Someone wrote me an e-letter from the South of France today which reminded me of an incident several years ago during my second honeymoon in Nice on the Riviera. My second wife was a fascinating woman of beauty and charm, educated in Switzerland, multi-lingual, and married three times before me. She was also, I came sadly to discover, a person who never drew a sober breath, although she hid her illness well and only late in our short marriage stopped trying to hide it from me.

Hiding it from me was relatively easy as I matched her drink for drink, or thought I did, and being young and even more egocentric than now, had no suspicion that she was also drinking on the side. She was also doing other things on the side, I came to realize, and I should have known better than to expect more of her than of her intimate friends. Her friendships were all derived from what was then known in New York as "cafe society," later to become "the jet set," then "the beautiful people." I have no idea what they are called now because I do not live in that world, but it still does, indeed, exist. Those faces in "Town and Country," the mansions, the limos, the international events, the drugs, the booze, the multiple marriages and divorces. It hasn't changed.

I think of my brief exposure to those social altitudes as part of my education in life, which, to be sure, got me nowhere at all, but helped to make the journey interesting as hell.

She loved me in her way is the best that I can say, and that, in it's way, is the best that can be said for me. We were a matched set in being hedonistic -- "the purpose of life is having fun" -- being both on the rebound from devastating personal tragedies that nearly wiped us out emotionally, until we found a sort of solace in "loving" each other. I had not wanted to marry, but in that day, it was not the done thing to "live in sin." I wonder which "sin" was the greater -- to cohabit without benefit of marriage, which is the way it began, or to marry for all the wrong reasons, which is what eventually would bring the marriage to an end.

I had been bisexual from the beginning, let us say at age 13, but with a stronger homosexual leaning that would become my dominant orientation at the age of 26. Men were always most important to me, but women had a place in my life. I suppose I was like what was written later of Tyrone Power, a bisexual actor I idolized, "He loved men, but married women."

With regard to our honeymoon in the South of France, it was carried out in high style and was full of adventures, sexual and otherwise, but two incidents stand out in particular.

We were in residence at the venerable Negresco Hotel on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. I was "honeymooned out" with female sex and lusted tremendously for the rough, sweet touch of a man, for his smell, for the feel of his body, to the point that looking at an appealing guy almost made me weak.

One night, I heard a noise in the hallway outside our suite at the hotel. Being a hostel frequented by the rich, a jewel thief came to mind. My wife had collapsed on the sofa from the thousand wines of dinner, but I was steady enough on my feet to poke my head out the door hoping, just hoping, that some gorgeous Frenchman was on the make for at least my "family" jewels.

No such luck. It was a guest next door putting out his shoes for the steward to shine overnight, a standard custom in European or upscale American hotels. I caught him leaning over to place his shoes outside the door. His bathrobe was hanging open. I saw one helluva set of family jewels I would have gone after if I'd had the chance.

He caught my eye and winked. Just a couple of guys in the honeymoon suites getting ready to enjoy our new wives is what his wink said to me. He closed his door as I closed mine. He had taken my breath away. I sat in an elegant chair and gripped the arms in a fervent bid not to jack off at the thought of him. What an embarrassment if my wife woke up and caught me in the act! So I suffered in silence for a few minutes until I heard two voices whispering at a distance in French, but where were they coming from?

I looked around. There was a connecting door to the suite next door. It would have been the hot Frenchman's room. I realized with a start that the door featured an old-fashioned transom, an opening at the top for the circulation of air. Normally closed, it was slightly ajar. I could hear everything in his room. And hear everything I did.

He must have been an extraordinary lover. He screwed his wife endlessly for a couple of hours, building her up to explosive orgasms until she screamed and was surely clawing at his back. I had noticed him to be slightly on the dark side complexion-wise, which could have meant that he came from Algiers, at that time a North African colony belonging to France. If so, he may have been influenced sexually by Arabs, many of whom practiced arithmetical movements when having sex, counting the thrusts and withdrawals and varying the depth of insertion, reading a woman's (or another man's) body like a holy book, concentrating on giving pleasure intensely and reaping the reward of intense pleasure in return.

A famous lover of the 20th century, Prince Aly Khan, notorious conqueror of beautiful women, admitted to its practice and once, when asked how he could service so many women and maintain his health year after year, told the interviewer he seldom allowed himself an orgasm more than once or twice a week.

