La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (3 page)

Dombasle was simply too sexy for me. So I turned to Inès de la Fressange. I had first met her when she was a fresh-faced yet flirtatious runway model and I was covering the Paris fashion shows for
Newsweek
. Even then La Fressange was not just any ordinary fashion model. She was the daughter of a French marquis and off-the-charts wealthy.

Thirty years later, in a 2009 Internet poll, she was voted “La Parisienne,” the quintessential Parisian woman. It’s hard not to be attracted to a woman with the long limbs of a runner, the raspy voice of a cabaret singer, the impish look of a coquette, the sense of humor of a stand-up comic, the smile of Audrey Hepburn.

La Fressange told me my subject was so vast and so serious that I needed firsthand experience. “You have to be conscientious,” she said. “You can’t talk about seduction, fashion, politics, beauty without a French lover. Yes, yes! For the final touch!”

“But I’m in love with my husband and I have kids,” I protested.

“Even better—an American woman in Paris who doesn’t want to get married and have kids and is sure to leave France!” she replied.

I told her I had no need to find a French lover; back in the 1970s, I had briefly had a French boyfriend, whose family owned a château with horses and servants.

That was beside the point, she said. “It’s all about attitude,” she said. “If you decide to be like a nun in Paris, who does American-style journalism with all the information, all the statistics, well, that will be interesting. But there will be no romance.”

To get off to the right start, she said, I needed to invest in a new haircut, new clothes, and a visit to a Turkish bath to “feel some pleasure.” Then she said, “You go to the terrace of a café. You say to yourself, ‘Voilà, something is going to happen.’ And you’ll see. Something will happen.”

I thought about the scene in the film
Clair de femme
when Yves Montand literally bumps into Romy Schneider as he gets out of a taxi, and then they sit together at a café. A bit later, he’s in her bed.

“You have to stroll the streets of Paris at night with your lover, go to Montmartre, walk along the Seine, eat soup in a bistro,” she said. “Then you go to Deauville and walk along the sea and eat shrimps until four a.m. And when your husband calls you, you say, ‘But, no! You’re just imagining you hear the sound of waves in the background.’”

She insisted that all would be fine as long as the affair remained secret. “Tell him absolutely nothing. There’s no reason to make him miserable. You have your foundation as a couple, a history, a marriage. You’ve built something you can be proud of, and this tiny romance in Paris is not going to disrupt it. Write about it in a way that the reader can feel things but not know them.”

Eventually, we compromised: I could take a virtual lover, a French man who would be my soul mate but only playact with me. “It doesn’t have to be torrid and frenetic,” she said.

Then came the coup de grâce. Because of my age, she said, I had no time to waste. “It’s your last chance!” she told me. “Pretty soon, you’ll be thinking only about your cats, your dogs, your knitting, and your garden. Your arthritis will make it hard to take long walks at night.”

The next morning, at breakfast with my husband, Andy, I started making a list of possible candidates: my downstairs neighbor, a white-haired, retired business executive who wears perfectly knotted cashmere scarves and elegant tweed sport coats, even when he rides his bicycle to the supermarket; a writer and radio talk show host who is very smart and safely gay; a famous stage and film actor who I feared might take the role too seriously; a colleague who said he would be happy to help, but alas, he is British; a former diplomat with a passion for nineteenth-century paintings whom I ruled out as dangerous because his wife lives in a foreign country. I asked Andy for his advice. He took a break from his Special K and put on his glasses. “I somehow don’t think you’re supposed to be telling me about this,” he said.

Now that I was concentrating on seduction, I began to see it in places where I had never noticed it before. Making coffee one morning, I looked at the Carte Noire coffee bag and saw that it described itself as “A Coffee Named Desire.”

Andy found nothing surprising in it. “Chock Full o’Nuts called itself ‘the heavenly coffee,’” he said drily.

“Heaven means celestial and pure and virginal,” I replied. “Desire is carnal.”

Seduction was like a neon light that never stopped blinking. On a road from Paris to Compiègne, there was an oblong, one-story prefabricated building with a small sign that read, “Auto Séduction.” I assumed the enterprise was some sort of kinky private club for personal sexual satisfaction. No, it was a garage for car repairs. Its website explained that it had “only one objective: your satisfaction.” I called Sylvain Chidiac, the garage owner, who said he had intended nothing suggestive in choosing the name of his company. He had initially wanted to call it Auto Prestige, but that name was already taken. “Auto Seduction,” he explained, “just imposed itself naturally in my mind.”

