La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (36 page)

“It’s the rule,” the manager of our apartment building told me when I asked to leave the cabinets. “Every tenant has to leave behind an empty kitchen.”

Undaunted, I appealed to the landlord’s representative. I tried the formal, obsequious French approach. “Would you have the kindness to consider allowing us to leave the kitchen cabinets for the next tenant?”

No. “The kitchen must be empty,” she said.

I tried cultural outreach. “May I invite you for tea one afternoon to inspect them yourself?”

No.

I tried moral grounds and ecological correctness. “Isn’t it wrong and a waste of energy and money to destroy a kitchen just so that the next tenant can install a new one?”

No.

I tried American marketing. “The cabinets will be a selling point!” I exclaimed.

No.

I tried Cartesian logic. “We are supposed to leave the apartment in the same condition in which we found it. The kitchen had cabinets when we first arrived. So it seems that there should be cabinets when we depart,” I said. “Things are different now,” she replied. “We have streamlined our operation.”

Finally, I tried the legal approach. “Why not write a clause into the new lease saying that the landlord takes no responsibility for previously installed cabinets?”

“The management has no need to take responsibility for cabinets that a tenant might complain about later,” she replied.

And there I had it, a perfectly good French explanation about making the minimum effort that was required to avoid any possible complication. Innovative thinking, saving money, common sense, flexibility, and basic humanity were not part of the equation. It is this rigidity that fixes France in a time warp, depriving the country of the fluidity and the excitement that comes with solving problems. Fixed positions remain, no matter how absurd they are, like those governing the dismantling, for no good reason, of a perfectly good kitchen.

I had run up against the limits of seduction. I asked Bruno Le Maire, the minister of agriculture, what is to become of France if anti-seduction wins out in the end. He responded that seduction has limited power and must be constantly refined. It has to be based on finding common ground with the other and bringing the other to yourself. It ultimately can be done well, he insisted, and the French do it best.

“We no longer have military power, we no longer have economic power,” he said. “The only force France has is its intelligence. It’s very precious. I don’t find it anywhere else in the world. The force of our intelligence allows us to talk to everyone, to understand the complexity of the real world.”

Le Maire said that France’s intelligence compelled it to argue years ago that the creation of the euro without a parallel European economic infrastructure was stupid. He said it was France’s intelligence that understood that war with Iraq would be a disaster for years to come. “You can keep telling me France is a medium-sized power,” he added. “I remain convinced it is a great nation. A singular nation.”

“And if France continues to lose its global influence, its farms, its countryside that gives definition to what is France, if it loses its culinary arts, its art of conversation, what does it become?” I asked.

“We cannot lose that,” he said. “If we lose that, we lose everything.”

Le Maire quoted one of his favorite lines from a poem of Alexis Leger, the diplomat who under the pen name Saint-John Perse was one of France’s best-known poets of the twentieth century and the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960. “Select a wide hat with the brim seduced.” I didn’t understand, so he explained: “To seduce means ‘to pull toward yourself.’ And when you ‘seduce’ the brim of your hat, you turn the brim toward the center of the hat. That’s exactly what seduction is for the French, to pull the other toward yourself, to lead back to yourself.”

Therefore, he continued, seduction requires concealed power. “That’s what’s at play,” he said. “It’s not a question of imposing power. It’s not a question of forcing. It’s to pull toward yourself with an operation in which you succeed by explaining, convincing, and making the other laugh. It’s the opposite of Italian charm, which is given completely freely.”

He cited the late Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni as someone who had an irresistible charm but was not seductive. “He was not adept at the process of seduction that brings one back to you,” he said. “Fundamentally, that’s the real French character. It’s to see, even on a geographical map, that France is the heart of the world.”

“Would you like me to give a dinner for you?” the elegant hostess asked over lunch in her apartment one day. “To discuss seduction?”

“I’d be honored!” I replied, perhaps with too much American eagerness.

The elegant hostess speaks elegant English, with considerably more grace than I speak French. So most often we speak in English.

The dinner, however, would be conducted in French. “How good is your French?” she asked.

The question was ever so slightly annoying. I had lived in Paris for several years. I wasn’t one of those Americans who had never learned to speak the language, was I? Then again, I rarely initiated conversations with the elegant hostess in French.

“It’s good enough to interview the president of France,” I replied, giving her a broad smile of gut-it-out bravado.

“Good,” she said, smiling back with more reserve. Then she put me on notice. “We’re going to do it the French way,” she said.

By this, I knew she meant careful plotting and preparation. A series of discussions followed by phone, by e-mail, and over lunch. She asked about my husband: his name, education, work, interests. She wanted to know whether we had dietary restrictions and how I wanted to be introduced.

This was to be an unusual event: not a casual, social affair but a strategically planned working dinner with twelve interesting people.

“More about these people when you next come to lunch,” the elegant hostess wrote in one e-mail. “
Je t’embrasse
(if I may),” she signed.

