La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (38 page)

There had been no secrets spilled. The conversation had been directed outward, not inward. We were far away from America. No one spoke about work, money, or real estate. If anyone had been betrayed or unfaithful, or had committed adultery in his or her heart, Jimmy Carter–style, it was not confessed.

But there had been recollections of sweet memories. I found it touching when the brilliant thinker said that in his boyhood, his mother had taught him to dress well and look good even when he ran the most routine errand. He recalled a Coco Chanel line about anticipation and promise that he had learned from his mother: a man should never go out on the street without saying to himself that he is going to meet the woman of his life.

As for me, I came away both disappointed and elated. I hadn’t been able to stop behaving like an American. I had wanted to appear a bit like Fanny Frisbee, a character in Edith Wharton’s 1907 novella
Madame de Treymes
. Fanny was a New Yorker who had married a cold and rigid French marquis and was contemplating divorce so that she could marry an American who was both her lover and a friend from childhood. In the process of living in France, she had shed much of her American skin and become more French. In the eyes of her lover, this was a good thing.

But I hadn’t transformed myself into Fanny. The influences of living in France had not made me mysterious, lowered my voice, regulated my gestures, or toned me down into harmony with the warm, dim background of a long social past. I had asked my questions with the brutal directness of a journalist, not the languorous sweetness of a siren.

Andy and I were the last to leave. As the guests of honor, should we have been the first? Too late.

We stood at the door with the elegant hostess and her husband. It was a special moment. We started to review what had been said and what had not. But now it was late, and the discussion was quickly suspended. We said they should come to our home, just the four of us, another time. Dinner that evening had been a gift, and also an act of intimacy. We had been let in. It would not be enough to write a note or call with a message of thanks the next day.

Andy and I made our way down the narrow winding stairs into the courtyard and the cold air of Paris after midnight. Late-night Paris belongs to the
flâneur
, the idle walker with no purpose except to roam. There is always beauty to be discovered. So we decided to walk. There was no traffic; the only sound was the click of my impossibly high heels.

Andy told me about his conversation over coffee with the partner of the British journalist. “She considered herself the guest at the table most outside of the classic ‘intelligentsia,’ yet she said things that so perfectly capture the importance of seduction in her life,” he told me. He said that she had described working long and hard on her appearance every morning, a French woman wanting to look good both for herself (for her feeling of well-being) and for others. She had told him how much she enjoyed French television programs—those endless roundtable talk-a-thons with no resolution at the end—that Americans find impenetrable and boring.

We walked past the real estate agency and the Saint-Germain church and the café Les Deux Magots. It wasn’t yet 1:00 a.m. so the city of Paris had not turned off the lights on its buildings and bridges.

I had the feeling of comfort that comes with belonging, not entirely of course, but enough. I thought of a gift I had once given Andy: a David Sipress cartoon that first appeared in
The New Yorker
. It shows a small, serious, balding, bespectacled, middle-aged man sunk deep in an oversized armchair. He is reading a book. An image of the Eiffel Tower illustrates the back of the jacket. The book’s title is “How to Be One of Those People Who Goes Off to Live in Paris.”

Andy and I had gone off to live in Paris. And it had seduced us.

“Every man has two countries, his own and France,” says a character in a play by the nineteenth-century poet and playwright Henri de Bornier. In our years living there, we have tried to make the country our own, even though we know that will never entirely happen. We will never think like the French, never shed our Americanness. Nor do we want to.

And like an elusive lover who clings to mystery, France will never completely reveal herself to us. Even now, when I walk around a corner I anticipate that something pleasurable might happen, the next act in a process of perpetual seduction.

Every American who sets out to write a book exploring France and the French is aware of many fine books in English that have already been written on the subject. I’d like to single out a few that were exceptionally useful in my research and may be of interest to readers who can’t get enough of things French.

One of the best overviews of France is still
Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French
, written by my former
New York Times
colleague Richard Bernstein. First published in 1990, the book combines reporting, memoir, and analysis to produce an authoritative, first-rate account of the country.

Paris to the Moon
(2000) by the master storyteller Adam Gopnik is an eloquent love letter to his wife and son and the life they all made together in Paris. His edited literary anthology,
Americans in Paris
(2004), a collection of delicious writings by Americans on Paris over the decades, is best savored with a glass of fine French wine.

Diane Johnson’s 1997 novel
Le Divorce
is a superb comedy of morals and manners about the American encounter with France in the tradition of Edith Wharton and Henry James. I dip into it over and over—and I always laugh out loud.

A helpful guide for American women on the mystique of their French counterparts is
What French Women Know: About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind
(2009) by Debra Ollivier. Ollivier, who is married to a Frenchman and lived in France for ten years, is an insider who treats her subject with the right blend of humor and gravitas.

Then there is
French Toast: An American in Paris Celebrates the Maddening Mysteries of the French
(1997) by my friend Harriet Welty Rochefort, who has lived in France with her French husband for more than thirty years. She offers lessons on the French in a sassy tone, and even shares her mother-in-law’s culinary secrets.

Finally, Charles Cogan’s
French Negotiating Behavior: Dealing with La Grande Nation
(2003) is an indispensable primer for negotiating with the French, in both diplomacy and life.

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———.
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———.
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———.
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———and Alain Finkielkraut.
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———.
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&
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———.
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Flanner, Janet.
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Fraser, Antonia.
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Fulda, Anne.
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