La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (5 page)

I asked François Demachy, the creative perfumer at Dior, what scent he would invent to evoke the spirit of Joan of Arc. His answer was schizophrenic. “There would be a metallic note, because she is in armor in most of the images we have of her,” he said. “But there would need to be something very flowery because she was a virgin.”

I then turned to Jacques Séguéla, one of the impresarios of French advertising. He is the man who introduced Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni at a dinner party at his home in 2007 and who helped catapult François Mitterrand to the presidency in 1981 with a catchy slogan and advice about changing his wardrobe, haircut, and teeth.

Even Séguéla couldn’t make Joan physically seductive. But he gave it a good try. I told him to imagine that I was his client and that I wanted to use the image of Joan of Arc to get consumers to buy my new product. What would be the ideal product and what would be the pitch?

He laid out his answer as if it were a mathematical formula. When you use a star to advertise a product, he said, the star must match up with the product’s selling points. Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot equal sex, John Wayne the classic American hero, Catherine Deneuve the ideal Parisian woman. “We have to find the product that shares the same qualities as the star who promotes it,” he said. “What are the qualities of Joan of Arc? One is purity, but there is also sacrifice and a kind of invulnerability. The only way to get her to disappear is to burn her at the stake. So, I would use her to launch an electric car.”

“C’est pas vrai!
”—“Not true!”—I said.

“Why an electric car?” Séguéla continued. “Because people are afraid of electric cars. They are afraid that they are not solid, that they are too light. Now, in her armor, Joan is solidity itself.”

“And then,” he continued, “the electric car has purity! It has zero CO
₂
, it has zero emissions, zero waste of energy, zero gasoline. So I have the purity and the solidity of Joan of Arc. And then, the electric car, it’s a revolt against the normal car! So I can explain this revolt. And then finally, the electric car, it’s young. And Joan of Arc is young.”

He could sense my skepticism. In the next breath, he acknowledged, “So, you will say to me, ‘But Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.’ Well, the ideal myth does not exist! Even God isn’t an ideal myth. So, we could come up with a different product!”

With that, he smiled. It was the smile of a man who had used the same lines a thousand times before and was confident that they would continue to work.

Before I let the subject of Joan drop, I went to Orléans one May, during the weeklong annual celebration of her victory over the English.

Dozens of groups in costume representing all corners of France (even its territories in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean) sang, danced, and marched their way through the streets. Brass bands competed with church bells and bagpipes. A sound-and-light show projected photographic images of Joan’s victory onto the facade of the cathedral. The bronze statue of Joan on horseback, her face looking upward to heaven, her strong body encased in armor, was ringed with baskets of flowers. Among the celebrators were 680 French troops, including horsemen from the Republican Guard in ceremonial uniform. During the parade, a formation of planes flew overhead. Joan was still the darling of the French military, as powerful a hero as Napoléon.

The star attraction was “Joan” herself, seventeen-year-old Charlotte Marie, who was chosen to be that year’s Joan of Arc for her spiritual devotion and her good works. I found her in a makeshift dressing room at a school. She wore twenty-five pounds of armor and a brass sword strapped to her belt. She was ready to mount a horse and ride around town.

I asked her if Joan was more like a man than a woman.

“Ah, like a woman!” she exclaimed. “Despite what everyone says, even if she was a warrior, I learned that she was a coquette! For the coronation of Charles VII, she had a dress made for herself. So she was a woman.”

Except for the dress, Charlotte had no evidence that Joan was a coquette. I found it hard to believe. Later that day, I met Marie-Christine Chantegrelet, the president of the Joan of Arc Association, which serves to keep Joan’s memory alive. Chantegrelet herself was Joan of Arc in May 1968, so while students in Paris were throwing cobblestones in the streets, she was riding a horse in full battle armor. She confirmed the coquette story.

“From the books I’ve read and the ‘Joanists’ I’ve talked to, I have the image of a young woman warrior who was a coquette on the side,” she said. She also told me the story of the dress made for the coronation, adding that when Joan traveled through certain towns, she asked for lengths of fabric so dresses could be made for her.

“I love this story about her,” Chantegrelet said. “I love that in addition to her faith and her service to God, to the king and to France, et cetera, et cetera, there was a small touch of femininity that got her excited.”

So could she seduce? I asked.

“In the broad sense of the term, yes, she was a seductress, someone who has the aura, the charisma, to make people follow her,” Chantegrelet said. “Everyone fell under her spell.”

