The Secret Life of France (2 page)

Laurent’s extraordinary adroitness in pursuing me was one of the most attractive things about him; his self-belief was utterly compelling. The experience of sexual surrender was new to me. Until then, I had only known English boys my own age, who were all infected by a certain erotic timorousness, which had made it necessary for me to be the pursuer. It was always I who had to make the first move. Even the Jewish boy from Kingston-upon-Thames, who had received the gift of mother-worship and was therefore considerably more sexually confident than most, had waited for me to kiss him. On that occasion, a combination of desire and exasperation had driven me to spit tea in his face. This had freed things up and we never looked back. But he was the exception. Most of the time, having sex with English boys had meant battling my way through their insecurities long before we got anywhere near mine.

One of the things I noticed that summer about Laurent and his male friends was that they were all totally unreconstructed by feminist ideology. It was as if the feminist revolution had never happened in France. I wondered if some of the sexual paralysis afflicting my English
male contemporaries was brought on by post-feminist guilt, which only seemed to compound the puritan tendencies inherent in our culture. Two of the boys I had slept with had actually confessed to feeling uncomfortable in the missionary position, saying that it made them feel ‘too dominant’.

It soon became clear that this was not the kind of complex my future husband suffered from. Early on in our relationship his hand had shot out while we were having sex and slapped me smartly across the face. Supine and submissive as I might have been, the gesture backfired and my desire went out like a light. Laurent wasn’t put off, though. He merely observed that smacks were obviously not my thing and that I shouldn’t feel bad about it. He admitted that he had probably done it out of habit (Aurélie, the sex goddess, had apparently appreciated a carefully timed slap in the face).

In retrospect, my poor husband’s erotic universe must have shrunk somewhat when I came into his life. What is certain is that after we split up, seventeen years later, he went back to some of his former sexual habits. For even though Laurent could hardly be called a libertine by Parisian standards, the opportunities offered by Paris’s bourgeoisie for a tasteful kind of sexual adventurousness are both varied and plentiful.

Although my personal experience of sex with French people is limited, I would venture to argue, in spite of the old myths peddled about the French lover, that the quality of each individual sexual encounter is no better or worse
in France than in England. Good sex and bad sex can of course be found everywhere, and one person’s ecstasy is another person’s nightmare. What I do believe, however, is that there is a climate surrounding sex in France which lends itself to a more open enjoyment of the seductive game.

For that is what sex is to the French: a game – with all the artifice that the word implies. The contractual nature of gender relations, both in Britain and America – requiring of us that we behave like adults – makes the kind of games played by men and women in France seem childish by comparison. For French women, the playing of games – the most hackneyed of which is not returning your lover’s call for at least three days – is a vital part of their romantic arsenal. Overhearing my French-born, teenage children discuss their amorous affairs with their friends, I was often struck by the mixture of candour and duplicity that seemed to dominate their relations with the opposite sex – those hitherto workaday creatures whom they had sat beside in the classroom and whom they had now to pretend to worship. It has taken a long time for me to reach the point where I no longer judge this kind of behaviour. Looking beyond the often tawdry games French people play in the name of
la séduction
, it has become clear to me that the driving force behind sex in France is quite simply the pursuit of pleasure. Not ecstasy, not oblivion, but pleasure.

When Laurent and I began to live together, long before we really knew each other, I became aware of a gulf
between our world views that I knew must be cultural. Mostly, we differed in our susceptibility to guilt. Laurent seemed to be virtually free of it. I was surprised to discover in his company how infected I was by various kinds of guilt: sexual, moral and political. It is hard to find examples of this since they go back a long way and I have been reformatted over the years to fit better into the French way of life. But I can tell that I have changed because when I go back to England I have a subtle but persistent feeling of discomfort, a kind of constant moral pressure to think and say the right thing.

This subtle feeling is, I realise, simply the result of habit. I know that my English and American friends feel a certain discomfort at the moral chaos that reigns in France. They dislike the discourteous driving, the queue-jumping, the fare-dodging, while I have come to find the level of civic obedience required in Anglo-Saxon society faintly oppressive. In London, I don’t reverse down a one-way street because I know that some well-meaning old lady will rap on the window and tell me that I am going in the wrong direction. This would never happen in Paris, where everyone is constantly breaking the law. Only if the law-breaker inconveniences you personally do you ever bother to launch into invective. If the offender is an old person – ideally old enough to have been an adult during the Nazi Occupation – a classic and powerful taunt is to call them a collaborator. I remember the first time I heard this insult: an old man in a beret who was racing along the cycle lane in Paris alarmed a young man
who was standing on the pavement, about to cross.

‘Collabo!’ the young man shouted, for all to hear. The old man nearly fell off his bike at the sound of that ugly diminutive but regained enough poise to raise his middle finger, leaving us onlookers to speculate on whether or not this had been the gesture of a collaborator or a
résistant
.

I never think of jumping the queue in London, while in Paris I do it all the time. Why? Because everyone is doing it. France is filled with disobedient children all busily trying to jump the queue. There is no guilt about this except, of course, for that special brand of shame you feel when you get caught.

I have read my Graham Greene and had always thought of guilt as the special ecstasy of Catholics. Since living in a nation of lapsed Catholics, I’ve come to realise that this is a gross over-simplification. The Catholic Church has certainly learnt over the centuries to use the idea of sin to great effect, but in comparing Britain, or indeed America, to France – all similarly developed, post-Freudian societies, one culturally Protestant and one culturally Catholic – it has been my observation that the dead hand of guilt falls far more heavily on us Protestants.

