A corner of Paris that will remain forever seedy

A native Parisienne, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet laments the loss of charm of her old quartier 

Jacques Chirac can be blamed for the 1994 'beautification' of the Champs, when he blew a fortune on widening pavements, buying designer benches and allowing the cafés to expand Photo: Bloomberg

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

7:57PM BST 14 Oct 2013

With its garish shops, escort-girl bars, uncouth and drunk visitors, it is crowded, stressful, overpriced – and shunned by the French themselves. No, this isn’t the description of a nastier corner of a banlieue, but rather Hugh Schofield on Paris’s best-known avenue, the Champs-Élysées. And the French are already furious. 

As a native Parisienne, born exactly 160 yards from the Champs-Élysées, who still lives round the corner, I have mixed feelings about the place. I know the crowds, because I hear their drunken arguments under my windows late at night. And it’s true that the avenue has little more to offer today than chain stores – H&M, Zara, Adidas, Nike – a few cinemas, and overpriced cafés where no Parisian would ever set foot.

True to the BBC’s default position, its Paris correspondent blames Jacques Chirac’s long tenure as mayor for the change; but he’s wrong. What changed everything was the opening of the RER train station at the Arc de Triomphe in 1973, four years before Chirac’s election. Today between 300,000 and half a million people descend every weekend.

True, Chirac can be blamed for the 1994 “beautification” of the Champs, when he blew a fortune on widening pavements, buying designer benches and allowing the cafés to expand. This brought even more people to the area, drove the rents sky-high, and completed the end of an era.

This used to be my quartier, a strange ecosystem of elegance and old-style seediness which had its own charm. I remember, aged 10 and on my way to the dentist, catching a glimpse of Marlene Dietrich walking along in full make-up, couture, gloves, and a little hat with a veil, not far from the Travellers Club (which is still there, barely, in the old palazzo built for the great Second Empire cocotte, La Païva). Metres away, the side street, Rue de Ponthieu, so offensive today, was then a row of louche bars with girls and hoodlums: indeed, several Jean Gabin and Alain Delon movies are set there.

In the post-war years, the Champs-Élysées were pure movieland. Darryl Zanuck was ensconced in the Hotel George V with his lover Juliette Gréco, from where he produced films such as The Longest Day, thanks to the Marshall Plan subsidies for European-American co-productions. Every major studio had an office on the Champs (Paramount was at No 33), and the French and American film crowd met at Le Fouquet’s long before the man who redefined it in 2007 with his infamous election party – Nicolas Sarkozy – was even born. But in 1975 the Marshall Plan ended, and everyone left, along with the money and the incentive.

Today, there’s a McDonald’s where the art bookshop used to be. The bullet holes from the August 1944 fighting have been filled in on the walls. The Hôtel de Crillon, recently bought by the Saudi royal family, was the last to sport its marks proudly, like duelling scars. It is now being refurbished.

As a child, I rode the Shetland ponies and went to the Guignol puppet show in the gardens near the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées; shopped for records at Sinfonia at No 68 and went to see old movie revivals at the Cinéac Élysées, where you can now find only a row of garish clothes shops with pop music blaring out on to the street.

Sadly, I bear some responsibility for the destruction. Back in 1932, my great-uncle Léonard started the rot when he had the first commercial building ever built on the Champs-Élysées, at No 116. It was a daring piece of Cubist architecture by an associate of Le Corbusier, the facade zig-zagging at straight angles: it created a scandal in its time, and for generations was a matter of pride in the family. No longer.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

Hands off our baguettes, you half-baked Anglo-Saxons

The truth is that baguettes are like wine: all differ depending on the baker, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:14PM BST 22 Aug 2013

The dreaded Anglo-Saxons are French-bashing again – and this time, they’re after our very bread. Stirred from their mid-August torpor, Libération and Le Figaro are shocked, shocked that The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and even, I’m ashamed to say, The Daily Telegraph have mistaken a perfectly reasonable campaign to encourage people to keep buying bread, of the kind that the Milk Marketing Board puts on for dairy products at regular intervals, for an admission of nothing less than the death of the proper French baguette. Cue a denunciation of the “deplorable trend in the Anglo-Saxon media to disparage France on just any old pretext”, which “seems to have intensified in recent months”.

The charges are these. French people buy far less bread than 50 years ago, because they’re richer and more diet-conscious. Even when they do, they have the gall to fork out for the wrong kind. These Anglo-Saxon “experts” tell us that une baguette pas trop cuite – as I regularly request from my excellent bakery on rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré – is in fact a travesty of what your proper crusty baguette should be like. It’s not been baked enough. It’s white, doughy, soggy, tasteless. It is, as Monty Python would say, an ex-baguette.

To which I answer: “Piffle!” The truth is that baguettes are like wine: all differ depending on the baker. You patronise the one whose product you like best. And the sheer gall of trying to compare any kind of French baguette – not least the heavenly petits pains served in Michelin-rosetted restaurants such as Ducasse or Arpège – to the terrifying, sickly hued, sugared-up, watered-down, plastic-wrapped, rubber-like objects that pass for bread in Britain or America makes my temper rise like Poilâne sourdough.

Even the figures implying an inexorable decline in the baguette consumption are as cherrypicked as a political party broadcast’s. Yes, the number of bakeries has gone down from 54,000 in 1950 to 32,000 today. But the number of bakers has risen slightly, to 160,000. This isn’t attrition: it’s consolidation.

I know this because of a recent report by the French senate on l’industrie boulangère. It exists because the state of our bread is a national matter, and has been for a very long time. We French apply to breadmaking the perfectionism the Japanese put into cars.

From the first price controls and regulations as to what constitutes lawful bread – passed under Charlemagne at the very beginning of the ninth century – to the bread shortages that sparked the French Revolution, “bread” in our wheat-growing country has really meant “food”. That’s why it was so devastating when Marie-Antoinette was falsely accused of quipping: “If they don’t have bread, let them eat cake.” When the king and his family were forced from Versailles to Paris in July 1789, the mob’s joyous cry was: “We have brought back the baker, his wife and the baker’s boy.”

For a millennium, the price of bread was decreed by law – one only lifted in 1978. The Confédération Nationale de la Boulangerie-Pâtisserie Française is happy to tell you that a day’s work at the minimum wage will enable you to buy 65 baguettes today, as opposed to 10 in 1950. (In 1800, it got you 16: Napoleon wanted to keep the price low.)

To this day, Parisian bakeries, like pharmacies, are obliged to keep to a holiday rota, so that even in the midst of August, at least one stays open per quartier (one fourth of an arrondissement). Bread is still seen as a vital staple, necessary if not to survival, then at least to the French way of life. And its quality, if anything, has risen, with regular competitions such as Best Baguette in Paris, won this year by the Tunisian-born patron of a Montparnasse bakery. We’re not expecting to crown an American or Brit any time soon.
I wonder why that is?

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

EN FRANÇAIS • Pourquoi je ne retournerai pas chez Marks & Spencer (unauthorised translation by Courrier International)

La fermeture soudaine des 18 magasins de la marque britannique avait traumatisé les Français en 2001. Dix ans après, la réouverture d'un premier magasin sur les Champs-Elysées est loin de satisfaire les fans de M&S. 

 The Daily Telegraph | Anne-Elisabeth Moutet |
28 novembre 2011
  

Comme toutes les Parisiennes, j'étais assez contente à l'annonce du retour de Marks & Spencer (M&S) à Paris. D'ailleurs, nous n'avons jamais compris pourquoi les Britanniques étaient partis [en 2001, M&S a fermé ses 18 magasins en France]. Ils avaient ce merveilleux magasin situé juste en face des Galeries Lafayette, dans cette partie du boulevard Haussman dédiée au shopping, la réponse de Paris à Oxford Street [la grande rue commercante de Londres].
Après avoir subi l'épreuve des conseillers de ventes à l'air distant aux Galeries et au Printemps - rutilants temples des marques de créateurs, des It-bags [sacs à la mode], des parfums renommés et des robes taille mannequin vendues à un prix astronomique - M&S faisait figure de refuge avec ses rayons remplis de petites culottes sages, de discrets pantalons en jersey noirs qui allaient avec tout, et son Food Hall, le marché d'alimentation qui représentait pour nous le comble de l'exotisme.
On n'allait pas chez "Marks and Sparks" faire ses courses pour le déjeuner dominical français normal, mais pour faire ses provisions en vue d'une fête, du repas de Noël, de l'anniversaire d'un enfant. Ou tout simplement pour se gâter.
Pour une fois, au diable le comptage des calories. Le bacon entrelardé grésillait allègrement en compagnie de nos œufs*  fermiers Label rouge. Le thé était bio (à l'époque, on n'en trouvait pas facilement à Paris) mais les biscuits et les gâteaux étaient, semblait-il, entièrement fabriqués avec des additifs alimentaires, du sucre raffiné et d'improbables colorants chimiques approuvés par la commission européenne.
On décorait la table du dîner avec des toffees, des boules de gomme et des caramels de la marque M&S, encore dans leurs emballages. Les agences publicitaires servaient des sandwiches M&S durant leurs séances de remue-méninges - c'était tellement décalé*, tellement créatif. On n'essayait jamais de faire croire qu'un plat cuisiné M&S avait été préparé à la maison si on le servait au dîner. Au contraire, on annonçait triomphalement : "Ce soir, dîner anglais ! Je suis allée le chercher spécialement chez Marks et Spencer* !"
A l'autre extrémité de l'échelle, dans le Septième* et le Seizième Sud*, pour les familles bourgeoises lectrices de Madame Figaro, dont les valeurs traditionnelles comprenaient une anglophilie préservée dans un genre d'aspic bcbg des années 1950 - vague mélange de jupes à carreaux écossais, de twin-sets en cachemire, de bons pensionnats de jeunes filles, de Prince Charles et du thé de cinq heures -, M&S était "la" Source, le fournisseur attitré de tout ce qui est authentiquement britannique, ayant à peine entendu parler des marques de luxe Mulberry ou Fortnum's.
Elles faisaient provision de thé, de scones, de muffins, de sablés écossais et de chocolats à la menthe avant de filer en voiture vers la maison de campagne, le vendredi soir. C'étaient là les gens qui écrivaient des messages de profond désespoir sur le livre des visiteurs mis en place par les employés licenciés du boulevard Haussmann lorsque M&S nous a abandonnés en 2001.
Et maintenant, M&S est de retour. Au coin de ma rue, en fait. Sur les Champs Elysées. Là où la boutique Esprit a mis la clé sous la porte après moins de deux années d'existence. Tout comme le magasin qui l'avait précédé. Et le journal dont les bureaux se trouvent au cinquième étage, le malheureux France Soir, maintenant pratiquement en redressement judiciaire.
Depuis que le café Sélect a été rasé il y a belle lurette, au coin de la rue de Berri, l'emplacement portait malheur. Je me suis également demandé ce qu'un client normal de M&S avait en commun avec la racaille des Champs Elysées. 
Tous les week-ends, environ un million de personnes envahissent l'avenue, une foule en sweat-shirts, jeans baggy, mini jupes ou baskets Adidas (une grande boutique Adidas se trouve au numéro 22), à laquelle se mêlent d'habiles pickpockets, des mendiants agressifs, et de supporteurs de football (un énorme magasin du club Paris Saint Germain est situé au numéro 27), faisant la queue pour voir le dernier film de Tom Cruise, s'acheter un Big Mac (au numéro 140) ou acquérir les leggings tachetés à 9,95 euros de chez H&M (numéro 90).

