La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (7 page)

Another French woman reported that she was shocked when the man she was seeing said, “‘Let’s have sex now’ as if he was saying ‘Let’s watch the Super Bowl together.’”

A third French woman wrote that it was a matter of different perceptions of efficiency: the French are more inclined to mystery, the Americans to mechanics. “American guys learned somewhere that girls like it when their clitoris is touched, so they focus on it, earnestly and directly,” she said. “Americans can be, well, so pragmatic.”

Valentine’s Day is not a big deal in France, certainly not as big as in the United States. But in 2010, the seaside city of Deauville celebrated the day by reenacting the famous embrace between Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée at the end of the 1966 film romance
A Man and a Woman
. The film is about fragile, tender, unpredictable romance—a paean to anticipation, expectation, and seduction. The embrace scene takes place on a cold and gray December morning. Aimée is on the beach near the sea. Trintignant has driven through the night to find her, and when he does, they run across the sand toward each other, arms outstretched. They embrace. He lifts her off her feet, holds her close, and twirls her in the air. We don’t see them kiss, but we assume they will.

The film won the Academy Award for best foreign film and the Grand Prix, at the time the highest award at Cannes. Claude Lelouch, the director, who had never made a box office hit before, was suddenly an international star.

To recapture the magic, the public was invited to the beach at Deauville on Valentine’s Day morning. Lelouch would be there to film the scene. I asked Andy if he wanted to come along. It would be Valentine’s Day, after all. “You sure someone isn’t putting you on?” he asked.

I assured him this was going to happen, that it was part of Deauville’s official campaign to celebrate its 150th anniversary.

So as snow fell on a Saturday, we took the train from Paris to Deauville. I read newspapers and magazines during the two-hour ride. One article described the distress of parents over the decision of the public elementary school system to cut out Saturday morning classes, a change that apparently disrupted the parents’ sex lives.

The next morning, ice-cold and brilliantly sunny, we headed to the beach. The sound track from the film blared from loudspeakers, and a vintage black Mustang similar to the one Trintignant had driven in the film was on display. We had expected about thirty or forty couples. Instead, there were several hundred: teenagers, middle-aged couples, grandparents in their seventies. Some had driven hours to be there.

We all lined up at the spot where the original embrace had taken place. The women and men faced each other, the women next to beach umbrellas lined up near the sea, the men near the boardwalk. Philippe Augier, mayor of Deauville, and his wife, Béatrice, still elegantly beautiful in their sixties, demonstrated how the running, kiss, hug, and twirl should be done. (No one, not even Lelouch, seemed to remember or mind that there was no climactic kiss in the original film.)

Then Lelouch picked up a megaphone and told the couples, “Run toward each other, exactly as in the film!” The men and women raced across the sand, found their partners, and kissed. The men picked up and twirled the women, some more deftly than others. Andy wasn’t bad.

“It’s lovely!” exclaimed Lelouch.

We played the scene a second time. “Oh, she’s too heavy!” one man said as he picked up his partner.

For the third and last take, Lelouch gave us different instructions. “Attention, now!” he said. “This time you are going to switch partners!” He was joking, right?

“I can’t see my husband,” I said to the women on either side of me.

“What does he look like?” one of them asked me.

“He looks like every other guy who’s wearing black,” I said.

“Well, don’t grab mine!” the woman on the other side said.

Then we all ran, embraced, kissed, and twirled, one last time.

When the kissing was over, couples lingered on the beach as if they were pondering how to find the nearest hotel room—or at least how to prolong the warm glow of romance. Some continued to kiss. Some had tears in their eyes.

Later, over lunch with the mayor and his wife, Lelouch said that when the event was over, a young couple came to thank him. Apparently, the young man had followed Lelouch’s suggestion that they change partners at the third kiss. “I found a fantastic woman! I found the woman of my life,” the young man told Lelouch.

