Free Emmanuelle by Emmanuelle Arsan Page A

refinement invented without her knowledge by the intuition of her senses, and whether the deprivation of Marie-Anne’s body that she thus inflicted on herself, against all instinct and reason, did not ultimately have a more subtle savor, a more perverse attraction, than physical intimacy might have had. And so instead of suffering, as she normally would have, from that situation in which a little girl manipulated her at will without granting anything to her desire in return, she discovered in it an unexpected source of sensual delight.
    Just as an unknown pleasure had thus arisen from the frustration of what had always seemed to her the most natural of all carnal desires, and the one she prized most highly, another erotic value had been revealed to her by the remarkable secrecy that Marie-Anne maintained with regard to her own sex life. When she noted the ease with which she resigned herself to knowing nothing, or almost nothing, about Marie-Anne, Emmanuelle realized that she had more cerebral and physical enjoyment from giving another girl a lewd spectacle than she would have gotten from witnessing it herself. She eagerly looked forward to Marie-Anne’s arrival every day, but it was now less for the excitement of seeing her naked or watching her lascivious games than for the infinitely more scandalous, and therefore more delectable, excitement of caressing herself, stretched out on her deck chair, before her friend’s attentive gaze. When Marie-Anne was gone, the spell was not broken— Emmanuelle would imagine her green eyes fixed on her sex and continue masturbating until evening.
    On the Wednesday following their first meeting, Emmanuelle was invited to tea by Marie-Anne’s mother. In the pretentiously furnished drawing room she found a dozen “ladies” who all seemed equally insignificant. Marie-Anne was sitting demurely on the rug, absorbed in her duties as a model little girl. Emmanuelle was already regretting that they could not be alone when her interest was revived by the arrival of a very elegant young woman who, at first sight, appeared to be as much out of place as herself.
    Emmanuelle was reminded of the Parisian models she had loved. The young woman had the same tall, slender figure, the same imponderable lassitude and illusory remoteness. Her mouth, partly open “like a rose,” her amber eyebrows raised above immense eyes, and the winsome curve of her eyelashes gave her face a look of ingenuousness so improbable that it seemed an act of bravado. Emmanuelle told herself intolerantly that she was the only one present who, because of what she called her “experience,” could discern the modesty in that totally studied elegance, the captivation in all that passion hidden beneath the detachment of a lustrous gaze. She recalled having thus discovered in her friends’ faces, “borrowed from the proudest monuments,” what Baudelaire had meant in condemning “movement that displaces lines.” The alabaster goddesses had been made flesh, but Man, who believed only in inaccessible paradises and inanimate gods, had kept his desire for statues, and the worshiped flesh had become stone again.
    This evocation was now charged, for Emmanuelle, with an ambiguous emotion in which the still-recent savor of her schoolgirl ardors was mingled with the more adult frenzies that she had known in fitting rooms.
    Before her mother had time to introduce the newcomer, Marie-Anne stood up and drew Emmanuelle into a corner of the drawing room where they could not be overheard. “I have a man for you,” she said with the satisfied look of having accomplished a mission.
    Emmanuelle could not help laughing. “Now there’s a real piece of news! And what a way you have of announcing it! What do you mean by ‘a man for me’?”
    “He’s Italian and very handsome. I’ve known him a long time but I wasn’t sure he was the man you needed. I thought it over and decided he was. You have to meet him without wasting any