If I were to follow a hero of French history, it probably would not be a military leader like Joan of Arc but an adventurer. In fact, I have one in mind: the late Jacques Cousteau, the undersea explorer and television showman. For many years in the 1960s and 1970s, ABC television presented
The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau
, a docudrama starring Cousteau and a crew of divers with good looks, French accents, sleek diving gear, and a research ship called the
Calypso
. Cousteau is remembered for his patient style and slow, deeply accented speech that mesmerized Americans with stories about hidden treasure and sea creatures of the deep. And the silences! Cousteau wasn’t all talk. He lured us in but then often left us alone, to dream. What American kid didn’t want to quit school, run away from home, and go off to explore the sea with Jacques Cousteau?

And then one day I found Luc Long, Cousteau’s modern-day incarnation. An archeologist and scuba diver, he digs up secret ancient Roman treasures from the bottom of the Rhône River. He works on the edge of the city of Arles, which two thousand years ago was a major colonial town. Long is lean and tanned, fast moving and fast talking, with wraparound sunglasses and locks of hair that spill onto his forehead and curl up along the nape of his neck. He works for the French state, on assignment for the Ministry of Culture, but he still speaks with the coarse twang of the south.

For twenty-five years, he has struggled to tame the river, one of the deepest and most dangerous in Europe. It pushes him away by turning black from currents and pollution; it sends out its one-hundred-pound bottom-feeders to sting his skin and bite his hands and feet. It serves as a massive garbage dump, a final resting place for busted motorcycles, rusty shopping carts, tree trunks, slabs of concrete, electric cables, car tires, and ordinary household garbage. It welcomes cargo-carrying ships that seem oblivious to the divers in their way. It is a depository for uranium waste, pesticide residue, and raw sewage—the ideal breeding ground for bacteria that fell the divers with urinary, lung, and ear infections. The river is even a resting place for dead bodies.

Luc Long has been nicknamed “the Serpent” by the river pirates who monitor his moves and who are, in turn, secretly monitored by French domestic intelligence police. The pirates are after the same prizes he seeks—long-submerged amphorae, pots, plates, funnels, oil lamps, bits of pillars, carved capitals, broken statuary—but for sale on the black market or for their private collections, rather than for preservation of the nation’s
patrimoine
, or heritage.

Long and his team of divers and archeologists are romantics, reveling in Gallo-Roman history. They work in shifts from morning until early evening every summer and early fall from their command center: a wooden boat that sits on the edge of the river. In 2007, they pulled up a treasure that shook the archeological world. It was a marble bust dating from around 49 B.C., believed to be the oldest representation of Julius Caesar made during his lifetime. Long called it “a living portrait,” so human that all of Caesar’s flaws are exposed: a slight depression in his skull, small eyes, deep lines extending from the bottom of his nose to his mouth, wrinkles on his neck, a prominent Adam’s apple, a receding hairline. Caesar haunted Long. “Did the people of Arles know him well?” he asked himself. “How did he get to the bottom of the river? Was he thrown in?”

On the day of my visit, the divers pulled up a chunk of white marble—an animal’s foot with sinewy veins—and a tiara that could have belonged to a head of Artemis. Long cradled the tiara in his hands, but, possibly overtaken by the excitement of the moment, he let it slip from his fingers. It plunged deep into the water. Xavier, a retired naval officer on the crew, whipped off his clothes and stripped down to his skivvies. He was not at all self-conscious about his soft, round body that contrasted with the lean torsos of his fellow crew members. He didn’t waste time suiting up. “It’s yours, my commando!” shouted Long. Xavier dived. When he came back up, the tiara was in his hands.

For Long, the Rhône is an untamed lover. “She’s very complicated,” he said. “She is used to doing what she wants. She gets upset and breaks all the plates and bowls. She suddenly turns off the lights and leaves you in the dark. She keeps her treasures hidden and reveals them only when she feels like it. She has a good memory and can be protective of what is hers. She will hurt you by sending out her surrogates to bite. She is a domineering mistress, too, because she demands all your time. You can lose everything because of her: your home, your wife, your children.”

