How the French Invented Love

by Marilyn Yalom

  The man is surprised to see a white girl using the native transportation system. He asks about her family in Sadec and tells her that he lives in the big house with the large terrace and blue tiles bordering the river. He has just returned from Paris where he was a student. Would she allow him to drive her to her destination in Saigon?

  Here begins the surprising history of a poor adolescent French girl with an older rich Chinese man. He has the traditional attributes of power—money and maturity—which she counters and subjugates with her youth, beauty, and skin color. Race is the subtext of this story. Being white gives her an incomparable advantage in that colonial French society, which looked down upon Asians, be they native Vietnamese or Chinese transplants. Her mother and brothers treat the man with contempt, and his father refuses the idea that his heir should marry “the little white whore from Sadec.” But before arriving at that point in the narrative, we follow the romance of the French girl and the Chinese man, and it is unlike anything we have read before.

  Every day the man comes in his chauffeur-driven car to the French high school she attends and drives her back to the state boarding school in which she sleeps. But one day after school he drives her to the Chinese section where he keeps a bachelor apartment. There he tells her that he loves her.

  She says, I’d rather you didn’t love me. But if you do, I’d like you to do as you usually do with women. He looks at her in horror, asks, Is that what you want. She says it is.

  And so they make love at her request, and he is the one who weeps and moans, rather than she. Their lovemaking has nothing of the stereotypical.

  He’s torn off the dress, he throws it down. He’s torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed. And there he turns away and weeps. And she, slow, patient, draws him to her and starts to undress him.

  . . .

  She touches him. Touches the softness of his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love.

  After he has penetrated her, he wipes the blood away and washes her as if she were a baby. Their lovemaking alternates between scenes of tenderness and passion, during which she, too, comes to experience exquisite pleasure.

  For a year and a half they make love regularly in his bachelor apartment, surrounded by the noises and smells of the Chinese quarter of Cholon. In time, her family finds out, and she is beaten by her mother and older brother. Her mother screams: she is no better than a prostitute, she will never be able to marry and find her place in society. This doesn’t stop the family from taking the money that comes their way from the Chinese man. They even accept his invitation to a meal in an expensive Chinese restaurant, where they behave very badly, don’t even speak to their host as they gobble up everything in sight.

  The girls in her French school stop speaking to her. She doesn’t care. “We go back to the apartment. We are lovers. We can’t stop loving each other.”

  He gives her a valuable diamond ring. This curtails some of the criticism at home and at the boarding school, which looks the other way when she is absent at night from the dormitory. By now the lovers are joined in a ritualistic dance of love. He washes her body with special water set aside in large jars for that purpose. She abandons herself to his caresses, strokes his body as he strokes hers. Their silent caresses are occasionally broken by tempestuous outbursts.

  Then suddenly it’s she who’s imploring, she doesn’t say what for, and he, he shouts to her to be quiet, that he doesn’t want to have anything more to do with her . . . and now they succumb to it again amid tears, despair, and happiness.

  Eventually the time comes when the girl must return to France for university education. The man is so pained at the thought of separation that he can no longer make love to her. “His body wanted nothing more to do with the body that was about to go away, to betray.” On the day of her departure, she stands on the deck of the boat that will carry her to Europe and sees his big car on the dock, “long and black with the white-liveried driver in front. . . . That was him in the back, that scarcely visible shape, motionless, overcome.” She starts to weep, hiding her tears from the mother and brother who will accompany her to France. Had she loved him as he had loved her? No. But she had loved him in her own way, and she will never forget him.

  Years later, after he had married the Chinese woman his father chose for him, after they had produced an heir, he comes to France with his wife. By then, the girl from Vietnam is a well-known writer. She had lived through the war, marriages, children, divorces. He phones and she immediately recognizes his voice. His voice trembles, he is nervous, still afraid. “And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he’d love her until death.”

  Why does this story make me cry as I read its final pages? Is it because I want to believe that such an enduring love is still possible? Is it because Duras has created a myth of carnal love that goes beyond the physical and transcends barriers of race, class, and money? Or is it because this story evokes my own history of a love affair in France when I was twenty (with a Norwegian) and a phone call forty years later when we immediately recognized each other. Duras tells a story, and it becomes your own.

  The Lover plays out the quintessentially French idea of love anchored in the flesh. The body of the other, when caressed and cared for like that of a child, can lead to supreme pleasure and diffuse happiness for both parties. For a time, the lovers were able to resist the prejudices of a colonial society that treated interracial unions as taboo. In this respect, Duras was well ahead of her time. Even if the lovers are eventually parted and each returns to the culture that birth dictated, this does not mean that their love was worthless. On the contrary, Duras suggests, in each of her works, that love, however curtailed, can provide an emotional wellspring as long as memory endures.

