Having grown fangs and a marsupial pouch during the night, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy awoke, and now she sat grooming in front of the giant termite mound that had sprung up in the middle of the presidential bedroom. She looked at Nicolas, her beloved husband, and screeched “Jabbajabbahabba?”

 

He opened his eyes, replied “Habbahabbajabba!” and leapt naked out of bed. Dragging his long reptilian tail, the president lurched towards the mound, where his wife squatted patiently with her back turned to him. Unperturbed by the patches of ringworm and dry rot, Nicolas began to pluck the lice from the First Lady’s back and devour them.

 

After a few minutes, Nicolas knew they were ready and he hopped around the room nervously until Carla admonished him: “Kabbakabbahabba!”So he hopped to the chopping block near the termite mound and lay his nose  sideways  on the wood and reached up to stroke it one last time, but Carla snapped “Kabba!” and he drew back his hand and looked at her sadly, his face the same as the day she’d met him, except for the holly leaves, velvet and worms. Carla steadied his head on the block and looked at Nicolas and said “Rabba?”

 

And he looked straight ahead and answered quietly: “Rabba.”

 

Carla took the jewel-incrusted handle and raised the scimitar above her head, let out a blood-curdling scream and brought the curved gleaming blade down hard on she woke up.

 

  “Oh Loulou,” Carla’s voice came crackling through my phone, “what do you think it could possibly mean?”

 

“Was it the one,” I asked groggily, “with the scimitar that ends with Nicolas bleeding to death again?”

 

“Yes, only this time it was even worse. I mean he hardly suffered at all.” I had told her before that I thought it came from her having issues about letting Nicolas be the one to sleep on the top bunk every night, but she refused to believe it. “Oh Loulou,” she cried, “I’m so miserable without Nicolas, it’s like having him here.”“Carla, darling, you’re the one who chose to abandon ship!”  I reminded her.

 

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is now sleeping at 60, rue de Varenne, but not at my place. Carla has very seriously hooked up with my friendly horrible American neighbor with the nice clothes, dullard’s gaze and cringe-inducing Y’all seen my dawg out here anywurs? heehaw accent and whose name I can’t even remember.  So while she’s at the American’s, Nicolas is sleeping at Carla’s place in the sixteenth—Carla had never really moved into the Elysee, and certainly hadn’t moved out of her own home since marrying Nicolas, and he was living with her there in the sixteenth district until he got his minister of justice Rachida Dati pregnant (http://www.paperblog.fr/), which was a surprise what with Nicolas being out of the closet and everything—but not with Carla, with Rachida, except on weekends, when Nicolas and Carla and their families meet up for a PR family reunion at the presidential palace. Meanwhile, a plumbing leak wreaks havoc at Seattle Grace as Dr. Webber attempts to implement new teaching policies and George tries to retake his residency exam. Derek hopes to make some changes at Meredith's house. Dylan shows up at Liberty’s with a video camera, ruining Parker’s plans. Meg finally returns to the farm and Paul is there. Thinking she was the one who killed Sofie, he warns her not to tell Holden anything and works to persuade her he was going to tell her the truth before they wed. The two reunite but Meg is spooked at the thought of Sofie buried in the garden.

 

Really, Carla, you must admit that it’s pretty rich: Nicolas’ ex-wife Cecilia fell for an American, and now you, too.”

 

And Carla said “Well, Nicolas no longer seems devastated. Even though I know he’s no happier with Rachida than he was with me because he said ‘Rachida will lie there in bed and make her eyelids open and close like a doll and say with this real like gravelly voice “I am North African Barbie, the doll who murders French Presidents ha ha ha ha ha!” just to scare me and I scream and run to the closet and hide.” And he said he feels pretty sure that she’s behind that Nicolas Sarkozy voodoo doll that’s flying off the shelves as well as that filthy web site that’s offering Legos that are supposed to look like us!” http://www.lepost.fr/article

 

And I said “Carla darling, Nicolas is devastation-proof. He fell in love with me, then Cecilia, then you and now Rachida: don’t you see a pattern?”

 

“Brunettes?”

 

“I was thinking Satanic bitches.”

 

And Nicolas no longer even likes living there. Four plain clothes police officers sit in two unmarked cars by the big rust-coloured steel door that leads to Carla’s home, and as they are bored to tears they like to wait until Nicolas returns from his late night jog around the block and then “accidentally” hit the insanely loud siren which goes bee bah! about two feet away from his myocardium and they roll their window down and say “Sorry, Mr. President” and then put the window back up and laugh so hard they choke because Nicolas’ hair when it goes completely vertical like that is as tall as Eraserhead’s.

 

And then the other night Nicolas and Rachida had gone to bed with the great floor to ceiling French doors open because Carla’s house isn’t that far from the Bois de Boulogne and you feel like you’re in a country house and occasionally an owl will alight in the big magnolia tree in the garden and Nicolas was trying to compliment himself to sleep, but kept running into bumps: Mayor of Neuilly, a black belt in judo, Minister of Finance, Minister of the Interior, President of France and  husband and master of a famous wife taller than any human  penis could ever be, I think, so everything mother wanted for me except to be a famous singer and now Carla says I can sing, so that too shall I lay at thy feet, for without thee I am nothing And it’s been so hard to sell the Skip a Meal for France program to the whiny French. so we won’t have to borrow even more than the 2.7 percent of our GDP that we already do to maintain our standard of living (if France were the fifty-first American state we would rank 46th, tied with Alabama, for standard of living), I’ve got a 36%  approval rating, which makes me more unpopular than any president one year into office since 1958  was I wrong to announce my plan to rebuild the Tuileries palace from scratch? Was I wrong  to show solidarity with the millions of Frenchmen devastated by the stock market crash by rushing off to stay at the Carlyle in New York with Carla and being photographed in a tux and one of those wing collars that you love maman but that non-Frenchmen titter at and they called me the croupier, which was an insult to France and Felix Rohatyn said we reminded him of that gangster movie where Bogart says to a hostage “Better do as he says lady, otherwise he’s liable to kick your teeth in,”http://www.arretsurimages.net/vite.php?id=1984 I love France maman where I can drive a convertible to the Ile de la Jatte and sit outside chez Carette on the place du Trocadero with the other rastaquouère and tax evading rug merchants and actually wear my cashmere blazer with the coat of arms on the pocket that says “Ivy Oxford Country Gentleman Club For Live,” without being laughed at by ignorant fools.

 

It’s just so easy to criticize instead of doing great things and by restoring that gate at Versailles that was already deemed ridiculously pompous by the Sun King’s contemporaries, all I’m trying to do is resurrect the grace and beauty of a more carefree and elegant time in France’s history, when men were men and Louis IX, later Saint Louis, was so scared of his mother, Blanche of Castille, that he’d hide behind the curtains whenever she entered his own wife’s bedroom  just like me with you, maman, and Louis XV was so scared of Madame de Pompadour he had courtiers disguise him as a fireplace whenever she was around and Louis XIV who was so afraid of one of his mistress’ children’s nannies that he gave her the title of Marquise de Maintenon and made her de facto Queen of France and Loulou showed me the diary of one of her ancestors, Louis XV’s daughter, the Duchesse of Parma, who wrote that “in the winter, wine freezes in the glasses, the ink freezes in the inkwells, and last summer everyone peed in the dark hallway behind my room  and the smell is dreadful,”  and really where would France, meaning me, be without stronger women telling me what to do and how things really are because one thing is certain and that’s that if you take French women out of the formula that makes up France then all you’re left with is a bucket of snails, some gunpowder and an accordion.

 

So Nicolas managed to lull himself to sleep and he was dreaming peacefully when  a liquid sensation at the foot of the bed caused him to stir but when he sat up he couldn’t see anything so turned on the light and a bat was sucking blood from his big toe, upon seeing which Nicolas executed the reverse,  over the head soccer kick that he’d been unsuccessfully attempting since childhood, smashing the bat into the large gilt mirror over the bed. One can easily imagine that this was the poor creature’s first encounter with a mirror and one can just as easily imagine the disappointment and even shock with which the bat, who had all of its life imagined its own face to be “a cross between Sherilynn Fenn and Charlize Theron,” now saw in its own reflection not Sherilynn but the Boogie Man Himself, and dropped, stunned and grieving, down onto the soft sleeping face of Rachida, who woke up long enough to scream  at Nicolas, who continued to grasp his toe as he hopped in place and spurted blood, like a kinetic sculpture made by some avant-garde artist whose entire deeply troubled opus consists of fountains made from pogo sticks and bodily fluids, to get a goddamn broom, then fainted, as BMH lay trembling across her face. Nicolas hopped to the closet, grabbed a broom and then, momentarily riveted by the uncommon site of a bat humping an unconscious lover’s and French justice minister’s nostrils, struck hard with the broom and the hideous little creature shrieked, frightening the bat.

