La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (37 page)

On the evening of the dinner, I arranged to meet Andy in front of a real estate agency a few doors down from the apartment of the elegant hostess. The agency entrance was brightly lit, and I had arrived early. I pulled out the text of my speech for some last-minute cramming. I tried to concentrate, but the heel of my left foot felt oddly naked.

Balancing myself against the building, I lifted my calf behind me to inspect the damage. A thin run in my hose was making its way with determination up the back of my leg. A bad omen. It was too late to do anything about it. Across the street, a man with gray hair, glasses, and a tailored black coat looked at me as he walked past. He said something I couldn’t quite make out. But he looked respectable enough.

“
Excusez-moi, monsieur?
” I asked.

“
Vous êtes superbe, madame!
” he replied.

I smiled, just a little. The good omen canceled out the bad. How could I be insulted?

We had been told that dinner was called for 8:45. Andy and I waited together under the lighted entryway until 8:55 so as not to appear rude by arriving on time. To our surprise, two other couples were already there when we walked in. Had I gotten the time wrong?

The elegant hostess was wearing a soft and clingy cashmere dress and dangly aquamarine earrings that caught the light when she turned her head. All of the other women were attractive and well dressed, but the elegant hostess dazzled. Only the lawyer and I were dressed entirely in black; the wife of the famous novelist dared to wear crimson Hermès.

The dinner party followed classic protocol. We drank champagne in the salon for nearly an hour. Candles set in front of the windows lighted the dining room table, which was covered in hues of red. The silver was English, the celadon-colored bone china French. As the guest of honor, I was seated in the middle, the famous novelist to my left, the British journalist to my right. The elegant hostess sat opposite me and announced that this would be a “working dinner” and that she would serve as “president” of the table.

But this was not an ordinary working dinner. The topic was not concrete, with arguments easy to organize, as French political leadership or the future of Europe would have been. This was a discussion that would be highly subjective and even confusing. Still, all the guests played the game, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm and insight.

“It’s a book on seduction in France,” the elegant hostess said, as a waiter served the first course—risotto with scallops.

“I don’t understand why we’re here then!” one of the men said.

Everyone laughed.

“It’s to seduce Elaine!” another said. Another laugh. Okay, so they were “amused,” as the elegant hostess had promised they would be.

“Listen, you sort it out however you like, but seduction in France is…it’s a way of approaching France,” the elegant hostess said. Did the guests understand the subtlety of her statement, that an “approach” could be interpreted as an act of seduction? I was grateful. The elegant hostess had signaled that she was my partner, my protector.

“She has a notebook!” the famous novelist exclaimed, spying the slim black notebook I had brought along in case someone said something unforgettable. I had positioned it to the left of my forks, rather than within the fold of the large napkin covering my lap, so there would be no secrecy.

Some of the other guests let out a long “Aaaaah.”

I had been told that the famous novelist could play the role of observer. But he was so relaxed that he continued the banter with what he called a “very American” question: “Are we to be paid?”

Everyone laughed again.

What could I reply? I thought about explaining how American journalists don’t pay for interviews, and then I stopped short. Think glib, I said to myself.

“Talk to my lawyer!” I joked, motioning across and down the table to my husband.

And then I started my speech. I thanked the hostess and the guests. I said that for me, seduction is a key to understanding France. I explained that the word has a sexual and often pejorative connotation in English, while it is much broader and more ambiguous in French. I said that while the French use the expression
opération séduction
, Anglo-Saxons say “charm offensive.”

The British journalist interrupted. “But ‘charm offensive’ is originally a French expression used in diplomacy,” he said.

Great. I didn’t know that. He went on to explain that most diplomatic terms in English have French origins. My carefully crafted speech was left unfinished as the table drifted into a discussion about the paucity of English diplomatic vocabulary and the precise meaning of the words
galanterie
and
courtoisie.

