Credit Lyonnais bought a studio but loses script

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet looks at the hubris of a French bank that overreached itself

The European, 28 March 1996

THE persistent rumour in Paris is that Jean Peyrelevade, the chairman of Credit Lyonnais, is seriously thinking of jumping ship and joining Lazard Freres as a senior partner. It surprises no one.

Until a year ago, his bank was commonly known as "Discredit Lyonnais" , and it sometimes seemed as though there was no loss-making venture in Europe in which Credit Lyonnais was not involved. However, Peyrelevade was recently able to announce that the bank was in the black for the first time since 1991; although he was not expecting wild praise, he did hope for some modest kudos.

The bank posted token 1995 profits of Ffr13 million ($2.5m) for an overall gross banking income of Ffr43 billion - the latter down by five per cent from last year. Provisions still stood at almost Ffr6bn, encouragingly down from Ffr14bn last year. Overheads were down by 3.4 per cent.

But few French analysts or fellow-bankers were in anything but a scathing mood, pointing out that even after the biggest bail-out in French banking history, estimated at Ffr45bn by the European Commission when it gave it a reluctant go-ahead, 1996 projections were so sombre that it was unlikely that Credit Lyonnais would stay in the black.

Peyrelevade forecast that the fall in French interest rates would cost Credit Lyonnais an additional Ffr1bn to finance its loan to CDR (Consortium de Realisation), the state-backed body established last year to administer much of its debt.

Privately, most Parisian experts believe the cost of this loan will be closer to Ffr2bn. CDR borrowed Ffr145bn from Credit Lyonnais at a variable rate, while Credit Lyonnais refinanced it at a fixed rate on the markets.

THE Credit Lyonnais saga has occupied, and fascinated, the French political and banking scene for almost five years, although measures to contain what may eventually amount to a Ffr100bn catastrophe started only on 10 November 1993, when Jean-Yves Haberer, the bank's chairman since 1988 and the main architect of its all-out expansion, was finally sacked by Edouard Balladur's government. In the meantime, the bank had posted Ffr1.8bn losses in 1992, and was about to announce Ffr6.9bn losses for 1993.

That Haberer stayed so long in office has everything to do with the French system of governance of stateowned enterprises. Credit Lyonnais' boss, like his France Telecom or Thomson counterparts, is appointed by the Cabinet, and usually plucked from the small, incestuous ranks of the upper French civil service, bred in elite schools, mostly ENA (Ecole Nationale d'Administration, Haberer's alma mater); and sometimes Ecole Polytechnique. As the losses mounted and the scandals surfaced -- bankrupt Credit Lyonnais creditors from Robert Maxwell to Giancarlo Parretti made world headlines -- it was distasteful for ministers who had themselves graduated from the same exclusive establishments to throw a colleague to the dogs.

Haberer belonged to ENA's creme de la creme, the Inspection des Finances, a state body that creams off only the five best out of each 120-strong ENA class annually. He had then headed the French Treasury during the presidency of another Inspecteur des Finances, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, before branching out into the private sector and chairing Paribas. Cross the Inspection des Finances with the senior ranks of the Treasury's alumni, and you find a list of a couple hundred men -- and few women -- who are the most powerful figures of France.

Haberer's fantastic ambitions for Credit Lyonnais become clear from a list of its major fiascos. In 1990 it financed, to the tune of $1.3bn, Giancarlo Parretti's takeover of MGM studios, through its Dutch subsidiary Credit Lyonnais Bank Nederland. During the 1994 National Assembly parliamentary inquiry hearings into Credit Lyonnais, it emerged the decision to go ahead with the MGM deal was taken in half an hour by the Credit Lyonnais executive in charge of foreign subsidiaries, Georges Vigon.

Vigon, who had not even consulted his direct boss, Alexis Wolkenstein, had previously been forbidden by Haberer in writing to grant any new loans to Parretti. But this did not prevent him from stepping in after Time-Warner withdrew from a similar deal a few hours before the projected closing. Episodes like this were common under Haberer.

Such was the bank's gung-ho culture at the time that Vigon was congratulated rather than sacked. Parretti has since been declared bankrupt by American courts, while his Credit Lyonnais-financed partner, Fiorino. Fiorini's Swiss company SASEA, now insolvent, is the object of a Swiss judicial inquiry. Credit Lyonnais still owns the loss-making MGM, which it has unsuccessfully tried to sell off ever since.

In 1990 Credit Lyonnais also bought, for Ffr250m, a controlling interest in the indebted International Bankers bank from its owner, Jean-Maxime Leveque, another Inspecteur des Finances and Haberer's predecessor as Credit Lyonnais chairman. A flamboyant right-wing establishment figure, Leveque, having chaired French bank CCF before its 1982 nationalisation, fancied himself a banker; and it would have been bad form for a fellow inspecteur to deny him. Not only did International Bankers specialise in risky property financing it turned out that several of its top executives had been receiving illegal commissions to extend loans. International Bankers is now in receivership, with few of its Ffr8bn debts expected to be recovered.

