La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (20 page)

The Vegas dancers, she said, lack the power of their Crazy Horse sisters. “The typical girls in Vegas, they’re almost victims,” she said. “I’m sorry to say but there is a sort of ‘I pump myself up with silicone. I put on little skirts to wiggle my ass.’ There is no seduction. They don’t bring out their own fantasies. They give in to the fantasies and demands of the guys. They lose something of themselves.”

The Crazy Horse, by contrast, “is very intellectual,” she said. “It’s all about suggestion. It’s in the imagination. It shows but you never really see.” The choreography is disciplined and precise, the lighting mysterious—“more like watercolors dressing the body rather than lighting it up.”

That night, the show was artistic and fancifully lit, not erotic. As I sipped champagne called Tsarine, I saw classic male sexual fantasies on display: a French maid with a duster; a female astronaut; a female executive who, when the stock market plummets, takes off her clothes, starting with her glasses and ending with her garter belt. There was a lot of
fesses
swiveling but no breast bouncing. The only act that brought the house down was a long comical tap-dancing sequence by two fully clothed, slightly balding, identical male twins.

It may be a bit of a stretch to cast the shows at Crazy Horse as an example of subtlety in the use of nudity, but it’s clear that the French do enjoy playing a bit with nakedness rather than getting too quickly to the point. A recent poll by Ipsos revealed that only 3 percent of French women believe they are most seductive in the nude, and only 17 percent of French men feel that women are most seductive when naked.

The body, it seems, is more appealing when wrapped in mystery, however slight. Seeing a woman in clothes should awaken the desire of others to see her naked. It is a constant movement between what is apparent and what is not. The fashion designer Sonia Rykiel told me this many years ago, when she was promoting a line of clothing that opened and closed. There was no nudity but a lot of movement. “Naked,” she said, “is not sexy.”

Flirting and teasing as a means of enhancing nudity and prolonging pleasure is codified in the striptease. The French claim to have invented the modern striptease show. The first,
Le coucher d’Yvette
—Yvette’s Bedtime Ritual—was performed in Paris in the 1890s. It featured a young woman slowly shedding layers of clothing as she searched in vain for a flea. In the succeeding decades, the Dutch dancer Mata Hari (later executed by the French as a spy during World War I) and Josephine Baker, the black American dancer and singer, brought their own styles to the genre.

The key lesson of the striptease is to master the balance between hiding and showing. To learn more, I sought out Violeta Carpentier, who ran a tiny striptease school out of a basement dance studio in the ninth arrondissement of Paris.

One Saturday morning, a dozen soberly dressed women, from the ages of twenty-two to forty-five, arrived for their class. They had been told in advance to come with easy-to-remove clothing: a blouse with buttons, a bra with no more than two hooks in the back, a skirt with a zipper in the back or on the side, a jacket that also could serve as a prop, shoes with no ties or straps, and, to maintain a modicum of modesty, a double set of underwear. By the end of the class, they’d be ready to perform a three-and-a-half-minute striptease act. One student was wearing a perky hat, another a black ostrich-feather boa. Sylvie, who was twenty-six, planned to give her husband a present—her performance. Thirty-two-year-old Laurence was there because her friends wanted her to shed her shyness and show off her body.

Charlotte, the teacher, dressed in a white pullover sweater and jeans, was tall and attractive but not red-hot sexy. She never took off her clothes as she took the class through the dos and don’ts. Pants are inelegant, jeans impossible. Removing a T-shirt or a sweater over the head isn’t sexy. Clothes that are too tight can leave marks on the body. Underwire bras are recommended because they will stay in place when you slip the straps off your shoulders. Elastic-topped hose that stop somewhere above the knee accentuate thigh fat. Facial makeup that is too heavy will clash with the rest of one’s skin color.

Long-haired ladies should pull their hair up in a chignon with a one-step, easy-to-remove pin, even a pencil, that will let it fly loose. The short-haired have to rely on hair ornaments like a flower or a scarf. The space for the performance should be free of furniture and lit with candles. The only other prop for each student was a chair that served as the centerpiece of the presentation.

