La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (15 page)

Much of the reason for playfulness in the workplace is that women in France are not used to gender segregation. They enjoy being with men. The historian Mona Ozouf told me about the six months that she spent at Princeton University in 1972 with her husband, when he was a history professor there. Ozouf was flabbergasted when she was invited to join a group called History Wives.

“For the French, this is an anomaly,” she said. “That the ‘history wives’ got together and there was, after all, a kind of segregation, this is unimaginable in France. There is sensitivity in France that women are omnipresent.”

The Tony Award–winning playwright and author Yasmina Reza followed Nicolas Sarkozy on the campaign trail for a year before the presidential election, and he gave her unusual access, allowing her entry into the most private of meetings. She turned the experience into a best seller. Soon after the book was published, a magazine interviewer from
Le Nouvel Observateur
asked her whether Sarkozy had ever tried to seduce her. “No,” she replied. “He wanted to seduce France.” Then, she added a line that could have worked well in one of her plays: “It is almost insulting to spend an entire year with a man without him trying to seduce you.”

When the codes are understood and accepted by women, it encourages men to perpetuate the game. It doesn’t seem to occur to men, even to some whose job is to deal with foreigners, that their words or gestures could be perceived as inappropriate. A male French diplomat told the story of being confined with a beautiful American woman in an elevator in a New York skyscraper one day. A trained observer, he caressed her body with his eyes. When the elevator reached its destination, she whipped around and asked bluntly, “Do you want the name of my lawyer?”

“I thought I was paying her a compliment,” he told me. “She was too lovely a sight to ignore. She was ready to sue me.”

I asked the British journalist Charles Bremner about the ease with which French men and women flirt. “There is a playfulness that has disappeared from northern European countries,” he said, observing that even Michèle Alliot-Marie, who has headed a number of key ministries, including justice and defense, puts seduction into her style. “Here she is, a powerful, senior politician in her sixties, and when we appeared together on a television show, she was wearing a tight skirt and high heels and was flirting,” Bremner recalled. “She showed her little girl side. It was not a conscious act.”

The writer Pierre Assouline put it in starker terms. He explained why so many French men and women prefer a conversation with a member of the opposite sex. He said that a conversation with a flirtatious twist is always more intriguing and interesting than one that is straightforward.

“There’s a
pourquoi pas
” (why not), he said. “There’s always a
pourquoi pas
.” I took this to be a provocative variation of Sophie-Caroline’s
on ne sait jamais
.

Finally, I wanted the viewpoint of a younger man, so I asked Alexandre Deschamps, my physical therapist. Alexandre has spent a lot of time in London. His girlfriend is Greek. Because he speaks English, many of his clients are foreigners. He is good with teenagers and had treated both of my daughters, one after a kayaking accident, the other after knee surgery.

“I would be in prison if I had to work in the United States,” he said. “When I see a beautiful woman on the Métro in Paris, I might want to tell her, ‘You know, you are really beautiful.’”

“But aren’t you invading her space?” I asked.

“It depends on how you do it,” he replied. “If you say it nicely and with respect, women really like it.”

“Of course, you couldn’t say that to a female colleague,” I said. On the contrary, he said. He told me he could be much more relaxed with a colleague than with a stranger. “Do you know the woman therapist here?” he asked. “She’s very young and pretty. We like to joke around. One day she asked me to give her a massage. So I said, ‘Sure, but only if you’re naked!’ It was a normal joke.”

“What about your female clients?” I asked. “Would you tell them they’re beautiful and you adore their perfume?”

“Of course!” he replied. “And they would smile.”

I tried to join in Alexandre’s game.

“In that case, the woman who came in the same time as I did is so sour today that she looks like she swallowed a lemon,” I said. “You would make her day if you tell her she looks beautiful.”

“I could, but I won’t,” Alexandre said. It was a question of integrity, he explained. “There has to be some truth in what you say.”