Since 1977 the maverick businessman, politician, film actor, and football impresario Bernard Tapie had enjoyed a special relationship with SdBO (Societe de Banque Occidentale), a wholly owned Credit Lyonnais subsidiary specialising in financing buyouts of bankrupt companies.

BASICALLY an asset-stripper, Tapie outreached himself with the buyout of Adidas in 1990, which Credit Lyonnais forced him to sell two years later to a consortium headed by former Saatchi & Saatchi chief Robert Louis-Dreyfus for Ffr1.6bn, as his outstanding debt to SdBO stood close to Ffr2bn.

Since Peyrelevade's arrival, the Tapie affair has degenerated into a blood feud. Peyrelevade, a born Marseillais of modest origins, resents Tapie's political ambitions in Marseille as well as his flamboyant, Credit Lyonnais financed lifestyle. He ordered that Tapie's 18th- century town-house and antique furniture be publicly repossessed in the summer of 1994.

Tapie is suing Credit Lyonnais. He claims that he was forced to sell at a loss; Adidas was successfully floated on the Frankfurt stock exchange last year, and stands at a Ffr11bn market capitalisation.

Credit Lyonnais' nose for a bad loan was unrivalled; its poor customers include Eurotunnel and the developers of Canary Wharf, Novalliance venture capital and the Jacques Fath couture house. If Credit Lyonnais was not top of the list of French banks hit by the property crisis, it is partly because losses sustained by other banks were even better publicised. In fact, the Lyonnais shared the property disaster, mostly with the developer Michel Pelege.

Pelege, like La Défense developer Christian Pellerin, is still afloat -- entirely propped by Credit Lyonnais, which feels it would stand to lose more in bankruptcy proceedings. SdBO is stuck with an unsaleable property portfolio -- the "assets" unsuccessfully stripped by its stable of dubious 1980s turnaround specialists, such as the disreputable Pascal Jeandet, who was bankrupt when he died two years ago, costing SdBO Ffr1bn.

The European Commission gave its agreement to the government bail out on condition that Credit Lyonnais sold 35 per cent of its foreign banking network. This leaves Credit Lyonnais with a reduced income basis at a time when even sound banks find it hard to make money in commercial activities. Haberer's ambitions of creating a German-style universal bank are dead: Credit Lyonnais has also been forced to shed most of its industrial portfolio.

Reduced to the state of a chronically unprofitable rump, Credit Lyonnais is short of expectations, and bereft of hope. It is hard to fault Peyrelevade for thinking of jumping ship.

© The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 1996

François Mitterrand - a personal memoir

What was it like meeting the former French president, who died last Monday? Our Paris Bureau Chief followed his career for 15 years and remembers.

On the first day that they learned of François Mitterrand's death, Parisians couldn't quite decide where to go and pay their last respects. At first people streamed to 22, rue de Bièvre, the narrow Fifth Arrondissement lane just on the south side of the Seine from Notre Dame, where the president had owned a house since the mid-70s: during the 14 years of his reign, rue de Bièvre had been increasingly restricted, then closed off to cars and passers-by, until iron gates had actually been erected at each end of the street, guarded 24 hours a day by police.

And yet those in the know - many people, as it turned out - chose to take their red roses and their private or political grief to another part of Paris, still on the Left bank, but in the infinitely more bourgeois surroundings of the Champ-de-Mars next to the Eiffel Tower, 9, rue Frédéric-Le Play, where the ex-president, it was officially known, had his "offices" after he left the Élysée last 17 May 1995. In fact the 450-square-meter flat loaned by the State was both office and home to Mitterrand, where he slept and entertained his longtime mistress Anne Pingeot and their 20-year-old daughter Mazarine.

Mitterrand died on the morning of Monday 8 January: he had been very weak for several weeks that had included a last trip to his beloved Upper Nile at Aswan, with Mazarine and Mrs. Pingeot, in mid-December, then proper Christmas celebrations at his Latche country home with his wife of 51 years, Danielle, their two sons Gilbert and Jean-Christophe, their grand-children and close friends. He woke up around 7:00 am, his doctor Jean-Pierre Tarot reported, said that he was very tired, and would try to get some more sleep. From that sleep he never awoke.

For a few hours the fiction that Mitterrand had died "at his desk" was maintained. TV crews were sent to interview passers-by, local shopkeepers and mourners to both rue de Bièvre and rue Frederic Le Play. This duplicate commemoration was in a way emblematic of François Mitterrand's entire life, spent on both sides of the political divide, of arguments, of policies, of families and friends, and ultimately of history.