The mayor found the story sweet and serendipitous. He urged Lelouch to tell the story of his own seduction. A few years earlier, while Lelouch was visiting Deauville, a woman named Valérie wrote him a three-page letter describing what his films had meant to her. She asked a friend to hand-deliver it. Lelouch read the letter that night and was thunder-struck.

“She said sublime things,” he recalled. “She saw things I thought only I had seen. She left no photo or phone number. She only signed it ‘Valérie.’”

Lelouch launched a search. He found her. Three months later, he was back in Deauville and met Valérie for coffee. It was a
coup de foudre
—a flash of lightning, love at first sight. Lelouch, who had been married several times and fathered seven children, left his wife. Valérie, the mother of two, left her husband. “We’ve been together since then,” he said. “You’d say it’s like a Lelouch film, no?”

Maybe. But wasn’t it also a celebration of infidelity? I didn’t say it, of course. To have done so would have exposed me as the worst type of American woman in the eyes of a French man: a puritan.

At the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, CBS News aired a lighthearted report on the French and their attitude toward infidelity. The report opened with footage of the Eiffel Tower. The writer Jean d’Ormesson was interviewed. He spoke in English, reveling in the role of the unfaithful Frenchman.

Excerpts from the CBS transcript of the interview:

The report ended with footage of the Eiffel Tower.

D’Ormesson was playing to an audience steeped in stereotypes. The cliché about French sangfroid in dealing with infidelity has been perpetuated in American movies for more than half a century. In Billy Wilder’s 1957 comedy
Love in the Afternoon
, Maurice Chevalier, playing a French detective, tells a client that his wife is in the Ritz Hotel suite of an American entrepreneur, played by Gary Cooper. The husband vows to kill the lover. Audrey Hepburn, the detective’s daughter, overhears the conversation on the phone and calls the police so they can warn the couple. The blasé police officer tells her: “Paris has 220,000 hotel rooms and on any given night similar scenes are taking place in 40,000 of them. If we were to warn them all, we’d have to send the entire police force, the fire department, the sanitation department, and the Boy Scouts in their short pants.”

The reality is more complicated. The French, like Americans, have not figured out a way to inoculate themselves against the pain of a partner’s unfaithfulness. Jealousy and guilt are alive and well. Adultery is a major reason for divorce in France, as in the United States. When infidelity turns serious and the unfaithful spouse leaves to live with a lover, a scorned wife (especially if she is no longer young) can have a much harder time recovering than a scorned husband, even in France.

Yet American and French cultures do tend to judge the act of infidelity differently. A French woman friend put it this way: “In American culture, infidelity is often considered a sin. You are led astray. You may burn in hell because of it. Or you can confess and perhaps be forgiven—‘
Est-ce que je lui pardonne?
’ [‘Do I forgive him?’] In France, seduction is a skill and infidelity is a willful act. And you can ask the question, ‘
Pourquoi il a fait ça?
’ [‘Why did he do it?’] Then come the answers. Maybe he was miserable. Maybe he doesn’t love you anymore. Maybe it’s just the way he is, and you love him the way he is.”

I told her I saw it differently. For Americans, infidelity is betrayal, the violation of a contract. For the French, what Americans call infidelity is often the glue that keeps the order of things: parents stay together; the children are spared emotional trauma; property stays in the family; financial security is maintained; family history is kept; vacations are taken. The game often is not as serious or as destructive as it would be for those with an Anglo-Saxon worldview, particularly if it is played in secret and no one gets hurt. A poll in 2008 indicated that 46 percent of the French believe an infidelity should not be “confessed.”

The habits the French develop in their personal relationships inform their conduct in other areas of life: the way they eat, do business, run the country. Exhortations to self-denial do not seem to resonate as they do in America, whether the subject is good food and wine, smoking, well-made clothes, leisure time, or the luxury of long conversations. From there, it’s not much of a leap to what seems to be a burning question in France: If sex and romance have faded in a marriage, is it even fair to demand that the partners forgo them on the side? Must all of the pleasures of the long seductive run-up to sex, as well as the sex act itself, be forsaken for the cause of loyalty?

