I know you always admired the portrait, Mother, although you thought it still unfinished.

I wrote, This same individual has painted two portraits of me now, the first being stolen by the English servant while in his cups.

I thought, I must not listen. I know the worst but cannot hear it.

In any case, he said, we were compelled to sit again. Shit again, I wrote.

He said, You know how tedious this is, Maman. I remember the stories you told of the boredom of your three sittings and how it might be relieved only by conversation. My little Marseillaise could not, of course, discuss the great matters of our religion, or pull apart the Jansenist tendencies of our beloved Bebe, but you will see how we made out just the same.

I wrote.

In my very ordinary cabin, a room so small, you would not give it to a servant, the most extraordinary events transpired and I will tell you of them.

I thought, You will tell her, little Pintle d'Pantedly. But I will tell her better. We will tell her together-Mother, I wrote, I know you share my revulsion for the philosopher's Confessions, and the last thing any of us wish to read is the general embarrassment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's failures in the arms of Madame de Warens. My account-which I would never have made were you in the same room or house or even continent-has not the least element of failure about it.

I doubt I will ever send this to you, I wrote, for how can a son tell his dearest sweet most upright mother that he has, with no spoken invitation, removed the most intimate garments of a young woman who has run her sable brush across his very manhood and thus produced what the ancients, I believe, called "pearls of joy."

Dear Mamma, I wrote, I rogered her.

I looked up to find Lord Migraine staring at me. To hell with you, I thought. I laid her on the floor, I wrote, and when the gift was all unwrapped, found a willing partner, a Marseille animal, who refused to be contained by the narrow space between the bunks. What bruises she must have, Maman. She so struggled to take charge of all the business but I would not have it, and she was not sorry either and such was her pleasure and her proximity to the main cabin that she must take the damn cushion in her teeth. I swear she tore it, for there were soon feathers floating in the sunlight.

Lord Migraine cocked his head at me and waited for my pen to cease.

I wrote.

And all the while, my dear Maman, not two feet away, the Puritans played whist. This is the servant writing to you, Comtesse, mother of Olivier. Your little Migraine is not whom you imagine, I wrote. He is vile. He has stolen my love. He has broken my heart. And I send you this news in that very same hand, that now and in the future, will declare myself your most affectionate son.

Adieu my dear mother. The wind is blowing from the west.

Later I placed blank pages in his envelope and ripped up my madness and its carbon copy and gave them to the air but those words, cruel instruments made by none other than myself, continued to rub like sand against my heart.

YOU WOULD SAY I was the perfect lover for a madwoman, and I confess to an attraction to that shadowed liveliness, those sudden passions, twisting stairs, violent updrafts that can break the wings of eagles in the tumult of a storm. That species never frightened me, although perhaps it should have. Did I drink too deeply from their pools of grief?

Mathilde and I first met when she was dispatched to tend to Monsieur's mural in the petite maison. It was gray and wet as Paris is in December. Here, clad in three pairs of heavy stockings, with a sheepskin rug forever slipping from her shoulders, she attempted to deal with the very poor foreshortening of Cupid's feet, an error not originally her own, although she owned it once she touched it with her brush.

Cupid, of course, was a central motif in many a man's petite maison and the Cupid in question was paying homage to Linnaeus and all the suggestive blossoms and insects the old man had classified and christened, in this case dragonflies, engorged, scandalously red, in a garden planted with a mixture of the fantastic and the exact.

Mathilde had not been pleased to be given this task. Firstly, the error was her master's. Secondly, her great talent was not with line but color. Thirdly-although no one would ever guess this-she felt herself judged. By me! For my own part I assumed she looked down upon me as an oaf and ignoramus.

So she labored-painfully embarrassed to be responsible for this deformed foot. All of womankind, she thought, would be held responsible for her failure to repair it. So she sat glowering at the wall, her cheeks an apple-russet red, her shapely upper lip marked with a faint charcoal smudge.

Monsieur was in Antwerp playing the part of the most aristocratic bookseller ever born, and I had been left with the job of quieting his creditors, always an extremely complicated business and never, ever, something to be rushed at. The amounts were often in dispute and even his signature must not be taken lightly, so I was daily engaged in meetings with bankers and money changers, facilitating the transfer of specie and so on.

In short, I was not the footman Mathilde assumed I was. And how might I have possibly corrected this impression? Please, miss, come look at my engravings?

As an artist I was certainly her inferior, but among the remaining items from the Marquis de Tilbot's library was an etching after Mantegna's Camera degli Sposi which had served as my instructor in the ancient art of foreshortening. Thus I could witness her present struggles with an almost educated eye.

And of course, I found her very beautiful, and the colder she was toward me the more I wished to force her to see exactly who I was. And when she finally understood, why, then I would punish her for her impertinence.

When she arrived on her second day, she found the door unlocked. As she sat upon her chair she saw, as though pinned by Cupid's dart, a very nice pen rendition of the foot as it should be. There was no message and yet the meaning was quite clear. "Here," it said. "Look."

I affected to be very concerned with Monsieur's ledgers.

"Who did this?" she finally demanded.

"An artist I suppose."

She cocked her head, seemed as if she might smile, crumpled my drawing, then placed it very neatly in the center of my desk where, as her footsteps receded, it slowly opened like a flower.

Two hours later the mural was repaired. And then, of course, the point was no longer one of line or perspective but of the light and spirit that came from every corner of everything she ever touched. Even under the most sullen brown there burned a fire you would not tire of watching.

Mathilde brought to her canvases something that her master-who had signed the work himself-could never have approached. She would use a light body to underpin, perhaps a yellow-white as a basis for a fiery red. Or she would lay a green-white beneath a cooler red and glaze it with a strong color. These glazes were, where necessary, partly wiped off or blended with all sorts of colors in adjacent areas. Thus she created that suggestion of mystery which continually engages the eye anew and never tires it.

Six years later, when she painted Olivier de Garmont in our cabin aboard the Havre, what was most notable was not the rapidity of her attack-she had many patrons to collect before she landed-but that while working in great haste, she had produced a lustrous jewel. Lord Migraine's coat and embroidery, his very skin, even the pale blue silk draped behind him, held such luminous vitality that you would, if you were mad and jealous, think she loved her subject with all her heart.

When the work was done his lordship sat in the main cabin, affecting to read or-worse-to write, but it was very clear to me that he was squirming on the hook of his own desire while she, the demon, turned all her energy away from him. Thus the great French lover was cast into the dark. Then, in all her mad perversity, Mathilde selected Mr. Eckerd for her attentions. It did not matter how the Americans were in love with her, and how they clamored to be done, she would do no more than leave her book on the main table so anyone requiring a portrait could enter their address and she would call on them when she was in New York.