The Happiest Yuppie In Paris

Moutet's Paris: The Happiest Yuppie In Paris

The European, 28 November 1994

THE successive corruption scandals involving France's largest water and building utility, the 150 billion-franc Compagnie Générale des Eaux, have made at least one happy yuppie. This is Jean-Marie Messier, 37 and 3/4 [he'll be 38 on 13 December], youngest partner at the prestigious investment bank Lazard since 1989 and former adviser to Finance Minister Edouard Balladur in 1986-1988. Messieur has been installed last week as designated successor of the redoubtable, secretive Guy Dejouany, 73, at what may be France's highest salary, 16 million francs a year.

For 18 years Dejouany ruled as an absolute monarch over his 200,000 employee-strong empire (where he started working in 1961) from his discreet rue d'Anjou headquarters, a chequebook's throw away from the Elysee. Nobody knew his diary, not even his secretary. His personal telephone lines were scrambled by state-of-the-art military devices. Strong men were daily seen leaving his office in a sweat: Dejouany, who never held a meeting of more than three people outside his company board, played at naming favourites, hinting that he would leave them in charge when he retired, then at pitting them against one another. Under his stewardship CGE became the world leader in water treatment, but also diversified into cable and pay TV (he's the one who really got Mitterrand's old friend André Rousselet fired from Canal Plus.)

But now, as revelation after revelation of payoffs to politicians in exchange for local contracts have made Dejouany the target of several judicial inquiries, the old man had to step down. When he announced his choice of successor, the CGE board (not to mention the infighting top executives) were enraged. Messier? This chubby baby Enarque with absolutely no industrial experience and only five years in investment banking under his belt? Peugeot's Jacques Calvet, a board member, loudly threatened to resign, before bowing to the decision. Young Messier, now effectively in charge of running the company, should be formally made its president in June 1996, after the board approves the 1995 results. "We needed someone clean, not someone from inside the company, who might one day be charged with yet another corruption scandal," CGE insiders told the press.

This drew guffaws from the Paris political and business establishment. Young Messier, who has more than once been dubbed the most ambitious Frenchman of the Nineties, used to be in charge of the first big round of privatisations at the Balladur Finance ministry. The bank advising most of these privatisations was Lazard. Barely a few months after the reelection of Francois Mitterrand to the presidency, ending the first two-year cohabitation, Messier was hired by, surprise, surprise, Lazard, with unheard-of privileges, directly as a full partner (associé-gerant) aged 33, with an office significantly located next to the bank's chairman, the billionnaire Michel David-Weill.

His first job was of course to follow the smooth workings of the newly privatised companies, in direct contradiction with French law, which stipulates that civil servants are not allowed to move into private jobs directly related to their former goverment activities.

Next Messieur was sent to New York for a while, to work with the legendary Felix Rohatyn on the multi-billion franc acquisition by Groupe Schneider of Sqare D, an electrical company, snatching the fat success fees from JP Morgan's, the white-shoe Wall Street bank that had initially presented Square D to Schneider. When he came back to Paris, he was the bank's star, and David-Weilll's obvious favourite.

How does young Jean-Marie do it? "He calculates every single move," says an associate. "For instance, he dresses more modestly than your average investment banker, which usually reassures industrialists. His 17th-arrondissement flat is rented, the furniture is dowdy Napoleon III. His wife Antoinette is no socialite, she prefers to care for their three kids. He listens a lot and unlike most members of the French establishment -- to which he belongs both by background (his family once were partners in the aviation firm Messier-Latecoère) and by right as an Inspecteur des Finances, one of the top 5 of his ENA class -- he never shows off. Balladur likes young men who can keep secrets and he called Messier 'as safe as a tumb'. David-Weill, too, likes people who can keep secrets. Messier knows where most Establishment bodies are buried."

REMEMBER this figure next time French farmers are out in the streets burning prefectures and dumping artichauts: according to the highly reliable INSEE (Institut National des Statistiques et Etudes Economiques), the average French farm income went up 11.5% in 1994, the CAP's second year over 4 times current inflation. Meat farmers made 12% more than last year; winegrowers took in a whopping 40% and large cereal and grain growers (usually accused of reaping all the benefit from demonstrations organised by poorer small farmer) 3% only.

© Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1994.

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

The Saigon Kid

Moutet's Paris: The Saigon Kid

The European, 2 May, 1994

An amusing photograph is making the rounds in Paris these days. It shows a rather surly young man, black hair parted in the middle, dressed in a wrinkled shirt and sawn-off denims uncovering white knees, lounging in the seat of a bicycle rickshaw in the middle of a Saigon boulevard.

This is none other than Romain Balladur, 24, the youngest of our PMs four sons. This apple of his father's eye has mysteriously managed, after graduating from ISG, a second-string Paris business school, to be posted for his military service as a VSNE (Volontaire pour le Service National en Entreprise), or business trainee, for the water and construction conglomerate Lyonnaise des Eaux-Dumez.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that a recent parliamentary report on campaign finance in the last General Election showed Lyonnaise-Dumez to have been the third largest contributor overall to candidates of whatever political stripe, even though its chairman, Jérôme Monod, is a card-carrying member of the Gaullist RPR.

Balladur the younger alighted in the former French colonial capital last November, I'm told, and set up his quarters at the Rex, one of the city's better hotels. Since then his activities have been mysterious. He has been having a wonderful time, members of the local French expatriate community will tell you, not very helpfully.

In an interesting coincidence, young Romain's tracks in Saigon and Hanoi crossed those of another famous scion of French officialdom, Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, formerly his father's African affairs adviser at the Elysée palace, now a consultant for Lyonnaise-Dumez's arch-rival, the mammoth Compagnie Générale des Eaux (also a generous contributor to many an electoral campaign). Having managed to pull off a contract to build a tubings factory near Hanoi for CGE, Jean-Christophe couldn't help a dig when asked about his young rival: "Don't confuse us, please. I'm involved in serious work!"

