Under the Roofs of Paris (Opus Pistorum) Henry Miller
Table of Contents
VOLUME I
BOOK I
BOOK II
BOOK III
VOLUME II
BOOK I
BOOK II
BOOK III
Epilogue
VOLUME I
“Drop your cocks and grab your socks.”
— Canterbury.
BOOK I
Sous les Toits de Paris
God knows I’ve lived in Paris for long enough now that I shouldn’t be amazed at anything. You don’t have to go deliberately looking for adventures here, the way you do back in New York … all that’s necessary is to have a little patience and wait, life will seek you out in the most unbelievably obscure places, things happen to you here. But the situation in which I now find myself … this pretty thirteen-year-old naked on my lap, her father busy taking down his pants behind a screen in the corner, the buxom young whore sitting on the couch … it’s as though life were viewed through a distorting glass, recognizable images are seen but discredited.
I’ve never seen myself as a cradle snatcher … those men you watch being hustled away in the public parks, always a bit shabby, a little shaky on their pins, explaining that the child had dust on her dress and they were brushing it off … But now I must admit that Marcelle with her hairless little body is exciting me. It’s not because she’s a child, it’s because she’s a child with no innocence …
look into her eyes and you see the monster of knowledge, the shadow of wisdom
… she lies across my legs and squeezes her naked figlet against my fingers … and her eyes mock my hesitance.
I pinch her lengthening legs, cover one entire cheek of her restless ass with a palm … the roundness and shapelessness of childhood have scarcely left her body. She is a woman in miniature, a copy as yet incomplete. Her cuntlet is damp … She likes it when I tickle it with my fingertips … she’s feeling the front of my pants for my dick … her fingers frighten me when they sneak into the front of my fly. I hold her arm … but she’s found my bush. She clutches my coat and pulls herself so close to me that I can’t keep her away from my dick, she begins to play with John Thursday … well, she’ll find him hard …
The whore sits shaking her head … Such a child … such a child, she says …
these things should be forbidden by law. But she watches every move eagerly. In her trade one can’t afford to feel excitement, whores live only when they’ve learned to sell their cunts and not their passions … but I can see emotion coming into her body, her voice is already thick with it …
She calls Marcelle to her. The child doesn’t want to leave me but I set her off my lap … I’m almost grateful to be rid of her. Why does she want to be a–well, a bad girl, she’s asked. She doesn’t answer, she stands between the girl’s knees and the whore touches her bare body. Does she do these things every night with papa? Yes, every night when they’re in bed … she is defiant, triumphant … And when papa’s working, when he’s away in the daytime? The little boys try to make her do things sometimes … she never does it with them, nor with the men who want to take her for a walk.
Her father steps irritably from behind the screen. The young lady will be good enough not to question the child … he produces a bottle and the three of us have a drink of stinging brandy. “There is a thimbleful of white wine for the daughter.
I sit with the whore on the couch. She’s as grateful for my presence as I am for hers, she has forgotten her trade or she’d take her clothes off when I reach for her leg … instead, she lies back and lets me feel up her dress … her legs are big and solid.
Marcelle is on her father’s lap in the chair. She plays with his dong and he diddles her between the legs … she raises her little belly and he kisses it, her spread legs show his finger sliding up in her tiny hole. Her mousetrap stretches when she puts one of her fingers in with his, and she laughs …
The whore’s body is hot, and when she spreads her legs I find that she’s wet between them. She has a bush as big as my hand and as soft as feathers. She lifts her dress in the front, takes my dong out and rubs John Thursday’s nose against her whiskers … will I pinch her breasts, she moans, and would I be offended if she asked me to kiss them, perhaps to bite? She’s catting for a fuck, that she’s been paid to come here has nothing to do with it now … she’d probably give the money back and something extra besides just to get a cock into that itch under her tail now …
Marcelle wants us to look at her. She’s bending over her father with his prick in one hand, gesticulating with the other, and calling loudly for an audience.
She’s going to suck him off, she tells us, don’t we want to watch her put it into her mouth? Her old man beams like a hashish addict, everything’s rosy now. He’s halfway out of his chair, waiting for the little bitch to take it.
I wonder if her pleasure is half as much as it seems to be … she’s been taught, that’s seen at once, it hasn’t all come out of her imagination. She rubs her nipples with the end of her father’s dick, puts it where it would be between her bubs if she had any, and cuddles it … then she presses her head against his belly, kisses him there, kisses his thighs, kisses his bush … her tongue looks like a red worm hiding in his black hair.
The whore grabs my hand and holds it between her legs. She’s so hot that she almost screams when the filthy little cunt suddenly pops her father’s cock between her lips and begins to suck it. Such things cannot be, she exclaims, and Marcelle goggles over and smacks her lips a bit to prove that they can …
Marcelle wants me to fuck her. She leaps onto the couch and pushes her way between the girl and me … there’s something so fascinatingly horrible about her that I can’t move. She slides into my arms, pushes my cock with her naked belly, opens her legs and places my dong between them … I turn onto my back to get away from her when I feel her bald cuntlet touching the end of my dick, but she’s straddling me at once.
“Fuck the dirty little cat!” The whore leans over me with narrow, excited eyes
… she pulls the bosom of her dress and pulls it half off her shoulders … her teats press my shoulder. I hear Marcelle’s father too–“Fuck her! I must see my little darling be fucked!”
Marcelle stretches her tiny split fig, holds it open and pushes it down against my dong … the little monster gets it in somehow … I watch my dong stretch her to twice her size. I don’t know how she manages to take so much … but her bald cuntlet seems to gobble me up, it takes my cock in and in … for a moment I have an urge to throw her beneath me, spread her child’s legs and fuck that splitting little trap until it bursts, open her and open her with my dong, fuck her baby womb and fill it with jism again and again … She’s fucking me now, has her sweet ass against my bush, the bareness of her cunt hidden by my hair … she’s laughing, the puppy, she loves that cock in her …
I throw her from me, push her off the couch, but she doesn’t understand that I don’t want her, or if she knows she doesn’t care … She clings to my knees and licks my balls, kisses my dong with her red lips–suddenly I see that they’re painted–and takes it in her mouth before I call stop her. She sucks me, and I’m almost coming … she gurgles and pants over my cock …
“You loony bastard!” I yell at her father. “I don’t want to fuck your damned kid!
Fuck her yourself if you have to have her laid!” I shove my dong into my pants and Marcelle runs to her father. “I must be as nuts as you are to have come here in the first place … I’m certainly not drunk … Now get to Jesus out of my way!”
“Papa!” Marcelle cries. I think she’s frightened by my violence, but she’s not …
not that little monster. She shines her amber eyes at me. “Get it now, Papa! Get the little switch so she can beat me while he fucks me! Oh, Papa, please!”
I absolutely run out of the house. I’d kill somebody if I didn’t get out, and I tremble so badly when I’m on the street that I have to stop and rest against a fence. I feel as though I had just escaped from something dark and bloody, something out of a nightmare …
“Monsieur! Monsieur!” It’s the whore following me. She clutches my hand desperately. “I threw his money in his face, the dirty old pig.” She sees me reaching in my pocket. “No, I don’t want any