And so the students got ready for action. They held on to the backs of their chairs, faced the mirrors, and swiveled their hips in figure eights as they lowered their bodies. They were told to imagine that the object of their affection was a handsome American. “We’re going to call him Bob,” said Charlotte. No one seemed very excited. “Unless you prefer we call him something else. Brad? We’ll call him Brad!” (A lot of French women apparently like Brad Pitt.)

This was refined dancing, not the sweaty bump-and-grind you might find in an American striptease class. It required smooth movement, not furious flesh wiggling.

The women learned how to walk toward “Brad” while unbuttoning their jackets. “Don’t walk like you think you’re going to miss your Métro!” Charlotte warned. They stripped one side of their jackets off their shoulders and then covered up again. They stole a look at “Brad” and flung their jackets forward to avoid tripping as they walked away from him.

They were told how to show their profiles to advantage, how to move their knees, and how to unzip, drop, and step out of their skirts with deliberate slowness. Their sexiness would emerge through their elegance, mastery of illusion, and control. Martine, a short-haired redhead who had a blue-and-orange bird tattooed on her lower belly, asked, in a serious tone, “Why is the skirt taken off before the top?”

“To be able to show off the
fesses
for a longer time,” Charlotte replied.

“But I don’t like my
fesses
, so what if I don’t want to show them?” Martine asked. I didn’t see what the problem was with her
fesses
. They looked pretty good to me.

“Well, then maybe you should forget about striptease,” Charlotte said, not bothering to disguise her irritation.

“Then I’m leaving!” Martine said and started to make her way for the exit.

Charlotte regained her composure and relented. “If you want to take off your top first, okay,” she said. “I’m giving you the main course. Afterward, you can add whatever sauce you want.”

Then the students mastered the arts of pole shimmying, hip swiveling, hair flinging, and breast thrusting, accompanied by a recording of “Mad About You” sung by Belinda Carlisle. They learned to unhook a bra in a swift, single movement, to pedal while sitting sideways and leaning back on an armless chair, and to slip off their panties without getting them stuck around their ankles.

Their success was unpredictable. One ethereally beautiful woman, with shiny waist-length blond hair and a perfectly proportioned body, couldn’t master the moves or even the look. She stayed deadly cold and serious, as if this were a final exam for her baccalaureate. Then there was a twenty-eight-year-old engineer who was not especially attractive in her prim black suit but suddenly turned irresistible when she started to take off her clothes. Her flower-print pastel bloomers with dangling ribbons said naughty innocence. Without any prompting, she seemed to know which body part to stick out when. She was giggling so much that her breasts danced.

Whether dressing the body or flashing nudity, the French have strict ideas of what constitutes good taste and a horror of violating it. A striptease can be artful and therefore sophisticated and perfectly acceptable. On the other hand, a carefully chosen business outfit can be off-putting. Nowhere are French distinctions of taste on clearer display than in the attitude toward makeup.

Chic women don’t wear makeup. At least they pretend not to.

While the dressed-up American woman will never leave home without applying a layer of foundation, then decorating with eye shadow and liner, mascara, blush, and lipstick, the chic French woman prefers to peel and polish rather than do a lot of painting. I asked Michèle Fitoussi to explain. Michèle is one of France’s most important literary figures, a novelist and biographer, as well as a columnist at
Elle
magazine. She wears black-rimmed glasses and has perfect skin. She looks as if she wears no makeup.

And yet when I urged Michèle to show me what she was carrying in her purse, she dug out pressed powder, blush, mascara, a taupe-toned eye shadow, and a pale lipstick. So I asked her about the minimalist French attitude toward makeup. “Makeup dates you,” she said. “It gives you lines. Like a tree.” She had one word to sum up the painted-doll look that some American women swear by:
vulgaire
.

