At 7:55 pm, 17 year-old Mariuccia Monteverdi, clad in nothing but skin-tight black neoprene hot pants bearing the legend PLEASE REMOVE BEFORE USE stamped across her arse, threw caution to the wind and extracted the first After Eight from its slender brown envelope, crumpled the wrapper into a dense little ball and then lobbed it with insouciant accuracy into a Murano glass ashtray (we have all experienced these serendipitous moments when eye, hand and mind coincide to banish the gremlins of error and dispatch the arrow, cool as a cucumber, straight to the heart of the astonished bull’s-eye) sitting on top of a squat rectangular coffee-table whose Formica top was printed—black on white—with the following words of the designer Charles Parmentier’s poem Qualities: ‘the coyly palindromic, the kinkily faded, the nervously parched, the sympathetically crippled, the hypothetically arch, the haphazardly burnished, the preposterously svelte, the usefully dysfunctional, the artistically sullen, the heavily dappled, the sanguinely embittered, the salubriously vague, the devilishly emblematic, the transparently brown, the famously obese, the raucously stiff, the presumptuously megalithic, the meekly telescopic, the frenetically safe, the luxuriously sulfurous, the moistly trilingual, the valuably automatic, the passably postglacial, the traumatically obscure, the gluttonously sassy, the tryingly lubricious, the hideously apt, the charmingly aquatic, the vibrantly injured, the wordlessly fallow, the ceaselessly creased, the tenuously umlauted, the viciously blue, the hopefully bandaged, the wishfully comatose, the honorably senile, the icily indicative, the fetchingly square, the mutely divided, the dreadfully spry, the mindlessly cosy, the wistfully sandy, the opulently sticky, the openly arithmetical, the mechanically intimate, the feebly hypnotic, the dopily striped, the winningly vapid, the superbly salty, the facetiously wet, the badly pampered, the densely lewd, the profitably zonked, the anxiously clad, the coldly remunerative, the nicely tumescent, the rapidly belligerent, the mortally outstretched, the cynically laundered, the woefully khaki, the eternally twee, the daringly fluffy, the incorrectly torpid, the shamefully elastic, the drastically gaunt, the ritually subatomic, the congenitally sloppy, the nonchalantly ill, the marginally fuzzy, the debatably fey, the adroitly myopic, the masterfully churly, the successfully slinky, the supposedly tawny, the oddly kinetic, the imperially sad, the absolutely panhuman, the dolefully lax, the wastefully stingy, the arrestingly flounced, the repetitiously obtuse, the adverbially fecund, the charismatically ordinary, the hurtfully pagan, the strikingly plump, the typographically minute, the achingly metallic, the lexicographically inexhaustible, the genuinely dank, the visibly bruised, the angelically horny, the exasperatingly posh, the rewardingly furry, the richly bespectacled, the hyperbolically buxom, the virtually orgasmic, the neverendingly dubious, the tenuously erect, the awkwardly tepid, the variably mournful, the imperiously bluff, the classically putrid, the safely spasmodic, the cryptically sexy, the shamelessly vulpine, the regionally rhythmic, the traditionally absent, the sluttishly becoming, the haughtily elegiac, the syntactically chaotic, the inadequately woeful, the verbally arid, the attractively stunted, the tearfully tetchy, the unwaveringly irreverent, the tauntingly facile, the simply serendipitous, the arguably nepotistic, the victoriously stamped.’

Some of you may recall that at last year’s auction of Classic Automobiles and Automobiliana celebrated at Sotheby’s in London, lot nº 129—a powder blue 1954 Pegaso Z-102 ‘Thrill’ Berlinetta with coachwork by Touring of Milan, formerly the property of the late Contessa Zanetti (née Ilka Monteverdi) and offered for sale by her executors with a healthy reserve of £195,000—provoked a furious bidding duel before a breathless audience, the ærodynamic Spanish coupé finally being adjudicated for the astronomical sum of £470,000 to the distinguished Lesbian dodecaphonic composer Flaminia de Plunkett, ultimately more energetic with her paddle than her tenacious rival, the Munich gallery owner and former lover of the late Contessa, Carlo Kitzler, whose purely sentimental motivations—he fondly rembered one brisk late-summer evening in 1957, slumped in the passenger seat of the vehicle, his head swimming in champagne as Ilka, divinely naked and fragrant beneath a knee-length ocelot coat after having left the Count to play with his cénacle of ephebes aboard their motor yacht Parnasso, thundered along the autostrada above Portofino at 200 km/h, laughing like a lunatic—were no match for Miss de Plunkett’s iron determination, the external sign of an æsthetic passion whose intensity was unsuspected until the tragic double suicide by morphine overdose just three months later that claimed the lives of the composer—later revealed to be in the terminal phase of bone-marrow cancer—and her inseparable sentimental companion, the militant mosaicist Jacqueline Gwynne, and the subsequent revelation that for some time the two artistes had been morbidly designing and calculating down to the last detail the mise en scène of their suicide, funeral and entombment, having even commissioned the modish illustrator Olivier Daubigny-Daubrée to execute an admirable series of thirty-six cross-hatched colour drawings in his usual photographic style, each drawing supplemented by copious text containing precise directions for the actualization of their macabre project, from the chilling scene in which Flaminia and Jacqueline are seen mutually administering the lethal intravenous shots with silver syringes, through the half-dozen vignettes cinematographically depicting the funeral procession (the rustic roadside church with its black Madonna; the biomorphic ‘Siamese twin’ coffins decorated with a marquetry mosaic of rare woods and suspended sidecar-fashion between two vintage black flat-twin BMW motorcycles; the all-woman orchestra assembled to perform La Toison d’Or, the song-cycle based on poems by Diana Schnell that first rocketed de Plunkett to fame), to the final suite of drawings detailing the extravagant décor of the burial chamber itself, a subterranean vault beneath the garden of their villa on the island of Ischia, in which the two lovers are embalmed and hermetically isolated behind a vast sheet of plate glass, Jacqueline at the wheel of the Pegaso, immaculate in chauffeur’s cap with patent leather visor, tasselled cyclamen uniform and black leather driving gloves, and Flaminia seated beside her, bare-shouldered in a floral sundress, her lips vibrantly painted, her face glamorously masked by a pair of green-tinted tortoiseshell sunglasses and by her favourite vintage Hermès foulard, decorated with repeated starfish motifs and knotted beneath the chin, thereby half-obscuring what is actually a flame-red wig, custom-made to hide a scalp left bald by months of chemotherapy.