 

Forgive me: I almost forgot to say Bonjour, future cadavers! You will have guessed that I’ve been impossibly busy but I must tell you that I’ve had such a delicious time of the summer and fall and now this perfect Indian summer, flitting between Paris, La Paumardiere, the President’s official retreat, the Brégançon fortress on the Riviera and Carla’s family villa nearby. Ah, the South of France, the earthly Paradise, with its gorgeous vestiges of Roman civilization  at Arles and Nimes and where just a few weeks ago we saw Michelito, the ten year old Franco-Mexican toreadoritohttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news(and what a time everyone had waiting for him to be maimed or killed!) and everyone drinking and laughing just like the people who had the arenas built in the first place; where six or seven years back, one whistleblower was so blatantly victimized by the corrupt local judiciary (pedophile magistrates again, yawn) that he was granted political asylum by the United States of America http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-06-26/news/group-plans-march-to-free-lauriane and where Nicolas just kicked off his own Union for the Mediterranean to celebrate cultures who share the three core values of olives, wine and slavery.

 

 

But nowhere have I been happier over the past several weeks than with my friends at La Paumardiere. Darling Paul Krugman and his scrumptious wife Robin were over for three days, shortly before Paul got his Nobel prize, adorable little Bernard Pivot, one of the few doughboys I’ve ever slept with and that was years ago but he’s the one who made me start writing, Lindsay and Samantha, Jacques Garcia who’s been decorating the guest house for us, but who is also a dear friend, delightful Sean Coombs, Claude Chirac, sir Paul McCartney and his daughter Stella, some good Mellons, some bad  Rothschilds (one of those can’t-get-out-of-it things),  Nicolas’ brother Andre Sarkozy and his girlfriend, but not at the same time as Nicolas because of friction, American Barry Sternlicht, who owns France, or at least Taittinger, the Hotel de Crillon and Baccarat and a laughing and bronzed and sort of repentant murderess Marina Petrella, a friend of Carla’s, who on Nicolas’ orders has now had to go back to being Miss Doom and Gloom http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/articleand I was thrilled to be able to surprise all my guests with those advance copies of Vanity Fair with Carla in her divine red Valentino gown on the roof of the Elysee palace and everyone squealed and jumped up and down and then even the women joined in and it was so funny because we were all acting like little children the first time they kill a cat.

 

The only somewhat negative note right now is this matter of Carla and this preposterous infatuation with her American. So I said “Carla, darling, summer is over, and we’re well into the fall, so please tell me you’re not thinking of letting a mere fling develop into something more permanent.

 

”And Carla just smiled that smile.

 

So I said “Darling, I beg you. I know you’re more demanding than this. I see him lurching across the courtyard from time to time and spot him at improbable places, once, you recall, at that Oscar party, once at a UNESCO human rights gala during which he sat on a sofa with his head thrown back, his mouth agape and snoring like a cement mixer into which someone had thrown a family of kudu skeletons, and again at the Peruvian embassy where I remember sitting in the balcony of  the recital hall with the ambassador and seeing your American slip out during some contralto’s performance to the buffet, where, I swear to God I am not making this up, he started stuffing his pockets with hors d’oeuvres. And you’re talking about leaving Nicolas permanently for that?”

 

And then she told me that he wants to take her to his home town, Cut and Shoot, Texas.

 

And I said “Carla, we need to talk now.”

 

And as Carla walked out my door and crossed the courtyard to the American’s house, she said mysteriously, “No, Loulou, we need to talk.”

 

Anyway, Vanity Fair was only part of the incredible media coverage Carla received for her CD Comme si de rien n’était (As If Nothing Happened). Le Nouvel Observateur magazine hailed it as “yawn-inspiring” and “trivial,” the Times of London trumpeted “there is no escaping Bruni's limited vocal talent,” but Nicolas appreciated Carla’s attempt at keeping up appearances during her interview with the famous Barbara Walters, whom I’d never heard of but who seemed very sweet when she did the interview here at my home in the rue de Varenne for US television so that audiences around the world could get to not know Carla any better than before,

 

Barbara asked Carla to show her one of the little blue spiral notebooks she’d brought along and that she writes her songs in and Carla showed some of the poets and artists who inspire her own writing, like Chad Kroeger of Nickelback, and she told Barbara that he told her he had spent a month writing that single, heart-breaking line “Why must life be so hard?” And then she showed Barbara some of her unrecorded material and Barabara read it aloud (with Carla’s permission) on camera:

 

super grass relaxes me

cocaine wakes me up,

my mother just seems

to really, like, hate

Nicolas’ mom’s guts

for no reason at all.

 

Then Barbara asked Carla to take her guitar and sing Ta Tetine, her song for Sarko: a declaration of passion for the president, whom she calls her "orgy," and as some of the lyrics are quite risqué, it is perhaps fortunate that they are utterly untranslatable.

 

Je suis ta tetine

Et toi mon gros grouin

d’amour en sourdine

j’suis tarte, mon Tatin.

T’es ma religion, je me roule un patin

Non ce n’est pas francais

Mais c’est con quand meme

 

And the interview itself was Carla at her plainspoken best.

 

BW: Tell us about your husband. What kind of man is he? CBS: Well, you may know that all of the men that I have ever loved have had a feminine side, and Nicolas is no exception. It’s rare for a man in his position to talk about his feelings or to enjoy wearing long, over-the-elbow gloves and blue eye shadow and waltz around the room singing “Satan Sold Me a Taco,” or make me pretend to be Elizabeth Taylor and say Tell mamma. Tell mamma all, and give him his bottle. These things are very intimate, but Nicolas is unashamed to express himself in these ways.

 

BW: But surely he’s also tough.

 

CBS: Of course he’s tough, and ambitious – he wouldn’t be where he is today if he hadn’t, as he puts it, “strangled some people to death with my bare hands,” but I think I am his absolute priority, along with his three sons and of course Brice, his personal trainer.

 

BW: Tell me, Madame Sarkozy, are you religious?”

 

CBS: Oh yes, very. I am Catholic, like my husband. Life raises questions I haven’t found the answers to. Why are we here? Why did God make Nicolas so talented and short and ugly that I feel like I’ve been kidnapped by an Oompa Loompa? Why didn’t my mother tell me who my real father was before I had actually slept with him? How do they get the toothpaste inside the tube? Do they lure the mother inside first, where she then lays her eggs? Is it all part of some great plan?

 

BW: Is it true that handicapped children are still not allowed in French schools even if a recent law pays lip service to their rights, which are still unenforced and unenforceable, ie no rights at all?

 

CBS: But they’re really not beautiful! Look, one of the many things my husband and I have in common is that our sons take priority over everything except our own pleasure and pursuit of power and adulation. So I know that Nicolas would never let his son Louis and I would never let my son Aurelien attend a school where they allow handicapped children inside. If we don’t have good reasons to exclude the handicapped in France, then why is the Eiffel Tower so tall and so pretty?

 

Anyway, once the important guests had left we received George Bush, John McCain, President Obama (Michelle Obama is our new BGF and we’ve already helped her rethink the Lincoln bedroom with ideas from La Paumardiere), and then the Pope.

 

We didn’t need anything else to make us love President Obama more than we already did (not that we would want a black man running anything more complicated than a broom in France, but Barack’s so wonderfully thin (can you imagine if he looked or spoke like Martin Luther King Jr?) that he’s like JFK and Sidney Poitier and Alfred E. Neuman all rolled into one), but when he chided his fellow Americans for not being more European and for not knowing how to say more than “Merci beaucoup” in French, we absolutely squealed! (http://www.youtube.com/watch)If Americans, said Barack, could express themselves in French the way we express ourselves in English—just look at official French government web sites like the one describing the chateau of Cheverny. “The castle that uses model to Hergé to draw Moulinsart, you will astonish by wealth, the density of his furniture and the authentic charm and  refined of his decoration. Today, the kennel shelters a meute of  70 English French dogs of which « the soup » remains a spectacle astonishing. {http://westernfrancetouristboard.com/loiredaytour2.htm)--well, America be her would place better.