Vulgaire
means more than “vulgar.” It connotes a lack of style, taste, proper upbringing, and good manners. To avoid the
vulgaire
look, you could do only one dramatic thing at a time. “If I wear red lipstick, I wear all black,” she said. “If I am wearing very high heels, they cannot be worn with a skirt that’s too short. A big piece of jewelry, I wear it with a sober suit. You can be eccentric but not with more than one, maximum two signs. There’s always a rapport with the erotic, but it’s hidden. Beauty in France is very interiorized—like wearing a trench coat with a mink lining.”

I asked the French women in my office about the subtle made-up look. Hélène Fouquet, a young reporter, explained the rule about balance. “It’s either the eyes or the mouth,” she said.

I told her I didn’t understand; American women dress up all their facial features. “If you wear a lot of makeup on the eyes, you don’t wear lipstick,” she said. “If you wear lipstick, you don’t do the eyes.”

When makeup is not worn, in the bedroom for example, there are other ways to convey the idea of the beautiful. Marie-Louise de Clermont-Tonnerre, the head of external relations for Chanel, told me how she uses her bedroom to charm her grandchildren. “The seduction by a grandmother of her grandchildren depends on important details,” she said. “She makes sure when they come into her bedroom that she is always dressed in a very beautiful nightgown. This form of seduction has nothing to do with fashion or makeup. It is seduction in a beautiful bedroom, with beautiful furnishings, and with her natural charm in her bed with its embroidered sheets. The grandmother must be magnificent when she is in her bed.”

To find out more, I turned to Laura Mercier, the New York–based French creator of a line of cosmetics and skin-care products. Showy makeup, she explained, is reserved for women who either make their living on the streets or are trying too hard.

“It really astonishes me the way American women wear so much makeup,” she said. “And when you are overly made-up, you send out the message that you are overly sexual.” By contrast, Mercier said, “French women are not flashy. They must be subtle. The message must not be, ‘I’m spending hours on my face to look beautiful.’”

Heavy makeup has its purpose, however. I asked a veteran showgirl at the Lido how it feels to dance practically naked night after night. She told me she has to sponge thick layers of makeup all over her exposed skin to give it a flat, uniform look under the lights. So she never really is naked, she said. But makeup is so much a part of her stage persona that she hardly ever wears it when she is not working.

Some things about French style, though, cannot be translated. Avoidance of the
vulgaire
takes special care when the art of dress and the game of revealing intersect.

Andrée Deissenberg of the Crazy Horse told me she always feels French in Las Vegas. “I don’t dress like them. I don’t walk like them,” she said of American women. “There is French elegance, or better, Parisian elegance. It’s restrained, nothing too fancy. Maybe a French woman will have her blouse a tiny bit opened, but she’ll never have big boobs hanging out, or even small boobs. Much more sober also.”

Details are crucial. “The heels will be the right height; the pants will be the right fit and the right material; the blouse will be the right transparency and the right cut. It will be sexy but you won’t see anything, but you might be able to imagine. I will never wear something too tight. I will never put on a pair of opened-toed shoes if the painting of my nails isn’t well done.”

Okay, I got that. But then she threw me a curve. “The funny thing, in the United States, you’ll go to a business meeting and you’ll see the American woman next to you sitting there, and she’s wearing the same black plants, the same nice blouse. Her nails are very well done. But actually, everything is wrong.”

How so? I wanted to know.

“Frankly,” she said, “I don’t know how to explain that.”

For the master perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena, who creates beautiful scents for Hermès, there is a passage in French literature that is deeply unsettling. It occurs in the 1930 novel
Regain
by Jean Giono.
Regain
is a pastoral tale celebrating the magic of tilling the soil. It is also the love story of Panturle, the last inhabitant of the ruins of a village in Haute-Provence, and Arsule, a woman who settles down with him to bring new life to the village and the fallow fields. Before that happens, however, Arsule falls into a life of wandering from place to place alongside an itinerant knife sharpener.

