Gallows Nymph (Short): Levi- 1 The Pretty Fall

August 08, 2024

Gallows Nymph (Short): Levi- 1 The Pretty Fall

The muted chatter of the dinner table was abruptly silenced as a breathless young footman burst through the ornate double doors, his eyes wild and his words tumbling forth in a torrent.

"Forgive the intrusion, Monsieur, but there are tidings of the utmost urgency!"

All eyes turned to the flustered servant, the clatter of cutlery fading over the half eaten kugel as the assembled family and guests fell into a hush.

Levi, his countenance typically inscrutable, arched a single brow as his clutch on the day's stock ledgers tightened, regarding the youth with cool indifference. His frumpy wife, however, could not contain her curiosity, leaning forward with a piglike squeal.

"Well, out with it, boy! What news do you bring that disturbs our repast so?"

The footman, emboldened by her tone, sputtered out: "It is the Viscountess Du Crete, Madame! She has been arrested, charged with the attempt to murder her husband, the Viscount!"

A collective gasp rippled through the ornate bourgeois' room,

Levi's beady eyes widened as the scandalous revelations poured over,

"Oh, the horror of it!" Levi's wife squealed, her pudgy face contorted in a most unbecoming manner. She cupped her hands over the ears of one of their children, and ordered her maids to follow her example over the rest of their brood, shielding their innocent minds from such wicked proceedings.

“...After having prodded her brazen maids to slay her own Lord- husband, the banking master!..."

Levi observed her theatrics with a detached amusement, stroking the his fuzzy suggestion of a mustache, The sordid news must have spread through the city like a plague by now. Levi tallied. Whispered and mutterings in darkened alleyways and the grand salons. If even that stupid boy who can't find his nose can learn of it, it must be making rounds.

"The brazen harlot!” His wife's shrill outrage pierced the air.

“Rutting like dog with the king's own men, the very pillars of our society! To think, she dared to call herself a widow!"

His facade of his expected patriarchal propriety betrayed only by the slightest quickening of his breath. Instead he leaned to the side of the chair to temper his circumcised cock, which already began to leak from its memory of the topical woman's eager mouth and spirited figure.

If only that shrieking thing knew the true nature of his own dalliances with the same now notorious, expensive adulteress. Or her talented insides. And how it felt to be lost inside the length of that insatiable, responsive furnace.

Oh, those stolen trysts, the illicit moments with her lithe form, or the fun of her cunt's embrace. The way her wanton lipstick smiled back from his stubby circumcised cock. The way each visit shorn off years along with the memory that he's tethered to...this.

But no, he would keep that delicious secret to himself, a private indulgence to be savored in the dark recesses of his mind. A wicked smile tugged at the corners of his lips, unseen by the others as they clucked and tsk'd at the scandalous revelations once only knew to few of the privied circles about, now ventilated under every Parisian roof.

THE PREVIOUS LIASONS

“VILE!”

His wife's eyes drew wider as she continued.

“...even men of the cloth!..."

“...all the while harboring such dark designs!" She shook her tubby head, "and those wretched maids, filles debauchees accomplices in such a heinous plot!

She shuddered piously, then cast a scandalized look towards their muffled children. "Quickly, dears, leave the table. This is no conversation for young ears."

The children dart happily from the table, smiling curious and ignorant smiles to each other.

With that, she rose, ushering the children from the room, her heavy skirts swishing as she went. Levi watched, his pulse quickening as the shape fled the room, her progeny in tow.

“Gah his Majesty'd just waive her devilishness like he'd done with that other favorite Montespan.” The matron wagged her notched toe- fingers to her nodding maids, “The goyims never, never, take heed of the day of wrath they profess. If a Glutton of sin who plotted against his own royal life can be pardoned even after Chambre Ardente~ this filthy Nymph could too.”

“Mark my words it will just be another royal pardon!”

Levi remained, alone save for the echoes of his wife's grating outrage down the corridor. His gaze fixed upon his half finished kugel and deep fried sardines on the silver plates. A bead of sweat trickled down his brow as he froze there, as the sardine's wide eyes stared back at his.

