The following story is in two parts, the first part is the true account of an event that took place in a large château fort in the Val de Loire.
Part One: At the Château
There are three hundred or so châteaux in the Loire Valley. Many welcome visitors and are also popular destinations for school trips. My friend Laurent is a tour guide in one such château. I was recently a guest at Laurent’s house and one evening he told me of something he had seen happen in the attic of the château in which he works.
Laurent first explained the security arrangements that are in place at the château. Each room within the large building has had discrete high quality security cameras installed, an obvious precaution since there are countless irreplaceable and valuable artefacts, some of them very fragile, on display. Each camera has an associated microphone which can be switched on and off as required from the security suite within the château. The cameras have been placed carefully so as not to detract from the historic ambience of the rooms and are therefore unnoticed by visitors quite unaware their movements are being monitored.
On the day in question there was a school party of one hundred and twenty pupils, both boys and girls, expected to arrive at the château. Laurent was due to undertake duties in the security suite, a task he found irksome as he would rather have been escorting visitors around the château regaling them with tales of the many historic events that had taken place within its walls. The staff were not expecting any trouble from the pupils as French schoolchildren are normally very well behaved. This particular group were from a Catholic boarding-school in northern France and were certain to be even better behaved than most, which made what Laurent witnessed all the more surprising.
It was decided to split the school party into three groups based on the ages of the pupils with each group under the supervision of one of their teachers. The separate parties, each of forty pupils, started to tour the château and its exterior. One group headed outside, another entered the cellars, while the third made its way towards the attic in the roof space of the building.
As Laurent watched the monitors he saw the groups moving about as they entered different rooms. When the teacher stopped to talk to the pupils, Laurent saw the children obediently sit cross-legged on the floor while they politely listened to what was being said. He reflected on the good behaviour of the boys and girls, quite unlike the disgraceful conduct of some children he had seen over the years. Why, some parents and even teachers seemed unwilling to accept responsibility for the actions of their children and didn’t understand that you couldn’t simply let them run around as if the château was an adventure playground in a theme park.
Eventually two of the groups crossed paths going their separate ways, one heading to the upper stories of the building, the other descending towards the lower floors. So it was that a group of fifteen girls and twenty-five boys arrived in the attic of the château. These pupils were between thirteen and fourteen years old as far as Laurent could tell. Other visitors toured the building, some even stopping to listen to what teachers were telling their pupils. It was fairly early in the season and visitor number were lower than they would be later in the year, but nevertheless it is important to note, given what was about to happen, that there were still quite a few families wondering around the building.
Laurent watched as the group entered the large attic space just as a couple with their three children were moving on to explore further this part of the building. He then saw the teacher in charge of the group take out her mobile phone and look at it frowning. She then addressed the group. Laurent flicked the switch to turn on the microphone so that he could listen to what she was saying. It transpired that the teacher had been sent a text asking her to meet with a colleague outside. Presumably something had come up that couldn’t be resolved over the phone and that it required her presence. Naturally, as she prepared to leave the room, she told the pupils to behave themselves while she was away.
What happened next must have been planned and prepared in advance by the boys involved, Laurent concluded. Since the microphone in the room had been switched on, Laurent could hear the usual low murmur of voices as the boys and girls separated and formed themselves into small groups and started talking among themselves. He noticed there was group of boys, five in total, off to one side of the room. They said nothing but seemed to be signalling to each other using eye contact alone. Having done so and presumably reached some sort of tacit agreement, they nodded and smiled as they looked at a sweet looking young boy standing with his back to them innocently gazing up at the complex timbered vaulting of the roof above his head.
Seconds later Laurent saw one of the five boys break away and dash out of the room following the teacher. Given what happened next Laurent figured the boy who had rushed off was to be the lookout when he saw, within the space of another few seconds, the remaining four boys walk purposefully, still saying nothing, across the room to where the young boy they’d been looking at was standing. The boy clearly had no idea of what was about to happen until it was too late.
Two of the boys suddenly grabbed the young boy’s arms and held him tight as the other two quickly moved in front of him. Laurent’s heart skipped a beat and was as surprised as the rest of the boys and girls in the room when they saw and heard what was happening right in front of their eyes.