Even the French style of conducting elections in two rounds rather than one could be seen as an exercise in seduction. French voters are said to vote their hearts in the first round and their beliefs in the runoff. The final competitors must attract a fraction of the opponents’ voters without losing their own. “Seducing to reduce,” is how the magazine
Valeurs Actuelles
defined the phenomenon.

I found seduction in France’s idea of itself, and the connection is an old one. The characters in Jean de La Fontaine’s
Fables
, the seventeenth-century morality tales taught in French schools, often demonstrate the supremacy of cunning over force. The French believe that their country (about the size of Texas) is able to project power around the world not because of brute force or military might or a robust economy but because of its imagined mythical power, its ability to lure others to want to be like France.

France is also a nuclear power with a colonial past and troops deployed in far-off places like Afghanistan and the Ivory Coast. Its philosophy as a colonizer was not manifest destiny but a
mission civilisatrice
—France’s civilizing mission. Unlike British colonialists, who also talked of “civilizing” far-flung lands but habitually regarded their subjects as “the other,” the French claimed their mission was assimilation. They taught their subjects that by adopting the French language, culture, and value system, they eventually could become perfect—that is, French themselves (as if those factors could truly determine nationality).

In foreign policy, France is a global case study in “soft power,” the ability to influence others through “attraction” rather than “coercion.” The term was coined by an American, Joseph Nye of Harvard University, but the concept is very French. In an interview with Nye that was translated into French, the concept of “attraction” under his soft power formula was rendered as
séduction.

Jacques Chirac’s
baisemain
became emblematic of what I needed to understand about the French. No French person to whom I told the story thought I should be offended; everyone expressed amusement. The writer Mona Ozouf described it as “a slightly theatrical gesture with a touch of irony.” Sophie-Caroline de Margerie, a jurist on the Conseil d’État, the highest administrative court in France, and an author herself, explained that the Polish aristocracy did it much more sensually. She took my hand but only half-showed me. Perhaps the kiss itself would have been too intimate for her.

But not for Maurice Lévy, the chairman of the French advertising giant Publicis. He gave me the definitive lesson in hand kissing.

Lévy is tall and strongly built and gives off an air of calm and nonchalance. He greeted me in his headquarters on the Champs-Élysées, in a reception area bathed in white. I prodded him into speaking a few sentences in English. I had been told that he carefully preserves his strong French accent and then apologizes for it, part of what his aides call his “French touch.” He doesn’t do hard sell. When he wants to make a point, he slowly closes his eyes, parts his lips, and leans back in his chair. But his greeting—a big, hard handshake and a command to get down to business—underscores what others had told me about him. Deep down he is a killer businessman, a cunning predator who built Publicis into the world’s fourth-largest advertising and public relations empire.

He had been well briefed on my book project and my interest in the themes of seduction and sensuality in French life. The intermediary who had arranged the interview must have told him about my fascination with hand kissing, because Lévy suddenly shifted the subject from the globalization of the advertising market to focus on my right hand. “You have evoked the
baisemain
,” he said, even though it was he, not I, who had raised the subject. He told me that a man’s lips should never
effleurer
the hand.
Effleurer
is hard to translate. It means “to skim” or “to brush lightly.” The sound and spelling of the word is similar to the French word for “flower,”
fleur.
That led me to think, the first time Lévy said it, that it might have something to do with the petals of a flower, a sort of delicate act involving a touch of something fragile.

“You must not
effleurer
the hand! You must not!” he said. “When you
effleurez
the hand, you are sending a special message.”

He stood up and ordered me to stand as well.

“The real
baisemain
, it’s like this,” he said, as he bent down from the waist, took my hand, and came within a hair of touching his lips to my skin. There was a barely perceptible squeezing of my hand before he returned it to me. “I must not touch, but you should feel that I am close enough.”

“If I do it this way,” he said, drawing back, “I am too far. I must do it close enough. You must almost feel my breath.”

I was getting nervous that one of his army of assistants would walk in and find us in midkiss.

Then his second kiss came. He pressed his lips gently to my hand. He defined that kiss as
affectif
—with emotion. “There, this is someone I like quite well, with whom I have a good relationship, and she knows it,” he said. “There we go.”

“And the last,” he said, “it’s to
effleurer
. I do it like this.”

So we were going to
effleurer
after all.

