The queen of coquetterie
Napoleon's reign
sobered things up but all through it, as previously during the Directoire,
one woman was the talk of Europe. This was partly because of her beauty,
for Juliette Récamier was probably the most beautiful woman of the time,
but mostly because of her skill at coquetterie. This goddess spent
her time breaking hearts without losing her own. She led her legions of
adorers, from Lucien Bonaparte and Bernadotte to Metternich and Prince
Auguste of Prussia, through the frustrations of the carte du tendre
and then stopped short before their reward. They were close to suicide
but she kept them as friends. Juliette was 16 when she was married off
to Récamier, who -- according to her niece -- never made use of his conjugal
rights; she remained a virgin until she was 41, when she met Chateaubriand
in May 1817. She fell like a ton of bricks, but kept him at arm's length
until October. This love lasted until they both died in 1849.
Juliette's coquetterie may well have been the inspiration of Empress
Eugénie. Napoleon III was determined not to marry her. The court was against
it, his mother was against it, it would bring no useful alliance to France.
She was seen everywhere with him in magnificent attire, but withheld her
favors for two years, until the wedding. If he played wooing games under
her bedroom window, she simply sang, "First, to church!"
French women today? They're as careful -- as obsessed, British and American
women like to say -- with their clothes, their hairdos, with dermatology,
in short with paraître, as ever. Mastering it, they have also mastered
the art of being sponsored for surfboarding across the Atlantic, solo
traversing the South Pole, or climbing whatever profession they pick.
Ask them what matters most and the answer is plaire -- to please.
Gaelle Piccard and Sévérine Roscot work for Bayard, the publishing house,
Gaelle, as an editor, Sévérine, in public relations. Gaelle is in her
thirties, a widow. Sévérine, in her late twenties, is unmarried. Both
are dark, slim, elegant and clearly French. At lunch, they launched into
the subject of pleasing, with gusto. In French. It is difficult to do
it justice to in English.
Gaelle: "La courteoisie française -- French courtesy -- is to consider
someone, the person you're talking to, as seduisant, seductive,
to give him or her the feeling that they are seduisant. If that
person is not seduisant, all the more reason to make them feel
that they are... because he will be more susceptible (sensitive)!!!
L'injure la plus mortelle -- the most deadly insult -- is to give
someone the feeling that they're not séduisant."
Sévérine: "And to show someone that they're seductive, you must be yourself
very soignée... well-groomed, careful about your appearance." They
learn this from their mothers, for instance, the smooth skin that results
from not shaving legs and underarms, but waxing them. Painfully. They
have an annual subscription to go regularly go the épilateur. "Then
when you're 40, the hair doesn't come back any more." (Later, Etienne
B., from Bordeaux told me: "I love it if women are hairless everywhere.
Well, except on their head.")
Gaelle: "Yes, and all this shows in your bearing, your manners, your clothes,
your way of speaking, your conversation, your wit... I want my women friends
as well as my men friends to be séduisantes, charming and good
looking."
Marthe de Rohan Chabot, a psychoanalyst, agrees. "Oui. On veut plaire,"
she says.
The ultimate French
weapon
A foreigner who
exults in séduction à la française is a gorgeous Japanese widow,
Lady Albery. She was on her way to a cocktail party when we met at her
hotel, drop-dead elegant in a black smoking (tuxedo) with satin
lapels, and a polka dot tie with a diamond pin. She loves France.
"The game of seduction is everything here," she said. "Seducing, in the
French sense of the word -- charming -- adds such spice to life. Charm
is the most powerful weapon here. If you don't use it, you'll be overcharged
by the taxi driver, you won't get your hotel room. The hotel concierge
is the biggest test. If you can't get that cold, closed, formal face to
relax and be charming to you in four days, move to another hotel."
The nuts and bolts of all this beauty, of being coquette and séduisante
-- and gorgeous after 50 -- that is, what goes on at the hairdresser's,
the dress shops, the boutiques for waxing, facials and body care often
perplex British and American women. They're uneasy about pampering themselves.
They're shocked at the expense (30 euros for a complete leg waxing, 70
euros for a facial). If you grow up in the U.S. or the U.K. scolded for
looking in the mirror, it's going to be difficult to get yourself to labor
mightily over the perfection of your appearance.
Sophie Y., 22, a slim and lovely Medill student, grew up in Chicago. Her
mother is French, her father, American. "I always knew I was different,
because my French mother brought me up telling me that my body was wonderful,
to love it and take care of it," she told me. "With American girls, it's
different. They're really not pleased and proud of it, like French girls."
