Alexandre Vladimirovitch sprang upward. His right forepaw nimbly rapped the tip of the doorknob. The laws of mechanics, instituted long ago by Archimedes during one of his baths in Syracuse, were set into motion. The door began to open. Dropping back to the floor, Alexandre Vladimirovitch shoved the door along with his left forepaw. After crossing the threshold, he used his trained eyes to check that the premises were free of spies, assassins, and mice; then he drew aside to let Hortense pass.

Hortense stepped into the palace bathroom. She headed for the large semicircular bathtub and turned the six water faucets: VERY HOT, HOT, LUKEWARM, COLD, FREEZING. From the sixth and last faucet flowed a current alternating between SCALDING and ICY thirty-seven times per second; each thin stream ran into the gilded bronze master faucet, creating a powerful, frothy, steady thrust. Hortense kept adjusting them until she got just the right temperature. The bathtub started to fill.

The cubicle bathroom covered a 317-square-meter surface. Three sides were in black marble, the other three in white. There were mirrors; a low, 41-square-meter bathtub, made of basalt and lava; black, white, and red towels bearing the Prince’s effigy; bars of scented soap; stopper bottles containing balsamic oils for bubble baths; bobby pins and combs, etc. Hortense placed on the floor the “cordless” mother-of-pearl snail-phone that she had been holding in her hand, kicked her slippers across the room, undid her belt. Her bathrobe slid down from her shoulders, momentarily detained by her breasts, reluctant to show themselves, and then likewise by her hips. She was naked. Stepping up onto the hypersensitive electronic scale, accurate, precise, and reliable, she stood very straight so she wouldn’t throw off the reading, which flashed up in red fluorescent figures on the white wall facing her: 124 pounds, 9 ounces—i.e., four ounces heavier than the day before. (“Chocolate, chocolate,” she reflected.)

Stepping off the scale, she extended her left foot down into the tub and tested the water with her big toe. The water’s message, penetrating her foot, climbed her leg and continued along her 171-centimeter length until it reached Hortense’s summit, up amid her dense, gossamer, very soft light brown locks: it communicated perfection. Hortense quivered with pleasure and set her foot down on the bottom of the tub. The water rose almost to her calf.

A laudable concern for symmetry led her to slip her second foot into the tub, and she held her pose for a moment as she got used to the warmth. Mentally she readied the various regions of her body for the water’s imminent contact and pressure, which in all probability would equal the weight of the displaced liquid (four more ounces than yesterday! “Chocolate, chocolate,” she re-reflected). This is one of those so very pregnant truths from the world of physics which are not given enough thought at bathtime.

Alexandre Vladimirovitch settled elegantly on the rim of the tub in the special cat’s seat. All bathtubs belonging to beautiful young women have a cat seat. It’s located at the one and only spot which remains splash-free while these women move about in the water. Between the tub’s gray basalt and the black marble of the three walls, Alexandre Vladimirovitch’s dark, gray-black fur, shot through with a bare hint of blue (but a blue so deeply blue it was practically not blue anymore, but almost red), discreetly blended in, as always, with its surroundings. In addition, he had white whiskers and gold-flecked pupils.

His eyes never left Hortense. After soaping at length between her toes, Hortense had moved up to her knees which, as on every morning, she studied with a puzzled look of reproach. Despite her fiancé the Prince’s repeated and persuasive arguments, to her mind they epitomized her failure to achieve genuine beauty: too round, she thought, and “goofy-looking,” as it were. She punished them with neglect and proceeded to the milky caramel of her thighs. In actual fact, her thighs were not fundamentally different in color from the other parts of her body; but it’s clear that the caramel/thigh association has a greater descriptive power than the conjunction of “caramel” with “calf,” for instance. This explains why it happens to take priority.

As we’ve already stated, Alexandre Vladimirovitch’s eyes never left Hortense, and he followed the sensual progress of her self-soaping. “I wonder,” thought Hortense, “what he might be thinking while watching me like that every morning?”

