As Related by Jay Robert Nash

from

ZANIES: The World's Greatest Eccentrics

New Century Publishers, Inc., 1982.

(pages 91-96)

The two women were sitting in the open-air cafe on a beautiful spring day in Paris in 1920. One of the women was the internationally known interpretive dance, Isadora Duncan, an eccentric in her own right. The other was her attractive companion, a sort of lady-in-waiting. A man sipping wine at the next table eyed the women intensely. There was, to Isadora's glance something strangely familiar about him. The dancer fluttered her eyelashes at him, trying to remember.

With a quick, jerking movement, the man—short, stocky, his bloated face ravaged by years of dissipation and debauchery—gulped down his wine and threw back his chair. He stood up and placed a bowler hat squarely on his head, smoothed down an old-fashioned frock coat, and then approached the two women, his lips together in a tight smile.

He ignored the famous dancer and went directly to her beautiful young friend. He bowed slightly, his sickening smile still clinging. "How charming you are," the man grated lasciviously. "Have you ever had a serpent's kiss?"

"Why, no," the young woman said, not alarmed, for it was an age where fanciful exiles from all countries infested the Left Bank of Paris and oddness was the order of the day.

"Wonderful," drooled the man as he bent forward swiftly, taking the brunette's hand while Isadora stared, fascinated. As the strange interloper bared his two front teeth, Isadora gasped. The man's teeth were filed to razor-sharp points. He bit deeply into her companion's hand, gnashing into a tiny vein that spurted blood.

Oh, my God! My God!" the young woman screamed before collapsing in a dead faint.

The man stepped back smiling crookedly, a small trickle of blood running from his lips. He swagged his tongue over the gore, drawing it into his mouth. He nodded quickly to Isadora, as if his brutish act had been nothing more than a usual greeting, and, before the stunned dancer could react, he strode briskly away down the boulevard Montparnasse. Isadora then ran screaming for a doctor.

The young woman recovered, even though she contracted blood poisoning from the infected wound; the man who had so ceremoniously bestowed upon her his serpent's kiss, had rubbed garlic on his fang-like teeth. Strangely, the attacker, whom Isadora finally remembered, was never apprehended. It was understood that in the bizarre expatriate circles of that permissive day one did not prosecute, let alone criticize, "The Great Beast."

. . . . .