Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (29 page)

High-strung, impatient, guarded, Madame X moved around her small office in Paris’s Opéra neighborhood like a caged lioness—or a Puerto Rican dancer in
West Side Story
. She plucked the sunglasses off her Medusa curls, twirled them, dropped them on her cluttered desk by her shrilling cellular phone, replaced them, scratched her stress-martyred hands, then answered the mobile with a sigh.

If previously I had doubts about her qualifications as a seductress—she certainly had not conquered me—this telephone conversation dispelled them. Her face and voice altered as she purred into the cellular phone, cajoling the woman at the other end in several languages. If nothing else, I sensed, Madame X was a good actress.

“Seventy percent of my clients are men,” she confirmed once off the phone, “thirty percent women.” Almost all her women clients, it turned out, come not to learn how to seduce men. Some want to master more effective business communications techniques. But, in a country with a thirty-three-percent divorce rate, where bed-hopping is the national pastime, most of them simply want to learn how to keep the men they have.

“Between you and me,” she said, getting colloquial and chummy, “we French women are spoiled. We’ve got full rights, we can have an abortion, we can take the Pill, we can cheat on our husband—no one busts your ass anymore if you commit adultery and it sure wasn’t like that once upon a time. We work, we’re independent—I just don’t understand why we complain. My grandmother always told me, ‘You’re so damn lucky!’ I’ve got to say, I’m very happy to have been born and to live now.”

The main problem with Frenchmen, it seems, and therefore the raison d’être for Madame X’s school, is the result of the power of French women today—women who don’t have time for men, families, love, or courtship.

Madame X’s men—most of them engineers, computer programmers, professionals, or business executives aged thirty to fifty—don’t know how to behave with these superwomen, have difficulty communicating with them, and have come to fear them. Madame X’s school is the last resort, the Last Chance Saloon for many who’ve already been to shrinks, matchmakers, and a variety of singles clubs. So her clients spend several thousand dollars and two to nine months learning how to overcome their fears—of rejection, ridicule, or psychic castration.

“For a while there, I wasn’t exactly cuddly with men myself,” she said, fixing me with a razor-sharp gaze. “I was one of those
castratrices
. Yes, a ball-cutter. Yes, we are ball-cutters, but Frenchmen have become pretty wimpy, too, pretty weak. It’s like, ‘We were victims, now the men are victims—everyone gets his turn.’ But that’s not going to fix anyone’s problems.”

A similar set of problems, related to post-feminist psychic castration, arose at about the same time in Italy, long believed to be the heartland of the Latin Lover. I mentioned this to Madame X and told her how I attended and reported on a school similar to hers run by a certain Giuseppe Cirillo, alias the Prince of Seduction or Doctor Seduction. In real life, Cirillo is a Neapolitan lawyer-turned-psychologist-sexual-therapist. He directed the 2009 movie
Impotenti esistenziali
—about “existential impotence.” With increasing social mobility and waning family values in Italy as in France, starting in the 1980s Italian men were suddenly finding themselves washed by their careers onto the shores of strange cities, surrounded by unfamiliar and demanding women. Liberated Italian feminists of the day dreamed up the slogan “Bread but also roses,” a baffling refrain to many Italian men and one which spawned countless then unheard-of lonely-hearts clubs, as well as Cirillo’s seduction school.

The colorful Cirillo Method, as I experienced it, involved individual and group activities that ranged from the banal—matching facial expressions with Cirillo’s so-called “seventy-five primary emotions,” gauging “gait and body language,” using “voice modulation, eye and hand techniques”—to the outlandish. Not only did we engage in thigh-to-thigh role-playing (in one session I had to explain my way out of being caught sleeping with my girlfriend’s best friend, in another I had to try to sell seminude ballerina figurines to the Salesian Brothers’ Oratory). We were also introduced to Cirillo’s secret weapon, the
tavola delle esclusioni
, a painted wood silhouette of a woman, with strategically placed slots at head, shoulder, and waist level. Out went the lights. In came a female presence. After sliding the silhouette’s panels back and forth, allowing us to see the mystery woman’s eyes, lips, cleavage, or waistline, Cirillo ordered us to step up and knead and stroke her. This was one of the most extravagantly embarrassing episodes of my adult life, but my fellow students, some of whom hadn’t touched a flesh-and-blood woman in years, were delighted.

Being French, and a woman, Madame X did not offer her clients anything remotely like Dr. Cirillo’s silhouette contraption. When I finished telling her about it she became pyrotechnic. “He must have a bunch of basket cases as clients, guys in death throes, morbidly shy guys,” she said, referring to Cirillo and his men. “I don’t have morbidly shy types, I have normal guys.” As proof she showed me a few photographs. Her clients did look normal. The first thing she does, she said, when she meets a potential client, is interview him, then send him to a clinical psychologist she works with. After he’s been profiled, she and the psychologist consult with the client and set up a strictly personal course of instruction. It can include everything from role-playing to field trips (pickup practice in clubs, cafés, parks), to dance classes or visits to a sexual therapist. “Some of my clients are virgins,” she admitted, “others say they don’t know how to put on a condom.”

