La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (4 page)

Because the past is romantic and can be viewed through the lens of pleasure rather than power, women play key roles in its retelling. For Alain Baraton, the Versailles gardener, French history has been driven by romance, seduction, sex, and love. “Ours is a country that built itself on love stories,” he said. “But for many historians the idea that sex has decided everything is unbearable. There always has been a refusal to accept that women and seduction might have transformed the French political landscape. And yet they have.”

At the top of the list of these transformative women is Marie Antoinette, the last queen of the Old Regime. During her lifetime, she was portrayed as spoiled, wasteful, promiscuous, and immature. But of all the royals, she is the one who most inflames the imagination of present-day France.

If I were a Marie Antoinette fan, I could join the Marie Antoinette Association; eat macaroons from a Marie Antoinette “collection” made by the Paris confectioner Ladurée; splash on the perfume created by Francis Kurkdjian in her honor; wear Lalique crystal earrings and a pendant inspired by one of her portraits; eat from copies of her royal dishes made by the Raynaud porcelain house; buy a Marie Antoinette Barbie doll; and cut with a limited edition jackknife made of wood from Versailles’s fallen trees and engraved with the initials MA.

It was front-page news when Versailles broke with precedent and allowed the American director Sofia Coppola to rent its premises for her $40 million film
Marie Antoinette
. When the film was released in France in 2006, the newspaper
Le Figaro
published a special 112-page glossy magazine on the queen’s life as “princess, icon, rebel.” The women’s magazine
Atmosphères
examined her “secrets.” The weekly
Le Point
put her portrait on a cover with the caption, “Misunderstood, decapitated, Marie Antoinette, the remorse of the French.”

France’s national obsession with a glittering past weighs most heavily at Versailles. Outsiders tend to approach the château as a historical monument, a collection of stones, paintings, mirrors, objects, gardens, but for the French, its power derives from both reality and myth. The authority of the actors and actions that have marked Versailles over the centuries makes it a permanent celebration of the past. Versailles is a never-aging center of power (the monarchy), beauty (the aesthetics, the architecture), and sexuality (the wives, the mistresses). It is a symbol of France as a glorious nation, and the French state has spent vast sums to restore it. “Versailles deserves it, so let’s not haggle over restoring its grandeur,” Charles de Gaulle said in justifying costly renovations in the 1960s. During his presidency, a wing of the Grand Trianon was reserved for the president’s use. When President Sarkozy decided to break with tradition and address France’s Parliament in 2009, he did so not at the Élysée Palace or the National Assembly or the Senate but at Versailles. America doesn’t have anything that comes close to it.

The gardener Alain Baraton has written a number of books on Versailles, including his most recent one on love at the château. He is a moderately attractive man in his fifties, with a slightly rounded belly. He wears pointy shoes, chain-smokes, and stares at beautiful women. We talked about his book, which is chock-full of stories about sex at Versailles: the famous actress who loved to visit there to expose herself; the older politician who had sex in the garden with a young woman whom he had tied to a tree; the elderly couple who complained when one of Baraton’s gardeners fell from a tree, landing on them as they were in the throes of lovemaking.

“I think I lack imagination,” I told him. “I can’t believe that people make love in the gardens of Versailles.”

“Of course!” he replied. “It’s one thing if you have a discussion around a table in a café at Versailles as we are doing now. It’s another thing if two people are sitting on a marble bench in the park as dusk falls with the sculptures and the fountains perfectly aligned. When there are no more disruptions, no more street noise, no more light and aggression, when you feel secure with someone who understands you and who only wants one thing in the end: to spend the evening with you and to give you pleasure.

“You might not say yes right away, but there will be hesitation because the site becomes enchanting! I’m not saying you are going to crack. I’m not saying you’re going to accept. I’m just saying that at a given moment, you yourself risk being swept up in this dynamic and saying to yourself, ‘If I begin to put up a barrier, I risk depriving myself of this magical moment.’”