His lips opened slightly and moved up and down, teasing my hand. The kiss could not have lasted more than two seconds. I felt the warmth of his breath and a slight tickling, as if I were being touched by a butterfly’s wings. I marveled at the mastery of the simultaneous double movement of opening and closing and up and down. The memory of the gesture lingered like the scent of an exotic perfume.

“In this one, I try to say that you please me,” he explained. “And if I brush my lips lightly, it means—”

I interrupted: “I might have intentions that are more complex and mysterious—”

“No, no, no, no, no, no,” he replied. “It means, ‘Will you sleep with me tonight?’”

“Ah. More direct!” I said.

“No, wait. It’s not more direct,” he said. “It simply means—it’s the final goal.”

I was at a loss for words. How do you respond to the chairman of one of the largest corporations in the world who has just shown you how a French man, without saying a word, can ask a woman to sleep with him?

So I changed the subject to Jacques Chirac. “Okay, but I have a fourth
baisemain
,” I said. I told Lévy I had been at an event hosted by Chirac that week and saw how he had greeted a dear friend, the former minister Simone Veil. Chirac had stretched out his arms and extended his hands three times as if he were rushing out from the wings onto center stage in a Broadway musical. Then he had grabbed Veil’s hand and smacked it. Loudly.

“And maybe that’s the
baisemain Chiraquien
?” I asked.

“No,” Lévy replied. “When I see Simone, who is a friend, this is the way I do it. Come—ah—So, here.”

And Lévy planted a big loud kiss on my hand. “Really
affectif
,” he said.

One morning in the 1990s, Alain Baraton, the chief gardener at Versailles, was making his rounds of the vast palace grounds when he came upon a young Japanese tourist. Her beauty was so absolute that it took his breath away. She was distraught: it was Monday and Versailles was closed. Baraton, who lives in a small house on the grounds, expressed regrets and moved on.

Then, in the afternoon, he saw her again, this time wandering in a garden. He discovered that she spoke French. With the keys to the château in his pocket, he offered to unlock the doors for her. “We were all alone,” he told me as we toured the gardens one morning. “I showed her the Galerie des Glaces. I showed her the bedrooms of the king and of Marie Antoinette.”

He took her into the Petit Trianon, the neoclassical mini-château built by Louis XV and intended for his favorite mistress, Madame de Pompadour. She already owned a big house in Paris: the current Élysée Palace. Decades later, Louis XVI would give the Petit Trianon to his teenage bride, Marie Antoinette, as a wedding present. “This pleasure house is yours,” the young king is said to have told his queen. At that point during Baraton’s tour for his unexpected guest, champagne in the gardens seemed to follow naturally.

“If you want to seduce a woman at a swimming pool, it’s best if you know how to swim,” he told me as he recounted the story. “If you want to seduce a woman at a nightclub, you should know how to dance. At a ski resort, you should know how to ski. But I, I have Versailles! And to drink champagne in the Versailles gardens with no one else around late in the afternoon, she was conquered!”

Baraton took her to his house and cooked dinner. And sometime after midnight, he invited her to stay the night rather than head back to her hotel. He made up a bed for her in the second bedroom.

“At that moment,” he recalled, “perhaps this woman said to herself, ‘I came to Versailles. I am sleeping at Versailles. And now, this man who has invited me is rather nice.’ Maybe she said to herself, ‘If I can make love at Versailles as well, well, this doesn’t happen every day!’”

And so, she stayed.

I didn’t ask him what happened next. He didn’t say.

He didn’t have to. Versailles is France’s national monument—to love and to power. It bears witness to an era when a goal of royal life was pleasure, and it serves as the centerpiece for the national romance that the French have with their history.

Baraton has written a book laced with stories of modern lovemaking at Versailles, in which most of the couples are French. But it makes perfect sense that in his favorite personal anecdote, his conquest is a foreigner.

It is easy to imagine her position—awed by the grand château and an atmosphere that seems to cry out, “Pleasure is here for the taking. Enjoy it.” For centuries, foreigners have heard this message as France’s siren song.

Modern travelers come to France seeking to be seduced by graceful surroundings, excellent food and wine, beautiful objects on display, stylish people to watch on the street and in the cafés. The fantasies of the visitors may not extend to the high of a romantic or sexual adventure, but almost universally, they expect to experience a sexy country. That is fine with the French, who expect to live in one. France’s status as the most visited country in the world and its aura of glamour and allure are international clichés. What visitors may not understand so well is that the French love to be seduced as much as they love to play the seducer. So they too have a stake in being charmed by their country.

