Free The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig Page B

until well into the hours of dawn, even in freezing and wet weather, constantly forcing their weary and badly painted faces into an enticing smile for every passer-by. All the big cities today look to me more beautiful and humane places now that these crowds of hungry, unhappy women no longer populate the streets, offering pleasure for sale without any expectation of pleasure themselves, and in their endless wanderings from place to place, all finally going the same inevitable way—to the hospital.
    But even these throngs of women were not enough to satisfy the constant demand. Some men preferred to indulge themselves more discreetly and in greater comfort than by picking up these sad, fluttering nocturnal birds of paradise in the street. They wanted a more agreeable kind of lovemaking in the light and warmth, with music and dancing and a pretence of luxury. For these clients there were the ‘closed houses’, the brothels. The girls gathered there in a so-called salon furnished with fake luxury, some of them in ladylike outfits, some already unequivocally clad in negligees. A pianist provided musical entertainment, there was drinking and dancing and light conversation before the couples discreetly withdrew to bedrooms. In many of the more elegant houses, brothels that had a certain international fame (to be found particularly in Paris and Milan), a naive mind could imagine that he had been invited to a private house withsome rather high-spirited society ladies. In addition, the girls in these houses were better off than the street-walkers. They did not have to walk through the dirt of alleyways in wind and rain; they sat in a warm room, had good clothes, plenty to eat and in particular plenty to drink. In reality, however, they were prisoners of their madams, who forced them to buy the clothes they wore at extortionate prices, and played such arithmetical tricks with the expense of their board and lodging that even a girl who worked with great industry and stamina was always in debt to the madam in some way, and could never leave the house of her own free will.
    It would be intriguing, and good documentary evidence of the culture of that time, to write the secret history of many of these houses, for they held the most remarkable secrets, which of course were well known to the otherwise stern authorities. There were secret doors, and special staircases up which members of the very highest society—even, it was rumoured, gentlemen from the court—could visit these places, unseen by other mortals. There were rooms lined with mirrors, and others offering secret views of the rooms next door, where couples engaged in sex unaware that they were being watched. There were all kinds of strange costumes for the girls to wear, from nuns’ habits to ballerinas’ tutus, kept in drawers and chests ready for men with special fetishes. And this was the same city, the same society, the same morality that expressed horror if young girls rode bicycles, and called it a violation of the dignity of science for Freud, in his clear, calm and cogent manner, to state certain truths that they did not like to acknowledge. The same world that so emotionally defended the purity of woman tolerated this horrifying trade in female bodies, organised it and even profited by it.
     
    So we must not be misled by the sentimental novels and novellas of that period; it was not a good time for the youngwhen girls were placed in airtight compartments under the control of their families, sealed off from life, their physical and intellectual development stunted, and when young men in turn were forced into secrecy and underhand behaviour, all in support of a morality that at heart no one believed in or obeyed. Straightforward, honest relationships, exactly what ought to have been bringing happiness and delight to these young people by the laws of nature, were granted to only very few. And any man of that generation trying to be honest in recollecting his very first