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  Nevertheless, the demise of the French monarchy did nothing to deter the new bourgeoisie from adopting the royal tradition of the kept mistress and the extramarital dalliance. It was quite common for a wealthy Frenchman of the nineteenth century openly to maintain a mistress in her own apartment, separate from the ‘official’ family – the poet and novelist Victor Hugo did exactly this, with his devoted mistress Juliette Drouet at his (other) side for almost fifty years, while the novelist Émile Zola also had a mistress to supplement his wife.†

  † While this was also true of English public figures – such as Charles Dickens – the openness with which mistresses were accepted as a part of life in France differed from the British practice of covering up such matters. During his exile in England in 1898, Émile Zola was alerted to the contrasting attitudes between the countries by his friend Fernand Desmoulin, who advised him not to bring his mistress Jeanne over to see him ‘in the country of cant’.

  Casual affairs were elevated from necessity to an art: brothels, utilitarian places in the early 1800s designed simply to service the frustrations of men trapped in loveless marriages, became, by the century’s end, extravagant palaces of luxury and hedonism, dedicated to serving every fantasy and populated by courtesans who famously rose up the social ladder on their backs. (The French referred to these ladies in colourful fashion as les grandes horizontales.)9

  FUNEREAL FELLATIO (skip)

  François Mitterrand wins the presidential prize for adulterous liaisons during his lifetime, but the nineteenth-century French president Félix Faure (1841–99) takes the laurels for the most spectacularly scandalous death. In fact, Faure has the dubious honour of being more famed for his death than his life: he suffered an apoplectic fit in the throes of an orgasm while in the arms of his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil.

  Rumour had it that she was fellating him at the fatal moment, and since the French slang word for performing oral sex on a man is pomper (literally, ‘to pump’), Steinheil was rechristened (rather unkindly) by the French press of the time as la pompe funèbre (‘undertaker’ or ‘funereal pumper/blower’, depending on how you choose to read it).

  Faure’s arch-enemy, the statesman and subsequent French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, played on this sense of the word when he delivered his salaciously punning epitaph on his late rival: Il voulait être César, mais il ne fut que Pompée. This translates as either ‘He wanted to be Caesar, but ended up as Pompey’, or – for those less charitably inclined – ‘He wanted to be Caesar, but ended up being sucked off.’

  The obsession of the post-Revolutionary age with breaking marital taboos is reflected in Gallic literature of the period. An adulterous trail had already been blazed by Choderlos de Laclos in his classic 1782 epistolary novel of sexual duplicity during the ancien régime, Les Liaisons dangereuses (‘Dangerous Liaisons’). The theme was further developed in Benjamin Constant’s novel Adolphe (1816), the tale of a melancholy young man’s infatuation for an older woman who happened to be another man’s mistress. The peak of the long-running affair of French literature with the theme of unfaithfulness was of course Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 novel Madame Bovary, the tragic tale of the attempts by a provincial doctor’s wife to escape the emptiness of small-town life with a string of liaisons. But Madame Bovary, towering as it does over the genre, was far from the end of the affair; Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867) followed hot on its heels with a similarly doomed portrayal of a married woman’s fall from grace. Even well into the twentieth century, it seemed that the French couldn’t get enough of infidelity, at least in fiction: as late as 1923, the twenty-year-old Raymond Radiguet shocked a postwar readership with his at least partly autobiographical tale of a married woman’s affair with a sixteen-year-old boy, Le Diable au corps (‘Devil in the Flesh’).

  Whatever it is that French women have, Madame Bovary has more of it!

