Yesterday, we took our first day trip from Paris, to Rouen. Our guidebook says that Rouen is a city of 400,000, ten times the size of Charlottesville. But when we walked back to the train station at the end of the day, Rouen seemed small. After just two weeks, we are starting to see the world from the vantage point of Paris.
Though not completely. “Why are there so many lingerie stores in France?” Ella asked, as we strolled the streets of Rouen. I’m not sure why she didn’t ask before, since our block sells more underthings than food.
“Because lingerie is pretty,” James said.
“But nobody gets to see your underwear,” she said.
“I almost told her I get to see yours,” James told me later “But she’ll figure this all out soon enough.” Or too soon.
I’m not really a prude, though I admit to sometimes enjoying my daughter’s naievete. My attitude often backfires, though, since she chooses the most public and inopportune moments to fill in the gaps of her sex education. In a place where advertisements for beds feature naked women lying over the covers, where kiosks display explicit magazines in plain view and cartoon condoms smile down from posters, she’s getting a crash course.
When she asked me yesterday what a prostitute is, we were sitting on the steps of the Musee des Beaux Arts of Rouen, so close to a twenty-something couple, they could have heard us whisper. (You didn’t notice the prostitutes we saw the other day in the Bois de Boulogne? I thought but didn’t say. Or do you think all French women wear hot pants and high heels and smile at passing cars?)
Ella’s question was prompted by a passage in her (children’s) book, which was recommended by a librarian here in Paris. Ella was taking a break with me, resting and reading, while James took one last look at our favorite painting in the museum: Gerard David’s 1509 masterpiece, “Virgin Among the Virgins,” pictured above. I laughed to myself, thinking about the contrast between what he and I were doing. “A prostitute is someone who has sex with someone else for money,” I told Ella.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“What’s what?”
“What’s sex?”
“You know what sex is,” I said. Did she really want me to give step-by-step details in front of this nuzzling couple? Or have questions just become a reflex with her, now that she lives in a place where everything seems to need explanation?
She had blitzed us with questions all day, sometimes suggesting we check our smart phones if we didn’t know the answer. Tell me the story of this saint, that saint, she’d said, in the cathedral. How did John the Baptist lose his head? What is the tree of Jesse? Who is Salome?
“Sex is what people do to have babies.” She finally admitted that she knew.
“Yes,” I said. “But there’s more. We’ll talk about it at home.”
And we will. Today. So she can truly see the world from the vantage point of Paris.