Read Online La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life by Elaine Sciolino - Free Book Online
Authors: Elaine Sciolino
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The French might come out with the word “pleasure.” The game is not one of notches on the bedpost. It is a process, based on the concept that the players are entitled to pleasure and that while sexual intercourse is exciting, the rich, heady, tantalizing pursuit of it may be even more so.
The preoccupation with prolonged sexual play is rooted in French history. One of the pioneers was the seventeenth-century noblewoman Ninon de Lenclos, whose beauty, cunning, independence, and sense of humor made her the most powerful and successful courtesan of her time. While most young women sought security in a well-constructed marriage, she renounced the feminine condition, declaring, “From this moment on, I am becoming a man.” She struck out on her own, opening an unusual business: a salon, and later, a school, which she ran for thirty years, to teach young men and women the art of seduction and love. Men had to pay to hear her lecture; women came for free. She celebrated her eightieth birthday by taking a new beau.
Her life lessons were strategic and unsentimental: “A sensible woman should be guided by her head when taking a husband, and by her heart when taking a lover,” and “Much more genius is needed to make love than to command armies.”
One of Lenclos’s cardinal rules was to conceal one’s intentions. When she was sixty-two, she decided to help the twenty-two-year-old Marquis de Sévigné win the heart of a beautiful but aloof countess. She told him, as Arielle Dombasle would tell me hundreds of years later, that seduction was war.
“Have you ever heard of a skillful general, who intends to surprise a citadel, announcing his design to the enemy upon whom the storm is to descend?” Lenclos asked the marquis. “Do not disclose the extent of your designs until it is no longer possible to oppose your success.”
The marquis took several weeks to make his moves, but then he veered from Lenclos’s orders and professed his love to the countess. The seductive spell was broken; the countess rejected him.
Some of the most unlikely characters throughout French history have valued the sizzle more than the steak. Georges Clemenceau is best known in the United States as the French prime minister who clashed with President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. But he was also a medical doctor, a journalist, and a novelist. In his 1898 novel Les plus forts , he celebrated the supreme pleasure of the prelude. One of the book’s characters, a ruined gentleman named Henri de Puymaufray, says, “The most beautiful moment in love is when I climb the staircase.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, the twentieth-century philosopher and writer, felt that the sex act was more of an obligation than a source of pleasure. Simone de Beauvoir, his longtime lover and companion, quoted one of their conversations. “I was more a masturbator of women than a lover…,” he told her. “The essential, emotional relationship is that I kiss, caress, run my lips over the body. But the sexual act—it took place, I performed it, I even performed it often, but with a certain indifference.”
The concept that the chase gives so much pleasure that it must be repeated again and again is embedded in one of the most celebrated figures of the French theater, the title character in Molière’s seventeenth-century play Don Juan . Don Juan wasn’t French, but Molière transformed him into a French creation by appropriating the myth of the archetypal French seducer, in this case one without scruples. Cynical, hypocritical, and cruel—but also intelligent, articulate, and polite—the nobleman Don Juan fools both noblewomen and commoners by disguising himself and lying to them. He is a transgressor, faithful to the original meaning of the seducer as one who turns another from the right path. Conquest alone interests him, and he abandons the women once they submit. As he says in the first act: “It’s a delicious thing to subdue the
The preoccupation with prolonged sexual play is rooted in French history. One of the pioneers was the seventeenth-century noblewoman Ninon de Lenclos, whose beauty, cunning, independence, and sense of humor made her the most powerful and successful courtesan of her time. While most young women sought security in a well-constructed marriage, she renounced the feminine condition, declaring, “From this moment on, I am becoming a man.” She struck out on her own, opening an unusual business: a salon, and later, a school, which she ran for thirty years, to teach young men and women the art of seduction and love. Men had to pay to hear her lecture; women came for free. She celebrated her eightieth birthday by taking a new beau.
Her life lessons were strategic and unsentimental: “A sensible woman should be guided by her head when taking a husband, and by her heart when taking a lover,” and “Much more genius is needed to make love than to command armies.”
One of Lenclos’s cardinal rules was to conceal one’s intentions. When she was sixty-two, she decided to help the twenty-two-year-old Marquis de Sévigné win the heart of a beautiful but aloof countess. She told him, as Arielle Dombasle would tell me hundreds of years later, that seduction was war.
“Have you ever heard of a skillful general, who intends to surprise a citadel, announcing his design to the enemy upon whom the storm is to descend?” Lenclos asked the marquis. “Do not disclose the extent of your designs until it is no longer possible to oppose your success.”
The marquis took several weeks to make his moves, but then he veered from Lenclos’s orders and professed his love to the countess. The seductive spell was broken; the countess rejected him.
Some of the most unlikely characters throughout French history have valued the sizzle more than the steak. Georges Clemenceau is best known in the United States as the French prime minister who clashed with President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. But he was also a medical doctor, a journalist, and a novelist. In his 1898 novel Les plus forts , he celebrated the supreme pleasure of the prelude. One of the book’s characters, a ruined gentleman named Henri de Puymaufray, says, “The most beautiful moment in love is when I climb the staircase.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, the twentieth-century philosopher and writer, felt that the sex act was more of an obligation than a source of pleasure. Simone de Beauvoir, his longtime lover and companion, quoted one of their conversations. “I was more a masturbator of women than a lover…,” he told her. “The essential, emotional relationship is that I kiss, caress, run my lips over the body. But the sexual act—it took place, I performed it, I even performed it often, but with a certain indifference.”
The concept that the chase gives so much pleasure that it must be repeated again and again is embedded in one of the most celebrated figures of the French theater, the title character in Molière’s seventeenth-century play Don Juan . Don Juan wasn’t French, but Molière transformed him into a French creation by appropriating the myth of the archetypal French seducer, in this case one without scruples. Cynical, hypocritical, and cruel—but also intelligent, articulate, and polite—the nobleman Don Juan fools both noblewomen and commoners by disguising himself and lying to them. He is a transgressor, faithful to the original meaning of the seducer as one who turns another from the right path. Conquest alone interests him, and he abandons the women once they submit. As he says in the first act: “It’s a delicious thing to subdue the
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