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By Root 835 0

the presidential favors, or was she simply trying rather hard to do so. She was not quite flirting, but nor was she being the cool, professional Clothilde of her meetings with Lydia’s bosses and the police and the insurance men back in London. She was being witty, gay, and just a little irreverent about the changing fashions in interpreting the cave paintings. Lydia knew the Abbé Breuil had seen them as a hunting ritual, portraying the beasts that the tribes needed to catch and eat. That had always seemed quite reasonable to Lydia as a hypothesis, although she remembered reading that the bones left in the middens of their campsites seldom came from the bison and horses that were most frequently depicted. They mainly ate reindeer, as she recalled, which were not that common in the cave art.

“Then came the 1960s, and the revolutions,” said Clothilde. “We had the political revolution in Paris that got rid of de Gaulle, then the sexual revolution, the intellectual revolution.”

“The what?” asked Manners.

“Structuralism. France’s great contribution to the age. Everything had to be reinterpreted. There were no authors, only texts, and your reading of it was as valid as mine, worth no more and no less than the considered opinion of the most learned professor.”

“Intellectual revolutions must always begin by discrediting the existing professors,” Malrand. said with a smile. “How else can they be pushed aside to make room for promotions for the brilliant young revolutionaries? The phenomenon is not unknown in politics.” He turned to Clothilde. “So, structuralism invades the caves?”

“Indeed, Monsieur le Président. Only in this case, the attack came from my teacher, André Leroi-Gourhan. He made a statistical and rigorously structural analysis of the cave paintings and found them divided between male and female symbols. There were quite enough phallic symbols and vulvas to justify this approach, but it must be said that this fit with the spirit of the times.”

“There was neither phallus nor vulva before the 1960s?” mocked Manners. Precisely the question she was thinking, thought Lydia, but did not presume to ask.

“Oh, every generation has to think it discovered sex for itself,” said Malrand. “My grandfather talked of la belle époque before 1914. My father waxed lyrical about the delights of the Jazz Age. And of course, we had the war. But continue, madame. The poor celibate priest, the Abbé Breuil, is confounded by the assault of the sexual organs.”

“He was not much of a priest,” Clothilde said. “He spent all his time in caves. But Breuil had trouble with sexual organs. There’s a famous cave painting in Africa, which he identified as the White Lady or the White Goddess, which is what everybody called it until somebody noticed that she sported an impressively erect penis. I’m surprised that even a priest could have missed it.”

Manners was now blushing, Lydia noticed, and much as she was enjoying Clothilde’s performance, she rather approved of his reaction. To her sudden dismay, she felt the President’s foot brush against her own, and stay there. Heavens, what on earth was the protocol of rejecting a presidential pass at his own luncheon table?

“The whole point of structuralism was that it was supposed to be an all-embracing system, a theory of knowledge that could explain and account for everything,” Clothilde went on. Malrand was clearly fascinated. “So after the phallic symbols, Leroi-Gourhan had to bring all the rest of the cave art into this male-female dualism.”

“Male and female animals, I suppose. A bit like Noah’s ark,” suggested Manners.

“Not at all, Major Manners. Leroi-Gourhan suggested that that was a grand plan behind the cave art, and he found enough sexual symbolism to conclude it was used for initiation ceremonies into sexual adulthood. The problem was that with some obvious exceptions like the bulls or the pregnant horses, it was often not easy to tell which was male and which was female among the animals. So Leroi-Gourhan decided that all the bison were female symbols and all the horses were male.”

“I thought