Once the din of the trailing servants faded, he allowed himself a private chuckle.

He strained inside his already crusted his breeches.

Even rarer it did not hurt a bit considering the flinty stones still stuck in his urethra.

Coursing through his veins with his mind's eye, he saw Madame Du Crete as he remembered her– her cool alabaster skin flushed with exertion, her dark auburn tresses disheveled, those painted lips reeking of miracles that would have worn his name.

Her long lashes batted in his sperm, the way her gold dusted eyes had smiled up at him, her tongue finishing up his own tallow streaks glistening upon her married face.

So naturally. He had always simply viewed the Madame as she was to him, a brazen, shameless creature of base pleasures, a vessel of expensive flesh to shave off his unhappiness with.

...until her wrongs against him.

But now, with the revelation of her true viciousness, she had...taken on a new allure. Now, with her other secrets laid bare for all to see, she was something else entirely - How deliciously wicked she had become, this demure harlot he had once possessed, had now sought to enliven her adultery with murder.

Pistols, plots, and murder, -oh, how much more delicious that woman is now. His mind raced, imagining the lurid details that are hardening into reality. Again Levi felt the stirrings of being alive, the same killing rush in a winning bet and possession.

It thrilled him seeing her this way. The more debased, the more depraved she mutated in his blackest imaginations of her, the more his briny loins ached with forbidden desire.

His business mind raced with the implications of Madame's sudden notoriety. Here was an opportunity, a chance to capitalize on the ruin of this wanton creature.

It was a miracle. He felt her again- despite his unextracted urine stones.

And Levi realized with a jolt of savage delight, that he if he chose, he held the keys to her undoing.

If only others would...see her that way.

If only enough of them would see her that way.

If they could only see her irrevocably irretrievably that way.

Then even all the courts and Kings cannot prevail against it.

What other course can be done then against a truly bad woman?

SOME YEARS BEFORE~

Madame Du Crete's nude happy body draped across the chaise. The languid afterglow of her recent tryst still clinging to her blushing curves. A sated smile played across her full lips, her eyes half-lidded as she replayed the the fervent attentions of her 2 Negro “guests” her shameless Duke had brought with him that day- their eager hands, their feverish mouths, their darting, coiling tongues, the waves of pleasure they had wrung from her willing, jetting body.

"Oh I insist you try them my dear." Some hours back, the Duke teased with his smiling eyes. "They can actually speak. Can even run as fast as my destriers. Oh but they are built like the Pillars of Hercules. Consider them a thank you gift" He straightened his silk waistcoat on his sitting chair, already unbuttoning his expensive buttons near his breech, watching as the first groan escaped her repressed bitten smile. "...just consider me as a theater guest."

Unbeknownst to her, the door creaked open, admitting the strained figure of Levi. His mole eyes narrowed for a second behind his spectacles as they raked over Madame's still-flushed visage, the corners of his mouth twitched with barely contained tremors.

So, the rumors were true.

How dare she - how dare this this THIS thiss sully herself with those gibbering animals, when she had once lavished those same lips upon him.

Madame alighted from her cushion, oblivious to the tempest beneath the man, and scampered spiritedly from the chaise. "Ah, Monsieur Levi," she beamed, her voice like sweetness against the stillness of the room. "I had not expected your visit."

Her gaze flickered over his tense frame, the corner of her mouth quirking in familiar amusement. "The usual then?" Her long manicured fingers trailed lazily along the curve of her supple hip leg~ his favorite morsel, her gaze flickering with a hint of her- their- old playfulness.

Levi's jaw tightened, the muscles in his neck corded with the effort of restraining his outburst as he spied those negro- induced afterglows. "Madame," he grounded out,

"Do not preten~”

Levi's flabby jaw tightened, his knuckles white as he gripped his tiny hands. He wanted to lash out, to demand an explanation. But the words caught in his throat, choked by the bitter realization that Madame had never truly been his to, to...

What were they ever were but pretend?

