What would have been said to all this by a disciple of Freud it is easy
to conceive. He would have read into it the existence of a complex
proving a suppressed desire which must have landed Lola in a lunatic
asylum. Common sense and a rudimentary knowledge of heredity might,
however, have given to the mother and the psychoanalyst the key to all
this. The fact was that Lola threw back to her French ancestress who,
like herself, was the daughter of humble, honest people, and the glamor
of the de Brézé memoirs had not only caught and colored her imagination,
which was her strongest trait, but had shown her how to exploit the gift
of sex appeal in a way that would make her essential to a man who had it
in him to become a great political figure, the only way in which she,
like the de Brézé, could be placed in a golden cage with all the
luxuries, share in the secrets of government, meet the men who counted,
bask in the reflected glory of power, and give in return so
whole-hearted a love, devotion, encouragement and refreshment that her
“master” would go out to the affairs of his country grateful and
humanized. She could not, of course, ever hope to achieve this ambition
by marriage. No such man would marry the daughter of a watchmaker. It
was that the spirit of this woman lived again in the Breezys’ little
daughter; that in her there had been revived the same desire to force a
place for herself in a world to which she had not been born, and that
she had been endowed with the same feminine qualities that were
necessary to such a scheme. In the knowledge of this and pinning her
faith to a similar cause—the word was hers—Lola Breezy had gone through
those curious years of double life more and more determined to perform
this kind of courtesanship, believing that she had inherited the voice
with which to sing the little songs of a canary in the secret cage of no
less a man than one of proved ability and idealism, who was within an
ace of premiership, and—so that her vanity might be satisfied in the
proof of her own ability to help him—against whom was pitted all that
was mean, ignorant, jealous and reactionary in a bad political system.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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