WHEN WE MOVED to Paris, fifteen years ago, I trusted that all I had heard about Frenchwomen—their perfect clothes, dedicated cookery, and elaborate wiles—would turn out on closer inspection to be untrue, and I would find they were just like the rest of us. Instead I learned that there’s a lot to these stereotypes. I was sure of it with the first recipe I tried from the Sunday newspaper magazine, marked “Très facile”: you began by removing the fish’s backbone, rinsing the fish for twenty minutes, then boiling it for twenty minutes with leek, laurel, and thyme, then cooling, straining, and reducing the broth for twenty minutes—all this before you began cooking the fish. It was then that I knew there were some serious lessons ahead of me. Americans at their foodiest don’t employ fourteen ingredients to make stuffed courgettes.
Much is expected of a French hostess, who presents an exquisite dinner—notice I don’t say “cooks” it. When I gave my first Parisian dinner parties, I would buy poulet masala from Marks and Spencer (there was one here then), on the theory that no Frenchwoman would have heard of it, or none would use preprepared food, but I was wrong about that, too. They are not complexées (their word) about making things from scratch, and whereas we might cheat but conceal it, they blatantly use frozen food and the microwave with no sense of transgression. Their object is, after all, a delicious repas, not competition. My game was up when, therefore, French hostesses also began to serve dishes from Marks and Spencer, to great enthusiasm.
As to that exquisitely turned-out look, Frenchwomen do shop carefully, buy two or three good things each year, and put them on to go to the store. They do indeed flirt with the butcher, which shocked me no end the first time I went marketing with my friend Charlotte: “Ooh, Monsieur Dupont, je sais que vous avez quelque chose de très, très bon pour moi,” and so forth. Daunting as this resolute charm was, I told myself that perfection ought to be decipherable and imitable. Could I, a somewhat lazy and absentminded foreigner, learn French ways?
You can almost tell how long an American or English woman has been in Paris by whether she’s wearing a scarf, only the most obvious sign that cultural reprogramming has begun. Every French person wears one, but Americans tend not to at first. Ditto the purse, a preoccupation that steals in on you like fog. You wake up one morning and find they are all wearing a sort of handbag you haven’t ever thought of having in your wardrobe. Last week I noticed that every Frenchwoman was carrying a big, brown leather, rather rustic-looking handbag with wide straps and lots of buckles and studs. The ultimate version is from Bottega Veneta and costs two thousand euros, with Dior saddlebag-shaped ones not far behind. Lancel, Longchamp, Delsey, and every other saddler had them in leather; Monoprix had them in plastic.
The question for me was, how did le tout Paris know, at the same moment, to buy a bag like this? I read Elle and Madame Figaro like everyone else, but I hadn’t noticed that my regular black leather bag was hopeless. When I go back to California for the summer, people will say “How French you look” for about two weeks, after which, I guess, I stop looking it. In France, I know I still stand out as a clueless American. At least, unlike us, they have cultural consensus. Perhaps this explains the strange predilection the French have for clothes and purses with the name or logo of the maker on them. We would never do that, or at least I wouldn’t, and I’ve never seen T-shirts reading “Isabel Toledo” or “Marc Jacobs” on a San Francisco street, either.
The French do have a different attitude toward individuality and eccentricity. They keep personal idiosyncrasies hidden, if they exist, behind the comfortable uniform facade of fashion or, one could say, of timelessness. The Chanel suit, jeans, the trench coat, never go out of style, and such clothes form the core of everyone’s wardrobe, no matter what age. At first I had a certain Anglo-Saxon scorn for this conformity, but I eventually came to see that for them it is liberating, like school uniforms. You put on your little suit, with its knee-length skirt and fitted jacket, scarf, and midheels, and that’s the end of thinking about it.
In San Francisco, you can’t but be struck, walking down, say, Union Street, by the number of shops that are clearly intended for the young, and no one over twenty would be caught dead in a miniskirt with rhinestones and so forth. In France, women seem not to have any idea of age-appropriate clothes. Frenchwomen of all ages have the figures of their teenage daughters, and they all wear the same styles. There’s a sartorial middle ground where girls wear ladylike clothes their mothers could wear, and their mothers wear the sleeveless dresses and short skirts we have been deeply programmed to avoid after a certain age. My English friend Hilary recently remarked that she had given up wearing jeans because one of her sons had commented, “Mutton dressed as lamb.” Does this mean that jeans, in England, are only for the young, or for arty or delinquent people of any age? Anyhow, this irritating remark brought to mind still other national differences. I don’t think many Frenchmen would feel that their mothers should dress like Whistler’s mother, and I also think they would refrain from using that unfortunate figure of speech based on meat.
It almost seems that Frenchmen like women better than English or American men do. Frenchmen seem to admire what women do, and will participate in discussions about curtains and recipes. You see them looking at fashions in store windows and even reading women’s magazines, whereas, as has often been remarked, Anglo-Saxon men seem to prefer the company of one another. It was fun to see The Voysey Inheritance at the National Theatre in London a few years back, but the status of the women in the big Voysey family of prosperous Victorians made clear a set of attitudes, condescending and protective, that may not have changed that much. All the important scenes take place with the mother and sisters out of the room.