The French did not introduce sex to the Western world, and they did not invent sexual seduction. But France was the first European country to create a culture of love in the Middle Ages. Marriage had little to do with love, and the sex act was considered brutal and vulgar. Among the nobility, the ideal of courtly love was created and expressed in poetry. The man declared himself a vassal to the lady, who was by definition rich, powerful, beautiful, of a higher status, seemingly indifferent to his charms, and usually married to someone else. Lust was sublimated to romance, and complex rituals, ceremonies, and entreaties were used, even in pursuit of such modest outcomes as the touching of her hand. As the French perfected other arts of enjoyment and sensuality, seduction evolved into a high art.

The word
séduire
derives from the Latin
seducere
, which means “to lead astray.” First used in the Middle Ages, it had a deeply religious and moralistic cast. Seduction was branded as “trickery, engagement in error, or in sin.” An early French dictionary defined
séduire
: “To abuse someone, persuade one to do evil, or indoctrinate a spirit with evil beliefs. The wife of Adam said to the Lord, as an excuse, that the Serpent had seduced her.” But in time the meaning changed, as seduction became linked to the pain and ecstasy of romantic love.

In the seventeenth century, the moral ground shifted again. The culture of the court of Louis XIV at Versailles ushered in a new era of freethinking. The pursuit of pleasure for its own sake was accepted and even encouraged. The nonchalant, unrestrained libertine who engaged in pleasurable sex appeared on the scene. Seduction became a campaign—often a game—to overpower the will of the other.

It was even codified, on a map. To illustrate her novel
Clélie
published in 1654, Mademoiselle de Scudéry drew the Carte de Tendre, a map of an imaginary country called Tendre, an allegory for the stages of love. The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris has a leather-bound first edition, including a hand-colored version of the
carte
. Jean-Marc Chatelain, the curator of seventeenth-century books, offered to show it to me. He unwrapped a large brown baize cloth to reveal a leather-bound volume with gold-leaf trim. Close to the book’s end was an insert. It unfolded into a twelve-by-nine-inch map, with a gentle river called Inclination, a Lake of Indifference, a Dangerous Sea representing passion, and peaceful villages with names like Pretty-verse and Love-letter. The map is still alive in French culture today: A few years back the lingerie maker Princesse tam.tam used it as the pattern on women’s pajamas. It reappears regularly in French books on sex and romance.

By the late eighteenth century, seduction became a virtuous skill, an invitation to erotic playfulness and political strategizing. In other words, the French managed to transform seduction from a force for evil into a force for good. Seduce me with a delicious meal and a glass of excellent wine, a promise of romance, an intoxicating scent, and a lively game of words. Have you done me harm, or have you led me to a place where I find freedom to enjoy and savor the best life has to offer? And if in the process you also serve your own purposes, isn’t it—as long as I understand the transaction—a fair trade?

Many foreigners have thought so, from the Romans who came to conquer but stayed and planted vineyards and made good wine, to twentieth-century expatriate writers and artists lured by sexual and intellectual freedoms.

Certainly President Barack Obama looked at France as a destination for pleasure seeking. During his visit to France in 2009 to commemorate the anniversary of the Normandy landings, he did no touring and declined an invitation to dine at the Élysée Palace with President Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni. Asked at a news conference why he was spending so little time in Europe, Obama said he was too busy to enjoy himself.

“I would love nothing more than to have a leisurely week in Paris, stroll down the Seine, take my wife out to a nice meal, have a picnic in the Luxembourg Gardens,” he said. “Those days are over, for the moment…. At some point, I will be the ex-president, and then you will find me in France, I’m sure, quite a bit, having fun.”

The French themselves take the permission for enjoyment and play as a basic right. This does not mean they live in the moment. On the contrary, they manipulate the moment, planning ahead for pleasure and seduction with a well-laid dinner table or plan of romantic attack. And they like to be prepared for unplanned opportunities as well, confronting the world armed with attractive dress, careful manners, and practiced conversational skills.

Leisure time is a right guaranteed in French culture. The preamble of the 1946 Constitution, which is recognized in the 1958 Constitution of the Fifth Republic, guarantees “to all, notably to children, mothers and elderly workers, protection of their health, material security, rest and leisure.” In our own time, the French resist initiatives to raise the retirement age or add hours to their thirty-five-hour workweek. Most businesses and shops are banned from opening on Sundays. Poll after poll shows that the French prefer more time off to higher wages.

The pleasure principle is clearly visible in French medicine. Medical insurance doesn’t come cheap here; workers and employers pay for it through direct contributions and steep taxes. But coverage can entitle you to all sorts of medical pleasures.

