Summer's here, darlings, and although President Bush was in Paris on Friday June 13 and the Eiffel Tower fell over on its side and the entire city burned to the ground, the usual events of the season are well under way. After Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, Madonna and Bruce Willis, the greatest of all artists, Kylie Minogue, recently received a French knighthood from a grateful nation (there is talk of a Nobel prize in 2009), the ceremony coinciding with the annual anti-leptospirosis parade in Paris-leptospirosis being the disease carried by our eight million Parisian rats-and with the highly decorative pile of dead rats and mice some supermarket employees made on the pavement outside their store in protest against the city's losing battle against the lethal bacteria caddies  France also lost at the French Open (where I wore a darling little short-sleeved khaki safari dress with epaulettes, gold and tortoise shell bracelets and rings, a coffee-coloured crocodile belt and matching Christian Louboutin shoes whose red soles provided the only dash of colour)  But we won at the Cannes film festival, where jury president Sean Penn ("I hope that {Barack Obama} will understand the degree of disillusionment that will happen if he doesn't become a greater man than he will ever be.") made George W. Bush sound like Pico della Mirandola. And the nation collectively celebrated the passing of designer Yves Saint Laurent. On Tuesday June 10, 2008, I went to a black-tie dinner given in the Louvre by a 61-year-old Texas socialite named Becca Cason Thrash, who ferried over a a slough of slack-jawed yokels known as American Friends of the Louvre, which Ms. Thrash helpfully described as "the preeminent art museum." I had on a black and gold Christian Lacroix dress with Lesage embroidery depicting my eighth husband's first death for insurance purposes. Ms. Thrash wore a beaded Naeem Khan, but Naeem kept climbing down off her head saying it made him dizzy to crouch like that up there and that the beads tickled his face. And finally we're celebrating the renewal of our membership on the U.N. Human Rights Council, to which we were re-elected on May 21, 2008, "having actively campaigned for a demanding concept of human rights." It was immediately pointed out by the usual naysayers that "Human Rights" and "France"-the same country that recently complemented its use of bills of attainder with a new law extending prison terms, without trial, based solely on the prisoner's looks, (maximum time in Guantanamo for untried suspects without access to a lawyer: five years; average time in custody in one of the rat-infested holding cells located beneath Notre Dame cathedral and the main court house without access to a lawyer: four years); routinely uses torture (still in first place in Europe); forced confessions (as in the surrealistic Pichard-Golse-Maury report); and strips a human rights troublemaker of his basic human rights (Paris Court of Appeal decision November 30, 2006 suspending his right to gather evidence or even to speak to the police), and as Nicolas' personal lawyer, Michele Cahen, called the individual in question (August I7, 2006 written summation and oral argument presented on October 25, 2006 to the Paris Court of Appeal , 24th Chamber , Section C ( R.G./Docket number: OS/22120 Dossier No. 20051029) " a person with no morals whatsoever," he must have deserved it is all I can say-is the most unfortunate and unintentionally hilarious pairing of words since U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger described sodomy as "an heinous crime."

 

As it's summer now, the children are here and at La Paumardiere for a few days. My fourteen year-old, Arnault-Ignace, has been begging me for a very specific guitar so he can play like American whiz kids and make music like his musical heroes all of whose names-e.g., Dimebag Darrel, Rusty Aids-Tainted Needle, Fifty Cent-seem to be drug-inspired and I said "My goodness, darling, we're already having your face tattooed for your birthday, and for Christmas you got that stockpile for your shooting spree this coming September." But I know he's serious about music because he has a rock group called Funeral of Death and they've even written a song ("In the seething gothness, you came to me/Together we lured this kid who wore corduroys in geometry/Away from the mall and then we took his cell phone and his lunch money/and we bought all this like Nazi perophrenalia from that guy.") and when he showed me that one owner described the guitar as "really urethral sounding," (http://www.guitarcenter.com/Gibson-Custom-Shop-EDS-1275-Double-Neck-Electric-Guitar-517600-i1149514.gc) I bought it immediately.