IT WILL be even more difficult than usual setting up an appointment with any Parisian of note between 12 and 23 May next: everyone who's anyone has managed to wangle, earn or steal some sort of assignment at the Cannes Film Festival, enabling them to hop South for at least three days of sun, screenings, galas, and gossip at the Hotel Majestic bar (tip: the Carlton is for Hollywood types).

One celeb however will be conspicuously absent from the opening star-studded gala dinner, traditionally given by the French Ministry of Culture: Jack Lang, the long-serving, charismatic and extremely popular former Culture minister under Mitterrand's both terms, has been informed by his lackluster successor Jacques Toubon's secretary that he was not welcome to dinner on the 12. News of this ham-handed slight went round Paris like lightning, with comments overwhelmingly detrimental to the hapless Toubon. Had he wanted to emphasize his (legitimate) fear of being upstaged by his predecessor, the gossip goes, he couldn't have gone about it in better way.

Meanwhile Jack Lang and his wife Monique have booked a suite at the Hotel du Cap-Eden Roc, like Bel-Air royalty, for the duration of the Festival, and will be among the guests of honour at the even more glittering party given on the following day, Friday 13th May, by the unsuperstitious Claude Berri (of Germinal and Jean de Florette fame) for his existentialist, Patrice Chéreau-directed megaproduction of Alexandre Dumas's La Reine Margot, starring Isabelle Adjani. Nobody in Paris doubts that Jack and Monique will be better seated than Toubon and his wife Lise

WOULD YOU willingly spend an evening reading 260 pages of statistics? Well, possibly, if they all have to do with Frenchwomen. Or so bets Agnes Michaux, a sociologist with an appreciable sense of humour, who has just come up with a book gathering every fact, poll, figure, statistic, test, market study, and assorted theses devoted to the female of the French species. The result is of course riveting (albeit better absorbed in small instalments.) Did you know that 7% of Frenchwomen have already made love in a lift? That 22% are bosses of their company? That 87% define the ideal man as "the one who makes me laugh"? (but that 84% also define him as owning a building society savings account large enough to buy them a house.) That 58% of them believe in astrology? (but 68% believe in Paradise.) That 27% would have liked to have been born in the aristocracy? That they account for 35% of the French homeless? That 3% would have liked to be Francois Mitterrand's mistress? That 26% keep their bank account separate from their spouses? That 91% say they're happy? And that 0%, not a single one, would leave their place in a liferaft to Madonna?

METEOROLOGICAL studies have just proven that Paris, the most compact city in Europe (and the one with the largest population density) enjoys a specific microclimate with temperatures 6°C warmer on average compared to its immediate surroundings. This is caused by the heat radiated by the city's buildings and population, but also by Paris's waterproof quality (most of it is covered in asphalt, stone or zinc, so that rainwater flows straight into gutters and sewers instead of slowly evaporating in the air as it does in cities with more public and private parks and gardens.) The heat of the city also repels rain in the cold season: in the past twenty years the average annual raintime was 840 hours at Orly airport, as opposed to 529 hours only in the Parc Montsouris weather observatory.

THE PARISIAN couture world is waiting with bated breath for 18 May, when Paris's Tribunal de Commerce pronounces its ruling on the bitter fight pitting Yves Saint Laurent against the American designer, Ralph Lauren, whom the Frenchman accuses of having plagiarized one of his designs, and is suing for 5 million francs. Sides are being taken, self-appointed goodwill ambassadors spend hours on transatlantic phone calls; even US Ambassador Pamela Harriman has been drawn into the battle between the two rag-trade primadonnas.

Ralph Lauren, who is countersuing YSL supremo Pierre Bergé for defamation for 1 million francs, has already sold 123 of his thousand-dollar black sleeveless tuxedo-cut evening dresses, "the exact copy, minus the qulity," Bergé sneers, of a FF140,000 ($25,000) couture model from YSLs 1970 winter collection. Perhaps significantly, the company withdrew the model from its racks the minute Saint Laurent sued. (In 1992-93 YSL had shown the dress again in its Rive gauche ready-to-wear collection.)

Respectively standing in each corner, watched over like prizefighters by huddles of protective lawyers, two top models wearing the two dresses were in turns sent sashaying in the narrow courtroom to demonstrate the fraud, or absence thereof, last Friday. "The Saint Laurent dress is obviously more beautiful, but that can't influence my ruling," Judge Madeleine Cotello remarked before retiring.

© Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1994.

The Renault Blues (and Was De Gaulle A Royalist?)

Moutet's Paris: The Renault Blues (and Was De Gaulle A Royalist?)

The European, 18 March, 1994

Renault's boss Louis Schweitzer, the quiet Protestant Polytechnicien who used to be chief of staff to Socialist PM Laurent Fabius (and is a direct descendent of legendary Dr Albert Schweitzer), has cause to feel sore these days. First of all, his long-planned merger with Volvo, the ailing Swedish carmakers, was botched at the last minute. The jittery, privately-owned Swedes left their French bride standing at the altar after our new Minister for Industry Gérard Longuet's undiplomatic gesticulations, insisting to announce and sign the new contract himself, thereby showing how little the French government believes in the independence of the companies it controls.

This cost Renault, in addition to a massive loss of face, hundreds of millions of francs in fees to their investment bankers, the arch-establishment Lazard Frères. (The Lazard partner who drew up the contract, énarque François Polge de Combret, a former aide to President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, is also said to have included, with Giscard-like arrogance, clauses leaving the Swedes in casual ignorance as to the French government's golden shares.)

Secondly, Schweitzer, who thought he would preside over the Renault privatisation, now awaits to be sacked on 22 May, the date at which he could reasonably have expected his mandate to be renewed. (The company is comfortably in the black and the entire Renault range of cars is a success, to the extent that the R21 is now the best-selling foreign car in Germany.) Longuet, a naive soul, was all in favour.

