Chapter 16

Lesson in French Love 2: Le Bonheur

WHEN IT COMES TO LOVE, there is no gray area in France. If French love were a set of traffic lights, it would have no yellow. Green or red—it’s either all or nothing.

I had been observing the French in their natural habitat for almost two years now and had come to the conclusion that as a people, they are genetically conditioned to always be somewhere in the vicinity of love. Love, or the cruel deprivation of it, is like oxygen to the average French person—and life is simply a series of stages of either falling into it, being up to your eyeballs in it, or falling out of it. Give a French person half a chance, and they’ll act as if they invented love. As if, for some cosmic reason, they were the only race capable of truly understanding and experiencing it.

The French belief that they have a heavenly ordained monopoly on love is best illustrated by their collective pursuit of the heightened state of emotion known as bonheur. Bonheur is a state of being that you can apparently experience only if you are French. Translated literally, it means, quite simply, “happiness.” A common enough condition, you might think, but for a French man the symptoms range from impaired reason and a sudden complete neglect of your male friends to an impulsive desire to spend ridiculous amounts of money on a range of state-approved love accoutrements (like an expensive dinner, a gaudy piece of jewelry, or a vacation for two in Corsica).

When a French man is experiencing bonheur, it’s best to quickly acknowledge the inferiority of emotional range inflicted upon you by virtue of your birthplace (namely, any country outside France) and sit back and take notes. He’ll tell you he is in love and that, despite the fact this is his third time in as many months, it has never been like this before. He’ll confidently maintain that this is it, the real thing—and that you, as a foreigner, couldn’t possibly understand. Then, like a new member of a secret club, he will suddenly find himself invited to a slew of dinner parties—strictly couples-only affairs—where he will bask in the unique, smug comfort that comes from being a member of a self-selecting community. He will happily, willingly throw himself headlong into the labyrinthine, hazardous obstacle course that is the French woman’s psyche and prepare to thrash about in an orgy of emotional self-flagellation. It is his birthright, after all.

There will be an initial bout of passionate, spontaneous sex. He and his paramour will devour each other in a carnal cornucopia of bedroom antics, pausing only for the occasional cigarette or to pop outside to a crowded café to indulge in a half hour of heavy petting—because God knows, it’s not worth petting heavily if it doesn’t offend the sensibilities of at least ten people sitting in close proximity.

All of this behavior will only be compounded by the French man’s unshakable belief in the persistent myth that he and his countrymen are the world’s greatest lovers, a misguided belief only encouraged by Paris’s worldwide reputation as a city for lovers. And once the French man and his lover have executed their public displays of affection, they will concentrate on the serious business of making public displays of aggression and melodrama. For a Parisian couple will not have an argument, will not fall into a passionate embrace—will not, in effect, indulge in any display of serious emotion—unless they have an audience. It is almost as if the audience legitimizes the sentiment. Why snog in the privacy of your own squalid studio apartment when you could do it on a heavily touristed bridge over the Seine? Why argue vociferously in the privacy of your own home when a packed café or restaurant would ensure a heightening of the melodrama?

As a stitched-up Anglo-Saxon in a land full of Latins, I soon stopped being charmed by public displays of affection and started to be repulsed by them. Whatever the reason—whether I was reacting against the contrived emotion behind them or felt I wasn’t getting my fair share of the loving that appeared to be on every corner—I wandered the streets of Paris willing the snoggers to take a cold shower and the heavy petters to get a room.

It was left to Julien, as my token French friend, to educate me on the complex relationship that your average French man has with love. Julien has almost been married on more than one occasion. In one instance he came perilously close to the altar. I know because I was supposed to be his best man.

It all began while our hero was on the rebound from a bruising romantic encounter with a feisty Italian principessa. His love interest this time round was Claire, the new girl in his law office. She was a young lawyer with a bourgeois Paris pedigree. He was the dashing young Parisian avocat, passionate, committed, and bearing more than a passing likeness to Olivier Martinez (albeit a distinctly smaller version). They started seeing each other outside the office, careful to hide their budding romance from colleagues. True to French form, it took barely a month before Jules had fallen hard. Within two months he had packed up his belongings from the apartment he shared with Will and moved in with Claire.

One blustery February afternoon, four months after the pair had started dating and hence disappeared from our lives into the vortex of dinner parties that is the fate of coupled-up Frenchies, Jules invited me for lunch. Given that we often met for lunch, I figured it was just one of our semiregular bloke’s lunch dates, a chance to catch up, check in, and swap notes. But he had an entirely different motivation for the encounter.

“Mate,” he said in heavily accented English, employing one of the few Aussie words I had managed to slip into his vocabulary, “there’s something I have to tell you.” The waiter arrived and delivered our lunch. “I have asked Claire to marry me, and I want to ask you to be my best man.”

It was all I could do not to choke on my steak frites. “Oh,” I exclaimed, scrambling for the right words, desperate to hide my complete and total shock. “Wow. Gosh. Yeah. I mean. Of course! Of course I will be your best man. It would be an honor.”

