Garconaire

The other night Joe took Neretta to Angel Memorial in Jamaica Plain. Neretta is a little black cat that has taken up residence on our front porch. She was feral when we found her several months ago and she’d run away if we got too close, but we’ve managed to tame her and she’s become quite affectionate. The problem is that we both have allergies, and a cat indoors is out of the question. We’re trying to figure out if she can survive outdoors during the winter months. So far, we’ve not been able to find a suitable home for her and we’d rather keep her outdoors than hand her over to an animal shelter. In the meantime, we thought we should get her checked out by a vet. We’re taking her to be spayed next week.

While sitting in the waiting room at the vet’s office, Joe picked up a small neighborhood newspaper (the name of which he could not recall) and came across an article from which he tore out the following excerpt:

“Hooking-up and having friends with ‘benefits’ is very common among students in schools and colleges throughout America.

In earlier times, affluent Americans had a place on their property called a ‘garconaire’ where young boys learned about sex. We ought to have it today for everyone…”

He found that quite amusing and brought the scrap home to me, suggesting I do a little research into the whole garconaire thing. Not having the complete article in front of me, I’m not sure if it was part of an editorial of some kind or what. The author went on to reminisce about the era of Doris Day and John Wayne, lamenting the libertinism of our own day, which, s/he argued, has lead to a rise in sexually transmitted diseases.

Regardless of the veracity of that argument, I too was intrigued by the concept of the garconaire as a place where boys go to learn about sex. These days that seems to be Capitol Hill.

I decided to google the term and discovered that the term is actually “garçonnière.” Apparently, during the 19th century, separate living quarters akin to small cottages were set up on the grounds of large estates for the family’s teenage sons. They seem to have been more common in the antebellum South, where they were referred to as garçonnières.

I myself was not familiar with this practice, so I probed a bit further. I didn’t find much, but I did manage to locate an entry on Wikipedia’s German mirror site:

Eine Garconniere (von frz. garcon für Junggeselle) ist eine voll ausgestattete und möblierte Kleinwohnung, die zumeist von Junggesellen oder Studenten bewohnt wird. Eine Garconniere dient jedoch auch Verheirateten manchmal als Zufluchtsort für Seitensprünge. Der Begriff ist vor allem in Österreich gebräuchlich für eine Einzimmerwohnung.

Not being a German speaker, I ran the text through altavista’s Babel Fish translator, and this is what came out:

A Garconniere (of fr. garcon for bachelor) is a fully equipped and furnished small flat, which is inhabited mostly by bachelors or students. Sometimes, however, a Garconniere also serves married men as place of refuge for side jumps. The term is particularly common in Austria for one-room dwelling.

Not bad for an online translator. It’s pretty readable, with the exception of the phrase “side jump,” which I found kind of amusing. Clearly a mistranslation, I isolated the word, “Seitensprünge,” and googled that. Here’s what I found:

Upon further investigation, I discovered that Seitensprünge refers to a fling or dalliance, which is kind of what I suspected all along and probably why I shouldn’t have googled it at work. Moreover, if that’s what used to go on in the garçonnières, I wish my parents had built one for me.