 

My daughter Marie-Caroline, back from convent school in the Pyrenees, had made a needlepoint prayer for me, and I looked at it and said "Oh thank you so much darling, you should be ashamed at how amateurish it sounds."

 

And she said "But maman, God doesn't look at the form, only the content."

 

And I slapped her and said "Honestly, Marie-Caroline, what have the Ursulines been teaching you? Why do you think the prayers of rich, well-educated people always get heard and answered immediately? Continue praying prayers like that, Marie-Caroline, and you'll go straight to Hell.

 

And she said Maman, where is Hell?

 

And I said Hell, darling, is not a place. Hell is the absence of axiomatic Nash bargaining solutions, and you don't ever want to go there. Believe me, I've been."

 

I sprained my right wrist and wore a sling for a week in June, and couldn't do a thing except correspond with the outside world via telephone and email, but Carla Bruni-Sarkozy stayed in touch several times a day even though her new Blackberry Bold still had some bugs in it and I was getting messages signed "Lot of love, big ki , Carla." Say what you will about my BGF, Carla shares everything with me. A message sent from Belle Ile: "Poor Loulou, we mi  ed  you   water kiing.  Becau  e of that   illy   ling there are  o many thing   you can't  do, you can't   ki or  ew or make your elf  ome  nice  u hi  or even ma  turbate, at lea  t not very fa  t, and I know that I would be  o   ad if I couldn't and even if it didn't feel  o  crumptious,  ex and   u hi are what  keep  me   lim! And a my hu band i a gay a a dai y, ometime I'm ju t timulating my elf and uddenly, what' thi ? he' there again, the big black man with no clothe on who live on the ceiling right above my bed and watche me, and hi pen i huge, it' a Mei ter tucke and he' writing omething down, and I ay who are you?

 

And he ay my name is noop Dogg.

 

And I ay how did you get in ide here with all the ecurity around the Ely ee Pre idential palace?

 

And he an wer hut up, you ivory- kinned he-devil!

 

And I ay plea e, plea e don't ay you want to put handcuff on my wri t and give me a panking and trangle me with my carf!

 

And noop Dogg ay : Ye ! I'm going to lap you're a with my mon ter nake!

 

And I ay plea e, plea e, top u ing ob cenitie !

 

And he ay , turn over on your tomach, you lut.

 

And I ay what are you aying?

 

And noop Dogg ay it' ju t my peni .

 

And I ay ye , but it' my heinou ! And I ay plea e, plea e don't tell me I mu t fir t uck anything pul ating!

 

And he ay Ye ! you mu t uck and uck unle I ay top!

 

And I ay Okay, and then I keep rubbing my  clitori   going round and round timulating my elf harder, fa t, then low, then ast again, and uddenly, my head  i pinning   and it make  me feel o   exy and  en ual and  illy and I ju t don't know whether to cream or ing or do both at the ame time and I hiver and hake all over and my toe  hrivel up and curl like ea hell  and he goe away.

 

"Oh Loulou," said Carla when I saw her the following day, "the Blackberry isn't the only thing not working. Nicolas' popularity ratings are sinking daily and his desire to avoid negativity of any kind has become almost unhealthy. This morning at dawn, he had all of the oscillating fans in the presidential palace taken out into the courtyard and shot.

 

"And now the press is accusing me of promoting drug abuse because of a single line on my new CD: "Mon mec, je le roule et je le fume." "I roll my guy up and smoke him," and everyone is saying how inappropriate it is for me to sing it as I'm the First Lady of France and all and I say they are wrong but nevertheless Nicolas has had to come clean about past drug use even though it was minor stuff and he's only smoked marijuana about 5 or maybe 6 thousand times in his entire life and yes he did take LSD once and that was news to everyone but me because it was one of the first things he bragged about on our first night and I thought my god he's not just a President, this guy really rocks and so he made up some more stuff about how Sum 41 had asked him to join their band and he'd said no I have to lead a nation. And they said: Which one? And Nicolas said: France. And they said: Where there's nothing but camels and sand? Bummer, dude. Anyway, he's never had a flashback from the acid, or even any ill effects, although he still sometimes takes the elevator without getting inside it and often puts his pants on head first, which makes him look a little bit how he looks in the full-body condom I make him wear, but it's pretty rare for him to grow agitated or violent if the microwave and the toaster refuse to sing Bessie Smith's rousing breakfast anthem "Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer" as a duet any more.

