The Secret Life of France Read Free Page B

belief.
    Laurent’s mother, Madeleine, was a handsome and formidably intelligent woman from an aristocratic family. His father, Jérôme Lemoine, was one of the nine stunningly beautiful Lemoine children of the sixteenth arrondissement, widely known in bourgeois circles for their parties, their small talk and their skill at dancing. When Jérôme and Madeleine met, he was leading a wilfully vapid life scraping through an architecture degree at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, while she – one of the first women to be accepted by the prestigious School of Political Science, Sciences Po – was sitting in the cafés and cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, listening to Jean-Paul Sartre and Juliette Gréco.
    After ten years of marriage and soul-searching philosophical enquiry Madeleine met a Hindu guru in Paris by the name of Sri Menon and became one of his first disciples. Every year she would go for a spiritual refill at his ashram in the Indian state of Kerala and, as she soon made clear to me, it was in this way that she was able toturn a blind eye to her husband’s chronic philandering.
    I first got wind of my father-in-law’s mistress the summer Laurent and I were married. Madeleine had been away in India for the usual six weeks in spring and Laurent and I were up in Normandy for the first time since her return in order to discuss plans for the wedding. I noticed that the house seemed uncharacteristically clean and the kitchen cupboards in almost obsessive-compulsive order. My mother-in-law was an efficient woman but she was no domestic goddess, and I knew that the rows and rows of homemade marmalade in the larder could not have been her doing. When one of the jars appeared on the breakfast table, I studied the label. ‘Iris’, it read. ‘Spring, 1985.’ As it turned out, Iris’s excellent marmalade had been enjoyed year after year by Laurent, his father and his brothers – even by Madeleine herself – without their ever once alluding to the mysterious English woman who had settled into that house for six weeks to make it.
    Four years later Iris would fall ill with cancer, and I watched my mother-in-law stand by in mute misery while her angry, grief-stricken husband spent night after night at the other woman’s hospital bedside. On one occasion only, Madeleine confessed her distress to me. We were sitting in the kitchen of their flat in the sixteenth arrondissement.
    ‘Why don’t you leave him?’ I asked.
    She smiled kindly at me.
    ‘What for?’
    ‘He’s making you suffer.’
    ‘He’s suffering more than me.’ She pulled herself together and stood up to prepare lunch for her husband, who came home every day without fail. ‘Anyway,’ she said bravely, ‘we don’t do divorce in this family.’
    It was Madeleine’s profound conviction – one held by much of Paris’s bourgeoisie, even today – that passion and desire should be accommodated within a marriage. You navigate your way through these emotions, treating your spouse as carefully as you can in the process. But on no account do you leave them.
    Iris, the marmalade mistress, died of cancer and was replaced a few years later by another, younger woman, who also happened to be English. My mother-in-law accepted this new woman into the shadows of her marriage and only once lost her temper. When she discovered that, during one of her absences in India, her husband had brought their grandchildren to the woman’s house for tea, she had asked Laurent, as the eldest son, to take his father out to lunch and have a word with him. Laurent obliged his mother and found that he didn’t have to say much; his father knew he had crossed the line and Laurent was pretty sure it would never happen again.
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    When I first arrived in the mid-eighties, I was particularly shocked by an advertisement for 1664 beer that was showing in French cinemas at the time. A beautiful mother is collecting her little boy from school. Shots of her waiting with the other mothers for her