 

A Frenchmen honoris causa, President Obama is, said Nicolas, “the fulfillment of our white Rousseauist fantasies of le bon sauvage or noble savage. Like Montaigne’s cannibals, he’s black, yet somehow civilized. We believe that he’s basically inferior, yet somehow endowed with a higher primitive wisdom, the way we believe that blind people can “see” things that other people cannot. And “Barack” even sounds a little like France’s favourite noble savage Chateaubriand’s tragic Mississippi native American: Chactas.”

 

Good old down-home Gallic primitivism explains why it is always such delicious fun for us to read about  cultivated French-speakers living among remote and repugnant but sexually hospitable savages--Rimbaud in Abyssinia, Gide in the Congo, Matzneff in the Philippines, Le Clezio in Panama, Julien Green in Oxford—and we got another dose of it when Nicolas freed French-educated hostage Ingrid Bettancourt from the Colombian jungle several weeks ago and there were parades and receptions and ceremonies for her because her rescue proved once again, Nicolas said, that France is always ready to come to the assistance of any attractive white French-speaking millionaire ambassador’s daughter who has been kidnapped by poor people espousing dangerous and repulsive political ideas such as sharing. Truly, said Nicolas, President Obama is one of us.

 

And Michelle Obama is also a Francophile, even though she campaigned against the teaching of Hard French, the kind with grammar and everything, at Princeton. Here’s an excerpt from an interview she gave to the Daily Princetonian student newspaper in November of 1984. “Non-Asian minority students are disadvantaged by the whole grammar and rules trip the French department is trying to shove down our throats. You can’t ever speak French if you’re always worrying about which conjugation to use and everything. My daddy, who was a Chicago city worker, didn’t know French, and are you calling him stupid? Is that what you’re saying? Well, did you ever think that maybe French is stupid:? In French, refrigerator, freezer, vagina and bowl are all masculine, while forks, erections, carrots and falling off a cliff are girls: that’s not just stupid; that’s nuts! Which is why the Princeton African-American Students League, meaning me,  is proposing New Conversational French, which is spoken the way the French speak English, by random mimetism, no grammar, no rules, just imitate the sounds you hear in movies. For example, you say to me “Comment allez-vous?” (That means “How are you?”)  And I pucker up my mouth like French people do and say Voulezvoustoulouselautrecmoutardedijon or something that at least sounds French and the context tells you that that means “Why I’m just fine, thanks, and you?” or “Nurse, could you give me a hand with these pancreaticoduodenectomial anastomoses?” or  “Our  talon tuck and jaw kits with 5/8 inch plain adaptors are located in aisle 4,” or “Mmm, snow cones! Yummy!” The wonderful thing about New Conversational French is that it can mean anything you want it to mean! Everything doesn’t have to be about rules 24/7 just because France says so. Asian kids would still have to take Hard French, for obvious reasons.”

 

Exciting news. I have to tell you that Carla and I have been making lists of smart, sexy (or, in Parisian shorthand, bcbg, or bon chic bon genre which means elegant or beau cul belle gueule which means easy on the eye), and high profile potential BGF material together since we were schoolgirls. And we’ve always rejected all of the BGF candidates for one reason or another. Recently, we even had a look at Seerapeelin, simply because Elle called her “the worst enemy of woman” and Mod Squad relic Julia Kristeva said that she’s worse than the Nazis, and even if there’s something about autumn and back to school that makes French women lose all perspective on the march of history and we agreed that they are probably momentarily blinded by the always astonishing return of tartan mini-kilts, we were intrigued.  But with her colourful tundra-and-lightning expressions (she praised Michelle Obama’s smile as “so generous and warm” that it would “thaw the snot in a grizzlie bear.” When Ms. Palin met the Afghan president at the U.N., she shook hands and said “Seerapeelin, pleeztameecha!” And he said “Hamid Karzai!” And she said “Gesundheit! You know, I really thought you’d have longer fur.”) she struck us as ready for the international stage but not for Carla and Loulou. And that girl who was in the papers the other day beneath the headline “Woman beheads man, parades it through streets” http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf seemed promising (I said to Carla “Now there’s a girl I could like. What kind of man would see an obviously fit and outdoorsy type woman  mowing grass with a razor-sharp sickle and think ‘now she looks like a good rape victim’?  She’s a true ecologist: that man needed beheading and she’s just culling the herd.”), but we deemed her circumstances unsuitable for her to become a viable BGF.

 

And that’s when we started to take a closer look at the sublime Michele Obama, a girl who has everything, and she has now become, by mutual consent, our first and probably last BGF.  Of course, even Michelle has flaws,  and you can take the girl out of the ghetto but when she met with Native American Obama supporters  and her husband had trouble pronouncing the name of the tribe, and one of the women introduced herself and said “My name is Mary Greyhawk and I am an Arapaho,” and her friend said “My name is Betty Silvercloud and I am a Navaho.” And Michelle said “My name is Michelle Obama and I am a Chicago ho,” and Barack just had a fit when they got back in the car and Michelle stared out the window and was, like, there’s always something. But neither Carla nor I consider anything we know about Michelle Obama to be a deal-breaker.

 

And above all, Michelle wants Carla and me to help her “to become French” and she has already flown back twice from Chicago to La Paumardiere because she really wanted her exquisite little girls about whom Vice President Joe Biden famously said “they are the cleanest and most non-violent pickaninnies I’ve ever seen—I mean they don’t even carry guns!”http://www.youtube.com/watch to learn to ride “English” as she called it, meaning French, and to speak French, meaning the whitest English possible.

 

And when Michelle arrived, Carla was there and she said “How darling! Old school jodhpurs!”

 

And Michelle said “No, these are actually stretch riding breeches, and those are my thighs.

 

”And Carla said “I am so sorry.”

 

And Michelle said “That’s okay. I didn’t take it seriously.”

 

And Carla said “I am so glad you don’t take it personally!”

 

And Michelle said “I didn’t say I didn’t take it personally, I said I didn’t take it seriously, coming as it does from someone who makes Paris Hilton sound like Susan Sontag.”

 

And Carla said “You are just so adorable comparing me to that person you just said!” and she hugged Michelle really tight around the esophagus, and then Michelle grabbed her by the hair and they were sprayed with mud from these fire hoses and everyone moved out of the way and formed this huge circle so they could continue to discuss Franco-American relations.

 

Well, no sooner had Michelle left than we had to help Nicolas with his son Jean’s wedding. I’ve known Jean since he was a baby, and at 21 he is already as talented and duplicitous as his father and a successful politician, and an actor (he played Julia Roberts in Charlie Wilson’s War), with all kinds of MySpace pages devoted to him by teenage girls who were distraught seeing him marry his childhood sweetheart, appliance chain store heiress Jessica Sebaoun. Shortly before the wedding, Jean and Jessica went to Israel and rumor had it that Jean was going to convert to Judaism even though a few months earlier to thank Jesus for having helped him to be illegally cleared of all charges in a hit and run incident involving his motorbike and the car of an Algerian immigrant’s son (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news) and it had looked as if the Arab driver might actually win in court (Jean was naïf at the time), Jean dropped to his knees and accepted Jesus Christ into his heart, but that same night, against all odds, Jessica, too, took Jesus Christ into her heart and spit him back out on the sidewalk and went yewee, so not the real Messiah.

 

Anyway, it was a traditional Jewish wedding and after the signing of the Ketubah, or what the Good Book calls “the blessed concealment of assets,” came the Badeken, where the Rabbi helps the groom to lower the veil over the bride’s face. We were told that this represents the story of Jacob and Rachel, when, after their wedding, Jacob found that he had actually married not Rachel but Leah, an eleven-foot manatee who, even by the fairly undemanding standards of the Sireniae, was not what one would have called a looker, yet who, the Bible says, kept Jacob happy by feeding him a steady diet of water hyacinths and turtle grass. So now, to make sure the groom has the right bride, he lowers the bride’s veil and then the rabbi tapes it shut. Then Jessica placed a wedding kippah, or rather a herring because no fresh kippahs were available, on Jean’s head. Then, following the age-old tradition, Jean and Jessica smashed their wine glasses on the floor and then the bride and groom knelt before the bride’s parents and Jessica looked at her mother with those big, almost biblically indecent eyes of hers and told her in Hebrew what girls have been telling their mothers in ceremonies like this from the beginning of time and which the Rabbi translated as: You’ve ruined my life.