The elegant hostess brought the table back to order and urged me to continue my presentation. I said I had three questions for the group: “Does seduction act as a driving force in France? Is there a dark side and does anti-seduction exist, that is, the perversion of seduction that makes the process more important than ever getting a result? Finally, without seduction, is France condemned to death?”

The brilliant novelist liked the game. “Everyone knows that the Frenchman who behaves like a seducer is insufferable,” he said. “On the contrary, the Frenchman who doesn’t play at it is the one who truly seduces. If you have to make an effort, it’s a failure. If there is effortlessness, it’s an art!”

Some guests insisted that to succeed, seduction has to be a deliberate, conscious act. They were talking so fast I couldn’t catch who was saying what.

“A willful act—” one male guest said.

“—but not too much at once,” a female guest added.

“You can’t see the mechanics behind it,” said another male guest. Aha. That’s exactly what some of the women in my women’s club had tried to explain to me: that a good seducer in France is one whose strategies are invisible.

The creative thinker announced that “seducer” always had a slightly pejorative ring to it, although not at all as much as in the United States or Britain.

There was agreement that Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had been a
grand séducteur
in his prime, more so than Jacques Chirac. Maybe even now, although Giscard is well into his eighties. The talk moved to Giscard’s novel about an imaginary love affair with Princess Diana, and I mentioned that he had signed a copy of his book for me.

“Did he include his phone number?” one of the male guests joked.

The female lawyer declared, “A very seductive woman—it’s not only sexual. There are women who seduce all the time, all the time, seducing women as well as men. To seduce, you have to want to seduce, to keep your smile, for example.”

I asked her directly—what do you do to seduce?

Andy cut me off with a warning: “Don’t go too far, Elaine.”

The novelist, concentrating on sexual seduction, proclaimed that the goal of the exercise is not to make a woman feel “seduced”; it is to make her feel
troublée. Troublée
? Disturbed? Perturbed? I asked him to explain. “When a woman says to a man, ‘I have been
troublée
,’ two days later—in the pocket.” He said “in the pocket” in English. In French, the expression is
c’est dans la poche
, meaning, “It’s a done deal.”

I understood. I thought back to what Alain Baraton, the gardener at Versailles, had once told me, that the goal of seduction is to find the weak spot of the other and avoid an outright rejection at all costs.

There was chatter about a much-criticized YouTube video that showed President Sarkozy giving the Legion of Honor to Dany Boon, the actor. Sarkozy had tried to be funny, playing on Boon’s Arab origins. His remarks were considered insulting.

“He tried to do it with humor—and therefore, seduce the public,” the famous novelist said. “But it was zero degrees of seduction.”

As the second course (a veal roast with apricots and prunes) was served, we landed on a subject that was currently gripping the politicians and thinkers of France: What does it mean to be French? The government had launched town hall meetings throughout France to determine what unifying values define the nation.

I pulled out a copy of the questions the government had sent to the prefectures across France to “enrich” the debates they were conducting. The table agreed that the debate on national identity was sheer folly.

“Look, it says ‘churches and cathedrals,’” I said. “Why not also say mosques and synagogues? Or why not just say ‘places of worship’?”

“Because that would evoke religion,” one man said. “Churches and cathedrals are things of beauty.”

“They are museums,” another guest chimed in.

There was talk about François Mitterrand’s campaign poster for the 1974 presidential election, which included the slogan “The Tranquil Force” and the bell tower of a church.

“This is France, madame,” one of the male guests told me with a blend of gentility and condescension.

I recalled Giscard’s admonition that as an outsider, I’d never be able to understand his country. I decided that this was a battle I could never win.

Inevitably, the conversation about national identity moved to the importance of desire, of pleasure.

“An identity for France is not an identity of the French people!” the British journalist proclaimed. He lost me there. I sat back and hoped no one would call on me as I had no idea what he meant, but people around me seemed to think it was important and nodded solemnly.

Then I understood where he was going. “How do you give people the pleasure of wanting to be French?” he asked. “With lectures, with gestures of welcome, with education, et cetera, and not at all with symbols, concrete things?”