Je connais mes Champs Elysées. J'ai vécu dans le quartier la moitié de ma vie. De fait, je suis née à 100 mères de ce que l'Office du tourisme de Paris aime appeler "la plus belle avenue du monde", une étiquette dûment reprise par la publicité annonçant  le retour de M&S. Bien avant l'ouverture effective le 24 novembre, on pouvait se demander comment l'enseigne réussirait à mettre tout M&S dans un magasin aux allures d'appartement familial. Je m'y suis arrêtée à la sortie du bureau le lendemain. Une longue queue s'était formée dans la fraîcheur d'un soir de novembre. Les clients d'un certain âge étaient admis, l'air médusé, à l'intérieur deux par deux.
A travers les vitrines, on apercevait les rayons de vêtements à moitié vides. On ne pouvait s'empêcher de se demander si la queue - dont parlaient tous les quotidiens après l'inauguration - ne tenait pas quelque peu du coup de pub.
A l'intérieur, la plupart des visiteurs faisaient de nouveau la queue pour le rayon alimentation - qui ressemble davantage à une caverne, reléguée au fond du magasin, pas plus grand que chez le marchand de journaux de votre quartier. De fait, les produits alimentaires ont été ajoutés presque à la dernière minute. A l'origine, le magasin était censé asseoir la réputation de M&S dans la mode. Ce ne fut qu'après une sorte de campagne spontanée par courriels, une fois la rumeur partie dans Paris, que l'enseigne a libéré de l'espace pour l'alimentation. Laquelle représenterait d'ores et déjà 35 % du chiffre d'affaires de la première semaine, au lieu des 10 % prévus.
Les cadres débordés donnaient un coup de main aux employés qui réassortissaient à tour de bras les rayonnages, à mesure que œufs écossais, poulet à l'indienne*, sandwiches au bacon* et autres scones s'envolaient au cours de scènes dignes des temps de guerre. Je cherchais mes articles M&S préférés, les cinq petites culottes en coton roulées, vendues au prix de 6 livres [7 euros], mais elles étaient visiblement considérées comme trop bas de gamme pour traverser la Manche. Même chose pour les collants noirs opaques à 8 livres [9 euros]. En tout cas, je pensais ne pas pouvoir imaginer, ni moi ni qui que ce soit d'autre, faire la queue une demi heure sous l'œil torve d'un agent de sécurité bâti comme une armoire à glace, pour un sandwich ou un poulet tikka masala. Quant aux petites culottes sages, je continuerais de les acheter à Londres.

Note : *En français dans le texte 

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2011

Paris has a Marks and Spencer again, but it's the wrong size and in the wrong place

After years without a store in Paris, Marks and Spencer brought one back last week. But the shop on the Champs-Elysées doesn't quite fit, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet outside the Marks & Spencer's on the Champs-Elysées Photo: ALASTAIR MILLER

 

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris

8:30AM GMT 27 Nov 2011

Like every Parisienne, I was pretty chuffed when I first heard Marks & Spencer were coming back to Paris. We'd never understood why they'd gone away in the first place.

They used to have this wonderful huge store just opposite Galeries Lafayette, in the shopping haven segment of Boulevard Haussmann that's Paris's answer to Oxford Street.

After going through the gauntlet of stand-offish sales counsellors at the Galeries and Au Printemps – shiny places all about designer brands, It-bags, big-name scents and eye-wateringly expensive size zero dresses – M&S was a refuge with acres of sensible knickers, tactful knit black trousers that went with everything, and the Food Hall, which to us was the height of exoticism.

You didn't go to Marks and Sparks to make your normal French Sunday lunch; you went to stock up for a party, for Christmas dinner, for a kid's birthday, for a treat. (Buying your Christmas cake, not the very morning from your neighbouring boulangerie, but in September? In a tin? This was more outlandish than anything they could dream up in Papua-New Guinea.)

The calorie count, for once, went out the window. The streaky bacon sizzled gloriously with our farm oeufs Label Rouge. The tea was organic (which at the time wasn't readily available here) but the biscuits and cakes were seemingly entirely made of additives, processed sugar, and improbable chemical colourings approved by the Brussels Commission.

Our kids loved it. We loved it. My friend Nadalette's twin daughters religiously celebrated their birthdays, year after year, with the M&S caterpillar-shaped chocolate cake, gaily sprinkled with multicoloured M&M shavings. They cried when they were told they couldn't have it any longer.

You'd decorate a sophisticated dinner table with M&S toffees, wine gums and caramels in their wrappings. Ad agencies would serve M&S sandwiches during their brainstorming sessions – it was so décalé, so creative.

You'd never try to pass off a ready-made M&S dish as your own if you served it at dinner; on the contrary, you'd triumphantly announce "Ce soir, dîner anglais! Je suis allée le chercher spécialement chez Marks et Spencer!"

At the other end of the scale, in the Septième and Seixième Sud, to Madame Figaro-reading bourgeois families, whose traditional values include an Anglophilia preserved in a kind of ideal 1950s Sloaney aspic - a hazy mix of tartan skirts, cashmere twin-sets, good boarding schools for girls, Prince Charles and le five 'o clock - M&S was the Source, the Ur-provider of The Right Stuff, when they barely knew about Mulberry or Fortnum's.

They'd stock up on tea, scones, muffins, shortbread and chocolate mints before driving off to the country on Friday afternoon. They were the people who wrote messages of bleak despair on the visitors' book set up by the redundant employees of Boulevard Haussmann when M&S abandoned us in 2001.

And now M&S were back. Round the corner from me, in fact. On the Champs-Elysées. Where the Esprit shop closed in under two years. And the shop before that. And the newspaper whose offices are on the fifth floor, the ill-fated France-Soir, bought by yet another Russian oligarch, Sergei Pugachev, for his 25-year-old son, Alexander, now nearly in receivership. (The paper, not the son.)

Ever since they tore down the Sélect café yonks ago at the corner of rue de Berri, this has been something of a jinxed location.

I also wondered what your normal M&S shopper had in common with the chav zoo the Champs have become.

Every weekend there are about a quarter of a million people on the avenue, in hoodies, baggy jeans, short skirts or Adidas trainers (big Adidas store at number 22), dodging pickpockets, intrusive beggars, and football fans (huge Paris Saint-Germain football club store, at number 27, complete with the odd optimistic David Beckham picture) to queue up for the latest Tom Cruise movie, get a Big Mac (McDonald's at number 140) or buy sprayed-on jeggings for €9.95 at H&M (number 90).

I know my Champs-Elysées: I have lived in the area half my life; and was in fact born about 100 metres off what the Paris Tourism office likes to call "the most beautiful avenue in the world", a tag duly picked up by the M&S advance publicity.

Long before the actual opening last Thursday, you had to question how they would manage to fit a complete M&S into a store with the footprint of a family flat.

I dropped by on my way home on Friday. There was a long queue patiently waiting outside in the nippy late November evening, with bewildered middle-aged shoppers admitted one couple at a time.
Through the windows, you could see near-empty clothes aisles. You had to wonder if the queue – spotlighted by every daily newspaper after the opening, Blitz spirit, free tea and biscuits, so Anglais – wasn't a bit of publicity stunt.

When I put this to the store manager, she blanched and went all elf 'n safety on me. There Were Rules, she explained. Which were Essential. It got a bit like pulling teeth, until I managed to get out of her that only 420 people are allowed inside the 14,000 square ft store at any time.

Most of these were queuing again, inside, for the "food hall" – which is more like a food grotto, in the back, the average size of your local newsagent. The food was in fact added as a bit of an afterthought: originally, the store was supposed to establish M&S as a fashion retailer.

It was only after something of a spontaneous email campaign, once the rumours started in Paris, that some space was freed for it. It apparently already accounts for 35 per cent of sales this first week, instead of the projected 10 per cent. "There will be Simply Food outlets in Paris soon," the nice publicity woman told me.

It's very obvious they can't open fast enough for us. Harried shop executives were helping the assistants continuously restocking the shelves, as the oeufs écossais, the poulet à l'Indienne, the sandwiches au bacon and the scones got grabbed in quasi-wartime scenes.

When we came back on Saturday morning to take pictures, the queue was still there, but the inside of the store was fuller. It was still the food that attracted the most customers – very few seemed to have found their way to the lingerie department, occupying most of the entire first floor – but the women's clothes now also got some attention.

The choice, I have to say, is very stylish and covetable. There was a €25 Autograph gold lamé tank top that looked just as good as something nearly similar I recently bought from Max Mara at €200, scrumptious shearling gloves in buttery suede for €62, a cashmere hoodie for €120. Not cheap by any standards – my favourite Per Una £15 nightie was €32.50 – and certainly more than the 10 per cent mark up on London prices announced.

