Talk to the Snail Read online

  The workplace is also a popular place to meet a partner. Here, the French have a major advantage over some Anglo-Saxon countries. Sexual harassment is illegal, and a misplaced hand on a colleague’s anatomy can lead to dismissal or prosecution, but a simple compliment will not be taken as a declaration of gender war.

  This compliment cannot be along the lines of ‘Oh, what spectacular breasts you have, Madame.’38 I have been told some horror stories by French women who appreciate sincere compliments but feel like thumping a man who oversteps the line. One woman friend of mine arrived at a meeting with two male colleagues to find that there were only two chairs in the room. ‘It doesn’t matter, you can sit on my lap,’ one of the men said. ‘No, thanks, I’d rather sit on the floor,’ she replied. The French may be open about sex, but they do know the difference between chat-up lines and stupid sexism.

  Workmates who want to find out whether they have more in common than a love of sales figures will probably start going out to lunch together, because French colleagues don’t go in much for casual socializing after work, the traditional time when the Brits loosen up and swap shoptalk for sweet-talk.

  After a couple of lunches, there will be the invitation to an early-evening drink or dinner, almost always coming from the man. The woman will usually wait to be asked out. If two people are getting on well and the man doesn’t suggest taking things further pretty quickly, she will either assume he’s not interested in her sexually, or that he’s too much of a wimp for her to bother with. If the drink or dinner goes well, and the mood is relaxed, both parties know full well that the woman will be propositioned.

  If the man says that he’d like to cook dinner for the woman at his place, and she accepts, then she has practically agreed to spend the night with him already. If she goes to his apartment and the man doesn’t make a move before the last crumbs of his dessert have been sensually swallowed, then she will be mortally offended and probably refuse any future invitations on principle.

  The French love to talk (and to listen to themselves talking), so the actual propositioning probably won’t take the form of a lunge across the settee. At dinner or over a drink at a bar, the man will tell the woman that she is the rare orchid that he has been seeking all his life in the jungle of love. Or that an inexplicable emotion has been troubling him ever since he first set eyes on her – it is the feeling that his life will be like an eternal night if she is not there to bring sunlight into it. Or simply that he can no longer resist the temptation to kiss her. All this means, of course, is ‘I’d love to have sex with you’, but as long as the man obeys the conventions of poetry and politeness, the woman will welcome the offer. She won’t sleep with him unless she wants to, of course, but she won’t accuse him of being a sexual predator who takes advantage of women who accept innocent invitations to dinner. In France, there is no 39 such thing as an innocent invitation to dinner.

  Homme Is Where the Heart Is

  Anyone looking for a French partner has to understand the gender roles involved. And because France is such an old-fashioned country, ladies must naturally come first . . .40 During the opening gambits of the game of amour (and, in theory at least, any subsequent relationship), the man must open doors for the woman, help her on with her coat, tell her she’s beautiful – which is actually a very pleasant rapport to have. When I was at university in England in the early 1980s, I had a girlfriend who, if I held the door open for her, would ask whether I thought she was too weak to open it for herself. And if I told her she was beautiful, she’d ask why I didn’t say she was intelligent. French women want equal rights in the workplace, but they enjoy old-school pampering from their homme. They’re feminine as well as feminist.

  French women also manage to be sexy without seeming at all tarty. They rarely show off their navel unless it is a perfectly sculpted navel. They can often be very sensual and provocative, but it’s more of a ballet than a lapdance. Because of the formalized French seduction game, they don’t need to get blind drunk and yell ‘Wanna shag then or what?’ in a man’s ear.

  French men are often confused, to say the least, by the forwardness of some (not all, of course) Anglo-Saxon women. An English friend of mine told me that she was kissing a Frenchman in a bar when she noticed that he was getting a bit too excited too soon.

  ‘Oh no,’ she told him, pushing the poor man away. ‘I only wanted a snog.’

