La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (8 page)

One morning over breakfast, I asked Andy what he thought of Ben’s rules. “It’s a pretty good primer for an adulterer,” he said. “All the rules make logical sense. But what’s striking is that it’s a very French perspective.”

I asked him to explain. “It’s not just a list of dos and don’ts to avoid getting caught,” he said. “It is revelatory that he puts so much emphasis on the importance of wife and family. He says the family is ‘sacred’—he uses that word twice—and the wife is the one who deserves ‘true love.’”

“You make it sound as if there’s something noble about this guy’s behavior,” I said.

“Not at all,” he answered. “It’s just very different from what we’re used to. An American version of this would focus on how to be really good at cheating so your wife won’t find out about it.”

We agreed that in the American version there also would have to be guilt if the husband were found out and either a rupture or begging for forgiveness. The French version was much lighter, as if somehow the stakes were not so high and the game could continue to be played and the pleasure prolonged, provided that secrets were kept and the family treated with respect. The story line might have been unrealistic, but the fantasy was rich, especially for the guy. Or maybe it was all a put-on, the product of an overactive imagination, designed to titillate and amuse.

I came away from the subject convinced that it doesn’t matter whether the French are better at sex than Americans or Chinese or Germans or any other people. What matters is that they take so much pleasure in all that surrounds the sex act. They make the before and after, the process and the denouement seem just as important and thrilling and worthwhile as the climax. Maybe for the very reason that sex is biological, physical, utterly subjective. The French have no control over that. But what they can manipulate, eroticize, embellish, intellectualize, sensationalize, and transform into art is the journey up the stairs and then back down again.

It was Roland Barthes who taught me that the Eiffel Tower is a woman. I was at a Paris literary festival listening to readings devoted to the tower, and then it happened: the world’s most identifiable monument moved in my mind from male to female.

An actor read these words from Barthes, the twentieth-century philosopher and writer: “The Tower is a human silhouette; with no head, except for a fine needle, and with no arms…and yet it is a long torso placed on top of two legs spread apart.” Barthes wrote that he discovered a new truth about the tower from a photograph taken from below: “that of an object that has a sex. In the great unleashing of symbols, the phallus is no doubt its simplest figuration; but through the perspective of the photograph, it is the whole interior of the Tower, projected against the sky, that appears streaked by the pure forms of sex.” From this perspective, he concluded, she is a woman who protects and inspects, like a hen sitting on her eggs. That would make her a 1,063-foot
femme de Paris
, its presiding mother perhaps, or its female lover.

For most of the world, the tower has a more general meaning, which any perception of its sexual power can only enhance. As the symbol of France itself—and specifically Paris, a city whose captivating power is unquestioned—it is the emblem of France as a seductive nation. An intricate iron construction, its architecture open to view, it sends a message about all of the seductive arts in which France excels. These sensual delights are not gifts of nature, like San Francisco Bay or the Rocky Mountains. This beauty is man-made. Seduction takes planning and manipulation. The goal may be an enjoyment that wells up naturally from the senses, but to inspire it, artifice is at work.

When Gustave Eiffel began building the Eiffel Tower, the defenders of Paris leapt into action, seeing in the nascent structure a threat rather than an enhancement to the city’s familiar allure. Many were convinced the tower would be ugly, a crude construction in pig iron spectacularly out of step with French refinement, the last structure one might identify with the standard of beauty traditionally embodied in the feminine form. In 1887, a group calling itself “Artists Against the Eiffel Tower” circulated a petition to prevent the tower from being built. “We come, we writers, painters, sculptors, architects, lovers of the beauty of Paris which was until now intact, to protest with all our strength and all our indignation, in the name of the understated taste of the French, in the name of French art and history under threat, against the erection in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower…this odious column of bolted metal,” they wrote.

In the first sentence of his reply, Eiffel wrote, “I believe that the Tower will possess its own beauty.”

After the tower was built, the writer Guy de Maupassant was so revolted by it, calling it an “omnipresent and racking nightmare,” that he left Paris. The Eiffel Tower for him was more than a work of architecture. It was a symbol of the decline of civilization, a form of anti-seduction. “Today the seductive and powerful emotion of the artistic centuries seems to be dead,” he wrote. Few would agree with him now, but his aesthetic passion still sounds familiarly French.

When I visited the tower during a recent refurbishing, Aderito Dos Santos Baptista, an architectural painter and a modern disciple of the tower’s beauty, urged me to see Eiffel’s creation as a woman of sophistication and grace. For nearly thirty years, Dos Santos Baptista has used color to rejuvenate
la grande dame de fer
—“the grand iron lady,” as he and others call her. She moves and sways because of the wind and the heat of the sun. She has never been naked but is always dressed in color.