This is why it is so difficult for anyone who crossed his path, even without being completely engulfed by his powerful personal charm - which he wielded with consummate artistry - to think back of him with anything approaching objectivity. I met François Mitterrand about half a dozen times between 1980 and 1994; before that, as a history student and a sometime member of the Jeunesses Socialistes, I hawked the Programme Commun, which he had drawn up to rebuild the Left in 1972, with complete conviction.

I would like to be able to say that at the time, aged 17, but coming from a family with deep-rooted Socialist traditions - my grand-father was a co-founder, with Jean Jaurès, of the SFIO, the ancestor of the Socialist party, in 1905, and later served as a minister in Leon Blum's Popular Front Cabinet - I had understood Mitterrand's cunning strategy to circumscribe and enfeeble the strong, neo-Stalinian French Communist party in an electoral alliance. The truth is that I bought the official line that the Communists were our friends and comrades. With longer memories, my parents - who unflinchingly voted Socialist at every possible election throughout their lives - muttered things about Kravchenko (Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag" was only published the following year) and about the 1920 Congrès de Tours (when the SFIO split between its Bolsheviks, the SFIC Communists, and its Mensheviks, the tattered remnants of the SFIO).

François Mitterrand, who himself had an extremely long and encyclopaedic memory, built his entire career on other people's forgetfulness, and on his acute instinct of how far he could blur the borders between truth and falsehood, ideal and manipulation. I first met him following his successful campaign of 1981. He had rebuilt the French Left and was about to carry it to power, a phenomenon of such magnitude in France that for the first months of Socialist rule in 1981, tens of thousands of people, not all very rich, frantically (and illegally) would be sending their money abroad rather than leave it to be appropriated by "the Reds". This panic was matched on the other side by the exhilaration of the campaign's last few weeks. From an old Fourth Republic warhorse with a few unsavoury episodes to his name - the faked assassination attempt in the Observatoire gardens in 1959, the Francisque decoration which he'd been awarded by the Vichy regime (but we all chose to believe he had had to accept it as a cover for his "Resistance work") - Mitterrand was transformed into the Left's Great White Hope.

He enjoyed it tremendously. He arrived late at practically every rally, having sometimes diverted the press pack to admire a little Romanesque church he knew in the area (he knew many), or invited some of the pundits of note (Jean Daniel of Le Nouvel Observateur, Jean Lacouture of Le Monde) to dinner at a gastronomic restaurant while the faithful were kept waiting in a state of frenzy with endless speeches by lesser figures of the party. He could do no wrong. Almost every journalist following the campaign had horror stories of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's hauteur, aristocratic pretensions, and his staff's iron control on the press, especially TV.

French political campaigns traditionally end 24 hours before the day of the vote, "to let people make up their minds in peace". Since elections are always held on a Sunday, this meant that Mitterrand's last campaign plane trip before his election took place on Friday 7 May, 1981 - a crazy dash from Épinal to Strasbourg to Rennes, crisscrossing France in private planes the cost of which none of us yet thought of questioning. Mitterrand used to chat with reporters, and that evening, he walked down the aisle to sit next to me, asking me questions about my grandfather, whose job as Colonies Minister he had taken over in the Fifties. I was so petrified with awe that I didn't know what to answer except a few platitudes. Smiling, he switched to literature and asked me if I'd read William Styron's "Sophie's Choice". I had, I said, and thought Styron had stolen the idea from the 1967 novel by Yael Dayan (Moshe Dayan's daughter), "Death had two Sons". This was apparently the wrong thing to say: Mitterrand had loved "Sophie's Choice". He suddenly switched off the charm. I had not passed. With a few words, he was on his feet again to chat with someone else, and what I remember most was the switching off bit - the way this incredible warmth, of which I was not consciously aware, suddenly vanished, leaving me feeling an abject, stupid failure. Later I also realised how addicted one could become to that warmth.

Partly by chance, I stood less than a yard from Mitterrand at half past six on Sunday, 10 May, 1981, when, after an interminable rainy afternoon of feverish waiting in the small lounge of the Hôtel du Vieux-Morvan in his constituency of Château-Chinon, an aide made his way through the swelling crowd and touched his arm, announcing that all the polls coincided - even though the voting booths in France's larger cities would only close at 8:00 pm, he had won the prize that had eluded him for so long. He was in the middle of a typical Mitterrand pose - taking his time to explain the vagaries of the Morvan climate to a pretty girl, this time the blonde correspondent from "Stern" magazine. For at least two full minutes he went on talking as if nothing had happened, about granite hills and how the clouds from the north-west were stopped by the heights. Then he looked around and asked: "Ca y est? Ca ne peut plus changer?" A pause. "Bon. Maintenant, les ennuis commencent."