Yet instead of Renault, the government will next put the loss-making Bull computers company on the block, even if it means flogging it off at bargain basement prices to IBM: Edouard Balladur has decided that no Socialist could possibly have the power to set up a noyau dur, the tightly-knit group of influential shareholders which prevent large French corporations from being taken over. Instead, Schweitzer is currently being enticed to accept the chairmanship of SNCF, the national railways, which has posted losses of FF 10Bn last year, is overstaffed, strike-ridden, under attack from the Greens for its projected TGV-Provence, and has just failed miserably to introduce its new reservations system, Socrates. Schweitzer's qualifications, you are told in Paris, is that he has always collected model electric trains and of course that he's a Fabiusien.

POOR Jacques Delors is rumoured to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. At the very time when he is being pressed to run for the presidency by a wide majority of left-wingers, who believe he can attract enough votes from the centre to win in 1995, his strong-willed daughter, former employment minister Martine Aubry, has put her foot down. Aubry has a good shot to become France's first woman president in 2002, and reportedly told her father that his taking the top job would be damaging to her own career (she would hate the likely suspicions of nepotism). The mousy Madame Delors herself, a bespectacled, unfashionable woman who may not relish the perspective of living in the Elysée glass-house, is said to have sided with her daughter, telling the beleaguered Delors that it was ''Martine's turn.''

WAS General de Gaulle a Royalist? So says Henri, Comte de Paris, 85, the pretender to the throne of France, who for years told intimates (and not-so-intimates) how Le General really intended to make him his successor in 1965.

The Comte prefers to underline that he's descended from Louis XIV younger brother, Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, than from France's last reigning King (and first Constitutional monarch), Louis-Philippe, called ''the regicide'' by most of his family since he voted the death of his cousin Louis XVI in 1793.

Barred from living on French soil by an 1886 Bill of Exile repealed only in 1950, Henri de Paris fought in the Foreign Legion during the Second World War, and finally came back to France with his family, soon to be sought out, says he, by General de Gaulle. They started meeting regularly over lunch, a habit which didn't stop with de Gaulle's return to power in 1958. The Comte claims de Gaulle had in mind for him a scheme not unlike Franco's high-handed restoration of Juan-Carlos de Borbon in Spain - but that the General's entourage almost coerced him into standing a second time. Surviving Gaullists guffaw at this. One didn't coerce de Gaulle, they say, adding that the Comte would have believed anything.

Now the Comte has published in book form his entire correspondence with de Gaulle (Dialogue sur la France, éditions Fayard), as well as what he claims to be exact transcripts of their conversations. The result is, how shall one put it, embarrassing.

The conversations show de Gaulle discussing everything from Algerian independence to the Fifth Republic Constitution with the Comte. The letters are considerably sparer, to the extent that the Comte has had to include absolutely every single piece of paper that ever circulated between them: bread-and-butter letters, Christmas cards, condolences, congratulations for the Comte's thirteen children's marriages, cover- and thank-you notes, stiffies from long-forgotten State dinners at the Elysée (robe longue, décorations), transcripts of telephone calls between de Gaulle's and the Comte's private secretaries, opinion pieces the Comte wrote for his own political newsletter and sent to the Elysée, everything is grist to his mill to fill up some 200 widely-spaced pages.

The most interesting revelation is no doubt that the General usually signed off with l'hommage de mon fidèle devouement, while the Comte never failed to conclude as votre affectionné, Henri., which I can't help believing must have sounded to the General as a deplorable instance of familiarity.

HOWEVER ungallant this sounds, it's hard not to notice that as his ratings plunge in the polls, Edouard Balladur seems to have gained the few extra pounds that cause his beautiful, made-to-measure Henry Poole Savile Row suits to strain at the seams. In his five years in Opposition, preparing for his current job with amazing determination (and a full-time staff of half a dozen political advisers), the sweet-toothed Balladur lost over 10 kilos in order to look younger on the day of his projected appointment as PM, a remarkable achievement for a man of 60 whose favourite pudding is a heavenly confection of whipped cream, chocolate and chestnut mousse called a Mont-Blanc from the renowned rue de Rivoli tea-room Angelina's. Vowing he'd never regain his flab, Balladur intrepidly had all his pinstripes, herringbone tweeds, exquisite Prince of Wales checks and heather mixture sports jackets flown to London to be taken in. Considering the price (some 2,000 for a coat, a decent shirt and two pairs of trousers) of a single Henry Poole outfit suitable for the nattiest man in France, the PM now has what might be called a considerable vested interest in staying popular and keeping off the gratification food.

© 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.

The Sons Also Rise: Paul Belmondo and Anthony Delon

Remember the split-screen opening titles of the old Sixties television series The Persuaders, where Roger "Brett Sinclair" Moore's aristocratic, privileged childhood ran parallel with Tony "Danny Wilde" Curtis's up-from-the-slums, tough, brawling one? That's exactly what reading the cuttings on Paul Belmondo (son of Jean-Paul) and Anthony Delon (son of Alain) feels like.

By the time both were eighteen, Paul's proper wooing of Princess Stephanie of Monaco had gained him entry to the Grimaldi palace as well as Vogue's society pages, while his first car racing victories got treated with respect by France's sports daily L'Equipe's seasoned hacks.

Meanwhile Anthony was already crime-reporter material - his first arrest in a stolen BMW, which somehow contained a 9 mm gun traced to a famous French gangster, his trial, his time in remand, and eventual conviction (to an eight months' suspended sentence) made headlines in France-Soir and Le Parisien for months.

Paris-Match ran pictures of one kid's film-star dad picking him up from Kensington's Lycée Français - and of the other's waiting for him, stony-faced in a too large, too shiny Lancia, at the gate of Bois d'Arcy jail.