The tower has also been treated like a beauty worthy of adornment. Soon after she was erected for the Paris Exposition in 1889, she was illuminated by thousands of gaslights. In 1900 Paris celebrated another exposition by bathing her in electric light. In 1925 the carmaker André Citroën used her as a giant advertisement for his company, running the word “Citroën” down her spine, with stars, comets, and signs of the zodiac in colored lights. Since 1985, more than three hundred sodium lamps set inside her lacy pig-iron structure have given her a bronze hue at night.

To mark the millennium, she started blinking, with a temporary light installation that made her sparkle like the whitest diamonds. The spectacle was so successful that a few years later, it was replicated in a permanent installation. Forty mountaineers, architects, and engineers endured high winds, sudden snowstorms, pigeon droppings, and bats to bolt and wire her with a complex system of lights. Nothing frightened them more than the possibility that a piece of equipment would slip, fall, and cause injury or death to the tourists below, all for the sake of glitter.

The transformation cost $5 million and required seventy tons of new materials. Pyramid-shaped glass fixtures had to be mounted in forty-two varieties of lead-free galvanized steel casings to fit every angle of her body. In all, she was dressed in twenty thousand lights strung on twenty-six miles of metal wiring. Since then, she has dazzled in white every night, for ten minutes every hour on the hour from dusk until after midnight.

But she was suffering—from corrosion, peeling paint, and rust—so the city of Paris decided to clean and repaint her. The tower could not be spray-painted because the wind would disperse the paint. Her skin had to be physically, gently touched and caressed with long brushes.

One morning in 2009, I descended stairs from the Champ de Mars, the vast lawn abutting the Eiffel Tower, into a bunker that had been used by the French military for telegraph and radio transmissions during World War I. It now serves as the tower’s engineering headquarters. Dos Santos Baptista, the painter, was my guide. He had lined up a series of small metal Eiffel Towers to show her different colors. She has been painted every seven years or so. In 1889 she was clad with Venetian red rust-proofing, in 1892 with bright yellow, in 1899 with beige, in 1907 with five shades of brown. In 1954 she turned reddish brown, and in 1968 she went darker.

This time, she was being painted with sixty tons of semigloss in three colors: Brown 1, Brown 2, and Brown 3. The formulas are kept secret so they cannot be duplicated and marketed. There is a creamy tan on the bottom, a darker brown tinted with gray for the middle, and a denser chocolate for the top. Together, they create an optical illusion that gives a uniform look to her complex structure, with its different densities of metal. The color variations remind me of shades of foundation and highlighter that a woman might use to cover freckles and blotches on her cheeks and dark circles under her eyes.

“The higher up you go, the darker she has to become,” said Dos Santos Baptista. “She moves from light to shade. She will always be a young maiden for me. I’ve spent thirty years in love with her. She still has hidden corners and keeps secrets from me. And discovering them gives me so much pleasure.”

The Eiffel Tower astounds with her stature and looks. Yet she is only one example among many that embody the importance of cultivated beauty in France. Once the French had transformed seduction into a positive force, and delighting the senses became a national value, it was only natural that cityscapes would be refined along with food, fashion, furnishings, and scent. All of the senses, after all, are ripe for gratification. The beauty of Paris, France’s defining cityscape, did not develop spontaneously. To sustain it requires coordinated effort, just as the beauty of an elegant French woman is far from a reflection of pure nature. The Paris that lures outsiders is the product of elaborate city planning, with little left to chance.

Pleasing the eye is more important in France than in the United States, in cities and in monuments to be sure, and also in the activities of everyday life—in the presentation of a meal, for example, or a landscape. The Germans and the English tend to enjoy nature as it is; the French like to enhance it. Just look at their gardens, all neatly organized like a geometry project. Even the wild-looking ones are often artificially constructed.

The Jardin de la Vallée Suisse is a case in point. Hidden beneath a flight of stairs near the Champs-Élysées in Paris, it is a lovely illusion, where nothing is quite what it appears at first sight. The rocks forming the pond and waterfall are sculpted from cement; so is the “wooden” footbridge. A visitor can sit on a certain bench and be enveloped by evergreens, maples, bamboo, lilacs, and ivy. There are lemon and orange trees, a bush called a wavyleaf silktassel that belongs in an Art Nouveau painting, and another whose leaves smell of caramel in the fall. Its gardener told me that despite the look of wild abandon, the garden is meticulously landscaped, planted, and pruned—and is much harder to maintain than classic celebrations of symmetry.

