1961. In this Me Too moment I look at everything in terms of rape culture and everything is appalling. This is supposed to be a sweet, sentimental and innocent book about a guy in Paris finally finding love. The main character, Armand is the Duc de Lamoury-Monfort, titled, entitled and wealthy. He is also naive to the ways of love and sex and painfully shy. When he was sixteen, his father sent him to a brothel to make him a man and the horrible things he experienced there turned him off women for years. So he is older when the book takes place. He has three vulgar, obsequious servants who conspire to accidentally send women to stay in his room so he'll come upon them in the night there and hopefully get it on with them, but this plan doesn't work either. Eventually he meets and woman named Evelyn and falls in love, but she encourages him to brawl in a restaurant in her defense and he is put in jail for three months.
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At the end of the book he gets out and can't find her and I thought sure his run of bad luck was continuing, but eventually he found her and they left on a ship for America. She said the captain would marry them on board the ship. Even then, I didn't trust that to happen, and I still feel like it won't work out between them, but there it ended.

It was a quaint, old-fashioned, comic, Paris novel, plot-driven and suspenseful, but trite. cliched, and treading well-worn tropes which I'm basically tired of. ( )