"The press really had a field day with Anthony and me, playing up the 'good boy/bad boy' image, and it was tough on him" Paul says carefully, deftly picking a piece of sushi with his wooden chopsticks in the subdued Suntory restaurant off the Champs Elysées.

The Suntory is mostly grazing land for neighbouring Japan Airlines executives, which makes it a good place for a quiet celeb interview, provided no-one objects to raw fish. Two days before, at the shoot for the pictures you see here, I'd tentatively suggested it to the younger Belmondo, and he'd agreed, pulling out a beige leather Hermès desk diary from his duffle bag and writing the address down. Any qualms I might have had disappeared when he ordered his meal - "how many rolls of tekka-maki are there on the platter? Good. And I'd like the squid without mustard, please." Anthony Delon's manager, on the other side, had set the locale for our interview: the bar of the swank Bristol hotel, on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Anthony and the bartender there were on first-name terms.

I'd just asked Paul about Princess Stephanie - whose tempestuous, short-lived affair with Anthony, around 1983, just after they had ended their two and a half-year relationship, had ensured that the "rivalry" between the two boys with the famous names would provide tabloid fodder for years to come. ("In His Father's Footsteps: Anthony Delon Captures The Heart Of Belmondo's Son Princess Girlfriend!" screamed a typical Ici Paris front page.)

"They got it wrong," Paul says. "By the time Stephanie met Anthony, we'd split up for almost a year. Well, drifted apart, really. People change a lot. I met her when I was 18 and she was 16. You don't marry the girl you met at 18." Some do, I suggest. He grins disarmingly: "Okay, sometimes they do. But rarely."

At this moment, he has every bit of his father's winning charm, the engaging scamp who walked down the Champs-Elysées, hawking the Paris Herald Tribune with Jean Seberg, in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless; or Alain Resnais's inspired choice for his Stavisky, the Third Republic big-time swindler to whom no-one could refuse anything, and whose fall brought down a government.

There never was much truth to the famed Alain Delon - Jean-Paul Belmondo rivalry, except that both became France's leading film stars at about the same age (Delon was born in 1935, Belmondo in 1933), and exactly the same time. Their first films, in the late Fifties and throughout the Sixties, were often masterpieces: Delon starred in Luchino Visconti's neo-realist Rocco and his brothers as well as his sumptuous Sicilian epic The Leopard; in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai; in Joseph Losey's The Assassination of Trostky and Mr Klein. Belmondo was Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou and Melville's Léon Morin Prêtre opposite that Muse of the New Wave, Emmanuelle Riva. He was directed by Marguerite Duras (Moderato Cantabile) and Francois Truffaut (La Sirene du Mississippi).

Then both stars' careers (if not their bank balances) took a downturn as each started making, almost back-to-back, predictable, tired gangster movies where all that seemed expected of them were a lot of car chases, bang-bang with big handguns, and final showdowns with either the police or the hoods (it didn't really matter which.) Somehow, this decline coincides with the one film in which they co-starred, Borsalino, a 1970 Jacques Deray period gangster movie set in Marseilles, which tried unsuccessfully for the effect The Sting would achieve three years later.

But every now and then, just when you'd almost discounted them for the younger generation of actors, the Depardieus and the Bohringers, one or the other would remind you how he could act, really act. There was Delon's incandescent cameo as Baron de Charlus in Volker Schloendorff's Swann's Way. (His son would shine with the same vibrant presence as the doomed Santiago Nasar in Francesco Rosi's 1987 Chronicle Of A Death Foretold, a film which the young Anthony neatly stole, with only three scenes, from a wooden Rupert Everett).

Equally inspired was Belmondo's much heralded return to the Paris stage three years ago, as Kean in the Jean-Paul Sartre rewrite of Alexandre Dumas' flamboyantly romantic play. (Its huge success prompted him to take on Cyrano de Bergerac last Christmas.)

Yet, if not enemies ("No-one ever spoke ill of Alain Delon at home," Paul Belmondo stresses) Delon and Belmondo the elders never became close friends. You could trace it all the way to their beginnings - while the pretty-faced, working-class Delon was picked, groomed, taken to parties by Visconti (whose title of Count of Modrone dates back to Piedmontais XIVth century), Belmondo, the son of a respected sculptor (who died three years ago a Membre de l'Institut) attended the Conservatoire, trying his hand at Molière when he wasn't getting his nose broken as an amateur boxer. With stardom, Delon took to hiring a retinue of gofers and yes-men, some of whom distinctly unsavoury (the discovery of the murdered corpse of one of his bodyguards, the Yougoslav hoodlum Stefan Markovic, in a limestone quarry in 1968, was used to start a political scandal aimed at tainting the wife of the then Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou.)

Delon's short-time wife Nathalie, Anthony's mother, then his glamorous girlfriends, from actress Mireille Darc to starlet Véronique Jeannot, were paraded like trophies in front of paparazzi flashbulbs, at parties, dancing at Régine's, at prizefights, at opening nights, for as long as they obediently remained in favour; then were discarded faster than gangster's molls.

Belmondo is so much of a family man that he remained friends with his wife Elodie, Paul's mother, after they'd divorced and she went on to marry Hugh Hudson. (He afterwards lived for several years with the original James Bond girl, Ursula Andress, then with Carlos Sottomayor, a Brazilian pop-singer and heiress to Banco Sottomayor, and he's still on friendly terms with both: he is famous in Paris for his parting gifts, such as the huge Seixième flat he offered Carlos Sottomayor when she moved out of his house.) Jean-Paul Belmondo still gives lunch to his mother at La Coupole most Sundays. A good party, for him, can mean getting drunk, raising hell and breaking glasses at Castel's with his photographer friend Claude Azoulay - but the one time he was actually beaten up by policemen whom he'd tried to stop from harassing a passersby (he was on his way to the clinic where his wife was giving birth to Paul, in 1963, the tense aftermath of the Algerian War) he let himself be clobbered rather than hit back: as a qualified boxer, he explained later, he knew that by French law his fists were considered as weapons.

