Chapter Three

Adultery, the Cult of Beauty and Le Jardin Secret.

In France, unlike Britain, sex is seen, 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 French bourgeoisie, at least, good sex is the single most satisfactory method of raising oneself above the drudgery 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.
    In our Anglo-Saxon culture, sex and love frequently become polarised because of guilt. In such a context sex can only achieve purification through love. There has always been a tendency in Britain 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. 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. It is felt, particularly among the Parisian middle classes, 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 discrete, to seek your fix elsewhere.
    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 an 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-facetted 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.
    A perfect example of this creative impoverishment was an advert for Lajaunie liquorice sweets that was also showing in cinemas when I first arrived. It depicted a young woman in a tight yellow T-shirt with no bra, jumping up and down and jiggling her breasts while saying ‘Lajaunie’ over and over again in a girlie voice. That was it. It lasted about 15 seconds.
    “That ad won awards,” Philippe said. “They had no money and they had to get the brand name out. It really worked.”
    It is hard for me to rekindle the intensity of the moral outrage I felt on discovering Parisian 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.’
    At the time, Laurent was wise enough not to try to explain something that my background would prevent me from understanding. Years later I would discover his utter scorn for the policy of truth-at-all-cost.

*    *    *

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 auction catalogues translated into English. The following week he took me to Fouquet’s. (This is an expensive restaurant off the Champs Elysées, once favoured by members of the Yakuza and reputed among the Parisian Haute Bourgeoisie as flashy and vulgar, 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 don’t make jokes about such matters.’
    I flushed 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 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, he had got the idea that I was available. I had not yet learnt that the kind of chummy, asexual openness with which English men and women behave towards each other can be misconstrued here.      
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 their level of sexual interest.
    I came home that evening smarting with righteous indignation.
    ‘Can you believe it?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘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. 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 both men and women. 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, among the Parisian bourgeoisie at least, is seen 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 more prepared. But this time my reaction indicated a slight erosion of my moral defenses. 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 high-brow. I had already interviewed the host, Jean-Daniel, in his office in the 8th 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 more attractive than the diminutive auctioneer and I began to chat nervously. He was watching me like a piece of prey and I sensed that he was going to pounce. When he took my hand and began to kiss my fingers, there was a moment of hesitation before I pulled my hand away: it had felt nice.
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. A measure of my corroded values was the fact that I didn’t mention the episode to Laurent.

*    *    *

The relative tolerance to infidelity in this country 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 Novel 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 and opinion. He was a kind of vassal, 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 the 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 schools. She'd sit up at the front and intervene copiously in a booming voice and with 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 most erudite Presidents of the Fifth Republic, 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 for the himself and the world to recognise 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 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.
    Today, in spite of rumours of an invasion of Anglo-Saxon prurience, the mainstream press still regards the sex lives of French politicians as off limits. 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.
    This habit of meddling with the media is an established tradition in France. Her two most influential newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro, were basically created - or in the case of Le Figaro, re-created - by de Gaulle in his own image. From as early as 1944, in his configuration of France’s post-traumatic political landscape, the General was animated by a deep mistrust of communism. Forced, by a legitimacy conferred by their Resistance credentials, to compose a government with Communist ministers, de Gaulle was careful to make sure that French radio and newspapers fell into in the hands of his political allies. Driven by a dual mistrust of communism and the Americans, de Gaulle created a new daily newspaper, Le Monde and named his resistance buddy, Hubert Beuve Méry as its editor. It was Beuve Méry who said on the eve of the allied landings “The Americans constitute a real danger to France. They can stop a necessary revolution and their materialism does not have the tragic grandeur of the totalitarian regimes.” Once again, at the heart of this widespread anti-American sentiment lies the conviction that Anglo-Saxon culture is basely materialistic and lacking in grandeur. It is this very sentiment, this love of so-called "tragic grandeur" that led legions of French intellectuals to support two of the worst totalitarian regimes in history - Mao's and Stalin's - long after everyone else had woken up to their horrors.
    Just like Le Monde, the modern day Le Figaro was intentionally partisan. In 1944, the paper reappeared, after a two year hiatus under the Nazi occupation. This right-leaning daily newspaper, in existence since 1826, became the official mouthpiece of the newly founded political party, the MRP, which had its roots in the Christian branches of the Resistance. Its first edition of 25th August, 1944 opened with a eulogistic editorial by François Mauriac on de Gaulle. This politicisation of the press, born out of the trauma of collaboration and the dangerous instability of post-war France, has meant that there is no lasting tradition of independence in the media. It also goes some way towards explaining the paucity of investigative journalism. Since the General, Presidents Mitterrand, Chirac and even Sarkozy are all known to have picked up their phones to have someone sacked from a TV station or newspaper.