I went looking for some of my favourite M&S items, the five rolled up cotton knickers for £6, but they obviously had been deemed too down-market to cross the Channel. Ditto the opaque black tights at £8.

M&S Paris have gone chic on us. They should be a success – I espied on a whiteboard, as we were dropping the photographer's heavy kit bag in a back office, that 3,100 customers have visited it the last two days, each spending an average basket of €36.50.

If the objective was to create a buzz in advance of the normal-sized stores scheduled to open within the next two years outside central Paris, they probably have achieved that.

All the same, as I walked home past my local supermarket, whose manager was hugely miffed that M&S are allowed to open on Sundays while he cannot, I thought I couldn't see myself or anyone queuing for half an hour under the baleful eye of a basketball-player-sized security guard for a sandwich or a Chicken Tikka Masala.

As for the sensible knickers, I'll still get them in London.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2011

Fisticuffs with a French robber left me bruised but not beaten

Not everyone who opens their door in a quiet street off the Champs-Elysées is a little-old-lady pushover, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

The Champs-Elysées on a safer day Photo: AP

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 7:08AM GMT 07 Mar 2011

35 Comments

It took about five minutes to turn me into a Victim. I opened the door one afternoon to find a slim woman in biker leathers on my landing, perhaps two inches taller than my 5ft 3in. She said she had a package for me, and was carrying a cardboard box complete with a sheaf of documents.

The next thing I knew, I was shrieking blue murder while she repeatedly butted me with her full-face helmet. "Au secours! Au secours!" I bellowed while she tried to muzzle me, simultaneously punching me in the ribs and shoving me back into my flat.

My overriding feeling was of flabbergasted surprise, a sensation of nightmarish unreality mixed with fury that this cow thought she could get away with knocking me out and helping herself to my things. I knew I had to keep screaming – as for fighting back, that was sheer instinct.

I think it was mostly the noise that made her flee, and perhaps the unpleasant surprise that not everyone who opens their door in a quiet street off the Champs-Elysées is a little-old-lady pushover. Shaken and shaking, I got back inside and called the police, who duly showed up 20 minutes later. When I told them I was quite unscathed, they suggested I sit down, have "a little glass of something strong" (we are Parisian, after all) and wait for the adrenalin to ebb away.

Running a hand through my hair, I found half a dozen bumps. Meanwhile, my ribs started complaining, too. "Do you need an ambulance?" the flics asked. Surely I didn't. I made my way to the police station in a taxi, to file a formal complaint, and was told to report to the Médecine Judiciaire's Special Victims Unit at Hôpital de l'Hôtel-Dieu near Notre Dame, the only place officially mandated to assess the damage.

The strange thing was that at the unit, my injuries were treated almost as an afterthought (in fact, the doctor I saw missed a hairline crack in my eighth right rib, which was later caught by my private GP). What seemed to be everyone's overriding concern was the deep psychological damage that I had to be suffering. I was urged no fewer than four times by various people in white coats to go and receive counselling from the shrinks.

It was no use objecting that I was fine, really. "But I won the round!" I protested. I could see on their faces that this was only proof of how disturbed I was. "You can get compensation from the state," I was advised. Compensation for what? That nice Sécurité Sociale is already picking up my medical bills, nothing was stolen, and while my rib does hurt, especially at night, I can still bask in a mild sense of achievement at having driven off the invading horde of one.

...

The prize for the oddest French burglars must go to the team who recently robbed a funeral parlour in the small town of Valadon, making off with a couple of coffins, some cash and the village's only hearse. Even stranger, this is the fourth time the place has been burgled in as many years. It certainly gives the lie to "You can't take it with you."

...

The fiscal rigourists attacking Britain's high-speed rail link, such as the Telegraph's own Simon Heffer, have got it completely wrong. We French always knew that the TGV infrastructure would be loss-making. But economists calculated that the benefit to the economy at large was well worth the red ink on SNCF's balance sheet.

This is known as the externalities theory. SNCF did not directly profit from the development of former rust-belt cities such as Lille, or subsequent falls in the local crime rate, or the sharp increase in property prices along the tracks, or the added mobility in the workforce. But eventually, we all did. I suspect that British northerners, like the French ones, would rather find jobs in their region than come south. So give them trains.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2011

A knife in the heart of cuisine

Putting Eurodisney in the shade, a new American import is threatening The French Quality of Life - the Subway sandwich shop. Unknown a couple of years ago, there are now 40 franchises in the capital alone – making them an obvious threat to the French baguette.

This comes on the heels of the Starbucks offensive, which started five years ago by catering to American tourists, and is now busily replacing bistros and cafés in the remotest neighbourhoods as well as near the Champs-Elysées. With le petit noir and le jambon-beurre being replaced by skim chai frappacinos and meatball marinara subs, what further horrors does the future hold in store? Californian wine bars?

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2010

I'll admit it, the French don't get Brüno

Sacha Baron Cohen's latest caricature is just a big bully, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Something tells me that we French are going to have a problem with Brüno, the Sacha Baron Cohen alter ego who is threatening to do for Austria what Borat did for Kazakhstan. On the other side of the Atlantic, one effete Euro-metrosexual may look like any other, as he prances around pranking rednecks and Paula Abdul alike. But we’re not buying it.

Italian fashion, we can accept. British fashion, even – just look at the swell job we gave John Galliano at Dior. But a gay Austrian fashion reporter? To the Parisian, Austrian fashion doesn’t extend beyond field-green loden coats, anything with edelweiss flowers embroidered on it, and those voluminous silk curtains with puffball sleeves that women wear at the Salzburg Festival. Similarly, the idea of a gay Austrian doesn’t so much bring up the catwalk as the late Jörg Haider, the neo-Nazi politician. (Bet he went for leather instead of hot pants, though.)



The problem is that while stereotyping other countries, then happily slagging them off, is a sport enjoyed by all, there’s surprisingly little overlap between nations. The English think of Americans as bullying, simplistic colonials, over-fed and over here, given to murdering the language with their excessively loud voices. The French mutter darkly about a Yankee masterplan to destroy Gallic culture, secretly hatched by Disney, Google and the CIA. Many Islamists see blasphemous, licentious heathens: Sayyid Qutb, the leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, spent a year at a Bible Belt college in the Forties and came back horrified by the innocent community dances held in church halls.

Such caricatures, of course, tell us as much about those who hold them as their target. When Brüno camped it up last week on the Champs-Elysées, cracking jokes about Carla Bruni’s love life, he was acting like a typical Brit – only you, it seems, are unable to accept the fact that a 40-year-old woman is comfortable with having had lovers. Of course, we’re just as bad: no amount of Michelin rosettes for the likes of Gordon Ramsay will erase our view of the British as a nation bred on over-cooked meat served with improbable jams and peas hard enough to be used for grapeshot, washed down with warm beer or gallons of nut-brown tea.

In French eyes, the British manage to have sex crimes but no sex lives (replaced by hotwater bottles from Boots); you are simultaneously perfidious and worship "le fair play"; you have the raunchiest tabloids and the most Victorian assumptions about how politicians should behave in private; as with the ducks you so like to shoot, your males are better dressed than your females; and, of course, you poisoned Napoleon.

As Baron Cohen proved with Borat, such stereotypes lend themselves to being exploited. While the British are suspicious of French men, expecting a suspiciously natty, chain-smoking poseur, always ready with a flowery compliment or Brussels directive, you paint us Frenchwomen in a more flattering light. We are Basil Fawlty’s unattainable charmer, Madame Peignoir, or Juliette Binoche in Damage: thinner, better dressers, always hostesses, never housewives.

Baron Cohen’s problem as we see it is that he is a typical product of a public-school, Oxbridge education, and of Britain’s unique tolerance for shock tactics. You laud him as an example of cuttingedge Jewish humour; to us, he has much more in common with Monty Python or the Christmas panto. Like Borat, Brüno uses the methods of the school bully, as much behind the camera as in front of it – those who complain, like the Kazakh foreign minister or poor Paula Abdul, are dripping wet, can’t-take-a-joke spoilsports.

Or perhaps that’s just my own prejudices showing.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009

The D-Day shindig has been bad news for Sarkozy

The French president may rue the day he thought up this photo-op, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

As Nicolas Sarkozy prepares for the hardest-won photo-op of his presidency – the D-Day commemorations on the Normandy beaches, starring Barack Obama, with the Prince of Wales and Gordon Brown as last-minute supporting players – he could be forgiven for thinking himself ill-used. What started as a mid-scale, bilateral event at the American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer (which is US soil, donated by France in perpetuity) has been successively targeted by the big guns of the Daily Mail, Downing Street, Sarkozy's socialist opposition, and the White House Communications Office.

Admittedly, Sarko's own intentions weren't entirely selfless. Yes, he is the first president since de Gaulle to pay constant and sincere homage to veterans of the Second World War and La Résistance (he was brought up by his arch-Gaullist maternal grandfather, a Jewish physician who was banned from practising during the Nazi occupation and had to go into hiding). But Sarkozy is also very aware that in the run-up to the European elections, held tomorrow over here, Obama is the ultimate arm-candy, a little touch of Yes-We-Can on the hustings.

A year ago, when Obama, still on the campaign trail, had just given his Berlin speech, Sarko invited him for a joint press conference at the Elysée, deploying all the ceremony usually reserved for heads of state. The two were bestest buddies, joking that they had reconciled their two countries after the froideur of George W Bush, Jacques Chirac and "freedom fries".

But since that golden moment – in fact, since Obama's election victory – the most pro-American French president ever has been snubbed. In vain did Sarko angle, time and again, for an invitation to Washington (he would have loved those DVDs that Gordon brought home). In vain did he plea for a repeat of the Elysée event in April. The Obamas, visiting Strasbourg for the Nato summit just after France re-joined the organisation, had no time, positively no time, to swing by Paris: the Bruni-Sarkozys had to make do with a short walkabout in Alsace. Adding insult to injury, Obama made the case for admitting Turkey into the EU, something both Sarkozy and Germany's Angela Merkel are dead set against.

