All tales of her innocence are lies. I swear and always will, that all of it was her fault! Hers, and her idiot father's. Truly, he was the fool who left her too long alone, with too many books. It was too much to bear for the fragile sense of a proper demoiselle. The poor thing started to believe in all this modern foolishness about new morals, education and progress...

She filled her head with naught but Voltaire, that deviant who moonlighted into philosophy. A talented fraud who, within moments of meeting her, would have happily abandoned any intellectual enlightenment to invent new and creative ways to defile her pristine cunt.

To Voltaire's hypothetical defence... Paris in our time had become a cesspool of debauchery, with loyalty sooner given to some Sade fellow than its kind King. A lavish and impudent feast of a city, where hiding was a thing of the past or the poors. It didn't take much time or skill to train a whore elegant enough, and any girl willing to like what she was told to could make something of herself in this grand bazaar. Miserable wenches earned rivers of gold and emeralds, displaying their cunts, breasts and tongues under showers of seed. They had it good. Noble courtesans traded only an evening of their boredom for the same.

As for Apolline, she was without a doubt the fairest in Paris. A blond angel, her wings folded in alabaster skin, with bright red lips and blood as blue as the Loire. Her bust was modest but she held it high, a good student for her masters in étiquette. Yet, every time she walked into a room, it was her eyes that eclipsed the world. Two gems, shining of black, that in any ballroom would drown all candlelight. These were not a gift from her own coat of arms. A rumour, too flattering to be hushed, told of a love affair between a young grandmother and a great man of Portugal. He had been a count, a duke, or a greater man even, depending on whom told the tale...

It was the King himself. But as he liked it in the arse, t'was his valet who bred the matriarch.

You will wonder I imagine, how I came into the life of the granddaughter? After all, I was then nothing but two hands amongst many in Monsieur’s mills. But I wasn't too old, nor too smelly, and I had the kind of pretty face that stirs something warm in the belly of young girls. So, during a spring visit to the common folk, the pretty thing convinced herself there was something more to be seen in me. Besotted, enlightened by Voltaire, she thought herself a great social mind when she endeavoured to teach me to read and write...

The readers will forgive, I hope, a small ellipsis in the gap of her thighs. The first few months of our dance were, I’m afraid, a long dull tale. My miserable crawl to literacy.

I remember it a labyrinth. Walls of unreachable golden ceilings, dead ends of mirrors vast as palaces, and the path I walked on bore the mysterious alchemy of the alphabet. A whole world of soft silk, crackled paper and grand old walnut, inhabited by us and a few mice. I studied. She taught. The mice shuffled by with silent little steps, bringing more ink and cocoa.

At first I thought my learning had a goal. That the words she taught me how to craft were naught but tools. And like owning the hammer always makes a carpenter, her words would make me some sort of a good man. One day amongst many, the young lady made me read an ancient myth that struck my fancy. I decided that day that I was Theseus, and ignorance was my maze. The lady was  Ariane, threading a wire of letters.

At this, I was doing splendidly. My reading had become much better, and I was even starting to show some small incline to literary promise. But on one cold winter day, as I was supposed to write a sonnet in the manner of Du Bellay, the poetree bore no fruits. She pointed out one bad mistake, some pitiful rhythm and rhymes.

“My apologies, mademoiselle”, I grovelled.

“Call me Apolline, you docile cretin!”, she snapped back.

When I looked up from the old book, I saw her angry for the first time. Her fury was like no other. It spread her wings and bared her soul. Her unfathomable eyes seemed to gleam away all the light they ever drank, burning the whole world in unveiled dark truthes. She preached like a fiery priest, one who craved sacrilege. For her, fate was mediocrity but freedom was greatness. The King was a fool and Reason a God. Obedience surrenders but love saves.

I was enthralled. She showed me that I’d been blind. Wise and powerful, her clairvoyant eyes pierced the lies, the legends, and the crafted screens of propriety. In her body, I found a whole world I had no words for. Diderot had never talked of the way her hands tensed, her long fingers rubbing together like thorny angry vines. Not a line in Marivaux, about the precious cotton of her summer gown and how it tensed over her bust, the hard sunlight revealing the idea of a corset underneath.

“We...You could be so much more!” She shouted. It would be the only time I ever saw tears trouble those two black gems. “If you would just...”

I kissed her. It was the most natural thing. Her tongue answered, vivid and mad, just long enough for me to taste white fire, to chain me forever. The slap she had to lash felt like a gentle smile. Was I stupid? Deceived? Apolinne was no Ariane. She was a gracile Minotaur and no one ever escapes mazes of love, or literature.