Madame's brow furrowed over with confusion, a shadow of concern crossed her features. She took a measured step forward, as if sensing the other had been stricken by some plague, her hand reached out to test placcatingly upon Levi's sleeve. "Monsieur, what had hurt you?”

It's amazing she even managed to sound innocent, almost a pleading, quality. Pleading...At least Levi though so.

“Was it the misses?”

“Did the insolvents ran to the King again?”

“Did one of the gentlemen call you Christ-killer again?”

But Levi's eyes were dead, so was his graying frame.

she murmured softly, her voice still tinged with that sweet naive vigilance. "come into my-"

He remembered one last gaze upon Madame's radiant face.

Then the flight of stairs.

And when he disappeared he vowed to never return up again. There was no one there anymore.

"There is nothing left to discuss, Madame.” he snapped to himself several blocks out.

“ You...you have made your choice."

He's small. So small.

Just a small man, with a small cock.

Who once fooled himself to think he was worthy of having someone.

He...didn't want to return to live his loathsome life, to be him.

She used to be everywhere in his head all the time. Some time in her flawless nude of course. Her likeness even chatting with him at work, at boredom, at his worst, enduring together in his wretched life.

He was so much better when he thought he was worthy of having someone.

So he sought to forget her. To pave over her.

And the years came. And after he embraced that he would not be happy. The year came easier. Even the urine stones came easier. Even when she became the King's whore it came easier.

As loathsome as his life.

But now the image of her, splayed and panting beneath those... those filthy animals, now forever tarred over everything. It was an unwanted intrusion, a violation –

If only others would...see her that way.

If only enough of them would see her that way.

If they could only see her irrevocably irretrievably that way.

Then even all the courts and Kings cannot prevail against it.

What other course can be done then against a truly bad woman?

In the privacy of his thoughts, Levi resolved this fate was one that he could not afford to squander.

If only she actually die as that.

Then she can BE only that.

And he would know, that he was the one who ended her.

And her only story will be his alone.

Yes. He needs her to be that, exactly that.

He only needs others to see her as that too.

With a frantic ring, the butler appeared before Levi's dinner table.

"Rouse the apprentices and printers at once. I want pamphlets, lurid accounts of the viscountess' crimes, distributed throughout the city by dawn." A cruel smile played about his lips. "Let all of Paris know the sordid truth."

Levi followed with a series of brusque detailed orders with his frenzied voice.

The butler, accustomed to his master's mercurial moods, especially those brought about by the trapped urine stones, bowed and departed with haste, leaving Levi alone with his thoughts.

He would see to it that the city, nay, the entire kingdom, was inundated with lurid pamphlets recounting Madame's misdeeds. The more debased she was portrayed, the more gratifying it would be to his awakened cock.

His version, his liberal pornographic exposee, would soon become the only accepted narrative. The public's thirst for scandal would ensure the widespread distribution of his salacious prints, and the courts would be swayed by the overwhelming tide of public opinion. The lurid pamphlets would shape the public's perception, and the courts would have no choice but to deliver the only unavoidable punishment.

Levi's twisted mind reveled in the exclusive fore knowledge that in only a few weeks, with perfect clarity and his dose of influence. He could already see it. His wayward woman would be made to expire upon the scaffolds, her shame and degradation then etched into the minds of all. And once that head was affixed before all, her reputation would be forever this.

Another comment which already scrawled onto the plastered pamphlet reads "Je veux toujours la baiser avant qu'elle pourrisse." accompanied by a rather well drawn graffiti of a doting dog staring at her debasedness. Paris would have little to imagine, by then it would became difficult to dispel the notion of her dalliance beyond her own species.

The very forethought of her, clad in the tattered rags of her ruined reputation, ascending the scaffold to meet her fate, sent a shiver of unholy ecstasy through him. Then he would own her. Because she can't be anything else.

Tomorrow, every corner of the city would be awash in the scandalous tales of Madame's misdeeds. And at every inspiration, he would exist in the same space whenever anyone else thought of her.