If you know this - and everyone in France knows all about Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo - then the fates of their sons seem to bear the stamp of something like Greek tragic inevitability: aren't soap operas and fan magazines rewritten on Aeschyles plots the world over?

"Yes, I was incredibly lucky in my family," Paul says. (He has actually been a guest on a TV chat-show on divorce, telling how his parents had "made a success of theirs.") "My father has always been there when I needed him. I listen to him because he has 30 years' worth of experience ahead of me - and he supports me whenever I need help. I couldn't have started my racing career without him." There aren't many young men who can get away with this kind of saccharine statement, but Paul Belmondo is one - you cannot but believe him. Because of that, he has sometimes been labelled "transparent" by the French press, the times when even Paris-Match gets tired of the" good boy," wholesome image.

As we started on our sushi, I asked about his profession, with little more than an opening gambit in mind. What I got was Harvard Business School case-study material, all the more impressive since Paul dropped out of the Lycée after failing at his Bac exam: how he builds his presentations to prospective sponsors, the answers he has ready for the money men arguing that a TV commercial would be cheaper and more efficient for sales than having their brand-name plastered over a Formula 3000 450cv racing-car.

"A Formula 3000 season costs 12 million francs (1.4 million) for two cars, and the pilots are expected to bring in half the sponsoring themselves." He races for a British team, CBM, belonging to a businessman named Brian Holmes. ("Bree-yan 'Olmess, like the detective" he repeats so that I can take it down, with exactly his father's French accent.) His sponsors are a video conglomerate, the French state-run horse-racing betting agency, a natural gas distributor, a fast food chain.

"Quick, the fast-food people, circulate news of my results among the employees, as part of their internal communication and motivation programme. I give advice and lessons during race driving sessions they organise for their franchise-owners; and they also organise a lottery for the restaurants' customers, with a series of lessons as prize: I just gave some yesterday. Obviously that's good for their image as well as team spirit within the company. And they do benefit from the fact that my name is well-known."

He really speaks like this, I swear he does. His poise is remarkable; also the ease with which he accepts his father's fame, the unassuming self-confidence that enables him to say that his father gave him his (okay, used) Ferrari two years ago, without in the least sounding like a spoilt brat.

"My parents never gave me expensive presents," Anthony Delon had told me almost apologetically, his long legs stretched under the small, gilt coffee-table, drinking his third espresso at the Bristol Bar. "I bought my first motorcycle, my first car myself." From Anthony's artless account, both the flighty Nathalie (a thoroughly Sixties girl, she once told a French radio interviewer her child-rearing principles, which including smoking cigarettes from age 6 and reading Sade rather than fairytales) and Alain Delon (if and when he took the trouble to see his son,) seemed imbued with character-building theories. As a teen-ager, Anthony was given £10 a week pocket money "which really was enough, since I could always cadge something extra from Mum to go to the movies." He remembers leaving a china lion money-box near the door of his then single mother's flat near the Invalides, with a sign requesting all her visitors (of which there were many) to contribute to his "fund" and his amazement at finding, when he finally broke it, a fortune - the equivalent of £250 in small change.

When he was 14 - and had dropped out of several schools - his mercurial father decided to that his character could do with some more building, and summarily installed him in the large Seixième Sud flat he shared with Mireille Darc. "God, was it useless to leave a money-box in that place," Anthony says wearily. "For one thing, no-one ever came. All I remember is banging on walls."

He did like the blonde Darc. "She did listen to me. She tried to be a buffer between me and my father. No use. Eventually I left when I was 17, and of course, after that, I wouldn't ask money from my father." His mother hadn't yet met her present husband, Island Records tycoon Chris Blackwell (whom Anthony describes enthusiastically as "the best ear in the music business, and so sharp as well!") and was broke.

"Well, it stands to reason," Anthony says, "if you say you're going to make it on your own, you're not going to run to your parents for money." And so he ran elsewhere, to people who looked more like his father's parts than like his father, who spent their nights in clubs and jimmied open the first car they found on the kerb at 5 a.m. for a ride home.

Comparing these two boys, both handsome, engaging, gifted, is a chilling exercise, reminding one with final clarity that no man whose childhood wasn't secure will escape unscathed.

"I used to run across him every now and then, but I've only gotten to really talk to Anthony since his return from living in Los Angeles, last year," Paul says. "We're good friends, you know." And then he tells two stories.

The first is this: he is watching TV on New Year's Eve, Sacrée Soirée, a popular variety show with a bit of This is your life thrown in. The evening's guest is Alain Delon, who will be confronted with a "surprise" in the course of the evening. The "surprise" is Anthony, flown back from California to be "reconciled" on air with the father who did not attend his 1982 trial after fetching him from remand jail, and two years later sued him for using the Delon name to promote a line of clothes, Anthony Delon leatherwear. (There is an Alain Delon scent.) Jean-Pierre Foucault, the show's host, duly calls for the "surprise" - and gets everything he could ever hope for. Alain Delon embraces his son for all the cameras to see, an Italian bear-hug like a Sicilian don's; he is actually crying ON PRIME TIME. His emotions overwhelm him, Delon says (or words to that effect.) His son, his son has finally come back to him.

"Well, I'm sorry if Alain Delon isn't happy when he reads this, but it really shocked me," Paul says. "First that it happened in public like that. And also, I mean, it's unnatural for a father to cry because he sees his son. That is something my father will never do. He doesn't need to, he sees me all the time."

I then tell him what I learned from Anthony when I brought up the show the day before: that when it was over, Alain Delon just walked away, didn't even have dinner with his son. That Anthony - who'd eagerly agreed to come, just to see his father - had flown back to L.A. the following day. Paul doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to - you know what he's thinking.