 

And Madame Sebaoun looked at the rabbi and then at the whole crowd and said “So, my daughter is taking a shower, washing her ladies only and all when suddenly she calls me and says remember those grapes we forgot about in the fridge for an entire summer that time, well someone has grafted them onto my word I cannot say in public, and so I said those aren’t grapes those are hemorrhoids and would everyone here please tell my daughter that she is crazy not to disinfect the toilet seats in public restrooms, which, along with Gentile lips, is where you get hemorrhoids and that this is a medical fact and no I’ll not keep my voice down I’m your mother,” and like a lot of brides on their wedding day, Jessica was so overcome with joy that she couldn’t stop laughing and crying hysterically until her bridesmaids took turns slapping her. And then Nicolas, who takes special pride in the fact that he has always had man-to-man talks with his sons—his dating advice, according to ex-wife Cecilia’s book, included such gems as “Never punch a girl in the face on the first date,” later modified to “If you punch a girl in the face on the first date, get her to sign something saying she hit you and if she refuses then call me” and other important legal counsel that only a caring father would actually take the time to bill for—spoke and he congratulated the young couple and told Jean that his destiny is to lead France to fulfill her own destiny, which is to become an amusement park for the Chinese.

 

And then the very next day we received His Holiness Benedict VI who was here for a few days of course, and I have to say what a gorgeous and fascinating man he is. The Pope speaks fifty languages, none of them perfectly except German of course, but if there’s one thing we Parisians find irresistible it’s French spoken with a thick German accent. Forget about his Nazi soldier past, Nicolas told us. Hey, weren’t Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler and Dietrich Bonhoffer once Nazi soldiers, too? I didn’t think so, but they could have been if they were.

 

We walked through one of the grand reception rooms of the Elysee and the mirrors showed our colourful retinue:  inexplicably, the mirrors failed to reflect the Pope as we passed by.  We presented the Holy Father with an official gift from France (that had been specially made for Louis XIV himself for his 35th birthday) and he amused us by riding the sculpted gilt stick-horse  around the room a couple of times (I’m not making this up) and then handed it to one of his young aides.

 

And Nicolas and Carla showed him Napoleon’s sword and St Joan of Arc’s shroud and Ste Marie-Marguerite Allacoque’s eggholder and St Theresa of Lisieux’s boxing gloves and two days later he’d be going, Nicolas reminded him, to Lourdes, the other capital of “True France,” and Nicolas spoke wistfully of “the famous shrine of Bernadette Soubirou, Shaggy and Velma and the others.” And then the Holy Father was shown something not even most other heads of state get to see: the Elysee toy room where he viewed Nicolas’ Bionicle collection and an impressive array of video games and Nicolas said “My mom says that if I can get my popularity ratings up to 50% then I can definitely count on an Xbox for Christmas.”

 

Carla told Nicolas not long ago that she hopes he never loses his childlike sense of fun, and it was on display during the papal visit, and the Pope hadn’t been here for an hour when Nicolas goes “Holy Father, would you care for some salted peanuts?”

 

And the Pope goes “Right, I open the can and a “snake” springs out,” and Nicolas said “Why no, Your Holiness, not at all,” and then the bottom of the can dropped open and a live cobra flew out and up the Pope’s cassock and you know that high F sung by the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute? Well, most of us agreed that the Holy Father nailed the G just above it, although the little dance he did looked more like something you’d want to do to “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.”

 

Turning his back on a state dinner in his honour with the archbishop and the President, and more astonishly still, on the scheduled Friday night mass at Notre Dame, the Holy Father stated quietly that his place was with the poor and the oppressed he’d seen in the seedy area surrounding Notre Dame and although Nicolas tried to dissuade him, he went and visited these poorest of Parisians, most of whom did not even seem to recognize him. He gave his exquisite white cassock with the coveted Annibale Gamarelli Ecclesiastical Tailors Piazza Minerva, Roma, Italia label to a homeless man who lived under the Pont Neuf; he knelt and comforted a ravaged-looking immigrant on the uriniferous quai that runs along Notre Dame, and then knelt and blessed a group of rats as they ate bread crumbs some tourist had left, while unbeknownst to him, a group of handsome young priests stood in the shadows beneath the bridge, admiring the Holy Father and whispering about how good-looking he—

 

I shit on God, on the goddamn cross, on the fucking carpenter who made it and on the son of a whore who planted the pine!  This colourful, gnarled oath, spewed in accented French with a sort of vaudevillian drunkard’s slur, had risen up through the ventilation ducts and startled the Holy Father from his reverie at the altar in Notre Dame, whose crypt shares corridors and walls with the city’s biggest loony bin, the Hotel Dieu, or God Hotel, God being the police (http://www.mehrnews.com/EN/News), and the Hotel being the medico-judicial hospital’s salles fermees (“locked wards”), and with the world’s largest conglomeration of holding cells, which are in turn built right above some of the 1300 miles of sewers that meander beneath the city of slights. So after having let out a little scream, the Holy Father proceeded to celebrate Mass while Nicolas stood in the shadows at the back of the cathedral with Carla and me and at five-minute intervals during the Pope’s homily bellowed  “Boring!” then pretended to be studying the amazing labyrinth on the cathedral floor only that’s at Chartres.

 

At 8 a.m. the following morning, the Holy Father was still not even dressed. “You know,” he said, his red satin shorty bathrobe with the black dragon on it hanging open, revealing way too much information in the shape of a black satin thong with a red dragon on it, “I don’t really feel like going. Can’t we just hang today, maybe watch some wrestling on TV, shoot some pool?”

 

And Nicolas said “Your Holiness, about one million people are standing outside waiting for you at the Invalides.”

 

And the Pope said “Why is it called that?”

 

And Nicolas said “That’s where Napoleon’s defeated officers returning from war, or who had in some other way displeased the Emperor, got their dicks chopped off.”

 

But the Pope was no longer there; he was fully dressed and standing in the Popemobile.

 

The outdoor mass was marred by a small incident that was caught by dozens of cell phone cameras and immediately uploaded to YouTube and, mercifully, yanked down by our government within an hour. The steep plywood steps leading to the elevated stage and the altar were only a few feet away from the altar itself and as the Pope was speaking he kept inching back from the microphone for some reason; I was sitting just behind him and to his left and could practically hear the hideous pulsations of the Rite of Spring/Jaws – something-terrible-is-about-to-happen theme song, ““France is the Church’s oldest daughter, and what Pope John Paul II called ‘The Teacher of Nations, the City of Lights is the secular lux mundi, the cultural light of the world, and your civilizing mission must nev— ”  By now he had inched his scarlet leather slippered-right foot halfway over the step at the top of the tribune; he slipped, faltered and then fell backwards, his head cracking on the top step and then on the splinter-filled edge of each successive step, as if some invisible incarnation of virtue were pulling him by his snow-white over-the-calf silk socks, one clunk at a time,—if he had been a cartoon,  a xylophonist would have been required for the soundtrack of this descent into hell,—down, down the steps until he suddenly stopped, crumpled and bruised. All of us were stunned, but Nicolas thinks on his feet and when he saw the Pope lying motionless at the bottom of the steps, he was desperate to save him and he recalled as best he could his CPR training acquired from watching ER when it first came on and without wasting a second, made sure the Holy Father’s  air passage was free of obstruction, then jumped up and down on his throat three times, waited and then jumped again repeating the pattern until he thought he saw colour return to the Holy Father’s beloved face and he kneeled beside him and Nicolas said later how he would never forget how the Holy Father had looked at him, speechless with gratitude.

 

That evening, we sat out in the garden of the Elysee palace, Nicolas and his advisers, Carla and I, the papal nuncio in France (the papal nuncio in Paris solicits, kidnaps and provides children for “donors,” and serves as a liaison with the Paris American Church’s Uruguayan child trafficking agent Ramos Ramos-Quintoz), the archbishop of Paris Msgr Vingt-Trois, Benedict XVI, and. the Pope’s supercilious priest assistant who had spent the day at the Druout auction house where he’d bought some “pediatric gynecology illustrations by Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldstein,” which the Holy Father found to be “exquisite.”

