How we cite our quotes: (Part.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
After my wife, and also before her, there were women about whom I shall not speak since they are irrelevant and unimportant. Sometimes I saw myself as an ageing Don Juan, but the majority of my conquests belonged to the world of fantasy. I wished in after years when it seemed too late to start that I had kept a diary. One's capacity to forget absolutely is immense. And this would have been some sort of monument with an almost guaranteed value. A sort of Seducer's Diary with metaphysical reflections might have been an ideal literary form for me, I have often thought. (Bradley Pearson's Foreword: par. 8)
How does Bradley Pearson's description of himself as a puritanical man align with his description of himself as a seductive Don Juan, and what are we to make of this apparent contradiction?
Quote #2
Of course I was 'in love' with Christian when I married her, and I felt that I was lucky to get her. She was a showy pretty woman. […] Later, when I imagined I knew more about 'love', I decided that my feeling about Christian was 'just' overwhelming sexual attraction, plus a curious element of obsession. (1.10.2)
At fifty-eight years old, Bradley Pearson seems to be generally disinterested in sex. However, if we can believe his accounts of his younger self, he was no stranger to overwhelming sexual attraction way back then.
Quote #3
'How can you tell me that,' I said, 'with that air of vile satisfaction. Am I supposed to be pleased because you've fathered another bastard? Are you so proud of being an adulterer? I regard you both as wicked, an old man and a young girl, and if you only knew how ugly and pathetic you look, pawing each other and making a vulgar display of how pleased you are with yourselves for having got rid of my sister—You're like a pair of murderers—'. (1.11.55)
One of the great ironies of The Black Prince—and Bradley Pearson is aware of this irony himself—is that after feeling rank disgust at Roger Saxe's relationship with his much-younger mistress, Marigold, Bradley himself goes and falls for a young woman with whom he's got an even bigger age gap. Not surprisingly, Bradley doesn't seem to believe that his own sexual relations with Julian Baffin are wicked, ugly, pathetic, or disgusting.