La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (25 page)

If France were to give an award for the most heroic champion of French cuisine in all its seductive glory, it would go to Jean-Claude Ribaut of
Le Monde
, the poet of French food critics. I imagine that Jean-Claude, who is about sixty, was quite a handsome youth. At the École des Beaux-Arts, he studied to be an architect. Eventually, he met a master chef who trained him to taste and to cook. Jean-Claude was initiated into the mysteries of Les Halles, then the largest wholesale fresh-food market in the world, where he met the food merchants and restaurateurs and learned their codes and rituals. He studied the history of French cuisine back to ancient Gaul and built one of the most impressive private libraries on gastronomy in France.

One evening, Jean-Claude and I dined at Jamin in the sixteenth arrondissement with a retired professor friend of his and a beautiful, twenty-three-year-old wine merchant named Fleur. It was close to midnight, and we had just finished dessert. Over coffee, I asked Jean-Claude what meal he would prepare if he wanted to seduce. The target did not necessarily have to be a woman, I said; it could be friends or family.

As Jean-Claude started to create a fantasy meal in his mind, his words fell over one another. He was so excited he jumped right to the main course. “I’d make a gigot of lamb, from a very young lamb,” he said. “Well dressed, studded with anchovies. It gives an extremely subtle taste to the meat, a bit complex. It’s cooked in the oven, so I’d serve it with its cooking juices—add a bit of clarified butter mixed with a mashed anchovy—as a sauce. Then an eggplant gratin on the side. It’s a success; it works every time!”

Fleur was enchanted. “With just your words, I want to follow you and eat,” she said.

The sumptuous meal we had just eaten was suddenly forgotten. We could taste the gigot and the eggplant.

We asked Jean-Claude to give us a course to start the meal.

“I’d start with a dish created around scallops,” he said. “Scallops that have just been opened, cooked only a little, served with a sauce made from a reduction of white wine. There is a second sauce made from a wine a bit more elaborate, like Banyuls or Rivesaltes. When it’s boiled down, it turns into a sort of syrup. Add a small spoonful of
crème fraîche
—not much. That melds the flavors and textures. But no flour, none. When the scallops are cooked, you sprinkle a little lime zest on them, so the contrast of the sweet Banyuls wine syrup with the creamed white wine plus the lime on the scallop—it’s magical!”

He elaborated on the ingredients with the scallops—small fillets of sole and langoustines, soft leeks, a sauce with a strong, fine red wine and sugar and shallots.

“
C’est magnifique!
” Fleur exclaimed.

Earlier in the evening, Jean-Claude had been concerned that he didn’t have a good subject for his column for Saint Valentine’s Day. I told him he should write about his fantasy dinner, under the title “
Les liaisons onctueuses
”—the phrase he had used to describe the blending of flavors and textures.

“So, what’s for dessert?” Fleur asked.

“I confess I don’t know how to make pastries,” he said. “But there is a magical dessert, magical, one I make almost all year round.”

His dessert, fruits poached in wine, was foolproof. “Nectarines, peaches, apricots—fruits with pits—it’s enough to poach them in a Sauternes or a Barsac or a syrupy wine for ten minutes,” he said. “The wine has so much power! It’s sublime! I add a little bit of sugar because the wine gets more acidic when it is boiled down, and you have to give them a little sweet emotion. I add some orange zest that I caramelize in a bit of melting sugar and that I put in this juice, in this syrup. There has to be balance. Then a night in the refrigerator! You make a few madeleines on the side. And if you are talented, then it’s directly…directly to…”

Jean-Claude didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t have to.

For the French, no food is too humble for seduction. One morning over another breakfast with Guy Savoy, the conversation turned to the sensual power of the most ordinary foods. I had overheard a famous food critic telling Savoy that his carrots were “sublime.” I couldn’t quite believe it and said so.

“Carrots are carrots,” I said flatly.

Savoy called over one of his sous-chefs and ordered him to bring us some carrots. A few minutes later two plates arrived. Each contained two whole, peeled, cooked carrots, with one-inch stems. They had been sautéed in butter and laid on a lacy greenish-black bed of spinach and trumpet mushrooms.

