Free The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

the rhythms of nature. While nature brings a young man to sexual maturity at sixteen or seventeen, in the society of that time he was of marriageable status only when he had a ‘position in society’, and that was unlikely to be before he was twenty-five or twenty-six. So there was an artificial interval of six, eight or ten years between real sexual maturity and society’s idea of it, and in that interval the young man had to fend for himself in his private affairs or ‘adventures’.
    Not that he was given too many opportunities for them at that time. Only a very few and especially rich young men could afford the luxury of keeping a mistress, meaning renting an apartment for her and providing for her keep. Similarly, a few particularly lucky young men matched a literary ideal of the time in the matter of extramarital love—for extramarital love was the only kind that could be described in novels—and entered into a relationship with a married woman. The rest managed as best they could with shop girls and waitresses, affairs that provided little real satisfaction. Before the emancipation of women, only girls from the very poorest proletarian background had fewenough scruples and sufficient liberty to engage in such fleeting relationships when there was no serious prospect of marriage. Poorly dressed, tired out after working at a poorly paid job for twelve hours a day, neglectful of personal hygiene (a bathroom was the privilege of rich families in those days), and reared in a very narrow social class, these poor girls were so far below the intellectual level of their lovers that the young men themselves usually shrank from being seen with them in public. It was true that convention had found a way of dealing with this awkward fact in the institution of chambres séparées , as they were known, where you could eat supper with a girl in the evening unobserved, and everything else was done in the small hotels in dark side streets that had been set up exclusively for this trade. But all these encounters were bound to be fleeting and without any real attraction; they were purely sexual rather than erotic, because they were always conducted hastily and surreptitiously, like something forbidden. At best, there was the possibility of a relationship with one of those hybrid beings who were half inside society, half outside it—actresses, dancers, women artists, the only ‘emancipated’ women of the day. In general, however, the basis of eroticism outside marriage at that time was prostitution, which in a way represented the dark vaulted cellar above which rose the magnificent structure of bourgeois society, with its immaculately dazzling façade.
     
    The present generation has little idea of the vast extent of prostitution in Europe before the world wars. While today prostitutes are seen in big cities as seldom as horses in the streets, at the time the pavements were so crowded with women of easy virtue that it was harder to avoid them than to find them. In addition there were all the ‘closed houses’ or brothels, the night-spots, cabarets and dance halls with their female dancers and singers, the bars with their hostesses. Feminine wares wereopenly offered for sale at such places, in every price range and at every time of day, and it really cost a man as little time and trouble to hire a woman for quarter-of-an-hour, an hour, or a night as to buy a packet of cigarettes or a newspaper. Nothing seems to me better evidence of the greater and more natural honesty of life and love today than the fact that these days it is possible, and almost taken for granted, for young men to do without this once indispensable institution, and prostitution has been partly eliminated, but not by the efforts of the police or the law. Decreasing demand for this tragic product of pseudo-morality has reduced it to a small remnant.
    The official attitude of the state and its morality to these murky affairs was never really comfortable. From the