The delights of two-timing

Looking back and trying to choose just one out of those incomparably bewitching women of one’s youth can be tricky. Giselle was definitely one of them – blonde, French, mesmeric, an apparition – but so was Kiki, very white-skinned, also French, patrician and very sexy. They were friends, those two, but they fell out after they chose the same boyfriend. They were also married to men who knew and liked the boyfriend, but back then such things were commonplace, and it was Paris after all. Both ladies are still alive and now quite old, Giselle a widow, Kiki a princess. There were many other beauties, of course, but those two stand out because of the timing: it was one hell of a winter month of sex and switch and switch again. Then the two of them got wise and it was goodbye. Ah, the foolishness of youth, though without it one would have been as useless as one is today.

I got the idea to reminisce after reading Jeremy’s column of last week. Unlike him, however, I never asked a lady how I was doing. Those things come naturally. I suppose it was the restless search for a purpose that led to the mad womanising, but incandescently porcelain skin in a woman can drive me mad, and as I said, Paris was a perpetual party, and as long as outward appearances were observed, it was ‘tout va’. My crowd was scornful of morality, yet very moral where anything but sex was concerned. Manners were observed to the extreme, and friends I made back then have lasted a lifetime.