Everybody remembers the amazing celebrations of that Sunday night, the hundreds of thousands dancing in the streets on Place de la Bastille and in so many cities in France. For years the election celebrations had taken place in les beaux quartiers, Gaullists in their nice Peugeots and Citroens driving up the Champs-Elysées tooting their horns, singing the Marseillaise and waving tricolours. This time the flags were red, the cars were beat-up 2CVs and 4Ls, and the music was rock. I don't think I was quite rid of the elation of that night when I saw Mitterrand again at his inauguration, on 21 May 1981, at the Élysée Palace.

Giscard, a sore loser, had stretched the 10-day period the outgoing president is allowed to stay to its utter limit. He greeted Mitterrand on the porch, had an insultingly short 15-minute meeting with him in his first floor corner office (which Mitterrand relinquished to Jacques Attali, preferring to settle in the central study that had been De Gaulle's own office) and decided, in a textbook display of everything that was wrong about his political and psychological instincts, not to drive but to walk out into the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, hoping perhaps to be applauded, or even pitied. Of course the crowd come to watch Mitterrand booed him mercilessly. We inside only saw this later on TV; we were waiting for that wonder of wonders, Mitterrand arriving at the Élysée for the first time.

Symbol was piled upon symbol. The 80-year-old Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose photographs of the first 1936 "congés payés" holidaymakers became the emblem of that era, was snapping away with his little Leica. The former Fourth Republic PM, Pierre Mendes France, the man who epitomized honesty and integrity for the entire Left, was there too: PMF was about the same age as Cartier-Bresson but a lot less sprightly - in fact his cheeks were gray and the lines on his face deeply-etched. Mitterrand, in a deliberate gesture, went directly to him when he entered the Élysée Salle des Fetes, and kissed him on both cheeks. It was said later that Mendes cried; certainly he was very moved. None of us, at the time, questioned the irony of the shortest-serving great leader of the Left - his high principles had caused him to always refuse compromise - being embraced, and, in a way trotted forward as the ideal alibi by the longest-serving politico of the Fourth Republic, who'd switched alliances and allegiances with enough brio that he took part in practically every Cabinet between 1946 and 1958.

Much later, another irony would find itself superimposed onto this dream publicity shot, when Mitterrand's Vichy past emerged - the sheer gall of his kissing the man whose luminous interview was at the centre of Marcel Ophuls's "The Sorrow and The Pity", the epoch-making documentary that opened the eyes of an entire generation to the realities of ordinary collaboration (and was banned from French TV for 14 years). In the film, Mendes had told of his being ostracised by fellow-officers in North Africa before being deported to be tried in Clermont-Ferrand by collaborationist judges, in front of a courtroom packed with Action Française goons. But we all believed, and would for quite some time, that Mitterrand had been a Résistance hero; it would be long before some of us would realise that those who vouched for his impeccable conduct (and he for theirs) were all his Angoulême school mates and Fascist-leaning law school friends of the Thirties.

Soon after the inauguration, Mitterrand organised a luncheon at the Élysée for the 20 or so reporters who'd followed his campaign regularly. The mood was light-hearted, the president was approachable and jocular, the food was excellent; under the white-and-gilt rococo panelling of the downstairs dining-room, we all, Mitterrand himself included, perhaps, still felt we were only visiting. Out of all the light, exhilarated banter I do remember the steel in him showing in two occasions, though. The new "free" FM-band radio stations were mentioned; at the time, they were not allowed to carry advertising. I argued that they should. "It's better to know where exactly the money comes from." (God I must have sounded naive.) "No," said Mitterrand, "let Radio Tour Eiffel (the Mairie de Paris, i.e. the Chirac FM station) cost them the maximum." His implacable "que çà leur coûte très cher" still rings in my ears. It was, I realised later, instructive. (The other occasion had to do with liberalising the money markets; Mitterrand and his chief of staff, later Minister for Justice Michel Vauzelle, were against it. I felt pretty silly again, although I would, later, be vindicated.)

There were other meetings later: press conferences, foreign trips, political rallies, and a long but rather disappointing interview for ELLE magazine on the eve of the 1988 campaign. Mitterrand, who was about to embark on a vote-pleasing discourse on equal rights, more or less shot down his argument in flames before he started by telling me and our photographer, as we entered his upstairs private apartments: "I'm sorry I can't offer you anything to drink, my wife isn't here." (I wanted to start my piece with the anecdote, but French ELLE vetoed it.) Still, after two years of uneasy cohabitation with Chirac, marked by a series of petty battles which the wily old Élysée householder usually won, Mitterrand looked a lot better than the Right. A few days after our interview, he gave his last campaign rally at Le Bourget, one radiantly sunny afternoon, in front of some 40,000 people, with a rousing hour-long speech in beautiful French, the barrister in him blending with echoes of great political speakers of the past. He was just way above the rest, and I duly voted or him.

