The Secret Life of France (4 page)

The
jardin secret
is a right to which, in theory at least, everyone has access; in practice, however, like many rights in France, it is one that not everyone is able to exercise. Whether or not you have a
jardin secret
often depends on the gifts that Nature has endowed you with. Nicolas
Sarkozy, who, like Napoleon, makes up in libido what he lacks in height, is the exception to this rule.

France, for all her obsession with equality, has never attempted to level the erotic playing field. Beauty still carries high status here and no apologies are made for this. Rather than try to change this harsh reality, men and women do what they can to accommodate it. Most women in France – and more and more men – regularly visit a beautician. You will find an
esthéticienne
(beauty technician) in even the most remote villages; often, I have noticed, alongside a poodle parlour called – bafflingly – ‘Doggy Style’. In line with all the other
corps de métiers
in France, the person plucking your eyebrows or waxing your bikini line will be extremely well qualified, with four years of training, a diploma in
esthétisme
and a great deal of pseudo-scientific vocabulary to go with it.

For a French person, man or woman, there is nothing to be gained by lamenting the superficiality of appearances, for in this culture appearances are all-important. The French are not only obsessed with Beauty in all of its manifestations; it is a value in itself. Everyone – in their physical being, their dress, their lives, their work, their homes – aspires either to
La Beauté
or to
l’Elégance
, its more democratic twin. No one is ashamed of this love of Beauty. It is triumphed and trumpeted everywhere you look. You only have to spend about ten minutes in France’s capital city to feel the truth of this: the grand vistas, the façades, the fountains, the cobbles, the bridges, the lighting, the shop windows, the signage, the awnings,
the street furniture, even the men in fluorescent green who pick up your rubbish before it hits the ground, all conspire to achieve one thing – to keep everything looking beautiful. Paris is all about Beauty. Everything else – including such things as commercial gain, prosperity or efficiency – is secondary.

For the French, Beauty does not reside exclusively in the past. It is a living, breathing, endlessly mutating deity. They’re not afraid of modernity, as long as it is beautiful: the TGV is fast but, above all, beautiful; the glass pyramid that was placed in the courtyard of the Palais du Louvre was ‘highly contested at the time and yet so beautiful in its transparent purity’, raves a tourist guide to Paris’s monuments.

It is interesting to compare the aesthetic legacies of two adjacent presidents, Chirac and Mitterrand. Jacques Chirac’s presidency was not wreathed in the same prestige of magnificent architectural
Grands Travaux
as Mitterrand’s was, simply because he had bad taste. Chirac is associated with the monumentally ugly Palais des Congrès on the Porte Maillot, a Soviet-style edifice built while he was prime minister under Giscard d’Estaing. Caving in to pressure, Chirac tried to make this building right in the nineties by spending 500 million euros on having it refaced by one of Mitterrand’s favourite architects, Christian de Porzemparc. When, as newly elected mayor of Paris, Chirac unilaterally chose Jean Willerval’s steel and chrome ‘umbrellas’ for the site of Paris’s old food market (Forum des Halles), it became clear that he could not be trusted,
and he was strongly discouraged from attempting to impose his architectural taste on the city again.

As an English woman I am still unsettled by the French obsession for physical beauty. My Protestant mistrust for the cult of appearances is deeply entrenched, and I find myself wincing when my own daughter excitedly tells me about a brand-new friendship: ‘She’s great. We talked all through lunch. She’s so sharp and funny and she’s really beautiful. She has the whitest skin and very dark eyes and these lovely long fingers which she uses all the time when she speaks …’

I have to remind myself that what my daughter is expressing is her deep cultural encoding for the myriad manifestations of Beauty. In some ways I find it touching that she is so affected by another girl’s beauty and then I fear that she, like all her girlfriends, experiences levels of insecurity about her appearance from which I, in my own culture, was shielded. But then I remind myself that there is no equivalent in France to the sheer power of Anglo-Saxon-style magazines, and while political correctness may seek to preserve young women from physical stereotyping, British and American celebrity culture certainly picks up the slack.

If Nature hasn’t been generous to a French person, he or she will very often use Art. Plastic surgery in France is a booming growth industry, with almost five times more people resorting to surgical procedures than in Britain.