 

"At least Nicolas is self-aware about certain things. As he was being applauded by a crowd in a market yesterday simply for being there, he turned to me and said through his smile: 'If the French, the world's biggest consumers of anti-anxiety medication and prescription uppers, were to go off their happy pills for a single day, they would slit the throats of their leaders within six hours, and their own within twelve.'"

 

"Did you say full-body condom?" I asked. "Does that mean you're still having sex?"

 

She nodded and said "I agreed as soon as the senior negotiator met my demands and pulled me off the ledge and back in through the window."

 

Carla feels that God sends us signs, and that these signs are messages to test her faith, like that time she was taking a shower and a grand piano fell on her head and she took it to mean that she should seduce Placido Domingo and most women would take a restraining order as a sign to change strategies, or even to turn the page entirely, but not Carla, who I remember took the court order out of her purse, handed it to me and said "He's cracking." and finally Placido actually did become her ski husband and they would drive from Paris to the Alps every year singing polyphonic European masterpieces together, only Carla kept coming in on Gently down the stream and ruining it and Placido went back to his wife.

 

And now she believes the fact that she can only touch her husband when he is shrink-wrapped is a sign that she should spread the news of his intellect, and so has recently announced that Nicolas "has several brains, all of them well-irrigated," http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20080605/world-news/world-briefs and the official Presidential web site now includes a supplemented biography of Nicolas Sarkozy, which includes the passage: "A cursive handwriter literally for decades, equally at home with a crayon, pencil, ballpoint or even, under supervision, fountain pen, not only is France's dynamic and youthful president an author, or at least a plagiarist, but he reads widely and well. And as if that weren't enough, he is a licensed car driver, a bather, dresser, gourmet eater, swimmer, fly swatter, bicycle rider, rubber ball thrower and catcher, teethbrusher, haircomber and a consumer of luxury goods as well as basic necessities, in short, a Renaissance man." Yesterday, as we watched Nicolas cut the tip of his cigar and light it, pull up his socks and open a door by himself, Carla turned to me and said: "Is there anything that man can't do?" Carla's admiration of Nicolas' brains notwithstanding, I believe she has now set her sights considerably higher than even the nuclear power of her husband. I almost feel ashamed but when Carla left her beautiful lilac-coloured ostrich-skin diary in my car last week, I peeked, and what I saw tells me that her ambition is growing daily and is no longer what any of us can consider truly wholesome, for this is the authentic entry that I saw written in her hand: "Jesus and Carla Christ cordially invite you to a cocktail-buffet September 4, 2010 at 5 p.m. Smart casual, please."

 

Oh yes, the dinner at the Louvre. The tables were set with battery-operated votives, yellow roses and sterling toothpick holders, and were-even if toothpicks on tables have all of the charm of chamber pots on tables-elegant enough. Among the 285 guests were Ceron, a Houston beauty parlour operator, Los Angeles thrift shop owner Cameron Silver, party planner Ben Bourgeois, Caroline of Monaco and Bianca Jagger and if they could have brought Halston, Warhol and other Studio 54/Factory trash back from Hell for the occasion, they would have. So how did I, Loulou de la Paumardiere, end up there? The way one always ends up in Hell: invited by a friend.

 

The host, Becca Cason Thrash, of Texas, acquired the nickname "TriBecca," we learned, for changing costume three times at every party she hosts at her 20,000-square-foot Houston mansion, and for having been the first person to provide a description of the complex and misleading chemical structures of penicillin, allowing the antibiotic to be synthesized for the first time; of vitamin B12, the essential vitamin that prevents pernicious anemia; and of insulin, the hormone necessary for successful carbohydrate metabolism-although that could have been Dorothy Hodgkin (like most people, I am constantly getting the two women mixed up).

