These small observations comforted me. They were evidence, surely, that my gallant soldier had been engaged in fierce combat.

“Well done,” I said as she got into the car.

“What makes you think it was so successful?”

She was a cool one, our Yasmin.

“Don’t tell me it went wrong.”

She didn’t answer me. She settled herself in the seat and closed the car door.

“I have to know, Yasmin, because if you do have the loot I must rush it back quickly and freeze it up.”

She had it. Of course she had it. I rushed it back to the hotel and made fifty exceptional straws. Each straw, according to my microscopic density count, contained no less than seventy-five million sperm. I know they were potent straws because at this very moment, as I write these words nineteen years after the event, I am able to state positively that there are fourteen children running around in France who have Marcel Proust as their father. Only I know who they are. Such matters are great secrets. They are secrets between me and the mothers. The husbands don’t know. It’s a mother’s secret. But my goodness me, you should see those fourteen silly rich ambitious literary-minded mothers. Each one of them, as she gazes proudly upon her Proustian offspring, is telling herself that she has almost certainly given birth to a great writer. Well, she is wrong. All of them are wrong. There is no evidence whatsoever that great writers beget great writers. Occasionally they beget minor writers, but that’s as far as it goes. There is, I think, slightly more evidence that great painters sometimes beget great painters. Look at Teniers and Bruegel and Tiepolo, and even Pissarro. And in music, the wonderful Johann Sebastian had such an overwhelming genius that it was impossible for him not to pass some of it on to his children. But writers, no. Great writers seem to spring more often than not from stony soil—the sons of coal-miners or pork butchers or impoverished teachers. But that simple truth was never going to prevent a small number of wealthy literary-snob ladies from wishing to have a baby by the brilliant Monsieur Proust or the extraordinary Mr. James Joyce. My job, anyway, was not to propagate geniuses but to make money.

By the time I had filled those fifty Proust straws and had immersed them safely in liquid nitrogen, it was nearly nine o’clock at night. Yasmin was now bathed and changed into fine feminine clothes and I took her out to Maxim’s for supper to celebrate our success. She had not yet told me anything of what went on.

My diary from that date informs me that we both started the meal with a dozen escargots. It was mid-August and the grouse were just beginning to come in from Yorkshire and Scotland, so we ordered one each and I told the head-waiter we wanted them blood-rare. The wine was to be a bottle of Volnay, one of my favourite burgundies.

“Now,” I said when we had given our order. “Tell me all.”

“You want a blow by blow account?”

“Every tiny detail.”

There was a bowl of radishes on the table and Yasmin popped one into her mouth and crunched it up. “He had a bell on his door,” she said, “so I rang it. Céleste opened the door and glared at me. You should see that Céleste, Oswald. She’s skinny and sharp-nosed with a mouth like a knife and two small brown eyes that looked me up and down with utter distaste. ‘What is it you wish?’ she said sharply, and I gave her the bit about having travelled from England to bring a present to the famous writer whom I worshipped. ‘Monsieur Proust is working,’ Céleste said and tried to shut the door. I put my foot in it and pushed it open and marched in. ‘I have not travelled all this distance to have a door slammed in my face,’ I said. ‘Kindly inform your master that I am here to see him.’”

“Well done, you,” I said.

“I had to bluff it out,” she said. “Céleste glared at me. “What name?’ she snapped. ‘Mister Bottomley,’ I said, ‘of London.’ I was rather pleased with that name.”

“Apt,” I said. “Did the maid announce you?”

“Oh yes. And out he came into the hall, this funny little pop-eyed bugger, still holding a pen in his hand.”

“What happened next?”

“I immediately launched into the long speech you taught me, starting with, ‘Pray forgive me, monsieur . . .’ but I’d hardly got half a dozen words out when he raised his hand and cried, ‘Stop! I have already forgiven you!’ He was goggling at me as though I were the most beautiful and desirable and spicy little lad he’d ever seen in his life, which I’ll bet I was.”

“Was he speaking in English or French?”

“A bit of each. His English was pretty good, about like my French, so it didn’t matter.”

“And he fell for you right away?”

“He couldn’t take his eyes off me. ‘That will be all, thank you, Céleste,’ he said, licking his lips. But Céleste didn’t like it. She stayed put. She scented trouble.

“‘You may go, Céleste,’ Monsieur Proust said, raising his voice.

“But she still refused to go. ‘You do not wish anything more, Monsieur Proust?’

“‘I wish to be left alone,’ he snapped, and the woman stalked out of the room in a huff.

“‘Pray sit down, Monsieur Bottomley,’ he said. ‘May I take your hat? I do apologize for my servant. She’s a trifle overprotective.’

“‘What is she protecting you from, monsieur?’

“He smiled at me, showing horrid teeth with wide gaps. ‘From you,’ he said softly.

“By golly, I thought, I’m going to be inverted any moment. At this point, Oswald, I seriously considered skipping the Blister Beetle altogether. The man was drooling with lust. If I’d so much as bent down to do up a shoelace, he’d have been on me.”

“But you didn’t skip it?”

“No,” she said. “I gave him the chocolate.”

“Why?”

“Because in some ways they’re easier to handle when they’re under the influence. They don’t quite know what they’re doing.”

“Did the chocolate work well?”

“It always works well,” she said. “But this was a double dose so it worked better.”

“How much better?”

“Buggers are different,” she said.

“I believe you.”

“You see,” she said, “when an ordinary man is driven crazy by the Beetle, all he wants to do is to rape the woman on the spot. But when a bugger is driven crazy by the powder, his first thought is not to start buggering right away. He begins by making violent grabs for the other fellow’s pizzle.”

“A bit awkward, that.”

“Very,” Yasmin said. “I knew that if I let him come near enough to grab me, all he’d get in his hand would be a squashed banana.”

“So what did you do?”

“I kept jumping out of the way,” she said. “And in the end, of course, it became a chase with him chasing me all round the room and knocking things over right and left.”

“Rather strenuous.”

“Yes, and in the middle of it all the door opened and there stood that dreadful little maid again. ‘Monsieur Proust,’ she said, ‘all this exercise is bad for your asthma.’

“‘Get out!’ he yelled. ‘Get out, you witch!’”

“I imagine she’s fairly used to that sort of thing.”

“I’m sure she is,” Yasmin said. “Anyway, there was a round table in the middle of the room and so long as I stayed close to it I knew he couldn’t catch me. Many a girl has been saved from a dirty old man by a round table. The trouble was he seemed to be enjoying this part of it, and soon I got to thinking that a good old chase around the room was probably an essential preliminary for those chaps.”

“A sort of pipe-opener.”

“Right,” she said. “And he kept saying things to me as we circled round and round the table.”

“What sort of things?”

“Dirty stuff,” she said. “Not worth repeating. By the way, putting that banana in was a mistake.”

“Why?”

“Too big a bulge,” she said. “He noticed it at once. And all the time he was chasing me round the table, he kept pointing at it and singing its praises. I was longing to tell him it was just a silly old banana from the Ritz Hotel but that wasn’t on. It was driving him up the wall, that banana, and the Blister Beetle was hitting him harder every second, and suddenly I had another problem on my hands. How in God’s name, I thought, am I going to get the rubbery thing on him before he jumps me? I couldn’t exactly say it was a necessary precaution, could I?”