French literature and popular culture are full of suggestions that the answer is no, that infidelity, while perhaps not ideal, should probably be tolerated. Even advice-to-the-lovelorn columnists tend to take a holistic approach. The advice columnist of
Femina
, the women’s magazine supplement of a popular weekly newspaper, is one of the most practical. One week, Anne B. from Alsace asked a straightforward question: “Should I leave my husband?”

“Married for thirty years, we haven’t had sex for five years,” she explained. “Recently, I met up with an old flame. We’ve had a secret affair for ten months. I am very happy with him, but he’s married as well, and he can’t leave his wife. I don’t feel brave enough to leave my husband. I don’t want to hurt him and financially, it’s impossible for me.”

The advice was to be romantic, self-indulgent, and mature—by being dishonest. “In fairy tales, heroes love each other passionately and exclusively in nights without end; in real life, it happens that you sincerely love your husband or wife at the same time that you have an affair for a while,” the adviser wrote back. “That’s what happened to you…. Live your relationship one day at a time, without rushing to make an irrevocable decision that you may regret.”

If Dear Abby were answering, the response would be very different. You cannot live a lie. Leave the lover. If you don’t, you will pay. That’s what Abby wrote to a woman whose husband left her when he found out she was cheating on him and who signed herself “Woke Up Too Late in Little Rock.” “I’m sorry, but there are no magic words that can turn back the clock…,” Abby said. “The only magic I can see is that in your hunger for excitement, you made your marriage disappear in a puff of smoke.”

In the 2009 book
Les hommes, l’amour, la fidélité
(
Men, Love, Fidelity
), the psychologist Maryse Vaillant argued that infidelity is natural—for men. She put men into a number of categories, including the anxious polygamist, the rehabilitated polygamist, the captive monogamist, and the deceitful monogamist. I was most intrigued by “Ben,” a deceitful monogamist: a handsome sociology professor in his forties, long married to “Amandine,” the mother of their three children.

Ben created an “honor code of the unfaithful but loyal husband.” I have no firsthand experience to judge whether or not his rules work, but here they are in full:

1. Take all necessary precautions to hide your affairs carefully.
   
2. Keep your little love affairs at a good distance from the big one.
   
3. Keep any sexual escapade as far as possible from your family life, from the friends you have in common as a couple, and from your wife’s relatives and acquaintances.
   
4. Know how to be discreet; do not trust the neighborhood or well-intentioned friends.
   
5. Monitor the contents of your pockets, your mail, your e-mails, your cell phone.
   
6. Inspect your shirt collars, and look for possible hairs on your jacket.
   
7. Never find yourself in a situation where you have to choose between your girlfriends and your wife.
   
8. Never fall in love. Know how to keep your heart if not your hormones under control. Affairs don’t count. With them, you relax. You don’t fall in love.
   
9. Never start an affair with a colleague, a family friend, a neighbor, your wife’s relative.
   
10. Never sleep or even flirt with the wife of a friend, a colleague, a neighbor, or a relative.
    
11. Always be safe. The condom is essential. It is out of the question to risk contaminating a wife and putting your health or your life in danger, or ever impregnating someone—out of the question to have children out of wedlock.
    
12. Never bring anyone home. The familial territory is sacred. It is unacceptable to frolic in the home of your wife and children.
    
13. Surround your wife with true, sincere, and loyal love. Give her lots of genuine attention.
    
14. Lie to her intelligently. Never underestimate her capacity for observation and deduction.
    
15. Never forget your wedding anniversary or any of the important dates involving the children.
    
16. Always celebrate Christmas with your family. All celebrations and familial social rituals are sacred. The absence of a father or a husband would make the whole family suffer.
    
17. Try hard to be a good father, a good husband, a good lover, so your wife won’t complain about anything.