 

The Pope is a brilliant linguist. Most foreigners on their first try stumble on the ting tang walla walla bing bang part, but His Holiness just totally nailed it right off the bat and we were all like high fiving him and you could tell that he was happy and he said “You know what” with this kind of quivering voice, and we all went “No, what?” and he said “This is the happiest I’ve been since my student days at Gregorian learning patristics, homiletics, drunken stepfather euphemisms for sex with minors, apologetics and systematic theology and then seminary initiation when we took turns using the hot cattle prod on this little Filipino novice and skinned him alive and then sat around drinking this wonderful chilled white wine from Ravello and nibbling on Girl Scout cookies, the kind with real Girl Scout bits in them and”—here he choked up—“I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I guess all I’m trying to say is: I love you guys!” and he just totally lost it, and we were all like “Awww. We love you too, Your Holiness.”

 

Suddenly I could smell triethylamine, the smell common to fish, semen, the hawthorn plant and menstrual blood. So I looked at Carla, but, wanting to remain discreet, whispered:  “N(CH2CH3)3? ”

 

And she said ??.

 

So I turned to His Holiness and said “N(CH2CH3)3?”

 

And His Holiness looked surprised and, as several little Brazilian acolytes and underage Congolese novice nuns spill out from beneath his soutane and run away into the darkness of the garden, went “Et3N?”

 

And I said nothing but gave him this look that clearly said Why did they come up from out of in under there for?

 

And then the Pope leered at me with this expression that meant like Are you prepositioning me?, pulled out a small hawthorn bush with a fish in it and said “What?” with his injured innocence voice.

 

And I said “I just want you to tell me something, Holy Father. When you were still just plain Joe Ratzinger and not yet the Pope back in 2002,  did you actually slap ABC reporter Brian Ross’s hand when he tried to ask you some questions about your covering up the pedophilia epidemic within the Catholic Church? http://web.archive.org//abcnews And back in the early sixties did you really help write the official Vatican damage control document that orders secrecy about and cover-ups of the pedophilia industry within the church itself and which is still in effect?http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/aug/17/religion.childprotection

 

And he gave me a stare so cold you could have hung meat in; you’d have thought I had left the umlauts off of Mötley Crüe. Then he slapped my face and I went Ow! and he said Nihil est. (It’s no big deal.)

 

And I said Your Holiness, excuse me but you’re speaking Latin.”

 

And he rolls his eyes and goes: Vah! Denuone latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur. (You’re kidding! Was I really? How silly of me. Sometimes it just sort of slips out.)

 

And as I saw he wasn’t going to snap out of it, I said “Nihil est?” (No big deal?)

 

And he repeated Nihil est. "Natura haec mihi praestat. (“Nature gives me these things.”)

 

And I said “Quod ‘haec’? (What ‘things’?”)

 

He grabbed his crotch and repeated in low-life Latin: Natura haec mihi praestat. (“Nature gives me these things.”)

 

So I was like: “Non intelligis te, quum hoc dicis, mutare Nomen Deo? (Don't you understand that this means you’re saying that God actually is Nature?)

 

And he goes  Tua  honestate dignitateque confide, sed quid enim est aliud Natura quam Deus, et divina ratio, toti mundo et partibus eius inserta?  Quoties voles tibi licet aliter hunc auctorem rerum nostrarum compellare,: hunc eundem et fatum si dixeris, non mentieris, nam quum fatum nihil aliud est, quam series implexa causarum, ille est prima omnium causa, ea qua caeterae pendent." (Believe in your own values, but in fact what’s Nature if not God and  divine intelligence that  permeates the whole universe ? Whenever you want, you can give another name to this Maker of all our things: You wanna call Him Fate? Fine! Fate’s nothing else than a  succession of coordinate causes whose He is the first cause upon which all the other depends.”)

 

And I rolled my eyes and I go Tua  honestate dignitateque confide, sed  nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione. (Believe in your own values, but please spare me your harebrained mumbo-jumbo.)

 

And he goes in this like real sing-songy voice: Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure. (I can't hear you. I have a banana in my ear.)

 

And I say “Et in dentibus anticis frustum magnum spiniciae habes,”(And a big piece of spinach in your front teeth.), but I was just kidding.

 

And he rolled his eyes and goes like : Nihil est, magister mundi sum!  (Big deal: I’m  master of the world.)

 

And I’m like “Intellectus?” (“What’s that supposed to mean?”)

 

And he goes between these like clenched teeth “Audio mihi, meretrix. Homo est quo dammodo omnia. Inter se geminos audes committere cunnos mentiturque uirum prodigiosa Venus. (“Now you listen to me slut. In a certain way man is everything. You can rub two cunts together and keep your gigantic clit working overtime as a fake cock, but you’ll never be a guy.”)

 

And I’m like “Obligatior viagrum.” (“You should do standup.”)

 

And the Holy Father blew this like huge pink bubble with his gum and it popped and he sucked it back into his mouth really loudly and without even looking at me—so stuck up—goes “Quisquis.” “Whatever.”

 

And then we had to take the Pope back to the airport and he said “Lovely, we can talk as we drive and thus as we say at the Vatican “rip out two aortas with one meat-hook,” and an aid spoke to him in Italian and he said “I’m sorry, the expression should be ‘to smash two skulls with one rock.’”

 

As president of the European Union until next July, and what with America now being, as Nicolas says, permanently out of the way, and France having won a Nobel prize for medicine and another for literature, Nicolas wants everyone to be more French, especially foreigners. It was in my bed at 60, rue de Varenne that he came up, in 2003, with the idea of a ministry of immigration and national identity and that law that makes it a crime to mock symbols of the state such as our flag, our national mascot the rooster, fashion icons Chanel and Louis Vuitton and of course our sanguinary national anthem. That is why he just went through the roof when he saw the way all those French kids booed the Marseillaise the other day during the France-Tunisia football game(http://www.youtube.com/watch?) And Nicolas said you have to know when to put your foot down, and I thought well that’s one thing I certainly know how to do, like at the Halloween party here the other night when we were all standing around drinking Frogs in a Blender and one of my children said please maman could she and her friends watch something called Nightmare on Elm Street and I looked at this Freddy Kruger character on the DVD case and said “I’ll not have my children giving themselves permanent nightmares from watching any movie featuring a monster who looks that much like Julian Barnes.”

 

Now these young anthem booers, “the scum,” as Nicolas has famously called them, would do well, he said in a speech yesterday, to learn from les enfants de bonne famille (children from good families), good families in France meaning “unindictable.” The scum would do well, Nicolas was saying, to look to people like France’s brilliant entrepreneur, polo player, playboy multimillionaire and heir to the Hermes luxury empire, Mathias Guerrand Hermes. And then of course as luck would have it, our delightful friend Mathias got arrested the same day on an Air France Paris-New York flight for having innocently tried to bully a woman sitting in first class, then her husband, who came to her defense, then the stewardesses who came to their defense, then the captain of the plane who came to everyone’s defence and Matthias grabbed the captain’s balls with one hand and tried to hit him with the other, and finally attacked totally the wrong guys in the shape of three gay Air France flight attendants who work out a lot,  and they of course tackled him and handcuffed him to his seat and poor Matthias spent the night in a New York jail and a spokesman for the Hermes fashion house  chuckled and said “Boys will be boys” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news but I must say that I know Matthias well and he is the gentlest soul one could ever hope to meet. I remember attending his wedding (to my darling friend Valesca Dost) in 1999 here in Paris and how it spilled over into a five-day orgy in Morocco my God what fun and the wedding guests took over the Mamounia and trashed it completely, and at the end of the second day one of Matthias’ servants, a young local woman, apparently asked if she could leave early as her child, who was only about a month old, was ill and they brought the infant to Matthias, who looked gorgeous in black tie,  and he held it by the ankles like a doctor delivering a newborn and everyone laughed and laughed and then his father Patrick, still in his polo togs, whispered something to him and Matthias started laughing and then smashed the child’s skull against a palm tree and bayed “Looks like mommy won’t have to go home early after all,” and Florence van der Kemp, who at 90 looked lovely and was there with her boyfriends, a blond twenty year old and some middle-aged wretch named Francois-Marie, laughed apoplectically and wheezed to Matthias “You naughty boy, h ha hac hack hack,” and everyone simply howled with laughter and then danced and sang until morning when Matthias wrote the young mother a check right there in front of everyone at breakfast for four hundred dollars which was more money than she’d made in ten years working for Matthias and his generosity and caring and concern for others truly knows no bounds.