My basic point is, Frenchmen are pretty uniformly gallant and approving of female appearance, and the result is more important than one might think. Since Frenchwomen are as capable as any of us, and maybe more capable, of getting themselves into misjudged outfits, it’s necessary to look more deeply into the secrets of their chic, and looking more deeply one finds that the secret is confidence. Their men are cooperative and supportive. Tact, maybe even genuine goodwill, seems to prevail and give them the confidence never even to think they might look “wrong.”
French compatibility between the sexes has even broader implications. An Englishman friend—a BBC filmmaker—whom I asked what he noticed that was different in Frenchwomen, said, “Well, they look right at you. English girls never do, they’re so mousy and meek.” Ah, I thought, that’s because they don’t want to be accused of being hussies or asking to be harassed. The concept of the “loose woman” doesn’t seem to exist in France, though that of the femme fatale does and is altogether approved of. The higher status of women in France, including old women, becomes clear in French restaurants, where it’s common to see an elderly woman in chic clothes dining by herself at a good table, with a good bottle of wine and the attention of waiters; elderly women in the United States or England are somewhat abject and tend to stay out of the way or stick together.
Because of confidence, a Frenchwoman wouldn’t assume that a male colleague is harassing her when he says, “You look great today.” Think of the recent case in Africa, where a houseguest was raped by a government minister who said he misread her signals because she crossed her legs. In some parts of America, it’s unfortunately still true that a rape victim can be said to have been “asking for it” if she was wearing a low-cut dress or had ever had intercourse before.
Frenchwomen seem to have more confidence as mothers, bolstered by the approval of society if they work, helped out by the fine crèches and nursery schools—unlike in the United States or England, where we are victims of the covertly Germanic Kinder, Kirche, Küche ethic, however this attitude is concealed, bolstered by hectoring, guilt-producing “experts” who foster the idea that an Anglo-Saxon mother dare not leave her child for ten seconds. The result: French children are civil, equable, and pleasant to have around, no complexes.
Frenchwomen don’t have a better take on everything, certainly not. There’s the matter of the red hair, for instance. Why do they dye their hair a red that has never been seen in nature? (And certainly never seen in the English-speaking world. I imagine there’s an explanation obscured by the mists of time—perhaps it was the admired hair color of a royal mistress of the seventeenth century, or Edith Piaf or someone.) It probably isn’t the influence of a current movie star, for the French seem relatively indifferent to celebrities (their most famous rock star, Johnny Hallyday, is now in his sixties), as if it is easier to designate someone and just keep him, instead of doing as we do: constantly dumping famous person A in favor of the new person B, to be dumped in her turn. When I travel to the United States or to England, I’m always baffled by the change in celebrities: Who is Brangelina? Who is Katie? The people in the headlines always seem new from a few weeks before.
Anyhow, some generalizations are possible: The famous English skin really is better (and in all ethnic groups), which must be from the relative lack of sun; French women still broil themselves on beaches and in tanning salons. (Nobody seems to have told them cigarettes confer wrinkles.) Mostly, French hair is short, much shorter than ours. In America, lots of people don’t dye their hair, and turn white early; in France, hardly anybody turns gray that you can see, and everyone over forty is a blond. Weight: Yes, the French aren’t as fat, certainly not as fat as Americans, and not being fat affects everything else—for instance, wardrobe. When you have a girlish figure you can wear girlish clothes. My own theory is that the French diet has far fewer carbohydrates in it—but it also has smaller portions. The French walk more (but not more than in London, I wouldn’t think), and they certainly don’t eat between meals. But also, their attitude toward food is different from ours. It’s not a reward; it’s a subject of study and appreciation. Coming from a culture dedicated to keeping sweets away from children, I was horrified at the way some English mothers actually offer candy to their kids as bribes to be good. French children are given dessert because it’s the proper conclusion to a meal. My little French grandson rebuked me once for mentioning a fish course out of order. “Pas de poisson avant l’entrée,” he said.
The French seem to have overtaken us as gum chewers, though. The polite Americans I know in Paris would never chew gum or, for that matter, go to McDonald’s. Why have the French begun doing this? If only we could save other nations from our cultural mistakes. (I would have forbidden the Chinese to get cars; they could have skipped that phase and gone right to some marvelous advanced form of public transport, but no—and now they have more pollution and congestion even than we.) I’d forbid the French to smoke, which they almost seem to do as an expression of anti-Americanism—on the street, now that they can’t smoke in restaurants.
But mostly, in sum, I’d give them a thumbs-up for doing a lot of things right, and if they seem smug, which they certainly do, they’ve earned a right to it. Overall, I wish as Americans we would generally feel freer than we seem to be to adopt foreign customs that we admire or that work better than our native ones. Can’t we have trains? Health care? Why not?