As for today's D-Day visit, which will mobilise several platoons of gendarmes and practically cordon off Normandy (7,000 official guests are expected, including Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks), the White House had – as of yesterday morning – still not given a firm schedule to the Elysée, whose hyper-professional flacks were uncharacteristically briefing against their American counterparts. No, Mr Obama had not accepted the dinner invitation on Friday; there would only be a working lunch in Caen today. Yes, Mrs Obama and her daughters would be staying in Paris over the weekend, but their plans were "uncertain"; it was a "private visit".

However, it was the fracas involving the Queen's invitation – or the lack of it – that really stirred things up. As it happens, nobody in Paris reacted at first to the accusation of a snub to Buckingham Palace. The French, who were originally planning to have Sarkozy attend a specific French-American ceremony, acceded to Downing Street's request that Gordon Brown tag along. But it was only when Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, insisted that Mr Obama wanted the Queen to attend, and was "working with those involved to see if we can make that happen", that the whole affaire took off.

The French opposition, which is expected to trail behind Sarkozy's UMP party in the Euro-elections tomorrow, realised that while French law forbids political campaigning from midnight onwards on the Saturday before a Sunday poll, Sarkozy would be on every television screen before the vote, saying worthy, statesmanlike things. They grabbed the Obama-validated royal story and ran with it. Sarkozy was pelted with insults by every opposition candidate in the country, who flew – with no sense of irony – to the defence of Britain, usually painted as the fly in the Euro-ointment. Sarkozy's behaviour towards Her Majesty was that of a cad, a buffoon, a jerk, a pathetic human being with no manners – a bad European, and a worse Frenchman.

Then, into this heated atmosphere, came the translation of Obama's speech in Cairo. Fabricated outrage was instantly replaced by very real indignation, in a country where the neutrality of the public space is sacrosanct. Obama's pointed words defending the hijab aroused the ire of feminists, teachers' unions, and even moderate Muslim groups, who have come to a civilised arrangement with the headscarf law, which bans the conspicuous display of religious symbols in schools. Equally vocal were France's political parties – not least the president's own.

For the first time, newspaper websites were full of anti-Obama comments – a decided first in France. However much he looked forward to standing shoulder to shoulder with the US president, Sarko may rue the day he dreamt up this D-Day photo-op.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009

Carla Bruni is fine - it's Sarkozy the neighbours can't handle

Sarko jogs early in the morning, accompanied by a retinue of aides and protection officers; has breakfast before 7am; then zooms to the office in a motorcade of bulletproof limousines, all sirens blaring. Nobody in rue Pierre-Guérin can sleep in, says Anne Elisabeth Moutet.

As every deal-deprived Paris estate agent enviously knows, Carla Bruni, épouse Sarkozy, is house-hunting. Her pretty 5,000 sq ft house on rue Pierre-Guérin, in the depths of the very bourgeois 16th arrondissement, is proving inconvenient as main presidential residence.

As long as Carla lived there with her cat, her dog, and her son Aurélien – whose father, philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, conveniently resides across the garden in another building – everything was hunky-dory, not least with her staid neighbours, who could recognise une jeune fille de bonne famille; one of theirs, however Bohemian.

Carla was always polite; if she gave parties, apologetic handwritten notes warned of possible disturbances; her in-house recording studio was soundproof.

Enter Nicolas Sarkozy, aka le Président bling-bling. Suddenly, residents’ cars parked on the quiet rue Pierre-Guérin are moved to make room for police protection and back-up; uniformed flics start checking the IDs of passers-bys; half the street’s wheelie bins (including the noisy glass-container ones) are moved at all hours to prevent terrorists using them for bombs; and everyone’s life is made thoroughly miserable.

Sarko jogs early in the morning, accompanied by a retinue of aides and protection officers; has breakfast before 7am; then zooms to the office in a motorcade of bulletproof limousines, all sirens blaring. Nobody in rue Pierre-Guérin can sleep in.

Sarko has famously said that he would “never yield to the pressure of the street”; but he meant the demonstrations the French so appreciate. The pressure of the Seizième rue was apparently harder to bear. And so Carla and Nicolas have been looking at suitable places to buy. It is, after all, the right time for it – Paris house prices have fallen by an average 25 per cent. The happy couple have looked at a 12 million euro former Carmelite monastery not far from Carla’s present address. Last week, they were spotted at Yves Saint Laurent’s old pad on rue de Babylone.

Wags have made a lot of the fact that Carla’s best-known old flame, Mick Jagger, owns two flats in the same building; but that’s not something Sarkozy will object to – if anything, he finds it an added attraction. A tribal man, he early on forced the bewildered Enthoven to call him tu; as the father of his wife’s son, he explained, he was now “part of the family”.

* The French are bemused by the MPs’ expenses scandal. French MPs, who are more or less paid the same amount as their British counterparts, have for a long time been in the habit of employing wives and relatives as parliamentary aides, a practice no one bats an eyelid about. They do not get large expenses, but enjoy low-interest bank loans, free first-class train tickets, and a good pension and health coverage plans. Those who do spend, spend, spend are Cabinet ministers. Rachida Dati famously claimed for tights and make-up.

* When former president Jacques Chirac heard that Google was planning to digitise all books, including French ones, with Google Books, he nearly blew a gasket. A commercial, American company? A large budget was immediately allotted to a committee of upper civil servants to create the digital library that would Save French Culture. Alas, three years later, Gallica, the Bibliothèque nationale de France website, is still unable to provide more than a couple of thousand electronic books, so that it is still easier to read online Balzac, Molière or Proust in English at Project Gutenberg than in the original French.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009

The recession hits the Prix de Diane

The Prix de Diane is hit by the recession, discovers Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Chantilly

You really know there's a recession on in France when the House of Hermès - of FF40,000 ostrich skin 'Kelly' handbags and FF1,450 horsey print silk scarves fame - decide they won't hold a luncheon this year at the June 13th Prix de Diane, which they have been sponsoring for yonks, my dear, and will give their guests PICNIC BOXES instead.

This, in Paris, is the equivalent of Royal Ascot going grunge. Especially since I'm told the vintage car competition, Le Gratin Du Panier, won't happen either. (Usually, when the Right came back to power, people showed off the 1937 Rollers they'd been hiding from the Socialist taxman, surely not the other way round?)

In past years the Hermès tent village, erected right in the middle of the delightful Chantilly racecourse, has been host to all sort of suitable charities, of the kind that mix properly with morning coats and exotic ladies' hats. (The year before last, the late lamented Audrey Hepburn showed up in her UNICEF ambassadorial role, and everyone sighed, remembering her Cecil-Beaton-designed black and white Ascot outfit in My Fair Lady: the perfect woman in the perfect place.)

For Chantilly in mid-June IS the perfect place, and you can bet Parisians toffs will bravely rough it and make do with sandwiches. It will be the spirit of the Blitz again, or perhaps the spirit of the Blitzkrieg, or Dunkirk if it rains. But the show will go on.

You notice I haven't mentioned horses yet. That's because, except for a handful of owners and serious punters, horses do not count at all at the Prix de Diane, unlike at the Arc de Triomphe in September, where they get serious about these things. The Diane is all about having a nice garden party with about 1,500 PLU, showing off the most outlandish hats (having acquired Motsch, France's wonderfully fuddy-duddy answer to Lock's, Hermès now has a stake in that, too), drinking lots of bubbly, being photographed for Point de Vue and Vogue, and airkissing six times per minute people you pretend to be astonished to meet here: 'Mais tu es là! Quelle surprise!'

One shows up around 11:30 a.m. or noon, having ineffectually sworn to be on time to avoid the traffic on the A1 from Paris, and having been delayed by 1) the sudden disappearance of one glove, 2) finding out that you don't fit your morning coat anymore to the tune of a stone or more, 3) having lost one of the children after having finally got them all properly dressed up, or/and 4) losing your way when trying to bypass the traffic on the autoroute by taking the Survilliers shortcut. (DO NOT park too near the enclosure, because it means you'll be stuck behind the poshest traffic jam of the year when you try to make your getway at the end of the day.)

The Prix de Diane - devoted to Spain this year, with the possible attendance of members of the much-admired Spanish Royal Family - is definitely the high point of the Paris Season. The word evokes a series of parties in the English tradition: teas, little dinner-dances, picnics al fresco, opera outings, garden-parties, country fetes, culminating with the big May balls (in June.) This charming picture, relentlessly fostered by every PR agency in town, belongs to another, gentler age. Two-thirds at least of any of those parties supposed to constitute The Season are in fact commercial affairs, sponsored by anyone from a champagne house (the Carré Rive Gauche Antiques Fair) to a hotel chain (the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe at Longchamp.)

A certain amount of social editing is therefore required before throwing oneself into the bop till you drop scene. You can live without showing yourself at either Auteuil or Deauville (it is actually strongly advised to avoid Deauville altogether), but nobody feels like giving the Diane a miss.

At the time of writing, it was still uncertain whether the traditional evening cocktail party in the Prince de Condé's splendid stables - where Milos Forman shot the first duelling scene in Valmont, and which look a lot better than the château de Chantilly itself, the latter having been rebuilt in the XIXth century while the stables are the original Louis XIV ones.

Having recently gone public on the Paris OTC Bourse, no doubt Hermès feel they can't give their shareholders the feeling they're wasting their future dividends. Perhaps this will comfort at last the HSP (short for Haute Société Protestante) families who've been owning the company for 150 years, and may have felt a bit uneasy at their own success during the Roaring Eighties: certainly the company resisted going big, even if it means you have to wait six months for any handbag that doesn't happen to be available right now in the boutique's windows in the colour of your choice.

Such considerations probably won't affect the success of the party next Sunday 13th. Tips: it's a lot more chic to picnic alongside the racecourse than behind the main tent, even (or especially) if this means you'll be in everyone's way. DO bring a plaid blanket (or a red-and-gold one to make the Spanish Ambassador happy). DON'T take Cristal Roederer bubbly in your hamper because the clear bottle tends to get warm faster than the dark Dom Pérignon or Krug ones. (Additional points this year for bringing vintage Rioja instead, but with the sun you may get very drunk very fast. Remember it's not done to be sloshed before at least the second race.)