 

Rather like Buffalo Bill or Billy the Kid, Ms. Thrash pays a comically illiterate travelling scribe named Shelby Hodge who follows her around and writes about her exploits in The Houston Chronicle in an Englishy sort of language that a cow might speak, e.g., "Her husband and her were dining at Armandos in Houston," "Becca's party manse is actually for sell (sic) for about 38.5 million price is undisclosed (sic) by the way," and "Guests at her lavish events are as varied as former socials Paris and Nicky Hilton, Vogue editor André Leon Talley and writer Plum Sykes," i.e., not varied at all but uniformly has-beens, creeps and mediocrities of the first magnitude from the nether regions of non-French so-called fashion, and if her were still here I would pinch her.

 

After dinner, there was for some reason, but we were not counting our non sequiturs that evening, a concert by Duran Duran.

 

Becca's reporter friend wrote breathlessly, "This was a party that seemed to never end," and darlings, I couldn't have put it better. And just wait until the Thrashes find out that the Louvre is entirely state-funded and so doesn't need any money and that the couple who introduced themselves as the museum owners, M. et Madame Claude Louvre, and to whom she made out the check for $2.7 million at the end of the evening, are in fact party-crashing fruit and vegetable merchants whose only affiliation with any museum is as pigeon feeders just outside.

 

Even without the suggested minimum $100,000 donation guests were expected to cough up, this little do was not inexpensive: $5,000 a plate for Parisians or $10,000 for others, but that included bus fare, a souvenir bag (containing a tee-shirt, refrigerator magnet, pot holder and cap with battery-operated propeller, all emblazoned with the words Mona Lisa At The Louvre!), your choice of a 1945 Château Pétrus or large Mountain Dew Slurpee with dinner and a waiver for the sprinkles supplement should you choose that topping). All of this was of course paid for by my escort, an old friend with the clean-cut good looks and sweet-smelling breath of a pedophile youth pastor and who was until recently France's youngest supreme court judge.

 

After being drawn and quartered by Duran Duran at the Louvre, the two of us walked over to his place overlooking the Palais Royal gardens. If good men were easy to find, then unattractive women who hang out alone in bars wouldn't have to respond to sexual attention from nice-looking, nomadic, homicidal ragpickers with money, housing, medical and dental benefits with zero deductible and 52-week annual paid vacations, now would they? And those of us who are sublime certainly wouldn't be forced, as we are, to complain that finding a suitable partner is not a matter of finding someone with no mental illness-men and mental go together like salt and pepper, sun and moon, hip replacement and Rolling Stones concert; it's a matter of finding a man with a mental illness that does not place us physically in danger while we're asleep.

 

Sometimes you can judge the unsuitability of a candidate by his regard, the look in his eyes, the two most egregious deal-breakers being a vitrified emptiness that is far too unintense to seem lifelike, an almost Anderson Cooper-in-the-headlights stare, where, right behind the eye sockets, in the place of the equipment that comes standard on most models, there is a Hustler poster and a rust-eaten Camaro up on cinder blocks, i.e., not even enough brain power to run a hamster wheel, much less to keep you entertained either in bed or out; and its opposite: the everything-is-clear-to-me-now gaze characteristic of recent religious converts and crystal meth users until it morphs into the violent crime stare and then into (forgive me for being so graphic) Anderson Cooper.

 

And if one thing strips away the pretence and the masks and the falsehoods, it's sex. And yet, even though I feel lonely without at least two or three men in my life at any given time, as a woman what I miss is less the physical side of things (We all have fantasies. I have a recurring one about being locked in an elevator with any one of my girlfriends' husbands without him trying to make any kind of physical contact with my uvula or my cochlea.) than emotional intimacy, having a man share with me the same two emotions that all men share with you in their most unguarded moments: fear and greed.

