Augustus and Lady Maude

Though the topics and themes are much the same as American erotica, the British use of English adds a luster to the stories, missing from the vulgar used in America. Intriguingly, this story could easily have some basis in fact, as historically 'wicked Uncle Gus' Augustus Edward Jessup is known to have exchanged letters with Lady Maude Bowes-Lyon, whose brother was the father of Lady Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon, the future Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

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It is characteristic, in that this collection has the appearance of being patched together from different sources, and in this case, whilst the 'letters' sections are reasonably consistent, the third differs. The earlier parts are a correspondence between the worldly wise Lady Maude, having a voyeuristic holiday in Venice, and her innocent, lovelorn cousin Augustus left behind in England and lusting futilely. The objects of his attraction are girls of lower class who have a tendency to do their chores wearing tight denim clothing as they kneel provocatively on the floor. Lady Maude uses her contacts to forcibly deprive Augustus of his fantasy objects, and in the third part we witness his conversion to the joys of punitive dominance of the lower class females while being married respectably. Some of the named characters in this last section will be familiar to devotees of the genre, including the ubiquitous Noreen. A classic.

Excerpt:

My dear Maude, You may be sure that I did not intend to write to you so soon after your departure for Lake Garda. Yet I need your advice and counsel in a matter of great delicacy. Indeed, I do not exaggerate when I tell you that it is a choice upon which depends all my future happiness. If a man may not consult his nearest and dearest female cousin on such occasions, where is he to look for assistance? I am tempted to believe that my life was changed utterly last night, soon after nine o'clock.

Dr. Raspail would tell you, of course, that such mental impulses on my behalf go only to prove my condition of neurasthenia. I cannot help these opinions on the part of others. Let me tell you first of the event and then beg your assistance. I went last night to the recital rooms to hear Poland's greatest son - the mane of splendid hair and the fingers so white and thin - perform a double prodigy. We were to burn in the romantic grandeur of Brahms's "Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel", having first had our spirits soothed by the elegaic cadences of my beloved Robert Schumann's "Etudes Symphoniques". There is something so intimate and sensual about a recital of this sort on a warm summer evening. One sits among red plush and gilding, the Steinway polished to a liquid gloss of honey, the keys smooth to touch and sounding with such cool precision. One's gaze caresses the bare neck and frail shoulder blades of a fine young woman in a low-cut dress. The bone so slender and the skin so sleek with humid air. There one observes a girl of sixteen, sitting meek and demure as a nun in the spell of the music, the sweep of her nut-brown hair like the veil of a novice framing a face of pale oval beauty, her loveliness lit by the steady gaze of hazel eyes.

Yet there is nothing more sensuous than the fine piano itself, its scents of velvet and wood, the fragrance of its polish, the pure white felt of its hammers. If ever there was a magic enchantment which put to sleep the court and castle, it was such clear and elegant music as this. So I thought to myself as a silence fell upon the beauty of women and the men in their formal dress and decorations. Then the spell was cast in the plaintive descending chords which are the prelude to the "Etudes Symphoniques". I was so absorbed in thoughts of Schumann, the great romantic angel who died in the madhouse, his soul torn between the sublime inner music of paradise and the torment of the devil's fugues, that I could not have told you if there was a woman within a hundred yards of me. My eye came to rest on her the first time and I scarcely noticed anything about her.