But the river always lures him back. This is not Versailles, a man-made palace that celebrates power, but a sweep-you-off-your-feet adventure of unpredictability, a repository of treasures hidden in the mud and sludge and black waters. It is romanticism in the most unlikely place, beauty from ugliness, heroism on a small scale in a remote patch of nature. “Life is just one long story,” said Long. “I’m not particularly religious or mystical, but sometimes I feel a connection with all these objects, as if they’re calling to me”—like the voices that called out to Joan or the ghosts of the kings and queens hovering over Versailles. Or maybe Long, like the former president François Mitterrand, has “a deep instinctive awareness of…[the] physical France, and a passion for her geography, her living body.” He desires to be seduced as much as he plays the seducer, using the ancient treasures he pulls from one of her rivers to dazzle the state, the art world, and the people.

I went to the Arles museum one day to see Caesar before he was put on public view. I was led up a flight of stairs to a private, locked work room. Inside a tall, blue metal cabinet was a Styrofoam box holding the head of Caesar, a man no younger than fifty, small-eyed, balding, with deep lines around his mouth. I looked into his eyes and he looked back at me, with an expression of pride dimmed by weariness.

Even though it was a symbol of the Roman invasion and conquest of Gaul, the Caesar marble was celebrated by the French state as part of the country’s grand past. The weekly news magazines put Caesar on their covers, as if he were a living hero, just as they do with other heroes of history.

In 2009, on the day each year when the buildings of the state are opened to the public, culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand (the nephew of the former president) feted the country’s heritage by introducing Caesar to the French people. He caressed the head, called it beautiful, and announced that for one full week he was able to keep it in his office. For that brief time, Caesar belonged to him. The gesture reinforced the idea of France as a global center of culture and beauty. It was part of the continuum of France’s seduction of itself.

One year at Christmas, my husband and kids gave me a collection of twenty-two films by the late, great director Eric Rohmer. I thought
L’amour l’après-midi
(
Chloé in the Afternoon
) would be a good place to start.

Frédéric, the narrator, is a thirty-year-old married man with a stable job, a structured life, a pregnant wife whom he appears to love, and a young daughter. But he has a secret obsession: women. He fantasizes about beautiful, anonymous women: in his imagination they approach him on the street, and he easily seduces them and takes them home to bed.

After lunch one day, Frédéric returns to his office and finds Chloé, the ex-girlfriend of an old, close friend, waiting for him. They begin to spend their afternoons together, shopping, eating, drinking coffee, but mostly talking. Eventually, Chloé confesses to Frédéric that she plans to seduce him; he replies that he will try to resist. A series of increasingly erotic scenes follow: Chloé undressing down to black tights and a tight black top; Frédéric touching a curve of her body, commenting on her beautiful figure; Chloé kissing every part of Frédéric’s face except for his mouth as they sit together on a park bench. In their final encounter, Frédéric arrives at Chloé’s apartment as she is finishing her shower. He brings her a towel, and she asks him to dry her. He does so, tentatively.

“No, really dry me!” she insists. The camera cuts to a shot of Chloé’s back. Frédéric moves the towel down her wet body. He tries to avert his eyes, but his face is at the level of her pelvis. Still looking at her, he kisses her neck. She runs into the bedroom. Just as Frédéric begins to take off his sweater, he catches a glimpse of the naked Chloé on the bed, waiting for him to join her. He looks at himself in the mirror, freezes, leaves without saying good-bye, and goes home to his wife. The movie ends without Frédéric and Chloé ever having sex.

I should have known this would happen. The title of the film suggested that the plot was driving toward an inevitable sexual liaison between a happily married man and a somewhat kooky force of nature. But Rohmer was a master in denying his characters sexual finality. The easy way out would have been for Frédéric and Chloé to have sweaty sex with enlaced limbs and rapturous orgasms. Instead, they engage in endless foreplay: long, drawn-out conversations, flirting, and
frôlements
, or slight brushings of their bodies. This is hard work, but hard work infused with eroticism and pleasure. Rohmer knew how to evoke the sexual without the sex.

The emphasis on what comes before, the anticipation, the progress, and even the setbacks separate this kind of storytelling from the classic American sexual fairy tale. In America, the goal is to conquer as efficiently as possible and, if you’re lucky, to live happily ever after. In France, the excitement comes less from gratification than from desire. If we Americans were to put the words “seduction” and “France” together, we might come out with the word “sex.” The French might come out with the word “pleasure.” The game is not one of notches on the bedpost. It is a process, based on the concept that the players are entitled to pleasure and that while sexual intercourse is exciting, the rich, heady, tantalizing pursuit of it may be even more so.