  That’s something that a French woman would never say. If she’s decided that she wants to kiss a man, she usually wants to do a lot more, too.

  Being fundamentally macho, French men often try classic entrapment techniques. A favourite amongst arty Parisian men is the old ‘come out to dinner and I’ll tell you how I can help you get published/get a film role/work in TV, etc.’ trick. French women pretend to fall for this, but usually go in with their eyes wide open. If the man is cute, they think, why not sleep with him? If he’s not cute but he really can get them a job with a TV channel, why not sleep with him? Les Françaises know what they want and they know how to get it.

  A woman who is looking for a relationship naturally hopes that the gallantry the man has shown before they slept together will continue afterwards. The problem with this theory is that one French word for sleeping with someone is conclure, to conclude. ‘Tu as conclu?’ a Frenchman will ask his friend the day after a hot date – meaning ‘Did you get what you wanted?’ But if sleeping with someone is the conclusion, it doesn’t bode well for life après. There is a scene in a film called Gazon Maudit (‘Cursed Lawn’41) by French comedienne and director Josiane Balasko in which an adulterer and his mistress are sitting at a restaurant when a man comes in selling roses. ‘No thanks,’ the adulterer tells the flower-seller, ‘we’ve already screwed.’ French women smile rather wryly at this joke.

  Some French men are considerate, good listeners, stylish, funny, and always available to take a woman out for a great evening. As in so many other countries, they are gay. Or they are straight and on their best behaviour because they haven’t yet got the girl into bed.

  The others fall into three basic groups. There is the smooth Latin Lover, the Anguished Artist and the Gérard Depardieu. All of whom are pretty macho in their own way.

  The Latin Lover is, of course, testosterone on legs, a stylish seducer who will be forgiven for disappearing after the first night or cheating on his partner because it’s in his genes.

  The Anguished Artist exists on such a high plane that he can’t do the washing-up. He will, however, be very good at borrowing the woman’s money so that he can buy her lavish presents.

  The Gérard Depardieu might give a woman a slap but he loves her really. (I’m talking about the roles Gérard plays, of course, and not the man himself. I am sure that Monsieur Depardieu has never raised a hand to a woman in his life, except to light her cigarette.)

  The singer Serge Gainsbourg somehow seemed to combine all three models. And although he was ugly, often drunk, and presumably reeked of tobacco smoke, it worked brilliantly with women. He is even quoted as saying, ‘If I had to choose between a last woman and a last cigarette, I’d choose the cigarette, because you can throw it away more easily.’ French women didn’t love him any less for it.

  But – and this is a major mais – the Anglo-Saxon man in search of a French partner does not have to adopt these tactics in order to succeed with French women. Au contraire.

  French women love Hugh Grant. He (or his 1990s movie persona, anyway) is charming, sincere and washes behind his ears. On top of this, he is slightly naïve, unsure of his charms, almost unwilling to impose himself on a woman. The complete opposite of the Latin Lover, who does seem to get on French women’s nerves now and again.

  I did a radio interview once, a panel show about Englishmen and sex. The presenter suddenly remembered the Hugh Grant prostitute scandal, and began to say how shocking it was. And I quickly realized that what he found so shocking was not that an actor could be caught in his car with a hooker’s face hovering over his flies, bu
t that Hugh Grant actually had a willy. Yes, this archetypal Englishman was (gasp) capable of sex.

  It’s a reputation that is not without its advantages for a Brit abroad. A Parisian woman once told me that she was at a party, and a typical Anguished Artist type was coming on to her. He was telling her that she ought to come and spend the night at his place. No obligations, they could just look at the stars and talk about modern sculpture.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she told him. ‘You really think I’m that naïve? Forget it.’

  ‘What if he’d been English?’ I asked her.

  She hesitated for a moment, then laughed. ‘I probably would have believed him,’ she said.

  ‘Actually, there’s a great view of Ursa Major from my apartment,’ I mentioned casually.

