The Secret Life of France Read online

  This subtle feeling is, I realise, simply the result of habit. I know that my English and American friends feel a certain discomfort at the moral chaos that reigns in France. They dislike the discourteous driving, the queue-jumping, the fare-dodging, while I have come to find the level of civic obedience required in Anglo-Saxon society faintly oppressive. In London, I don’t reverse down a one-way street because I know that some well-meaning old lady will rap on the window and tell me that I am going in the wrong direction. This would never happen in Paris, where everyone is constantly breaking the law. Only if the law-breaker inconveniences you personally do you ever bother to launch into invective. If the offender is an old person – ideally old enough to have been an adult during the Nazi Occupation – a classic and powerful taunt is to call them a collaborator. I remember the first time I heard this insult: an old man in a beret who was racing along the cycle lane in Paris alarmed a young man who was standing on the pavement, about to cross.

  ‘Collabo!’ the young man shouted, for all to hear. The old man nearly fell off his bike at the sound of that ugly diminutive but regained enough poise to raise his middle finger, leaving us onlookers to speculate on whether or not this had been the gesture of a collaborator or a résistant.

  I never think of jumping the queue in London, while in Paris I do it all the time. Why? Because everyone is doing it. France is filled with disobedient children all busily trying to jump the queue. There is no guilt about this except, of course, for that special brand of shame you feel when you get caught.

  I have read my Graham Greene and had always thought of guilt as the special ecstasy of Catholics. Since living in a nation of lapsed Catholics, I’ve come to realise that this is a gross over-simplification. The Catholic Church has certainly learnt over the centuries to use the idea of sin to great effect, but in comparing Britain, or indeed America, to France – all similarly developed, post-Freudian societies, one culturally Protestant and one culturally Catholic – it has been my observation that the dead hand of guilt falls far more heavily on us Protestants.

  If guilt is the inner struggle between the I want and the I should, or as Freud would have it, the effect of the struggle between the Ego and the Superego, then Catholicism is the domineering but indulgent Mother and Protestantism, the aloof and exacting Father. The legacy of Catholicism in France is, amongst other things, her powerful and interventionist state; what Anglo-Saxons refer to as ‘the nanny state’ and the French more affectionately call l’Etat-providence (the munificent state). Under such a system, citizens are children, perpetually clamouring I want, I want; alternately scolded and mollycoddled by the powers that be. In both British and American society, on the other hand, where the citizen is supposed to behave like a self-regulating adult, guilt becomes a natural and highly effective enforcer.

  *

  I remember my delight as I began to understand the particular relationship the French have with the law. I had accumulated a few parking tickets and had started hiding them in my sock drawer, a habit of avoidance that would take me at least twenty years to break. Laurent caught sight of them one evening when we were dressing for dinner. ‘I’m going to pay them,’ I said.

  ‘What year are we?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘1986,’ he mused. ‘It’s worth waiting.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘The presidential elections. There’s an amnesty for parking offences at each presidential election. Better to wait for the next one.’

  As the years went by, this lawless atmosphere worked its magic on me and I began to behave like everyone else. I would abandon my car – battered from the general practice of ‘nudge parking’ – on zebra crossings, pavements, traffic islands, while I ran in to collect my children. The Parisian authorities have never resorted to clamping – they prefer to tow, since immobilising a car in a bad place doesn’t make sense to them – but in those days, towing hadn’t yet caught on and so the tickets began to pile up and the letters from Monsieur le Préfet became more and more insistent. The amnesty* seemed a long way off when fate intervened in the form of B., an employee of the Renseignements Généraux, or RG, France’s bizarre, tentacular secret police force.

  B. was a short man with an outlandish moustache and a thick southern accent whom I met while working as a freelance researcher for the BBC. He would occasionally invite me out to lunch and ply me with useless, often misleading information and I would go home with my head full of colourful detail of no use whatever to my employers. It was B., for instance, who told me the preferred euphemism used by RG spooks to indicate that the subject of their memo was homosexual: ‘He is partial to the English style of life.’

