Chapter 3: Août 1688, Versailles

It was a beautiful late summer’s day six months later that I found myself in Aurora’s (for that was l’Comtesse’s given name) bedchamber.

I had long since read Newton’s brilliant ‘Principe’ and was still digesting his equations that among other things explained so much that had mystified astronomers since Ptolemy. In short, he proved that the planets orbited the Sun, which had long been understood, but not in the circular motion that had always been assumed, rather in ellipses. That explained and solved so many of the inconsistencies that had plagued earlier planetary calculations. It was if the entire universe was a great clock run by mechanisms finally revealed.

I sat naked in an ornate chair, upholstered with costly embroidered Belgian silk cloth, reading, while Aurora lay naked in her afterglow, her skin marble-white on the bed. Her golden hair spread out around and above her head, while her rounded breasts, topped by the most delicious pink nipples, pointed towards the ceiling. Her eyes were closed and her unblemished limbs were entangled in the sheets. She lay unmoving, a short trail of blood dripping from her arm where I had used my scarificator to bleed her.

Her voice broke the silence of the summer afternoon.

She raised her head off of the pillows and looked at me, as I took a sip from the crystal glass.