It is said of some men that 'he would cut off his right arm before doing thus-and-such.' Of Étienne, it used to be said that he would sacrifice a limb before violating the smallest rule of etiquette. But now people say, rather, that he actually did cut off his right arm out of politeness, for several years ago something happened at a party to that general effect – accounts vary, for I get the impression it was in some way disgraceful to his family. At any rate the details are unknown to me, but the tale rings true. He has become a great patron of woodcarvers and silversmiths, whom he pays to make artificial hands for him. Some of them are shockingly lifelike. The hand he extended to help me down out of the carriage was carved of ivory with fingernails fashioned from mother-of-pearl. When we dined on roast grouse in his quarters, he had switched to a hand of carven ebony, permanently gripping a serrated knife, which he used to cut his meat, though it looked as if it would have made an excellent weapon, too! And after dinner, when he undertook to seduce me, he wore a special hand carved out of jade, with an extremely oversized middle finger. That digit was, in fact, a perfect reproduction of a man's erect phallus. As such it was nothing I had not already seen in various private 'art' collections in and around Versailles, for lords, and even ladies, love to have such things in their private chambers, as proof of their sophistication, and many of their rooms are veritable Shrines to the god Priapus. But I was caught unawares by a hidden feature of this hand: it must have been hollow, and stuffed with clockwork, for when Étienne d'Arcachon tripped a hidden lever, it suddenly came alive, and began to hum and buzz like a hornet in a bottle. Inside, it seemed, was a coil spring that had been tightly wound in advance.