For him, being French was an attitude, a state of emotion, a feeling—of contentment, of well-being, of belonging.

The famous novelist countered: “Pardon me, but when you say ‘with education,’ there is also ‘La Marseillaise.’ So you cannot remove the symbols. In education, there are the symbols of civic instruction.”

The former corporate president disagreed. “For me, education is not symbols,” he said. “It is the capacity to read.”

The two of them embarked on a lengthy digression, a dialogue of subtle gamesmanship that was never impolite or angry but was not always comprehensible, at least not to me. It was also a classic exercise in the art of conversation, in the intellectual foreplay I had come to recognize. They seemed to be enjoying it.

The British journalist raised the issue of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, asking whether he could be the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate in 2012 if, say, compromising videos were discovered and posted on YouTube.

But a woman said that Strauss-Kahn’s reputation as sexually vigorous would add to—not detract from—his appeal as a candidate.

A male guest suggested that it was a statistical issue. “The big news in France is not that politicians who have had plenty of women win elections,” he said. “This is not a question of nature; it’s a question of degree. Between one and five, no difference; between five and a thousand, there is a difference.”

Okay, now I got it. It was okay for a president to have had five mistresses but not a thousand.

But France had evolved, he explained. “The big news is that Carla Bruni has been accepted, even if she might have had dozens of men,” he continued.

Not everyone agreed. A woman disapproved of the fact that Bruni was said to have had so many lovers. The guests tried to name all of them: the well-documented ones like Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, and Raphaël Enthoven; then the rumored and imagined, including the son of a famous Nazi hunter, a former prime minister, Enthoven’s father.

“She knew how to seduce the public,” one woman said.

“It’s true. She seduced, she really seduced,” one man said.

As dessert was served (a charlotte with red fruits and meringues), the famous novelist defined the topic as very important. “In France, there has always been a rule,” he said. “When a man sleeps with plenty of women, he’s a Don Juan. When a woman sleeps with plenty of men, she’s a whore.”

“Yes! And Carla Bruni was the first—” said a woman.

“—to have turned this concept on its head—” said her husband.

“—who knew how to reconstruct her image,” his wife replied.

I caught only one faux pas. One of the male guests got the elegant hostess’s first name wrong. When he did it a second time, the famous novelist corrected him. The male guest apologized. When he got her name wrong a third time, his mistake was ignored. I figured it would have been too brutal for him to lose face once again. Frankly, I was relieved. My gaffes were noticed, too, I assumed, but perhaps more easily forgiven.

Strong espresso, herbal tea, and the Armagnac of the Armagnac couple were served in the living room. The “working” session was over. But even after the dinner guests were split up into several smaller groups, the conversation continued to focus on the subjects that had been raised at the table. “You could say, in effect, that these sophisticated dinner guests had been sufficiently seduced by the notion of discussing the subject that they voluntarily continued doing so,” Andy said later.

There was a greater physical casualness than one might expect at a dinner party with such a refined group. Two of the women, including the elegant hostess, sat on the floor. The loosening up was more than the effect of champagne and fine wines. The nature of the dinner conversation had lent an unusual ease to the final act of the evening.

The brilliant thinker took me aside over coffee to say he had been struck by what had been left unspoken. I asked him to explain, but another guest joined us. The revelation that seemed to hold so much promise was put on hold.

The guests lingered until after midnight, even though it was a week-night. The dinner had been a success. But what new insights had I gleaned about seduction?

There had been no disciplined Cartesian debate that culminated in a climax of sublime revelation and transcendence. But there had been an enthusiastic embrace of the subject. There had been agreement that the French
art de vivre
—art of living—was much superior to the “American way of life” because it was not work but encompassed pleasure and the appreciation of beauty. There had been disagreement over whether the art of conversation could take place in a bistro in a working-class suburb or needed a rarefied atmosphere like ours.