  Long after it became clear to B. and me that we were quite useless to each other, we still occasionally met for lunch. He had stopped trying to impress me by showing me where he kept his Smith & Wesson (in a holster round his ankle) and plying me with Chivas Regal in his office at the Ministry of the Interior. Instead we would meet for long, usually duck-themed lunches near the rue des Saussaies and exchange stories. He would talk in fast, unrelenting police speak – an elaborately formal metalanguage spoken by cops and understood by criminals – about the endlessly fascinating rivalries within the French police, and I would tell him about what life was like outside the confines of a surveillance vehicle. Usually over coffee, he’d click his jewelled fingers at me and hold out his hand for my parking tickets, which he would roll up and put in the pocket of his leather jacket, never to be seen again.

  Adultery and the Cult of Beauty

  In our Anglo-Saxon culture, sex and love have become polarised through guilt. In such a context sex can only achieve purification through love. There has always been a tendency in Britain and America to see sex without love as dirty. In the minds of the French middle classes, sex, even where love is absent, is a source of pleasure to which every human being has an inalienable right. Whether a person chooses to exercise that right or not is another matter.

  In France sex is viewed, at its most basic, as a legitimate source of pleasure and, at its most elaborate, as an art form, a means of sublimation. For the Parisian bourgeoisie – and it is they who set the tone in this still hierarchical society – good sex is the single most satisfactory method of raising oneself above the monotony of everyday life. For this reason alone, drugs and alcohol do not have the same hold here as they have in Britain. When sex is combined with love, the French believe that its mood-altering effects are only intensified.

  The belief in this idea explains the comparative tolerance towards adultery, which filters down through all of society from the urban bourgeoisie and is reflected in literature, cinema and the media. The French, led by the Parisian middle classes, are brought up to believe that if you’re lucky enough to find erotic satisfaction within your marriage, then so much the better, but if you can’t then you’re entitled, so long as you remain discreet, to seek your fix elsewhere. As I would soon discover, even my future mother-in-law held this belief.

  Laurent’s mother, Madeleine, was a handsome and formidably intelligent woman from an aristocratic family. His father, Jérôme Lemoine, was one of the nine stunningly beautiful Lemoine children of the sixteenth arrondissement, widely known in bourgeois circles for their parties, their small talk and their skill at dancing. When Jérôme and Madeleine met, he was leading a wilfully vapid life scraping through an architecture degree at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, while she – one of the first women to be accepted by the prestigious School of Political Science, Sciences Po – was sitting in the cafés and cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, listening to Jean-Paul Sartre and Juliette Gréco.

  After ten years of marriage and soul-searching philosophical enquiry Madeleine met a Hindu guru in Paris by the name of Sri Menon and became one of his first disciples. Every year she would go for a spiritual refill at his ashram in the Indian state of Kerala and, as she soon made clear to me, it was in this way that she was able to turn a blind eye to her husband’s chronic philandering.


  I first got wind of my father-in-law’s mistress the summer Laurent and I were married. Madeleine had been away in India for the usual six weeks in spring and Laurent and I were up in Normandy for the first time since her return in order to discuss plans for the wedding. I noticed that the house seemed uncharacteristically clean and the kitchen cupboards in almost obsessive-compulsive order. My mother-in-law was an efficient woman but she was no domestic goddess, and I knew that the rows and rows of homemade marmalade in the larder could not have been her doing. When one of the jars appeared on the breakfast table, I studied the label. ‘Iris’, it read. ‘Spring, 1985.’ As it turned out, Iris’s excellent marmalade had been enjoyed year after year by Laurent, his father and his brothers – even by Madeleine herself – without their ever once alluding to the mysterious English woman who had settled into that house for six weeks to make it.

  Four years later Iris would fall ill with cancer, and I watched my mother-in-law stand by in mute misery while her angry, grief-stricken husband spent night after night at the other woman’s hospital bedside. On one occasion only, Madeleine confessed her distress to me. We were sitting in the kitchen of their flat in the sixteenth arrondissement.

