La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (13 page)

He gave the phenomenon a name: “Profound superficiality, to know about a lot of things, to have much partial knowledge.”

By contrast, he explained, Americans tend to be specialists in only one field. “Your entrepreneurs have no education. They may be geniuses but they have no education—in philosophy, history, sociology, literature. They don’t seem to read anything.”

Yet Americans have learned to navigate in France. It was the art of good conversation that attracted the American novelist Edith Wharton to the French. She felt as if she could compete in the salon and at the dinner table with the wittiest and most elegant of partners and adversaries, her intellect trumping the handicap of her gender.

The Americans who have most successfully endeared themselves to the French are those who know how to play the game of profound superficiality with ease and elegance. To move effortlessly in a conversation
du coq à l’âne
, from the rooster to the donkey, from one subject to another—is considered a valued asset.

Benjamin Franklin knew how to do it, and used the skill in a life-and-death campaign of seduction on behalf of his infant country. When he was the American minister to France during the Revolutionary War, he continued to pursue his love of science, philosophy, and printing. He did more than just learn French—he played at it, writing love letters to women and essays to Parisian friends. Charmed, they corrected his grammar. Ellen Cohn, the editor of
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin
, called the process “a big parlor game.” In an age when laughter and lightness were important, Franklin sought to sow happiness and get the French to like him, not just for purely intellectual or frivolous reasons, but because America needed French soldiers, French ships, and French money.

As Franklin’s papers show, he immersed himself in the oddities of French culture, like papermaking and hot air balloons. He investigated how to improve insane asylums and how to make a better bread-making oven for prison bakeries.

The antithesis of this approach is personified by Franklin’s fellow diplomat John Adams, who considered his colleague’s joie de vivre a sign of laziness and his politesse and errant interests a waste of time. Adams rose at five a.m., Franklin at ten. Adams was a straight talker; Franklin had embraced the French habit of indirection and the avoidance of overt conflict. Adams looked at the relationship with France through the prisms of power and profit: if America won its independence, France would enhance its influence in Europe at Britain’s expense and capitalize on a favorable trade relationship with the United States. The French hated John Adams.

Franklin’s Frenchness continued to serve him well in negotiating a peace treaty with the British after the American victory at Yorktown in 1781. “Great Affairs sometimes take their Rise from small Circumstances,” Franklin wrote in his journal about the negotiations. Take the example of his letter to a longtime acquaintance, the Earl of Shelburne. In addition to expressing hope for a general peace, Franklin made detailed reference to gooseberry bushes the earl had sent to one of Franklin’s neighbors. The letter was the catalyst for peace negotiations.

I do not know whether Christine Lagarde would consider Franklin a man who thought too much, particularly about trivial subjects. But when he died, France went into mourning for three days. He loved France, and France loved him back.

Sophie-Caroline de Margerie speaks English with bell-like tones and an upper-class accent that’s a bit too perfect, like the one Henry Higgins’s reinvented flower seller acquires in
My Fair Lady
. Eliza Doolittle was judged by a linguistic scholar to be “born Hungarian” and a princess; Sophie-Caroline is the daughter of a Polish count. The British journalist friend who brought us together told me that only a sensitive British ear can detect the mysterious foreignness in her voice.

Her address on rue Bonaparte near the Seine in the sixth arrondissement is one of the best in Paris: her apartment is understated and dressed in shades of soft taupe and gray. The paintings are the fruit of decades of collecting by someone who knows good art. They are hung so discreetly that it is difficult to study them without appearing to stare.

I met Sophie-Caroline for the first time when she invited me to lunch. A member of the Conseil d’État, the highest administrative and public law court in France, she appeared at the door of her apartment perfectly done up. She wore a cashmere sweater that did not hide her cleavage, a pencil skirt, matching gray hose, and high-heeled black pumps. Her hair was styled in loose curls that framed her face; her cheeks were slightly rouged, her large eyes made larger with shadow and liner. She was almost too beautiful.

A maid served us a three-course meal at a long, damask-covered table. Like me, Sophie-Caroline was on leave from her day job and writing a book at home. I was curious why she’d put herself into such elegant but restrictive clothing when she didn’t have to.

“My working days are for me and myself, and yet, I’m well turned out,” she explained. “This is my work uniform. It gives me discipline. It defines the moment when I start working. If I go to work in my dressing gown, I’m not a hundred percent at work.”

I asked her if she, like so many French women I know, dressed up to buy a baguette.

“Of course,” she said, moving into French. “
On ne sait jamais
”—One never knows.

“One never knows what?” I asked.

“
On ne sait jamais
is the impulse to look one’s best all the time,” she replied. “Maybe not one’s best, but to look…”—she struggled for a word—“…okay.”

Okay?
I thought. Either she was being modest or she was clueless about the effect she had on people, or she knew and was pretending she didn’t.