  Piquant Mix

  A mixed Franco-Anglo relationship is a practically obligatory cultural-tourism experience for anyone living in France. What’s more, if you play your cards right, hooking up with a local can solve all sorts of accommodation problems. What better way to find an apartment than to move in with your new amour?

  But all cynicism and property-finding issues aside, the long-term mixed relationship has major advantages and disadvantages.

  The biggest plus, I have always found, is that you can blame any gaffes on the language. ‘No, chéri(e), you misunderstood me,’ you can claim if your French other half erupts into tears or fury over some stupid thing you have said. You then have several minutes to backtrack and think how to say the exact contrary in mangled French or simple English. Similarly, if you are being ranted at in a foreign language, it is relatively easy to tune the ranting out and carry on reading your book or watching the football on TV.

  These conflict-evasion devices are great tools for bringing harmony into an otherwise stormy relationship. And given the French love of talk and melodrama, Gallic partners can be very good at storminess.

  The downside of a mixed relationship is that it can be very high maintenance. Adapting to a new culture by speaking the language and driving on the required side of the road is one thing, but when this adaptation extends to the way you eat and drink, what makes you laugh and what you say and do in bed, the pressure can be hard to deal with. It is somewhat embarrassing when you are in bed and your partner is saying something apparently very urgent to you at a critical moment, and you have to ask for a translation or explanation. Please don’t ask how I know.

  Then there is the question of what you expect from a long-term relationship. An English friend of mine says that before she got married (to an Englishman), she lived by the mantra, ‘French boyfriends yes, French husband no.’ Her French boyfriends made the effort to say ‘je t’aime’ and buy flowers, but they were just too traditional for her. Sure, they were happy for her to devote time to her career, but it would be nice if she did the cooking, too. And, she felt, if she’d had a child with a Frenchman, it would have felt as though she now had two kids to look after.

  However, this theory does not take into account the fact that France has very generous maternity leave – and, in many companies, paternity leave – and that in urban areas, French childcare facilities are second to none. It’s no coincidence that we use the French word crèche for our childcare centres. Paris municipal crèches often charge daily rates proportional to salary, and are open from eight in the morning to seven at night. Providing they get a place at the crèche – which isn’t guaranteed – working mothers have no problems enjoying a fulfilling career, even if their husbands pretend not to know how to unfold the stroller.

  Meanwhile, perhaps for exactly the same reasons, pretty well all the Anglo men I know in France are with French women and happy to be so. Sure, you have to remember your daily je t’aime quota and be willing to put up with existentialist debates on Le Couple, but the whole feminist-but-feminine thing is designed to make 42 daily life feel pretty damn sexy.

  In any case, French men and women have absolutely nothing against mixed couples, and if the worst comes to the worst, they will accept splitting up as an opportunity for more melodrama and a rant against globalization, so you have nothing to lose.

  Lover’s All You Need

  Foreigners with a French fiancé or fiancée are often surprised to discover that in France, it is perfectly legal to get married twice.

  No, this has nothing to do with polygamy or bigamy. Well, not exactly.

  If a couple wants a religious ceremony, then they have to have two weddings. The first one will be at the town hall, officiated over by the mayor or a town councillor. The second service will be in church. Because France is a secular country, a religious wedding alone is not legally binding.43 Double-tying the knot doesn’t guarantee a stronger marriage, though. Adultery is an institution in France, especially amongst the most respectable people of all, the Catholic bourgeoisie. The Catholic city of Lyon, watched over by a thousand statues of the Virgin Mary like so many stone CCTV cameras, is famous as a civilized hotbed of cuckoldry, with people living completely double lives. Husbands take time away from the office to meet their lovers, who themselves are the wives of the men doing the same in the hotel room next door. Secretaries send out bouquets to both lover and spouse, and never confuse the two. It is an institution, a system that no one disturbs by doing something so vulgar as getting jealous or threatening divorce (which is a mortal sin for Catholics, anyway).

