…
we face another Gallic paradox, like the one about red wine and foie gras keeping you thin
writes
Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.
“The
whole problem with this Hollande scandal is that he is not married,”
says Jean-Marie Rouart, the French novelist. “Had he been married, this
affair would never have been revealed.”
He
observed that, as an “elected monarch,” the president has to maintain
appearances. “In France, having a mistress is not considered cheating,”
he says. “We are not a puritanical country. France is Catholic. We
accept sin and forgiveness.”
It’s
bad enough to hide under a helmet and dismiss your security and go
incognito on an Italian scooter to have a tryst in an apartment that is a
stone’s throw from the Élysée Palace and has some tenuous connection to
the Corsican Mafia. But everyone here except François Hollande seems to
agree: You do not install one mistress at the Élysée when you have
another mistress. That is simply bad form.
Why
should the tabloids stick to the rule of the French press to ignore the
private lives of presidents if Hollande breaks the rule of French
presidents to lead an “exemplary” public life, which means having a real
wife to cheat on?
… “The
concept of the first lady doesn’t exist in France, and even less the
first mistress,” sniffed Olivier de Rohan, a vicomte and head of a
foundation that protects French art. “The protocol in France is very
strict. It is not a question of choice or pleasure. The wife of the
president of the republic was always seated as the wife, never paraded
as the first lady. I don’t care with whom Hollande sleeps. But the whole
thing is totally ridiculous, the head of a great state exhibiting
mistresses, one after the other.”
Or as one French journalist murmured, “All this, in the place where de Gaulle was.”
… The
French have spent centuries making fun of us for our puritanism, and
now they feel the unbearable sting of our mockery, as our press and
comedians chortle at a mediocre pol caught up in a melodrama with all
the erotic charge of week-old Camembert. (Maybe that’s why the French
got so swept up in the ridiculous but glamorous rumor about Obama and
Beyoncé.)
All
those French expressions we siphon because English isn’t nuanced enough
— finesse, etiquette, savoir-faire, rendezvous, je ne sais quoi, comme
il faut — Hollande flouted.
In the minds of many here, the French president is a loser because he’s so unrefined he might as well be American.
