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than that. You did a brilliant degree. You’ve got a high-powered job.’
    ‘Still. My energies all went elsewhere. We were brought up to be, above all, seductive. We put on our high heels and our make-up to go to Sciences Po and we hunted for men among the elite.’
    ‘How exhausting.’
    ‘Sometimes. But it’s in us. We can’t be any different. We have an obligation to our femininity. In our company a man should feel like a man. There should always be a spark of mystery.’
    ‘And what about as you get older? Do you still have to go on doing this in your fifties and sixties?’
    ‘Actually, it gets easier. You learn to wear only what suits you and you use what you have.’
    ‘Do you wish things were different?’
    She leaned towards me, lowering her voice.
    ‘ It was fun .’ Then she added, ‘In theory, of course, love affairs should just be the icing on the cake. They shouldn’t define you but they do. They take up so much time .’
    She paused.
    ‘The trouble is, of course, you dwell in appearances.’
    ‘And we all lose our looks,’ I said.
    She smiled mischievously.
    ‘Men lose their looks too. You must just take a younger lover.’
    Even though I knew the answer, I asked her if she had had affairs.
    ‘Many,’ she said.
    ‘And your husband?’
    ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know.’
    ‘Do most of your girlfriends have affairs?’
    ‘Yes. I would say that most of the couples that we know are unfaithful to each other. There is a tradition of libertinage in my milieu , which is very strong. It’s in our literature, our theatre and our cinema. Of course there is guilt. I never want to hurt my husband but a love affair is irresistible. I don’t want to resist it.’
    I will never share with Hortense the intimacy and camaraderie that I share with my English girlfriends. There is an ease among both British and American women that is the direct result of the lack of rivalry. Because of the archaic, unreconstructed nature of gender politics in France, women still perceive each other as rivals in the game of love. I know that for Hortense her love affairs come first, that she wouldn’t hesitate to cancel me in favour of an assignation. This is understood. With the sisterhood in England and America, things are different. We’re taught to put our female friendships first, or at least make sure that we appear to do so.
    *
    I think of Aurélie, the sex goddess, and remember howterrified I was by her erotic legacy in the early days of my marriage. To me she embodied everything that I mistrusted about the French woman. Her agenda was seduction and all her energies seemed to go in that direction. She seemed to have no female friendships at all and always seemed to be stealing other people’s husbands or boyfriends. When I discovered, over dinner in a restaurant with Laurent, the manner in which their affair had begun, all my worst fears were confirmed.
    Aurélie was the girlfriend of one of Laurent’s oldest friends, Robert, a photographer who would become godfather to our first child. After they had been together for about two years, Aurélie found herself suddenly and irresistibly attracted to her boyfriend’s best mate, Laurent. Laurent had recently taken up running first thing in the morning in the Bois de Boulogne, close to where he worked. Aurélie asked if she might join him. Laurent described to me over dinner how she had made her move on him:
    ‘She stopped to rest against a tree. She was panting, her insolent little breasts [I remember he used the word narquois for those breasts, meaning, literally, mocking] heaving up and down under her tiny vest … She was staring at me and panting, waiting for me to jump on her. I couldn’t resist.’
    This is the French woman’s way: you never make the first move, but you try to make it impossible for the man not to. Judging from a conversation that I would have years later with my own daughter, this is still the approachof the Parisian female. Ella