After our first kiss, I had felt the acid taste of her tongue many times more, piercing through lips, eager for a touch of my own. I had learned with caresses the hard shapes of her corset, that cruel armour of hips and bust. In the darkness of a broom cupboard, which in palaces are as small as any shack, I felt her long fingers wrap themselves around my bared cock. With those creeping vines, she thorned me into irresistible pleasure.

In the darkness, as my member pulsed with fire, I was worried an instant about making an indiscreet mess for the mice to find. But as we slipped out, making sure none was here to see and tell, I saw no trace of seed anywhere. Apolinne had a mysterious, content air, her eyes gleaming from satiety.

As for the lessons, they continued. But they too had taken a new sort of charm. Apolinne crafted a poet in me – she begs me now to write “awoken” instead, the adorable thing – and for the artist she was a most impassioned muse. I wrote everything of my love and for it got rewards only she could unleash. Caresses for a good rhyme, a throaty moan for a nice anaphora...

A fair alexandrine, meant the touch of her lips.

All along I caressed the faint hope that one day, she would inspire something prodigious. A perfect poem, a penetrating fuckery, getting me with artifices of style deep into her womb. She would then lust for me as I lusted for her. She would read it and drop to her knees next to the walnut desk, reach for my member. She would swallow me whole, she would throw herself at it like the eager whores of Montmartre. And her eyes would look up and tell me in shining black silence that Apolinne was all mine. She’d say “I love you” then, choking on a throatful of cock and balls.

Instead, I toppled an inkwell.

The lady was as agile as she was beautiful. She snatched it in mid-air, before the cristal bottle could break and spill. Alas the tiny tin cap was left undone. It made a timbale sound when it fell, and my poor Apolinne was tied right there, her hands held in a cup, keeping the ink pouring out of cristal from defiling the ancient parquet. It poured and poured, filling her little palms and long fingers to the brim with darkness.

“Help me!” She pleaded.

But I didn’t. For that poem I craved was unfolding in front of my eyes. In her haste, the strap of her silky dress jumped off her sculpted clavicle. It fell down along her arm, revealing her more and more. She was not wearing a corset and as I watched the fabric softly slide down, her nipple caught the tiniest seam, stopped for an instant her disgrace. Sunlight flowed through the tall windows, making her pale skin and blond hair shine alive, like deserts of diamond sand. She’d have been an angel, untainted, was it not for obsidian eyes and the ink pool that kept her hands bound together. These were the demons of Apolinne and they blazed darkly.

I extended my hand, grazing the evoked shape of her breasts with my fingertips. She opened her mouth, but chose silence. I passed my thumb over her lips, in a pitiful pastiche of the fellatio I truly wanted. She scraped her teeth against the nail. The ink felt her vibrating lust. Like a stone thrown in a clear pond, it left in the black pool an impression in fading circles. She noticed and stood stillest.

Under my touch her skin felt like a thing I’d only ever caressed in Monsieur’s library. The purest, most precious vellum, made of murdered calves. In the flesh of my muse, it was made to inspire.

I grabbed my pen on the desk. A cheap iron thing I bought for half of a fake coin. Hers laid right next, with their gorgeous tips of engraved supple gold. But she had chosen me, I figured, for I was naught but a brute. I dipped the tool briefly in between her palms. It came out sticky, dripping black, leaving no wrinkle behind. Apolinne didn’t even shiver when the soft metal grazed the skin and bone between her breasts. The pen left a clear stroke. A wiggly line on a perfectly pale skin, that curved over and over in a mad arabesque and two brisés. She had taught me it meant: “I want you”.

I wrote up from down. The poem started narrow in between her breasts, barely scraping their shape, leaving them two angelic silences, punctuated by nipples. As for the poem, easily smeared, it crawled and crawled up the valley. It conquered the plains open under her throat. Then, the offensive! A quick cavalcade around made it a collar of words, a black river that matched any a jeweller.

It kept climbing. The best poem I had ever written. In laces swirling around her neck, reaching and conquering her chin and cheeks. Reading only of lust and passion. I called her “ma douce” by her breasts, “mon hétaïre” by her throat. And I will swear, by the way her mouth widened at the touch of the iron, she felt the words in her flesh, as the pen darkened her bright red lips with hard capital letters that read: “MA PUTAIN”.

I couldn't stop, dipping the pen time and time in her cupped hands. She was trapped by the ink she held, and adored by the ink that held her. Her face soon was covered in fine dances of black and naughty words. A masterpiece of a poem, never have I ever written a better one. I know every syllable of it still, but they belong to me.