DO take off your shoes to walk on the grass if you feet are killing you by mid-afternoon (last year, Hermine de Clermont-Tonnerre set the tone by actually spending the last two races slumped on the grass with her two fet in two champagne buckets filled with ice cubes.) DON'T go alongside the enclosure ropes to throw brioche crumbs at the hoi polloi massed there, making remarks such as 'Mon Dieu qu'ils ont l'air pauvre!' (also heard last year).

DO watch out for the green badges (meaning Jockey Club) on the best men. DO NOT go and sit on the Jockey's stands, on the flimsy grounds that they're about the only place from which one can see a horse for a split second however, since you're likely to be thrown out politely but firmly by one of the members of this arch-elite (who regard the rest of the scene as rather mixed). DO go and gatecrash the little sponsored dos in various tents: there will be more free drinks, and you're the public they're trying to impress anyway. DO wangle as many extra tickets as possible: 'The secret is to take several friends, so you have your own little party inside the party,' says Dominique de Lastours, who being a 28-year-old personable Marquis is something of an expert social butterfly on the Paris social scene. Dominique and his friends do gate-crash "but we behave a lot better than the English gate-crashers. We never break anything and we keep very polite. Sometimes, I assure you, we set a better tone than the actual guests."

I have a soft spot for Dominique, whom I've seen at the best (or the most publicized) parties. The Prix de Diane is a welcome relief from his usual haunt, Castel's, he says, "because the food is a lot better and the women are older." I also suspect the formidable PR women in charge of things actually let him in when they haven't actually got him on their lists. It's difficult enough to get the right mix as it is. When the Lebanese middleman Samir Traboulsi was indicted for insider trading three years ago - he is to take the stand in the Paris courts the very week of the Prix de Diane - one of them wailed to me: 'This is a disaster. His wife was always the first to send me her cheque. She'd buy whole tables of 10 and 12 guests for the charity luncheon, and pay immediately. I'll miss her.' So shall we, digging into our picnic boxes.

© Copyright The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1994

Salon Decadence: Hair-Raising Tales at Carita

An interest ought to be declared here. I have been a Carita customer for I don't know how long. Well, I do know how long: even since, just out of university at 22, and earning less than today's minimum wage in my first magazine job, I started blowing almost a third of my earnings on a really good haircut, highlights, and the odd facial, regularly: I simply couldn't resist the way I could be made to look from what, over years of school and undergraduate years, I thought ineradicable ugly-duckling basic material. All of you non-French readers (except possibly the Italians, who know what I mean), take note: this is what Paris does to you. Frenchwomen (and French men) are usually good-looking, but there's no secret to it: they work at it. Hard. And expensively.

The grand old house of Carita's, at 11 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a stone's throw from the Elysée Palace, was founded in the late Fifties by two emigré Spanish sisters, Rosy and Maria Carita, and is now owned (with commendable lightness of touch) by the Japanese cosmetics giant Shiseido. It is arguably the most sybaritic beauty and hairdressing salon in the world, not discounting establishments aspiring to that title in Los Angeles, Tokyo and New York. On four Andrée-Putnam-starkly designed floors, men and women are offered a range of beauty care undreamt of anywhere else. I am not lightly indulging in puffspeak here. They have a regular Italian customer, a man, who flies over every month from Rome to get his eyelashes permed. It may cost FF495 sans le service, but I'm told it gives him that extra velvety eye no doubt necessary to his feminine conquests.

Other perfectly respectable Frenchmen (and discerning foreigners) come to Carita Monsieur not just for a shave and a short back-and-sides (which they can of course get) but to get their backs waxed (FF265), their chest hairs dyed (FF275), their scalps, neck and shoulders massaged for an hour (an absolute snip at FF368), their extremities pedicured and manicured (FF345 and 145 respectively), and anything else you can think of from a light beard trim à la Yasser Arafat (FF115) to a one-and-a-half-hour shiatsu massage (FF500) with the best practitioner in Paris, a trim Japanese called Sendi, who is usually booked eight weeks in advance.

I've always been fascinated by the Carita Monsieur section of the salon, chiefly because, in an interesting role-reversal, it's men who are in complete purdah here on the top floor, with a discreet separate entrance and almost complete anonymity. Carita's efficient press officers will happily namedrop feminine luminaries ranging from Catherine Deneuve to Paloma Picasso, Isabelle Adjani, Carole Bouquet, the late Indira Gandhi, Jerry Hall-Jagger, Princesses Caroline of Monaco and Ira of Furstenberg et al, but do clam up the minute you try and find out who les messieurs are. (Broad-mindedness, even in France, still has some limits.) Over the years, I have however espied, passing the little door at the left in the hallway, such diverse stars as Jean d'Ormesson, the Académicien Francais and Le Figaro columnist, the champion jockey Yves Saint-Martin - and I still remember the frisson at knowing from his own hairdresser (summoned at the nearby Palais Marigny, official residence of France's most honoured guests) definite confirmation that Ronald Reagan did indeed dye his hair.

If the men's salon is discreet, the women's is flamboyant, with some of the city's best gossip being bandied over salmon canapés and champagne (Carita's, where a star hairdressers like Jean-Michel Henry has been known to keep addicted customers waiting for over three hours, happily has its own restaurant). Sometimes the object of the gossip itself takes place there, and the parties for which everyone is being readied turn out to be an anticlimax.

I still remember the time, a good ten years ago, when Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild found herself, for some unfathomable reason, driverless. 'Un taxi pour madame la Baronne!' echoed round and round the salon. Alas, the chasseur downstairs couldn't find a taxi, and for some reason the switchboard had gone kaput. The Baroness, in her impeccable hairdo and makeup, still clad in her white peignoir over a little Givenchy something, was led with many apologies to the payphone in the corner. 'But how do I go about this?' she was heard to ask. 'You need a one-franc coin, Madame La Baronne. Un franc!' She fumbled ineffectually into her Hermès handbag. In a matter of minutes, four hairdressers had proferred franc coins, pushed them into the slot. 'Appuyez sur le bouton, madame la Baronne!' There was the taxi service number to be dialled, the muzak waiting tone to endure: the whole process defeated her. As I left, my own hairdresser was suggesting lending his own cherished BMW so that one of his teen-aged assistants could be allowed to drive the Baroness to Hotel de Lambert, her splendid Ile de la Cité townhouse. I never knew the end of the story, although I don't think the BMW was totalled, and certainly Marie-Hélène de Rothschild has been seen, perfectly coiffed, at many parties since.

Yet the new, revamped Carita (they have hired as their new Directeur Artistique Bruno Pittini, who until recently had established his own house in New York) is keen to establish their technical pre-eminence: the Nineties may no longer be the time to rely only on the 'star effect.' They therefore invited me to come and spend a full day at the salon, promising, among other delights, their new star treatment, a 'body lifting' care called 'prolifting.' 'You'd need a forklift truck to lift my body,' I answered. They insisted. Reader, I selflessly accepted. All day long, my hair was massaged with oils, washed, streaked, cut and set; my face was sloughed, moisturised and made up, and yes, yes, my body was massaged all over with tingling little sponges linked to an electronic machine. At the end of all this I looked, and felt, like a zillion Francs Forts. (Which, thank God, I didn't have to pay this time.) They needn't have gone all this way out with me: I was already convinced. I'll be back with the mortgage money. Soon.

© Copyright The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1993

© Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1993.

Another big name on a little bottle: Princess Stephanie dabbles in the perfume business

THE celebrity scent gimmick is an extension of the couture perfume business. There has to be A Name. The stakes are high: of the 500 or so perfumes on the market, fewer than 20 account for some 80% of sales in a $1.5 billion industry. Paloma Picasso's is one. Elizabeth Taylor's is another, in America at least. Cher's Obsession and Deneuve are also fighting for customers.

And now, in France, there is Stéphanie. The 24-year-old Princess Stephanie of Monaco is launching her own scent. Or to be exact, the Bourjois cosmetics company (the House of Chanel's mass-market division), having secured her name against unspecified royalties, has produced, packaged, and will soon be flogging (at £17 for 3.5oz) an eau de parfum called Stéphanie in department stores and "a few selected supermarkets''.

The launch was celebrated at the Ritz in Paris last week. There was a video presentation, a press conference, a "picture opportunity'' - a ritual involving the release, Circus Maximus style, of two dozen growling and clicking French paparazzi who swarm before the celeb on display for a few minutes, before several security guards shoo them away - and a lunch. The tone was understated, but forceful. Princess Stephanie, for those few readers who have managed to escape all of the past decade's gossip columns, is the rock-singing, disco-going, swimsuit-designing one. The idea was to make us forget all those Paris-Match covers.

There were, therefore, five Bourjois execs on the rostrum, surrounded by huge, glossy pictures of their precious property: Stephanie elle-même, in a severe Saint Laurent charcoal suit, high heels and sheer black tights. She is unexpectedly and strikingly beautiful, in a fine-boned, coltish sort of way. She sat down, fidgeting, tossing her head back or hiding behind her hands. Everyone's eyes were distracted from the video screen to her, and back, assessing, comparing. The Cartier watch matched the outfit. The silver slave bracelet belonged to the blue-jeaned, Mexican-booted Stephanie of the gossip magazines.

The video must have cost a mint. It showed us Stephanie walking on the beach at Deauville and Malibu, waterskiing, sitting in a Californian house to the sound of Aretha Franklin's Natural Woman and of Maurice Jarre's Out of Africa score, so that we could understand her Creative Process. ("C'est bien,'' she said, on being given perfume samples to smell. "Non, c'est pas bien.'' "Oui, j'aime bien ca.'')

The Bourjois people had rigged the press conference so that the first question would be suitably deferential. They looked alarmed when another journalist grabbed the microphone from their plant. Knowing the French press, they needn't have worried. Stephanie was addressed as "Princess'' and was given the opportunity to explain how Jacques Polge, Bourjois's star "nose'', had taught her that smells remind one of images and memories.

