Thirty years later, in a 2009 Internet poll, she was voted La Parisienne, the quintessential Parisian woman. It’s hard not to be attracted to a woman with the long limbs of a runner, the raspy voice of a cabaret singer, the impish look of a coquette, the sense of humor of a stand-up comic, the smile of Audrey Hepburn.
So we were going to effleurer after all.
That’s because seduction is bound tightly with what the French call plaisir — the art of creating and relishing pleasure of all kinds. The French are proud masters of it, for their own gratification and as a useful tool to seduce others. They have created and perfected pleasurable ways to pass the time: perfumes to sniff, gardens to wander in, wines to drink, objects of beauty to observe, conversations to carry on. They give themselves permission to fulfill a need for pleasure and leisure that America’s hard-working, super-capitalist, abstinent culture often does not allow. Sexuality always lies at the bottom of the toolbox, in everyday life, in business, even in politics. For the French, this is part of the frisson of life.
I told her how different it was in the United States, where many women feel liberated and sexy walking around the bedroom in the nude. I thought that perhaps her insistence on the value of concealment was an affectation of an aging sex symbol struggling to cling to her youth. A young French journalist from my office was with us, so I turned to her and asked, “If you were in a love relationship, and you were getting out of bed to go into the bathroom, you would not be totally nude?”
To get off to the right start, she said, I needed to invest in a new haircut, new clothes and a visit to a Turkish bath to “feel some pleasure.” Then she said, “You go to the terrace of a cafe. You say to yourself, ‘Voilà, something is going to happen.’ And you’ll see. Something will happen.”
The women have a lot in common. They have Latin roots: de la Fressange’s mother is Argentine; Dombasle lived in Mexico as a child. That has given them the air of outsiders who had to master the rules. Both are past 50 and have been performing for more than three decades. They move with the swiftness and fluidity of cats — Dombasle as an actress and singer, la Fressange as the former supermodel for Chanel. Both are impossibly tall and thin, with bodies that long to be stared at. Both are smart businesswomen who understand the need to continue to market their allure and their beauty.
“I’m nude when I’m alone, and I’m nude when I’m in his arms, but never in a sort of casually stupid gesture of the morning or whatever. Never.”
I, too, should never be nude in front of my husband, Dombasle advised. “Otherwise, he won’t buy you lunch.”
La Fressange told me that my subject was so vast and so serious that I needed firsthand experience.
The kiss was not an act of passion. This was not at all like the smoldering scene in Proust’s “Swann’s Way” in which the narrator “blindly, hotly, madly” seizes and kisses the hand offered to him by a lady in pink. Still, the kiss was unsettling. Part of me found it charming and flattering. But in an era when women work so hard to be taken seriously, I also was vaguely uncomfortable that Chirac was adding a personal dimension to a professional encounter and assuming I would like it. This would not have happened in the United States. It was, like so much else in France, a subtle but certain exercise in seduction.
Over tea one afternoon, Dombasle compared seduction to a battlefield of communication. “Seduction is largely transmitted through words — what you say and when you keep quiet,” she said. “That’s the key. Voilà.”
“And the last,” he said, “it’s to effleurer. I do it like this.”
Seduction can surface any time — a tactic of the ice cream seller, the ambulance driver, the lavender grower. Foreigners may find themselves swept away without realizing how it happened. Not so the French. For them, the daily campaign to win and woo is a familiar game, instinctively played and understood.
The power-kiss of the president was one of my first lessons in understanding the importance of seduction in France. Over time, I became aware of its force and pervasiveness. I saw it in the disconcertingly intimate eye contact of a diplomat discussing dense policy initiatives; the exaggerated, courtly politeness of an elderly neighbor during our serendipitous morning encounters; the flirtatiousness of a female friend that oozed like honey at dinner parties; the banter of a journalist colleague that never ended and never failed to amuse. Eventually I learned to expect it, without quite knowing why.
The milk producers of northern France were not simply on strike; they were on a “seduction mission” to explain to consumers why they were blocking trucks and collection points.
I was encouraged. “I know war,” I said. “I was a war correspondent. I don’t understand seduction, but I understand war.”
Adapted from ‘‘La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life,’’ to be published in June by Times Books.
I was getting nervous that one of his army of assistants would walk in and find us in midkiss. Then his second kiss came. He pressed his lips gently to my hand. He defined that kiss as affectif — with emotion. “There, that is someone I like quite well Free Web space and make money online, with whom I have a good relationship, and she knows it,” he said. “There we go.”
I had no idea what she meant. I asked her to explain. “You must choose your words carefully, as you would in a war,” she said. “The way you seduce depends on whether you want to win or you want to lose.”
Then he drew back. “If I do it this way, I am too far,” he said. “I must do it close enough. You must almost feel my breath.”