  Duras opened up a subject that has had enormous ramifications in France: interracial love affairs resulting from the French colonial interventions in Indochina, Africa, the Near East, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. Such unions unsettled traditional French notions of love. Whereas it was once unthinkable, or at least very rare, for a white French man or woman to marry someone of a different race, today such unions have become considerably more common. Men coming from the Ivory Coast or Guyana, women from Vietnam or the Antilles sometimes pair up with indigenous French and produce tea-skinned or café-au-lait children. France is becoming multiracial faster than anyone could have predicted when Duras was a girl.

  Marguerite Duras’s assiduous biographer, Laure Adler, tracked down the origins of The Lover in Vietnam.4 She concluded that the Chinese lover had really existed. She visited his grave in the company of his nephew and saw his house, now turned into a police station. But the lover that Marguerite Duras wrote about in her famous novel, as well as in other works, was by no means identical with the man she had known at sixteen. Though he was Chinese, very rich, and her suitor for two years, he was definitely not nice-looking—in fact, he seems to have been quite ugly. Moreover, though he paid large sums of money to the Donnadieu family for Marguerite’s company, he may not have slept with her until shortly before she departed for France. These differences and significant others are inscribed in notebooks, discovered after Duras’s death, that are probably closer to the lived facts than the account in The Lover. Ultimately the lived events inspired a more aesthetic reality.

  By the time Duras wrote The Lover, at the age of seventy, the Chinese lover had become part of her personal mythology, and she herself might not have been able to distinguish between life and literature. With his yellow-white skin and fine hands, his wealth and outsider status, he was the transgressive lover who had initiated her into sex and love. For the rest of her life, he would remain embedded in her consciousness. As a writer, Duras could repair the flaws in the original relationship. Such is the grace of memory. She could transform a some
what sordid affair into a mutually passionate romance and project into posterity her vision of love as an irresistible force that penetrates through the skin, regardless of its color.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Love in the Twenty-first Century

  TODAY, CAN YOU IMAGINE A NOVEL HAVING AS ITS TITLE TREASURE OF LOVE?

  Philippe Sollers, Trésor d’amour, 2011

  Postcard: Paris Capitale des amoureux. LAPI–Roger Viollet/D/R.

  April in Paris is sometimes all it’s supposed to be. With the horse chestnut trees in flower, sending their white spikes up like candles, and the yellow tulips drinking up the sun in the Luxembourg Gardens, I returned to my cultural home. Young and not-so-young lovers sitting on benches were still kissing each other avidly, oblivious to the tourists from every country gazing enviously at such unseemly behavior. Yes, indeed, the cupid-bedecked postcard I bought for one euro had reason to advertise Paris as the capitale des amoureux, the capital city of lovers. But what kind of French lovers does one find in the twenty-first century? That was the question at the top of my list when I returned to France in 2011.

  First I attended the funeral services of a ninety-one-year-old woman whom I had known for more than forty years. And I had known her deceased husband even longer, as far back as my student days in Tours. Paul and Caroline had become lovers in a familiar French manner—that is to say, she was over thirty and married with two children when they met, while he was single and six years younger. I remember a letter from Paul describing their torrid love affair and his escape just in time from her marital bedroom. The expression “J’ai failli y laisser ma peau” (I almost left my skin there) remains inscribed on my brain. Leaving her husband and a very advantageous financial situation, Caroline moved into Paul’s bachelor apartment, taking her daughter with her and sending her son to boarding school in Switzerland. They remained there until Paul died and Caroline went to live near her married daughter in the south of France. Whatever their problems—and there were many—their tender devotion to each other was evident to anyone who knew them. Caroline, in her seventies and eighties, was still a very elegant coquette and held onto all the wiles that Frenchwomen of her generation and class knew how to manipulate. Later, when Caroline lived in a nursing home, she lost much of her memory but not all her charm. At one point she asked her sister-in-law: “How many husbands did I have?” When her sister-in-law responded, “Two,” Caroline was a little disconcerted. “What? Only two!”

  I did not expect to find this kind of love and marriage among the younger generation, and I did not. Everything I encountered in Paris from friends, academics, plays, movies, and printed materials drew me into a whirlpool of present-day love relations, where the rules for men and women were in the process of change and where marriages of fifty years seemed more and more unlikely. And yet, love itself had not disappeared. Not at all. It was still as obsessively present in France as it had always been.

  Popular plays with titles like L’illusion conjugale (Conjugal Illusion), Le gai mariage (Gay Marriage), J’adore l’amour (I Adore Love), Un manège nommé désir (A Merry-Go-Round Named Desire), La meilleur amant que tu aies eu? (The Best Lover You Ever Had?), L’amour sur un plateau (Love on a Tray), Ma femme me prend pour un sextoy (My Wife Takes Me for a Sex Toy), Amour sur place ou à emporter (Love Right Here or Carry Out), and Mars et Vénus: La guerre des sexes (Mars and Venus: The War of the Sexes) were attracting enthusiastic audiences throughout the city, and so were classical plays like Le Misanthrope and Cyrano de Bergerac. There was even a version of Tristan et Yseult, publicized as “a love of youth and adultery, passionate, enflamed, loaded with carnal desire,” and ending with the question: “A myth or an ordinary tragedy?”