Wine was served—a Puligny-Montrachet—and a lesson in carrot eating followed. Savoy said that the taste of the carrot was very subtle and sweet at the tip and got stronger and more forceful closer to the top.

“It’s not true,” I protested, trying not to laugh at him. But he was serious, so I corrected myself. “I had no idea,” I said.

“You have to start at the tip,” he explained. “You eat the carrot in little bits.” We sliced a chunk of carrot, ate it, and sliced and ate again and again until we came to the top. “When you get to the top, you do like this. It is an incredible taste, you’ll see.”

My attitude toward carrots slowly began a transformation.

I told him that carrot leaves are inedible. He told me I was wrong. He popped a chunk of carrot and stem into his mouth. After he chewed and swallowed, the lesson resumed. “Taste up here. Okay, it is a bit tough.”

I put the carrot top and the green in my mouth and began chewing the leaves and stems. I realized I was wrong. They were crunchy, like fried parsley, only sharper.

“Explosive!” he exclaimed. “Is it good? Me, I love it. Here it is, the concrete!”

I don’t know whether it was the food on the plate or the excitement in Savoy’s voice that made the carrot experience memorable. But it helps explain why the French don’t eat alone. It is simply too delicious an experience to keep to oneself.

Soon after I moved to Washington in the late 1980s as a diplomatic correspondent, I was invited to dinner at the residence of the Pakistani ambassador. I assumed more would be involved than fine dining and idle conversation. Still, the extent of my editor’s expectations surprised me. “You should be able to get three stories out of it,” he told me.

I was new to the Washington scene, and it would take a while for me to understand how much the city’s dinner parties are an extension of the workday, offering opportunities for powerful people in government, diplomacy, business, and the media to pass on privileged information discreetly. Insider knowledge is doled out judiciously, and everyone understands that words exchanged over dinner and drinks are weighted. If the source is honorable, the facts are reliable and worthy of further investigation, since it is unwise to be caught in a lie. Revelations may serve as fodder for important decisions, to get information into the public sphere, to enhance or break reputations. I had to learn how to use these occasions to my advantage, and my newspaper’s.

Little of this translates to France.

The French, too, have dinner parties where influential people get together. Plenty of words are exchanged. But the purpose is a lively contest in verbal jousting. And the first casualty of finely honed conversational rapiers is accuracy. When the aim is to be clever and engaging, the truth of what is being said is secondary. Transparency might make the speaker seem crude or boring or both. Embroidery and entertainment, for everyone’s pleasure, trumps truth every time.

“
L’art de la conversation
is a national art,” the writer and consultant Alain Minc told me one day. “It’s not like in the United States, when after the fish is eaten, someone says, ‘And now we will discuss seriously,’ and everyone is supposed to discuss seriously. The rudest thing that can happen at a French dinner is for someone to say, ‘We will now have a discussion.’”

Instead, said Minc, “If you want to speak lightly about serious subjects, you come up with false rumors and creative secrets. And that’s a game. So when dinner is over, everyone has forgotten what he pretended to believe for a while.”

“Wait, everyone forgets what he thought was the truth?” I asked. “But that’s very different from America.”

“Exactly,” said Minc. “In America, everyone takes things seriously. Here, everyone takes things without any seriousness. Even when they are serious. It’s the difference between an old country and a new country!”

“But what if the business is serious at a dinner party?” I asked.

“At a dinner party, nothing is serious. Never. Never.”

The French relationship to the truth is not the simple “Thou shalt not lie” of a more puritanical nation. On a deeply moral level, the French would probably argue in earnest that a seriously damaging deception is no more common in France than anywhere else. It is not that truth has no value; rather, it has its place. And that place is determined to a large extent by the demands of seduction.

The French trade in secrets. They are titillated by rumors about powerful figures and politicians. The practice dates back to the era of the royal court, when information was power yet had to be handled carefully. Salacious stories, whether true or not, made for good entertainment.

