"Charming evening."
"Adieu. Come again." simpered Madame X. Behind a door, girls tittered.
Back on the pavement, padding silently, he donned his public face, a rigid mask, and thus noncomittally reviewed the coarse repartee he had heard in the Strand and which he had subsequently carried to Madame X, a devotee. He had not traveled far when a figure, showing much agitation, emerged from the shadows, crying "Philander! Philander!" The figure smelled of pernod.
"I am not Philander," said Julien.
"No matter!" said the figure, slowly crumbling. "You are one of us!"
Julien went all soft inside, thinking no, no, it's not true, when I was a child they perfumed me and called me their little princess, I couldn't help it, I hated it, there was that time the hardnoses at school caught me in the lots and did those things to me and said I would never be a rock, and then there -- I hate hardnoses, they are all rightists, he thought with charming irrelevance. This last thought girded him and he stepped past the figure, who had deteriorated to a size alarmingly diminutive, causing passers-by to cluck their tongues, saying "Mon Dieu!" and "Bizarre!"
No mystery here: The fellow is simply proving he does not EXIST, contrary to bourgeois convictions the truth must be told at all costs, charming, yes -- his thoughts drifted back to school: M. Rimbaud, loathed and feared, M. Rimbaud the horny-handed, academician to the manner born, Vulture Visage Rimbaud, rasping you block you stone you worse than senseless thing, rending the air with his donnish cackle, a cackle which gained strength and momentum, careening and screeching along the wall slate until it found a transome or an open door, there to begin a cacaphonic tone poem of diminishing reverberations down the corridor and around the bend, jarring the aged and paltry custodian until he swelled and cursed, then rattling past and dying an eldritch death in the W.C., M. Rimbaud rapping him with a stiff meter stick in his private parts and the girls panting and tee-heeing and later tormenting him, he remembered the humiliation, he would cry out when they tore his trousers SAVE me HELP me -- really, he thought, really, his only moment of triumph against the Vast Conspiracy was a little didactic Latin thing he he had done for L. Tussaud in the 6th Form, viz:
Hic, haec, hoc,
Never let it poke,
Until your hic is haecer,
And your haecer hoc.
(it seemed contemptible to him now) but they would have him at last, he remembered the headmaster's resonant voice behind oaken doors, they were figuring how to dispose of him entirely, the big voice said hem hem do you know ho ho he's got to the point where he's actually distributing mimeographed expository pamphlets and tracts ho ho bearing such titles as "Why Am I So Good?" and "Wherein, Precisely, Lies My Superiority?" and ho get this he signs them PUBLIUS or something hoo ha....
Julien woke to the sounds of neighborhood delinquents and watched them idly as they hurled sticks, refuse, bits of spotted fruit at him from an arsenal in their alley, bespattering his face and shoulders and bruising his nose. It suddenly came to him, during this humiliation, that he was in front of Verliac's. "Well," shrugging, "I must get off the pavement." He obtained a room and bathed langorously, listening to feminine sounds beyond the wall. He listened for a long time. I will drill a little hole, thought Julien, yes, at eye level, and later I will send her a note and a bottle of Bonaparte's Best and she will say....