Often the beginning of a typically Parisian course with Madame X involves the sartorial and hygienic remake of a client. She showed me a series of photos demonstrating how she and her crew have transformed one client from a hopeless slob—mismatched tie and shirt, baggy outdoorsy pants and rain gear, unkempt hair—to a snazzy hunk. In the photos the remade man wears a gray suit and dark turtleneck and his hair is raked back like a rake with a license to seduce. This makeover technique is called
re-lookage
, a wonderful example of the Franglais Madame X favors. “I often use Alain Delon as an example of how to dress,” she said deadpan, adding that she believes clothes do indeed make the man. “He’s a successful role model. You might or might not like him, but he’s not your run-of-the-mill actor, and he did it himself, so it means you
can
transform a man. When you work at it, when you have the will to change yourself, you can.”

Dr. Cirillo may have his silhouette, but Madame X has two secret weapons of her own. The first is the small black Belgian sheepdog that snorted and padded around the office as we spoke. Parisians are dog obsessive; Madame X lends her pet to her clients so they can easily pick up dog-owning females anywhere.

The second weapon comes in the form of field trips to one of Dr. Cirillo’s stomping grounds: Rome. She met her husband there, an Italian who picked her up in a café. This explains why Madame X is convinced that Cirillo’s clients are total basket cases.

“I take a bunch of Parisian men, we fly to Rome, go the center of town, and I and my women helpers are the bait,” she explained. “We sit at a café and demonstrate how Roman men pick us up. We get all dolled up, we sit down, with our clients nearby, and then we wait. And I assure you we don’t wait long. Go sit at a Paris café and unless you’re wearing a miniskirt pulled up to your panties you can wait two hours before a guy will even talk to you.”

So, I asked, despite Cirillo’s basket cases, the secret of being a great lover is to be Italian? I could just imagine the Bill Gates lookalikes at Madame X’s future American campuses exchanging their pen-protectors for
Dolce Vita
suits, worn boldly to help them shark in on single gals slurping twenty-ounce lattes at the local Starbucks.

“I’m not going to teach American men to pick women up like Roman men,” she protested. “The essential thing is to be likeable instantly in the first seconds when approaching someone.”

I soon understood why Madame X was hoping to open a school in America, specifically in California, a Mother Lode of dot.com nerds, luckless bohemian bourgeois
bobos
, and geeks surrounded by post-feminist
castratrices
with sharp sheers, fat wallets, and dating contracts (You
shall not touch me until I specifically request you to do so …
).

One question remained in my mind, however: was she qualified? Madame X has traveled to, but never lived in, America. She speaks fluent though flawed English and demonstrates a deep understanding of American culture. “My impression,” she confided, “is Americans don’t know how to flirt. There isn’t a single American who knows how to flirt, and I mean the mating dance, the seduction dance, they don’t know how to do it. They don’t have good table manners either. I’m not saying all Americans are like that—some aren’t of course but … The guys in Silicon Valley, in front of their computers all day, they barely know how to hold a fork. American guys can be jokesters, bon vivants, and suddenly they reach out and grab your ass and say
I want to fuck you
or whatever. They’re capable of behaving like real hicks. Whereas the bourgeois American guy is calmer, more puritanical.”

Once I had left her office I formulated in my mind the “Madame X Method” in three easy steps. One: if you’re a man, have Roman gene–implant therapy. Two: if you’re a woman, fly to Rome and drink your latte there (despite the fact that no grown Italian drinks latte, which simply means “milk”). Three: if the first two methods don’t work, buy a dog. In any case, do not bother coming to Paris in search of romance. Apparently the women nowadays are viragos, the men wimps.

In the Spring

When good Americans die they go to Paris
.

—O
SCAR
W
ILDE
,
A Woman of No Importance
(1893)

l fait beau, c’est le printemps
, ran the lusciously enunciated, taped dialogue at the Pompidou Center’s language laboratory. “The weather is beautiful, spring is here,” I repeated, joining my own to a dozen eager voices as snow fell beyond the windows. Wherever I went that first April in Paris—now three decades ago—through sleet, rain, wind, and snow, I would cheerfully say my
bonjours
in grade-school French, adding with a wink,
c’est le printemps
. As if in answer the cloudy sky would blow for a few minutes into a blue expanse shot through with light, brightening the wet tin-and-tile mansard roofs time and again, like pebbles on a beach.

Cynics will remind you that the tune “April in Paris” got its name because the lyricist needed a two-syllable word for his refrain, and “May” or “June” wouldn’t do. So what if the “thrill” of a wintry Paris April rhymes with “chill?” Springtime in Paris is a celebration, a chant, a hope—a modest dream that keeps millions going. Even people who have only visited the city in their imaginings know about it. They have sniffed and tasted a Paris spring in books, movies, and paintings, and felt it warming their skin from Moscow to Manhattan. To Romantics and adepts of Shakespeare a Paris spring means sweet lovers loving on the Seine. To foodies it’s the arrival of the year’s new Michelin
Guide France
to hotels and restaurants. To footloose walk-aholics like Alison and me, spring stands for flower-spangled gardens and sunny hikes. Of course, to those who view life through jade-colored lenses, and see horizontal pollution where cobbles glisten, it means rain, wind, and the first crowds of noxious tourists.