The Secret Life of France Read online

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  The relative tolerance to infidelity in France is reflected both in the media and in the extremely stringent libel and privacy laws. French newspapers never hound a public figure for acts of infidelity. For many Anglo-Saxon journalists this is further proof of French gutlessness and pusillanimity. I think it is more to do with the primacy of pleasure over duty.

  Not long after I had arrived in Paris for good, Laurent took me to a dinner party. The conversation touched on the newly opened Musée d’Orsay, which some felt was a triumph and others a failure. Everyone, however, approved of the curatorship of the collection. Anne Pingeot, the president’s mistress, had been a good choice. When I asked how they all knew that she was the president’s mistress, no one bothered to answer. When I went on to ask why it wasn’t in the papers, a journalist from the weekly news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur took umbrage.

  ‘What for? It’s not news. Why should it be in the papers? It’s no one’s business who the president chooses to sleep with …’

  Listening to him talk, I got the distinct impression that the journalist considered himself less a reporter than an arbiter of taste. He was also a kind of vassal, the guardian of his Lord’s privacy. I listened, agog, as they went on to discuss the president’s ‘secret’ love-child, Mazarine. The journalist sat with a knowing expression on his face while another guest lamented Mitterrand’s choice of a rather gloomy flat for his mistress and their child. Someone remarked on its redeeming view of the Seine.

  ‘He’s been going there every evening to help Mazarine with her homework. Apparently, she’s a good student. He hopes to get her into Normale.’

  Normale is the absurdly inappropriate abbreviation for the impossibly competitive Ecole Normale Supérieure. Every year thousands of French children, who have been groomed by ambitious parents – often since birth – apply for about forty places. (At every parent–teacher meeting I attended I could always spot the mother whose child was being groomed for one of these Grandes Ecoles. She’d sit up at the front and interject incessantly in a booming voice, with all the authority of someone convinced that her offspring was destined to run the country.)

  As for Mazarine, the years of private coaching from one of the nation’s most erudite presidents paid off in the end. She got into Normale ten years later, specialised in Spinoza and came out fourth in her year. Indeed, it was the year she got into Normale that Mitterrand decided it was time he and the world recognised his brilliant daughter, his two legitimate sons, Jean-Christophe and Gilbert, having been a bit of a disappointment. (The elder would make his name as a fraudster and arms dealer, while the younger would forever languish in his father’s shadow as a small-time apparatchik of the Socialist Party.) Dying slowly at the time of prostate cancer, the president gave his permission for his ‘secret family’ to be revealed to the world, and the whole saga was told in full-colour pictures in Paris Match. Mitterrand had insisted on the presence of all three of his women – wife, daughter and mistress – at his funeral. When it finally took place in January 1996, the papers extolled the ‘dignity’ of the wife, Danielle Mitterrand, in the presence of a woman with whom she had been sharing her husband for more than thirty years.

  Much has been written in the Anglo-Saxon press about President Sarkozy’s new style of governance and the apparently un-French way in which he dangles his private life in front of the media. It is true that the easy summoning of Paris Match into his life with Carla Bruni would suggest a new frankness, a willingness to offer up his jardin secret to public scrutiny. In the early days of his liaison with the former model the president held a press conference at the Elysée Palace in which he famously announced their decision ‘not to lie’ about their affair. This did indeed represent a break with presidential tradition, but there was a certain continuity in President Sarkozy’s deep-seated conviction that when it came to exercising his libido, the public would always be on his side. In the same press conference the president, with an undeniably flirtatious swagger, thanked TV journalist Roselyne Febvre for her question on his vie sentimentale and pointed out that she would never have dared to quiz his predecessors on their love lives, even when it was a known fact that they were ‘playing away’. Alluding to Mitterrand’s double life, Sarkozy announced his desire to end the ‘hypocrisy’ of former presidents and live in the open. He then went on to urge the press to exercise taste and restraint in their reporting of his life, requesting not to be photographed first thing in the morning (or indeed in the evening). The coy and admiring way in which the female journalist received the president’s recommendations offered a perfect vignette of both France’s sexual politics and the independence of her media.

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  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 h
is 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.

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  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.

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  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.

  * Nicolas Sarkozy was the first president to decide to break this tradition – which never became law.

  3

  Being a Woman

  La Libido, La Femme Fatale and the Sisterhood

  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.