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The annuity does not appear to have done Sophie much good. We next hear of her as servant-maid in a Piccadilly brothel, a lupanar much patronized by wealthy emigres from France, among whom was Louis-Henri-Joseph, Duc de Bourbon and later Prince de Conde, a man at that time of about fifty-four. The Duc's attention was directed to the good looks of Sophie by a manservant of his.
It was for the versifiers. The theater is to poetry what the opera is to music. As Berlioz said: Sicut amori lupanar. And in the end they plumped heroically for Duty. Christophe could not see how Duty differed from sordid interest: but the public was satisfied. The word Duty was enough for them: they did not insist on having the thing itself; they took the author's word for it.
This woman, who was a prostitute, pulled up her clothes to her waist and screamed to the guards in that frightful language of the lupanar that one is always compelled to translate: "Cowards! fire, if you dare, at the belly of a woman!" Here the affair became appalling. The National Guard did not hesitate.
Oh me, for the day when the whole city shall be bare and the chambers unroofed and every cranny visible to the Light above, from the Forum to the Lupanar! Ethel takes up the pen. "My dear uncle," she says, "while Clive is sketching out of window, let me write you a line or two on his paper, though I know you like to hear no one speak but him.
In hunting for them she unearthed the bundle, and that together with the other things, she threw on the bed, which was not brocaded, or even daised. It was silver. A few days before, when she had first seen it, she had clapped her hands. The vase too she had applauded. Now the lovely room, that had seemed so lovely, a curl of smoke had turned into a lupanar.
Consulted on the subject, Tiberius replied that the law must be observed. Originally instituted in prevention of offences against the public good, it was found to change into a crime, a word, a gesture or a look. It was a crime to undress before a statue of Augustus, to mention his name in the latrinae, to carry a coin with his image into a lupanar. The punishment was death.
A frame chapel, in which a clerk, a messmate at the burg, officiates, is connected with the women's apartment, the latter being essentially a lupanar, to which no man save the count himself is admitted. There, under the very eyes of his wife, every evening after drinking, the count picks out his bed-fellow for the night.
The Pantheon had become a lupanar of divinities that presided over birth, and whose rites were obscene; an abattoir of gods that presided over death, and whose worship was gore. To please them was easy. Blood and debauchery was all that was required. That the upper classes had no faith in them at all goes without the need of telling; the atmosphere of their atriums dripped with metaphysics.
Within the gates, in an enclosure ample and noble, a space that exceeded a hundred square miles, an area sufficient for Paris quintupled, observatories and palaces rose above the roar of human tides that swept in waves through the wide boulevards, surged over the quays, flooded the gardens, eddied through the open-air lupanar, circled among statues of gods and bulls, poured out of the hundred gates, or broke against the polychrome walls and seethed back in the avenues, along which, to the high flourishes of military bands, passed armed hoplites, merchants in long robes, cloaked bedouins, Kelts in bearskins, priests in spangled dresses, tiara'd princes, burdened slaves, kings discrowned, furtive forms prostitutes, pederasts, human wolves, vermin, sheep the flux and reflux of the gigantic city.
On the morrow the palace of the Caesars was turned into a lupanar, a little larger, a little handsomer than the others, but still a brothel, one of which the inmates were matrons of Rome and the keeper Jupiter Latialis. After that, seemingly, there was nothing save apotheosis. But Caligula, in the nick of time, remembered the ocean.
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