  ‘Why don’t you leave him?’ I asked.

  She smiled kindly at me.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘He’s making you suffer.’

  ‘He’s suffering more than me.’ She pulled herself together and stood up to prepare lunch for her husband, who came home every day without fail. ‘Anyway,’ she said bravely, ‘we don’t do divorce in this family.’

  It was Madeleine’s profound conviction – one held by much of Paris’s bourgeoisie, even today – that passion and desire should be accommodated within a marriage. You navigate your way through these emotions, treating your spouse as carefully as you can in the process. But on no account do you leave them.

  Iris, the marmalade mistress, died of cancer and was replaced a few years later by another, younger woman, who also happened to be English. My mother-in-law accepted this new woman into the shadows of her marriage and only once lost her temper. When she discovered that, during one of her absences in India, her husband had brought their grandchildren to the woman’s house for tea, she had asked Laurent, as the eldest son, to take his father out to lunch and have a word with him. Laurent obliged his mother and found that he didn’t have to say much; his father knew he had crossed the line and Laurent was pretty sure it would never happen again.

  *

  When I first arrived in the mid-eighties, I was particularly shocked by an advertisement for 1664 beer that was showing in French cinemas at the time. A beautiful mother is collecting her little boy from school. Shots of her waiting with the other mothers for her child to appear are interspersed with shots of her with her lover, whom she has just left in a hotel room. Cut into the image of her little boy running towards her with his arms open are images of a hand unbuttoning her silk shirt, her long hair released from its pins, her head thrown back in sexual rapture. Philippe, a friend in advertising, explained the message:

  ‘If you’re a woman who drinks this brand of beer you’ll be powerful and enviable, not bound by convention. You’ll be the Total Woman – mother, lover, wife. You’ll have everything,’ Philippe explained. ‘That ad was the beginning of a movement which started to depict women as sexy, mysterious, multi-faceted creatures who were in control of their destinies. It was the end of the housewife and the beginning of the sexually liberated woman.’

  Of course, this particular vision of sexual liberation was completely lost on me. Accompanying our Protestant vision of sex as dirty is the feminist idea that to depict a woman as a sexual object is to degrade her. Embedded in my friend’s explanation is the French belief that it is possible to use sex to sell without degrading women. As a result French advertisers have never hesitated in using sex in their campaigns, often to the exclusion of all subtlety, humour or creativity.

  It is hard for me to rekindle the intensity of the moral outrage I felt on discovering French attitudes towards infidelity. I do remember interrogating my new husband on the subject like an inquisitive child.

  ‘But what would you do if I went and slept with someone else?’

  ‘I’d hope you wouldn’t be stupid enough to let me find out.’

  ‘But wouldn’t you want to know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What is the point?’

  ‘Knowing the truth.’

  ‘The truth is overrated,’ he said.

  *

  After I had been in Paris for a few years, one of Laurent’s acquaintances invited me out to lunch. I had sat next to him at a dinner party and he had asked me if I would be interested in doing some translation work. He was an auctioneer and often needed catalogues translated into English. The following week he took me to Fouquet’s (an expensive restaurant off the Champs-Elysées, later favoured by members of the Yakuza [Japanese Mafia], now reputed among the Parisian haute bourgeoisie as flashy and vulgar, and where the upstart president Sarkozy went to celebrate his election victory). Once seated in a secluded alcove upstairs, the auctioneer proceeded to flirt with me so openly that I began to wonder if it weren’t some elaborate joke. As he had the self-seriousness of certain very short men, I thought this unlikely. Then, over coffee, he came to the point: would I like to be his mistress? I laughed out loud. He looked me dead in the eye, his pouting little mouth twitching with indignation.

  ‘I do not make jokes about such matters.’

  I turned red with embarrassment.

  ‘You don’t have to answer now,’ he said. ‘Think about it. We would meet once, maybe twice a week. I will spoil you. Make you feel desired.’

  ‘Thank you but No.’

  ‘Do you not find me attractive?’