Why had she chosen to embark on the perfume business? "I was asked.'' How much work would the launch entail? "As little as possible.'' The execs showed dismay. Would she follow with the whole line bath oil, soap, body lotion? How about cosmetics, nail varnish, eyeshadow lines? Antoine Housset, chairman of Bourjois, soothingly took over. "Of course, if the princess wishes to...'' "The princess,'' Stephanie snapped, "hasn't decided yet.'' We then trooped out to lunch, she herded by Bourjois hostesses in blue and silver lamé dresses matching the scent's package. Finding myself next to her, I asked if she felt whether that woman, the one in the film and on the pictures and on the bottle displays, was really her. "I don't understand your question,'' she said.

Two or three months ago, I had attended a similar charade at l'Automobile Club in Paris: Liz Taylor had been whisked out of a Californian fat farm to launch the men's line of her Passion scent. The Passion hoopla, which must have earned the club serious money, was the kind of thing that has older members of L'Auto scuttering for the Travellers, the Interallié or the Jockey-Club: TV crews, all the tabloids, arc lights, massive security. Taylor looked terrible - she was an embarrassing three stones heavier than on publicity pictures surrounding her - and sold her stuff like a trouper. "Wear it everywhere you want to be touched,'' she said coyly.

But despite the hype, not every celebrity scent succeeds: can you remember Sophia, Sophia Loren's perfume? Or the ghastly Forever Krystle after Linda Evans's character in Dynasty? Which brings us to the question: what is Princess Stephanie's scent like? It's flowery, fairly strong, and it smells a bit of vanilla. Mon parfum est comme je suis, goes the advertising slogan. That Princess Stephanie doesn't seem to know exactly who she is doesn't seem to bother anyone.

23 September 1989

© Times Newspapers Ltd & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1989.

The twilight years of Madame Man Ray

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet meets the widow of the great Surrealist in Paris.

What struck me first was the intercom button. It was made of ordinary translucid plastic, one in a row lit from inside, with "Man Ray" inscribed on it, among names like Jean Bernard and Jean-Claude Amselle, and Marie-Thérèse Fischer - who, come to think of it, could have been one of Picasso's mistresses, late Cubist period - and Berthe Michel, who sounded like a late XIXth century revolutionary; and Yolande Zelmanovich, who I was sure could have been one of those bedraggled Russian nihilists throwing bombs at the Czar's carriage. STOP! this was a lot too much to daydream about in this perfectly ordinary early seventies cossu French apartment block, admittedly marble-plated, admittedly in one of Paris's choicest locations (rue d'Assas, in the Sixième, just opposite the Luxembourg gardens, average price per square ft. freehold £ 350,) terribly banal nonetheless. We were about 800 yards and one zillion years away from La Coupole, circa 1922. This was not the kind of building where I expected Juliet Man Ray, widow of the famous Surrealist photographer, painter, sculptor, designer, touche-à-tout, to live.

Juliet herself was more like the real thing - even though, in many ways, she isn't. (For one thing she never knew Man Ray's truly great days, in Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, when everyone from James Joyce to the Marquis de Castellane vied to pose in his studio. They met in Hollywood, in Vine Street of all places, in the Forties: he'd fled Paris, she was a tourist from the Midwest.) She is a slight, vague, elegant little old lady with the dark hair colour she's obviously decided to keep forever, a quiet knit dress, Ferragamo pumps, who won't tell you her age with a simpering "Oh, a lady really doesn't say, does she?"

She has somehow appointed herself guardian of that curious unshrine-like shrine, that white, square-roomed, plate-glass-windowed modern flat on Rue d'Assas, almost entirely filled and furnished with Man Ray oeuvres d'art. There's the chess-set director Albert Lewin used in his best film, the mythical 1946 "Pandora", with Ava Gardner and James Mason. There are variations on Man Ray's Marquis de Sade's famous portrait - in copper, in wood, in watercolour. There are wonderful articulated screens with her name written in Man Ray's round, unchildlike, distinctive handwriting - "the twenty days and nights of Juliette", Juliette happening to be Sade's most famous heroine - the virtuous one. There are priapic compositions of two round stone balls and an erect column, several of them, set on the floor, size from 2 to 4 ft. There is a bronze broom which she urges you to try and use (impossible), giggling at the 55-year-old joke. There are her shopping lists on the coffee-table, presumably written for the French daily, "cibolette" for "chives", "aile" for "garlic", etc. in her bad French, on ordinary squared notepaper (Man Ray wrote grammatically impeccable French). Next to these is a book with a black and white photograph of an impossibly beautiful and enigmatic woman, partly veiled.

"I saw this in a bookstore recently and thought, 'this looks very much like me'," Juliet Man Ray says, in her slightly quivering voice. It doesn't, but you let it pass, because she is rambling on anyway, telling you that she almost got the main part in "A Farewell to Arms." Then she shows you the book, a French coffee-table edition of Man Ray's photographs, and there she is, you know her now, the shape of the jaw, something in the firm mouth, on every page, wonderful photographs etched over with strong lines by Man Ray, evocative of Matisse's or Picasso's drawings, or lit with sensuous softness, or superimposed with the shadows of a decaying stone wall. It is splendid, imaginative, elegant - and yes, yes, something does click now, you can forget about the white-walled, too modern apartment in which she has lived for only three years. (Every single object in the sitting-room, including the hardwood chairs with their inkwell-shaped ashtrays in the arm, was designed by Man Ray.)

"We met in Hollywood," she says. They were married there, with Max Ernst as their witness in front of a Beverly Hills justice of the peace. "It was quieter then," she says, "almost provincial." There she met other exiled surrealists, a French group unhappy in Southern California, the poets Paul Eluard and Tristan Tzara - both communist fellow-travelers; and Jean Renoir who was making movies and would, years later, after some years in France, reconciled with Hollywood, return to California to live his last years. But Man Ray didn't like his native country - he wasn't feted like some of the Surrealists, he wasn't exotic enough. They returned to Paris in 1951.

Then her memory fades a bit; dates and places and time waver just like in one of her husband's compositions. Tim Mayotte, the tennis champion, who's currently playing in the French Open at Roland Garros stadium, is coming to visit her this afternoon, she says. They are friends because his girlfriend in an American journalist and wrote an article on her, she says. He likes the chess-set, she says. Would I like to see her bedroom? Yes, I would, and so we go and see the same casual mixture of impersonal modern furnishing, Man Ray objetcts and paintings, and shelves with nothing but books on him and his work. Would I like to see the chess set? I remember the chess set from a passage in "Pandora", which has been playing in one or the other Paris revival houses almost non-stop for at least twenty years, and is the most surrealistic and romantic film I've ever seen, a blue-lit gem set in an imaginary Spanish coast in the madcap Twenties - no Revolution, no Spanish War, no Republic, no Francisco Franco... - with sets like Delvaux and Chirico paintings, and Ava Gardner as the femme fatale. There it is, in the beige pile wall-to-wall carpeed hallway, the board surrounded by Man Ray's inscription like a poem, in his rounded script: "Le Roi est à moi, la Reine est la tienne, la Tour fait un four, le Fou est comme vous, le Cavalier déraille, le Pion fait l'espion ,comme toute commande, fait de toutes pièces, Man Ray."

The two rooms on the other side of the flat are two offices where Jerome G__ , a soft-spoken American art expert, who doubles as sometimes nurse and dame de compagnie for Juliet Man Ray, quietly toils away at cataloguing all of Man Ray's as yet unpublished photograps and manuscripts, has been working on the forthcoming book and a large retrospective at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, and, like some mediaeval monk, seems exclusively devoted to the anonymous praise of the artist (he didn't want to be quoted or his name printed.) "I will gladly help you to check any facts you need," he said humbly. "Mrs Man Ray can sometimes mix them up, as you perhaps have noticed." (I hadn't noticed that many facts in our rambling conversation.) He showed me photographic plates and prints and explained there were many more. He praised Bloomsbury for republishing Man Ray's autobiography, self-portrait. It was clear he'd written Juliet Man Ray's Afterword himself, although he was quick in denying any credit for it. His selflessness, whatever its motivations, was rather endearing.

And then, of course, next to the matt black filing drawers and the chrome office chair on its hi-tech casters, I saw the wooden filing cabinet, about four feet tall. It was ugly and scratched and overvarnished with the kind of cheap, yellowing varnish used on unexpensive, utilitarian office furniture in Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. It had four drawers with old lttle brass label holders on them, where you slid a card indicating the contents of the drawer. Two drawers were unremarkable but the third had a yellowing bit of cardboard that said "Letters", in a rounded script I'd seen on many priceless objects in the flat. "That was Man Ray's, wasn't it?" I couldn't help asking. "Yes," Jerome told me. "That's his handwriting, isn't it?" Yes, it was, and the drawer was used to store personal correspondence, as it alwas had been. That ugly wood filing cabinet touched me in a way no other art object in the flat had. It was neither on display nor exalted nor catalogued. But it had existed, serving the same purpose, in Paris in the Twenties when La Coupole was just the brasserie next door from Man Ray's atelier, a few yards and a zillion years away from this pretty modern flat. "Nice label," I said. "Label? Oh... yes," said Jerome.

© Copyright The Tatler & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1988

Raine at the Ritz

Lord and Lady Spencer, the Escoffier Cookery School, and Paris Ritz memories

"Can you be at the Ritz tomorrow morning by 11:30?" a Mr. Klein said out of the blue on the telephone. "Lord and Lady Spencer will be opening the new Ritz cookery school." "Tomorrow?" I said. "Tomorrow. Earl Spencer, you know, the Princess of Wales's father. And Lady Spencer, uh..." "...is her stepmother. Barbara Cartland's daughter," I said. "Yes, we-ell, yes. Well, can you make it?" I said this was jolly short notice, and I might be ten minutes late, due to a prior appointment at the other end of Paris. "Oh, that's quite all right," Mr Klein (who later turned out to be the Paris Ritz's president, no less) said. "Actually, we're expecting Lord and Lady Spencer at noon, but you know how it is, we want the press to be there before them."