 

 

In France, finding the right man is particularly difficult as all Frenchmen share a deep historical mind-set that links our beloved transvestite Joan of Arc and her BBF, the pedophile serial killer Gilles de Rais (go ahead, Google him, but as far away from meal-time or bedtime as possible http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_de_Rais), the weirdly admired Marquis de Sade; the misleadingly named Paris Children's Tour that takes visitors to the Necker Children's Hospital, the rue Verneuil nursery school, the rue Éblé elementary school, the Duquesne and Fabert police stations, a rue du Bac law office, the Paris Family Court, Court of Appeal, Supreme Court, District Attorney's office, the state adoption agency and the Olga Spitzer Association, and when the disappointed tourists ask what the hell they've just been shown are told that these are the places where children may be purchased ($1500 for an African girl, $20,000 for a European boy) and all fronts for our government's amazing pedocriminal ring; and my former neighbor from 54, rue de Varenne, Julien Green, who summed up not only his own but French thinking when he made the mysterious claim that the natural outcome of all eroticism is murder.

 

Well, call me old-fashioned, but nothing, to me, says let's call it an evening like having a well-dressed, well-educated, well-to-do and apparently well-balanced man slowly lift his lips from your nipple after a few minutes, look you in the eye and say "Wait a minute. You're not Mother." So, when my judge friend came back from the kitchen with the hammer, I grabbed the champagne bottle by the neck and struck him in the face with my very best forehand-it is, perhaps, a cliché, but, as all women know, most men simply don't tolerate pain as well as we do; the slightest little severed limb or trigeminal neuralgia and they turn into such crybabies. (And yet, men are just so bad about going to the doctor. I had a boyfriend once whose upper torso had been separated from his abdomen in a freak fairground accident (Tilt-a-Whirl, zipper) and I said "Sweetheart, you really should have that looked at," and he, or I guess one should say the part of him with the head on it, said "Aw Loulou, go see some old sawbones so he can poke at me and then charge me $100 when if I just wait a couple of days it'll clear up by itself?")-but even so my date was positively hogwhimpering with pain on the Versailles parquet in his living room and I believe I did some permanent damage to his ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to generate compassion, but no one noticed any change when he took the bench the next day, and I am rather proud to say that although my fright level at the time hovered between catatonia and incontinence, I did not just remain cool, but cool like Lava Girl when the kid says "You're hair's on fire" and she goes "Yeah, it does that" as I leapt from the balcony into the tulips below and disappeared into the night.

 

The funeral at the St. Roch church for Yves Saint Laurent, who had been embalmed since 1985, was very moving. Yves was, it was loudly murmured in the pews, killed by Tom Ford, about whose positively dreadful designs the divine Yves said "The poor guy does what he can," but say what you will, and even if Tom can't decide on his own image (manly gay cowboy or Las Vegas sleazebag?), the Americans are better than anyone at making money. After the commercial failure of Tom's Toupee, "the first fragrance with real hair in it," Tom's new unisex fragrance for men, Attrape Tes Chevilles! (Grab Your Ankles!) put the YSL house back in the black almost overnight. After the funeral I accompanied my good friend Catherine Deneuve back over to her book-lined flat on the place St Sulpice, and as we walked we spoke about how all of our friends seemed to be dying, or at least faking it very well, and how she used to be with Serge Gainsbourg, who looked the way Paul Leautaud smelled and who did that Lemon Incest video promoting child abuse that Catherine still calls "absolutely brilliant," and he was gone, too, now, and so it was nice to talk about living people and Catherine astonished me when she revealed that she had almost married Nicolas Sarkozy!

 

And I said "But you're old enough to be his mother--fucker would you look at the size of that pigeon!--twin sister."

