No sex please ...we’re French

WE LOVE their chic f ashion, their benevol ent cl i mate and exquisite cuisine. We envy the ability of French women to remain whippet-thin on a diet of croissants, steak frites, mousse au chocolat and red wine.

We marvel at French children, with their uncanny ability to sit quietly through dinner with the grown-ups, consuming without complaint all sorts of challenging food — escargots, smelly cheese, salad — that would have our own kids throwing epic tantrums.

But what do we really know about the French?

Piu Marie Eatwell is married to a Frenchman and has lived in France for almost a decade. Her story, she writes, ‘is the usual one for many expats in France: meet, fall in love, marry’.

And, like many an expat before her, during her early years in France she was seduced by the charm of her surroundings: the freshly baked croissants, the rude waiters, the elegant French women on the Parisian boulevards, the enticing street markets. It was all so deliciously Gallic. But with familiarity came disenchantment. The croissants were sometimes stale, the women not always glamorous, there were supermarkets alongside the street markets and fast- food joints next door to the bistros.

In short, she began to notice that France wasn’t quite as French as her first romantic impressions.

Yet how tenaciously the myth persists. In fact, Piu Marie describes a recognised medical condition known as Paris Syndrome, a psychosis characterised by hallucinations, panic attacks and persecution complex, brought on by the realisation that Paris is not the glamorous City of Light, but a place of unspeakable lavatories, whose streets are in fact encrusted with canine merde.

Japanese tourists are particularly susceptible to the syndrome. So many of them succumb to it that the Japanese embassy in Paris apparently maintains a 24hour hotline for sufferers.

Piu Marie’s debut book is devoted to debunking some of our most treasured fantasies about the French. She argues that these have been fuelled in recent years by an epidemic of ‘Froglit’, which she defines as ‘a highly commercialised and f ormulaic genre of l i ghtly humorous fiction or non-fiction, generally written by Anglo-American expats living in France and usually with an autobiographical bias, dedicated to eulogising, elucidating, satirising or otherwise promulgating stereotypical ideas about the French’.

Piu Marie’s own contribution to the genre tackles the most egregious stereotypes head- on. French food, French women, French culture, French attitudes to sex, sanitation, hippophagy (the consumption of horse meat) and their views on the entente cordiale are all l aid out f or examination like a frog under a microscope.

Not, to be sure, that the French would ever consider putting a frog under a microscope.

They have better things to do with them, bien sur — such as sautee-ing them lightly in butter with a touch of garlic and parsley. Her approach is bracingly factual. In her chapter debunking the myth that ‘ The French Are Obsessed With Sex’, the statistics on Gallic sex l i ves are startling: more than three - quarters of French couples reported having bad sex lives in a 2010 survey — fancy!

But if the action in the French marital bed is unexpectedly dull, there is cheering news for those of us past our first youth. In a 2004 survey to find out which women the French considered the most beautiful in the world, over half of the top ten names were over 40, including Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Adjani, Carole Bouquet and Emmanuelle Beart.

Piu Marie concludes: ‘ The results suggest that the French take a similar view towards women as they do towards wine — that is, that a great specimen improves with age.’ Which sounds to me like reason enough to move to France right now, whatever the state of French cuisine (rapidly succumbing to malbouffe, or fast food), or French manners — so dreadful that in 2012 a politeness campaign (one of many) ran on the Paris Metro.

At the end of each section, Piu Marie provides a quick summary of whether the myth in question is true or false, concluding that all sorts of idees fixes, from the awfulness of French pop music to the Gallic passion for cheese, are entirely false.

But in an Afterword she admits that we are unlikely to let the facts get in the way of our romantic obsession. The truth may be that France is a country much like our own, with food that can be nice or nasty, children who may be brattish or mannerly and women who sometimes look tres chic and sometimes don’t.

So why, as I turned the final pages of her book, did I wish so fervently that I were reading it at a marble cafe table, with an iced glass of pastis in front of me, and the strains of Serge Gainsbourg in the background? Some myths aren’t meant to be debunked.