At a visit to one of Paris's famous hairdressing salons soon after her
arrival in France, Lynn Kelley, an American from Florida, had a good look
at the role of French mothers in bringing up future French women. Lynn,
always elegant, with cover-girl blond looks, had decided on a splurge
chez Carita to raise her spirits.
"This wasn't a salon as I knew it," she said, "but an alien world where
chic women were giving each other air kisses, ordering lunch for their
dogs and having their toenails painted and their eyelashes tinted. I sat
there quietly for ages, ignored, too intimidated to make a fuss. Just
as my 'stylist' finally waved me into a chair, a glamorous woman breezed
in with her little daughter, about seven. More air kisses and excited
discussions about this person or that, yesterday's party or tomorrow's.
And wouldn't you know it, the stylist asked me to wait just one petite
minute, the little mademoiselle needed her hair cut. Up she went,
sitting on cushions piled up like the princess and the pea, regarding
herself with satisfaction in the mirror from all angles. I was fascinated.
How does a seven-year-old child get that much confidence? That much style?
La petite minute turned into 40 minutes, time to ponder that Parisian
women are different and that the difference starts very early.
Somehow they know that it's not beauty that counts, but chic, and part
of chic is confidence."
To an out-of-context foreigner, every day in Paris seems like Valentine's
Day. Greg Young, from Yorkshire, came to one of my seminars saying he'd
figured out why Paris is known as the City of Love: "It's because everywhere
you look, people are kissing." A movie-theatre ad for coffee shows an
amorous young man trying to make friends with a young woman on a train.Young
girls and old ladies are treated with gallantry by salesmen in stores.
Every week there are prime time evening television discussions of amour.
Books, movies, television programs show men and women enjoying each other's
company. You can watch them in cafés and restaurants: they're exchanging
ideas, looks, smiles, complicity... with lots of coquetterie.
Do foreigners understand what is going on? Not always. The message about
French amour courtois and coquetterie gets skewed over borders
to the north and overseas. French mothers obliged to send their children
to school in the U.S. and the U.K. tell of their daughters being taunted
with 'French whore' and 'slut.' The mother of a 13-year-old in school
in Cincinnati told of her daughter coming home in tears after being asked
who her pimp was. English newspapers regularly allude to the French as
sex-obsessed.
The French ambassador to the UN invited Sylvie Couturié to an elegant
dinner in New York before she was married. "I had American men on both
sides of me," she said, "and one of them ignored me completely until the
dinner was almost over. Then he turned to me and said, 'Will you sleep
with me tonight?' Of course I was shocked at this rudeness, and of course
I said No. But I was curious why he would ask me, since we had hardly
spoken and certainly had no atomes crochus, as we say in French
-- hooked atoms. So I asked him. He said, 'Because you're French.'"
Folies Bergères to the contrary, French girls, closely guarded by their
parents, are probably the most modest in Europe. Showing their shapes
is not an invitation but is part of the culture of paraître.
"There is a true complicity between French men and women," said Emmanuella
Dalyac, a young French mother and freelance writer living in London. "That's
why they flirt. It makes it spicier. It doesn't mean they want sex, as
the English and Americans often think. They just like being together,
it feels better that way. English and American men often misinterpret
the codes. French women wear lots of earrings and bracelets and rings
because it's part of the fun of flirting to look feminine -- not because
they're out for sex."
Emmanuella says that even her French accent brings unpleasant comments
from English men. "Last week in a taxi crossing Hyde Park, the driver
recognized that I was French, and in a greasy, vulgar voice, laughing,
said that the way I spoke was 'just like wearing black stockings.'"
Another skewed cross-cultural message is what Anglophones see as the "frivolous"
French view of marriage. They like to quote the actor Pierre Arditi, who,
when asked in an interview if he was faithful to his wife, quipped, "Often."
In La Bûche, one of the comedies mentioned above written and directed
by the beautiful Danièle Thompson, Sabine Azema plays a 40-year old singer
who has been having a merry affair for years with a married man. He has
four children, and a fifth is on the way -- no problem, except that Sabine
discovers she's also pregnant. The movie opens at a cemetery during the
burial of her stepfather. Her mother, discussing over her late husband's
grave his affair with his mistress, says that she buried him with his
mobile phone with the messages from his mistresses -- and that she never
had the heart to bother him about them. She is about to celebrate Christmas
with her first husband, also a philanderer.
