After our falling out o'er the baby rhinoceros (I had been of the opinion the ungainly beast belonged, not in an elegant Craftsman home filled with fragile china and other breakables, but rather gamboling untrammeled on some sprawling veldt or savanna, happily jamming its little horn into things), Ruprecht and I had parted ways sine die, and I hadn't expected to see the lethargic haberdasher again for quite some time; imagine my surprise then, when scarcely a fortnight later I saw him on the plage of the Cigogne Dyslexique, rushing with great precipitancy into an oncoming wave, naked but for the gold party-hat strapped hastily o'er his yarbles, a magnum of Piper Heidsieck 1907 in one hand and a waterlogged copy of the Quran in the other, hooting like Daffy Duck on acid (in point of fact--as I later learned--several peyote buttons had been furtively slipped into Ruprecht's crème brûlée by a Lebanese architect, whose suggestion the party-hat had also been).

“There certainly is no precipitancy or sense of urgency in your supposed desire to marry me” Josephine reproached when, one day before my departure for the Maldives, I postponed our wedding date sine die, and she broke into tears when I said insensitively that I would be “too lethargic on the plage to even begin to think about it.”