She stood before the Botticelli work titled Venus and Mars, and might have been standing on another planet or in another time, so completely did it absorb her. Nothing but the painting mattered or even existed. If anything else was in Leonie’s mind-her reason for coming here this day, for instance, or where “here” was or who she was-it had by now drifted to a distant corner of her skull. What wasn’t in doubt was what this pair had been doing before the male-the Roman god Mars, according to the exhibition catalog-fell asleep. Leonie Noirot’s mind offered sixteen different answers, none satisfactory. Did her lips hint at a smile or a frown, or was her mind elsewhere entirely? She watched him with an unreadable expression. Unlike him, she was fully dressed, in gold-trimmed linen, and fully awake. The woman reclined nearby, her elbow resting on a red cushion. Head fallen back, eyes closed, mouth partly open, he slept too deeply to notice the imps playing with his armor and weapons, or the one blowing through a shell into his ear.
He lay naked but for a cloth draped over his manly parts.
This annual Exhibition is the best set-off to the illiberality with which our grand signors shut up their pictures from the public-making, in fact, close boroughs of their collections.
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