  None of this is flaunted, because that would spoil the polite social veneer. It is an unavowed law of nature, the equivalent of a bodily function that you don’t impose on other people.

  Politicians, too, are expected to have lovers. As Paul West says in A Year in the Merde, a politician without a lover is like a sheriff without a gun – people think he has no firepower.

  The conventional wisdom is that the French don’t care about politicians’ adultery. This is untrue. They love to read about sex. When President Chirac’s extra-marital adventures were chronicled in a book by his chauffeur, the French were fascinated by his success with women (and his alleged speed when ‘dealing’ with them). President Mitterrand’s love child Mazarine was hounded by the paparazzi, and is now something of a star in her own right. And when Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife walked out on him with her lover, and Monsieur Sarkozy took his own lover on holiday to Mauritius, the French media went into a feeding frenzy.

  However, the big difference is that the French don’t judge. They love to read the exposés, but no one howls for the politicians’ resignation, because the French don’t see how it could stop them doing their job. On the contrary, a politician’s job is to seduce the voters. So what if a few people are literally, physically seduced rather than just lied to on the election platform? A good adultery 44 scandal will only boost a politician’s ratings in the polls.

  If the French media don’t disapprove on the public’s behalf, this is not just out of respect for the law preventing the press from intruding into people’s private lives. That would be relatively easy to get round by claiming that their reporting of the affair was in the public interest. It’s also because journalists don’t want any stones they cast to bounce back and hit them. What magazine editor, for example, is going to whip up a public scandal about a minister’s indiscretions with a researcher, when he’s been doing exactly the same thing with one of his reporters for years? And what upright bourgeois citizen is going to express disgust at the minister’s misbehaviour, when he or she read the magazine article about it while lying in a hotel bed between bouts of illicit sex? The French can be hypocritical, but they’re not stupid.

  The politicians’ wives, meanwhile, remain aloof or silent. Despite the revelations about Chirac’s fondness for the ladies, Madame Chirac carried on as First Lady, apparently unperturbed (if the continued rigidity of her hairdo was anything to go by). Whether she was pleased at the revelations is another matter, of course. But at least in France she would never have to watch the interrogation of her husband on TV. No French politician would ever have to say, Clinton-style, ‘I did not have sex with that woma
n.’ After all, in Mitterrand’s case, it would have been a pretty silly thing to say.

  Playing (Away) with Words

  Adultery is so ingrained in French culture that it has its own, rather charming, jargon.

  An overnight bag is called a baise-en-ville or ‘screw in town’, the implication being that someone coming to the city on business is actually staying over for less professional reasons. The French have also formalized the concept of the cinq à sept, or quick sex session between five and seven o’clock after work. In the old days, when France had hundreds of brothels, this was the time when men went to visit prostitutes. Now it’s usually used to refer to a less professional meeting. So while British office workers are at the pub having a post-work drink, the French may be enjoying an altogether different aperitif.

  There is one essential set of phrases that prospective members of the cinq à sept community will need to know:

  37 Though there is probably a niche market for Romanian air hostesses, too, as there is for all fantasies. A British friend of mine told me that he got rid of a French trainee after he found the young man looking at a website featuring naked old ladies chained to trees.

  38 Just for information, this would be expressed most effectively as ‘Vous avez des seins remarquables, Madame.’

  39 On a purely practical note, a woman accepting a dinner invitation might find it useful to take a pack of contraceptives (préservatifs, pronounced ‘pray serve a teef’) along with her, because most French men are ignorant of their existence. And later on, she should not allow herself to be fooled by a Frenchman’s claim to be suffering from ‘condom allergy’.

  40 Sorry, but this is a deliberate double entendre.

  41 This title has nothing to do with gardening, as it would if it were a British film. It is apparently a lesbian term for a woman’s ‘lawn’.