  I attended a Sunday matinee of the award-winning L’illusion conjugale. The house was packed and the performance outstanding. So what if it dealt with the oldest of all French themes: the husband, the wife, and her lover? The wife was, of course, beautiful, thin, stylish, charming, and dependent on her husband for her material situation. She was the same stereotypical Frenchwoman who had appeared in any number of comedies during the gay nineties and the 1930s. In this play, the wife suggests that she and her husband tell each other the number of affairs they have had during the course of their long marriage. How many has he had? Well, he finally admits to twelve. She takes the number in stride. And she, how many has she had? Just one, just one? He explodes. One is worse than twelve. One means that she truly cared about someone, whereas his were just passing affairs. Once unleashed, his jealousy cannot be contained. He must know more. How long did it last? Who was it? Was it his best friend? The best friend arrives and further revelations take place that shake the entire foundations of the marriage. Yet in the end, the wife refuses to confirm her husband’s suspicions. She retreats into mystery, a safe haven for Frenchwomen, and ultimately, it appears, the necessary glue for French marriages. Tell all and you destroy the conjugal illusion.

  In 1948, the poet Paul Claudel had begun the preface to a new edition of his own play Partage de midi (Break of Noon), first written in 1909, with these words: “Nothing apparently more banal than the double theme on which this drama is based. . . . The first one, that of adultery: the husband, the wife and the lover. The second, that of the struggle between a religious vocation and the call of the flesh.”1 In 2011, you can forget about the struggle between a religious vocation and the demands of the flesh, but adultery still packs them in.

  There were, however, different themes in theater, film, and fiction that pointed to new issues in the eternal quest for love. For example, the play Le gai mariage was emblematic of the remarkable openness with which the French now treat homosexuality. Why, even the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, is openly gay. French laws established in 1999 allow for a form of civil union known as PACS (Pacte Civil de Solidarité) that provides all the financial benefits of matrimony, regardless of the partners’ sex. Although PACS was set up with same-sex couples in mind, it has now been co-opted by heterosexual couples as well. At present, there are two civil unions for every one marriage performed in France. Civil unions are much easier to enter into than legal marriages and much easier to dissolve. Perhaps that is why straight couples are PACSing more and more frequently. Many young people, straight and gay, seem to be uncomfortable with the notion of lifelong marriage. With life expectancy hovering around eighty-four for French women and seventy-seven for men, the thought of spending fifty or sixty years with the same person may be too much to expect.

  So, then, France, like the United States, is undergoing a romantic revolution. Premarital sex, living together with or without legal commitment, divorce, and serial unions are ousting old-fashioned lifetime marriage. The traditional format of husband and wife (with breathing space for his and her lovers) is becoming less of a norm than an ideal.

  What has changed everything is that more women are now working outside the home and, as in the United States, trying to combine all the wifely virtues with the hard-nosed realities of the working place. My younger women friends—those under forty-five—still tend to their appearance, do the cooking, are attentive mothers, and now contribute to the family economy. This makes for the same kind of conflicts in time and energy that American women are facing. Of course, the French governmental support for maternity leave and day-care centers make it somewhat easier for French mothers to continue working. The French legally have fourteen weeks of paid maternity leave, which increases to twenty-six weeks for a third child, as well as fourteen days of paternity leave, but many mothers manage more. My hairdresser took six months with full and then partial pay for the birth of each of her daughters. A friend who has an important position with a European airline took off a year with each of her sons, and her husband got unpaid paternal leave for the year between their births. Many men have taken over child-care responsibilities that would have been unthinkable in the past. For example, my French publisher habitually leaves her daughter with her ex-husban
d or her live-in lover when she must travel.

  There is no doubt that the reality of women as economic competitors with men has thrown a wild card into the game of love. Men who once knew what to expect of themselves and of the women who were economically dependent on them are confused by women who may earn as much as they do and sometimes even more, though the work world still privileges men in numerous ways. One senses a malaise in France among certain men and women who have become afraid of love. My women friends tell me that it is the men who shy away from permanent attachments, whereas the women invest greater emotional energy in maintaining their relationships. If this is true, French and American women have much in common.

  The noted French intellectual Philippe Sollers begins his 2011 book by asking if we can imagine a novel with the title Treasure of Love. He believes readers would find such a title grotesque and open it only in secret.2 Such is the contemporary disillusionment with romance, according to Sollers. Nonetheless, he titles his autobiographical novel Trésor d’amour and rhapsodizes about Minna, his love treasure.

  Minna is thirty-five; Sollers, the male protagonist (who doubles for the flesh-and-blood Sollers), is at least twice her age. Minna was married for two years to an Italian banker and has a five-year-old daughter. So much for numbers. Venetian-born, Minna is Italian and a specialist of French literature, most notably Stendhal. Sollers and Minna share a love for Venice, where they meet on a regular basis two or three days a month, and a passion for Stendhal, whose life and work become the subtext of the novel.

  Sollers sums up the history of French love in the following manner: