Epigrams and aphorisms are making a comeback, going by the success of Fried and Hansson’s Rework, Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes and other smartass non-fiction best sellers.
So I’m pleased to see that my people can keep up.
Here’s a fresh look at the state of things from Sylvie, Book Three in the Tabou quintet, now available for all eReaders.
Annihilate the enemy with acts of kindness only you can afford.
Patience Herrick
Owner, The Philadelphia Flyers
The only risk they acknowledged was scandal.
John Dobbs
General Counsel, Russet Brewing Company
Who chooses to spend the rest of her life building a dream with a girl who belongs to another woman?
Patience Herrick
Weak people will hide ignorance. I am not shocked, of course.
Marie Christine Aurore Faucigny-Lueur
de Scey-Brouillard, Princesse de Fillery
at age 15 in 1959, writing to her long lost sister
“I will tell you everything.” “Oh please. Not everything–not yet. I’m still high on the mystery.”
Patience and Aurore
getting to know one another on Antigua
Patience steals more than her share of Oscar-worthy scenes in this volume:
On setting boundaries:
“Since we are to be cordial neighbors after you get off my property at once.”
On whether to book one hotel room or two:
Forget about less is more. More is more.
Unmatched in seduction technique!
“I remember you as a drug addict.” “I remember you as an uptight bitch.”
Patience and Sylvie du Montclair Russet
chatting over a candlelight dinner on Antigua
And history comes alive!
On courting:
She was always off to the wars, “Like you, little one,” leading troops into battle and so forth while Louis dieted. “Now there was a woman with a big dick.”
Sylvie on the Duchess of Montpensier
On cooking:
“People don’t know how to make a real banker’s sauce anymore except in France. It’s impossible in America. I don’t ask my people to do it.” “Nutmeg?” Patience put out her hand: Sylvie handed it over. “Thank you,” said Patience. “The banker’s sauce?” “Béchamel. Court banker.” There was a long pause, with Patience not following. “I mean to the court of Louis fourteen.”
On cognac:
“So Cognac is like the ATM at the Royal Bank of Bastardy.” Sylvie nodded. “A very stable financial institution. But a very volatile social organization.”
On dynastic challenges:
In your case I am not sure how it is regarded in England. The legitimation aspect. Certainly let us hope with respect! He was not the one who got his head cut off.
Aurore at 15, in France
writing to Sylvie at 11 in the South Pacific
On going native:
I have attached a treatise on the South Pacific, with pictures I drew, it details outrigger canoes and the flora and fauna and some things you may not know about in France. I doubt your teachers know anything about our people, my father is making a study because he says the French are ignorant of this great culture. I am worried that perhaps you have never seen people naked? If it is shocking you can just fold over the page. Memorize it though in case they take it away from you in the convent. Everybody goes around like this here, it is breezier in effect, but my mother tells me that this is not the case in France. But I don’t believe it. It is not natural. And France is real civilization, no?… With my most distinguished sentiments, princess,
Sylvie Russet, age 11, on Hiva Oa
Eavesdrop on Greta Garbo’s lookalike hob-nobbing with Greek tycoons moored off the shore of Martinique.
“Ah, the scent of a woman. What can never be duplicated. The perfect fragrance.”
Sylvie Russet, lost twin of Greta Garbo
Have an affair with the world’s most talked-about woman? Was she crazy? No. It’s out of the question. Our children are falling in love, and besides, my husband will kill me. That made it even more exciting a thought, somehow, but she had to get Sylvie off the boat in case something else happened.
Appolonia Mavros, aboard her yacht Serena
“You were so cold, so offhand!” “I’m not offhand now.” Apple put her hands on. Oh dear Jesus. She could see her marriage going up in smoke. Her whole life going up in smoke. Ostracized. All for Garbo. “But this room…”
Appolonia and Sylvie admiring a Titian
Visit Curacao and Caracas and learn from tales of treachery, tax avoidance, social gaffes and wardrobe malfunctions:
Think two generations ahead, the way Kate did naturally and had done since Macbeth.
Eric Leyden, insurance executive
summarizing business lessons learned from
Kate McKenna Russet
Scottish-born Virginia matriarch
“The boys had their first date, I’m told, in a desert hot spring….Anyway, Talloway’s a Scot and there have been terrible rows over how many skirts to pack. Lesbian couples always dress alike.”
Jocelyn Russet
‘Bail money,’ he said without irony. ‘Every good general counsel always has enough on hand.’
Esteben Ovéquiz de Castañeda y Bohorques Inigues
General Counsel, Empresas Glacial
Cooper looked Esteban over. He was wearing a fancy Italian suit and handmade Spanish shoes and about $50,000 worth of jewelry. Cooper had seen the wives of dictators flee their homelands with fewer accessories.
Gary Cooper off duty in Caracas, Venezuela
Leyden knew Kate well enough not to be shocked by her violent sex analogies. Plain-spoken, horse breeding woman.
Eric Leyden as a houseguest
of Kate Russet in the 1980s
The bitch never sleeps, thought Leyden, and if nobody but me worries about that at night…well, they should.
Eric Leyden, Independent Director
Russet Brewing Company
appointed by Kate Russet
Sylvie Russet. Leyden imagined money like water falling in the bright sunshine over the sculpted ice of her face, her body.
Eric Leyden on Curacao, May 1993
His pink neck was rolling over his shirt collar. His fake smile barely covered his social aggression.
Rowan Rask, Governor of Florida (R-Fl)
A violent society is proof of its own ignorance.
James Russet IV, Chairman
Russet Brewing Company
Herrick’s cold rage was an enforceable warrant.
Ambassador Herrick on jealousy
Due to the incompetence of those around him, he was only ever thirty seconds away from rolling away to a violent death.
James Russet IV
Ah, Valerie
In New York, the Anglo-Irish Countess of Tiffin and Ross, Valerie Drummond, is back and better than ever, taking center stage with an Oscar-winning back story of her own.
‘I see by your sheepish grin and your Freudian slip that all’s well that end’s well.’
Valerie keeping the mental gears well oiled
‘Learn to accept the power of your attraction for others.’
J.O.P. “Oliver” Russet
Iunching with Valerie at the Café Royal, 1934
If one could have any girl one wanted at the drop of a hat, would one want one?
Valerie in Socratic dialog with herself
MORE FROM THE VALERIE CHRONICLES
On Natalie Barney:
“I do recall asking for half, but all I got was teatime.”
The pioneer strain:
‘All this fuss about the G-spot,’ she’d said to Helen Gurley Brown the other day when they met to walk their dogs, ‘and I’ve known about that for centuries. I mean why doesn’t anybody ask me anything?’
Like mother like daughter:
She liked David, although she preferred Albert of Monaco. A principality whose name she pronounced roughly synonymous with the breath freshener Binaca.
Mercedes Russet, Valerie’s younger daughter
On the charm of Edwardian pleasures:
She hated the drama. She wanted them both to stop it, the girl and the young man. There was no need for all this drama. She would sit them down together and calmly explain what she was made for. She was fashioned for, built for, loving them both. She’d tell them she cared for them equally, tell them she’d treat them equally, draw up a schedule and make copies. It’s really only a question of management, like nearly everything else in life.
On guilt over the suicide of a lover:
For the first time in Valerie’s life, she found that everything was more than she could give.
On adventure travel:
If one wants to explore anything nowadays, Valerie felt she had no choice but to conclude, one should get down into a diving bell or up onto a rocket ship or deep into a viral molecule.
On the droit de seigneur:
Virgins deflowered by their true love are like that. Valerie knew from experience.
On lesbian appeal:
Valerie considered all the women who’d ever run from loving other women, going back 3,000 years. Well, none of them had ever laid eyes on her granddaughter.
On slipping standards:
“Spent marriages lying about all over the place. How are you going to tidy that up?”
On gratitude:
“Thank God for that girl at Bletchley Park, even though she sent me straight down the wayward path with her…her…” (Valerie blushed) “…comprehensive tuition.”
On dowager duties:
She had raised them to lead and be role models, befitting their position in society. Lead what? Model what? Society where? The gay world seemed so fragmented now. There was no more real underground. No elite, no social pecking order. Fewer and fewer exciting secrets. And deep confusion actually, when it came to society. You never knew if you were in it or not, to steal the words of Henry Adams…. So she had gotten what she wanted for her granddaughters, a safer world to live and love in, but Christ, how utterly mind-numbingly boring!
Suggestions for improving psychotherapy:
“Let’s have your muddle first. Then we can have mine.”
On the principal of No Surprises:
“Jocelyn, dear, brace yourself.” Yet Valerie made no pause. “I need to tell you that you’re to be cruelly disinherited by me.”
