A few years ago I spent the weekend in a château deep in the rural Auvergne region of central France, writes Natasha Lehrer in The Observer.
Even more memorable than the crumbling property with its hectares of forest and decaying outbuildings, were the two elderly men to whom we were introduced when we arrived, who were enjoying an afternoon gin and tonic in the library. One – the father of my friend Guillaume – was Guillaume’s mother’s longtime lover until her recent death. The other was his mother’s husband and the owner of the château where Guillaume grew up. The two men had remained on excellent terms for 40 years.
The setup had all the ingredients of one of those lyrical French films starring Gérard Depardieu, replete with lavish interiors and rhapsodic landscapes looping through the changing seasons. It also ticked every box for lascivious British assumptions about the French, among whom infidelity, at least among the rich, powerful and famous, has long been something of a hallmark of a specifically French insouciance.
François Mitterrand famously maintained an extra- marital relationship with Anne Pingeot, which began when she was 20 and he was 47 and continued throughout his presidency. They had a daughter, with whom Pingeot lived in a grand apartment paid for by the state. She remained his mistress until his death in 1996. Indeed, during the entire 20th century, apparently only one French president – Georges Pompidou – was known to have been faithful to his wife. How the other wives felt about this remains undocumented; the stereotype of the Parisian woman is that she is as discreet as she is chic.
Since #MeToo, French attitudes towards consent and power within relationships both personal and professional have come under the microscope as never before. What was acceptable, even admirable, 20 years ago is now considered beyond the pale. The publication in January of Le Consentement, a memoir by Vanessa Springora, detailing her relationship with the prizewinning writer Gabriel Matzneff when she was 14 and he was in his 50s, was like a bomb going off in the country. Gallimard, which published Matzneff’s diaries, hastily announced that it was halting sales of his books and he was stripped of the state-funded grant he had been receiving.