La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (11 page)

For Assouline, conversations give meaning to life and work. “You bring something to the other,” he said. “I adore conversation, because I leave richer than when I came. I have given something as well.”

A basic element of the French art of conversation is argument, intricate word games of one-upmanship played with grace and finesse. Whether at a dinner party or in the press, no subject is too trivial for profound and lengthy debate. The arguments are called
polémiques
, and the topics can be both erudite and banal—the real truth about Joan of Arc, the wisdom of allowing pedophilia in French novels, the validity of corporal punishment to discipline young children.

Prime-time television on Saturday night features roundtables in which groups of people sit around and talk. Sometimes newspapers and magazines choose two eminent figures to debate each other, with their photographs on opposite pages, pitting them against one another on topics like “Did the sexual liberation movement really liberate us?” “Does discreet charm exist?” and “Does liberalism govern our sexuality?” To an outsider, some of the most serious also seem the most self-indulgent, like this one in
Le Figaro
magazine: “What’s the use of intellectuals?”

One holiday weekend, Andy and I were invited along with sixteen other people for a four-day sleepover at the château of French friends in southwest France. The first morning we covered the following subjects: the exit strategy from Iraq, the health care crisis in the United States, the pitiful state of print journalism in France, Tibetan scarf making from goats’ beards, discrimination in the French educational system, and the wisdom of legislating a ban on face-covering veils for women. And that was before we finished breakfast.

Talking has long been a hallmark of French films. A main reason why the French have always loved Woody Allen movies—even the bad ones—is that there is so much talking and so little action. Allen is said to have been inspired by Eric Rohmer, who explored the pleasures of talking rather than copulating in his films. In
My Night at Maud’s
, which had a cult following in the United States, Maud and Jean-Louis spend the night together. In a scene charged with promise and erotic tension, they end up in the same bed, but they never have sex—they are too busy talking. My all-time favorite line in a Rohmer film comes from
Les nuits de la pleine lune
. The actor Fabrice Luchini tells the young woman who is the object of his affection, “I love seduction for the seduction. It doesn’t matter if it succeeds. Physically, I mean.”

To some degree, this is a reflection of real life. “There is an intellectual flirtation that is very French,” Laure de Gramont, a writer and editor, explained to me. “You can have a two-hour lunch with a man who is not your husband and never want to sleep with him. There’s a bit of flirtation, of course. You will have made love with words. It’s much nicer than playing footsie.”

Gramont cautioned that this kind of play has a potential downside if it is done with too much enthusiasm. “Sometimes, after about ten minutes, the man feels guilty because his wife is watching,” she said.

More generally, Gramont explained her definition of the witty French person: “You have a superior intellect and have the ability to utter the last word on any subject. You don’t repeat what was in the newspaper that morning.”

To navigate as an American in a culture of verbal seduction, I came up with my own set of rules. First, if your conversational partner tries to speak English, compliment him on his charming accent. Second, kill him with kindness and exaggerated politesse. Third, compliment a woman on her beautiful complexion. Fourth, make a man feel important. Fifth, make sure all this is done so cleverly that it doesn’t come across as flattery and, even better, isn’t noticed at all.

Along the way, learn banter, even for the most banal telephone conversation. One way to overcome the brusque initial response of the person who answers the phone at a business or office is to engage in light but respectful conversation. It draws the other party into the process, establishes her importance (it is most always a she), and can become an innocent game of momentary, fleeting pleasure.

An example:

I was brutally outmatched, however, in an encounter with Marc Fumaroli, a member of the august Académie Française. Fumaroli is nearing eighty and is perhaps the country’s most learned expert on the art of conversation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. When I called on him at the Collège de France in the heart of the Latin Quarter, he swatted my questions as if they were flies that wouldn’t go away. At first I assumed it was part of a game of teasing and testing.

“What more do you want me to say?” Fumaroli asked at one point. He tapped his fingers on his desk. “I don’t understand journalists who come and say, ‘You have written a book. Explain to me what’s in it.’ My book explains everything in itself, Madame! No? The questions you ask me prove that you haven’t understood what I mean, you see? That’s what disturbs me. If you don’t get it, I can’t set you straight!”

“
Je voudrais m’exprimer en anglais
” (I’d like to express myself in English), I said. I knew he could read English. I didn’t really care whether he spoke it or not. I wanted to set up a barrier.

“I’m really sorry I’m wasting your time,” I said. “I came with
gentillesse
,
politesse
to start a conversation…. I don’t want to waste your time, sir.”

“No! Let’s speak in French!” Fumaroli commanded, returning to French. “Speak in French, because if you speak in English, you spoil everything.”

That was it. It
had
been a game for him but one that ended badly.

As I went to shake his hand to say good-bye, I looked closely at his face. It had a pasty matte finish, as if he were wearing makeup. Perhaps he felt he had to keep himself hidden.

Sometimes the
polémiques
take the form of a seamless and seemingly endless conversation. It is not unusual to have an entire book devoted to a conversation between two important figures. A classic is the 232-page dialogue between the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and the late Françoise Giroud, the cofounder of the weekly magazine
L’Express
and the first minister of women’s affairs.

The book,
Women and Men: A Philosophical Conversation
, was published in 1993, and it recorded their conversations while sitting under a fig tree in Paris one summer. As the title suggests, the core subject was male-female interaction. But the book was full of intellectual spin. The duo used Stendhal, Proust, Baudelaire, Freud, Valéry, Gide, Zola, Laclos, Sartre, and an army of other literary giants to make their points.