The following advertisement comes from the website
of one of Paris’s most popular and exclusive
clubs
échangistes
, or swingers’ clubs: ‘Seduction is an art to be cultivated. We are players in the game of seduction. No excuses! If you no longer seduce, look in your mirror for your mirror is truthful … We propose that you pamper yourself, look after your body. We invite you to use a thousand artifices: clothes, make-up, jewellery, wigs … We love you feminine, elegant, refined, coquettish, provocative …’

It is hard to imagine anything so openly sexist being written in English today. But in France, the somewhat archaic idea that women are endlessly mysterious and fascinating creatures whose role is to sexually intoxicate men still holds sway. The sexual protocol in clubs like these remains pretty close to what it must have been in the eighteenth century. An English journalist, who went to a
club
échangiste
in order to write about it for his broadsheet, described the experience of walking into one of the elegant back rooms where a naked woman was tied, blindfolded, to silken manacles on the wall: ‘It was like walking into a chapel. A few men and women were pleasuring her while the rest were watching in what can only be described as total awe.’

Only a certain ritual, or what the French call
mise en
scène
, can promote this kind of atmosphere. The ‘contractual’ nature of relationships between men and women in Britain and the resulting de-sexualisation has made it difficult to return to these primal roles, and so the kind of religious awe the English journalist was describing
becomes more and more difficult to achieve. These unchanged stereotypes in an otherwise changed world create a paradoxically innocent atmosphere. There is an elegance and a decorum in Paris’s swingers’ clubs that makes them remarkably unthreatening. Laurent, who has been a few times with various girlfriends, described meeting a business acquaintance whom he met sipping champagne with a scantily clad woman at the bar.

‘We acknowledged each other politely and that was it. There was no embarrassment. It was like meeting in a parallel universe. It will never be mentioned again.’

While we were together Laurent soon gave up trying to convince me to go with him to a swingers’ club. He knew that with my background, our evening would never be light-hearted, fun, anecdotal. With my insecurities and my puritan guilt, the experience would only become tawdry and complicated.

I came to France wearing the uniform of my generation: pink, spiky hair, mohair jumper pulled down over a tartan mini-skirt, fishnet tights and Doc Martens. After a year in Paris living under the gentle but persistent influence of Laurent and his entourage, I had been radically remodelled. In my sock drawer, silk underwear and stockings had supplanted fluorescent tights and stripy socks. While my English girlfriends continued to hide their figures under multiple layers, I was undergoing a slow conversion to the French cult of appearances. For many years I resisted the change – periodically ‘regressing’ to clothes that I
could hide in, or as my husband’s friend Gilles would put it, clothes that chopped me up into ‘unflattering sections’. It was Gilles whom my husband had left, that first summer, in charge of taking me shopping.

‘Ma chérie,’ Gilles said as we walked down the rue du Jour one afternoon in July. ‘This “poor English girl” look has to go. You should enjoy your figure [
plastique
] and let other people enjoy it as well.’

At the time his words encapsulated everything that an earnest young woman like me despised: snobbishness, superficiality and sexism. Today I can see a certain generosity of outlook. His remarks were not about sex or politics but about the nature of Beauty. In his view, whatever shape God had given me needed to be adorned and embellished for my own enjoyment and for that of others. Clothes, he believed, were not tribal dress, designed to flag our position on the social grid. They were there at the service of Beauty and should be used to emphasise certain elements of a person’s physique and to de-emphasise others.

Gilles had used the word
plastique
(from the Greek word
plassein
, to mould). This word perfectly conveys the various assumptions that lie behind his observation. When used as a noun with a feminine indefinite article,
plastique
refers to the beauty inherent in shape. The example for the definition given in the Le Robert dictionary is
Cette femme a une plastique étonnante
. Translated into English the sentence loses its meaning: That woman has a formal beauty that is striking. Since the noun
plastique
invariably tends to be used for a woman, it expresses the French belief that the female form is inherently beautiful.

All of this should help to understand why the French tend to be conservative in their dress. Clothes at the service of Beauty don’t draw attention to themselves or to the personality of the wearer but to the
plastique
or particular beauty – whatever it may be – of the rack they’re adorning.

