The Secret Life of France Read Free Page A

waiting.’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘The presidential elections. There’s an amnesty for parking offences at each presidential election. Better to wait for the next one.’
    As the years went by, this lawless atmosphere worked its magic on me and I began to behave like everyone else. I would abandon my car – battered from the general practice of ‘nudge parking’ – on zebra crossings, pavements, traffic islands, while I ran in to collect my children. TheParisian authorities have never resorted to clamping – they prefer to tow, since immobilising a car in a bad place doesn’t make sense to them – but in those days, towing hadn’t yet caught on and so the tickets began to pile up and the letters from Monsieur le Préfet became more and more insistent. The amnesty * seemed a long way off when fate intervened in the form of B., an employee of the Renseignements Généraux , or RG, France’s bizarre, tentacular secret police force.
    B. was a short man with an outlandish moustache and a thick southern accent whom I met while working as a freelance researcher for the BBC. He would occasionally invite me out to lunch and ply me with useless, often misleading information and I would go home with my head full of colourful detail of no use whatever to my employers. It was B., for instance, who told me the preferred euphemism used by RG spooks to indicate that the subject of their memo was homosexual: ‘He is partial to the English style of life.’
    Long after it became clear to B. and me that we were quite useless to each other, we still occasionally met for lunch. He had stopped trying to impress me by showing me where he kept his Smith & Wesson (in a holster round his ankle) and plying me with Chivas Regal in his office at the Ministry of the Interior. Instead we would meet for long, usually duck-themed lunches near the rue des Saussaies and exchange stories. He would talk in fast,unrelenting police speak – an elaborately formal metalanguage spoken by cops and understood by criminals – about the endlessly fascinating rivalries within the French police, and I would tell him about what life was like outside the confines of a surveillance vehicle. Usually over coffee, he’d click his jewelled fingers at me and hold out his hand for my parking tickets, which he would roll up and put in the pocket of his leather jacket, never to be seen again.
Adultery and the Cult of Beauty
    In our Anglo-Saxon culture, sex and love have become polarised through guilt. In such a context sex can only achieve purification through love. There has always been a tendency in Britain and America to see sex without love as dirty. In the minds of the French middle classes, sex, even where love is absent, is a source of pleasure to which every human being has an inalienable right. Whether a person chooses to exercise that right or not is another matter.
    In France sex is viewed, at its most basic, as a legitimate source of pleasure and, at its most elaborate, as an art form, a means of sublimation. For the Parisian bourgeoisie – and it is they who set the tone in this still hierarchical society – good sex is the single most satisfactory method of raising oneself above the monotony of everyday life. For this reason alone, drugs and alcohol do not have the same hold here as they have in Britain. When sex is combined with love, the French believe that its mood-altering effects are only intensified.
    The belief in this idea explains the comparative tolerance towards adultery, which filters down through all of society from the urban bourgeoisie and is reflected in literature, cinema and the media. The French, led by the Parisian middle classes, are brought up to believe that if you’re lucky enough to find erotic satisfaction within your marriage, then so much the better, but if you can’t then you’re entitled, so long as you remain discreet, to seek your fix elsewhere. As I would soon discover, even my future mother-in-law held this