Baraton explained the different ways Versailles can be used to seduce visitors. It becomes a multifaceted creature that can adapt, providing various possibilities, playing with its attributes. For men of power and money, Baraton shows the grounds from the kingly, manly perspective, with the château, the formal gardens, and the statuary straight ahead. For passionate gardeners and environmentalists, he goes to Marie Antoinette’s “domain” surrounding the Petit Trianon with its gazebos, bridges, benches, hidden pathways, and luscious informal English garden with dandelions and wild roses. Her estate does double duty as a place to take a potential lover. An artificial grotto, where she held private encounters on a curved bench cut into stone, is constructed with two doors to better allow discreet entrances and exits. “Look on your right,” Baraton commanded, as we drove along the pathways. “There is even the Temple of Love! When you have a temple devoted to the glory of love, it’s not innocent. There are many structures here to let you isolate yourself, to talk, to reflect. There are small rivers. There are lakes, animals, birds. It’s a place of seduction. Do you believe now that one single man needs such a big garden only for himself? No he doesn’t. If you built so much, it’s in order to seduce, to show your strength, your power.”

The Petit Trianon itself and its surrounding fields and gardens work best. Baraton explained how. We drove through a set of iron gates along a winding dirt road, past fountains and elaborate flower beds and through another gate. He parked his car in front of a small château, the Pavillon Français. He introduced me to the caretaker, whom he referred to as “the king’s first valet.” The caretaker’s lips curled up ever so slightly, a signal, perhaps, that he had heard it all before.

Baraton continued to spin his tale. “Let’s say there are only the two of us. I’m Louis XV, and you’re a young lady from a good background. And then, at some point it starts raining,” he said. He led me into a small room with enormous gilt-framed mirrors and urged me to let go, to use my imagination to relive history. “You can see yourself in the mirrors with the king!” he said. He pointed out the moldings with their farm animals, musical instruments, and arrows of love. “Those are not war symbols!” he said.

“Now imagine, you’re with Louis XV. You find yourself here. He has arranged for chocolates and tea to be set up. There’s a fire in the fireplace. You must admit the temptation is here! I may be wrong, but the king is pleasant; the place is wonderful. Voilà! You see, this a place built for seduction. It’s not a place built for power. It’s not a place built for friends.”

I asked him whether there are strategies to protect oneself from seduction. Apparently, it’s not easily done. There is only one way.

“You must get away!” he said. “Flee!”

Seduction, he added, is a game. “It’s danger. It’s charm. It’s conviction. And then, don’t forget one thing: this is the essence of life! It’s the motor.”

“So you truly believe seduction is the motor driving society?”

“Of course it is,” Baraton replied. “Driving everything. You can live only to seduce. I’m convinced of it.”

The sex-charged nature of Versailles has been undermined in recent years by natural and man-made developments. Fierce wind storms in 1999 felled trees and destroyed landscaping, and, despite replanting, the gardens have been deprived of many of their hidden spaces. Cell phones and cameras have driven off exhibitionists. And technology has transformed the quest for companionship.

As Baraton said, “I have lived through a time when a very beautiful woman would walk in the gardens in the afternoon, would stop at a bench, and after half an hour a very elegant man would come sit down next to her, and they would start with, ‘This place is really nice. Do you often come here?’ and that was it! Nowadays, I’m afraid the same guy is on the Internet at night, starting with, ‘I want her tall, blond or brunette.’ The art of courting has changed, completely.”

France has always been a woman. When Clovis, the first king of the Franks, was baptized at the end of the fifth century, France won the title “eldest daughter of the Church.” Despite the strict separation of church and state, the late Pope John Paul II reminded the French of that status during his papacy, and France’s two most recent presidents, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, used the phrase during their respective visits to the Vatican in 1996 and 2007.

In sculptures, paintings, engravings, medals, and coins dating from the Renaissance, the French nation has been portrayed as female and draped in the robes of antiquity. She has been depicted as a nurturing protector and as a loving mother surrounded by children.

Today, a fantasy woman is France’s national symbol. She is Marianne, the personification of the French Republic and the idealized embodiment of freedom. She was a daring choice, not so much because she was feminine and often portrayed as sexually appealing but because she was a commoner. Some even called her vulgar. In the eighteenth century, the name “Marie-Anne” was one of the most popular in France and often found in the lower social classes. According to the American historian Paul R. Hanson, “To call the Republic Marianne was to characterize it as little better than a peasant, or more derisively, as a common whore.” But she was adopted with pride by the republicans, and since then Marianne is the closest thing France has to Uncle Sam, if Uncle Sam had breasts.