  I began to cast about the room for an escape. He had asked for an isolated table. There were no waiters in sight.

  ‘It’s not that,’ I stammered. ‘I just don’t want to be unfaithful to my husband.’

  There was a long pause. He coolly observed my embarrassment.

  ‘You should be careful then.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You shouldn’t make yourself available as you do. You give off signals that you’re disponible [available].’

  ‘Well, I’m not disponible.’

  During that dinner with Laurent, then, he had got the idea that I was available. I had not yet learnt that the kind of chummy, asexual openness with which British and American men and women behave towards each other could be easily misconstrued in France.

  Because of the ubiquity of the seduction game, Parisian women tend to cultivate a certain detachment, often approaching haughtiness. They keep up their guard with men, letting it down by mathematical degree according to the level of their sexual interest.

  I came home that evening smarting with righteous indignation.

  ‘Can you believe it?’

  ‘Of course,’ Laurent said, calmly folding his paper.

  ‘But it’s disgusting. He’s supposed to be a friend of yours.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘And he invited me to lunch right under your nose.’

  ‘He was just trying it on. If he fails, he’s lost nothing.’

  ‘God, I hope I never see him again.’

  I did, of course, see him again. When we next bumped into each other, he pretended to have difficulty placing me. He clicked his fingers.

  ‘Of course! Laurent’s wife. How are you?’

  *

  The unwritten rule that the pursuit of erotic pleasure is a basic human right applies in France to women as well as men. As a result, French men, unlike Italian men, are not haunted by the spectre of the cuckold. The word cocu(e) can be applied to men and women, and adultery is widely perceived as one of the principal components of marriage.

  On the next occasion that a member of Laurent’s entourage made a pass at me I was better prepared. But this tim
e my reaction indicated a very slight erosion of my moral defences.

  I was researching a story for an English glossy magazine about literary salons in France. Laurent had told me about some aristocrat who had a castle in Brittany where members of the intelligentsia gathered to eat, drink and be highbrow. I had already interviewed the host, Jean-Daniel, in his office in the eighth arrondissement and was due to spend the weekend at his château in order to write a long, colourful piece describing the characters, atmosphere and events of one of these salons. He suggested we catch the train together on Friday evening.

  Jean-Daniel picked a first-class compartment that remained miraculously empty on an otherwise busy commuter train, and it was only afterwards that I wondered if he might have bribed the guard. I sat down by the window so that I could use the table to make notes. Instead of sitting in the seat opposite me, he sat down beside me. He was considerably less repulsive than the diminutive auctioneer and I began to chat nervously, while he stared at me. When he took my hand and began kissing my fingers, there was a moment of hesitation before I pulled my hand away.

  For the rest of the journey I barricaded myself in with banter and the appropriate body language, but I had let my guard down and he knew it. I avoided him all weekend and as a result the article was flat and lifeless and never got published. When, in a Protestant bid for transparency, I recounted the episode to Laurent, he was highly amused and admitted to feeling aroused by the picture of me having my fingers kissed on a train.

  *

  There is a saying in France that everyone is entitled to his or her jardin secret (secret garden). This quaint phrase tends to be a euphemism for infidelity and conveys the innocuousness of the sin in France. Today, in spite of rumours of an invasion of Anglo-Saxon prurience, the mainstream press, generally speaking, still regards the sex lives of French politicians as below their interest. Only the growing numbers of celebrity magazines, modelling themselves on British and American tabloids, are prepared to violate France’s stringent privacy laws and pay the fines. The broadsheets are still too cautious to brave the tradition of shameless interventionism from politicians who can and will have people removed from their posts or relegated to placards (cupboards) – the term used for the dead-end jobs created for employees who have displeased the authorities. Even Sarkozy, who aspires to Anglo-Saxon transparency when it comes to his private life, couldn’t help having Alain Genestar sacked as editor-in-chief of Paris Match after the news magazine published a picture of his then wife, Cécilia, with her lover. Sarkozy’s behaviour was widely viewed as the petulance of the runner-up, rather than the action of someone trying to preserve his reputation.