The other story is that of the star-studded "reconciliation dinner party" for fifty staged by a mutual friend at Maxim's a year ago, between these two boys who barely knew one another, and which got written up in Paris Match - perhaps unsurprisingly since the friend also happens to work as a PR for Pierre Cardin, the couturier, who owns Maxim's. The really interesting thing about it is that Paul is still friends with the Cardin PR. "Oh well, it doesn't really matter," he shrugs. "Of course we didn't come to know one another at that dinner; but later Anthony and I got to talk, at this friend's country house. So who cares, some good did come out of it." On both occasions, the 26-year-old Belmondo's tone, talking of the 25-year-old Delon, takes a tinge of protectiveness. This is when you start to really like him a lot.

Both boys are quite likeable, as a matter of fact, and it is difficult to find someone in Paris who, knowing them, will bad-mouth either of them. The French actor Marc de Jonge, who met Anthony while having a drink with a producer at the Plaza Athenée, recalls how the young Delon, who knew the producer, eventually approached them and asked him eagerly what it was like to work with Sylvester Stallone. (De Jonge played the Russian baddie in Rambo III.) "He was much better known than I, yet he acted just like a nice kid. And he asked good questions."

Both Anthony and Paul answer the inevitable questions on Princess Stephanie like gentlemen: "She's had a really rough deal with the media," Paul staunchly says, before volunteering that yes, she may be badly advised. "If I'd had to organise her scent launch, I'd never have put her in those public situations [a Galeries Lafayette promotion appearance] that were so bad for her image, her status," he explains, his voice gettting protective again. (He doesn't see her anymore; the last time they met was a year ago, in an airport lounge.) Anthony is even more diffident: "I used to see her from time to time at friends' in L.A., hello-howareya, that's all," he says.

There are differences, of course. The ever-rational Paul says he want to give Formula 3000 yet another year, then, if he doesn't get to Formula One level, he'll quit. "I won't like it, but at least I'll know I'll have given it my really best shot." If he doesn't become another Alain Prost - and it is worth remembering, in a field that isn't governed by showbiz rules, and doesn't take kindly to moneyed amateurs, that Prost has commented favourably on his driving - then he'll work in films, producing or directing rather than acting, although he doesn't rule that out. "If you're a baker's son and you take over your father's boulangerie, nobody sees anything in it. Why shouldn't the same apply to movies? I was born in the movie world, I worked on my father's films' sets when I was a kid, I was even an assistant director on another film. Like it or not, I know more about the business than someone who's just starting."

He has a point, but then he always has. He's walking on air, Paul Belmondo is, never puts a foot wrong, not even down the Suntory's narrow staircase (man goes FIRST) after which he managed to let me pass him (woman gets seated at the table FIRST), no so that you'd notice, he does that instinctively, just as he instinctively made a move for the bill, because he usually never lets a girl pay. He lives in a Parisian duplex with his dog, which of course is a black Labrador, he is taking piano lessons, he likes going to deserted churches that no-one in Paris thinks of entering, his favourite books are Camus's L'Etranger and Balzac's César Birotteau - how more PERFECT could one get?

In contrast, Anthony had answered my first question on his everyday life with a not-too-promising "I am usually bored." He was in-between films; he'd left California and acting school for Paris and a rented Latin Quarter flat; he looked as if he wasn't too sure he would enjoy a talk. His manager, a Mr. Taieb Allard, had come too, and sat with us at the Bristol bar. An hour later the pair was due at yet another bar, the Crillon's this time, down the Faubourg Saint Honoré, on Place de la Concorde. I remembered that before he'd agreed to the Tatler pictures, Anthony had asked to meet our photographer, Thierry Rajic, at the Plaza Athenée bar - and I suddenly had this vision of him trekking from one luxury Parisian hotel lobby to another, time hanging on his hands, drinking strong espressos along the way, half slouched in repro armchairs, attended to by white-coated waiters. During his trial, his defence barrister, the star Paris lawyer Georges Kiejman, had referred to his dark good looks and clear blue-green eyes as those of a "languid Adonis," and you could see why - if there is such a thing as fatal beauty, then Anthony has it, in spades.

The thing is that he laughs if you say something of the kind, a genuine, dazzling smile, the smile that comes to his lips when he mentions his mother, his helicopter-flying lessons, his 16-month godson who is Taieb's fifth child. He wants children, he says, several children, whom he'll bring up and love. And so instead of liquefying at his feet, what you really feel is a strong urge to cuddle him. I'd brought his cuttings file with me, and mentioned that the first picture I'd seen published of him was at a picnic organised by his parents when he was five. He looked surprised, so I pulled out the yellowed France-Soir clipping. "I can't believe it!" he exclaimed, staring at it. "I know that picture. My father has it. He's got it in his house. I never knew he gave it to them. Great." It was as if the betrayal had taken place yesterday, not twenty years ago.

A little time ago, this boy who may be even more gifted than his father, and still hurts when he talk about him, who's done time in prison, and was given a party in New York by Régine at her Park Avenue disco barely weeks afterwards ("In honour of Princess Chantal of France and Anthony Delon," the tricolour stiffy read), started seeing an analyst, a man who'd saved, he said, one of his friends. "I believe you pay for everything in life," Anthony says. "You pay for your happiness, for your success, for your money. And all you can do is try to understand, try not to follow your instincts rather than your intelligence, try not to pass judgement on people."

© Copyright The Tatler & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1990

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 Men Who Would Be Le Roi

In this French Revolution Bicentennial, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet meets the many pretenders to the throne of France.

On Monday 30 January last, I clearly remember standing in my Parisian kitchen, hoping to defrost something that might pass for dinner, when the telephone rang. "The King is dead," my friend Dominique announced dramatically. "It is a disaster."