The preoccupation with prolonged sexual play is rooted in French history. One of the pioneers was the seventeenth-century noblewoman Ninon de Lenclos, whose beauty, cunning, independence, and sense of humor made her the most powerful and successful courtesan of her time. While most young women sought security in a well-constructed marriage, she renounced the feminine condition, declaring, “From this moment on, I am becoming a man.” She struck out on her own, opening an unusual business: a salon, and later, a school, which she ran for thirty years, to teach young men and women the art of seduction and love. Men had to pay to hear her lecture; women came for free. She celebrated her eightieth birthday by taking a new beau.

Her life lessons were strategic and unsentimental: “A sensible woman should be guided by her head when taking a husband, and by her heart when taking a lover,” and “Much more genius is needed to make love than to command armies.”

One of Lenclos’s cardinal rules was to conceal one’s intentions. When she was sixty-two, she decided to help the twenty-two-year-old Marquis de Sévigné win the heart of a beautiful but aloof countess. She told him, as Arielle Dombasle would tell me hundreds of years later, that seduction was war.

“Have you ever heard of a skillful general, who intends to surprise a citadel, announcing his design to the enemy upon whom the storm is to descend?” Lenclos asked the marquis. “Do not disclose the extent of your designs until it is no longer possible to oppose your success.”

The marquis took several weeks to make his moves, but then he veered from Lenclos’s orders and professed his love to the countess. The seductive spell was broken; the countess rejected him.

Some of the most unlikely characters throughout French history have valued the sizzle more than the steak. Georges Clemenceau is best known in the United States as the French prime minister who clashed with President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. But he was also a medical doctor, a journalist, and a novelist. In his 1898 novel
Les plus forts
, he celebrated the supreme pleasure of the prelude. One of the book’s characters, a ruined gentleman named Henri de Puymaufray, says, “The most beautiful moment in love is when I climb the staircase.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, the twentieth-century philosopher and writer, felt that the sex act was more of an obligation than a source of pleasure. Simone de Beauvoir, his longtime lover and companion, quoted one of their conversations. “I was more a masturbator of women than a lover…,” he told her. “The essential, emotional relationship is that I kiss, caress, run my lips over the body. But the sexual act—it took place, I performed it, I even performed it often, but with a certain indifference.”

The concept that the chase gives so much pleasure that it must be repeated again and again is embedded in one of the most celebrated figures of the French theater, the title character in Molière’s seventeenth-century play
Don Juan
. Don Juan wasn’t French, but Molière transformed him into a French creation by appropriating the myth of the archetypal French seducer, in this case one without scruples. Cynical, hypocritical, and cruel—but also intelligent, articulate, and polite—the nobleman Don Juan fools both noblewomen and commoners by disguising himself and lying to them. He is a transgressor, faithful to the original meaning of the seducer as one who turns another from the right path. Conquest alone interests him, and he abandons the women once they submit. As he says in the first act: “It’s a delicious thing to subdue the heart of some young beauty by a hundred sweet attentions; to see yourself making some small progress with her every day; to combat…her reluctance to surrender, with tears and sighs and rapturous speeches; to break through all her little defenses…and gently bring her round to granting your desires. But once you are the master, there is nothing more to say or wish for: the joy of passionate pursuit is over.”

In the end, Don Juan goes straight to the fire of hell. But his appetite for a challenge and his rejection of Christian religious principles intrigued the increasingly freethinking public of Molière’s day.

A contemporary take on sex as the end of seduction is a line I heard from a young woman I know. Whenever a flower seller approaches her and a friend (male or female) in a restaurant, she responds with a straight face and a cutting line: “No thanks. We’ve already had sex.”

So how to play the game? Several weapons need to be mastered.

The first is
le regard
, the look, the electric charge between two people when their eyes lock and there is an immediate understanding that a bond has been created.

The concept is a classic component of French seduction, rooted in antiquity and developed in the love poetry of the troubadours. “The look is like an arrow that enters the Other’s body through his/her eyes and infects the body and soul of the person, rather like Cupid’s arrow,” explained Lance Donaldson-Evans, a French Renaissance scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. “It can have a spiritual dimension, but it is usually associated with erotic love.”

There is something chaste and pure about the look, as there is no sullying of the body. But there is also something inherently unfaithful about it, because with the look, you never stop falling in love. Stendhal, the nineteenth-century master of psychological and historical realism, defined
le regard
as “the heavy artillery of virtuous coquetry.” He explained why: “You can say everything in one look, and yet you can always deny the look, for it cannot be quoted word for word.”