*    *    *

There is a saying in France that everyone is entitled to their secret garden or jardin secret. Not everyone, however, is able to indulge that right. In this very ‘lookist’ society, whether or not you have a jardin secret often depends on the gifts that Nature has endowed you with. France, for all her obsession with equality, has never attempted to level the erotic playing field. Beauty still has cult 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 estheticienne (beauty technician) in even the most remote villages. (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 aesthetisme 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 its manifestations, it is a value in itself. Everyone aspires to La Beaute (or l’Elegance, its more democratic twin)  in their physical being, their dress, their lives, their work, their homes. 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 facades, 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 – such things as commercial gain, efficiency or speed - is secondary.
    For the French, Beauty does not reside exclusively in the past. It is a living, breathing, endlessly mutating godhead. They’re not afraid of modernity, as long as it is beautiful. The TGV is fast but it is above all, beautiful. Those voices, which at first decried the glass pyramid that was to be placed in the courtyard of the Palais du Louvre, quickly faded away: “...Highly contested at the time and yet so beautiful in its transparent purity…” raves a tourist guide to Paris’ 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 prestige of magnificent architectural Grand Travaux that Mitterrand’s was, simply because he had bad taste, and bad taste is rarely allowed to triumph in France. Chirac is associated with the monumentally ugly Palais des Congres on the Porte Maillot, a Soviet-style edifice built while he was Prime Minister under Pompidou. Caving in to pressure, Chirac tried to make this building right in the nineties by spending 500 million euros on having it re-faced by one of Mitterrand’s favourite architects, Christian de Porzemparc. When, as the newly elected Mayor of Paris, Chirac unilaterally chose Jean Willerval’s steel and chrome ‘umbrellas’ for the site of Paris’ old food markets (Forum des Halles), it became clear that he could not be trusted and he never tried to impose his taste on the city again.

*    *    *

As an English woman I am still sometimes shocked 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 it is touching that she is so touched by another girl’s beauty. But on the other hand, she, like all her girlfriends, experiences levels of insecurity about her appearance from which I’m sure her English counterparts are be shielded. On the other hand, there is no equivalent in France to the sheer power of British magazine culture and while political correctness might preserve young women from physical stereotyping, British celebrity culture certainly picks up the slack.

*   *   *

If Nature hasn’t been generous to a French person, either men or women, they 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. This statistic is probably due to two main factors: less shame and better health coverage.
    The advertisement below comes from the website of one of Paris’ 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 contemporary Britain and the resulting de-sexualisation has made it difficult to return to these archaic 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, by all accounts, an elegance and a decorum in Paris’ swingers’ clubs that makes them remarkably unthreatening. Laurent, who has been a few times with various girlfriends, some platonic and others not, 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 swinger’s club. He knew that with my background, our evening would never be light, 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 Martyns. 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 of mohair, 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, Cédric would put it, clothes that chopped me up into ‘unflattering sections.’ It was Cédric whom my husband had left, that first summer, in charge of taking me shopping.
    "Ma chérie," Cédric 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."
    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 emphasize certain elements of a person’s physique and to deemphasize others. 
    Cédric 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. Here the word plastique contains both the meanings ‘beauty’ and ‘shape’. 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 betrays the no doubt sexist 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 shocked or thrilled or appalled my girlfriends at Oxford 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.
    Elly, my nineteen 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 cat-calls, 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 Elly, of course, it felt like rudeness to be ignored.