So on the following dawn, whilst my English printers were storming toward the palace with pikes and tricolor, his mother's own Olivier, without my knowledge, got together with his mate, young Blacqueville, and lined up some national guards before the palace gates.

As it turned out, the mob was not the problem. Instead the two nobles and their men found themselves the object of a violent action from the rear. That is, the fellow they had come to protect came charging at them incognito, a common burglar with all the silver he could carry in his bags. The king's carriages galloped by and Olivier de Garmont wept to see the last of the Bourbons departing, mud smeared like so much shameful shit across the royal escutcheons.

That all this spying should become my business was in no way to my liking. Yet it was more agreeable than smuggling folios and ivory carvings past the customs posts. In the second week my responsibilities were broadened so it was my job to observe the poor pale creature swear a loyalty oath to another king. I knew it was not his wish. He neighed and snorted, but on orders from his parents he complied. I transcribed the oath myself and when it was stamped and sealed by the marquis I was the one who delivered it to the parquet, that is, the law court at Versailles.

For making this oath his own team, the Bourbons, declared he was a rat to swear loyalty to the House of Orleans. As for the new team, they did not like him either. He was from the Bourbon side no matter what he signed and swore. He was therefore called back before the court and told he would have to swear a second time, just to make sure they heard him right.

Watching this, I considered it advisable for him to do a bunk. I could have smuggled him to London immediately. I made the offer, but this was much too straightforward for the family of Garmont. So I was sent not to Calais but to the booksellers to buy more important volumes concerning prisons, for goodness' sake.

Thus Olivier de Garmont was being helped to develop an interest in penal servitude. Let me see if I can put it plain-if he was prepared to write a report On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France, it was his patriotic duty to go abroad and do so.

Then it was communicated that the new government would not spend a sou on a Garmont, but if he wished to pay for himself-well, they were happy to have him find out how felons should be best tortured in the world to come.

During this great fuss I was busy with another matter entirely. I mean, Mathilde Christian. It was she who came into my bed in the petite maison, she with the fragrant oil paint still beneath her nails, my gorgeous creamy-skinned, raven-haired, plump-armed, nestling, rutting, smiling creature who spent her days painting in the canvases her master sketched, and her evenings with her pencil and her pen.

Mathilde.

ELISABETH VIGEE-LEBRUN once complained about the fate of female painters-Women used to reign, she said, until the Revolution dethroned them. The Revolution dethroned Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun of course, but by the time of this second revolution, my Mathilde was hard at work in the salon of Comtesse X and Marquise Y. Indeed, she had once been called to paint the Comtesse de Polignac, a portrait that turned out so well her master was pleased to sign it himself. This was the turbulent and shining soul who was my lover and my teacher, and when I woke by her side I knew myself, most mornings, a lucky man.

We might sleep in Monsieur's petite maison, which he had built in the garden of a relative in the faubourg Saint-Germain, or we might choose Mathilde's studio in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, it mattered not to me. In the middle of the night I would turn and see her wide dark lips in the blue moonlight and think how many hard roads she had traveled, how many rivers I had swum, sailed, canvas slapping and thwacking in the dark, to arrive at this moment. She had that rare combination of strength and femininity, not like Rosa Bonheur, who had to be issued a certificate to dress in men's clothes, but like herself.

Was it because I had no mother that I so passionately sought her breast or fell asleep with my face nestled between her legs, or was it only that I who had no home was at home with her? In any case we both sat with brush and pen before the so-called quality, and it was her lot to grant the grand ladies the luxury of forgetting their lack of chest or wealth of chin.

For all that, we somehow tricked ourselves into believing we were not their servants, and at night in her studio, while her mother soaked her weary feet, she worked by lamplight on Un tableau de deux figures en pied representant une femme peignant et un ange dechu.

It was partly a self-portrait-herself in her studio but there was the shocking secret in the shadows, the fallen angel-her bare-legged Parrot sleeping in the morning light. This was later judged blasphemous and destroyed but the real outrage was that she had ravished me and that I, and every male who looked upon it, was thereby unmanned. This was contradicted by that truest judge of these situations, my manly instrument itself.

Yet the truth about the painting was much more ordinary, for when we were together in her studio-which we frequently were-we also had her aged mother to care for, and only when the old lady from Marseille, her spine twisted sideways, her veins blue and aching, set off down the stairs for Les Halles did we enjoy the golden pleasures the painting suggested.

All around us the world rose and fell, people went hungry, the days were hard, kings fled, nobles fretted, but we had, until now, occupied a tea-sweet backwater. Mathilde, whose master was a noble of a sort, had arranged that her mother should have a grace-and-favor apartment in the Louvre, no small thing, but once the old woman attempted entrance this grace was denied. So old Mme Christian was our burden, although a burden I was pleased to accept and it was no terrible duty to rub her ugly old feet and knead her little knotted shoulders. She was not quite there but not quite gone, and although she had a tendency to talk to herself, and therefore to reveal her gums, she set off each day to market and returned with the best and cheapest and freshest of everything, laying out her findings on the windowsill where we must inspect each item and then hear the full adventure of its purchase. There was also a flagon of good wine from a merchant with his own vineyard in the Loire which we all, madame most of all perhaps, enjoyed too much.

Thus, by our own lights, we were doing very well.

Very soon after the fall of Charles X, the last Bourbon, and the coronation of the fellow from the House of Orleans, I was ordered to present myself urgently at the petite maison where Monsieur received me, not in the anteroom but in the salon.

Of course I knew this room, right up to its domed ceiling whose amorous scenes had been painted by Mathilde's master. Mathilde herself had lain up on the scaffolding and, although Monsieur did not know this, and I was forbidden to tell, the most personal aspects of the cherubs had been made by her.

The salon, at once so beautiful and commonplace to me, was a most particular paradise. The candles were alight, all thirty of them, held by a chandelier and girandoles of Sevres porcelain arranged in brackets of gilded bronze. These thirty candles were reflected in beautifully crafted mirrors set in lilac-colored panels. With the room arranged, as for a scene in a play, I entered.

There were a pair of gilded chairs placed in comfortable relation to a low table, its surface painted by none other than Proudhon.

"Sit," Monsieur said, tapping his table with the stem of his pipe.

Then I was afraid.

"I want you," he said, "to take young Garmont to America."