CHATEAU NOIR by Frank Watson
FORWARD
AN HISTORICAL NOTE
When I first came to the Chateau Noir it was in the role of
special emissary from my uncle, Lord S., a long-time
contributor of funds to that special school for wayward young
ladies and secret training institution for possibly the finest
courtesans the world has ever known.
Although I certainly had no reason to suspect it at the
time, my first visit to that well-isolated estate was to be
for me the beginning of a life-long fascination. There are
those today who no doubt suspect the existence of places like
the Chateau Noir, and there may very well be some similar
institution operating even now on some other secluded country
estate somewhere in the wide world. But if such a place does
in fact exist, I am unaware of it.
Like many another disillusioned older person finding himself
uncomfortably stranded in these lamentably "modern" times, and
who spends his declining years lamenting the imagined or
actual glories of the past, I believe that among the many
other precious treasures lost the privately trained courtesan
must be counted.
Someone compelled to observe the competitive struggle, in
the world of business and in private life that is the current
state of affairs between the men and women of today could, I
fear, scarcely hope to comprehend the simple beauty of a young
woman strictly trained from early youth exclusively for the
pleasure of a man. And that is the reason, I suppose, that
drives me to pen this account of my own personal experience of
those fair and distant days at that dark chateau.
Something truly wonderful in the world was lost with the
death of Mademoiselle Marie T., and the subsequent closing
forever of the Chateau Noir, the most singular and most
secretly revered institution which she managed for nearly
twenty years, all told.
I do not at all intend what I am about to set down be an
historical account of the Chateau Noir. The exact location of
the isolated country estate upon which the school was founded
and the various biographical facts regarding the persons who
made up the school's remarkable staff are, I believe,
unimportant to my story, and at the time I write there are
many of those who were intimately involved with the school who
yet remain among the living, although, with very few
exceptions, their exact whereabouts are unknown to me. There
are, at least, relatives of those involved alive certainly,
and I have no wish to complicate their innocent existences by
officially connecting them with what will undoubtedly be seen
by some as most shameful and, perhaps, even criminal events.
All of the names and most of the places mentioned herein
will therefore be entirely fictitious. The events themselves,
you may be assured, are true; they were personally observed by
myself, and the memories of those days are visions that will
haunt me, unfaded and unblurred, until the day of my death, a
day that I am informed by my physicians will not be long in
coming.
The few brief background facts regarding the Chateau Noir
which I will relate are simply as follows.
My uncle, the fore-mentioned Lord S., had enjoyed a career
of some distinction in the Her Majesty's foreign service, and
had, in consequence of that career, some frequent dealings
with some of the darker Arab nations. During the course of
those dealings he had had the opportunity to observe first-
hand certain singular, ancient and time-honoured methods used
by the men of that region in training their young women for
service, both within the most unique Arab version of the
institution of marriage and without, a system which involved
the carefully balanced application of the strictest, indeed
sometimes most cruel forms of corporal discipline, combined
with the exaction of the most intense and utterly pure
experiences of sexual pleasure the female of the human species
has ever known.Those who are familiar with relationships
between the sexes as they existed in England during the reign
of our late Queen Victoria will readily understand the
startlingly attractive contrasts such an exotic and altogether
foreign structure of sexual relationship presented to a man of
my uncle's repressed and, I believe, wholly unnatural era in
British society.
To put it simply, a Great and Singular Idea at length was
formed, and with the help of certain other men of great means,
acquaintances who shared a similar fascination for the more
exotic Arab way of life, my uncle, upon returning to the West,
founded on the Continent what was to become the world's finest
school for the training of what the French call courtesans,
though the splendidly unique product of this particular school
would expand and fulfil the meaning of that word in such a way
as would put any courtesan in service before that time to
humble shame.
The Chateau Noir enjoyed many years of successful and
profitable life before the school was dismantled due to an
impending investigation by the French government. As
governments become ever stronger, life in the main becomes
ever duller.
There are those who maintain that there is something to
be learned from any history. The task before me here is but
to simply and as accurately as possible relate the events
encompassing my experience with the Chateau Noir exactly as I
saw and felt them. The interpretation of those events, what
they might mean for society, indeed, what they may might mean
for all of Mankind, what these events have to teach the World,
I leave for the reader to decide for himself.
T.S.
