In France, age is a stage of mind
AUTHOR Mireille Guiliano has written a second book that extols Gallic female’s virtues, French Women Don’t Get Facelifts
Sacré bleu! After a run of successfully provocative books, including French Women Don’t Get Fat, author Mireille Guiliano has just published her latest thoughts on the general superiority of her nation, French Women Don’t Get Facelifts: The Secret of Aging with Style & Attitude (Grand Central Life & Style).
Except the timing couldn’t be more infelicitous. Mere weeks ago, many outside France would have hung on her every withering word and gazed longingly at her stereotypes of ageless, elegant French femininity.
But in the light of the farce running at the French seat of power, it’s hard not to feel as though the Chanel-shod idols have feet of clay and perhaps aren’t quite so savoir faire. After all, when France’s first lady Valérie Trierweiler, 48, discovered her presidential partner, François Hollande, 59, had found a younger mistress and was breaking up with her, she didn’t deal with it by getting a chic new haircut and taking up yoga.
Instead, there were reports — rapidly denied — that she trashed his office to the tune of several million dollars and may have taken an overdose. She was certainly hospitalized. It was later confirmed that he’d dumped her.
Meanwhile, amid fervid rumours that the other woman, 41-year-old actress Julie Gayet, is holed up in her apartment and may be pregnant, the international image of cool, Gallic insouciance in affairs of the heart rings rather hollow.
“It is so pathetic!” cries Guiliano. “It’s a disgrace and so, so embarrassing!”
I agree, but her sense of outrage turns out to be a singularly French one.
“The man is a president and he doesn’t know how to deal with mistresses?” she says, pulling an unhappy moue. “He’s supposed to do it secretly in the French way. He should have watched how his father dealt with women.”
Given that her new book focuses on the aging process, would it be fair to say that the broken-hearted Trierweiler will be binging on Ben & Jerry’s and weepily wondering if a nip or a tuck might have prevented Monsieur Le President from setting her aside for a younger rival?
“Firstly, French women don’t binge,” says Guiliano. “Secondly, what has age got to do with it? In France, nobody would make an issue of something like that. Both are beautiful women. If a woman has joie de vivre and is fit and healthy and takes care of her appearance then, of course, she is the equal of any other, no matter how many years she has lived.”
Guiliano, who has an aura of genuinely girlish charm that only a Frenchwoman or possibly Shirley MacLaine could get away with, declines to say how old she is.
“My number isn’t listed,” she quips. I have her down as 68, but there is something about her that seems curiously ageless. And at a point in life when many women feel invisible, she radiates a selfawareness that draws the eye.
“In France people don’t give a fig about the president’s private life,” she says. (In fact they do, but in a good way: His record-low popularity ratings have improved slightly.)
“What we do care about is living well and taking pleasure from things; we are hedonists. We grow old, but we don’t whine about it. We stay slim, not because we eat like birds and deprive ourselves of carbs. We have balance, we have equilibrium.”
Born in Lorraine, northeast France, Guiliano, who has a degree from the Sorbonne, worked for 20 years as an executive at the Champagne label Veuve Clicquot and is credited with turning around its fortunes in the U.S., where it had a low profile. Married to an American, Edward Guiliano, president of the New York Institute of Technology, she lives mostly in Manhattan but also has a home in Paris. The couple have no children, which might explain her unfurrowed brow.
Her Stateside milieu also provides the backdrop for her cultural comparisons. “The U.S. is a youth-obsessed culture to the point of insanity,” she says. “In France, we just don’t cry over our wrinkles the way they do; gravity is gravity, it’s not what matters most after 50.
“Of course, there are women who have facelifts and cosmetic surgery, but in France, it is a very last resort,” she says.
One nitpicky U.S. book reviewer has researched the veracity of her sweeping claim, pointing out that France had 207,049 cosmetic surgical procedures in 2011, compared with America’s 1,094,146.
That is around 10 procedures for every 1,000 people in the U.S. and around seven procedures per 1,000 in France.
Nevertheless, for Guiliano, being “bien dans sa peau” is the ultimate aim, which is something most of us would agree with, in principle. But her advice takes no account of the pressures of real life as most women know it.
Yes, I need to drink more water and walk more (French women wisely prefer a hearty stroll through Les Jardins de Luxembourg to an hour in the gym) and laugh more and buy well-cut clothes that suit my figure and generally allow my inner fabulousness to shine through.
And I will, once I’ve tidied away the mountain of washing and defrosted tonight’s Bolognaise sauce and written this. Beauty, longevity, enjoyment of life are all laudable goals, but I find it hard to fit in “a month-long vacation” to rejuvenate myself.
“Women especially are nurturers and multitaskers,” says Giuliano. “We do everything for everybody else and often forget to take care of ourselves. French women have no guilt complex about pampering ourselves. It’s all part of recharging and relaxing and refocusing.”
In French Women Don’t Get Facelifts, Guiliano begins with a quotation from Coco Chanel: “No one is young after 40, but one can be irresistible at any age.”
In Britain, grouchy novelist Martin Amis opines: “Time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like s----.” No wonder then that despite what she says to the contrary (“We are not perfect!”), it’s hard to escape the suspicion that Giuliano does feel that being born French is to win the Lottery of Life. What makes it worse is that she’s probably right.
“We are a country of moderation versus a country of excess,” she says. “We pick our moments. When I am in London, I love to have scones with clotted cream in that little department store next to Harrods.
“The scones there are delicious, but I will have only one, and the next day I will be careful about what I eat. That is the French way.”
Sometimes it’s the British way, too. But there’s less cultural pressure on us to stay alluring. Perhaps there should be. It’s rather refreshingly un-PC to state outright that staying attractive ought to be central to any right-thinking woman’s existence.
“Aging is what it is,” says Guiliano, airily.
“If you are an interesting person who loves life and is fun to be with and who knows what makes you beautiful and plays on that, you can attract a man anywhere. It’s easier in France, because as a culture, we are constantly flirtatious.”
So if, by now, you are wondering why every woman over 40 doesn’t just invest in some great shoes and buy a one-way ticket to France tout de suite, I leave you with this: Au revoir et à bientôt! See you on the other side.