Why I am giving up trying to be French
We’re fascinated by the French, as two new books show. Marie-Claire Chappet aspires to be Parisian but her Englishness gets in the way ay
The greatest compliment you can give me? Tell me I look French. No, wait, tell me I look Parisian. Much better. Let’s be honest, it’s what a lot of women long to hear. There’s still a fascination with the almost mythical ability of the Parisienne to be the epitome of chic; artfully detached, effortlessly sexy, alluring yet challenging. Who doesn’t want to exude the confident aura of a woman who has just left her lover in bed (hair sexily ruffled, night-before kohl smudged under her eyes) in order to read Proust in the park with a café au lait?
Why wouldn’t you want to get the look: white shirt just the right side of loose-fitting; trousers cropped elegantly above a classic pair of brogues. It’s timeless, modishly insouciant. I aspire to it all every day. And I am not alone. This month, the release of two books shows this fascination isn’t going anywhere. Stefania Rousselle’s Amour: How the French Talk About Love (due to be published on Tuesday) is a collection of true stories from her journey through France; a country she chose to reaffirm her belief in love, precisely for its amorous reputation. Then, there is Older, But Better, But Older, by Caroline de Maigret and Sophie Mas, which came out earlier this month, the sequel to their bestselling book How to be Parisian, which instilled the idea that one can acquire the signature attitude of the
French capital, wherever and whoever ver you are.
It is perhaps odd that both these books are on my January reading list, t, because, actually, I am French. I am a Parisienne. Sort of. It’s the “sort of ” that poses the problem. I am half-French, half-English. My father is a Parisian. But my mother is an English h rose, from London where – crucially y
– I was born and raised.
My relationship with my Frenchness ess has always been problematic. I have a French passport and I can vote in French elections. People ask me about ut being French a lot; like when anyone e comments on my unmistakably French name, or when I was at school ol and the other children would ask why hy I said mama and papa, not mum and dad. I was always proud to wear my Gallic differences as a badge of honour. ur. But my rusty French and my London n address make me feel like a fraud. My y cropped trousers aren’t chic enough; h; my sense of ennui isn’t authentically y Parisian and my hair isn’t so much artfully tousled as just plain messy.
Yet the late Karl Lagerfeld famously ly once said: “You don’t have to be French to be Parisian”, and Maigret and Mas’s first book dedicated an entire chapter to the most iconic Parisiennes who weren’t even born in the country, from Josephine Baker to Jane Birkin.
How to be Parisian can be read as a love letter to that iconic ideal of the French woman: stylish, smart, impossible; with impeccable taste in books, art and dangerous men. It owns the stereotype of the Parisienne we all want to ape, and pokes a little fun at it. Older, But Better, But Older provides a blueprint for how I would like to get older. Because, apparently, no one ages as beautifully or as wittily as a Parisian (sorry Helen Mirren!). I mean, just look at Caroline de Maigret with her shaggy fringe and barely there make-up. Her smart and rakish attitude is as sexy as hell.
I love the cheeky knowingness of it: “We’re methodical and yet shambolic, proud and yet self-deprecating, loyal and yet unfaithful. We are paradoxes, imperfect, vague, unreliable.” I, too, am proud and self-deprecating, so have those boxes ticked. Hmmm, but I am reliable to a fault, and certainly not unfaithful. Drat. I curse my mother’s dependable English genes.
I get in touch with Stefania Rousselle, another half-Frenchie, and ask her how on earth I can conquer my French impostor syndrome. After all, her book, Amour, is a mass research project on the way the French love: “Brutally honest. Raw. There was no pathos. Love was not fidelity. Love was not forever. Love was not always kind. Love was not romantic.”
Yup, sounds pretty French to me. Rousselle recommends I forge a similar investigation to get to the heart of my Gallicness: “Go on a road trip across the country. Live with the people. Connect with them. Listen. Share. Laugh.”
But then I realise, I already know the heart of my Gallicness. It’s my father. Parisian through and through, he is achingly French. I check his credentials against both books, just to make sure: he wears mostly black and navy (signature style sorted) and is certainly an intellectual snob – openly denouncing small talk, which he calls “cheap talk” as he sits me down with a glass of red wine (naturally) to discuss art, politics or… love.
Once, after a particularly heinous break-up, I asked him why I continually went back to a man who I knew was wrong for me. For an answer, he scrawled “Le Coeur a ses raisons que la raison ignore” on the back of a receipt. I framed it.
My father is also my living link to my late grandmother – a woman I feel enormously connected to, despite knowing her for only the first decade of my life. I have literally grown into her. My mother is thin, tall and blonde. I am a short, petite, curvy brunette like my grandmother. I know we must have the same hands too, as I wear her wedding ring on my right hand every day. One day I shall move it to my left.
A seamstress, my grandmother was a daughter of the Marais and Montmartre, who came to Paris from her native Le Havre unmarried and with a newborn son (my father), in 1950. Her story couldn’t be more French. I still visit her old flat in Le Marais every time I go to Paris, and it makes me miss her. My memories are of her flirting with the nurse in her hospice, cheeky and playful and yet – how Parisian in her contradictions – also pious. My father tells me stories of her eating oysters by the barrel – my own favourite indulgence.
But while I identify with the romance of her, in reality, there are many parts of me that couldn’t be more English. Yes, I am French in the way that I talk frankly about sex and love; like my father, I have a loathing of “cheap talk” and a natural love of black and navy. My love of men’s shirts, coffee, red wine and liberalism were all things that I did not learn from a book, but from the real Parisians in my life. But, then I realise all the ways I fail at being French could be celebrated as the parts of me that are brilliantly English: my sense of humour, a love of horse riding, pubs and Seventies BBC sitcoms; my all-consuming obsession with Hampstead Heath, where my beloved mother – a lifelong Londoner – was born.
Had my parents settled in Paris, I would, I know, hanker after all things London and romanticise the things that make me unmistakably English. All these are beautiful reminders of where I am from and when I think of them, I feel exactly French enough.
My cropped trousers aren’t chic enough; my sense of ennui isn’t authentic