I learned about
le regard
one day during a visit to a small museum in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, which houses a permanent collection of art from the 1930s. I was with the museum’s director, Frédéric Chappey, when we happened on a room with drawings and lithographs, including an advertising poster for the Salle Marivaux theater. I admired the poster’s tranquillity and Art Deco composition. Chappey told me I had it all wrong.

“This, this is seduction,” he said.

“What is?” I asked.

There was elegance, certainly, in the poster, which showed two couples in formal dress at the theater. The women were seated, and the men stood behind. But seduction?

Chappey explained that the men put the women in front of them so they could both look at the napes of their necks and search for other potential conquests. “They signal they are in pleasant company, but they are looking elsewhere,” he said. “The message is, ‘I have already had this one. I have already succeeded. What matters now is the next one.’ It’s saying, ‘I am very elegant. We are very elegant. I am a great seducer, and because I am such a great seducer, I can seduce again.’ I think it is full of humor!”

“This is too subtle for me,” I said.

My ignorance encouraged Chappey to go further. “The couples are not talking to each other because they have already sinned,” he said. “Seduction has already been tested and incarnated. So, the most beautiful victory is not this one but the next one. It’s not today’s; it’s tomorrow’s. He is saying, ‘See what a seducer I am? Are you ready? Are you free? Tonight, I am busy, but tomorrow? Are you free tomorrow?’ He doesn’t say anything. He talks entirely through his
regard
. And you, you cannot help but give in.”

“It’s too complicated,” I said. Seemed like too much of an investment of time and effort, too.

Still, Chappey’s analysis was intriguing. I decided to learn more about
le regard
. I knew in advance I would never learn how to do it properly myself, as I am hopelessly nearsighted, which means that my eyeballs get reduced to the size of peas behind my glasses. But as a journalist, I’m a trained observer. And I discovered that one of the best ways to learn how the French do
le regard
was to watch French films.

In
Les amants
, the 1958 film by Louis Malle, Jeanne Moreau plays the character Jeanne, who has an officious husband, a sweet daughter, and a polo-playing lover. She falls in love with Bernard, a young archeologist she meets by chance. It takes only one look. They are in the moonlit garden of her house in the country late one night. He tries to kiss her. She resists. He runs after her. He firmly grabs her shoulders in order to prevent her from moving. Her back is pushed up against a tree, and she has no way to escape. They are now staring at each other passionately. Jeanne smiles with contentment.

“Love can be born in a single glance,” we hear Jeanne say, speaking of herself in the third person. “In an instant, Jeanne felt all shame and restraint fall away. She couldn’t hesitate. There’s no resisting happiness.”

Jeanne and Bernard hold hands and walk in the moonlight. She declares her love; they can’t stop looking at each other.

The Coen brothers mocked
le regard
in their contribution to a collection of vignettes that became the 2006 film
Paris, je t’aime
. At the Tuileries Métro stop, an anguished American tourist (played by Steve Buscemi) ignores one of the surreal warnings in his Paris guidebook: “Above all, eye contact should be avoided with the other people standing around.” The tourist cannot resist staring at a pair of quarreling lovers on the other side of the tracks. The girlfriend toys with him, caressing him with her eyes to make her boyfriend jealous; the boyfriend glowers. Suddenly, the girlfriend is sitting next to the tourist. She kisses him passionately. The boyfriend punches him.

In real life a sexually tinged
regard
may also be used to disarm. On a visit to Strasbourg, Carla Bruni found herself in front of a swarm of photographers calling her name. She decided to give herself to one of them. He was sloppily dressed but no matter. For five minutes she posed, looking only at him, ignoring all the others. He was gobsmacked.

Le regard
is not done with an open, wide, American-style grin but mysteriously and deeply, with the eyes. Never with a wink. “French women don’t wink,” one French woman told me. “It disfigures your face.”

Another told me she picked up the habit of winking from a classmate when she was about twelve years old. She worked hard in front of the mirror practicing her wink. Her father, a military intelligence officer, made her quit. “Only whores wink,” he told her.

The word is the second weapon. Verbal sparring is crucial to French seduction, and conversation is often less a means of giving or receiving information than a languorous mutual caress.

The practice was perfected by Marivaux, the eighteenth-century playwright, who devoted more than twenty-five plays to the light and lively art of conversation in flirtation, courtship, and seduction.
Marivaudage
in contemporary French means “banter” and “wordplay.” When words are used as a tool of sexual seduction, indirection and discretion may work best. The frontal approach can be considered brutal and vulgar. The French seducer should not be transparent.