I then knew exactly how it was: we - half a dozen hacks and twice as many photographers - were going to get the closest to a Royalty walkabout as could possibly be contrived. Be there before them. Don't leave before they go. Dutifully smile at their jokes. Don't touch. Look, but don't stare. Jot down every utterance, however inane. And, puh-leeeze, give a good plug to the new Ritz-Escoffier cookery school, ready from April 5 to take on Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne in the highly competitive market of expensive Paris-based top class cookery schools (one week spent in the basement of the Ritz under neon lights, learning to knead pate brisee, starts at £450; the full 12-week course costs £5650,) whose attendance is roughly equally divided between English society debs (there is life after spag. bol.) and serious aspirant two-rosette chefs from all over the world (there is life after kiwi fruit.) In fact, the man in charge of the Ecole De Gastronomie Francaise Ritz-Escoffier, an inexpressibly chic American with a Mid-Atlantic accent called Gregory Usher, was poached by Mr Klein from La Varenne, which he manages to praise while letting it be known that the Ritz-Escoffier will be a lot "more inventive."

The following morning found us dutifully assembled in the immaculate Ritz basement kitchens - a far cry, indeed, from George Orwell's horrendous, squalid descriptions of the neighbouring Hotel Lotti's, circa 1928, in Down and Out in Paris and London. The New York Times was there, and the Sunday Times, and the Telegraph, and ELLE, and Le Figaro Madame. The white-hatted Ritz chef Guy Legay, one of the three French chefs to be awarded the Legion d'Honneur (the other two are Paul Bocuse and Jean Troisgros) was handing out his card to everyone in sight, and promising us he would explain the recipes again afterwards. It was all very cosy, due to the absence of students, who were not expected to start courses until about a month later. Gregory Usher looked charming. Mr Klein looked worried. And then, at 12:00 on the dot, They appeared.

As always when you meets celebrities whose pictures you've seen everywhere, you had to adjust for a fraction of a second to what they really look like. Raine, Countess Spencer, for instance, is much taller than you'd expect - almost as tall as her husband, whom she calls John (not Johnny.) This, coupled with the fact that Princess Di's dad is a quiet sort of unassuming chap, with a friendly manner and unsure smile (not unlike his youngest daughter's in the days when she tried to avoid the press outside her Coleherne Court flat,) certainly contributed to the instantaneous effect she gave - of being totally and immediately in charge.

Clad in an impeccably cut blue dress and a few good jewels (canary yellow diamond ring, diamond bracelet, huge pearl choker, pearl and diamond brooch, all in definite need of cleaning) Raine swept into the gleaming white-tiled kitchen, her husband meekly following three paces behind. (Well, perhaps two paces. Behind.) She exhibited definitely royal graciousness, underscored with Princess Michael-like aplomb. How perfectly lovely, she said, and how extraordinary that in forty years that she'd been coming to the Ritz, she'd never been down to the kitchens before. The two assistant chefs who were about to demonstrate how to cook a Tarte Tatin and a Mussel Soup were duly introduced. "Je ne sais absolument pas faire la cuisine," Raine said in excellent French, translating for our benefit "I really can't boil an egg", then switched back to French, never missing a beat. "Mon mari adore le Ris de Veau, vous savez. Nous venons ici depuis toujours." The Ritz people were impressed. We were impressed.

"Your wife speaks excellent French," I told Lord Spencer, who had pottered away from the group, unnoticed. "She does, doesn't she?" he said with obvious pride, beaming at her. "D'you know, she speaks Japanese too." Japanese? "With all those tourists coming to Althorp, our house I mean. She learnt Japanese and now they're tremendously chuffed when she starts speaking. Fluent Japanese, d'you know." Did he speak Japanese? Oh no, he said, he wasn't clever like his wife. But French, perhaps? Lord Spencer demurred. "Pas devant la famille", he said somewhat puzzlingly with an atrocious accent, making his point.

In the background, the two Ritz cooks had started preparing the mussel soup with swift, competent moves, chopping shallots and heating butter and mincing vegetables and in general being very, very efficient, without anyone paying much attention. The mussels disappeared into a pan, reappeared, got shelled and chopped so fast that I'd defy a competent cook to see how it got done, let alone our little platoon. (Guy Leguay said yes, the cooks would take more time during an actual class.) Within minutes, a small round pan containing an appetizing, sophisticated saffron-yellow steaming mixture was presented to Lord and Lady Spencer, who got at it with large spoons and obligingly posed for the photographers, the full spoons poised in mid-air. Then Raine spoon-fed Lord Spencer, twice (one of the photographers had missed his shot the first time round.) Excellent, they pronounced. Wonderful, very good, first class, absolutely marvellous. The two young cooks then started on the Tatin, ignored by the group - it was now time for the requisite bit of chitchat with Lady Spencer.

"When, uh, when was the first time you came to the Ritz ever," I asked. "Oh, it's such a long time ago," she said a bit vaguely. "Years and years and years. Such a lovely place." I was about to tell her her husband had just told me of his first stay here on Place Vendome, in 1947, aged 22, on his way to ski-ing in Meribel (he'd remembered how his telephone call to his family had been "a big thing, had to book it hours in advance, in those days") then checked myself. Raine Spencer had first stopped at the Ritz when she was still married to the Earl of Dartmouth, while her adoring husband was taking his first wife, Frances Fermoy, now Mrs Shand Kydd, to that same gilded, grand palace of a place. The Paris Ritz, one of the world's truly magical places, had started as separate memories for them - before their messy divorces, before their marriage.

So instead I lamely asked about her knowledge of Japanese. "There are already a lot of Japanese tourists coming to the UK, and we must attract some more," Raine said forcefully, her manner switching in a flash from Royal to New Tory - she reeled off so many figures she could have been Mrs Thatcher on the campaign trail. "The largest group is the Americans, two and a half million. Then the French, 897,000; then the Germans. I was in Berlin recently for the World Tourism Fair, you know." She is, she explained, a member of the British Tourism Authority, has been for years, long before she opened Althorp to the public. "I already was very active when I was married to my first husband." She was recently a judge in a Bed-and-Breakfast competition ("We British must stick to what we're best at, but excel at it") and another tourism design competition. What was she like as a judge? "Oh, I suspect I'm rather bossy," she said with a smile. "But it's worth its while - you feel you're doing something effective."

In past years, Raine Spencer has often been cast in an unfavourable light - her flogging off XVIIth century paintings to refurbish Althorp earned her a lot of flak, as did the tabloids' easy picture of her as the Princess of Wales's wicked stepmother, not to mention the high visibility of her best-selling authoress mother. But with our little flock of journalists, including the notoriously hard-bitten French photographers, she came out with flying colours. "Elle est très sympathique, cette Lady," the tall burly paparazzo from the Gamma picture agency, with his 35lbs of expensive Japanese hardware dangling from his soulders and neck, said between clicks.

Under the eyes of an agitated Mr Klein, I sidled up to her during a brief lull in the baking of the Tarte Tatin. Would she and her husband perhaps agree to a portrait picture upstairs, in the great Ritz hallway? "Of course," she said. We waited for the Spencers for a good while, slightly worried that once the function had been performed, they might have vanished to enjoy their holiday in Paris in peace. But they were as good as their word. "You must excuse us - my husband was a bit tired, and needed to rest for a while," Raine said. I couldn't help remembering that it was she who nursed him, willed him back to life ten or fifteen years ago, when he suffered a serious stroke and lay in hospital in a coma. She had never stopped talking to him for days, until he responded, and it was agreed in the family that she had "brought him back." "Are you all right, sir?" we asked. "Oh, yes, fine," said Lord Spencer. "Well," said Raine Spencer brightly, "where would you like us to stand?" She led her husband over Aubusson carpets into the great gilded and paneled corridor, its French windows opening onto the lovely indoors Ritz garden, and obligingly stood next to him in the best-lit spot, holding his arm and smiling. "We've been coming here for forty years," Lord Spencer said.

© Copyright Associated Newspapers - Mail on Sunday & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1988

CHARLOTTE AU CHOCOLAT

Ingredients for 6 to 8 servings
3 layers of sponge cake
Sponge fingers for a charlotte
1 cup (1/4 l) black coffee
Chocolate Mousse (recipe below)

Method
Brush the sponge cake layers with black coffee. Place one inside a flan ring on a serving platter. Slide the sponge fingers in-between the sides of the ring and the sponge base.

Pour a third of the mousse into the ring, smooth the surface and place the second sponge base on top. Fill with half the remaining mousse and cover with the remaining base.

Finish with the rest of the mousse. Decorate with chocolate curls and a dusting of icing sugar.

Refrigerate for at least 3 hours. Remove the flan ring before serving.

Mousse au Chocolat Ingredients:
5 tbsp (7cl) black coffee
9oz (250g) plain chocolate chopped into small pieces
1 cup (1/4 l) egg whites
6 tbsp (75g) sugar

Method
Heat the coffee in a small saucepan until it almost boils. Remove from the heat, add the chocolate and stir until smooth and creamy. Leave to cool.

Beat the egg whites until stiff, but not overly so, then fold in the sugar little by little until perfectly smooth. Combine a little of the whites with the chocolate, then transfer mixture to the remaining whites and fold in, using a spatula. The mousse should be perfectly smooth when finished.

N.B. The egg whites are easier to beat and much smoother if a little lemon juice is added to them first

© Copyright Escoffier Cookery School, Associated Newspapers - Mail on Sunday & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1988

Fink Tank

Alain Finkielkraut is the Left Bank's most conspicuous new star. Anne-Elisabeth Moutet studies his fatal attraction

They may have sold La Coupole to the mass-market Brasseries Flo chain, and admittedly Lipp's is wall-to-wall nobody now that Monsieur Cazes has died, and yes, the level of the French novel has sunk to the point that Philippe Djian, of Betty Blue fame -- Philippe Djian! -- is rated the best writer in France these days; but don't let yourself be deceived: your Left-Bank French intellectual -- bright, elitist, arrogant, handsome, seductive, mad, bad, and bent on the pursuit of universal truth pour épater le bourgeois -- is around and kicking and still published by Gallimard's, juste like Sartre and Camus before him. The only concession he may make to these sad modern times is to chainsmoke Marlboros instead of Gauloises. (For our Gordon Gekkos of the intellect, low-tar is for wimps.)