“Why do I dress up a bit when I go and buy the newspaper?” she went on. “Well, because there is the odd chance that the window cleaner might whistle, and if he does, my day will be sunnier!”

“No!”

“That’s the bigger part of
on ne sait jamais
. Then, of course, there’s the odd chance that I might bump into an old friend or school chum, and I don’t want him or her to think, ‘Ooooo, she looks old,’ which he or she might do anyway, but in any case a bit less. Voilà. There you have it.”

“So it’s a connection with the other?” I asked.

“Yes. It’s a connection with the other.”

“In the United States, if a window cleaner whistles at you on the street, he’s invading your space, and as a good feminist, you’ll be insulted,” I said.

She saw it differently. “On the contrary, I walk away with a springier step,” she said. “I might even text somebody with a message of ‘Guess what happened today?’ Not that it happens that often. But when it does, it makes my day. It certainly does. Like a macaroon.”

Afterward, I asked Florence about
on ne sait jamais
and whether she feels flattered or insulted when an unknown man on the street comments on her appearance. She said she enjoys the game, and she explained the rules.

“Men’s compliments on the street? Of course, I love that,” she said. “As long as it remains light, and as long as it doesn’t demand anything from me. Ideally, I pretend I don’t hear or see anything.”

A certain distance has to be maintained, she said. “If a man yells at you because you don’t respond to his compliment, or starts being rude, it becomes disagreeable,” she said. “Absolutely.”

The same compliment that is acceptable on the street, where the encounter is brief and fleeting, would be off-limits in a confined space like a bus or the Métro. “You don’t want to engage with someone and then have to face the consequences,” she said.

Florence told me the story of her trip to work one morning on one of Paris’s bikes-for-rent. It was a sunny day, and she was wearing a short skirt. (“Neither vulgar nor provocative,” she said.)

“I was perfectly aware I was doing my ‘girl who rides a bike in a skirt’ act,” she said. “One man gave me a look of approval. I smiled at him. No risk at all! I was on my bike and by the time I smiled, I was gone. Another one told me I was ‘charming.’ I said, ‘Oh, thank you!’ and kept going.

“Along the way, while I was crossing the Alexandre III bridge, there was a car with two or three men in it. They were looking at me. We were blocked at a stoplight. I didn’t ‘answer’ at all and was looking as indifferent as possible. But when the light turned green, I looked at them and gave them a bright smile as I rode away. I heard them exclaiming, ‘Wow.’ And that felt good!”

Sometimes the line can be crossed. An Australian dancer at the Lido cabaret club told me about the time she was coming out of a butcher shop at three in the afternoon wearing normal street clothes and little makeup. A young man on a motorcycle pulled over and asked, in all seriousness, “Excuse me, would you be interested in being part of a threesome?”

As for my own style on the street, it is as relaxed as possible unless I have to dress up, even in the upscale neighborhood where I used to live. Take the Saturday afternoon I was making cookies with my daughters and ran out of butter. Dusted with flour, still in my jogging clothes from a morning run, I dashed out to the convenience store up the street.

But this was not just any street. It was the rue du Bac, a chic place to see and be seen on Saturdays. I heard my name called and turned to face Gérard Araud, a senior Foreign Ministry official. He was wearing pressed jeans, a soft-as-butter leather jacket, caramel-colored tie shoes, and an amused look. In his hand was a small shopping bag containing his purchase of the morning.

Gérard invited me for coffee. We sat outdoors at a café on the corner of the rue de Varenne. In retrospect, I should have known better and invited him into my kitchen. This was one of the premier people-watching intersections in all of Paris. I was inappropriately dressed for the curbside chitchat that followed.

The Swedish ambassador and his wife rode up on their bikes and stopped to say hello. Both were in tailored tweed blazers, slim pants, and expensive loafers. Then Robert M. Kimmitt, the American deputy treasury secretary at the time, who happened to be visiting Paris, walked by. He accepted Gérard’s invitation to join us.

“I see that Paris hasn’t done much for your style,” Kimmitt joked.

“At least I’m wearing black,” I replied.

When he left, Gérard made what he considered an important point with as much seriousness as if he were delivering a diplomatic démarche to a recalcitrant ally. “The rue du Bac is not the Upper West Side,” he said.

“All right, all right,” I conceded. I knew the rules: jogging clothes (shoes included) are to be removed as soon as one’s exercise is over if you don’t want to look like a rube or an American or both.

Then I got a bit defensive. “This is my neighborhood,” I said. “I belong here. So I can dress however I want!”

“You can,” he said, with the sangfroid that makes him such a good diplomat. “But you shouldn’t.”

I’m convinced that American-style feminism has prevented me from easily absorbing the reality of the playground of the streets.