During our next encounter, the elegant hostess told me about the professional lives and personal interests of the guests. There would be the famous novelist and biographer who worked on several books at once and his British wife, an intellectual in her own right; the creative thinker (a retired banker) and his wife, who produced and sold excellent Armagnac from their estate in the south; the former corporate president and his lawyer wife; the British foreign correspondent and his French businesswoman partner; and the hostess’s husband, a Renaissance man who collected art, ran a think tank, campaigned for political reforms, and earned a living as a banker.

She said they were “thrilled and amused” by the prospect of the dinner. Thrilled, okay. But amused? I could accept that they might find the subject of seduction intriguing, but somehow I didn’t see myself as the source of dinner table amusement. I enjoyed reading Edith Wharton and Henry James, both of whom had been gifted conversationalists in French at tables in Paris in their day, but I didn’t think I had the skill to live up to their example in real life.

I decided to launch a two-pronged
opération séduction
. First, I would have to be presentable and glib enough to lure the guests into the game. Then, I would lay out questions and ideas about the role of seduction in French life in such a way that they would find the topic engaging and discuss it with relish. They didn’t have to buy my ideas; they just had to be seduced into a good talk.

A formal dinner party is a test of manners in any culture. But sophisticated Parisians are different. They love to be seduced, expect to be seduced, and have a code of politesse and appearance that demands that everyone meet a minimum standard of seductiveness.

If you don’t meet the standard, you can’t really operate as an equal, certainly not in intellectual circles. Some slack will be cut for a foreigner. But this was a dinner party with me as the star attraction. I didn’t care if I wasn’t praised, but I wanted to be accepted.

Even after years living in Paris, I found that many of the codes of dinner party protocol eluded me. It wasn’t enough that I was a correspondent for the
New York Times
, successful by the standards of my profession and my country. The French so easily can make an outsider feel awkward and
mal élevé
—badly brought up. All those centuries of drawing rooms and salons and minuets have given many of them a highly refined ability to throw others off.

My own experience in giving formal, catered dinner parties was limited. In all my time living in Paris, I had hosted only one. It was in 2003, to mark the occasion of Gérard Araud’s appointment as France’s ambassador to Israel. I had met Gérard in Washington in the late 1980s, when he was responsible for political-military affairs at the French embassy.

When Gérard was about to leave France for Israel, I threw a dinner party in his honor. I sent handwritten invitations on engraved stationery and ordered good wines and a lot of champagne. I covered cheap kitchen chairs in white linen. I hired a chef to prepare the perfect dinner and a waiter to serve it.

I consulted with French friends and came up with three criteria that have to be met for a formal Paris dinner party to succeed:

• The hostess must offer a beautiful meal, with effortless serving by hired help and first-rate wines. (The excellence of the food is less important than how it looks on the plate.)
  
• The guests must be seductive in appearance and level of charm.
  
• The conversation must be intellectually engaging, with all the guests contributing.
  

I did more research. One French friend warned me not to try to compete with the French in the table setting. They will always find a flaw, she said. I had no good crystal. My silver flatware didn’t match. My set of good china was in storage in Delaware. So I decorated the dining table with miniature vegetables and satin ribbon instead of flowers. One guest, a senior Foreign Ministry official, announced that the table was perfect. Either he thought I was pathetic or he was very good at
second degré.

Some guests brought flowers. One brought a bookmark with hanging baubles. A four-star general brought a miniature porcelain pot and his security officers.

I have no recollection of what we ate, except that the food was good enough and everyone praised it and that gooseberries and slices of star-fruit decorated the dessert plate. The conversation was so lively that I broke with protocol and kept everyone at the table instead of retiring to the living room for coffee.

I had already made a much more serious protocol blunder. On the dinner invitations, I had invited the guests to say good-bye to Gérard as he took up his post as ambassador in Jerusalem. Israel claims Jerusalem as its capital; in the absence of a resolution on the final status of the city, the rest of the world does not. Gérard’s post was in Tel Aviv, the city where foreign governments have their embassies. With a stroke of the pen, I had moved France’s embassy, rewritten history, and insulted the French state.

This time, I would be better prepared. I consulted notes I had taken for an article several years earlier about the importance of politesse in France. As part of my research, I had attended a private seminar on proper table settings and dining habits. There I was, with a group of French and American women in a hotel suite adorned in silk brocade and velvet. All of us had paid the equivalent of ninety dollars apiece to raise our dinner-party consciousness.

I was taught that in the perfect French world, rules govern even the most trivial acts: how to greet a guest at the door, how to address someone you have just met, what gift not to bring to a dinner party. (Giving a bottle of wine can be considered an arrogant act that gives the impression you think you know more about wine than your hosts do. I once brought a one-hundred-euro bottle of 2004 Sauternes that I had purchased from a private domaine south of Bordeaux only to be told by the hostess that she and her husband had six one-thousand-euro bottles of Château d’Yquem in their wine cellar.)

Among the other lessons: Always arrive fifteen minutes late at a dinner party. The woman—not the man—extends a hand for a handshake or a kiss of the hand. A woman should leave her hands on the table and not rest them in her lap during dinner to avoid giving the impression that hanky-panky is going on below. She should also fold one hand over the other at the table, the better to show off her jewels.