I found one example in Évian-les-Bains, the Alpine haven of 7,500 people on Lake Geneva, whose natural spring is world-renowned. In 1926, the French government declared the source of Évian’s spring in the mountains to be in the “public interest,” and its purity is now protected by a nature preserve twelve miles in diameter. In the center of town stands a small pavilion partly hidden under a balcony, where a red marble fountain with a brass spigot spews Évian mineral water at a constant temperature of fifty-three degrees, a free public amenity required by law.

At a state-subsidized curative spa in Évian, I met Pierre Lewandoski, a car mechanic from Arras in northern France. Dressed in tiny, skin-tight swim trunks in shades of ocean blue, he lay still in a deep tub in a small treatment room. Évian mineral water, heated to ninety-five degrees, bubbled and swirled, gently massaging his soft, middle-aged body. He seemed eager to explain what he was doing in a bathtub five hundred miles from home.

“I’m here on doctor’s orders, for rheumatism in my neck,” he said. “I have no idea if this is going to work.” But French social security was paying 65 percent and his boss approved a paid leave, so there he was. The spa and health club overlooking the lake is not ashamed of what it is doing at taxpayer expense. On the contrary, its brochure boasts eighteen-day “thermal cures” to treat ailments like urinary tract infection, irritable colon, arterial hypertension, gout, postfracture trauma, and tendonitis. Clients can swim in an exercise pool filled with Évian water (lightly chlorinated) or take a twelve-jet shower with hot and cold Évian.

Years later, I longed to go to Évian after I slipped and fell on the avenue Montaigne, one of Paris’s poshest streets. The sidewalk had just been polished to look prettier. I found myself on crutches but with a prescription for massage therapy. For months, Jean-François, the physical therapist, made house calls three times a week. The French health care system paid for most of it.

A vital part of living in this seductive country is France’s romantic history. The French are at once stuck in their past and charmed by their national stories and myths. There is a perpetual fascination with the Old Regime, and the kings and queens of France regularly grace the covers of magazines. Few seem troubled that a permanent obsession with monarchy coexists so easily with the ideals of the Republic.

The romantic story line of French history goes like this: First there were the Gauls, who were vanquished by the Romans and then conquered their occupiers with the force of their artistry and sophistication. The two cultures intertwined as many Gauls became Roman citizens and Rome looked to Gaul for silver, glass, pottery, food, and wine. Then came the medieval era, with its troubadours and the twelfth century’s star-crossed lovers, Abélard and Héloïse. Later, literature and art began to focus on the romantic and sexual intrigues of the royal family. At last came the Revolution and the French Republic, born and reborn in heroic resistance and gallant marches to the barricades.

The stories don’t have to be faithful to reality. History may weigh on the French like a guilty conscience, but not enough to force an exploration of its darkest corners. The extent of French collaboration with the Nazi occupiers in World War II was revealed not by a French historian but by an American scholar, Robert Paxton of Columbia University. An example of France’s amnesia is a plaque affixed to the wall of the Hotel Lutetia, an Art Deco landmark on the Left Bank in Paris. It identifies the hotel as the reception center for returning deportees and prisoners of war in 1945; it says nothing about its sinister role between 1940 and 1944 as the Paris headquarters of the German Army’s intelligence operations during the Occupation.

This airbrushed version of history provides the French with protective shelter. The past is both celebrated and continually reinvented and improved. No anniversary is too minor to celebrate. In recent years, France has marked the 200th anniversary of the high school baccalaureate diploma, the 60th anniversary of the bikini, the 100th anniversary of the brassiere, the 150th anniversary of the twenty arrondissements of Paris. When Dim, the hosiery maker, celebrated its 50th anniversary as a period of “freedom for women,”
Le Monde
ran an article illustrated with photographs of the legs of three women, their skirts flying up à la Marilyn Monroe in
The Seven Year Itch
.

The affection for a certain version of the past helps explain why so many French citizens with ethnic Arab and African roots feel alienated from the country’s history. They don’t relate to the romantic story line, and they don’t even feel French. They remain a people apart in the present, facing discrimination and treated like outsiders on many levels. It also explains why the French government in late 2009 felt compelled to launch debates in cities and towns throughout France on the country’s “national identity.” The French are taught a particular view of history, one that celebrates not diversity but an idealized secular republic that is color-blind and ethnically indifferent; this vision is considered essential to the French sense of identity.