The Flanders Panel

Like a Charles Stuart climbing to the scaffold almost as if he were doing so as a favour to the executioner, with his already rehearsed “Remember” on his lips and in the hope that he would be beheaded in profile, as he appeared on the coins struck in his image.

his bones would doubtless tremble with pleasure beneath his dusty gravestone in the crypt

Quite innocently, Julia imagined him naked, in the half-light of Cesar’s bedroom, beautiful and silent as a marble statue, his blond hair fallen over his face, with what Cesar termed, using a euphemism Julia believed he’d stolen from Cocteau, the golden sceptre, erect and ready to be tempered in the antrum amoris of his mature companion