It is a drama I have seen played out hundreds of times. The scene is the Paris Métro—or maybe a street where the sidewalk is too small for two people walking in opposite directions to pass each other without some maneuvering.

Parisians are going about their daily business, commuting, shopping, running errands. All is quiet. If there is talking, tones are subdued. The subway car door opens—or the walking traffic reaches a corner—and a group of American tourists appears, talking and laughing in voices that shatter the calm. Suddenly they come so close to a Parisian that they are nearly touching. The Americans smile, reaching out with what they perceive as the most natural gesture of kindness. But the smile is not returned. It is greeted with a blank stare, or even worse, a scowl.

Taken aback, the Americans move on, convinced they have confronted, once again, the most puzzling paradox about France: Why, in this charming country where even the air feels like an invitation to enjoyment, are the natives so cold? What objection can these people possibly have, after all, to well-intentioned visitors with pockets full of cash?

What has happened is a disconnect in manners, not unusual in any foreign country, but a particular hazard for Americans in France. French rules regulating interpersonal behavior are a complex maze, intended, in part, to regulate the daily interplay of seduction. One wishes to seduce but not indiscriminately. There are matters of taste to consider. To be overly familiar is to invite revulsion and scorn. On top of this, there is the universal fear of the stranger, which penetrates deep into French soil. But when the encounter is kept at a safe distance, barriers can fall. Advertisements, for example, can be daring and even invasive because they do not involve direct personal interaction. Close up, barriers stay high.

One way to understand the tension in everyday public behavior is to consider the importance of the smile. Smiling is complicated in France. Americans are accustomed to smiling at strangers; the French—particularly the Parisians—are not. That helps explain why some Americans find Parisians rude. The reluctance to smile does not indicate the absence of kindness in the French character, but it does signal reserve. A French smile is fraught with too much meaning to be bestowed as a mere pleasantry. When a smile is shared, on the Métro, for example, complicity is created and the two smilers suddenly exist as a pair; even without a word, they are no longer separate individuals.

Perhaps the nonsmiling stems from French history—foreign invasions, revolution, and civil wars—that fueled suspicion and contributed to the construction of facades of politesse. Whatever the historical reason, a smile is weightier in France than in much of the world. And this is even truer in Paris. According to a February 2010 poll, 71 percent of French people living outside Paris believe Parisians smile less than the rest of the French.

I was having lunch in a bistro one day with two women friends when two elegantly dressed men, in their late twenties perhaps, were seated next to us. The tables were so close that we had to move ours to accommodate them. One gave me a smile that showed teeth and spoke openness.
He’s dressed like a French man, but he’s not French
, I thought to myself.
No French man would smile like that.

I was right. He was German.

A smile can have a purpose. For Christine Lagarde, the finance minister and former national swimming champion, it is a symbol of power and strength. “Political life has hardened me,” she once told an interviewer from French
Elle
. “When I was on the French synchronized swimming team, the coach hammered into us: ‘Grit your teeth and smile.’ So now, today, I grit my teeth and smile. And I do the job!”

When the smile is bestowed one-on-one, it is a gift. Or more. It is so powerful it can suggest sexual interest.

In the movie
Le Divorce
, Kate Hudson, who plays an American ingenue living in Paris, is advised by her young French lover to look more serious. “You were smiling too much,” he tells her when she has an unpleasant encounter with the American husband of her brother-in-law’s lover. “Don’t do that. Smiling gets a girl in trouble.”

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the writer, couldn’t tolerate the smiles of strangers as he traveled across America. In his book
American Vertigo
, Lévy railed against “those affectless, emotionless smiles, smiles that seem to be there only to signify the pure will to smile.”

When I asked Lévy about this observation, he told me that in France the smile is a deliberate sign. “We decide at what point we send it,” he said. “And we don’t send it right away. We send the signal when the process of seduction has begun. In America—it’s nothing. It’s like—” his voice filled with disgust as he uttered the next two words—“shaking hands!”

