‘They are young, surely that is enough,’ she said indignantly. ‘Surely they don’t need to amuse themselves as well.’
‘But in the States, Madame Innouïs, we think it our duty to make sure that precisely while they are young they are having the best years of their lives. Now in what way do the young folks here spend these best years of their lives, Madame Innouïs?’
‘I believe they are entirely nourished on porto,’ said Madame Rocher enigmatically. She decided that she must get away from Mr Dexter come what might, and even if it had to be at the expense of that big box and two rows of stalls. She made a sign of command to Eugène de Tournon, who sprang forward, gave her his arm, and took her to supper.
‘Many people don’t realize at all,’ she said, ‘what I go through in order to support those dear good creatures at the Hospice. Champagne please, at once. He called me Madame Innouïs.’
‘But everybody knows, Tante Régine, that you are a saint, an absolute, literal saint.’
‘Yes indeed, Tante Régine,’ said Charles-Edouard, at whose table they sat down, ‘we shall find you on the ceiling one of these days, I’ve always thought that.’
‘And where is our adorable little Sigi?’ she asked, as a very tipsy Grand Dauphin tottered past the table, followed by Mademoiselle de Blois who, with that high whine peculiar to French children, was demanding another glass of champagne. The innocents were beginning to come to life again.
‘That old dragon of a Nanny came and took him away. So stupid. As if one night out would do him any harm.’
‘Poor little things.’ Madame Rocher surveyed them through her lorgnette. ‘I’m glad it’s not me growing up now. What a world for them! Atom bombs, and no brothels. What will their parents do about that – after all you can’t very well ask your own friends, can you? I suppose they’ll all end up as pederasts.’
‘Far the best thing to be, if you can fancy it,’ said Charles-Edouard. ‘Just imagine – no jealous husbands, what, Eugène? None of the terrible worries that make our lives so distracting. No pregnancies, no abortions, no divorce – I envy them.’
‘Blackmail?’
‘Blackmail indeed! They’ve only got to write a journal clearly stating what they are. You can’t blackmail a man by threatening to tell the world what he has told the world already.
‘Now supposing I were to write a journal making it quite plain how much I have loved women – to begin with nobody would buy it, and to go on with it would have a terrible effect on the husbands and I should be in worse odour than ever before. It’s really most unfair.’
Charles-Edouard got up to shake hands with Mr and Mrs Dexter, saying, since they were clearly going to, anyhow, ‘Do come and sit here. We are talking about brothels, pederasts, and blackmail.’
‘You don’t surprise me at all,’ said Carolyn.
The Dexters, having now lived two years in Paris, had become quite accepted as part of French society, and were asked everywhere. But Carolyn still could not get to like, or be in the least amused by, the French.
‘I am very very happy to be able to tell you,’ said Mr Dexter, settling into his chair, ‘that when our ancestors left little old Europe and shook its dust off their feet in order to found our great United States of America, those three things are three of the things they left behind them here on your continent.’
‘Well then, perhaps you can tell us,’ said Madame Rocher, ‘how, in a country where there are no brothels, do the young men ever learn?’
‘I am very very happy to be able to tell you, Madame Innouïs, that the young American male is brimming over with strong and lustful, but clean desire. He is not worn out, old, and complicated before his time, no ma’am, he does not need any education sentimental, it all comes to him naturally, as it ought to come, like some great force of nature. He dates up young, he marries young, he raises his first family young and by the time he is ready to re-marry he is still young. And I am now going to give you a little apercoo of our American outlook on sex and marriage.
‘We, in the States, are entirely opposed to physical relations between the sexes outside the cadre of married life. Now in the States it is usual for the male to marry at least four, or three times. He marries first straight from college in order to canalize his sexual desires, he marries a second time with more material ends in view – maybe the sister or the daughter of his employer – and much later on, when he has reached the full stature of his maturity, he finds his life’s mate and marries her. Finally it may be, though it does not always happen, that when he has raised this last family with his life’s mate and when she has ceased to feel an entire concentrated interest in him, but is sublimating her sexual instincts into other channels such as card games and literature, he may satisfy a longing, sometimes more paternal than sexual, for some younger element in his home, by marrying the friend of one of his children, or, as has occurred in certain cases known to me personally, of one of his grandchildren.
‘In the States we just worship youth, Madame Innouïs, it seems to us that human beings were put on this earth to be young; youth seems to us the most
