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Let me tell you a story.

It was 1928 and the season had just begun in St. Tropez

I was comfortably installed in my usual Palace Hotel suite and even though it was to go down as a summer of legendary hi-jinx I was in a considerable funk.

Remember that in February of that year I had accomplished a near-sweep of the Italian national championships --- taking first in verse and painting, and second in calligraphy (due to the judging scandal that has since been discussed ad nauseum).

Then one night at the roulette table there appeared, through a veil of cigar smoke, a column of cinnamon chiffon fulfilled by one of the most charming musculatures my eyes ever squoze. The waiter (a friend) just happened to let slip within her hearing that the great so-and-so, champion of Italy, was in attendance and nodded in my direction. Her eyes flashed diamonds. Literally. A small stone was glued onto each lid, creating a soul-rippling sparkle with every blink.

It was Masha. She claimed to be Russian nobility, but I doubted it. She was most certainly nobility of the flesh. I smiled at her elaborate malarkey and bantered on.

We sat elbow to elbow for several hours and cheerfully lost her a small fortune. When she rose to retire, she bemoaned (in a husky whisper) that her door was broken and that her room, a few doors from mine, was doomed to be unlocked all night. She pressed my shoulder and was gone.

As a changed into my pyjamas moments later in my suite I had a moment of vertigo. Could it be that I had misunderstood her signal? Could it be so easy? I caught sight of myself in the mirror. Reassured, I made sure the hallway was empty then tiptoed along it. There was no mistake.

The afternoon light off the sea flooded Masha's bedroom as we awoke from our first bit of sleep, illuminating her felty skin, a chorus of empty bottles, and a richly framed photo portrait of the King of Spain on her nightstand.

I can say with certainty that Paul was the only Cordon Bleu chef on the continent to be able (with my help) to prepare Korean food. Masha and I emerged from her room only at midnight and only to verify the spin on the roulette wheel. Several days passed in this manner.

Relaxed and inspired, I conceived the plan of writing a love message to Masha on the surface of the bay beneath our balcony via the carefully choreographed manoevres of four speed-boats and some quite toxic dyes. We were so little conscious of ecological issues in those days! It's the kind of project I would be paid a susbstantial sum for, today, but I was in the hammerlock of love. Or so I imagined.

Rehearsing the speed-boats on the dock a few days later, I was approached by a neatly dressed Spanish gentleman who requested satisfaction on behalf of another Spanish gentleman "whom discretion required remain anonymous." The time and place, his choice, were Sunday dawn in a private park near the esplanade. The choice of weapons, mine, was the usual saber.

The only problem, aside from my risk of injuring a person of importance (a thing never to be done lightly), was that the time nearly exactly co-incided with my scheduled bit of aquatic language arts. I would have to wrap up the duel, leap immediately into a waiting car, and arrive nonchalantly at Masha's bedside in my dressing gown and find a way to rouse her (a heavy sleeper) and escort her plausibly and casually to the balcony --- all inside 20 minutes.

Instead of increasing my physical training in the intervening days before the duel, I took to bed in high dudgeon, consoled only by Paul's astonishing terrine of Egyptian vegetables, duck and blood sausage bound with revealed goose fat.

Sunday arrived and I would be lying to say I had slept well. The strict regime of bedrest had produced a high degree of nervous agility, and I felt ready to jump out of my skin. Anything can happen in a fight.

I arrived on the grounds with Paul as my second. I guessed immediately that the figure in the domino half-mask twitching under an alder was to be my opponent. To this day I believe it to have been the King of Spain, but it cannot be confirmed.

I questioned the President of the Duel about the mask and he assured me it would not block my opponent's vision. Shirts off, wrists bandaged --- all was in order, but my opponent continued to confer with his attending surgeon.

My watch thundered desperately in my pocket. I could imagine the speedboats already waiting at the dock, the pilots' eyes on my balcony doors. My opponent at last stood ready. His opening was shaky, but showed pluck, and, more importantly, training. I would have to be skillful.

All targets on the body are permitted in saber fighting, and I parried, feinted and drove for the head. Paul gasped and muttered caution as my blade hissed and danced about the noble noggin.

I got close the first time, and reached my target the second; I managed to snag the black lace of the domino and rotate it nearly a quarter turn on my opponent's face. Blinded, he cried out, waved, and I held back.

He readjusted and we began again. A second time I turned the mask, he waved and I paused. Then I lunged from the left I managed to pull the mask nearly off.

Understanding my strategy, he conferred with his seconds. Despite my hurry I had to remain calm, icy. The issue was weighed --- honor, or the revelation of identity.

His seconds offered Paul a draw. I refused. I was furious. I had been roused from my bed, distracted from my art. All for what? Nothing short of an apology would do!

With all the subtleties of the mighty Spanish tongue put into play, a statement as close to being an apology as it could be --- without actually being one --- was foisted into the negotiations. Paul gestured toward the church clock. I sighed, bowed, and acquiesced.

Demoralized, I collapsed back into bed, and rose again, gloomily, with Masha in the early afternoon. Dead-set on sunning herself she dragged me to hotel's vast pool, where I sulked beneath an umbrella despising glass after glass of champagne.

The text I had prepped for the bay was still rich within me, and, as texts will, needed to take the air. Despite my determination to stay grumpy, I began to chuckle at the thought of it, then, still trying to hold it in, began laughing. Unable to fight it any longer, I threw on a loose shirt and some linen pants and ran to the nearby home of my tailor and convinced him to open his shop for me for a few purchases for which I paid double.

And so it happened that Masha looked up casually from her fashion magazine to see, floating in the swimming pool of the Palace Hotel, St. Tropez, written in coils of red ribbon, one of the finest, silliest, simplest, most touching quatrains that has ever flowed through my torso and out my fingers.

It sprang from the same impulse as the quatrain that would have been in the bay, but of course it had to be quite different . . . a swimming pool is an entirely different medium!

The literary critic of Figaro, vacationing there at the time, burst into tears on the spot.

As for Masha --- I realized not too many weeks later that she was not looking for a husband, but rather, for a rich husband. I was crushed.

But I soon recovered.

The moral of the story is that if, some fine Spring day, you absolutely must have a Korean picnic, it is a thing that can always be done.

And, oh yes, dear Rob, when you are changing media, don't over-think the matter. The new medium tells you what it wants and all you have to do is listen.