And then of course it all started coming tumbling down: les affaires, the Péchiney scandal, the irresistible elevation of Bernard Tapie. Mitterrand treated them with contempt - contempt seemed to have become his overriding sentiment, together with an arrogance fueled by the courtiers gathered around him. It was as if, not having to campaign for reelection again, he had given up the seduction game - except when it pleased him. I remember the 1989 Bicentennial celebrations, and the Élysée garden-party that day, with the 10,000 or so guests trying to touch the President as if he were a faith-healer, like the people outside Versailles used to wait and be touched by the King. The mantle of Louis XIV is tempting for any French leader with hubris, and Mitterrand didn't lack it. We had a great Bastille Day party, just as we were given a great Opera, a great Pyramid, a great Arch, et caetera.

I came peripherally across the track of another, quite different François Mitterrand in 1991, while researching a story - which The European broke - on the cosmetics company L'Oréal, disclosing that it still employed a war criminal and noted collaborationist, Jacques Corrèze, as head (and key shareholder) of its American sister company, Cosmair. L'Oréal's founder Eugène Schueller had given Mitterrand a job and a salary in 1946 (as editor of the magazine "Votre Beauté"). Schueller had funded the Cagoule, a fascist group, in the Thirties, to which Robert Mitterrand, the president's brother, had belonged. He had also funded one of the nastier pro-nazi collaborationist parties during the occupation, the RNP. Robert Mitterrand married Corrèze's niece Edith. Schueller's daughter Liliane (still today the majority L'Oréal shareholder, and France's richest woman) had married a school friend of Mitterrand's, André Bettencourt, supposedly a Résistant - but it turned out he had been certified a Résistant by Mitterrand's own shadowy organisation. (Bettencourt had in fact written shrilly pétainiste articles for a German Paris-based Propagandastaffel publication during the war.)

And still it never occurred to me that Mitterrand himself was at the heart of this tangled web - I remember being reassured by a remark he made after our story broke (complete with damning Bettencourt quotes) at a small Élysée dinner-party attended by a friend. "Bettencourt made some mistakes when he was very young, but he made up for them later on in the war," the President said dismissively, and being told of this, I remember feeling reassured.

It was, of course, illusory. Even before Pierre Péan's biography disclosed Mitterrand's Vichy career in 1994, some of the President's more provocative moves came under public scrutiny. Every year, for instance, he had the local Préfet - the official representative of the Republic! - lay a wreath on Pétain's grave. During his customary 1992 Bastille Day interview, he flatly refused to acknowledged any French responsibility in the rounding up and deportation of Jews by Vichy (75,000 died). As René Bousquet, the former secretary general of the Vichy police, finally seemed about to be tried, Mitterrand took his defence in "casual" conversations with journalists - and it became obvious that they had remained friends throughout the years (Mitterrand even played a cruel joke on his chief aide of 11 years, Jacques Attali, who is Jewish, by once inviting him to lunch "with a few friends" at the restaurant Dodin Bouffant - then after the lunch telling him who exactly the perky elderly South-Western notable sitting next to him really was.) I later asked Attali how he accounted for Mitterrand's attitude and past, and he wouldn't answer - it was plain he had been and still is seduced by the president's charm and vast intelligence, but was wounded. ("Le silence est la forme ultime de la gratitude", he said with some elegance and not a little meaning recently.)

Ultimately, what I can't forgive François Mitterrand are less his youthful mistakes (although they were far more important than he let Péan on to) and certainly not his private life vagaries (though we'll be hearing in forthcoming weeks of two more illegitimate children, the youngest of whom is only 8) but the fact that towards the end of his mandate, and his life, he had become so convinced of his own powers that he tried the ultimate sleight of hand on the French people - make them accept that truth mattered little, and principles not at all. I shan't even go into the shady money dealings: the tip of that iceberg was revealed by investigative journalist Jean Montaldo, and I am equally certain that the huge amount of misappropriations by the president and his various family members will come out in a short time. This is the man who for PR purposes hijacked the funeral of his former PM Pierre Bérégovoy, an honest man goaded beyond endurance to suicide, and whose anguished telephone calls he had refused to take for several weeks.

When the Péan book came out Mitterrand gave a nauseating interview to TV pundit (and state channel chief) Jean-Pierre Elkabbach: half of it was devoted to brushing away the sins of Vichy as minor misdemeanours. Mitterrand - a law graduate! - said that as late as 1942, he wasn't aware of the "statut des Juifs", the stringent 1940 legal racial restrictions imposed on France's Jews. (He also said they applied to "foreign" Jews, a revealing slip of the tongue.) He justified his criticising of the maquis fighters among the Resistance organisations (how untidy!) The second half of the interview was devoted to long, stoic, beautifully phrased answers about his prostate cancer, designed to make him look good, noble, brave. The implications were clear: collaboration was OK because so many people were involved; while how could such a heroic character as he be criticised for anything he chose to do in his life? It was pure, unadulterated self-sanctification. He had been more or less in power (or a member of the Establishment) for over 50 years; he wrote elegant (if contrived) French; his friends were the best and the brightest of the Left bank; he practically walked on water. In front of my TV set, I simply felt sick.