Now 1989, as the French Ministry of Culture, the Mairie de Paris, the French Tourism Board, various Air France offices round the world, and the all-blue-white-and-red window-displays at Galeries Lafayette (complete with miniature tricolour key-ring guillotines) won't allow you to forget, is Revolution Bicentennial Year here. Some things therefore take a little longer to register. Only two weeks before, TF1, the main commercial television channel, had treated us to an extraordinary phone-in live extravaganza purporting to be a reconstitution of Louis XVI's trial. Roger Planchon, the closest we have to Sir Peter Hall, played the King; Jean-Edern Hallier, the maverick novelist and professional provocateur, thrice blackballed from the Académie Francaise, was Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor. And acting as Louis's defender was one of present-day France's most hated figures, the flamboyant barrister Jacques Vergès, whose clients include Klaus Barbie and the Lebanese terrorist convicted of having masterminded the bloody September 1986 Paris bombings, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah.

Viewers were invited to pass the verdict all over again. Over 65% voted against death, which didn't bode so well for the projected year-long celebrations, already budgeted at some 4 billion francs. On the other hand, the 50,000 or so French royalists, my friend Dominique de Lastours - whose ancestors either emigrated or got their heads chopped off during the Revolution - among them, were delighted. "All this Bicentennial nonsense will lead to exactly the opposite of what was intended," he'd said with glee. "What actually went on during the French Revolution doesn't bear close inspection in our mawkish, liberal times."

These optimist forecasts are about the only mutual ground to be found between the various warring French royalist factions, a breed even more divided than, say, the London-based Free French during World War Two, and no more numerous. There are Left-Wing monarchists and Le Pen-voting monarchists. There are Bonapartistes and there are Orléanistes. And - until 30 January 1989 at least - there were enough pretenders to fit each splinter group. Except that on that very morning, in Vail, Colorado, the 52 year-old Prince Alphonse de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou and Cadix, grandson of King Alfonso XIII of Spain, great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson in direct line of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and considered by an increasing number of French royalists to be the only rightful pretender to the hypothetical Trône de France, skied down a piste that had just been closed off to be readied for the afternoon's world downhill racing championships, straight into a steel cable marking the finish line - and, barely a week after the anniversary of Louis XVI's 1793 execution, was decapitated.

"His son Louis becomes the rightful pretender now," Dominique went on. "But he's only 15 - he hasn't got a chance." I refrained from saying I didn't feel the late Duc d'Anjou had stood that much of a chance to reign as King Alphonse I of France either. French royalists are serious about these things. Besides, what Dominique really meant was that the young "Louis XX" was no match for the other serious Pretender, Henri, Comte de Paris, 80, descended from Louis XIVth younger brother, Philippe, Duc d'Orléans - and also from France's last reigning King (and first Constitutional monarch) Louis-Philippe, deposed by a Bonaparte in 1848.

The Orléans branch had been in almost sole possession of the field for over a century - to the extent that in 1886, at the shaky beginnings of the French Third Republic, an uneasy National Assembly passed a Bill of Exile barring the Orleans pretenders from living on French soil. The Bill was repealed in 1950, and the Comte de Paris, who had fought in the Foreign Legion during the Second World War, came back to France with his family, soon to be sought out by General de Gaulle. The Pretender and the then-retired General started meeting regularly over lunch, a habit which didn't stop with de Gaulle's return to power in 1958.

The Comte de Paris claims de Gaulle promised him he would name him as his successor shortly before the end of his first Presidential mandate in 1965 - a scheme not unlike Franco's high-handed restoration of monarchy in Spain, having appointed Juan-Carlos de Borbon as his successor - but that the General's entourage almost coerced him into standing a second time. Surviving Gaullists guffaw at this. One didn't coerce de Gaulle, they say, adding that the Comte would have believed anything.

French Royalists, of course, don't base the validity (or lack thereof) of the Comte's claim on De Gaulle's hypothetical anointment, but on an arcane dynastic debate: could Louis XIV's son Philippe, who became King Philip V of Spain in 1700, by formally renouncing his claims to the French throne, actually give them up in his posterity's name as well? Yes, answers the younger Orléans branch, since that conveniently puts them next in line. No, say the Légitimistes, who quote whole treatises of monarchic law to the effect that the head of the elder branch is next in line of succession, whatever decisions one of his ancestors may have taken in his own lifetime. Accordingly, the Légitimistes supported the late Alphonse, Duc d'Anjou.

Of course there's a lot more than minute constitutional legalities involved here. The Comte de Paris and his 9 surviving children (out of 11) have come under a lot of unseemly publicity in recent years. First, his younger son Thibault married without his permission a Scottish girl of good, but not noble family, Miss Marion Gordon Orr. The Comte was so furious (almost all his other children have married into European royalty) that when Thibault's first son died aged 18 months, he flatly refused permission for the baby's body to be buried in the Orleans Royal Chapel in Dreux. A few months later, Thibault was arrested for burgling paintings from a villa in Southern France, and was sentenced to a year in jail, to screaming headlines from the delighted French popular press.

Then the Comte's eldest son and heir, Henri, Count of Clermont, divorced from his first wife (née Princess von Würtemberg) to remarry a divorcée commoner, whereupon his father stripped him of his rights to the throne, demoting him to mere Comte de Mortain (pop. 3,000), and appointed Prince Henri's own 19 year-old son Jean as Duc de Vendôme and heir to the French Crown. (Prince Henri, who makes a living flogging his scent "Lys Bleu" to Japan and the Gulf countries, refuses to accept his father's ruling.) Meanwhile, the Comte himself was separating from his wife of fifty years (née princesse Isabelle d'Orléans-Bragance) to go and live with a Madame Monique Friesz, the housekeeper of the Fondation Condé, a charity for the elderly he runs in Chantilly. The Comtesse retaliated by suing for family property, jewels and silver which she claimed the Comte was selling at the instigation of Mme Friesz.