In the countryside, vistas must be carefully tended. Bordering roadways, especially in the south, are long
allées
of plane trees. Napoléon III ordered them to be planted, not only for their beauty but also as protection for his soldiers. The branches keep snow off the roads in winter; the leaves provide shade in summer. They are functional, but also pleasing to the eye.

Even fortifications may be dressed up. In
The Sorrow and the Pity
, Marcel Ophüls’s four-hour film masterpiece about French collaboration with the Nazis during World War II, the former prime minister Pierre Mendès-France, who had been an air force lieutenant with the Free French, spoke with irony about the beautification of the Maginot Line. “Some self-righteous women from the Parisian bourgeoisie had organized a small club to…make the landscape…more pleasant,” he said. “The idea was to plant rose bushes along the Maginot Line, to make it prettier, nicer, more attractive. And there were some people who gave contributions, who would write checks to plant rose bushes, so that our soldiers would not have to look at those inhumane and unpleasant cement walls, to allow them to live in a flowery context.”

The preservation of rustic beauty is directly tied to an idealized view of French history. A website dedicated to the 150 “most beautiful villages of France” explains their history and heritage and entices visitors to share “an art of living, charm, and authenticity” in these places “charged with emotion.” When François Mitterrand was the mayor of Château-Chinon in central France, he decreed that, despite the high cost, all roofs in his town be covered in genuine Anjou slate. It was, he wrote, “a question of attunement to the setting, of harmony with the texture of the surroundings.”

In an effort to retain costly farm subsidies from the European Union, France often argues that the payments help preserve the beauty of the landscapes around the French country homes owned by citizens of many EU nations. Jacques Chirac spoke forcefully about preserving French farms and the surrounding countryside, arguing that they are national treasures. “The beauty of our landscapes is, quite evidently, part of the quality of our lives…,” he said. “It is unacceptable that all types of pylon forests distort our countryside, and even our most beautiful sites…. We have to begin reconquering our territories as soon as possible.”

The love of elegant presentation leads to a concern for detail that borders on the fanatical, and this fastidiousness is taught from childhood. In many schools, students are required to write with a fountain pen and to demonstrate beautiful handwriting during exams. Neatness and penmanship can affect the grade by as much as 10 percent. Form is equally important in oral presentations. Students who deliver them with a sense of timing and a dose of panache can earn a perfect score even if content is deficient.

Elements of daily life must also adhere to a precise aesthetic standard. The French claim to have invented the sugar cube, and they take great pride in it. In 2009, they celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the
morceau de sucre
, “the sugar piece” that is not really a cube but a rectangle in either white or brown. The sugar cube celebrates so much that is French—national pride, beauty that is ordered and constructed, and a craving for pleasure. In a news release marking the happy event, an industry group with the unwieldy name of the Center for Studies and Documentation of Sugar noted that with his invention in 1949, a French engineer used casting by compression to give sugar a domino form that was “smooth and calibrated,” easily transportable, and adapted to daily meals. It ascribed “legendary gaiety” to this “famous domino” and called it “a national emblem, a cultural curiosity, and an illustration of the culinary ‘French touch.’”

There seems to be universal agreement that cubes are superior to granules. My French friends never use granulated sugar for their coffee or tea; they tell me it is messy and imprecise. “How else would you get the right dose?” they ask. It goes without saying that individual choice plays no part in deciding what the “right dose” is. Even when granulated sugar is served, it never comes loose in a bowl but is packaged in slim paper packets that allow a precise quantity of the granules to flow evenly into the cup.

The positive side of this preoccupation is the French ability to make the most banal things beautiful. There is nothing unusual in baking a beautiful cake, but no one can top the French flights of fantasy in the
bûche de Noël
. Traditionally, this is a chocolate buttercream-filled sponge cake made to look like a Yule log. Not so for the fancy Parisian pastry and chocolate shops. Over the years, Lenôtre has hired fashion designers Nathalie Rykiel, Karl Lagerfeld, and Hubert de Givenchy, among others, to create
bûches de Noël
.

One year the chocolatier Jean-Paul Hévin produced a log called “Cinderella,” a woman’s stiletto in chocolate, with a scuff mark at the heel, filled with chocolate Christmas tree ornaments in red and gold. The Plaza Athénée produced the limited-edition “Red Carpet”
bûche
inspired by the hotel’s architecture. The curved staircase was made of milk chocolate mousse and almond paste with a touch of a Japanese citrus fruit called
yuzu
, covered in white chocolate and a marzipan red carpet, with an ornate chocolate wrought-iron and gold banister. The price of a cake for six to eight people: eighty-nine euros, or more than one hundred dollars.