Secrecy and concealment also present an unblemished facade. An exhibition at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris in 2008 crossed the line into too much truth by displaying more than two hundred color photos of life on the streets of Paris under German rule between 1940 and 1944. The photos had been taken by a collaborationist photographer, and they showed Parisians going about their business as usual—and even worse, having fun. One of the most jarring photos was the one used for the exhibition’s poster and hung all over Paris: a group of pleasant-looking, well-heeled Parisians at a Métro entrance, a German soldier alongside them. The posters suggested that the French had adapted well to occupation. Some officials called for the exhibit to be closed; the mayor refused, although he authorized the removal of the posters.

The rules of what may be concealed or revealed are complex, shifting with circumstances, but the general principles are ingrained. Rumors create a fantasy and manipulate the way people see political or public figures. It is less important whether the rumor is true than whether it is interesting and appealing. Secrets, on the other hand, are more private and have more value. They play with the truth, depending on how much is given and how much withheld. Secrets lure you closer by revealing something to which no one else has access.

The very word “secret” appeals to the French public. The titles of the books I saw for sale one day at the main newspaper stand of the Gare de Lyon attest to the popularity of the concept:
The Secret Stories of Miss France
.
The Hidden Face of Banks
.
The Secret Story of Employers. Secrets of Happiness.
During slow news times, an investigative article or multi-part television series about the Freemasons as the country’s secret power center is certain to please.

But secrecy in French political and public life is more than a game. It is part of a national survival strategy. Choices about veiling or revealing information are tied to the desire to sustain a certain image of the country and its people. Ugly truths are easily covered up in the interest of maintaining a pleasant outer world in which anyone can operate. And where aesthetics conflicts with ethics, aesthetics often wins out.

That said, the secrets of the powerful usually stay secret, outside the mainstream media and the public pronouncements of politicians. As an American journalist working in Paris, I had to learn to navigate in an environment where secrecy is valued and its inevitable counterpoint—telling the secret to the chosen few—is highly selective, with journalists expected to observe unstated rituals and rules that are never defined but don’t fit an American newspaper. More often than not, the French media play along. It’s a survival skill. As might be expected, the tradition of keeping secrets feeds lively rumormongering. The one who has access to the secrets has power, like the serpent tempting Eve with the promise of forbidden knowledge.

There are three reasons why rumors passed around in select, private circles are rarely put into public discussion.

First, because the French believe in the right to pleasure, they are highly tolerant of other people’s private behavior, especially sexual behavior. They believe that private lives must not be invaded by outsiders.

Second, because they value a pleasurable existence, they do not enjoy ugly revelations that disturb the surface and threaten the social fabric. This is one reason that American-style investigative journalism is rare in France. (The French media’s fear of retribution by the powerful is another.)

Third, libel laws are so protective of private lives that the smallest intrusion in print or broadcasting can lead to legal action and heavy fines.

Whenever there is a gap in the conversation at a French dinner party, all a guest has to do is mention the name of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund and a former finance minister, who is said to harbor presidential ambitions. Someone may innocently ask whether the rumors about his serial womanizing are true. It always livens things up.

Rumors can be exceptionally cruel and personal, even if not proven to be true: a certain former minister is a homosexual pedophile; a certain party leader may have a drinking problem; the father of another former minister’s child is the former prime minister of a European country; the wife of yet another former minister caught him in flagrante delicto in a Morocco hotel suite; any number of intellectuals died by committing suicide. There is no hard evidence, that is, no attributable on-the-record testimony.

As an American who wants real proof, when I am treated to a particularly outlandish rumor, I ask my informant, “How do you know?”

Invariably, the answer is, “Everyone knows.”

Because Paris is a small town, everyone in the political, literary, academic, journalistic, legal, and business world seems to know or be related to everyone else. France is so centralized in many domains that what happens in Paris is all that seems to matter. Almost everyone, as a result, is a self-appointed rumormonger. Politicians talk to their barbers. Policemen talk to their physical therapists. Chauffeurs talk to one another.