A French businessman I know who travels all over the world said that when he visits the United States, the most uncomfortable place for him is the elevator, because people smile and strike up conversations with him and he can’t escape.

Whenever I’m baffled about French customs, I turn to the writer and television host Philippe Labro. I asked him about smiling, and he replied with a story from his time as an exchange student at Washington and Lee University in Virginia in the 1950s. Labro was shy, awkward, badly dressed, and only eighteen when he landed on the campus, with its Southern culture, coat-and-tie dress code, and strict rules. One was the “speaking rule.”

“You had to say ‘hello,’ ‘good morning,’ ‘good evening’ to anyone you passed,” Labro recalled. One day he was summoned by a student advisory council and told that he wasn’t greeting people properly. “It wasn’t a trial or anything like that, but I can remember the sentence. It’s printed in my memory: ‘Philippe, you don’t quite understand the spirit of the speaking rule.’”

Labro replied, “Of course I do. I say ‘hello’ and ‘good-bye’ and ‘good morning’ and ‘good evening’ to everyone.”

“Yes,” the student representative said. “But you don’t smile.”

“For me,” Labro continued, “It was a good moment, because I thought: ‘Okay, I’ll get you guys. I’ll smile, don’t worry. I’ll play your game.’ And I played the game.”

“So was it hard?” I asked.

“No, because it’s not hard to play a role in a comedy,” he said. “Yes, a comedy. I mean, it was forced. Why should I smile at someone I don’t know, and maybe I don’t like? It’s completely hypocritical to smile all the time!”

The French reticence to smile immediately and indiscriminately, he said, “comes from what is taught from childhood: a rather strong dose of skepticism, of reflection. We are a critical people. We are a literary people. We have to question everything. It’s so we will never be duped.” For Labro,
le regard
—the look—is much more important than the smile. “You can see more in the eyes than the lips,” he said. “The eyes are total life, the absolute personality of someone. There can be magnetism. There can be light. Boredom. Stupidity. Yes, stupidity, the emptiness of the look.”

There it was again,
le regard
. I told him I had a stupid question. “In America, we’re taught to stress our good points,” I said. “So, if you have a great smile, to use your smile, et cetera. What if you have terrible eyes? How do you do
le regard
? I’m nearsighted. So how do you talk with your eyes if you can’t see? And what about when you get older and your face droops and you smile more to look younger?”

“You compensate,” Labro said. “Your body has many, many weapons. You use the rest of your body. You play with your hands. Your voice. Voice is a fantastic weapon of seduction. And you use humor and make people laugh. Any man who can make a woman laugh can have that woman.
Bien sûr
.”

On that point, he was right.
Bien sûr
. But that talent is universal.

My former neighborhood in the seventh arrondissement is a place of refinement and politesse. If you look as if you belong and are not just an itinerant shopper, people you don’t know will give you a ritual
bonjour
when they pass you on the street.

In its commercial guise, it is upscale: its sidewalks lined with specialty shops selling narrow categories of goods from fine and overpriced stationery to fine and overpriced hosiery. I could have paid eighty-seven euros for a fine and overpriced key at the local locksmith that ended up costing just eighteen euros at the department store BHV.

It is the same with food. To furnish the table for the evening dinner, the shopper can pay a lot of money at one high-quality shop after another, for produce, for cheese, for bread. Even in Paris, supermarkets and big-box stores are pushing aside shops like these, but many of them manage to hang on.

There are two shopkeepers in the neighborhood who taught me very different strategies in seduction. Both run small, expensive shops and have been in business for decades. Both know their customers’ tastes. Both deliver correct service and gastronomic excellence. Both display their wares artfully. But there the similarity ends.

