To distinguish fact from fantasy, Miss Satin

had grown from the headdress upward into gay

explanations and ratty descriptions. The letter to

Baudelaire had come, or purported to come, from

features of the terrestrial décor — theatre programs,

dinner menus, the infamous Eulogy of Make-up. She

herself had garlanded Nature on great occasions with

plumes of black thought, worn with regrets at the side,

but nothing, she reasoned, could rival a fan, their

abjection as rich as you please or quite simple:

a few recited lines of verse, but most were good

to go. A challenge and a rebuke would follow,

hidden away in her journal, where she

is forced to sleep, eat and drink in order to

protect herself. Something hovers in the far distance:

a shimmering of prospects embossed in gold, of really

artistic design, like the fustanella of a whirling dervish.

Evil is natural, and is therefore likely to torture and kill.

Not so virtue: this natty little animal stupefies even the

best endowed, bifurcating plantwise at the lips and

reshaping the journal’s immense coup de bluff

into a new toilette weaving in and out of waving —

Ah, the sea, sighed meaningfully, can be synonymous

with monde or world (as in signs of spirituality and longing

for the ideal), but its factual role in the everyday, played

by fantastic has-beens, is to set one’s sights on

landing sites, citing every which way.