If guilt is the inner struggle between the
I want
and the
I should
, or as Freud would have it, the effect of the struggle between the Ego and the Superego, then Catholicism is the domineering but indulgent
Mother
and Protestantism, the aloof and exacting
Father
. The legacy of Catholicism in France is, amongst other things, her powerful and interventionist state; what Anglo-Saxons refer to
as ‘the nanny state’ and the French more affectionately call
l’Etat-providence
(the munificent state). Under such a system, citizens are children, perpetually clamouring
I want,
I want
; alternately scolded and mollycoddled by the powers that be. In both British and American society, on the other hand, where the citizen is supposed to behave like a self-regulating adult, guilt becomes a natural and highly effective enforcer.

I remember my delight as I began to understand the particular relationship the French have with the law. I had accumulated a few parking tickets and had started hiding them in my sock drawer, a habit of avoidance that would take me at least twenty years to break. Laurent caught sight of them one evening when we were dressing for dinner. ‘I’m going to pay them,’ I said.

‘What year are we?’

‘What?’

‘1986,’ he mused. ‘It’s worth waiting.’

‘What for?’

‘The presidential elections. There’s an amnesty for parking offences at each presidential election. Better to wait for the next one.’

As the years went by, this lawless atmosphere worked its magic on me and I began to behave like everyone else. I would abandon my car – battered from the general practice of ‘nudge parking’ – on zebra crossings, pavements, traffic islands, while I ran in to collect my children. The
Parisian authorities have never resorted to clamping – they prefer to tow, since immobilising a car in a bad place doesn’t make sense to them – but in those days, towing hadn’t yet caught on and so the tickets began to pile up and the letters from
Monsieur le Préfet
became more and more insistent. The amnesty
*
seemed a long way off when fate intervened in the form of B., an employee of the
Renseignements Généraux
, or RG, France’s bizarre, tentacular secret police force.

B. was a short man with an outlandish moustache and a thick southern accent whom I met while working as a freelance researcher for the BBC. He would occasionally invite me out to lunch and ply me with useless, often misleading information and I would go home with my head full of colourful detail of no use whatever to my employers. It was B., for instance, who told me the preferred euphemism used by RG spooks to indicate that the subject of their memo was homosexual: ‘He is partial to the English style of life.’

Long after it became clear to B. and me that we were quite useless to each other, we still occasionally met for lunch. He had stopped trying to impress me by showing me where he kept his Smith & Wesson (in a holster round his ankle) and plying me with Chivas Regal in his office at the Ministry of the Interior. Instead we would meet for long, usually duck-themed lunches near the rue des Saussaies and exchange stories. He would talk in fast,
unrelenting police speak – an elaborately formal metalanguage spoken by cops and understood by criminals – about the endlessly fascinating rivalries within the French police, and I would tell him about what life was like outside the confines of a surveillance vehicle. Usually over coffee, he’d click his jewelled fingers at me and hold out his hand for my parking tickets, which he would roll up and put in the pocket of his leather jacket, never to be seen again.

In our Anglo-Saxon culture, sex and love have become polarised through guilt. In such a context sex can only achieve purification through love. There has always been a tendency in Britain and America 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.

In France sex is viewed, 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 Parisian bourgeoisie – and it is they who set the tone in this still hierarchical society – good sex is the single most satisfactory method of raising oneself above the monotony 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.

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. The French, led by the Parisian middle classes, are brought up to believe 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 discreet, to seek your fix elsewhere. As I would soon discover, even my future mother-in-law held this belief.

Laurent’s mother, Madeleine, was a handsome and formidably intelligent woman from an aristocratic family. His father, Jérôme Lemoine, was one of the nine stunningly beautiful Lemoine children of the sixteenth arrondissement, widely known in bourgeois circles for their parties, their small talk and their skill at dancing. When Jérôme and Madeleine met, he was leading a wilfully vapid life scraping through an architecture degree at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, while she – one of the first women to be accepted by the prestigious School of Political Science, Sciences Po – was sitting in the cafés and cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, listening to Jean-Paul Sartre and Juliette Gréco.

After ten years of marriage and soul-searching philosophical enquiry Madeleine met a Hindu guru in Paris by the name of Sri Menon and became one of his first disciples. Every year she would go for a spiritual refill at his ashram in the Indian state of Kerala and, as she soon made clear to me, it was in this way that she was able to
turn a blind eye to her husband’s chronic philandering.

I first got wind of my father-in-law’s mistress the summer Laurent and I were married. Madeleine had been away in India for the usual six weeks in spring and Laurent and I were up in Normandy for the first time since her return in order to discuss plans for the wedding. I noticed that the house seemed uncharacteristically clean and the kitchen cupboards in almost obsessive-compulsive order. My mother-in-law was an efficient woman but she was no domestic goddess, and I knew that the rows and rows of homemade marmalade in the larder could not have been her doing. When one of the jars appeared on the breakfast table, I studied the label. ‘Iris’, it read. ‘Spring, 1985.’ As it turned out, Iris’s excellent marmalade had been enjoyed year after year by Laurent, his father and his brothers – even by Madeleine herself – without their ever once alluding to the mysterious English woman who had settled into that house for six weeks to make it.

Four years later Iris would fall ill with cancer, and I watched my mother-in-law stand by in mute misery while her angry, grief-stricken husband spent night after night at the other woman’s hospital bedside. On one occasion only, Madeleine confessed her distress to me. We were sitting in the kitchen of their flat in the sixteenth arrondissement.