Fillmore must have sensed how I felt, and what an ordeal it was to sit and look on all night, for suddenly he pulled a hundred franc note out of his pocket and slapping it in front of me, he said: "Look here, you probably need a lay more than any of us. Take that and pick someone out for yourself." Somehow that gesture endeared him more to me than anything he had ever done for me, and he had done considerable. I accepted the money in the spirit it was given and promptly signaled to the Negress to get ready for another lay. That enraged the princess more than anything, it appeared. She wanted to know if there wasn't anyone in the place good enough for us except this Negress. I told her bluntly NO. And it was so – the Negress was the queen of the harem. You had only to look at her to get an erection. Her eyes seemed to be swimming in sperm. She was drunk with all the demands made upon her. She couldn't walk straight any more – at least it seemed that way to me. Going up the narrow winding stairs behind her I couldn't resist the temptation to slide my hand up her crotch; we continued up the stairs that way, she looking back at me with a cheerful smile and wiggling her ass a bit when it tickled her too much.

It was a good session all around. Everyone was happy. Macha seemed to be in a good mood too. And so the next evening, after she had had her ration of champagne and caviar, after she had given us another chapter out of the history of her life, Fillmore went to work on her. It seemed as though he was going to get his reward at last. She had ceased to put up a fight any more. She lay back with her legs apart and she let him fool around and fool around and then, just as he was climbing over her, just as he was going to slip it in, she informs him nonchalantly that she has a dose of clap. He rolled off her like a log. I heard him fumbling around in the kitchen for the black soap he used on special occasions,

and in a few moments he was standing by my bed with a towel in his hands and saying – "can you beat that? that son of a bitch of a princess has the clap!" He seemed pretty well scared about it. The princess meanwhile was munching an apple and calling for her Russian newspapers. It was quite a joke to her. "There are worse things than that," she said, lying there in her bed and talking to us through the open door.

Finally Fillmore began to see it as a joke too and opening another bottle of Anjou he poured out a drink for himself and quaffed it down. It was only about one in the morning and so he sat there talking to me for a while. He wasn't going to be put off by a thing like that, he told me. Of course, he had to be careful… there was the old dose which had come on in Le Havre. He couldn't remember any more how that happened. Sometimes when he got drunk he forgot to wash himself.

It wasn't anything very terrible, but you never knew what might develop later. He didn't want any one massaging his prostate gland. No, that he didn't relish. The first dose he ever got was at college. Didn't know whether the girl had given it to him or he to the girl; there was so much funny work going on about the campus you didn't know whom to believe. Nearly all the coeds had been knocked up some time or other. Too damned ignorant… even the profs were ignorant. One of the profs had himself castrated, so the rumor went…

Anyway, the next night he decided to risk it – with a condom. Not much risk in that, unless it breaks. He had bought himself some of the long fish skin variety – they were the most reliable, he assured me. But then, that didn't work either. She was too tight. "Jesus, there's nothing abnormal about me," he said. "How do you make that out? Somebody got inside her all right to give her that dose. He must have been abnormally small."

So, one thing after another failing, he just gave it up altogether. They lie there now like brother and sister, with incestuous dreams. Says Macha, in her philosophic way: "In Russia it often happens that a man sleeps with a woman without touching her. They can go on that way for weeks and weeks and never think anything about it. Until paff! once he touches her… paff! paff! After that it's paff, paff, paff!"

All efforts are concentrated now on getting Macha into shape. Fillmore thinks if he cures her of the clap she may loosen up. A strange idea. So he's bought her a douche bag, a stock of permanganate, a whirling syringe and other little things which were recommended to him by a Hungarian doctor, a little quack of an abortionist over near the Place d'Aligre. It seems his boss had knocked up a sixteen year old girl once and she had introduced him to the Hungarian; and then after that the boss ha............