“There is an extraordinary passage,” Ellena said. “The man is a grinder, someone who sharpens knives. He meets a woman who is a little lost. He decides to take her under his wing. We are not yet in a love affair, but we are getting there. She is pushing the wheelbarrow that carries his sharpening machine. She is in front, and she pushes the wheelbarrow along the country road, like this.”

For emphasis, Ellena moved his body as if he were pushing something heavy, then continued. “Giono describes this scene very well. The man is behind the woman, and he smells her odor. He smells the odor of her sweat. And the passage is full of eroticism. Aaaah…Marvelous!”

Ellena paused suddenly as if he were afraid to continue. But he could not stop. “It is a smell that is truly that of an animal, a human but an animal at the same time,” he said. “It has nothing to do with perfume. We are in the skin, in the flesh. I remember…”

His voice trailed off and stopped and started again. Ellena was aware of the significance of his words. “The story really disturbs me,” he said. “I find this very…very…because I believe…as a creator of perfume, I believe the most beautiful smell is that of human skin. Much more than perfume. Perfume is nothing but clothing. That’s all it is. It’s makeup. A set of jewelry.”

Ellena is said to be the most articulate perfumer in the world, capable of translating the scents he creates into poetry. It is this talent that sets him apart. A dabbler in watercolors and a collector of Chinese art, he professes to draw his inspiration from literary figures like Baudelaire, composers like Debussy, painters like Cézanne, and jazz singers like Stacey Kent. He spins his impressions into creations that trigger memories and fantasies.

He is usually a calm and controlled man whose movements are graceful, whose style is refined, and whose personality has the marks of an oversized ego. On the day we met, he was dressed in his “uniform”: a perfectly pressed shirt, well-cut gray trousers made from an expensive fabric, and white shoes in soft leather. He knows he is handsome and playing at the top of his game, and he uses his dark brown eyes to destabilize his audience. That’s what made his confession so daring.

Ellena may be an expert at combining scents from different flowers and extracts, but his story invites a conclusion that has little to do with those ingredients: that in the world of seduction, perfume is an extension of human sweat. Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, the great eighteenth-century seducer, knew that. “As for women, I have always found that the one I was in love with smelled good, and the more copious her sweat the sweeter I found it,” he wrote in his memoirs. But if perspiration, unaided, produces the most seductive scent in the world, and man-made perfume is nothing more than a covering, like an article of clothing, or an adornment like jewelry or makeup, then there is no need for a multibillion-dollar perfume industry.

“In your profession, this must be a very dangerous thought,” I said.

My words jolted Ellena out of his troubled state. He had slipped out of his corporate persona but now recovered his equilibrium. He embraced me with his easy charm, and he smiled.

“But this is not serious,” he said, his voice turning to velvet. “I can exaggerate.”

Of all the senses, smell is the most emotionally powerful and the most elusive. It sends its messages straight to the limbic system, a mysterious part of the brain that arouses emotions and feelings rather than ideas and thoughts. As Ellena’s story illustrates, its connection to sexual seduction is natural and innate. But in France, the creation and use of scent has been refined far beyond the basics of sweat.

Perfume allows smell to be communicated in a pleasurable and compelling way. Even the names of its ingredients evoke the exotic and the romantic: Indian tuberose, Calabrian bergamot, Egyptian jasmine, Indonesian patchouli.

It is a medium that cannot be seen, tasted, felt, or touched. Its power is imagined, its allure a manipulation of time. The feeling it produces can linger long after the carrier of the scent has departed. That prolongation of the moment is the trick it plays on its target, by making its wearer impossible to forget. In that sense, it is the packaging of both possibility and remembrance.

Ellena used a simple demonstration to prove how scent plays with memory. He opened a tiny glass vial of an artificial version of vanilla and dipped a paper smell strip into it. He dipped a second strip into sweet orange. When he put the two strips together, they smelled like a madeleine. He dipped a third strip, this one into cinnamon, and made the smell of gingerbread. He dipped the fourth strip into lime, joined them all, and suddenly, I smelled Coca-Cola!