Shame I had not yet discovered how to swirl the text around her breasts, to make her nipple a clever point.

Like this.

When I was done, every visible strip of her skin was half an evil arabesque on half a pale angel. But her eyes and the pool were sin as well, she had abandoned herself the tales of her perfection. The ink started to escape. Irremediably dripping in between her tight white fingers. She was losing the fight against the tide. Tiny droplets formed under the back of her hands, slipping slow to her knuckles. When they got big enough to fall, they clicked on the parquet with a whiplike sound.

“How can I ever hide this?” She wondered.

I’ve wondered since if she meant what I understood. Did she want to dissimulate the vulgar insults that showed her needs, from her nobility, her world and her father? Or did the ink, showing her true self, could not in her mind be kept a secret? She felt beautiful I think. Her desire awoken by being art displayed.

“You know how to.” I answered.

She did and raised her hands under the cristal chandelier, tilting her head backward to receive a libation of sin. The ink left in her hands flowed free and fell over her face. To hide her sins, she had chosen the path of her city. Riddled with debauchery, she could only draw harder to smother nuances. Drowning lust only in itself. Making of her skin an invisible message in black on black. She never closed her eyes, and with flood kept away by her eyelashes, the two gems of her eyes burned like ebony on a moonless night.

As the liquid fell and flowed along her face, the white tip of her nose floated like ice on the Seine in winter. The tide rushed quick and wide, an overwhelming blackalanche. It covered her cheeks, ran her blond hair. Droplets formed on her chin to fall on her breast. I watched my poem destroyed senselessly, as the ink ran free in the isthmus of her breasts where it was born.

I brushed away her dress, bringing down the dike it made. Not for the sake of stains on silk. I tore it all off soon. The freedom of black was most important. For a precious second, the cute cut of her dress was remembered, in the way the arabesques cut straight to bared skin. A moment later it was all swallowed. Her nipple stood, pink on pitch. I caressed it with my thumb, painting it all black.

Apolinne was almost naked now. A transparent culotte standing alone in the way of depravity. I tore that off too, leaving a wet trace on the back of my hand where it had brushed against her swollen lips. I licked that. The ink flowed.

I knelt in front of her, as I followed it down the shapes of her body. The tide reached her pubis, and made a swamp out of its hair. I passed my finger along, amazed to find it cleanly painted. I noticed another drop of black, pearling from the cleft of her cunt, and threw my tongue madly against. I licked her like a savage, sating myself on her juices and the darkness’ rough taste of lead.

She came on the spot, the dirty little thing. Her knees failing, her pussy weighed down all over my face, leaving a clear print of her lips and the button in between. In orgasm, she tensed and released. She squirted hard, spotted my skin with a greyish solution of ink and pleasure.

I threw her on the bed after that, may the silk sheets be damned and ruined! I fucked her right there, tainted whole as she was, looking like one of those women of Africa. I didn’t care for gentleness. I took the reward I was owed and her sex in one fell thrust of hips on ass. I shook myself deep inside, made her scream her lungs out. A song of beautiful agony. Her cunt seized me quick, sent me in those heavens only a muse knows. I sprayed myself all over her face and belly. The seed she could reach, she licked voraciously, her clean tongue darting adorably into corruption. The rest of my sperm she scraped with nails and vines, making new arabesques of greyish white on greying black. Her creation was sleazy hieroglyphs.

There would be  no hiding the shape of her body printed on the silk sheets, nor my face and cock painted dark by her cunt. You know the rest. I was soon thrown in the King’s embrace. Apolinne, in a scandal that broke presses all the way to Amsterdam, joined me of her own will. From that moment our destinies were clear as fairytales and ink. You need money to survive inside the Bastille. Easy enough, the prison made a porous brothel and Paris a generous mistress.

For a city avid of debauchery and curiosities, she was a black diamond. An angel fallen from grace, covered in gorgeous ink, art and other dirty things. Men and queens brought gold for her time. Some wanting only a taste and fuck out of Monsieur’s daughter. Others needed my everchanging words, like you my dear, who kept coming back. The craft faded in hours, smeared by rough caresses, saliva, seed and sweat. And new poems soon took their place on her face.

So I wrote on her skin and she whored herself. Oh, the tales of it we could share...

But we are reaching her pubis now, and the riot outside is getting louder. Is that the head of the prison governor, I see mounted on a pike? Stop giggling, Apolline! I want that button in your cunt to be my final point. Make it an exclamation, drawn sharp inside. I know those make you cum.

So what are you waiting for, poor reader? You’re so close to the end. She is my Masterpiece, my Paris Palimpsest. Taste her!