A Frenchman will never tell a woman she looks ‘well’ when what he means is that she looks beautiful or radiant or sexy. Nor indeed will a woman. I remember how thrilled or appalled my girlfriends could be when Laurent used to greet them. He would always mention how lovely they were looking, and the genuine delight in his face usually disarmed them.

Ella, my twenty-year-old daughter, has been brought up in France. She says that London makes her feel sad and ugly. In Paris she no longer notices male attention, but in London she notices its absence: no smiles, no catcalls, no homage whatsoever to her youth and beauty.

‘Nobody looks at each other here,’ she once remarked as we stepped off the London tube. ‘It’s not just the men, women don’t look at each other either.’

‘It’s rude to stare,’ I said, unconvincingly.

But for Ella, of course, it was rude to be ignored.

The cults of Pleasure and Beauty are allegedly why French women don’t get fat. This, of course, is simply not true. There are plenty of fat French women about and as fast-food invades France, they’re getting more and more numerous.
*
But because there is no sin attached either to the pleasure of sex or to the pleasure of food, overeating tends not to be a manifestation of self-loathing. Put simply, if your body is a temple for the pursuit of guilt-free sexual pleasures, then you’re less likely to want to trash it.

I, like most women in France, have a gynaecologist. When I first arrived, my mother-in-law, Madeleine, had insisted on it. The French gynaecologist is usually a self-appointed sexologist as well. Every time I went for a check-up my gynaecologist would look up from his notes and, with an earnest expression, ask me:

‘
Et la libido? Ça va?
’

Once, I admitted that things were a bit sluggish in that department.

‘How long have you been married? Eight years?
C’est
normal
. I can give you a little testosterone if you like.’

He then warned me that it might produce a little unwanted hair but that it worked wonders.

I told him that I’d leave it for the time being.

Even French GPs concern themselves with their patients’ sexual health. An English friend of mine who has been living in Paris for five years recently went to his GP for a check-up. In the middle of the consultation, there was a knock on the door. The doctor’s secretary begged to be excused for the interruption. She had a patient on the phone who was complaining that she hadn’t had an orgasm for a month and she wondered if it could be the result of the medication the doctor had prescribed. My friend watched the doctor in disbelief as he pondered the matter for a moment.

‘
Non, non
. It’s not the medication. It’s probably psychological factors. Tell her she can make an appointment to discuss it.’

The secretary smiled sweetly at my friend and then closed the door behind her. Without the slightest ripple of unease, the GP picked up where he had left off.

There is an entire sub-genre within the canon of French cinema that deals with the subject of frigidity. When I first arrived, Laurent was always taking me to see these films, the first of which was one of his favourites:
L’Eté
Meurtrier
, with Isabelle Adjani. This film is also part of the category known as
Femme Fatale
films, for which the French seem to have an inexhaustible appetite. In the film
Adjani plays a tragically frigid, pouting beauty who seeks revenge for the rape of her mother by marrying and mentally torturing the son of one of the supposed rapists. The film, set in a picturesque village in Provence in the mid-seventies, is a vehicle for Adjani’s lithe and permanently sweaty body. At the time I couldn’t believe that my new husband, a man who had three university degrees, could actually fall for such drivel. Now, when I see the film, I’m struck by how accurately it portrays French provincial life – a certain turn of phrase, a certain era and a certain type of French woman, who really does exist. French women do pout. Widespread pouting among women is a reflection of the belief that women are allowed to, expected to, behave badly. (It is also a fact that the French language – with its reliance on the various forms of the short ‘o’ and ‘u’ sound – is set up for pouting.)

Pouting is also the speciality of the
femme-enfant
, a label that would be highly inappropriate in Britain but which has wide currency as a compliment in France. The term would probably translate into English as ‘bimbo’, losing all positive connotation in the process. For the French, on the other hand, Brigitte Bardot was the classic
femme-enfant
, and the scene which best depicts this feminine ideal is the opening moments in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film
Le Mépris
(Contempt) in which Bardot lies naked on the bed and asks her lover which part of her body he likes best. The refrain ‘And my feet, do you like my feet? And my breasts, do you like my breasts? Which do you prefer, my nipples or my breasts?’, the monumental
stupidity of Bardot, comes across in France as irresistible coquetry. In French she sounds sexy; in English, like an overgrown and deranged toddler.