  MGM ADVERTISING SLOGAN FOR ITS 1949 FILM OF FLAUBERT’S MADAME BOVARY

  However, this obsession with infidelity in France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – in life as in literature – concealed many deep-seated anxieties, and those who laughed at the farces of Feydeau, which famously dealt with the subject, did so through gritted teeth. As the old century gave way to the new, brothels became less outrageous and fantastical and more and more bourgeois: gentlemen would come to take tea with their mistresses in the afternoon to the background tinkling of a piano, the reception rooms of the whorehouse approximating more and more to the banality of the middle-class salon.10 A whole window of the early evening – the infamous cinq à sept, or interval from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. – became ritually devoted to extramarital dalliances, the space to play after a day’s work before going home to family life. Tied down in arranged marriages, men paid to flirt with the idea of a meeting of minds and bodies, consorting with tarts who resembled, more and more, their bourgeois wives at home; while those very Emma Bovaries at home were beginning, slowly, to exhume a long-buried eroticism. The tart was becoming respectable, and respectable women were discovering their inner tart. Just like the English late-Victorian and Edwardian obsession with double identity and concealing hidden lives behind a respectable façade,* the French fetish for the theme of adultery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, in truth, a critique of existing social constrictions on personal relationships, an advance role-play for their dissolution in the century to come.

  * As exemplified by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

  Now that those social constrictions have all but disappeared, in France as elsewhere in Western Europe, the evidence indicates that ordinary French people are no more unfaithful than anyone else. In fact, they are perhaps less so. Reliable figures on infidelity rates and attitudes to infidelity are rather patchy and hard to come by, not least because, when questioned, men have a tendency to exaggerate their past indiscretions, while women tend to minimize them. There is also often a big discrepancy between the almost universal condemnation of infidelity, and actual practice. A 2009 survey by the French magazine Madame Figaro found that 66 per cent of French people believed that fidelity was essential to a real commitment, while 19 per cent admitted to having actually cheated on their partner.11 The United States, on the other hand, in a 1994 nationwide survey, was the most conservative country in condemning infidelity (94 per cent) but estimates indicate that between 20–25 per cent of married Americans will have sex with someone other than their partner.12 And despite what many Froglit authors would have one believe, these days the old French window of dalliance – the cinq à sept – is little more than the equivalent of the British ‘happy hour’, a time to snatch a quick drink (as opposed to a quickie) with colleagues before heading home. If French couples feel the need to move on, like anybody else these days, they simply divorce.

  Christ pardoned the adulterous woman. By God! It wasn’t his wife.

  GEORGES COURTELINE, FRENCH ROMANTIC NOVELIST AND PLAYWRIGHT (1858–1929)

  None of this contradicts the fact that, for a very small group of the older generation of the French élite – notably French presidents – the old tradition of the mistress and/or ‘kept family’ has been maintained with panache. In terms of sheer chutzpah in this respect, first prize must surely go to the late François Mitterrand, president of the French Republic from 1981 to 1995. Because Mitterrand assiduously cultivated the image of a committed family man, it took twenty years for it to come to light that he had a whole second family – a mistress and secret daughter – who had been kept hidden from the world. At his funeral, all the three women in his life stood together by the grave. None of this shocked the French public unduly, until it was revealed that the ‘second family’ had been housed at the taxpayer’s expense. Then there really was a scandal. But while Mitterrand must surely hold the supreme title for extramarital dalliances among the French sexus politicus, he is by no means the only French president to have al
legedly had a complicated personal life. In October 1974, for example, the satirical French weekly Le Canard enchaîné caused a storm when it claimed that the then president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, had crashed into a milk float in the early hours of the morning, accompanied by a young actress in a Ferrari 250 that he had allegedly borrowed from the film-maker Roger Vadim. In the resulting furore a number of ironic remarks were made on the rumoured nocturnal perambulations of the president, including the observation by the former prime minister, Maurice Couve de Murville, that ‘Giscard is the only Head of State in the world of whom one knows with certainty where he does not sleep.’13 Jacques Chirac (president from 1995 to 2007) was likewise said to have been a vigorous pursuer of extramarital relationships. His many alleged conquests were documented in a ‘drive-and-tell’ book published in 2001 by his former chauffeur, Jean-Claude Laumond. According to Laumond, the steady stream of women walking into Mr Chirac’s office was so constant that female staff would joke: ‘Chirac? Three minutes. Shower included.’14 Most recently, any sighs of relief heaved at the election of (the thankfully unmarried) President François Hollande in the 2012 présidentielles proved premature: the president’s complicated love life has subsequently more than proved that love triangles are not the prerogative of married couples.*