“You can’t talk about seduction, fashion, politics, beauty without a French lover. Yes, yes! For the final touch!”
Then came the coup de grâce. Because of my age, she said, I had no time to waste.
“No, no, no, no, no, no,” he replied. “It means, ‘Will you sleep with me tonight?’ ”
His lips opened slightly and moved up and down, teasing my hand. The kiss could not have lasted more than two seconds. I felt the warmth of his breath and a slight tickling, as if I were being touched by a butterfly’s wings. I marveled at the mastery of the simultaneous double movement of opening and closing and up and down. The memory of the gesture lingered like the scent of an exotic perfume.
What is constant is the intent: to attract or influence, to win over, even if just in fun.
Clearly, seduction in France does not always involve sex. A grand séducteur is not necessarily a man who easily seduces others into making love. The term might refer to someone who never fails to persuade others to his point of view. He might be gifted at caressing with words, at drawing people close with a look, at forging alliances with flawless logic. The target of a seduction — male or female — may experience the process as a shower of charm or a magnetic pull or even a form of entertainment that ends as soon as the dinner party is over.
“In this one, I try to say that you please me,” he explained. “And if I brush my lips lightly, it means — ”
In the fall of 2002, Jacques Chirac was seven years into his 12-year presidency. The Bush administration was moving toward war with Iraq, and the relationship between France and the United States was worse than it had been in decades. I had just become the Paris bureau chief for The New York Times. Chirac was receiving me and Roger Cohen, then The Times’s foreign editor, to make what he hoped would be a headline-grabbing announcement of a French-led strategy to avoid war. When we arrived that Sunday morning, Chirac shook hands with Roger and welcomed me with a baisemain, a kiss of the hand.
Dombasle explained that this war was nonviolent. The woman warrior must avoid the sort of traumatic exposure that comes with vulnerability in front of the adversary. Dombasle has not hesitated to bare her breasts for a Paris Match cover or for a revue in front of hundreds of people at the Crazy Horse cabaret. But she insisted that nakedness is a vulnerability that must be used with care. Apparently on the battlefield of the bed, the rules are different. “Nudity is extremely violent to gaze at,” she said. “I would never walk naked in front of my husband. Never, never, never. One must maintain a certain mystery.”
The main difference between them is the way each has chosen to promote her look. Dombasle seems to have been worked on and is always done up. Her allure comes from her resemblance to a gorgeous alien. La Fressange, a mother of two, often wears jeans and loafers, and she smokes. She has retained the innocent air of a much younger woman.
He stood up and ordered me to stand as well.“The real baisemain, it’s like this,” he said as he bent down from the waist, took my hand and came within a hair of touching his lips to my skin. There was a barely perceptible squeezing of my hand before he returned it to me. “I must not touch, but you should feel that I am close enough.”
Elaine Sciolino on Seduction, and France
It is not enough to conquer; one must also know how to seduce. — Voltaire Free Web space and make money online, “Mérope”
When the sales of Dell laptops declined, it was because the company had “a hard time seducing.” The left-leaning newspaper Libération once ran a two-page article illustrated with a photo of a French soldier in full battle gear and pointing a large automatic weapon under the headline “Afghanistan: The French in Seduction Mode.”
Dombasle was simply too sexy for me. So I turned to Inès de la Fressange. I had first met her when she was a fresh-faced yet flirtatious runway model and I was covering the Paris fashion shows for Newsweek. Even then de la Fressange was not just any ordinary fashion model. She was the daughter of a French marquis and off-the-charts wealthy.
The ritual — considered old-fashioned nowadays by just about everyone under the age of 60 — was traditionally a ceremonial, sacred gesture; its history can be traced to ancient Greece and Rome. In the Middle Ages, a vassal paid homage to his lord by kissing his hand. By the 19th century, hand kissing had been reinvented to convey a man’s gallantry and politesse toward a woman. Those men who still practice it today know the rules: never kiss a gloved hand or the hand of a young girl; kiss the hand only of a married woman, and do so only indoors.
But not for Maurice Lévy, the chairman of the French advertising giant Publicis Groupe. He gave me the definitive lesson in hand kissing. Lévy is tall and strongly built and gives off an air of calm and nonchalance. He greeted me in his headquarters on the Champs-Élysées, in a reception area bathed in white. I prodded him into speaking a few sentences in English. I had been told that he carefully preserves his Maurice Chevalier-like accent and then apologizes for it, part of what his aides call his “French touch.” He doesn’t do hard sell. When he wants to make a point, he slowly closes his eyes, parts his lips and leans back in his chair. But his greeting — a big, hard handshake and a command to get down to business — underscores what others had told me about him. Deep down, he is a killer businessman, a cunning predator who built Publicis into the world’s third-largest advertising and public relations empire.