There are no points awarded in France for plain honesty; and admitting to one's mistakes is laying yourself open to ridicule, to the very least. But a Socialist president elected to "Change Life" (his perhaps unrealistic campaign promise of 1981) and vowing his regime would restore "morality" - Robespierrian virtue! - to Giscard's France could have taken one or two steps in the right direction. Instead François Mitterrand elevated lying and betrayal to an art with such brilliance that if I were a believer, I would have little doubts as to where he is now - back to running that rather warm place down there. No wonder he was angry with Gorbachev for letting East Germany go.

© Copyright The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1996

The uncertainties of Béatrice Dalle

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet meets the refreshingly frank Bad Girl of French cinema.

There is something irredeemably rebellious about Béatrice Dalle that has kept her firmly outside any kind of Parisian establishment, even the movie crowd, not known here for being usually that exclusive. And so last week it was shocking, but not especially surprising, to see the police arrest and hold for an outrageous 72 hours of questioning, without a lawyer, in the garde-à-vue procedure usually reserved for dangerous terrorists, the actress who smouldered her way into international stardom with her first movie, Jean-Jacques Beineix's Betty Blue, back in 1986, for owning 0.7 gram of cocain and 0.2 gram of heroin.

Before she was released, a judge charged Dalle with drug use and being an accessory in drug dealing. As it turned out, police had raided and ransacked her Paris apartment on a tip-off from two homeless small dealers whom she had sheltered for a couple of days.

The entire scene was exactly the sort of thing that never happened to, say, Françoise Sagan, when she was accused of regular cocaine use and dealing five years ago. (Sagan, who happens to be an extremely nice person, readily admitted that she used the stuff and denied dealing, exactly like Béatrice Dalle). France's most famous novelist, who made a writing career of loving fast cars and difficult men, never saw the inside of a police station cell: she was politely notified of the charges, and was fined by a lenient judge a year later. Sagan had played at being bad and only managed naughty. Ever since the amazing success of Betty Blue, Béatrice Dalle has assumed the uneasy part of France's "bad girl", the one France's usually tame journos feel they can snigger at.

There was the radio columnist Philippe Aubert, who alway made nasty jokes about her sensuous mouth and deep cleavage. There was the film critic at L'Express who disparaged her looks and her acting. Three years ago, when she had her first brush with the police for shoplifting in a cheap jewellery store, the newsweekly Le Point called her a liar and a thief; and a few months later, TF1's star anchor Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, who'd invited her to speak about her latest movie, reneged on a deal with her publicity people to ask her live about the jewellery incident: the sort of thing he'd never, ever do to either Isabelle Adjani or Catherine Deneuve.

Such hatchet jobs are almost unheard of here: producers and actors are known to be capable of retaliating by withholding access to sets, rights to reproduce stills, invitations to gala nights or chummy dinner-parties at Le Fouquet's and, in some cases, advertising from offending newspapers. It's as if Béatrice Dalle's enemies had sensed she's not part of that little game, and therefore won't defend herself in the usual way. (She may slap someone's face, but she's unlikely to sue.) Those who dislike her, her independence, her wild streak, are usually men. There's something in her that taunts them. "I'm an outsider, and always was, even as a child," she has said. "I don't plan my career, I chose movies on a hunch, I've made mistakes and I'll make more."

Although she's acted in a lot of duds, Dalle has a presence on-screen that is truly powerful and makes her smallest parts stand out. With a good director (Beineix, Jim Jarmusch for Night on Earth, or Truffaut's former apprentice Jacques Doillon for La Vengeance d'une Femme) she gives the kind of performances that have made Quentin Tarantino, John Turturro, Neil Jordan, Spike Lee and Madonna seek her out and offer her parts, which she hasn't taken "because I don't speak good English, and I can't imagine being coached until I say my parts by rote; acting for me is saying something I mean."

In real life she is mesmerizing, devastatingly direct, a charmed sprite. I first met her on a magazine assignment, immediately after Betty Blue, on the set of her forgettable second movie, with and by the moody stage star, Francis Huster. She was 22 and knew the film would be terrible. "They've rewritten the screenplay after I signed, and now I get to undress on page 2," she moaned, dragging on a cigarette cadged from one of the technicians.