Another classic that Laurent took me to see was
Le
Septième Ciel
(Seventh Heaven), by Benoît Jacquot. It’s about a woman called Mathilde who cannot reach orgasm. To solve her problem she goes to see a hypnotist. The hypnosis works and she goes home to her husband and her climax wakes up the neighbours. Betty, a girlfriend with whom I discussed the film, informed me that I was wrong, that the story wasn’t at all implausible. Plenty of Parisian women, she explained, went to hypnotists to help them relax enough to come, and if I liked she could give me the number for hers, a very nice man (though with bad breath) whose practice was near the Place de la République.

Having been brought up in post-feminist Britain, it took me almost a decade to adjust to the experience of being a woman in France. Since France seemed to have been bypassed by the feminist revolution, women appeared to me woefully un-emancipated, still pitted against each other and trapped in the archaic patriarchal model of sexual competition. They seemed to have no interest in friendship and would invariably gaze past me at parties when I tried to engage them in conversation, as if they were watching a world of erotic opportunity disappearing down the plughole. Often I would come home after such evenings and cry on my husband’s shoulder. I missed
England and above all, I missed my female friendships.

My eldest sister, Florence, after ten years in Paris, had fled her younger sisters a second time and gone to live in Manhattan. Irene and I hardly ever saw each other. She had moved with her French husband to a chic suburb to the west of Paris and I found myself repeatedly bowing to Laurent’s bourgeois Parisian reluctance to cross the
périphérique
(Paris’s ring road) to visit her. Over the years, Irene and I developed opposing techniques to cope with our homesickness. Irene made a haven of Englishness for herself and her Anglophile husband. They spoke to each other in English, listened to Radio 4, watched English football on satellite TV and, when their children were born, employed an English-speaking nanny to look after them. I, on the other hand, slowly but surely and much to Irene’s amusement would, as she would put it,
go native
.

Recently, I had lunch with Hortense, one of those Parisian women whom I had found so icy and who has, over the years, become my friend. She was interested to hear that she had terrified me when I first met her, and that she had seemed disdainful and unapproachable. She smiled.

‘You frightened
me
,’ she said. ‘You were so … open, so different.’

Her hazel eyes shone with affection. I’ve known her for twenty years and she has changed very little. She still has the same mass of shiny, beautifully blow-dried hair, the youthful spattering of freckles across the nose and the same (pouting) mouth.

‘It was the role we had to play,’ she explained. ‘
La
femme fatale
. You have to remember that here the pleasure all lies in the business of being a woman. That’s where real life is played out, in our love affairs. Nowhere else. There’s really not much difference between the life of a
bourgeoise
like me and the life of a courtesan.’

‘But you’ve been more than that. You did a brilliant degree. You’ve got a high-powered job.’

‘Still. My energies all went elsewhere. We were brought up to be, above all, seductive. We put on our high heels and our make-up to go to Sciences Po and we hunted for men among the elite.’

‘How exhausting.’

‘Sometimes. But it’s in us. We can’t be any different. We have an obligation to our femininity. In our company a man should feel like a man. There should always be a spark of mystery.’

‘And what about as you get older? Do you still have to go on doing this in your fifties and sixties?’

‘Actually, it gets easier. You learn to wear only what suits you and you use what you have.’

‘Do you wish things were different?’

She leaned towards me, lowering her voice.

‘
It was fun
.’ Then she added, ‘In theory, of course, love affairs should just be the icing on the cake. They shouldn’t define you but they do. They take up so much
time
.’

She paused.

‘The trouble is, of course, you dwell in appearances.’

‘And we all lose our looks,’ I said.

She smiled mischievously.

‘Men lose their looks too. You must just take a younger lover.’

Even though I knew the answer, I asked her if she had had affairs.

‘Many,’ she said.

‘And your husband?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know.’

‘Do most of your girlfriends have affairs?’

‘Yes. I would say that most of the couples that we know are unfaithful to each other. There is a tradition of
libertinage
in my
milieu
, which is very strong. It’s in our literature, our theatre and our cinema. Of course there is guilt. I never want to hurt my husband but a love affair is irresistible. I don’t
want
to resist it.’