My Frenchman was not that sparing of himself. I heard him cum three times, violently, in those hours of fabulous fucking, halfway through which I could stand it no more and gathered my sleeping wife up in my arms and threw her on the bed, tore at her panties and, with his cries of passion resounding in my ears, and the screams of his transported wife, I gave my wife, who woke up in the midst of it and had the time of her life, better sex, she claimed, than from any husband she ever had.

The next day, she was exhausted, and slept like a baby, but I awoke early, my dick still rampant from the night before. The sex with her had provided no satisfaction at all, and the fantasy of its being with him was not enough to satisfy my lust.

I remember being in a desperate state of mind as I dressed, fantasizing that I would walk out and find him picking up his shiny shoes from the night before, and wink at me again, and I would wink back, and he would entice me into his suite and take me into the bathroom while his own wife slept, and give me what I wanted.

That's not what happened, but I did fall heir to an unbelievable stroke of luck. There was a hotel page whose swinging butt when I saw him delivering messages and such had more than sparked my interest, but I had always been with my wife.

I opened my door, and there he was, delivering my dream lover's glossy shoes from the steward's room. He greeted me with what I interpreted as a "knowing" smile, of which I was the target of plenty at the hotel because, of course, we were staying in the wedding suite area. It was a smile that meant to say, "Please don't fuck yourself to death, at least while you're a guest in this hotel!"

"Why are you doing that?" I asked. "Delivering shined shoes is not the job of a page!"

"No, m'sieur, it is not," he said, "but the steward is very busy this morning. The house is full. I am helping out."

There was that little something in the way he looked at me. I had seen a trace of it in him before. It was what I thought of as a look that said, "Too bad you're on your honeymoon...if only you were alone."

Maybe it was more in my mind than his, but I turned on my "simmering" gaze and reached out to twist his lapel. When I touched him, he grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze.

It takes one to know one, I thought. I held on and pulled him gently into the room. His gaze went to the bedroom door. I shrugged to indicate that my wife was no menace, then lifted my hand to suggest taking a drink and crossed my eyes and bugged out my eyes. He got it. She's sleeping it off was the thought I soundlessly put into his mind.

Still, there was no time to waste. A hot embrace that knocked off his page's hat, some fumbling with the brass buttons of his uniform to loosen the jacket and drop his pants, and he was turned around and he was leaning on the back of a chair, as ready as he could be.

Still fully dressed, with just my cock sticking out of the fly, I pressed against him and drove it in. He gave a little gasp and jerked his buns away a bit, but his fingers reached to pull the cheeks farther apart. He was adept at this. No virgin, he, bending his knees and using them like springs to push himself repeatedly against me.

The heat of lust consumed us both. I braced myself with my hands on his hips to keep my balance while he did most of the work. I could tell he dug it like this. One hand reached back to pull me closer while the other was jerking his dick until I could feel him tense up, rise a little on his toes, and cum in quick spurts that made his sphincter grip my tool with little bites.

When he finished cumming, I felt all the muscles in there relax, letting me plunge deeper than before. He was wet and slippery inside, more like a woman than a man, but he was clean. I felt myself sliding down his chute until my cum rose to the spraying stage. In that moment, I pulled out of him quickly and whipped him around and took him in my arms and kissed him passionately while I came on his belly in lava-like streams of semen.

We fell apart, him against his chair, me against the nearest wall. Catching my breath, I sneaked into the bathroom past my sleeping wife and brought out a towel which we used to wipe ourselves off. We said nothing as we cleaned ourselves, but shared lingering looks and soft smiles that seemed to make us a loving pair. When he had buttoned all those little buttons and straightened his smart page's hat, he reached into his pocket and put on his crisp, white page's gloves.

Hs stood back, his beauty on display. There had been nothing really furtive in our bold encounter. We had simply come together for the joy of sex. We were both ready to start our respective days, and I, for one, felt more sexually satisfied than I had for a week. He gave me a sweet good-bye kiss and left the room.

I picked up the phone and told Room Service we were ready for the "continental breakfast" that came with the suite. Then I went in to wake up my wife. We had things to do, including a special luncheon which would turn into an adventure like none other, not even with the handsome page.

That, however, is a story I will tell later, if anyone wants to hear.