“What I’m thinking,” thought Alexandre Vladimirovitch, who like all cats (excellent cognitivists that they are), but with even greater clarity due to his personal qualities and his noble rank (he was a prince), hadn’t any problem at all decoding human brain waves: they’re so slow, so elementary, not to mention so awfully encumbered with language.

So then, Alexandre Vladimirovitch thought, “What I’m thinking is how remarkably bare of fur her whole body is; no doubt, according to human criteria, if I take into account the appraisal of the Prince who’s a connoisseur, Hortense’s scanty fur is placed on her person correctly, strategically, and with a touch of charm, I grant. But first: the awkward discontinuity between fur and non-fur, a trait shared by all human beings regardless of sex, is a regrettable defect in harmony; second, if this fur has an erotic purpose, and this is assuredly so in Hortense’s case, how does it happen that a large part of said fur serves in fact no practical purpose? Is it not a deceitful lure, a disappointing simulacrum? The fur of our females, by contrast, serves so very many . . .”

So ran Alexandre Vladimirovitch’s thoughts, along with a good number of others, at a cat’s mental speed which is too swift to be followed, exceeding the velocity of all material, corpuscular, and wave particles, and thus disproving the most (wrongly) unchallenged principles of Inchtin’s Relativity and Max (le Planque)’s Theory of Quotas.

Hortense’s relationship with the Prince’s cat was still marked by a slight, but noticeable discomfort. He was always very courteous, purring politely whenever she petted him; he fulfilled the responsibilities of his office punctually, parsimoniously, and with virtuosity, but some hint of a misunderstanding between the two, dating back to when they first met, persisted despite everything. Alexandre Vladimirovitch first set eyes on Hortense one summer in another city (the City, yours and mine, yours and theirs, its inhabitants, the City in short, ours); she was walking down the street in the morning sunshine, and beneath her dress her body was bare of anything down under!

(The above sentence is a trifle ambiguous: it’s impossible to say that there wasn’t anything under Hortense’s dress; she herself was there, if we grant that she bore her own body [and very well at that]; so there was something underneath: perhaps we should revise ourselves to read: “and beneath her dress she didn’t bear the skimpiest fabric upon her upside down under”: in all probability, this is what the expression “upside down” originally meant, afterward taking on a secondary connotation stemming from the disorder unfailingly sown in their wake by young women who dress likewise.)

This oversight, quite unintentional of course, had ultimately beneficial results, since the love of the Prince, whom Al. Vl. considered alone among human beings as his equal, had resulted from it; nevertheless Alexandre Vladimirovitch had retained the faintest hint of moral and (far worse perhaps) aesthetic reprobation.

“Plus,” thought Hortense, “I know full well that he protects me from spies and assassins in the Enemy’s hire—from mice, too. But isn’t he around also to keep an eye on me?”

Just then the bell sounded. A split second beforehand, Alexandre Vladimirovitch had leaped down into the bathtub and, catching up the mother-of-pearl snail in his paw, he held it out to Hortense. It was the Prince on the phone.

Hearing the Prince’s voice at the end of the nonline (it was a cordless phone), Hortense’s breasts abruptly stood up as if uncovered without warning by a spring breeze slipping between two chaises. Until that moment they had rested so seemingly peaceful and satisfied upon her chest; but animated with a hope and a life all their own, they now moved upward, and in unison their homomorphic points hardened, while they swelled palpably in volume. Since this phenomenon occurred even before Hortense brought the earpiece to her ear, the impression created was that they (her breasts) had themselves been suddenly endowed with a sense of hearing. And it wasn’t the Prince’s voice alone that caused this, but the knowledge (shared by Hortense with her breasts) that the Prince’s telephone was equipped with a full-screen video monitor in which she was visible from head to toe, in her moist, total nudity.

“Love in human females,” thought Alexandre Vladimirovitch, witnessing the topological transformation, “love has strange effects. How far subtler with our females,” he thought once again, “whose first hint of interest is shown only by the whiskers.”

However, as the conversation progressed, a certain disenchantment became discernible in Hortense’s breasts; soon, flatly disappointed, they returned to their initial, anerotic (as we’ll call it) position. Perhaps (but we wouldn’t swear to this) they sensed that the first chapter was drawing to a close.