You should eat asparagus with your fingers and sorbet with your fork. Do not say
bon appétit
at the start of a meal. (It’s too direct a reference to the body.) Take only as big a helping as you intend to eat. (It is impolite to leave food on your plate.) Do not take second helpings of cheese. (The host may think you’re still hungry). Never leave the table in the middle of the meal to use the powder room. (If you really have to go, wait until dinner is over and ask, discreetly, “May I wash my hands?”)

In her pencil skirt and fitted cashmere sweater, our instructor looked as if she never ate. She compared a dinner party—for both guest and host—to mastering a sport. “You have to train hard,” she told us. “But once you train and know the rules, it all comes naturally.”

Most terrifying was her pronouncement that all can be lost in the first minute of acquaintance. “In the first twenty seconds, others will judge your look; in the second twenty seconds, your behavior; and the third twenty seconds, your first words,” she said. “There is a code. If you do not follow it properly, it will be very, very hard to make a comeback.”

The elegant hostess’s dinner would require a layer of complexity that we hadn’t learned in class: verbal quickness and playfulness. I knew that some of the nuances and sparring would escape me.

“If there is a conversational one-upmanship with a lot of light play…” I told the elegant hostess one day, my voice trailing off.

“There will be,” she interrupted. “There will be a lot of
second degré
.”

Ah, the treacherous
second degré
, where what is said is not really meant and you have to catch the second meaning, and then try to reply with a soupçon of humor and wit. I knew I was much too
premier degré
, too direct, too much in search of clarity. Even if I understood all the French expressions, I sometimes didn’t get the jokes. I realized that it had been a mistake to tell the elegant hostess that my French was good enough to interview the president of France. Interviewing presidents is easy: the goal is to push them to make news, but in doing so, they have to express themselves clearly.
Second degré
—droll ambiguity—does not translate into good newspaper copy.

I confessed to the elegant hostess that her dinner party idea might not work; I was not nimble enough for
second degré.

“I may just sit and observe,” I said. “If I start thinking someone will judge me because I’m not using the imperfect subjunctive, so be it. If I don’t do Edith Wharton, you’re going to have to bail me out.”

“They’re all nice people, and they’re my friends,” she assured me. She repeated that they were “thrilled and amused” by the prospect of the dinner.

Once I had the list of the guests, I went to work. I asked Florence to do an electronic data bank search on each of them. I learned who had gone to a
grande école
and who had aristocratic roots, who had an ancestor who had helped bring the Statue of Liberty to America and who had launched a travel magazine, who had worked in the United States and who belonged to the exclusive Racing Club, who was seriously and who was casually religious.

I had to figure out what to wear. Michèle Fitoussi from
Elle
told me I needed a black dress that was elegant and sexy, but comfortable, and designer shoes with high heels, no matter how uncomfortable. I had neither. My “good outfit” for dinner parties was a Sonia Rykiel tuxedo jacket and pants that I had bought years before.

I consulted Olga Boughanmi, who runs a consignment shop in my old neighborhood. She picked out an Italian black silk wrap dress and a pair of Christian Louboutin high-heeled mules. I paid her two hundred euros. The dress was comfortable; the mules were not. Perfect.

I read and annotated a novel by the famous novelist that was entirely devoted to a chic Parisian dinner party. Along the way I found several references to the word
séduction
. One of the guests at this fictional dinner was a female journalist who had asked her assistant to do research on the other guests. I realized I wasn’t being clever, just predictable. The famous-writer character in the novel ridiculed women who always came to dinner parties dressed in black. They gave the dinners the feel of a funeral, he said.

Another book by the famous novelist portrayed the dinner party as an exercise in stealth worthy of a sensitive military intelligence operation. One character had a habit of dropping his napkin so that he could position a video camera on the floor under the table to film the guests playing footsie. The fictional hosts installed a microphone in the elevator to monitor the comments of their guests as they departed.

Arielle Dombasle had been right: seduction is war.

Then came the preparation of my opening remarks. The elegant hostess explained that I would give a five-minute summary of the thesis of my book. Then she would turn the floor over to the other guests.

The French are particularly good at oral presentations, having been required from a young age to deliver what are called
exposés
—without notes. The
exposé
always follows a
plan
, a rigid, formal structure in which logic is more important than accuracy. I wrote a speech in French. Andy edited it. Florence corrected the grammar. I read the speech aloud until I got it down to five minutes.

“May I take notes?” I had asked the elegant hostess.

“A few,” she said. “Thank you for asking. But no recorder on the table.”

I smiled and thought of the time in Tehran, years ago, when I had interviewed the wife of President Mohammad Khatami. She had examined the bouquet of flowers on the table between us and exclaimed, surprised, “There’s a microphone in the flowers! Someone is listening to our conversation!” Apparently, our conversation was being recorded. For me, planting a microphone in a floral bouquet would have been bold and brilliant if it worked, humiliating and unforgivable if it did not.