 

And she told me about their first night together, and how Nicolas had had his chauffeur drive them to her flat after a party in Neuilly, and how they had left a movie-like trail of clothes behind them as they kissed and groped their way to the bedroom and had talked through the night and almost even made love before Nicolas had fallen asleep, and how Nicolas had had to leave before daybreak to avoid the paparrazi and put on his pants and realized, but only once he'd buckled his belt, that two rats-sound-sleepers both, had gone to sleep inside them, and he tried to shake them out the bottom, first one leg, then the other, but that just made them sink their little quarter-inch needles even deeper into his thighs, so he was doing this sort of bow-leggedy vaudevillian cowboy dance with the little rats squealing and lacerating and one of them managing to poke its head out of his fly now and then, and this was about a foot away from Catherine's sleeping face and she woke up and saw the rat's face going in and out of Nicolas' fly and thought "that poor man, but I guess that if I were a man and my own circumcision had been that badly botched, I would be shy, too," but then she saw Nicolas' glans bare its sharp yellow teeth and squeal and Catherine bared her perfect white teeth and squealed and stood straight up on the bed and squealed some more and bounced up and down and right out the window onto a passing bakery truck below and the mathematicians at the Sorbonne (ranked first in the world in both alchemy and gargoyle carving, but where there are still no outlets for laptops, the President of the University having said of computers last week: "I mean, how many people do you know who actually use one?") were asked about the statistical probability of any of the driver's colleagues believing him when he said I heard this loud noise and slammed on the brakes and Catherine Deneuve slid down onto the windshield wearing a baby doll nightie with "Friday" on it and the mathematicians calculated it at "less than zero." Anyway back upstairs, Nicolas was desperately trying to keep the rats away from his plumbing fixtures so was grabbing the rat lumps on the inside of both thighs which gave him the appearance of someone who, suddenly afflicted with tarantism, was now performing, as if he had often read about but never actually seen, the Charleston.

 

And Catherine told me that Yves Saint Laurent had left her something that she wanted me to see and I just couldn't wait and as we walked back over to the Left Bank I must have seemed in a hurry because Catherine giggled "Loulou darling, do slow down!"

 

We arrived at her flat and she said come into the kitchen and stood in front of the refrigerator, smiling mischievously. What, I wondered, could Yves, a lover of the best in everything, a man who imported exotic foods, of all things, to Paris, of all places, from around the world (Yves didn't wear a size 60 belt for the past twenty years by not importing his favourite edible rarity of all: Velveeta)-I thought of an exquisite unheard-of Mongolian ice, or a fabled champagne left over from some sheik's fiftieth birthday party in Marrakesh, or perhaps an entire box of something one might use to sew little calico hearts out of gamma aminobutyric acid. Catherine opened her refrigerator and I believe I let out a little scream and there it was: Yves Saint Laurent's head, and Catherine said "Finally, thin again," and she lifted it off the shelf and bit off part of Yves' cheek and smiled at me as she chewed and said "Di you know dat Belbeeta iszh de only cheeszh dat ratsh won't eat?" and I shook my head and leapt from the balcony into the tulips below and disappeared into the night.

 

It still never fails to amaze me how many Parisians keep human heads in their refrigerators, presumably so they can sing "You've Got a Friend" together and share what it's like to be "special;" I can think of three within twenty minutes of my house. There's Nicolas Claux, the self-proclaimed vampire and cannibal, and condemned murderer, author of what has to be my least favorite non-fiction sentence in the French language, (Claux recalls desecrating his first tomb and stabbing the corpse: "All I can remember is that when I woke up my forearms were covered with corpse slime."), now free. There are lots of others-Jesus, what a town-but the most vile is Professeur Jean-Claude Job, who, although not stricto sensu a cannibal, but merely a serial killer, actually created almost a thousand French cannibals out of unwitting victims in the 1980s, feeding them contaminated growth hormone made from the pituitary glands of rotting Romanian corpses even though a safe American synthetic hormone was available, killing 111 children, with 800 more, now adults, waiting to die of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) like the others.

 

Last night, Carla and Nicolas came over and Francois Fillon, the Prime Minister, crossed the street after work and joined us for dinner in the garden, and it was so much fun to be with the three of them. We talked about the crazies in Paris and Francois pointed out that while America has had 185 serial killers, France has only had 12.