We sat there in the café nodding and grinning stupidly at each other. He was genuinely excited about the decision he had impetuously made. I was uncharacteristically lost for words.

Why? It wasn’t the fact that the courtship had been so short. It was more a conviction, shared by most of our circle of friends, that on a very basic level the couple were not well suited. Julien was never himself when he was around his bride-to-be; he seemed to spend the whole time they were together tending to her, fetching her things, worrying about whether she was too hot or too cold—and always tiptoeing around her on eggshells. There’s thoughtful attention, and then there’s mollycoddling. This, we all agreed, was definitely doing the latter.

And so he and I sat opposite each other, eating in silence. Every now and then I would utter a “Wow, marriage, eh?” or “I must say, I didn’t see that coming.” Then finally I could stand it no longer.

“Look, I’m going to say this once, and then I will never say it again. You have to promise me you won’t be offended. I am only saying this because we are good friends, and good friends should be able to say these sorts of things without offending each other.”

He put down his knife and fork and looked at me with concern.

“Well. It’s just that—are you sure you know what you’re doing? I mean, are you sure you’ve made the right decision? The thing is, it’s just that, it’s all been rather quick. Why the rush? Why not give it a few more months and then get engaged?”

He stared at me in disbelief.

I looked at my plate. I had said what I felt needed to be said, and now I couldn’t make eye contact with him.

His expression turned from concern to abject pity.

“Mate,” he said in his best benevolent tone. “One day you too will fall in love. And then you will know that I am making the right decision.”

It was official. The man was a lost cause. The wedding was on, and as best man, my role from here on in was to be chief cheerleader.

“Right,” I replied, trying to hide my sense of rising indignation.

“Of course. When I fall in love, I guess I’ll understand.”

And so the wedding preparations took place. A ring was purchased, a dress was selected, a venue for the reception was booked, and cases of Champagne were ordered. I had all but picked out my suit and prepared my best man speech in French—before, three months shy of the big event, he pulled the plug. With the benefit of hindsight, I suppose I should have seen it coming. After all, during a bachelor party weekend in Barcelona I was privy to an early-morning conversation with Julien that ought to have set off alarm bells.

The male members of the Posse had trooped en masse to the northern Spanish city for Julien’s bachelor party.

Following an evening of sustained substance abuse, Julien and I found ourselves unable to sleep and so left our hotel in search of breakfast. After a good hour at a café, most of which was spent in silence, sipping a single orange juice and staring dully into the middle distance, we decided to take a walk. Experiencing a moment of clarity of the kind normally reserved only for recreational drug-takers and the truly psychic, we spotted a double-decker, open-topped tourist bus making the day’s first tour of the city and decided to hop aboard.

It was nearly empty. We had seats to stretch out on, fresh air to breathe, and there would be a passing parade of Gaudi-inspired architecture to aid our passage back to the realm of the clearheaded. Or so our reasoning went. Of course, five minutes into our tour—when the pair of us were stretched out across a bench seat on the top deck at the back of the bus, staring blankly up at the cloud-spattered sky—every early-rising tourist and his annoying band of children clambered aboard, ruining our idyll. Forced to sit up (a challenge in and of itself), we spent the remainder of the two-hour journey hanging listlessly over the edge of the bus as the wonder of Sagrada Familia cathedral was explained to us in no fewer than five languages.

As we rounded up the tour with a wholly unnecessary turn through Barcelona’s more unsightly light-industrial areas, Julien suddenly sat upright.

“Mate,” he said, opening our first verbal exchange in two hours.

“What do you think about monogamy?”

Tearing my eyes away from the riveting spectacle of a passing tire factory, I looked at him with disbelief. Surely, knowing my current state, he couldn’t expect me to hold forth on the relative merits or otherwise of having sex with the same woman for the rest of one’s life. If he was seeking reassurance for the decision he had made to chuck in his freewheeling single days and get hitched, his timing couldn’t have been worse. On any normal day I am the fount of all emotional knowledge. But today I was no good to either man or beast. I knew what I was supposed to say. I knew that this sudden outburst was indicative of a deeper malaise in my little French buddy’s soul—that it was, in effect, a cry for help. I mustered all the sensitivity I could find, straightened myself in my seat, and looked him square in the eye.

“Jules, it will all be okay,” I said. “You have made one of the biggest decisions of your life. It’s perfectly normal for you to be questioning it. If you truly believe you have made the right decision, then I am sure everything will be fine.”

Three weeks later the wedding was off.

Apparently it had all come to a head one night when he was at home with his fiancée. She had drifted off to sleep in front of the television. It was nine o’clock on a Friday night, and outside the window of their stylishly bourgeois apartment, the sleepy streets of the interminably dull sixteenth arrondissement were deserted. Julien stood at the window, poured himself a whiskey, and stared out across the lights of Paris, imagining where his single mates might be—which bar they were in, what mischief they might be getting up to.

He looked back at the couch, saw his future, and decided, quite simply, that he didn’t want it after all. Even in the City of Light, the path to bonheur is not a straightforward one.