The Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham Read Free Book Online

had recently returned from a weekend in London, where she had been to a party given by the daughter of a friend of mine. Her description of the dance floor took me back to my own adolescence: all those lovely, strong females dancing together in the middle of the room and all those insecure, faltering males hovering around the edge as if repelled by the contrapuntal force of the girls’ erotic empowerment. Apparently, Ella tried the waiting game she usually plays at parties in Paris and the boys all ignored her.
    Laurent went on to tell me how poor Robert, six months later, discovered his affair with Aurélie. They and a group of friends were having dinner together in a big, noisy brasserie off the Place de la Bastille. Aurélie was sitting beside her official boyfriend and opposite her lover. When Robert bent down to pick up his lighter, he saw his girlfriend’s foot comfortably nestled where it shouldn’t be and that was that. She moved out of Robert’s flat and in with Laurent. It is a measure of the banality of adultery here that Laurent and Robert – and indeed Aurélie – are still firm friends.
    When I heard this story I inwardly vowed to cut Aurélie out of my life. At the time Laurent had the elegance not to object, but after we had split up he and Aurélie became close again. Today I feel a good deal more charitable towards her. In fact, as Hortense once explained to me, women like Aurélie fulfil a useful role in society. They are erotic catalysts. Not all women should be matronly or sisterly or otherwise sexually passive. If theyare, the erotic charge disappears from the social group, or goes underground and becomes pathological, disembodied, infected by guilt. The idea is that in the presence of this type of predatory woman, wives and girlfriends feel at risk and this sense of risk reboots the libido. Significantly, Carl Jung identified the vital social role of this type of woman in his book Aspects of the Feminine . Even he, however, could not help giving her the pejorative label ‘The Overdeveloped Eros’.
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    There is no ‘sisterhood’ in France and for many years this was something I missed profoundly. With time, however, I realised – as I did of most areas of French life – that in losing one thing I had found another. I learnt that the extraordinary female friendships I had known in Britain were part of a wider landscape, itself not so pretty – a landscape ravaged by a low-level and persistent war between the sexes. The absence of gender conflict in France has become a source of relief to me. Once I had overcome my prejudices, I realised that the constant flirtation – often heavy-handed and irritating but sometimes subtle and uplifting – was a pretty harmless thing compared to the deep-seated resentment that seems to infect gender relations in Britain. There is no tradition of gender segregation in France because men enjoy the company of women. Stag parties are a recent aberration imported by Anglophiles, and the gentleman’s club is reserved for a tiny proportion of the French aristocracy that enjoys aping the English. There is no such thing here as a‘ladette’ because French women are happy to be admired for their femininity.
    I had imagined that the hostility between the sexes in Britain began with feminism, but I now think that it must have been a much longer-standing feature of British life. You only have to look back to seventeenth-century Jacobean tragedy to find evidence of an already entrenched and elaborate misogyny that was absent from French courtly drama. From as early as the fourteenth century, British women had become targets of male animosity as they found ways of engaging in Britain’s emerging market economy, mostly as manufacturers and sellers of goods. France’s Salic Law (which barred female heirs from the throne) and her enduring chivalric tradition – whose values were perpetuated by the French court – kept French women in a subordinate position, shielding