In Le Goût des Autres, the other movie mentioned above written
and directed by a woman, Agnès Jaoui, the main character, an industrialist
plouc, leaves his wife for his intellectual, leftish English teacher
when he sees her on stage in Iphigénie. Jaoui herself is moving
and sad as a bar girl who warms up a romance with a former lover until
he tells her he has a petite amie (a steady) who is away, studying
in America. She shrugs and then falls in love with his colleague, who
loves but leaves her.
These movies are funny and tender. They have no steamy sex scenes and
no violence, but lots of talk, lots of wit, lots of fun and lots of love
involving the minor as well as the major characters, as there are in all
the recent popular French movies, without the coarseness of, for instance,
American Beauty. The theme running through them is that love is
good, it's there, it's tender and it matters, and so does marriage, and
enjoy it all as well as you can.
So does that mean that for the French, adultery is no big deal? Some anglophones
think so, and it riles them. "French men are liars," said Elisabeth Kine,
a Londoner whose company, Kilmuir, introduced cottage cheese to France.
"French men cheat on their wives as easily as combing their hair."
Others find the Gallic way -- to adore women and pretend to take serious
things lightly -- is preferable for the long haul.
"I used to be a hotshot stock broker in the City," said Eve C., from London,
"and then I married Jean-Marie and had three children. I thought I'd become
awfully boring, and asked Jean-Marie if he didn't miss the businesswoman
he married. And he said, 'Oh, no! Eve, you are the most wonderful woman!'
As if being a woman was something special! And that's the way he treats
me."
Young unmarried Anglo-Saxon women visiting France burn to know if the
French reputation for being unfaithful is true or false. It's like asking
if French water is pure or not. What water? Lake water, river water, well
water? No doubt centuries of love outside of marriage are a cultural turn-on.
No doubt the public example of the mistresses of the Kings and Presidents
has an effect. In France, government scandals are about money, not sex.
In Britain and the U.S., it's just the opposite. There is no Puritan streak
to the French. It's not so different in the other nearby countries, by
the way, Italy, Spain and Austria. In Austria I was told that for married
philanderers who want to stay married, all women are fair game except
for the au pair girl, the woman next door and an American -- because she'll
insist on marriage. Very often it's like father, like son. If a Frenchman
grows up with faithful parents, or if he has a deep religious faith, or
if he marries late and is captivated by his mate, he is likely to be faithful.
Also if they don't live in Paris.
Young Anglo-Saxon women also want to know how French women stand it, if
their husbands are unfaithful -- or do they? Is it possible that they
don't mind? That they're that different from British and American
women?
The answer to the second question is clear. Indeed, French women do mind.
Younger women mind violently. Their reaction is never like the one of
American and British women I know: "Well, if he's like that, then I'm
better off without him anyway." More likely they scheme to charm him back.
Women's magazines are full of pertinent suggestions. If there are children,
the equation is heavily weighted for them to weather things out. In any
case, French husbands usually want to stay with their families. The divorce
court is the last resort.
Tanja de Rosnay, a French author, wrote a novel called Marié et père
de famille (Married and a Father) about seven young couples
and how the wife found out that her husband had strayed, and her reaction.
I went to see her.
"Young wives are terrified at the idea," she said. "They say things like,
'If my husband is unfaithful, I'll kill myself.' As they get older, they
get more lucid. People live much longer now -- they see that for a man
to be faithful for 40 years is really asking a lot. The point is that
he should always deny it. No matter how incriminating the evidence,
he should never admit it. That is just too hard on wives. And he should
never have a long affair -- that hurts too much. Women today work and
don't have to put up with that -- and they don't. But -- short flings
in small doses, and above all, if he doesn't let his wife know...
I mean, after all. Particularly if there are children. "
In an interview, Françoise Sagan said something similar: "If a lover is
unfaithful and tells me, that's it, it's over. He just shouldn't tell
me."
Sylvia Couturié: "They have to be liars, if they're unfaithful. Not only
not to hurt the wife, but because appearances must be kept up. But every
situation is different. I have a friend whose husband's mistresses are
common knowledge. Her friends have felt that it was too bad that everyone,
including his wife, knew about them. She is in her 60's now, and during
a game of bridge recently, one of them said, 'Really, Marie-Claire, why
do you put up with Jean-Xavier's philandering?' And she very sensibly
said, 'Why not? He has always been a good husband to me, a good father
to our children, a good provider, we go on vacation together...' She raised
her index finger and looked at it. 'Why should I bother about a little
muscle like this that he shares with someone else?' We all collapsed in
laughter -- and admired her courage and her philosophy."
Adapted from Chapter 13 of Savoir-Flair by Polly Platt.
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