  * The alleged battle between the present companion of the French President, Valérie Trierweiler, and the mother of his children, Ségolène Royal, has been a subject of extensive speculation in the French press, not least when his children and former partner failed to appear at the presidential inauguration. When Hollande gave his former partner a peck on the cheek in public, Trierweiler swept in to give him a full frontal smacker on the lips. Matters reached a head with Twittergate, the infamous sending by Trierweiler of an indiscreet tweet in support of Royal’s opponent in the 2012 legislative elections for the region of La Rochelle.

  So it seems that while ordinary French people are no more likely to bed-hop than anyone else, they are less likely to judge those who do (especially their presidents). How does one explain the Gallic tolerance of infidelity in public office? The answer partly lies in the French bourgeois obsession with secrecy. The roots of this obsession are unclear: possibly, it dates from the days of the Revolution, when anybody with anything other than proletarian roots was wise to keep their head down, if they wanted to keep it. Or it could be derived from the strict separation of Church and State enforced by the Revolutionary government, the insistence that one’s religion and morals are a private affair. In any event, privacy is a very public obsession in France. Everybody, in the French view, is entitled to his or her jardin secret. This curious term – literally, ‘secret garden’ – is uniquely French, and used to describe a person’s own world of private interests. It can include anything from cavorting naked in dog collars to stamp collecting. It’s a hard phrase to translate into English, as ‘secret garden’ tends to suggest either nineteenth-century children’s books or unmentionable parts of the female anatomy. ‘Own private world’ might be the best paraphrase. One facet of this obsession with privacy is the draconian French privacy law, which forbids the press from revealing details of a person’s private life without their consent. Adultery in the French view is a private sin, not a public matter, and not of itself reason to exclude a person from public office (an exception is when heavy extramarital petting allegedly turns into something worse, as in the case of the disgraced former Socialist politician and IMF leader, Dominique Strauss-Kahn). Because they are seen as private sinners, adulterers in France are not subjected to public humiliation, and forever branded with the letter ‘A’ like the unfortunate American sinner Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. This does not mean that adultery is tolerated by modern French people in the private sphere, any more than anywhere else: adultery is in fact the number one reason for divorce in France.15 It simply means that playing the field is one’s own affair. The relatively non-judgemental view of adultery adopted in France by the outsider to a relationship is echoed in French cinema’s long-standing fling with unfaithfulness: French films typically tend to view marital infidelity with a blackly comic eye, or as angst-ridden self-exploration set to the music of Schubert.*

  * As in Bertrand Blier’s film Trop belle pour toi (1989).

  This contrasts with a seminal Hollywood portrayal of infidelity as a pact with a she-devil that has disastrous family consequences, including bunny-boiling, acid thrown on the family car, and knife attacks in the shower.

  Of course, in France as elsewhere a distinction has historically been made between the adulterer and the adulteress, the latter being guilty of a far worse misdemeanour than the former.†

  † A difference in attitude towards male and female adultery is replicated in many cultures and probably links with the fact that female adultery can obscure or ‘taint’ the blood line. The very word ‘adultery’ has been argued to come from the Latin word adulterium or ‘altered’, meaning polluted or tainted blood. French children born of an adulterous relationship did not obtain equal rights with legitimate children until 1972, and were only entitled to half the inheritance of legitimate children until 2001.

  Under the ancien régime, men who had affairs were just being men; by contrast, a woman who took a lover was liable to have her head shaved and be immured in a nunnery. That the French have traditionally taken a more censorious view of the cheating woman is illustrated by the fact that, until as late as 1975, a French woman who committed adultery was technically liable to be sent to prison for three months to two years. On the other hand, a man who played away was simply liable for a fine (and this only if he committed the sinful act in the marital home).*

  * France was one of the later European countries to decriminalize adultery for women, in 1975. The UK had done so as far back as 1857.