La Boucherie de Varenne is a butcher shop dedicated to the art of conversation. Roger Yvon, its owner, is more than a cutter of meat. He is a playful spirit, the soul of the rue de Varenne. This is the street where the writer Rainer Maria Rilke and the sculptor Auguste Rodin lived and worked while Edith Wharton was writing in her grand apartment a few doors down. Roger is an available and faithful suitor who entertains his clients by telling stories, sharing recipes, and making introductions as if his business were a modern-day salon. The gratification is instant.

Roger is the exception to what I call the customer-is-always-wrong rule too often adhered to in France, and especially in Paris. I once watched him spend five minutes as he lovingly chose two center-cut lamb chops for a female client. Were they to be cooked today or tomorrow? Were they to be grilled or sautéed? What were the side dishes? What was the sauce?

Around the corner and down the street from Roger’s butcher shop is a seafood shop, La Poissonnerie du Bac, which prides itself on honesty, efficiency, and brusqueness. Sure, it beckons with luminous oysters displayed on ice-lined racks that spill out onto the sidewalk. But as is customary with many French fish stores, the shop has no front door or even protective curtain, so in winter it is cold and damp. The low temperature may suit the fish just fine, but it does little to enhance the personalities of the people who work there.

Here, the customer must court management, a process that is glacially slow. The manager-cashier, an older, full-figured woman whose wardrobe changes very little, plays so hard to get that at first I wondered whether she cared if I ever came back. Yet in a perverse way, her indifference made the chase more stimulating. Andy and I kept returning, hoping that one day the obligatory
bonjour
would be followed by a comment about the weather, an inquiry about our health and our children, and a smile.

France, a nation whose magnetism is so strong it is a cliché, is also the home of the surly shopkeeper and obdurate bureaucrat. What, I have often wondered, can explain this contradiction? In the worlds of commerce and officialdom, even French people must often battle to be treated with civility. For foreigners setting out to live in France, especially those who don’t speak terrific French, the challenge can be daunting.

When Andy and I first moved to Paris, we were treated repeatedly like foreign invaders, outsiders who ruined the neighborhood with our American accents and itinerant ways. I well understood the suspicion of the outsider, so familiarly tribal and European, from seeing it in one of my Sicilian grandfathers. He cursed the
stranieri
, the foreigners, the outsiders. The only people who could be truly trusted were family members, and even some of them were unworthy. My grandfather saw the world as a series of concentric circles with himself as the center, then the family, then people who had emigrated from his hometown, then Sicilians, then other Italians, then everyone else. For a long time in Paris, Andy and I were “everyone else.”

What I did not understand was how businesspeople could expect to attract and hold a clientele when they seemed so lacking in basic customer service skills. But I bonded with Roger the butcher, whose natural warmth made him easier than most, over the issue of Thanksgiving—after another butcher had given me the brush-off.

The French don’t know much about our Thanksgiving. Almost all of their official holidays mark either military victories or major religious (that is, Christian) events; May 1 is the equivalent of our Labor Day, but it doesn’t come with backyard barbecues, just workers’ protests.

I have explained to French people that Thanksgiving is an American holiday that draws its inspiration from traditional harvest festivals in Europe. At the first Thanksgiving in 1621, the settlers at Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts joined with Native Americans from the Wampanoag tribe to give thanks to God for the fall harvest. They ate venison, waterfowl, lobster, clams and other seafood, berries and other fruit, pumpkin, squash, and, of course, wild turkeys. I mention that no presents are exchanged, a fact that surprises those Frenchmen who believe that Americans care too much about material things. In addition, the holiday is all about the preparation and consumption of ritual foods, a concept the French fully understand.

Because the French don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, finding a turkey can be challenging. French turkey farmers hoard their birds until Christmas, the holiday when turkeys are served along with oysters, smoked salmon, foie gras, and champagne.

Our first year in Paris, I was determined to give a proper Thanksgiving to my children, still unhappy about being wrenched from their safe and predictable lives in America. I ordered a turkey from the butcher at the local fancy-food emporium, where just about everything is pint-sized and wrapped in elegant but environmentally incorrect layers of packaging. Bargains are nonexistent.