The most recognizable Marianne is that of Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting
Liberty Leading the People.
Barefoot, with muscular arms, she leads the rabble over the barricades, a bayoneted rifle in one hand, the revolutionary tricolor flag in the other, her bonnet firmly on her head. She does not seem to notice that the bodice of her dress has fallen to her waist. In the years since, Marianne has been reenvisioned in the image of France’s most beautiful actresses and fashion models.

A far more important female figure in French history is the fifteenth-century teenage virgin-warrior Joan of Arc, who is memorialized throughout the country. Almost every city and town is graced with a statue or painting of Joan, almost every church and cathedral has a stained glass window or plaque. Thousands of novels, plays, biographies, films, songs, even operas and video games have told her story. Her image has been used on labels for mineral water, liqueurs, and cheese. A navy officer training ship was named after her. She is France’s national hero.

Physically strong, psychologically independent, Joan vowed to stay sexually pure because she took her orders from God. Though she was an illiterate girl from the country, she was intelligent enough to convince her parents that she was hearing voices from heaven. She left home and made her way to the side of the dauphin, fighting to restore his kingdom. Using some unknown power of persuasion, she sweet-talked him into giving her money, horses, weapons, and soldiers so that she could rid France of its English invaders.

She led the siege against the English at Orléans and paved the way for the dauphin to be crowned King Charles VII at Reims. Then she was captured, sold to the English, tried for witchcraft and heresy for communicating with God directly instead of via the church, and burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431 at the age of nineteen. Asked during the trial why she was commanding an army rather than keeping to “other womanly duties” like raising children, she said, “There are enough other women to do those things.”

Because so little is known about Joan’s life, she has become one of the most myth-generating true-life characters in French history. A virgin, she is pure. A warrior, she is fearless. A free spirit, she is liberated. A military commander, she is a leader. A patriot, she is the incarnation of France. There is pleasure, amusement, and passion in the way the French debate details about Joan’s story.

Jules Michelet, the great nineteenth-century historian, argued that Joan was responsible for the country’s transformation into a woman worthy of love. Because of her heroism and sacrifice, he wrote, “for the first time, one feels, France is loved like a person…. Until then, it was a coming together of provinces, a vast chaos of fiefs, grand landscapes, a vague idea. But from that day on, by the force of the heart, she has been a
patrie
…this ravishing image of
la patrie
…. Remember always, Frenchmen, that
la patrie
is born from the heart of a woman, from her tenderness and her tears, from the blood she has shed for us.”

France has not consistently embraced her. The kings tended to ignore her. Voltaire mocked her as an “unfortunate idiot.” But French soldiers in World War I prayed to her, and the Vatican made her a saint in 1920. In World War II, the Germans and the Vichy regime used her as a martyr of national unity who had confronted the English invaders; the anti-Nazis saw her as a symbol of opposition to the Occupation.

Many in contemporary France view Joan with distaste because of her identification with right-wing extremism. Since the 1980s, she has been the icon of the far-right National Front party, which celebrates her every year as the personification of Gallic purity in the face of invading immigrants. For others, she is a well-worn cliché. Yet, stripped of centuries of overlay, Joan’s story is enduringly romantic, even when she herself was far from the typical image of the romantic heroine.

Joan was neither feminine nor sexy. There didn’t seem to be anything subtle or playful about her. In French art, she has been cast as a simply dressed shepherdess with long braids, a flat-chested tomboy, a warrior-goddess on horseback brandishing a sword and carrying the emblem of France. A nineteenth-century engraving by Fortuné Méaulle of a full-figured Joan tied to the stake in a flowing white dress with a plunging neckline robs her of beauty: her hair has been cut off. According to Colette Beaune, a medieval historian and Joan’s most recent biographer, she ate and drank little, was anorexic, never menstruated, hated physical contact, and was terrified of being raped. Beaune noted the speculation that Joan was a lesbian, but she gave no credence to those claims.