The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris

it was to an ordinary twitch as the pulsing of a tiny insect’s heart is to the beating of a clock. The beholder, in fact, did not necessarily notice this movement upon first meeting the aunt, it was so slight. Once you had become aware of it, however, it lent a faint negative quality to everything the aunt said and did; whether she praised your poem, invited you again to tea, agreed with your politics, the imperceptible vibration of her head seemed to reiterate constantly, “Nay, nay. It is all nothing, I deny all.” She dressed in long gowns of the Empire period and wore her hair in ringlets, although the effect was somewhat marred by the gold-rimmed spectacles that gave her a kind of Voltairean air. It was said she was very wealthy. I believe she disliked men on principle, and perhaps this is where Luisa got her suffragism, although the connection was a little tenuous. In any case she was very polite to me. She spoke French in an accent of her own that involved distinguishing sharply between the vowels, with a different shape of mouth to go with each. “On voit,” she told me calmly and not unkindly, “que vous z-êtes un vr-rai é-rudit.” I forgot to record that one of her breasts had been removed in an operation and she wore a padded appliance in its place.
    In additionto the aunt there was an uncle in Pondicherry, another aunt in Palma de Mallorca, and a female cousin in Poland with whom Luisa exchanged violet-scented letters. The house on Quai d’Orléans remained something of a mystery to me for a long time. There it was in the middle of the Seine, neither on the Left Bank nor on the Right. It was ambiguous. It may have been true that the family “belonged to the best society of the Île Saint-Louis,” although such judgments are of course a matter of taste. Certainly they had nothing to do with those old Bourbons and Bonapartists who hated each other so cordially in their seventeenth century town houses on Quai d’Anjou and rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île. The aunt’s teas were frequented by a coterie that ranged from the fringes of Faubourg Saint-Germain to the more dubious elements of Montmartre. There was a young professor of art history from the College de France, a pederastic English poet, a Brazilian naval doctor of impeccable credentials. I was introduced to M. Lugné-Poe, the director of the Théàtre de I’Oeuvre, which impressed me only negligibly since I had never heard of the place. The inhabitants of the house were all women, the guests all men. Except for a lady physician, a friend of the aunt’s, who had a frame like a stevedore and specialised in nervous afflictions. Perhaps it was she who treated the aunt’s trembling. There were other ornaments: a fashionable photographer, a teacher of geology from the École Normale, and once the Greek poet Jean Moréas came to sip tea and recite his verses from under his soft mustache. I will say that the principles of the place were thoroughly democratic. On one occasion I was introduced to a street paver, on another to a retired customs inspector who painted in his spare time, a rather stupid fellow he seemed, named Rousseau although he was no relation to the philosopher. I went there a score of times perhaps, and in addition escorted Luisa occasionally to places like the Café Royal or an exhibition of Etruscan artifacts. It was perfectly proper, since we were accompanied at all times by her dog and sometimes by the footman from Quai d’Orléans, a gloomy andred-faced young Breton with pimples. In fashionable afternoon attire Luisa made a remarkable effect. Her dark hair in medium length with a simple knot at the back was not the fashion just then but it suited her admirably. Her gown of black moire was cut to the level of the breastbone, and the coat she wore over it she had a way of throwing back over one hip with her hand. It was clear to the spectator that she was an