We had shooed off the film's publicist, something experienced actors know never to do when meeting an unknown interviewer, and Béatrice happily started to tell me about her childhood in a council block in Le Mans, her nosy neighbours who called her and her mother "sluts" because they wore make up, her dropping out of school at 16 to come to Paris, staying in and out of friends' flats or the odd squat, doing odd sales assistant jobs, living on fruit and milk, going out clubbing at night, and being "discovered" by a model agency scout on the Champs-Elysées. (The Betty Blue offer materialised after her first published pictures, a fairytale by filmland standards.) I felt I'd known her for years, so much that when she mentioned smoking joints, I put down my pen and notebook and made her promise never, ever to tell it to a journalist again.

We met again a few times. There was an interview in the wood-panelled bar of Hôtel Raphaël, which she had annexed as her second home for a while, and where all the waiters grinned at her in a slobbering trance. I remember we talked about diets and lipsticks and the expensiveness of Hermès Kelly handbags. Béatrice Dalle still believes to this day that she's ugly; and at the time she also thought she was fat. (She is now proudly waif-thin to the point of anorexia, beautiful in an almost tragic way, after a series of crazy diets that I immediately and unknowingly ascribed to cocaine when I first heard of her arrest last week.)

Another time I asked her to take part in a Clive James's Paris Special for BBC Two, and they got along like a dream, even though Béatrice swears she doesn't like reading books. (Well, not quite. For instance she read all of the Marquis de Sade after she saw Barry Lyndon and Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract.) After they'd finished shooting, we walked up the Champs-Elysées to Le Fouquet's, the movie crowd legendary bar brasserie, where she'd never set foot before, and she told me about being madly in love with Rupert Everett, who'd just starred as Guy Burgess in Marek Kaniewski's Another Country. "He's soooo much more handsome and more intelligent than I am," she wailed. "Béatrice, he may be more educated, but you're more intelligent," I replied, meaning it. She didn't look as if she believed me.

She has been married once, to the painter Jean-François Dalle. She's still sorry it ended. They met in a club before Béatrice ever thought of standing in front of a camera. She was 19. He was 25. They hoped it would be forever. Then Béatrice started flying from location to location, being interviewed and photographed. "I'd go someplace with him, nobody even looked at him, they all rushed at me. I was the cause of the breakup," she says. Since then there were romances, always sincere, not always happy. "I am ab-so-lute-ly faithful to the man I'm in love with," she says. "I can't imagine cheating. What would be the point?"

She doesn't cheat and hates it in others. When suave father-of-four Poivre d'Arvor, whose wife appeared with him on many lovey-dovey TV magazine pictures, suddenly asked her about her shoplifting live on prime-time news, she hit back: "You said you'd not talk about it. Well then, I'll talk about the [love] letters you sent me. Aren't you sorry you wrote them now?"

But then Béatrice always preferred difficult men like the rap singer Joey Starr or the actor Christopher Lambert. Difficult neighbourhoods: her Paris apartment is on working-class Place de la République, not trendy Bastille. Difficult friends: she remembers when she relied on others' hospitality for a roof, and opens her door readily to people like the junkies who shopped her last week. Now she's holed up at a friend's house in leafy Yvelines, with instructions to visit a doctor once a month. It won't quite tame her.

© Copyright The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1995

"Life of the Party": Blowing the Whistle on Pamela Harriman

A new, tell-all biography of the American Ambassador won't faze the French, predicts Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

If the whistle indeed had to be blown on Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman's notorious lovelife and career, then the best place by far for her to reside when that bomb exploded was where she is right now: in Paris, once the theatre of some of her exploits, and where she currently officiates as Bill Clinton's competent and respected Ambassador.

Mrs Harriman is reported to be hopping mad about her indiscreet (and riveting) unauthorized biography written by the former Time Magazine chief diplomatic correspondent, Christopher Ogden, Life of the Party. Worse, she has chiefly herself to blame: she's the one who initially approached Ogden in June 1991 as a suitable co-writer when asked by a publishing house to write her autobiography. She had been, Ogden explains, favourably impressed by a biography of Margaret Thatcher he had recently penned.

A contract was duly drawn up, and Harriman sat for over 40 hours of taped interviews with Ogden before she started getting uncharacteristically cold feet. The publishers, Ogden reports, had offered a generous 1,625,000-dollar advance, and Pam realised she would have to produce a fairly complete memoir for that kind of money. Mercifully, at 73 and after three rewarding marriages, the multimillionnaire Harriman didn't need it. As is often the wont of the rich, she forgot that Ogden was not similarly circumstanced, and left him high and dry, having given up his Time job to write her book for her. Hence his decision to forge ahead.

The resulting book is a wonderful read, and Mrs Harriman shouldn't worry about the effect it has on her Parisian socialite friends (as opposed to the depressingly conformist inside-the- Beltway Washington crowd, or even her former British compatriots). The Pamela Harriman Tips On How To Seduce Rich And Powerful Men have been the guiding principles of Frenchwomen over the centuries. "When with a man, socially or professionally, not merely sexually, [Harriman] concentrated on him with laserlike intensity," Ogden writes.

