Bound in Moonlight

Never in her twenty-four pampered and cosseted years among New York City's privileged Upper Ten had Emmeline witnessed acts of such appalling lechery, nor supposed that people of her own class might stoop to indulging in them.

She was determined to find Lord Hardwyck and be quit at once of this shameless ch�teau. Surely her distinguished and urbane fianc� had not suspected the nature of this bacchanalian house party when he accepted the invitation.

Such were her thoughts as she opened the door to which she had been directed by the countess in the leather mask. Emmeline was further comforted upon entering the room within and discovering it to be lined floor to ceiling and wall to wall with bookshelves. No doubt his lordship had spent the weekend ensconced in a secluded corner with his nose in some dusty old tome.

Imagine, dear Reader, our heroine's dismay when her gaze lit upon Archibald Dickings, Baron of Hardwyck and heir apparent to the earldom of Upswinge, atop a polished mahogany writing table with his nose, along with the rest of his face, planted snugly between the thighs of one voluptuous blonde and his turgid shaft between those of another.

"I'm coming!" cried the latter as she strained against the silken cords that bound her hands and feet to the four legs of the table. "Oh, yes! God, yes! Oh! Oh!"

Upon hearing Emmeline's gasp of horror, Lord Hardwyck looked up and blinked at her. "Miss Woodbridge. Fancy encountering you here. I didn't even know you were in France."

From Chapter One of Emmeline's Emancipation by Anonymous, first published in 1903 by Saturnalia Press and reprinted since then in innumerable editions worldwide. A rare first edition from the original eight-hundred-copy print run sold in 2003 for $158,000 at Sotheby's in New York.

k January 17, 1922 Steamboat Springs, Colorado

Dearest R�my,

No, no, a thousand times no, I will not marry you. I will, however, ride you like a cowgirl as soon as I see you again. I mean, the moment I lay eyes on you, so I suggest you don't meet my ship when it arrives, unless you want us both to be arrested for public indecency. Or don't they care about that sort of thing in France? Probably not. God, I love the French. You most of all, naturellement.

You can't imagine what it means to me in my present wretched situation, hearing from you (most especially when you relate one of your deliciously filthy little fantasies, like the one about you making a stag film starring moi). I reread your letters with pathetic regularity, like some moony sixteen-year-old. Thank God for Air Mail. Every morning I sit in my wheelchair in front of this enormous picture window in the front room of the inn, my poor smashed leg in its plaster cast propped up on the window seat, waiting for the mail. It arrives via the strapping, ruddy-cheeked young Nils, who delivers it on skis after picking it up in town, except of course when the weather won't permit the mail plane to land.

Nils, who hails from Norway, is a silver-blond giant. I tend to gape at him, because you just don't see men that tall in France. You tower over most of your countrymen, and you're at least an inch or two shy of six feet. I read somewhere that the reason most Frenchmen are on the short side is that Napoleon turned all the tall ones into soldiers when he was trying to take over the world, and of course most of them didn't live to reproduce. Weren't there something like twenty-five thousand French casualties at Waterloo alone?