The Comte de Paris's fourth son Jacques, the present self-styled Duc d'Orléans, known in Paris as "rent-a-Duke" because he and his wife, the pianist Gersende de Sabran, will grace any committee or attend any party they are asked to, briefly went into the champagne business (it sold, or tried to sell, under the brand-name "Champagne Duc d'Orléans") and is now a reporter for Dynastie, a royal-watching weekly next to which Ingrid Seward's Majesty reads like The Independent Magazine. His 44-year-old sister Claude divorced in 1982 from the husband their father had handpicked for her, Prince Amédée of Savoy.

But to many of his former partisans, the Comte de Paris's chief fault remains having declared for Francois Mitterrand in 1981. The Comte says Mitterrand is the most "monarchic" president since de Gaulle. He may have a point, but it is not one the majority of French Royalists - including many members of the Orléans family - are prepared to take. French royalists by and large believe Mitterrand is the Anti-christ. (The Comtesse de Paris herself once told me that France was being ruled by "bandits," professed support for National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, then unfelicitously explained that Cardinal Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris, had had to "overcome the heavy handicap of his Jewish origins.")

All of which helps explain the rising popularity of the late Alphonse, Duc d'Anjou, King Juan-Carlos's first cousin, a quiet, unassuming French-Spanish banker, who for quite some time was better known for being General Franco's handpicked aristocratic husband for his granddaughter, Maria Del Carmen Martinez-Bordiu. The man who took it as his sacred task to further the Anjou claim to the French throne is Baron Pinoteau, a chubby, dapper, fastidiously polite man whose title was created by, of all French monarchs, Napoleon. This unlikely kingmaker masterminded a low-key campaign in which Prince Alphonse politely started answering all invitations from French Legitimist Royalist circles to attend ceremonies excluding the Orléans family, never issued a formal claim to the French throne ("it has to come from the people," he said), and eventually won a Court case against the Orleans four months ago to retain his Anjou title. (A sure indicator of Prince Alphonse's growing popularity was the annual January 21st Commemorative Mass for Louis XVI, over which he started presiding five years ago, and which soon drew twice the attendance of the rival Orléans Mass said in another Paris church.) Although Prince Alphonse never pronounced on political issues, Pinoteau is an avowed Le Pen partisan, and the annual Mass is said in Latin, in defiance of Vatican rulings.

Baron Pinoteau has vowed to serve the young prince Louis's cause as he did his father, but it is fairly obvious he will have a much harder time of it. So obvious that many French royalists have started reconsidering their loyalties, and giving the field another look. The result has been a recent flourishing of Pretenders, all kinds of Pretenders, who feel this may be their big chance (or, who, more simply, have been "discovered" by the ever increasingly Royalty-obsessed French Press.)

First there were a few tentative stirrings from Switzerland, where Prince Napoléon - descended from Jerôme Bonaparte, Napoléon's brother whom he made King of Naples - lives. (Until a few years ago, French debutantes were presented to the Princesse Napoléon.) This elicited in no time a reaction from a Count Léon, who raises prize black hens in Villiers-sur-Marne, some 40 miles out of Paris, and claims to be the illegitimate great-grandson of Napoleon. Count Léon's card bears a genealogical tree which he'll gladly explain to anyone who might ask. The gendarmes at Villiers-sur-Marne have granted him a special parking pass and a N.B. registration plate for his battered Peugeot. "They respect me because many of them are Corsicans," Count Leon explains. Count Leon is fairly famous in his Département of Seine-et-Marne (he regularly features in the local paper, and on the local TV news) but his following outside the area is weak, to say the least.

We've also seen the recent advent of Charles XII, a French-Canadian real-estate dealer from Stouffville, Ontario, who claims to be descended from Louis XVI's son Louis XVII - over whose death, in 1795, aged 10, at the Temple Prison in Paris, strong doubts still linger. In the XIXth century over half a dozen pretenders, including a West Indian quadroon, appeared at various times claiming to be the lost prince, with little success. The self-styled Canadian Charles de Bourbon, Duc de Berry first made headlines a year ago, claiming to be directly descended from one of the most convincing early pretenders, Charles Guillaume Naundorff (1785-1845.) He now has a small but devoted band of followers, led by the elderly Baroness Marie-Madeleine de Rasky, and the actress-turned-historical novelist Jacqueline Monsigny, who organise tea-parties for him. At the time, Naundorff's claims had been acknowledged by the Royal House of the Netherlands, and the Dutch Ambassador is infallibly represented by several Hesse princesses at Baroness Rasky's parties.

Then, just in case, there is Prince Sixte de Bourbon-Parme, 46, a descendant of a younger Bourbon branch, and whose brother Hugues pretends to the Spanish crown. Prince Sixte doesn't exactly pretend, but he is, we are told, "available". (It runs in the family.) Prince Sixte de Bourbon-Parme is known for his extreme-rightist opinions. He numbers among his close associates Christian Lebanese militiamen, Italian MSI members, and the Basque reactionary leader Ernesto Mila. With such friends one may make the kind of enemy who, eight years ago, on a quiet Sunday morning, surged from behind Prince Sixte's back near Saint-Augustin church in Paris, slit his throat over 4 inches with a razor, missing the carotid artery by a millimeter, and ran away, never to be traced.

But some other Bourbons lead notably quieter lives - such as the urbane Académicien Français Jacques de Bourbon-Busset, descended in male line from the illegitimate son of a XIIth century Bourbon bishop. The Bourbon-Bussets would be the eldest Bourbon branch had they been legitimized (not necessarily easy in the circumstances,) and every now and then, a member of the family points out that they gained actual recognition when they were allowed to call themselves Bourbon in the XIVth century. The present Bourbon-Busset wisely stays away from the controversy, secure in the knowledge that his life seat at the Académie founded by Cardinal Mazarin in the name of Louis XIV is rather more prestigious, and a good deal more secure, than having to slug it out with half a dozen other pretenders. In today's France, this, of course, gives his the kind of legitimacy any Pretender, and most politicians, can only wistfully dream about.

© Copyright The Tatler & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1989