On a trip to the Doubs region in the east of France with agriculture minister Bruno Le Maire, I was ferried around by a governmental chauffeur. It turned out that he had worked for years at the Élysée Palace. We got into a discussion of French presidents. I learned which president had been reserved but flawlessly polite; which one had been arrogant; which one had liked to sit in the front seat, fiddle with the car accessories, change the radio stations, and jump out at stoplights to shake people’s hands. “I had a ball,” the chauffeur said. Still, he didn’t dish. Not a word about anything specific that he had seen while accompanying French heads of state on unofficial trips or holidays. He just let me know that he knew.

During my time in France, the codes began to crack, the secrets to be revealed. The country became infected with a virus called
pipolization
—the hunger for personality-driven, tell-all tales. In addition, new technology made the rules ambiguous. The transformation of technology made it easy to record and film private meetings on a cell phone, contributing to a transparency that had never before existed.

I invited a well-connected friend over for lunch one day, and the conversation turned to the rumor that both President Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, were having affairs. Allegedly, the president was having an affair with a married junior minister in his cabinet, while the first lady was doing the same with a fellow pop singer.

The story had started with a vague posting on Twitter, which was picked up by a blog on the website of the weekly newspaper
Le Journal du Dimanche
but not printed in the paper itself. Then the story exploded in the British and Italian media. Denials and declarations by Élysée officials kept it alive and fueled new rumors.

Initially the mainstream French media ignored it all, although some news outlets ran stories saying they would not run stories of the current rumors about the private life of the president and his wife. They didn’t say what the rumors were.

That was the moment of my lunch. The day after, my friend sent me this e-mail:

I wanted to ask her how she was so sure of her information. But I did not feel comfortable asking the question in an e-mail or a phone conversation. When I was a young foreign correspondent in Paris writing about secret negotiations to free American hostages seized at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979–80, an official in the intelligence world told me that he could tell from the clicks and static on my phone that our conversations were being listened to. I also know that France still has an active intelligence surveillance system that has been accused of illegally phone tapping and physically following journalists and procuring their personal phone records in an effort to ferret out the source of their information.

Whether the rumors about Sarkozy and Carla were true didn’t seem to matter much. One day, even before the story broke, a French editor told me that one of the paper’s reporters had caught a glimpse of the president kissing a woman who was not his wife. I asked the editor why the story wasn’t printed. “There was no proof,” was the reply. “My colleagues know about the sex stories of the politicians they cover. Sometimes they witness things.”

“Of course there was proof,” I said. “There was an eyewitness. Your reporter saw it.”

“Even if it could be proved, we wouldn’t print it,” the editor said. “Our readers are not interested in that sort of story. In fact, they would be upset.”

In the United States there would be a rush to make the affair public. The American people would learn the truth about the deception; political wounds would be inflicted. Not so in France. This time, uncharacteristically, the rumors about the first couple became a matter of state, but it was one worthy of a Feydeau farce: finger-pointing at the glamorous former justice minister who was a friend of the president’s ex-wife, formal investigations by the police and the domestic intelligence service, the freezing out of presidential advisers, suspicions of plotting by the Anglo-Saxon financial system to destroy the French economy, and declarations on state-supported radio by the first lady that the rumors were “insignificant.” Like so many other rumors in France, this one failed to hold the public’s interest, and it went away.

Official secrecy can also backfire in other ways. Journalists have the right—even the duty—to ask questions, not to titillate but to get at the truth. Their role is to get the record straight, usually to everyone’s benefit. The absence of on-the-record transparency creates a breeding ground for rumors that get passed around so widely that eventually they are assumed to be true. I was confronted with this situation in September 2003 when France Inter’s morning news show dropped a bombshell. In a swift review of that morning’s press, the announcer cited reports of “a supposed illegitimate son of President Chirac in Japan.” The Japanese love-child story had been rumored for years, but for the first time it was in print, in the pages of
Nos délits d’initiés
(Our Insider Trading), a book by Guy Birenbaum, a left-leaning political scientist, author, and journalist. Birenbaum devoted twenty pages to building an argument that Chirac, an expert on Japanese culture and regular visitor to Japan, had fathered a child there two decades before. The child, now an adult, was believed to be living in Switzerland.