 

One role model is, however, not enough.  So Nicolas has gone on a French identity rampage, which is why he recently told a French court to annul the marriage of a Muslim couple based solely on the husband’s claim that the wife was not a virgin http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Virginite and denied citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wears a burqa http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/12/france.islam, on the grounds of "insufficient assimilation" into France, and " excessive submission to men.” On the same day, a Moroccan man who regularly beats his wife to make her submit to his sexy French wife fantasy was awarded French nationality and a signing bonus that included a boxed set of Victor Hugo and a Peugeot 502 that plays Run for Your Life, the Beatles’ bouncing ode to uxoricide, when he honks the horn.

 

Furthermore, Nicolas has just created a National Commission on Immigration, Citizenship and National Identity to which I feel very honoured to have been appointed. (Our three external members are Elie Wiesel, the Dalai Lama and Ms. Fatimata M’Baye of the Mauritanian Human Rights Federation). Nicolas presided over the first meeting, held just last week at the Elysee, and said he wanted to remind us of what exactly it was that we were there to define and defend, so he started off talking about our universally-recognized contributions to civilization: fairy tales (Perrault), cooking, wine, fashion, perfume, the Eiffel Tower, the cogito or supposed clear thinking and of course me, or more broadly, said one famous member, Maurice Druon, the Frenchwoman I embody, to perfection—all French icons that make foreigners giddy with gratitude. What makes us French? asked Nicolas.

 

And someone suggested that surely one of the things that makes us French is how we look. “Frenchwoman” and “elegant”, i.e., thin, go together like “physician-who-pilots-his-own-plane” and “2 Killed in Cesna Crash.”

 

And I pointed out that one out of two French adults and one in five French children is overweight. Of course that’s using the French medical association’s standard, which places anyone who can be easily hit with a slingshot from twenty paces while standing sideways in the morbidly obese category. I myself am of course a Modigliani but do have some girlfriends who are rather rondes and whom I describe as Giorgione madonnas, Rubensesque divinities, Titianesque odalisks, Renoir bathers or Courbet earth mothers and one of them is on the verge of becoming a major Botero.  If they grow bitchy, I choose, of course, from my long list of spirit-sapping adjectives. A lot of distinguished Frenchwomen such as Simone Veil, Simone Signoret, Marguerite Yourcenar, and our Health Minister, Roselyne Bachelot, have been unthin. Roselyne is the author of some of  the French state’s  most egregious fashion mistakes http://blogs.rtl.fr/aphatie/public/ancien_blog (after one of which Nicolas told her to “make an appointment with Madame de la Paumardiere today,”and I explained to her that the purpose of haute couture is to attract gay men who will see in you the mother they never left and I kissed her on the lips and she started crying and I said don’t ever let people see you cry you’re a cabinet member and she said how beautiful I was and I said I know.)

 

Even my darling friend Mireille Guiliano, author of Frenchwomen Don’t Get Fat has put on twenty pounds and when I saw her down on the corner at the Café de Varenne  last Thursday or Friday enjoying a lard lover’s special with pig’s snouts, pig’s feet, pig’s intestines, garlic sausage, pistachio-stuffed saucisson de Lyon en brioche and a side order of bacon so much that she was actually starting to snort, I said “Mireille, ma petite cherie, only 11% of us are obese for now, half the American rate, but we’re definitely on track to match American levels by 2020 ( http://www.slate.com/id/2113911/),so shouldn’t you think about writing a sequel and you could call it Frenchwomen Don’t Get Fat, My Ass?” And Mireille smiled at me with her mouth very full and started to answer and I said “Please don’t try to speak or smile that is just so gross,” and hurried off to not have lunch.

 

Being effortlessly fit or fit-looking comes quite naturally from one of the foremost characteristics of the French mindset, and that is la mesure, or moderation in everything, but don’t miss anything. I always have an entrée or first course, a main course, cheese and never skip dessert; have wine at lunch and at dinner; never skip breakfast; never eat between meals, except mid- morning coffee and pastry and tea-time pastry and champagne; never accept food outside of those meals and never refuse alcohol or drugs from friends. One of the reasons that we are the most enthusiastic consumers of wine in Europe and of amphetamines in the world is probably because we are all so desperately unhappy ( http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com) The Frenchwoman's secret is to stay slightly drunk 24/7, but do speed so she doesn't fall asleep.

 

The country that has understood the principle of la mesure the least is also the only country by whom we feel truly threatened, Italy, who taught us everything we know and makes us feel ugly and unimaginative and greyly symmetrical (Bernini proposed sculpting spectacular gigantic seashells into the façade of the Louvre so that they would reflect in the Seine and the city fathers handed him back his drawings and said “This is so not Parisian,”) so we are thankful that they are vulgar and flashy and emotive and allow their children to get fat. What Bernini and his race do not seem to understand is that the principle of moderation applies not merely to food, but to everything. As I remember telling one of my children who’d stuck her tongue out at another child, “You want to be sparing with that sort of thing. There are so many people in need.”

 

All I know is that I want to be really sick when I die—so sick  that the doctors will be unable to determine whether it was the butter and alcohol poisoning or the exertions of the sexual fun  they had repeatedly warned me, a 150-year-old woman, against, that finally did me in and will simply stand there and shake their heads and say “Coulda been anything.”

 

And then Elie Wiesel said surely another characteristic of what it means to be French might be what primitive cultures refer to in their unlettered idioms as “lying”. Only France, said he, has anything like the Court of Justice of the Republic whose sole purpose is to whitewash all officials from cabinet ministers to government contract killers. Only the French president, who is also the Chief Magistrate of France, spends such an amazing amount of time rigging judicial cases concerning everything from homicide to kidnapping, child custody, noisy neighbors, stolen bicycles and parking tickets (http://www.reds.msh-paris.fr/). Only France routinely falsifies scientific data the way, say, our state-contract physicists, who are the best in the world, have: no Iranian or North Korean physicist has ever, so far as we know, falsified data. Nicolas helped oversee the whopper of a state-propagated lie about the Tchernobyl fallout having missed blessed France as he was at the time a lowly charge de mission for nuclear fallout and radioactivity, i.e., at the heart of the state lie. (http://forums.france2.fr/france2) Strangely, that part of Nicolas’ c.v. has since been deleted from official records,” said Elie with a chuckle. “In May 2006, an independent Dutch investigative commission concluded that it wasn’t Lance Armstrong who cheated to win seven Tours de France, but the official French state laboratory that falsified data to make it look as if he had. In February of last year a state-subsidized rag called Courrier international du Monde claimed that New Jersey was about to become the first American state ever to follow France’s moral lead and abolish the death penalty the way France had in 1981, “forgetting” to mention that, e.g., Michigan abolished it 117 years before France. “Even when France is found guilty of human rights crimes that resulted from the falsification of objective scientific data,” admonished Elie, “you refuse to change your position (http://noelmamere.fr/article.php3?id_article=736) just to make it fit with what non-France calls ‘objective reality.’”

 

And Nicolas started whistling as if he hadn’t heard anything. (Quite frankly, I was ashamed.) And Elie Wiesel told Nicolas he was being childish and Nicolas said “I know Elie Wiesel is, but what am I?” and stuck his tongue out at him and stomped out of the room.

 

And then Fatimata M’Baye said: “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but surely sadism, the taste for torture, is as French a characteristic as Selmouni vs. France July 28 1999;  Rivas vs. France, 1 April 2004 and R.L. et M.-J.D. vs. France, 19 May 2004, for starters. And since 2000 there has been a 70% increase  in the number of people being thrown in jail over minor or even purely invented incidents http://www.ldh-toulon.net/spip.php?article2660 and now you’re even jailing women you know in advance shouldn’t be jailed. http://www.raidh.org/Temoignage-d-un-ex-officier-de.html. Why?  Because any jail time even for a few hours means the prisoner must by law be stripped naked and given a body cavity search, so let’s all order pizza and get drunk and take photos and who’s to know? If you weren’t seriously into torture why else would it actually be illegal to read a suspect her rights, to have a lawyer present during questioning by the police (other than, bizarrely, for five to fifteen minutes during the first and twentieth hours (why then?); or  to release her even if you cannot specify what crime she committed?