Laurent explained: “... yes, they were surprised, but the way they behaved and their reaction when they saw the boy being seized, was as if they all knew what was happening… so the rest of them, the boys and girls, moved until they were standing in such a way as to shield the boys holding their victim so they couldn’t be seen by anyone else. They were all looking at what was happening… the girls too, some of them giggling and elbowing each other as they watched. They had formed a sort of protective three-quarter circle as the boys moved towards a corner of the room. I suppose they were all aware of what would transpire and they didn’t want to get themselves into trouble in case anyone should raise the alarm…”
“So what did happen?” I asked eagerly.
“The two boys who were in front of the victim… he was very cute… well one of them dropped to his knees and grabbed hold of one of his victim’s legs, while the other went for the belt of the boy’s denim’s… the boys were all wearing either denims or chinos, but all of them, boys and girls were wearing polo shirts printed with the school’s badge…. I thought, ‘My God! They’re going to pants him… to take down his denims!’ But I didn’t understand why the boy kneeling down was obviously going to take off the boy’s sneakers… which is what he did, but not only the sneakers…”
“You mean… his socks as well?!” I asked, “What was the boy doing… did he struggle, did he fight to try and stop them?”
“No, not really… obviously the boy reacted when he was grabbed from behind… you could see he was as surprised as anyone would be, but he didn’t put up much of a fight… he didn’t kick or yell out, just pulled his arms about, struggled a bit and tried to free himself from the two boys holding him, but they were too strong… that was all really… but what struck me then was that a sort of resigned look came over him as if it wasn’t the first time this had happened… like he knew what the boys were going to do… but he was totally helpless and couldn't do anything about it.”
Laurent then went on to tell me how the two boys in front of the victim got to work taking down the boy’s denims, “They’d obviously done it before… the boy who took off the socks and sneakers tossed them into the corner and then helped his friend to pull the denims right down and off… along with the boy’s underpants…”
“Wow! What was the reaction of the rest of the group?”
“They were all watching and it struck me how none of them protested about what was happening… I mean no one tried to come to the aid of the boy. As I said, some of the the girls giggled and jostled each other for a better view… the boys were just as interested, but more restrained… maybe they didn’t want to appear too curious, or maybe the were just thankful it wasn’t them being pantsed…. Because I still thought that’s what was happening and that once they’d got the boy’s denims and underpants off, that would be the end of it…”
I gasped: “It wasn’t…?”
“No… I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the two boys who just stripped the victim from the waist down go for the boy’s polo shirt!”
“You mean?”
“Yes… right there in the open space of attic of the château, which don’t forget was busy with other visitors, they pulled off the boy’s polo shirt… stripped him totally naked!”
“My God!”
“Yes, they threw the boy’s clothes out of the way into the corner, but that still wasn’t the end of it…”
“...there was more?!”
“... you see the boys had stripped their victim really quickly… a couple of minutes at most. I wasn’t keeping track of the time, but it didn’t take them long… that’s what made me think they’d done this before, it was all so cleverly choreographed… but from the surprised look on all the other boys and girls in the room, it must have been the first time they’d seen him stripped in such a public place… and certainly never before in a château!”
“Go on… what happened?”
Laurent kept me in suspense as he searched for the right words and then, after a moment, said simply: “They displayed him…”
I must have looked perplexed, but it was only because I was simply stunned. What did Laurent mean ‘displayed’, displayed how? The boy had been stripped naked in a public place. How could his classmates possibly make it any worse for him?
Laurent calmly went on to describe how the boy, now totally naked, had his arms held stretched out wide by the two boys holding him. He was then pulled this way and that to give all the boys and girls a full view, front and back, of their nude victim. The boy was completely helpless and had no choice but to turn and twist in which ever direction his captors tugged him.
“I could see his penis waggling quite clearly as the boys pulled him about… he had a few little wispy hairs at the base… everyone got a good look.”
“What was the reaction of the others during the display?”
“They all looked at the naked boy, sure… they couldn’t really avoid doing so the way he was being pulled around. The thing that struck me again was that none of the others in the room tried to help the boy, they just let the perpetrators get on with their game, as if it was… well just that… a game and they didn’t want to interfere… besides they must have been aware that to make a fuss would have attracted attention from other visitors and then they’d all have been in trouble…”
“Did anyone come into the room while this was happening?”
