Free The Suitors by Cecile David-Weill Page A

powder.
    Next in grandeur came the Peony and Lilac rooms, which had perfect proportions and a fantastic view of the lawn and the sea. Less sumptuous, the Turquoise Room looked out over a small terrace that seemed to relegate the sea to the background. Although they were huge and enjoyed an oblique view of the water, the Yellow and Chinese rooms were one notch below the Turquoise, since they overlooked the staff’s outside dining area, a nuisance that in a hotel would have justified a distinct reduction in their rates. Finally, dead last, came a trio of rooms at the entrance to the hall leading to the servants’ quarters, rooms that no amount of remodeling could change into bona fide guest rooms and now named after Flora, Ada, and Sasha, frequent guests in the house in my grandparents’ time.
    L’Agapanthe had originally had so many more staff rooms than guest rooms that my parents had built what we called the annex, over by the entrance to the property.The annex so lacked the charm of the main house that guests lodged there sometimes felt slighted, but others were flattered, because my parents gave those rooms only to previous visitors whom they were inviting back for another stay.
    Colette, a lovely young woman from Normandy with a Louise Brooks bob, was already in Sasha’s Room when Marie and I escorted the Braissants upstairs. Laetitia stiffened with indignation when the smiling chambermaid asked her, “Would Madame like me to unpack her suitcase?”
    “No, thank you, I’ll manage by myself,” she replied, with the studied manner of someone who, scandalized, refuses to participate in a degrading ritual from another era.
    The dismayed Colette was about to withdraw when Marie returned her smile and asked, “Colette, would you be good enough to unpack mine?”

Friday, 6:30 p.m
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    I heard the sound of crunching gravel again. Was it Odon Viel arriving, or Jean-Michel Destret and his chauffeur? (It turned out to be Jean-Michel.) While Marieand I were heading for the front door, I remembered a sidewalk game we used to play when we were younger: you had to pick, from the first ten men who came toward you, the one who would be your husband for life. I always panicked; should I be cautious or optimistic? Take the first one who wasn’t either elderly or repulsive, or wait for a good-looking boy, at the risk of missing the boat and getting stuck with the tenth passerby, who might well be a ghastly old man?
    Sex was a topic often and broad-mindedly discussed in our presence by my parents and their friends, who for the sake of appearances would pretend to lower their voices around our innocent ears. They treated sex with the humor and relaxed detachment expected of cultured people, because a light, bantering tone was to them an essential ingredient in any civilized conversation. Artful and amusing, amorous dalliance was thus a required subject, just like literature or the opera. Compared to my friends’ parents, who never broached the subject and certainly not in front of children, my own parents sometimes even struck me as obsessed. Marie and I were privy, as it turned out, to a real education. Whether down-to-earth or laced with literature, those conversations instilled in us the vocabulary and aesthetic nuances of a libertine freedom of thought that never stooped to a vulgarfamiliarity, ranging from the naughty, spicy, smutty, and just slightly perverse language of a Choderlos de Laclos, to sensual and voluptuous concupiscence, or brazen Rabelaisian ribaldry—and from the grandiose debauchery of a Sade to the crudest, ugliest, most unsettling pornography and all the raunchy, sordid, lubricious, salacious, libidinous depravity drawn along in its wake. Thus educated in indecency by proxy, as we had been in wine and painting, we ended by appreciating this cultural inheritance passed down by parents who were most unusual, to be sure, but who had the merit of being emancipated and nonconformist.
    Which by no means meant