Consider this: I am sitting at a choice table in Les Antiquaires, the Hôtel du Pont-Royal restaurant, just above the bar where Sartre and Malraux and Philippe Sollers drank, where Francoise Sagan used to beg her publisher Henri Flammarion for fatter advances, where Michel Foucault indulged in a spot of (harmless?) highbrow cruising. Pierre Nora, the historian, is engrossed in serious speculation with a Nouvel Observateur columnist two tables away. The white-maned, 70-year-old Claude Gallimard is ensconced behind me, his back (safely?) to the wall, with a novelist, whose face I know and whose name I can't place, from his nearby stable receiving eagerly The Word between morsels of Oeufs Savignac.

And, next to me, simultaneously berating les copains: Libération, the trendy Globe magazine, all six French television channels, humanitarian champion Bernard Kouchner, philosophers André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Gilles Lipovetsky, and the slowness of the waiter, is Alain Finkielkraut, 38, latest boy wonder of the Paris literary scene, a former Agrégé de Lettres turned visiting professor at Berkeley, turned philosopher-at-large at Gallimard's, turned sudden bestseller and media superstar last summer with his eighth essay, La Défaite de la Pensée, now turned Savonarola of the establishment that created him. A ho-hum everyday success story on the Left Bank. The Parisian Dream writ in 12-point Plantin typeface inside the white and red covers of a Collection Blanche Gallimard novel.

"Television ought to be restricted to one, two channels maximum, and be forbidden to show movies, any movies at all," Finkielkraut is intoning. "This... debauch of images is perverting us, debilitating our culture, trivialising everything. It's a drug, an addiction -- you come home tired, you turn the box on, you leave it droning on and on. Fellini is right: films should be shown in theatres, on a real screen, in the dark, the way they were meant to be seen, none of this cropping the edges to make the pictures fit, no commercial breaks. Television shoud be educational -- definitely more than just one or two hours of intelligent programmes a week. I mean, how can you hope to counteract the daily effects of Wheel of Fortune or Falcon Crest with one hour on Lacan or Dumézil every other month? Am I talking too fast? Did you take all of this down?" he asks solicitously, peering at the illegible scrawl on my notebook. Yes, I assure him. "Will you be able to re-read it?" he insists, his voice gently blending concern and doubt. "Certainement," I say, which single reassuring word triggers new bursts of impassioned eloquence against those misguided spirits who think fashion is art and equate a Jean-Paul Gaultier suit with a Turner painting, graffiti on Métro cars with the Divine Comedy. "Do have some wine," he offers at the end of a period, never missing a beat -- hell, he must be a lot thirstier than I am. "It's not bad at all, non?"

Since it is Château La Lagune 1985, I should jolly well say it's not bad at all, nod, and down some more. These mad reforming monks of the French intelligentsia wouldn't dream of going out to the barricades without some decent claret. That's why changing the world in Left Bank cafés is so... well, comfortable. (The same form applies in, say, a fight between two motorists in the middle of a traffic jam on Place de La Concorde at 6:00 pm. You shout a lot, wave your arms a lot, "...et vous en êtes un autre, Monsieur!" a lot. You don't whisk out a .22 rifle and shoot indiscriminately. That's for Americans, who, as we know, are naught but overgrown children and flood our French airwaves with the deplorable Dallas and Dynasty.)

Yet, for all his imprecations against late 80s mod. cons., Finkielkraut is not your French egghead buffoon, as reviled in (for instance) Sun leaders. La Défaite de la Pensée is a surprisingly clear book, making a few points which Spectator readers might find themselves agreeing with. To wit: the seal of approval indiscriminatingly granted Third World dictatorships as long as they call themselves "progressive," punk musicians, rock video directors et al, always proceeds from the same spirit of appeasement -- when in doubt, follow the latest fashion. Finkielkraut dares to challenge current sacred cows (youth "culture;" the mediacracy -- no better in France that in England; the little coteries who run the publishing world; Live Aid; the myth that the Barbie trial would clear up France's past; France's most watched book programme, Apostrophes and its Clive James-style star presenter Bernard Pivot; the Pope) in a tone Peregrine Worsthorne might now disavow.

Finkielkraut himself is articulate, intense, handsome. For all his disdain of the star-system, he did allow himself to be photographed for an 8-page French ELLE spread enticingly headlined Les Nouveaux Séducteurs, in which he was profiled next to actors Peter Coyote, Rupert Everett, Jean-Hugues Anglade, and heartthrob Paul Belmondo -- and so he became the latest coqueluche in Paris, being interviewed on anything from Israel's policies to the deeper meanings of the film Fatal Attraction -- which, incidentally, he hated. "It's a regressive, infantile fantasy. Americans are so scared of AIDS that they'll call 'an instance of moral revival' what is really little more than a juju dance."

This is when I remember that Finkielkraut also wrote two essays on the need for a return to what he calls "the wisdom of love:" Le Nouveau Désordre Amoureux and La Sagesse de l'Amour. "You've read them?" he asks a little impatiently. Well, no, I haven't, for the very good reason (to me) that they're out of print. I am soon made to feel that I ought to have bought them at the outset. Broadly, he explains, we ought to try for fresh emotions, for a creative romanticism, for relationships that break out of our era's tired routine -- "not just between men and women but in all the relationships of love -- love toward friends, family, parents." (After our lunch I managed to track down copies of the books, and they indeed contained beautiful pages in his distinctive, clear, literary style -- on watching the face of someone you love; on dispelling a child's fear of the dark; on the rapture of being in love -- pages that brought to mind Stendhal's cristallisation theory, and bore evidence to Finkielkraut's literary training.)

He is Jewish, born of Polish parents who settled in France in the Thirties and managed to escape the Nazis during the Occupation. His unsettling, almost Sartrian honesty in describing the strange condition of being a young Jew growing up in France after the Holocaust has often provoked -- enraged -- militant French Jews. "I experienced all the vicarious advantages of being a hero without having been exposed to real danger. Being Jewish was an easy way out of the eventless Fifties." Jewishness as a safe course out of the Zeitgeist does not necessarily tally with the more orthodox views of a, say, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Finkielkraut doesn't make things any easier with offhand remarks such as: "Of course I was not immune to bouts of depression -- but I had over the other children the immense superiority of being able to dramatise my own biography. Out of my people's real tragedy I created a tragic theatre in which I was the hero."

True to form, Finkielkraut delights in being hard to place. Having taken firm stands against the Revisionists during the Faurisson and Barbie trials -- he'll say flatly he doesn't believe, "on the dubious grounds of freedom of expression," in allowing the publication of Revisionist history treaties, the kind which pile up thousands of grim, surrealistic figures (time needed to consume a human body multiplied by square feet on concentration camp groundplans multiplied by cost of fuel...) to deny the Nazi genocide of the Jews -- he then voiced concern at Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and, recently, handling of the Palestinian riots.

"I don't think the French are anti-Semitic," he says, "but I do believe the real anti-Semites are the antii-Zionists. You just can't be anti-Semitic anymore in Europe -- you can't shout 'Death to the Jews' because too many Jews died already. But you can keep a smug Left-Wing stance and be anti-Zionist -- this is socially acceptable, this is the latest in radical chic. Instead of telling the Jews: "You are an evil race," you tell them "You are racist; Israel leads Nazi policies; therefore you have to justify yourselves for Israel's policies. I hear this all the time around me."

This is one of the exquisite attractions of La Rive Gauche: one can indeed have a serious, intense conversation while sipping Château La Lagune and ordering more coffee and bitter chocolates. Our talk turns to the loss of quality in life, the evermore accepted sloppiness in intellectual pursuits; in books, in films. Finkielkraut likes to quote Hannah Arendt wondering whether the world's greatest works of art would survive their trivialising commercial exploitation.

"Well, she wrote it of Hollywood in the Fifties. You know, people who saw Doctor Zhivago, or Madame Bovary, or The Idiot -- and assumed they'd read the books. Now they produce this pap for television." Doesn't he watch television? (He certainly has appeared on it quite a few times.) "Of course I do. I hate myself for it. I feel soiled, dirty when I've watched it -- but it's addictive and I can get myself sucked in by it." Oh, the demons that threaten a French Left Bank intellectual! The dragons that lurk in a book-lined Quatorzième flat! And all of this before you've bought your morning copy of Libé, which you'll read spluttering with rage at your rivals' infernal gall! "I loathe the Libération - Globe branché crowd because they work on a principle of exclusion. Fashion is exclusion. Trendiness is exclusion -- and an admission of defeat. You blow with the wind, you hold no moral convictions, you start pushing this infernal idea of consensus, you annihilate any kind of debate. Left is not Right! It is now de rigueur in France to despise the body politic. Well, politics have a function -- one that can't simply be fulfilled by humanitarian associations. One-shot orgies of charity, Live-Aid pop concerts and the such, are an easy way to buy oneself a clear conscience -- it's Wash'n Dri absolution!"

He motions to the waiter. No, no, I protest, the lunch's on Tatler. We go through the accepted motions, in French polite society, of fighting for the bill. (Finkielkraut does this ritual dance very well, and loses gracefully. I pay.) Whom does he like, then? He looks surprised. He likes lots of people and things. Francis Ford Coppola. Ryszard Kapuscinski. Jacques Derrida. Duke Ellington. Mozart. A new French writer called Claire Desréaux. Fellini's Intervista; in fact anything by Fellini. This, you understand, is Paris, where bookshops on Boulevard Saint-Germain, next to the Café de Flore, stay open until 2:00 am; where you can see 500 different films a week; where they're building a fourth Opéra on Place de la Bastille; where you can hear jazz at Le Rosebud and Barbara Hendricks at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées; where you can get up from lunch at Les Antiquaires at 3:45 pm, having agonised over the problems of the world, pronounced against false prophets from the rival publishing houses, polished off a bottle of Château La Lagune over a Navarin d'Agneau -- and all of this without guilt! For this is how we live, on the Left Bank, upholding our right to freedom, truth, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. Or at least of a really good book programme on prime time television.

© Copyright The Tatler & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1988