“A couple of kids looked kind of curious trying to figure out what was happening, but they didn’t stay… their parents must have noticed something was going on and called them back… I mean there were forty boys and girls in that room and it must have been obvious that something was happening, but rather than get involved they just moved on into another part of the attic… besides, no one could have seen from any distance what was happening since all the boys and girls who weren’t involved were standing around the corner of the attic space where the stripping was taking place… it was like they instinctively made a protective guard to stop any prying eyes from seeing what was going on…”
Laurent paused then added, “... don’t forget, this all happened very quickly, in the space of a few minutes. It had to be done that way because their teacher wasn’t going to be away for very long… they all must have known that and that’s probably another reason for the others to just let the boys get on with stripping their victim… so although the others didn’t take an active part, they were to a degree complicit in that they protected the boys who were carrying out the disrobing…” Laurent stopped in thought for a few seconds, “Yes, I think it’s fair to say that… yes they definitely made sure no one else could see, but I think they were also protecting themselves…”
I asked the obvious question: “What happened when the teacher came back?”
“The moment the lookout came back and told them their teacher was on the way, the boy was released. He raced into the corner where his clothes had been thrown and started pulling them on as fast as he could. The boys who had stripped him laughed and high-fived each other, while the rest of the group surrounded the boy as he dressed…”
“... shielding him in case the teacher got back before he finished putting his clothes back on?” I speculated.
“Yes, definitely… and when the teacher did walk back into the room they were just talking among themselves as if nothing had happened.”
“And the boy?”
“He didn’t say anything… just finished lacing up his sneakers and stood around with the rest of the group waiting for the teacher to tell them a bit more of the château’s history…”
“The teacher didn’t suspect anything?”
“As far I could tell… not a thing.”
“... and the boys… do you think they realised there was a security camera in the room… that they might have been seen?”
“I doubt that very much… as I said, our cameras are very discreetly placed and besides they were having far too much fun to be bothered even if they had noticed…”
I tried to imagine what it must have felt like for the boy who was stripped bare in front of his classmates, all thirty-nine of them, boys as well as girls and then paraded to make sure they all got to see every part of his naked body. Impossible I guess, unless you had ever been the target of a similar game. Laurent had told me how red-faced the boy was and with good reason, the humiliation he had endured must have been intense. Even if, as seemed likely, the boy had been stripped naked before, having his all his clothes pulled off in the attic space of a château on a school trip with the distinct possibility of being seen by other visitors, must have been unlike anything else he’d been subjected to before.
But what had also intrigued me was the sheer daring of the boys who carried out the stripping. They must have known the likelihood of being caught was high, but that only seemed to confirm Laurent’s view that the boys were well practised and one could only conclude it was part of some greater game played out at school. I reminded myself of how I’d been told of the look of resignation on the boy’s face; the look of surprise rather than shock, or possibly even outrage, that one might have expected to see on the faces of the boys and girls watching. Laurent was convinced this was a sign that once they had seen the boy being grabbed by his arms, they all knew what was going to happen right in front of them, right there in the room. He judged their surprised reaction was due to the way it was to be carried out in such a public, and therefore more risky, place. Presumably this is why they swiftly moved to isolate the stripping to one corner of the attic away from prying eyes.
The more we thought about what Laurent had seen as he sat in the security suite, the more intrigued we both became to know more. We were convinced the boy’s stripping in the attic was not a one off; there were simply too many signs of it having happened before. The careful choreography, the look of resignation on the boy’s face, almost as if he was sighing to himself, ‘... here we go again’, the reaction of the rest of the group… they knew what the boys were up to when they saw the victim seized.
A little later Laurent took me on a visit to the château. I admit to a frisson of excitement as we climbed the stairs up towards the attic, but I was totally unprepared for how I felt when I saw the immense size of the space in which the events he described took place. I had imagined a modest sized room, but as I entered the space I saw at once how wrong I’d been. The attic area was completely open and very big with information boards and models along one side. Visitors entered through a doorway from the staircase at one end and departed around a corner into a passage which led to another staircase down to other rooms within the building. It was astonishing to think how daring the boys had been… and how lucky they were to have Laurent on duty in the security suite to let them get on with their game uninterrupted.
The second part of this story, a speculation of what might have happened next, is entirely fictional and will be posted separately.