  French literature abounds in examples of adulterous women who suffer heinous consequences for their sins (generally suicide by ingestion of arsenic).16 In contrast, French women who stand by their erring husbands in public are seen as paragons of wifely devotion. This was the case, for example, with the late Danielle Mitterrand, who when questioned by a reporter about her reaction to her husband’s infidelity, made the extraordinary statement that it concerned his own private life and was therefore his affair. Yet actions speak louder than words; when Mme Mitterrand died in November 2011, she was buried in the cemetery at Cluny (Saône-et-Loire), and not beside her erring husband at Jarnac (Charente). Barred by social convention from voicing her real views in life, she stated them most eloquently in death.

  OOH LA LA! ORIGINS OF THE FRENCH MAID FETISH (skip)

  In addition to adulterous liaisons beyond the precincts of the family home, the nineteenth century was also the heyday of le troussage de domestique, or the ancient right of the master of the house to help himself to the personal services of the household maid in every sense of the phrase.

  The belle époque had something of an obsession with maids: le fétichisme du tablier (‘apron fetish’) manifested itself by the innumerable appearances of maids in novels and plays of the time. There were, for example, titillating works such as the racy Journal d’une femme de chambre or ‘Diary of a Chambermaid’ of 1900 – full of keyhole observations of the bourgeoisie in compromising positions – and the sensationally popular farces of the playwright Georges Feydeau.

  The relegation of maids to tiny bedrooms, or chambres de bonne, usually located on the sixth floor of Parisian houses, made them all the more accessible to a discreet knock on the door from the master of the house. These chambres de bonne exist in Paris to this day, and are generally rented out as studio apartments to students and poorer members of the Parisian population. Even as late as 2011, a member of the bourgeois establishment shocked the French public by referring to Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape of a hotel maid as le troussage de domestique.

  By the twentieth century, the French fetish with the maid had migrated to Britain and America. A strongly modified style of their evening uniform of b
lack dress and frilly apron – with necklines much lower and hemlines much higher than would have been tolerated at the time – had established itself as one of the most popular forms of fetish and fantasy wear, in countries as far afield as Japan. The symbolism of domination/submission inherent in the outfit presumably only added to its appeal.

  Where does all this leave us in terms of the messy affair of the French and their views on unfaithfulness? Hopelessly muddled, unfortunately. One thing is for sure, and that is the fact that as long as men and women (of any race) commit to each other, some are bound to stray. And the ultimate difference between the French and their Anglo-Saxon counterparts is perhaps simply that they accept (but do not revel in) this reality. As the French writer Pascal Bruckner observed, ‘One cannot imagine a way of loving more likely to generate discord. And that is why adultery is the eternal, universal road companion to marriage: they are unthinkable, one without the other.’ Or, as W. Somerset Maugham more succinctly put it: ‘You know that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.’

  Myth Evaluation: Partly true. The French are probably more tolerant of adultery than the puritanical British or Americans, at least in public office, but they actually practise it less.

  THE FRENCH HABITUALLY HAVE LARGE FAMILIES

  La France a besoin d’enfants. (‘France needs children’)

  SLOGAN ACCOMPANYING FRENCH STATE NATALITY CAMPAIGNS

  This is not so much a myth as a fact. The French birth rate, at 2.01 children per woman on average, is (along with Ireland) the highest on the Old Continent of Europe.17 And while most French families average two children (40 per cent), the French have one of the highest rates of families with three children or more (30 per cent).18 In fact, France is one of the few countries in Europe which is not suffering from an ageing population, and which is likely to be able to reproduce itself in the foreseeable future. The French are the reproductive miracle of Europe, envied in particular by countries such as Germany, growing grey-haired even as its Gallic neighbours churn out bouncing babies.