It took years—and two tours as a foreign correspondent living in Paris—before I fully understood the
on ne sait jamais
of public space. I found it both sexist and offensive that strange men felt entitled to comment on what I wore or how I looked. Maybe I never got over an episode during my first stint in Paris in the late 1970s, in the days when joggers were as rare as bicycle helmets. I used to jog several mornings a week in the Champ de Mars, under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. One morning a young guy walking with his buddies yelled out, “
Allez, vieille sportive
!”—“You go, old gal!” I was approaching my thirtieth birthday.

In Paris, women and men are supposed to please each other on the street. You never walk alone but are in a perpetual visual conversation with others, even perfect strangers. Mona Ozouf, the historian and writer, described men’s compliments to women on the street as “benedictions, and not at all aggressions.” She was eager to elaborate. “If a mason standing above on scaffolding whistled at me—it hasn’t happened in years—it was marvelous! It was absolutely marvelous!” she said. “And this kind of thing, this gesture of homage, is very rarely taken in France as harassment. It is interpreted more as approved gallantry: the elementary politeness of the relations between men and women consists in the expression of tributes.”

One summer, when my daughter Gabriela, a college student, was working in Paris, she told me that in a single day, she was called “
superbe
,” “
magnifique
,” and “
belle blonde
” by older men as she maneuvered the streets. “Men don’t have the right to say these things,” she said, “especially when they’re old. But the vocabulary is much more elegant here than in the U.S. So they can get away with being sleazy.”

A French woman I know felt out of place when she lived in the Chicago suburbs because she got dressed up every day and no one seemed to notice. “In France, men look at you,” she said. “It brings pleasure. Even women look at you. It’s not always positive, but it’s an acknowledgment that you exist. You walk differently when you know someone is looking at you. It’s the one thing I missed in the States. The ‘look’ is missing. I think it’s why American women get fat.”

A poll by the respected polling organization CSA for the magazine
Figaro Madame
stated that, on average, 21 percent of French men say they turn around to look at a woman once or twice a day, 32 percent between three and five times a day, and 5 percent at least twenty times a day. Head turning occurs whether the man is married, involved with a woman, or unattached.

“It is not politically correct to admit it,” said Jean-Daniel Lévy, CSA’s political director. He added that “the candor of the poll respondents to this question” made the results credible. In the same article, an anthropologist argued that the practice of head turning could be the result of society’s “patriarchal validation of the man who knows how to appreciate beautiful women.” A psychiatrist urged women to see men’s stares as a positive way “to start communicating,” and not just “a hormonal response.”

I asked several French men how many times a day they turn their heads to look at a woman. Philippe Labro, the author, journalist, and television host, who is in his midseventies, e-mailed me the following answer: “A thousand times, but 900 times it’s to look at my wife! Is that enough of a good French answer?”

“Who are the other 100?” I asked.

“The other 100 are the marvelously gracious and unknown Parisian or French beauties whom one can cross in the streets, in restaurants, public places, on the terraces of bistros the minute the sun comes out,” he wrote back. “These mysteriously serene or inhabited-by-their-intimate-stories women without whom the urban scenery would be dreary and sadly grayish.”

Then I asked a physical therapist whether any of his male patients had suffered a car or bicycle accident from turning his head to ogle women. “Not that I can recall,” he said. “But it’s good for upper body mobility to turn your head around several times a day.”

The game of the sexes also extends deep into the workplace. In the United States, the mildest playfulness during business hours and in a business setting is forbidden; in France, it is encouraged. In American corporations, men are told routinely that they cross the line when they compliment a female employee on the color of her dress or the style of her hair. In France, flirtation is part of the job.

My husband, Andy, is the only American in a French law firm. He took the French bar examinations a few years back and more recently gave advice to a young, female American lawyer who was doing the same. She had just completed a practice oral exam for a bar review course and had worked hard to come across as sober and serious. So she was stunned by the professor’s comments.

“He told me I was too stiff,” she told Andy. “He said I had to be more
séduisante
”—more seductive.

Andy tried not to laugh. “The French use the word
séduisant
, but they don’t mean it the way we do in English,” he told her. “I’m sure what he meant is that he wants you to try to be more…engaging.”

I told the story to French friends one evening, and Bertrand Vannier, a senior executive at Radio France who had spent several years as a correspondent in Washington, said he could top that story. “I once had a young female reporter who couldn’t have been more than twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, but she was so solemn and serious that she seemed double her age,” he recalled. “She walked as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. She kept her head down. She wore long black skirts. Her reporting was good, serious—but boring.

“So I took her aside one day and gave her my ‘miniskirt and makeup’ lecture. I suggested to her, ‘Why don’t you work and write your stories as if you are wearing a miniskirt and makeup?’

“She didn’t put on a miniskirt and makeup but she did something even better. She met a guy, fell in love, and had a baby. She was happy. She finally became what I wanted her to be: a good, serious, and not boring reporter.”

I thought of Bertrand’s story when I saw a cartoon entitled “It Doesn’t Take Much” by Pénélope Bagieu, a young Parisian illustrator.