Chirac reached for my right hand and cradled it as if it were a piece of porcelain from his private art collection. He raised it to the level of his chest, bent over to meet it halfway and inhaled, as if to savor its scent. Lips made contact with skin.
I interrupted: “ ‘I might have intentions that are more complex and mysterious — ’ ”_
I sought advice from the two women I consider to be France’s icons of the modern world of courtesans (without the sex part): Arielle Dombasle and Inès de la Fressange.
“No,” she replied. “It’s not only prudishness. It’s just, you know. . . .”
How do you know something like that? I wondered.
It could be a campaign to weaken your opponent by injecting an element of surprise, for example. “You could play against type to throw your adversary off balance,” she said. “Seduction is not a frivolous thing. No. It’s war.”
“You must not effleurer the hand! You must not!” he said. “When you effleurez the hand, you are saying something else.”
I thought about the scene in the film “Clair de Femme” when Yves Montand literally bumps into Romy Schneider as he gets out of a taxi Free Web space and make money online, and then they sit together at a cafe. A bit later, he’s in her bed.
For centuries, the most perceptive experts on seduction in France have been its female courtesans. More important than their youth, beauty and sexual performance have been their experience and maturity. Therefore,
He had been well briefed on my interest in the themes of seduction and sensuality in French life. The intermediary who had arranged the interview must have told him about my fascination with hand kissing, because he suddenly shifted the subject from the globalization of the advertising market to focus on my right hand.
Jacques Chirac’s baisemain became emblematic of what I needed to understand about the French. No French person to whom I told the story thought I should be offended. The writer Mona Ozouf described it as “a slightly theatrical gesture with a touch of irony.” Sophie-Caroline de Margerie, a jurist on the Conseil d’État, the highest administrative court in France, explained that the Polish aristocracy did it much more sensually. She took my hand but only half-showed me. Perhaps the kiss itself would have been too intimate for her.
Lévy was playacting, of course, but his message was serious: understanding the French would require a fine appreciation of ambiguity, process, tension and playfulness — in other words, seduction.
“So nudity is not something trivial?”
And they are national treasures; both have been awarded the Legion of Honor.
The first time my hand was kissed à la française was in the Napoléon III salon of the Élysée Palace. The one doing the kissing was the president of France.
“Pretty soon, you’ll be thinking only about your cats, your dogs, your knitting and your garden. Your arthritis will make it hard to take long walks at night.” Eventually we compromised. I could take a virtual lover, a friend who would only play along with me.
“So you’re only nude in the shower?” I asked.
The word’s omnipresence in the French consciousness can be unsettling. During a trip to Israel in May 2009, the pope was said to have “seduced the Palestinians” with his call for the creation of a Palestinian state.
“You have evoked the baisemain,” he said, even though it was he, not I, who had raised the subject. He told me that a man’s lips should never effleurer the hand. Effleurer is hard to translate. The closest meaning is “to skim” or “to brush lightly.” The sound and spelling of the word is similar to the French word for “flower,” fleur. That led me to think, the first time Lévy said it, that it might have something to do with the petals of a flower, a sort of delicate act that involves touching something fragile.
A key component of seduction — and of French life — is process. The rude waiter, the dismissive sales clerk, the low-ranking bureaucrat who demands still another obscure document are all playing a perverted version of a seduction game that glorifies lingering. It may be a waste of time and end without the desired result. But played well, the game can be stimulating. And when victory comes, the joy is sweet.
“You have to stroll the streets of Paris at night with your lover, go to Montmartre, walk along the Seine, eat soup in a bistro,” she said. “Then you go to Deauville and walk along the sea and eat shrimps until 4 a.m. And when your husband calls you, you say, ‘But, no! You’re just imagining that you hear the sound of waves in the background.’ ”
Séduction and séduire (to seduce) are among the most overused words in the French language. In English, “seduce” has a negative and exclusively sexual feel; in French, the meaning is broader. The French use “seduce” where the British and Americans might use “charm” or “attract” or “engage” or “entertain.”
The next morning, at breakfast with my husband, Andy, I started making a list of possible candidates: my downstairs neighbor, a white-haired, retired business executive who wears perfectly knotted cashmere scarves and elegant tweed sport coats, even when he rides his bicycle to the supermarket; a writer and radio talk-show host who is very smart and safely gay; a famous stage and film actor who I feared might take the role too seriously; a colleague who said he would be happy to help, but alas, he is British; a former diplomat with a passion for 19th-century paintings whom I ruled out as dangerous because his wife lives in a foreign country. I asked Andy for his advice. He took a break from his Special K and put on his glasses. “I somehow don’t think you’re supposed to be telling me about this,” he said.
“Of course not. But we know that.”
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