I will never share with Hortense the intimacy and camaraderie that I share with my English girlfriends. There is an ease among both British and American women that is the direct result of the lack of rivalry. Because of the archaic, unreconstructed nature of gender politics in France, women still perceive each other as rivals in the game of love. I know that for Hortense her love affairs come first, that she wouldn’t hesitate to cancel me in favour of an assignation. This is understood. With the sisterhood in England and America, things are different. We’re taught to put our female friendships first, or at least make sure that we appear to do so.

I think of Aurélie, the sex goddess, and remember how
terrified I was by her erotic legacy in the early days of my marriage. To me she embodied everything that I mistrusted about the French woman. Her agenda was seduction and all her energies seemed to go in that direction. She seemed to have no female friendships at all and always seemed to be stealing other people’s husbands or boyfriends. When I discovered, over dinner in a restaurant with Laurent, the manner in which their affair had begun, all my worst fears were confirmed.

Aurélie was the girlfriend of one of Laurent’s oldest friends, Robert, a photographer who would become godfather to our first child. After they had been together for about two years, Aurélie found herself suddenly and irresistibly attracted to her boyfriend’s best mate, Laurent. Laurent had recently taken up running first thing in the morning in the Bois de Boulogne, close to where he worked. Aurélie asked if she might join him. Laurent described to me over dinner how she had made her move on him:

‘She stopped to rest against a tree. She was panting, her insolent little breasts [I remember he used the word
narquois
for those breasts, meaning, literally, mocking] heaving up and down under her tiny vest … She was staring at me and panting, waiting for me to jump on her. I couldn’t resist.’

This is the French woman’s way: you
never
make the first move, but you try to make it impossible for the man
not
to. Judging from a conversation that I would have years later with my own daughter, this is still the approach
of the Parisian female. Ella had recently returned from a weekend in London, where she had been to a party given by the daughter of a friend of mine. Her description of the dance floor took me back to my own adolescence: all those lovely, strong females dancing together in the middle of the room and all those insecure, faltering males hovering around the edge as if repelled by the contrapuntal force of the girls’ erotic empowerment. Apparently, Ella tried the waiting game she usually plays at parties in Paris and the boys all ignored her.

Laurent went on to tell me how poor Robert, six months later, discovered his affair with Aurélie. They and a group of friends were having dinner together in a big, noisy brasserie off the Place de la Bastille. Aurélie was sitting beside her official boyfriend and opposite her lover. When Robert bent down to pick up his lighter, he saw his girlfriend’s foot comfortably nestled where it shouldn’t be and that was that. She moved out of Robert’s flat and in with Laurent. It is a measure of the banality of adultery here that Laurent and Robert – and indeed Aurélie – are still firm friends.

When I heard this story I inwardly vowed to cut Aurélie out of my life. At the time Laurent had the elegance not to object, but after we had split up he and Aurélie became close again. Today I feel a good deal more charitable towards her. In fact, as Hortense once explained to me, women like Aurélie fulfil a useful role in society. They are erotic catalysts. Not all women should be matronly or sisterly or otherwise sexually passive. If they
are, the erotic charge disappears from the social group, or goes underground and becomes pathological, disembodied, infected by guilt. The idea is that in the presence of this type of predatory woman, wives and girlfriends feel at risk and this sense of risk reboots the libido. Significantly, Carl Jung identified the vital social role of this type of woman in his book
Aspects of the Feminine
. Even he, however, could not help giving her the pejorative label ‘The Overdeveloped Eros’.

There is no ‘sisterhood’ in France and for many years this was something I missed profoundly. With time, however, I realised – as I did of most areas of French life – that in losing one thing I had found another. I learnt that the extraordinary female friendships I had known in Britain were part of a wider landscape, itself not so pretty – a landscape ravaged by a low-level and persistent war between the sexes. The absence of gender conflict in France has become a source of relief to me. Once I had overcome my prejudices, I realised that the constant flirtation – often heavy-handed and irritating but sometimes subtle and uplifting – was a pretty harmless thing compared to the deep-seated resentment that seems to infect gender relations in Britain. There is no tradition of gender segregation in France because men enjoy the company of women. Stag parties are a recent aberration imported by Anglophiles, and the gentleman’s club is reserved for a tiny proportion of the French aristocracy that enjoys aping the English. There is no such thing here as a
‘ladette’ because French women are happy to be admired for their femininity.