In order to carry out the plan which the good Major Grout had put into my head, I straightaway announced to Madame Boisvain that I would be leaving first thing in the morning to stay with friends in the country. We were still standing in the hall and we had just completed the handshakes. “But Monsieur Oswald, you have only this minute arrived!” the good lady cried.
“I believe my father has paid you six months in advance,” I said. “If I am not here, you will save money on food.”
Arithmetic like that will mollify the heart of any landlady in France, and Madame Boisvain made no further protest. At seven p.m. we sat down to the evening meal. It was boiled tripe with onions. This I consider to be the second most repulsive dish in the entire world. The most repulsive dish is something that is eaten with gusto by jackaroos on sheep stations in Australia. These jackaroos– and I might as well tell you about it so that you can avoid it if ever you should go that way–these jackaroos or sheep cowboys invariably castrate their male lambs in the following barbaric manner: two of them hold the creature upside down by its fore and hind legs. A third fellow slits the scrotum and squeezes the testicles outside the sac. He then bends forward and takes the testicles in his mouth. He closes his teeth on them and jerks them free from the unfortunate animal and spits this nauseating mouthful into a basin. It’s no good you telling me these things don’t happen because they do. I saw it all last year with my own eyes on a station near Cowra in New South Wales. And these idiots went on to inform me with pride that three competent jackaroos could castrate sixty lambs in sixty minutes and go on doing it all day long. A little jaw ache was all one got, they said, but it was well worth it because the rewards were great.
“What rewards?”
“Ah ha,” they said, “you just wait!” And in the evening I had to stand and watch while they fried the spoils in a pan with mutton fat over a wood fire. This gastronomic miracle is, I can assure you, the most revolting, the toughest, the most nauseating dish it is possible to imagine. Boiled tripe comes second.
I keep digressing. I must get on. We are still in the Boisvain household having boiled tripe for supper. Monsieur B went into ecstasies over the stuff, making loud sucking noises and smacking his lips and shouting “Délicieux! Ravissant! Formidable! Merveilleux!” with every mouthful. And then, when he had finished–would horrors never cease?–he calmly removed his entire set of false teeth and rinsed them in his fingerbowl.
At midnight, when Monsieur and Madame B were well asleep, I slipped along the corridor and entered the bedroom of Mademoiselle Nicole. She was tucked up in an enormous bed and there was a candle burning on the table beside her. She received me, oddly enough, with a formal French handshake, but I can assure you there was nothing formal about what followed after that. I do not intend to dwell upon this little episode. It has nothing at all to do with the main part of my story. Let me just say that every rumour I had ever heard about the girls of Paris was substantiated during those few hours I spent with Mademoiselle Nicole. She made the glacial London débutantes seem like so many slabs of petrified wood. She went for me like a mongoose for a cobra. She suddenly had ten pairs of hands and half a dozen mouths. She was a contortionist to boot, and more than once, amidst the whirring of limbs, I caught a glimpse of her ankles locked around the back of her neck. The girl was putting me through the wringer. She was stretching me beyond the point of endurance. I was not really ready at my age for such a severe examination as this, and after an hour or so of unremitting activity, I began to hallucinate and I remember imagining that my entire body was one long well-lubricated piston sliding smoothly back and forth within a cylinder whose walls were made of the smoothest steel. God only knows how long it went on, but at the end of it all I was suddenly brought back to my senses by the sound of a deep calm voice saying, “Very well, monsieur, that will do for the first lesson. I think, though, that it will be a long time before you get out of the kindergarten.”