 

“You can’t complain about police brutality unless one of your parliamentarians does it on your behalf (fat chance), and then of course the only commission authorized to hear such complaints is run by an elderly crank former judge named Pierre Truche, someone so corrupt that even other French judges have written books denouncing his activities as liable to give French judicial corruption a bad name, so once the torture statistics for 2005-2010 start rolling in, it’s a pretty good bet that France will hold on to the much-coveted victor’s cup for, like, the fifitieth year in a row.

 

“Still, as much as you love torture, your love of bullies  is blatantly expressed in your nostalgia for a King, for a Master or, as you used to say, a Fuhrer, aka masochism, which is why when you go into a hotel or a shop and hand out free slaps to everyone there, starting with the big cheese and working your way down, you’ll be treated like a living god, but the slightest whiff of French provincial excuse-me-for-bothering-you and you’ll be treated, if you’re gifted, like a dog.”

 

And Nicolas said “Perhaps we could not hear from Madame Hakuna Matata.”

 

And Madame M’Baye said “Thank you, Mr President. I wonder if there isn’t a contradiction between making Louis Vuitton a national symbol and the fact that the Louis Vuitton family built their empire by actively aiding the Nazis and Marshal Philippe Petain’s puppet government, which was responsible for the deportation of French Jews to German concentration camps, and they even built  a special factory just to mass produce 2,500 busts of Petain himself!”

 

And Nicolas said: “Well, that’s all in the past, isn’t it?”

 

 

“Well,” said Fatimata, “I note that in June of this year a 17 year-old Jewish boy was beaten into a coma and on Sunday, September 7, 2008, three Jewish kids were severely beaten in Paris, and isn’t Google just swarming with other examples of recent Jewish victims such as Mathieu Roumi and Ilan Halimi?”

 

And Nicolas said, “But those things happened decades ago. Today’s France has changed. I mean, look, it’s late October 2008!”

 

Then Fatimata said: “I don’t want anyone to take this the wrong way, and I absolutely believe, with you all, that Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was one of France’s greatest women, but during the Nazi occupation of Paris, didn’t Coco  live at the Ritz, which had a Nazi flag flying over it, with Nazi officer Hans von Dincklage (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Gunther_von_Dincklage), a military attaché with the German Embassy and a spy, 13 years her junior? Hans was in charge of uncovering Jews who were hiding in Paris and he and Coco used to laugh and play and look over the lists together and sometimes go in their chauffeur-driven limousine over to a raid and join with other German officers, whose boots were always polished and most of them could quote Latin writers and so were real gentlemen, and watch as families were dragged out of their apartments by their hair and Chanel was asked why she was living with a Nazi officer and She answered “Hans is a Nazi? I thought his uniform, Nazi salute to other Nazis and those Nazi flags mounted on the fenders just meant that he liked to play dress-up!” And indeed Chanel had once dressed Hans for a meeting of senior Nazi officers and he showed up wearing only her pincushion bracelet and a tape measure. And one time in their suite at the Ritz Coco answered the phone and it was Hitler himself and he asked “Is Paris burning?” And Coco put her hand over the receiver and turned to Hans and said “Watch this,” and Hans was making these frantic throat slitting gestures for her not to do it and she says “I’ve got a little joke for you, Mein Fuhrer,” and he goes “Shoot.” And Coco says “Why did the chicken cross the Mobius strip?” And Hitler said “I don’t know, why?”And Coco goes: “To get to the same side!” And Hitler laughed and to tell the truth he needed a laugh because he was still recovering from the nasty accident that had occurred when he’d accepted another one of those famous master race dares from Goebbels, who bet him an entire hamhock that he couldn’t go down the University of Berlin library steps backwards on roller skates without falling. So then Hitler said to Coco: “I’ve got one for you: Knock knock,” and Coco said “Who’s there?” and he goes “Aufmachen!”(“Open up!”) and she just fell all over herself and Hitler sort of chuckled at her laughing so hard and then Coco told him that she often went to German restaurants in Paris and that she even preferred them to French ones and Hitler was so flattered and he said “Really?” and she goes “Yes, the food’s great; the only thing is—stop me if you’ve heard this one, mein Fuhrer— an hour later you’re hungry for power!” And Hitler laughed so hard that the stuffed squab he had in his mouth came out his nose and seeing the pigeons’ faces protruding from the Fuhrer’s nostrils made his aide de camp just crack up and Hitler said “I’b glad you fide it so fuddy!” and gave the aide de camp one of his famous Russian front stares and still laughing the aide de camp took out his Luger and shot himself.  And Coco managed to negotiate the capitulation of the Allies but the deal fell through when the Allies tricked her and won the war instead and when V-Day came Hans was forced to walk down the Champs Elysees in that humiliating pincushion tenue but my countrymen were thankful that France had won the war (with parenthetical help from the Allies) principally because if we’d lost we’d have had to watch Churchill wear the pincushion. Chanel is, at any rate, the finest embodiment of True France and is perhaps remembered most fondly for her final negotiations with Hitler, during which she made her now famous suggestion. “You know,” said Coco, “The National Socialist Party’s swastika logo is absolutely stunning, but so terribly angular. If we were to soften it just a trifle, we could make it into, say, two interlocking Cs.”

 

When he was Interior Minister, Nicolas gained a reputation for his brilliant covert operations against threats to national security (Nicolas says that “national security” is one of the three modern synonyms—the other two are “the child’s best interest” and non compos mentis (when applied to elderly parents living in pointlessly splendid beachfront properties)—for “witch,” and they all allow civil and human rights to be “momentarily” suspended for an “emergencies”), although the famous Invalides incident of 2003 has unfortunately tended to overshadow his considerable achievements as France’s de facto chief of police. At the time, the threat was embodied by an Australian human rights lawyer named Henry Lawson who lived at 1, avenue de Tourville in a second-floor corner flat overlooking the Invalides on one side and the boulevard des Invalides on the other, and who had been deported more than once for having taught a choir of alley cats to sing  “Paris Is the Reason They Make Exit Signs.”

 

Nicolas placed detectives Heilbronn and Leclerc in charge of eliminating Lawson. Heilbron, the brains of the operation, was called upon whenever Nicolas needed to fabricate evidence or force a confession and although he was known as a two-faced swindler with a weakness for murder,  Heilbron possessed MacGyver-like skills which a thousand Mentos geysers had turned into legend. He was joined by his partner, detective Leclerc, a good-natured colossus and papa-gateau.

 

Heilbronn was a specialist in Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) and notably time bombs disguised as innocuous everyday objects, and in this case used a large padded envelope bearing the return address of the God Is Human Rights. Org group by whom the victim was employed, only containing what Nicolas had called “a nice little surprise” in the form of two sticks of dynamite and an alarm clock, set to go off in thirty minutes, at which time the victim would have arrived and been home for about ten minutes. But when Heilbron looked at the blueprints and saw the size of the flat, he enclosed the dynamite in a deadly plastic explosive called Primasheet, then he added a short section of steel water pipe containing black powder, nails and ball bearings,  and an electric fuse running out to the alarm clock to insure success.

 

Heilbronn decided that he would disguise himself as a gentle blind man with his seeing eye dog. He was given Moumoute, a 3-year-old golden retriever who’d become a bomb sniffer with the gendarmerie after being kicked out of the seeing eye dog school on the avenue de Saint Maurice due to an almost dolphin-like penchant for the ludic and Leclerc would work him into a euphoric frenzy with his who’s the pwettiest widdle boy that ever lived, who’s the best puppy, who’s the best yes he is oh yes he is until Heilbronn slapped him and said “Ever think about trying to act like a grown man?”