"She would take a man who interested her out of a group the way a cowbow and fine horse could cut a steer from a herd for branding. She would approach the man, bring him out of the traffic pattern to a sofa, sit down and talk to him for five to ten minutes. She focused on his strengths: what he was doing, what had happened since they last met, his plans, all in a low, throaty, conspiratorial whisper, and in the process learned his weaknesses or what troubled him. She was glad to answer his questions if he had any, but she was extremely careful never to babble and never to burden the fellow with anything that might be troubling her. She wanted him to shine even as she learned what was on his mind.

"Careful never to keep anyone long, especially if his wife was with him, she would then return the man to the group, pick out another and repeat the process, perhaps half a dozen times or more. Rarely did she attempt to talk to a man in a group, rarely did she talk to women, although she tried not to alienate them unnecessarily. For those moments, those men sensed that no-one else in the world existed for Pamela. As her reputation grew, receiving the full frontal Pamela treatment, being Pamelized, was a heady experience for most men."

The time is 1947, the place is Paris, and Pamela Digby, 27, had been divorced for two years from Randolph Churchill. The "fast" debutante who'd married after a two-week courtship the son of the legendary British PM, then, neglected by him, had enjoyed a string of passionate affairs with some of the most interesting men to be found in London in the war years, from Jock Whitney to CBS broadcaster Ed Murrow and (déjà) US envoy Averell Harriman, had moved to to Paris to properly enjoy her divorcee status.

Paris was made for Pamela and Pamela was made for Paris. She met Aly Khan, son of the Aga, at the annual ball he threw each June at the Pre Catelan after the Grand Prix de Paris race, and to which she'd been invited in 1947 with her friend Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, daughter of Joe's and sister of Jack's. Aly Khan's 33 to 1 longshot horse, Avenger, had just won. It was lust at first grope. The two danced cheek to cheek as if welded. When Kick warned Pam against Aly Khan as a known womanizer, she made the mistake of hinting at his dark skin as well. It was enough to decide the headstrong Pamela.

Other playboys of the Parisian nights would follow: the young Gianni Agnelli, whom she eventually found too hard to pin down to the serious business of marriage, and even more tantalising, Baron Elie de Rothschild, whom she simply snatched away from his less beautiful, less devoted wife Liliane in 1953. An intellectual who was a voracious reader and an expert on eighteenth-century art, "Liliane certainly wasn't going to worry about bringing Elie his slippers," her own brother-in-law once explained. "Pam was. She's so good about paying attention to all the small things."

Although the new couple were trying to keep their affair discreet, all of Paris knew. Where an English or an American wife would have confronted her husband with recriminations and tears, Liliane de Rothschild was wiser. The Duke of Windsor once asked her which of the Rothschilds was involved with Pamela. "My husband", she replied. And yet she suffered so much that forty years later, she still can't bring herself to say Pamela Harriman's name, calling her "that woman". Elie didn't divorce.

But the beauty of Paris was that Pamela Digby Churchill could lead her own life as freely as she wished, and still be received by everyone without difficult explanations. She was a regular at Louise de Vilmorin's salon, where she could meet the poetess's lover, André Malraux, and the future Academicien Francais Maurice Druon, with whom she had a fling. The American brigade - the Irwin Shaws, the Art Buchwalds, Theodore White, the 24-year-old Ben Bradlee, then press attache at the American Embassy she was one day to command - introduced her to the brilliant photographer, Robert Capa, whom she fell for. Later she'd complain to a Parisian friend: "Everyone always talks about the rich men I have slept with, no one ever talks about the poor men I have slept with."

When she left Paris for New York and marriage to the Broadway producer, Leland Hayward, in 1958, Pamela had made a host of French friends, from Ysabel de Faucigny-Lucinge (later Marquise de Ravenel) to viscountess Jacqueline de Ribes, Versailles curator Gerald Van Der Kemp, billionaire industrialist Paul-Louis Weiller, or Princess Irene Galitzine, connections which would serve her crucially upon her return.

Never fazed by her style even at its wildest, Parisians these days find her positively low-key. And no-one, but positively no-one, would ever dream of not attending one of her dinner parties at the Ambassador's residence on 41, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore - fittingly, a former Rothschild residence, in which her move with her own Impressionists and furniture was duly recorded by Karl Lagerfeld's camera for "Vogue". There are rumours that she plans to settle in Paris even after the end of her tenure as Ambassador. It could be her wisest move yet, especially since another unauthorized biography, this time by the experienced writer Sally Bedell Smith, is in the works in Washington. Whatever new comes out, it will only add to Pam Harriman's prestige here.

"Life of the Party: the biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman," by Christopher Ogden, Little, Brown and Company, £ 18.99.

© Copyright The European & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1996

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.