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Baudelaire, who looks in the mouths of everyone present.
Interesting, interesting. Then he looks in the wheezing
mouths of the horses, interesting, interesting, and
diagnoses an oviduct inflammation, a syphilis nation with
the loss of the center of the world, the breaking of the
baguette. The diagnosis makes patients deeply sad. The
allegory is ineffective, the generic alexandrine amputated. If
we were at Place de Grêve, we would throw a few live cats
on the grill in consolation. Here, horses must be content
with horses, and microbes with the outrage at boudoirs.
Nothing upright. Maybe it was July fourteenth, maybe every
July was the fourteenth, perhaps there were fourteen Julys
on the calendar at the Japanese restaurant, where all seven
lay doubled across fourteen tables. In the middle of a
glowing white fourteenth day, with their eyes rolled back,
they lay and waited for the doctor to arrive in tricolor and
align bone after bone, all fourteen bones. And at least as
many tables.