“I play with your memory,” he said. “I manipulate you.” He was right. This was an old trick that I knew Ellena had performed before. But it proved his point.

Modern perfume, which relies on chemistry and technology, was invented in France in the nineteenth century. Yet the idea of perfuming was already alive on French soil thousands of years before, when Cro-Magnon man, living in the caves of what is now southern France, scrubbed himself with mint and lemon.

In the Middle Ages, French women wore
bijoux de senteur
, gold or jeweled containers for perfume preparations. In the seventeenth century, wigs were powdered with scent from flowers like jasmine, rose, hyacinth, daffodil, and orange blossom and sometimes spiked with musk, civet crushed with sugar, or hot amber oil. In the succeeding centuries, the French elevated perfume to a fine art, and their expertise at creating scent became part of the national mystique. Many perfume creators (known as “noses”) consider the scents they make not products of chemistry but works of art, as important as paintings or poems.

Others are more down-to-earth, confessing that the romantic story lines may lure customers but bear no relationship to the hard work of perfume making. “Perfume companies and perfumers will tell you stories—of the queen of the night flowers that blossom once a year and by chance I was there and was inspired to make a perfume,” said François Demachy, the chief perfumer at Dior. “What I do is far from that. Perfume is a science—the science of doubt. I’m an artisan.”

But even Demachy allows himself to be swept away in the magic of what he does. He took me one morning to the Bagatelle gardens in Paris so we could see, feel, and smell the dozens of varieties of roses that are grown there for an annual competition. It is a ritual he follows every spring, to remind himself of the roses of his childhood in the perfume-making city of Grasse and to search for something new.

We dodged peacocks and British tourists carrying cameras and notebooks as we made our way along the paths. He showed me how to press my nose deep into each rose and take several sniffs. We smelled a large white rose tinged with fuchsia that didn’t need much of a fragrance to attract insects because of its gaudy appearance. A yellow tea rose with glossy green leaves named O Sole Mio smelled like the color green, Demachy said. The small white Vierge Folle—Crazy Virgin—had no scent at all. There were roses with the smells of almond, lychee, peach, pepper, vanilla, cloves, and straw. I learned that roses get a slight honey smell when their petals begin to drop, that their scent evaporates as the day gets warmer, that older plants often produce fainter smells. “Every time I come here I discover another rose,” he said. “Every rose has its own smell.” He is a serious man, but here, in the rose garden, he was smiling.

Over the years, I have become conditioned to the smell of perfume as an integral component of the French ambience. It belongs to French culture, the same way lingerie and wine do, and I smell it a lot more often in Paris than in New York.

Proximity is one factor. Since everyone does a lot more cheek kissing than hand shaking in everyday life, there are opportunities to get close. The custom is to wear only enough perfume so that it can be detected when one is near enough to kiss. Getting close thus means being invited into another person’s smell. A perfume becomes a form of intimacy, a gesture of sharing pleasure and a means to compel the other person to remember you.

A sophisticated and alluring perfume can play a central role in a seduction campaign. Drawn to the scent, one is drawn to the person. Lured by sensations that cannot be expressed in words, one is tempted to suspend rational thought and follow the lead of emotion. After an interview over lunch with Olivier Monteil, the communications head of Hermès perfumes, I stood to say good-bye, and he kissed me on both cheeks, close enough so that I could smell his scent. I asked what he was wearing, but he played coy. “An experiment,” he said. “Rose, spicy, peppery. You cannot smell it from afar, only when I kiss you.”

Each year the French spend more than forty dollars per man, woman, and child on fragrances, more than any other people in the world. Americans spend only about seventeen dollars and the Japanese, four dollars. Spaniards and Brazilians consume more perfume than the French, but they spend less money on it.