On prospects for the entrepreneurial generation:
Mastery of the physical world “merely” seemed central to their spiritual quest. They always wanted to be worthy of enjoying their luxuries. They were Epicures.
On looking at art:
It wasn’t androgynous in the sense of stripping away one’s identification with sex, but rather ultra-masculine and ultra-feminine at once, in the sense of adding to it.
Valerie watching her granddaughter
Jocelyn enter a room at 960 Fifth Avenue
Not to put down the every-day, tossed-off aperçus of family life:
On family planning:
These days it’s the mere announcement that two people are preparing to breed that’s the real excitement. The actual pregnancy’s such a letdown.
Tristan Canoncourt, Fourth Lord Crome
On chores:
“I never get bored of it. Watching their ass lifting a load.”
Jocelyn Russet, amateur alpinist
What becomes a legend most
Her exploits had invented the term starfucker.
Jocelyn giving credit where credit is due–
to her grandmother
On masculine appeal
He hasn’t a microfiber of investment banking in his body. Couldn’t manipulate a number if it was attached to his scrotum.
Astrid Kay
President, Art Students League of New York
On troublemakers:
One impossibly attractive and too-capable lesbian in my life was trouble enough. Two of them together is a menace.
Constance Canoncourt, Lady Crome
Economizing
Nobody has half a million to spare.
Phoebe, Comtesse du Montclair
Scrabble
An owner is the person with the most responsibility.
Phoebe du Montclair
Comme il faut
Never take a man’s car to St. Cloud.
Phoebe du Montclair
Every beneficiary is a minor for life.
Jocelyn Russet
“Not so fast, Narcissa dear. What about her own legacy? The one you share?” “The one we what?” “The one you share. Share, share, as in commingled assets.”
Jocelyn and Valerie
fighting over a pot au crème
All mixed in, of course, with pearls like these:
I hope you lead yourself to find yourself, Madame.
Natalie Barney’s male ghost
encountered on the rue Vignon
This river go to Mombassa. No! Shit! That was La Brea.
Darius Jones, UCLA film student
“He can’t go back to Italy. I’ve already ravaged the entire country as you know.”
Valerie mulling over
her estate planning problems
One man’s son, and no man’s progeny.
Ambassador Herrick as a young man
in 1939 with money problems of his own
Never cross a Herrick. You could feel the murderous impulse throbbing across the table.
Sylvie Russet having drinks at the Ritz
A late entry I’m afraid. A very late entry. Oh I’d love you to read it, but in Denmark, you see, we don’t actually write the paper until it has been presented to society.
Alexander “Zander” Duffield
Hollywood screenwriter, Zen master,
rock climber and secret agent
We must deconstruct denial itself! How much of it is implicitly acceptance?
Zander gaining entry to an academic conference
under false credentials
You’ll meet numbers guys
Laughing like money going downtown.
Julien Russet, terror attack survivor
“Basically I do math, sir, not clandestine operations that severely deplete my mental resources.”
Kit Hemion, math genius, arborist, surfer
Patience is never happy with two-fifty, thought Joss, unless it’s followed by six zeros.
Jocelyn on Patience
And literary posers
“I’m exploring the human heart. Taking all the borders off the maps.”
Jocelyn Russet
On insufferable dead poets:
Don’t take the fragment thing so seriously!
Jocelyn Russet, Hollywood screenwriter
Indulge your inner Peeping Tom!
“Oh please! Don’t believe everything I say in our pillow talk, for heaven’s sake.”
Jocelyn Russet
She can’t find the place on the map where she used to be comfortably wasted.
Jocelyn on Patience
And your hopelessly romantic side
Trying to forget her…that would be like trying to get the ocean out of her inner ear.
Sylvie on Jocelyn
“All people really want, Louise, is a bit of a dream.”
Witherspoon to his secretary
in HIRE WITHERSPOON!
screenplay by Jocelyn Russet and Alexander Duffield
“Please, be at leisure! At leisure! I can’t think in this atmosphere!”
Witherspoon to his staff
on taking over the family business
so his identical twin can elope with a courtesan
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. So that’s Sylvie in a nutshell. It’s a bit like a multinational DOWNTON ABBEY. Only sexier. How deep the wisdom? I’ll leave that up to you.
Love these, they are so fun to read. Looking forward to reading the book!
Thanks, Steven! Have fun.