The Secret Life of France (3 page)

‘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 time 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.

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.