And there is more. The sense of smell itself, not just perfume, is more important in France than many other places. As children, the French are taught to identify smells; there is a popular board game called Le Loto des Odeurs (The Lottery of Smells) that asks players to identify thirty smells, including eucalyptus, mushrooms, lily of the valley, hazelnut, grass, biscuits, fennel, strawberries, honeysuckle, and the sea.

Perfume is seen as an essential element in a woman’s personal arsenal, and French men are invested and interested in it. They are more likely than American men to appreciate and recognize a woman’s scent, to know what’s on the men’s market, and to wear a scent themselves.

While Americans are inclined to project the smell of cleanliness (deodorant soap comes to mind) or power (a scent that can be detected three feet away), the French prefer subtlety and mystery.

Ellena explained it this way: “The American vision of perfume is what I call performance. Americans talk about long duration, tenacity, power. Some perfumes—like Elixir Aromatique or Giorgio—immediately create distance, because their smell is so strong that I go like this.” He extended his arm as if to push me away. “Perfume functions almost like a shield,” he said.

The French vision of perfume, on the other hand, is based on aesthetics and discretion. “I prefer when a perfume brings people physically closer than when it creates a distance,” Ellena continued. “You are present, through your smell, but you don’t disturb me. I come to talk into your ear. We are in whispering mode.”

Perfume may be an invisible whisper, but it carries the force of a weapon useful in a myriad of ways. Ellena revealed a battle strategy of long-haired women. “They put perfume just here,” he said, placing his index finger behind one ear, then moving it slowly downward toward his neck, repeating the gesture behind his other ear. “When they walk, the wind enters into the hair, and it leaves a superb wake. And that I find very, very erotic. Devilishly erotic.” He laughed out loud.

His response reminded me of one of Coco Chanel’s most repeated sayings: “A woman should wear perfume wherever she expects to be kissed.”

I experienced firsthand the sensitivity of French men to perfume one day after an accident landed me in a physical therapist’s office. I was lying on my stomach as Alexandre was kneading my shoulder. He was explaining the difference between acute tendonitis and a torn muscle. We fell into silence. Then he raised a different subject.

“What perfume are you wearing?” he asked.

“I’m not,” I replied. “But why in the world are you asking me about my perfume? No American man has ever asked me what perfume I wear.” This is a fact. Not even my husband has ever asked me this question.

“I’m always interested when I like a perfume,” Alexandre said.

He told me about a former client who wore the most exquisite scent. He forgot to ask her its name. The scent haunted him. It had a quality crucial for a great perfume: it persisted in memory.

He still had the client’s phone number, but he didn’t dare call her. The inquiry after the fact would be too direct and might be misinterpreted. He had missed his chance. He was so earnest that I felt compelled to help him identify the source of my scent. “It must be the hair conditioner,” I said.

He smelled my hair. “That’s it!” he declared. He smelled me again and said he detected mango.

The same question about my perfume choice came one day from Sophie-Caroline de Margerie, the writer and jurist.

“What perfume do you wear, if you do, and if I can be so bold?” she asked me in an e-mail.

I couldn’t tell her that I suffer from allergies and rarely wear perfume. How unseductive would that seem?

“
Je suis infidèle
” (I am unfaithful), I replied “And what about you?”

“Very faithful to Guerlain, one for the summer (Après l’Ondée), one for the winter (Mitsouko),” she wrote back. “And a very secret one which I’ve handed over to my daughter: Iris Poudre by Frédéric Malle.”

The next time I saw Sophie-Caroline, I asked her why she wanted to know about my perfume.

“I want to get to know you better,” she said.

I told her I could not imagine how knowing her perfume would help me to get to know her better.

“A perfume gives an idea of the image you want to project,” she replied. “So if you have a very strong, sexy scent, or if you have a lily of the valley scent, or if you have nothing at all, it tells me something about you. Maybe not who you are deep down but what you want to leave, to linger behind you. So that’s why I asked. It’s a very intimate question.”