In the chapter “Seduction and Its Games,” Giroud quoted the turn-of-the-twentieth-century writer Jules Renard, who said, “One experiences no pleasure in conversing with a woman who could not possibly become one’s mistress.” She asked Lévy whether this was true for him.

Lévy replied, “It’s true that I do not believe in friendship between men and women, and when that touch of ambiguity is lacking, the relationship seems to me to be—what word do I want?—futile, sterile, useless.”

In the chapter “On Ugliness as a Basic Injustice,” Lévy made the surprising statement that it was harder to seduce an ugly woman than a beautiful one.

“The beautiful woman is used to it,” he said. “She’s experienced and clever…. She knows both the tricks of seduction and the rituals of seduction. You always know quickly whether it’s going to happen or not…. The ugly woman is so flustered, she’s so surprised at what’s happening to her, she begins by being suspicious, incredulous, by telling herself there’s something going on she doesn’t understand, that someone’s setting her up.”

Giroud finished the thought. “The true libertine action today, the prime libertine adventure, would be to seduce an unattractive woman,” she said.

It was inevitable that the two would seduce each other, at least spiritually. Lévy reminded Giroud about the first time he met her, at a dinner party twenty years before, and said she had been an “archetypal seductress.” “It was all there in the smile, the look, a great attention to gestures—your own and others’—flirtatiousness, an endless fund of coquetry, and little ways of suddenly reassuring your partner.”

Giroud replied that flirting gave her pleasure. “Did I really set out to do my best to charm you?…I’m sure I did it spontaneously, because you were a good-looking, dynamic young man and it amused me to get your attention. But for what purpose?…For a moment of pleasure…. I must confess that I’ve enjoyed that pleasure all my life.”

She said there was a difference between being a “tease” and a “charmer.” The charmer was engaged in “offering oneself and holding back, giving in and remaining aloof, an odd mix of playfulness and reticence.”

Sounded like a tease to me.

In the fall of 2009, I went to see Lévy in the grand apartment he shared with Arielle Dombasle on the boulevard Saint-Germain. A thin, efficient-looking female assistant ushered me into a vast formal living room, where I sat on a taupe-colored couch and sank into red velvet accent cushions. The walls were lined in silk damask; the room smelled of incense. There was too much to look at: collections of boxes, old glass bottles, bronze Buddhas, stacks of leather-bound books, antique swords, daggers, stone eggs, gilt-framed mirrors, a stuffed bird.

Lévy made his entrance fifteen minutes later. He invited me into his office, a less formal space whose walls, carpets, drapery, and couches were swathed in comforting shades of sand that blended with the bleached oak-paneled walls. His desk was piled with books, magazines, and newspapers.

An Indian manservant in a white Nehru jacket with gold buttons brought me a small bottle of mineral water called Rosée de la Reine (The Dewdrops of the Queen). He served Lévy tea from a sterling silver pot set on a silver tray. I asked if seduction was a driving force of French life.

“It’s more than a driving force,” said Lévy. He leaned back on the couch, put his hand inside his trademark half-unbuttoned white shirt and rubbed his chest. “Life…is seduction. Civilization is seduction. What distinguishes men from animals is seduction.”

The French understand seduction better than Americans for two reasons. “First, they have thought about it more and explored it in their literature; second, they repress it less than Americans do.”

I can’t say that I found Lévy seductive, but he knows how to think. He had spent months traveling throughout the United States for his book inspired by Tocqueville’s journeys, so I considered him an experienced observer of the differences between the Americans and the French. I asked him why he had called America a great mistress in his book.

“America is like a mistress with whom you spend great weekends, and you want to know if you can go further, if you can live with her, and you give it a shot,” he told me. “Because a mistress on the weekend, it’s easy; everything’s beautiful. But can we wake up together, go to bed together, have problems together, have a daily life together? That’s the question.”

Americans, he said, are afraid of being seduced. “What struck me in America was this obsession to not let yourself be taken in,” he said. “Even skillful seduction doesn’t work in America because it scares everyone. In France, there is truly a desire to eroticize relationships to the maximum. All relations, human, political, professional—it doesn’t matter—are eroticized, subtly eroticized. It doesn’t trouble anyone.”

“So in America, if you find a woman beautiful, you wouldn’t tell her?” I asked.

“A hundred times no!” he exclaimed. “When I find a woman beautiful and if we know each other, I have a tendency to tell her. If I don’t know her, she can’t help but see it in my eyes. I realized that in the U.S., I had to force myself to avoid showing a woman that I found her seductive, because I knew that instead of creating complicity between us, it would create a barrier.”

He told about trying to compliment the assistant of a newspaper executive friend. “I saw the girl in question arriving, and I told her: ‘This morning you look like a bimbo!’”

I burst out laughing.

“I really thought she was going to slap me,” he said. “I knew I had made an enormous mistake. I apologized. I said: ‘But wait, no, I believed this was a compliment!’ Even if it had been flattering, I had the impression her reaction would have been the same.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Even if you had said, ‘You’re such a beauty,’ you could have gotten the same reaction.”

“But if I had said, ‘You are a baby doll,’ that would have been…”

“No, Bernard-Henri, ‘baby doll’ is also pejorative!” I replied. “In the United States, even if you said, ‘You look like a beautiful Greek goddess,’ you could have been in trouble.”

“Terrible,” he said. “For a French man, that’s a real problem!”