Entre brazos cada día más numerosos

“Entre brazos cada día más numerosos” is both an erotic maxim and a measure of the novel’s governing desire. It describes intimacy as an ever-widening movement among bodies rather than a settled attachment to one partner, turning physical experience into a principle of freedom, abundance, and continual discovery. The expression also carries an important tension: although it promises liberation from restrictive moral codes, it can make desire sound like an imperative of expansion, a demand to keep increasing the number of available embraces.

Definition and Form

The expression appears in its most complete formulation when Emmanuelle and Mario discuss whether the central value of their proposed erotic ethic should be pleasure or art. Emmanuelle suggests that the proper phrase is not simply pleasure pursued skillfully but “the art of pleasure,” and then formulates the maxim: “All the time spent on anything other than the art of pleasure, among ever more numerous arms, is wasted time.” Mario praises her gift for concise formulas and immediately recognizes the sentence as suitable for a list of maxims. The expression therefore functions not as casual romantic language but as a compressed rule, shaped through dialogue and intended to organize conduct.

Its wording binds together two ideas that might otherwise remain separate. “The art of pleasure” gives erotic life a formal and aesthetic dimension, while “ever more numerous arms” gives it a social and bodily direction. Pleasure is not presented as a private sensation completed by one perfect union; it is an art whose field enlarges through repeated contact with others. The phrase’s image of arms is intimate without reducing desire to a single sexual act: arms imply holding, receiving, surrounding, and moving onward.

Ethical and Philosophical Use

Mario places the expression within a broader rejection of inherited sexual morality. He argues that bad laws are not overcome by anarchy, because the alternative is not a return to the jungle but recognition of human powers that society has suppressed. His proposed new law declares that making love well and freely is beautiful and good, that virginity is not a virtue, that the couple is not an absolute limit, and that marriage need not be a prison. In that framework, “Entre brazos cada día más numerosos” names the positive practice required by freedom: one must not merely refuse people less often, but offer oneself continually, give oneself, join the body to more and more bodies, and regard hours spent away from other arms as lost.

The expression consequently transforms sexual generosity into a doctrine. It rejects the idea that moral virtue consists in preserving the self from erotic contact, yet it also rejects a merely negative freedom defined as permission to do nothing. Mario’s formulation is active and expansive. The body is expected to circulate; desire becomes an art requiring participation, repetition, and openness. The maxim’s force comes from this conversion of private appetite into a public ethic, one that seeks to replace prohibition with abundance.

Recurrence in Emmanuelle’s Experience

The maxim gains concrete force from the novel’s recurring attention to Emmanuelle’s body as a site of movement, display, and response. On the airplane, the young English flight attendant’s nearly identical clothing makes the difference between them legible through the body: the attendant’s bra restrains the mobility suggested by her figure, while Emmanuelle’s partly open blouse allows the profile of a breast to appear through a gesture or a current of air. Later, after the cabin has been restored for the night, Emmanuelle exercises beneath the blanket, raises and bends her legs, studies the pleasure produced by the muscles of her thighs, and deliberately pulls her skirt higher so that her legs can be seen. These scenes make the body an active instrument of perception rather than a concealed possession.

The same principle appears at the Royal Bangkok Sports Club. Emmanuelle goes there to swim rather than listen to gossip, completing ten lengths of the pool without concern for time or the looks of the few men present. Repeated movement causes her breasts to emerge from a strapless swimsuit, and the water emphasizes their contours and the satin of her skin. The scene does not treat the body as static decoration: swimming, breath, water, and muscular exertion make erotic visibility arise from action. “Entre brazos cada día más numerosos” thus belongs to a larger pattern in which bodily freedom is experienced through motion, exposure, and the possibility of being encountered by others.

Ariane intensifies that pattern through direct physical familiarity. When she asks whether Emmanuelle wears a bra, Emmanuelle answers that she never does and owns none. Ariane responds enthusiastically and lifts her lightly by the waist with both hands, revealing unexpected strength. The moment turns a question about clothing into an immediate bodily exchange. Clothing, touch, and erotic recognition are not separate domains; each helps create the space in which the other can act.

Marriage, Jealousy, and Expansion

The expression also illuminates the strain between the ideal of multiplying intimacy and the emotional claims of particular relationships. Jean asks whether the guest room can be ready within a few days, and Emmanuelle explains that it is already usable except for curtains, colored cushions, and a lamp. The domestic detail establishes a household designed to accommodate guests and encounters, not merely the private enclosure of a conventional couple. Her marriage is therefore connected to hospitality and erotic possibility rather than presented as a closed unit.

Yet expansion does not eliminate attachment. After becoming close to Bee, Emmanuelle begins to avoid Ariane, abandons her morning swimming sessions to reduce the chance of meeting the countess, and feels a violent jealousy when Jean says that he finds Ariane attractive and would gladly have made love with her if the opportunity had arisen. Emmanuelle normally takes pride in her husband’s success with other women, but this time jealousy poisons her day even though Jean and Ariane have not slept together. The maxim’s abstract promise of ever more arms is tested by the singular force of a desired person who may withdraw.

When Bee disappears and appears unwilling to see Emmanuelle again, Jean advises her not to chase someone who has caused such distress. He argues that she should think of herself as someone being courted, not as someone running after others, and urges her to take revenge in other arms. His counsel converts emotional injury into a search for alternatives, treating new partners as both consolation and demonstration. Emmanuelle listens, and the possibility of other, still faceless companions slightly distracts her anguish, but the expression cannot make the lost lover interchangeable. Its expansive logic offers movement away from abandonment without abolishing the pain of singular desire.

Gift, Display, and Narrative Significance

The expression’s ethic is repeatedly enacted through gifts and invitations that make intimacy circulate. The flight attendant gives Emmanuelle a lightweight dry-leaf-colored maillot that collapses into a fist and then suddenly swells like a balloon when shaken. Emmanuelle applauds in wonder and asks to borrow it, only to learn that it is a gift because the attendant is certain it will suit her style. The garment becomes an object passed from one woman to another, carrying recognition, erotic knowledge, and permission to inhabit a shared aesthetic of openness.

Emmanuelle likewise invites Ariane’s circle to visit her newly finished villa and especially its garden, with enormous trees. She explains that Jean will remain in Bangkok now that the engineers are installed, rather than spending most of the year at Yarn Hee. The house is consequently positioned as a place where time, bodies, and social relations can gather. Its unfinished details do not weaken that function; the missing curtains, cushions, and lamp suggest a domestic environment still being arranged around future forms of intimacy.

Mario later interprets Jean’s public display of Emmanuelle’s body through the language of desire. He asks whether Jean wants only to make her sexually alluring, or whether he is displaying her beauty out of pride; neither explanation seems fully adequate to him. Emmanuelle defends her husband, saying that if he makes her exhibit her body, it is so others may enjoy it as well. Mario treats this as confirmation that Jean wants her to awaken desire in others and make love with them. In this reading, the body becomes a social gift whose erotic value increases when it is seen and shared rather than monopolized.

Near the end of the supplied sequence, Mario repeats the expression while explaining that he offers Emmanuelle not the pleasure of the instant but the pleasure of what lies farther away. Happiness, he tells her, is always where one dreams of arriving; then he returns to “Among ever more numerous arms” and says that he wants not to extinguish her thirst for illusions but to make it burn with reality. The recurrence gives the phrase its final dramatic charge. It is at once promise and pressure, a horizon beyond present satisfaction and a program for turning imagined abundance into lived experience. Its enduring significance lies in that doubleness: it names the book’s aspiration toward erotic freedom while exposing the emotional cost of treating expansion as the measure of happiness.