 

On that early winter evening it was already dark when Heilbronn placed the envelope  against the victim’s door, then he and Moumoute quietly left the building, the blind man and his seeing eye dog and crossed the boulevard des Invalides where Leclerc was waiting within sight of the  victim’s flat and now seemed to be gesturing to Heilbronn who had to pretend not to be able to see him but as he got closer he could see that Leclerc was indeed waving his arms wildly and pointing at him and shouting Run! and as he got closer  Run goddamn it! and as Leclerc had run away he’d bellowed even more intriguingly Oh God we’re all going to die! and Heilbronn looked down and Moumoute was grinning with the envelope in his teeth and was waiting for Heilbron to thank him for having picked it back up and pat him on the head but instead Heilbron said many bad words and ran after Leclerc and Moumoute ran after them because he loved to play tag and after zigzagging up and down and back and forth across the boulevard des Invalides shouting Moumoute, go away! The detectives jumped into the dry moat that surrounds that institution and hid there, their hearts pounding, for over one minute. Then, a thud. And they looked down and of course there stood Moumoute, tail wagging, and you can jump down into the moat but there’s no way back up and it’s a mile or so around so they said Moumoute, stay, and ran away and the dog stayed until he couldn’t stand it and so ran after them until Leclerc found a rock and it hit him and really stung and Moumoute decided he’d misjudged Leclerc and decided then and there that henceforth he would give all of his love to Heilbron, who was harder to catch so he sped up until on his second sprint around the moat with Moumoute hot on his heels, Heilbron started to slow down, looplegged with fatigue and his screaming having now modulated to a high-pitched squeal that sounded like the gifted eight- year-old female guest soloist of a pentecostalist gospel choir singing “Mama Get A Hammer (There's A Fly On Daddy's Head)” on helium and finally the wheezing was all but silent as he tried unsuccessfully to catch his breath, almost too weary to draw his weapon when Moumoute appeared at his feet still grinning and slobbering with the envelope in his mouth, tail still wagging inanely and Heilbron struck him with his night stick and Moumoute yelped and ran away as fast as he could, so loveless and forlorn that he hadn’t even remembered to pick up the envelope he’d set at Heilbronn’s feet in the dark. And the explosion catapulted the dog back onto the sidewalk above the moat where, no longer a pariah, he ran across the boulevard des Invalides to the welcoming, tree-trunk-like arms of  Leclerc,  and Heilbronn rocketed skyward, pieces of him raining down on the surrounding pavement with a nasty splat, like raw liver being shot from a purpose built automatic weapon mounted in a helicopter and hundreds of eyewitnesses said that the golden dome of the Invalides jumped sixty feet off its chapel and came back down again in a cloud of smoke the bodies of the cars that lined the streets within a six-block radius levitated off their axles and then back down again, the lid had blown off of Napoleon’s magnificent mahogany casket and the Emperor’s remains had somehow landed intact in the arms of a tourist to whom someone had just said “First time to Paris?” and who promptly died of a heart attack. Anyway, Nicolas was not happy with the operation.

 

We helped draft a supplement to the 2003 law on national identity and national symbols (with legal assistance provided pro bono and even though they were busy defending their own son Daniel on major felony charges in court that day by Nicolas’ patriotic lawyers Micheline and Bertrand Cahen) and voted into law on November 15, 2008. In it we outlaw offensive descriptions of the French and of France by French authors, who are not, Nicolas pointed out, representative of True France. Already on our initial list were four or five hundred authors, including Montaigne for having written inter alia in 1580 “The French surpass cannibals in every kind of barbarity.” Writer and French ambassador Paul Claudel called France," that stupid, hateful, bourgeois (i.e., Philistine) country on which I shake off the dirt from my slippers.”  France’s greatest poet, Aime Cesaire, referred to his own homeland as “an old turd” and “a worm-drawn carriage.” And perhaps the worst violator of the sacred symbolism of our great nation was General De Gaulle, who once said—and this was while he was the President of France—that only an utter fool would ever speak unironically of la douce France,” i.e., the storybook sweet and gentle France dear to the French masses and foreigners. http://www.europe-revue.info/1999/giraudouxintro.htm Here are some of the loathsome sentences or phrases formerly found in the oeuvre of Voltaire (they all come from the year 1769 alone, so one can see the necessity of a permanent committee such as ours) that we decided during our preliminary meeting to delete permanently:

 

“The French are a composite of ignorance, superstition, stupidity, cruelty and clownishness.”

“Not a year goes by without  French judges  sentencing some innocent family man to an appalling death, and they do so serenely, even gaily, the way one cuts a turkey’s throat in a  barnyard.”

“France is a country of monkeys who frequently morph into tigers.”

“France is a land of cannibalistic clowns.”

“The French hurry from watching people being burned at the stake to an evening ball, from a beheading to the music hall. They spend a second talking about fanaticism then head immediately to a show and tomorrow their barbarity, having grown more insolent still, will use the law to slit the throat of whomever it so pleases.”

“Woe to a nation that, having been civilized for so long, is still fond of horrific ancient practices. Why should we change our legal system? France says ‘Europe uses our chefs, our designers, our wig-makers; therefore our laws are good ones.’”

“Foreign nations judge France by her entertainments, her novels, her pretty verses, by her sweet-mannered girls from the Opera, by her ballet dancers, full of grace. What they don’t know is that there isn’t a more fundamentally cruel nation on earth.”

All of these sentences are libelous, defamatory and even though Nicolas has made it illegal to photograph or film police officers committing crimes, http://www.digitalworld.fr unless you are a journalist, this is what the undercover cops look like at the door.

 

At our next meeting, in January 2009, we’ll be looking at ways to keep the horrid Scandinavian languages from using the word “Frenchman” to refer to the cockroach.

 

The meeting broke up and I went into Nicolas’ office  and  he and Rachida both had their hands over their mouths and were red-faced trying to contain their laughter, and I said “Well, are you going to share?” and Nicolas said “Rachida had that African lady arrested. Apparently she objected to abusive treatment of a Mauritanian youth who’d asked for French nationality and who was being accompanied as a handcuffed prisoner on a flight back to Africa, so Rachida (well, okay, at my request, but did you hear that bitch during the commission meeting going on about torture and Coco Chanel and God knows what other lunacy?) had her arrested, handcuffed, removed from the plane, stripped naked, given a body cavity search and thrown into jail in Paris for no reason other than sadistic pleasure. (http://en.afrik.com/article12935.html).

 

I step out of my bath and am toweling off in the upstairs bathroom at 60, rue de Varenne and using my new pink Caron powder puff and a few drops of La Tubereuse or Vol d’Avion and have candles going and the whole pheromone arsenal and I look in the mirror and the moon through the window shows up just above my head, dotting the i of Louise. I stick my tongue out at myself and I think Loulou, you, my girl, are pointlessly beautiful and gifted and smart and alone. And I know I’ve been a terrible mother, too busy throwing parties and attending them and planting and throwing up privet hedges of gossip and shopping and travel right and left in order to preserve what was left of my innermost self, if it ever even existed, to have been able to open up my heart to my children’s love or to give any in return. Well boo fucking hoo.

 

Neither one of us was hungry this evening so I too climb into bed, where she has on the 3-D glasses that came with the 2009 Guinness Book of World Records, and I take a magazine with some serotonin-boosting Rich and Famous Caught Off Guard photos showing America’s sweethearts in graceless states, and Carla turns over to me and props herself on her elbow and runs her long narrow index along my stomach and says “Loulou sweetheart, I’d hate for anything ever to come between us.”

 

And I say “Oh Carla darling, we’ve been through everything together. What could possibly come between us?”

 

There’s a rather long pause and then she says “The American for example.”

 

“Oh don’t be silly Carla,” I say, “I’ve told you how ridiculous I think that situation is, but you’re a big girl and you have to live with your own decisions, especially decisions about making love to hillbillies.”

 

“But Loulou, he and I have never made love.”

 

“What? I don’t believe you. You’ve been sharing the same bed for weeks!”

 

“Yes, sharing the same bed and talking endlessly about his one obsession.”

 

“Which is?”

 

“Which is you, Loulou.”

 

I shrieked. My heart was fluttering like a hummingbird trapped inside a jock strap. “But that’s nonsense,” I said. “We’ve barely even spoken! He doesn’t even know me!”

 

“Oh but he does, ma petite Loulou. I have no idea how, but it’s as if he knew your innermost thoughts. He even knows things that happened to you at school when you were 14 and I know they were true because I was there at the time!”

 

“Carla darling, you are so weirding me out. How can this be possible? What is he—a stalker?”

 

“I don’t know, but he seems harmless enough and I just adore him, I really and truly do.”

 

“Carla, I can’t believe my ears.”

 

And of course the doorbell rang, and I thought well it must be the concierge bringing laundry at this hour so I’d better go down. And I open the door, and no one’s there, but on my doormat, the one with the words Parva Sed Apta (Small but Adequate), there’s this gorgeously-wrapped package in opalescent salmon- pink satin paper with a broad Nattier blue silk moiré ribbon. It’s fairly obviously a book, and I can’t wait to open it, but there’s a small envelope wedged on top and I stand there on my doorstep and open it and read the note and I cannot believe my eyes.

 

© 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.