cretins! What a turd in a piss pot you are, asking for sausage when we could have feasted on roast pig! Or even the king’s own fesses smoked like hams! I’ve not had a square meal since I married you, and now, when you get the chance, all you come up with is a stool the consistency of a newborn’s ca-ca to share between the two of us! What a miserable goat’s anal fissure you are!”
    As you can imagine, this enrages the poor bonehead. It enrages him so much that he picks the thing up between finger and thumb and cries:
    “I wish this sausage were stuck up this slut’s nose!” And at once it is. She, of course, is even angrier than she was—if such a thing can be imagined .
    “You miserable wretch!” she screams, the ignominious piece of tripe wagging like a puppy’s tail and causing her to sneeze—and each time she sneezes, she lets go a triple salute of musketry loud enough and hot enough to cause sunspots and other meteorological disturbances. “You bishop’s bastard with a stool for a brain! I will hound you till you shit pea soup and ham hocks, you dead camel!” And on and on until he cries:
    “I wish this shrew were as she was before!” And so she is, and so they are—the two of them as miserable as they were .
    Ah! I, too, have used up all my wishes foolishly! My youth, my passion, my promise. Today, nothing much remains but fever that prodded by unrequited appetite summons a satanic sauerkraut renewing itself as it is eaten, not one sausage crowning the cabbage heap, but forty-four:
    Frankfurterwürste,
    saveloys,
    crépinettes,
    sheep’s gut würstchen,
    pig’s brain sausage,
    madrilènes,
    Polish sausage,
    Strasbourg sausage,
    chorizo,
    boudin blanc,
    boudin noir,
    bite d’évêque,
    boudin fumé,
    marrow sausage,
    truffled goose liver sausage in the manner of Mademoiselle de Saint-Phallier,
    Rindfleischkochwurste,
    sausage made from calf’s mesentery,
    dry Lyon sausage,
    saucisson parisien,
    Genoa salami—
    and so on and so forth. But these are mere garnishes! For gleaming like smiles, bedded down like houris within the mound of glistening cabbage that rises like the tits of la Doulce France in my mind’s eye, are chunks of fat-studded pork loin smoked and fresh, grilled and boiled, and slices of fried bacon as thick as dictionaries, and pork chops broad enough to sail the Seine on, and goose, and meatballs studded with onions, and onions as glazed as the eyes of slaughtered cows, and lastly—and thanks to Science, which has assured us that potatoes may be eaten with impunity, that rather than thin the blood they thicken it, strengthening muscle and bone, soothing the brain yet animating the intellect—a steaming heap of Dutch potatoes, yellow as butter, sausage-shaped, sweet as honey and as firm as my buttocks once were and are no more .
    I’d settle for a macaroon. When I was a little boy, I was given a large macaroon stuck with angelica and gilded with gold leaf. The nuns who made it had put in all their misdirected sweetness, and I could tell that as they pounded the almonds and sugar together in the mortar they had dreamed of love. I devoured it quickly