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currency as a compliment in France. The term would probably translate into English as ‘bimbo’, losing all positive connotation in the process. For the French, on the other hand, Brigitte Bardot was the classic femme-enfant , and the scene which best depicts this feminine ideal is the opening moments in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris (Contempt) in which Bardot lies naked on the bed and asks her lover which part of her body he likes best. The refrain ‘And my feet, do you like my feet? And my breasts, do you like my breasts? Which do you prefer, my nipples or my breasts?’, the monumentalstupidity of Bardot, comes across in France as irresistible coquetry. In French she sounds sexy; in English, like an overgrown and deranged toddler.
    Another classic that Laurent took me to see was Le Septième Ciel (Seventh Heaven), by Benoît Jacquot. It’s about a woman called Mathilde who cannot reach orgasm. To solve her problem she goes to see a hypnotist. The hypnosis works and she goes home to her husband and her climax wakes up the neighbours. Betty, a girlfriend with whom I discussed the film, informed me that I was wrong, that the story wasn’t at all implausible. Plenty of Parisian women, she explained, went to hypnotists to help them relax enough to come, and if I liked she could give me the number for hers, a very nice man (though with bad breath) whose practice was near the Place de la République.
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    Having been brought up in post-feminist Britain, it took me almost a decade to adjust to the experience of being a woman in France. Since France seemed to have been bypassed by the feminist revolution, women appeared to me woefully un-emancipated, still pitted against each other and trapped in the archaic patriarchal model of sexual competition. They seemed to have no interest in friendship and would invariably gaze past me at parties when I tried to engage them in conversation, as if they were watching a world of erotic opportunity disappearing down the plughole. Often I would come home after such evenings and cry on my husband’s shoulder. I missedEngland and above all, I missed my female friendships.
    My eldest sister, Florence, after ten years in Paris, had fled her younger sisters a second time and gone to live in Manhattan. Irene and I hardly ever saw each other. She had moved with her French husband to a chic suburb to the west of Paris and I found myself repeatedly bowing to Laurent’s bourgeois Parisian reluctance to cross the périphérique (Paris’s ring road) to visit her. Over the years, Irene and I developed opposing techniques to cope with our homesickness. Irene made a haven of Englishness for herself and her Anglophile husband. They spoke to each other in English, listened to Radio 4, watched English football on satellite TV and, when their children were born, employed an English-speaking nanny to look after them. I, on the other hand, slowly but surely and much to Irene’s amusement would, as she would put it, go native .
    Recently, I had lunch with Hortense, one of those Parisian women whom I had found so icy and who has, over the years, become my friend. She was interested to hear that she had terrified me when I first met her, and that she had seemed disdainful and unapproachable. She smiled.
    ‘You frightened me ,’ she said. ‘You were so … open, so different.’
    Her hazel eyes shone with affection. I’ve known her for twenty years and she has changed very little. She still has the same mass of shiny, beautifully blow-dried hair, the youthful spattering of freckles across the nose and the same (pouting) mouth.
    ‘It was the role we had to play,’ she explained. ‘ La femme fatale . You have to remember that here the pleasure all lies in the business of being a woman. That’s where real life is played out, in our love affairs. Nowhere else. There’s really not much difference between the life of a bourgeoise like me and the life of a courtesan.’
    ‘But you’ve been more