 

And Carla said: "Is that true, Nicolas? Why can't we have serial killers too, like America? It would make us seem more like Hollywood."

 

And Nicolas said, "But we do, sweetheart. Bernard Kouchner, our current minister of foreign affairs, once had legislation passed making sure no damages could ever be awarded to victims contaminated with Hepatitis C by the French government, so just sit back and watch them die, he said; former minister Martine Aubry, who routinely twisted facts about the dangers of asbestos, is directly responsible for the fact that ten Frenchmen die every day from exposure to asbestos, and 100,000 will die in the next twenty years. Former health minister Jean-Francois Mattéi claimed that nothing could have been done to prevent the heat-related deaths of 15,000 elderly French people in August 2003 (and refused to return from vacation to find out for sure), but Spain counted only 141 deaths during the same period; and former minister of justice Robert "The Vampire" Badinter single-handedly murdered over one thousand Frenchmen with blood transfusions that he and other cabinet members knew to be contaminated with HIV. Serial killers? Hell, Carla: black magic (Tchernobyl) cannibalism (the growth hormone scandal), asphyxiation (asbestos), torture (we're number one!), vampirism (the blood scandal) and pedophilia (inter alia, the Operation Achille scandal)-we've got it all. We just don't feel that the term serial killer is good for tourism. Don't think rats: think Ratatouille!"

 

"You always know how to make me feel better, Nicolas," said Carla. "But how do you make French people believe that everything's always okay all the time, even when it's so obvious that it isn't?"

 

"Sweetheart, in a country where state-trained scientists and senior executives at Elf Aquitaine, France's largest oil company, once gave $150 million to an Italian TV repairman and con artist who claimed he had developed a way to detect oil from the air using a TV with a photocopier inside it, it's easy to make people accept anything. That, for example, France shouldn't have any facilities for autistic children because our leading authority (a child psychiatrist who has never been published in a peer-reviewed English-language journal) still speaks of refrigerator mothers as the cause of autism."

 

And Carla said "Nicolas, you are so sweet."

 

And Nicolas sat on the edge of his chair and leaned towards Carla so that their knees were touching and he said "I love you, you know," and Carla took Nicolas' face in her hands and looked him in the eye and said "Me neither."

 

And the four of us kept talking and laughing in the twilight, and as the summer breeze carried the scent of the peonies and the roses into our nostrils, the hurricane lamps finally went out and it was so dark that our faces were invisible, and words seemed to show up like fireflies in the air, and I felt happy, but sad at the same time, and Francois walked behind my chair and placed his hand on my shoulder and said "More champagne?" And I said "No, thank you: just a light."

 

 

© 2008 Louise de la Paumardiere

 

About LOUISE DE LA PAUMARDIERE It would be difficult to imagine anyone more purely French or a better embodiment of France and French values than polyglamorous Louise de la Paumardiere. Loulou's paternal great grandfather Andre Le Troquer, unfairly removed from office as President of the French Senate in 1958 for having run a pedophile network, and her maternal grandfather General Paul Ausseresses, unfairly stripped of his rank and thrown out of the Legion d'Honneur because of his role as a torturer in the Franco-Algerian war, are but two of her many famous ancestors. Author of From Foreign to French: 100 Makeovers in Stories and Pictures (New York and London: PLB Books, 2006), multi-talented and multilingual Loulou de la Paumardiere first came to public attention when several of the high-profile Paris-based foreign women on whom she performed makeovers committed suicide. Her family operates the majority of the uniquely French institutions known as Centres d'aide par le travail, or CATS, factories in which handicapped French citizens are employed at less than minimum wage because, as Loulou puts it with her typical Cartesian clarity, "they are handicapped." Her ancestral home, Château de la Paumardiere in Boilly-sur-Gui, an hour from Paris in Normandy, has hosted every head of state since Louis XIV and was a favorite haunt of Lully the Sodomite. She continues that great tradition of French hospitality on weekends in Boilly and during the week at her luxurious mansion at 60, rue de Varenne in Paris.