A woman called Sylvie -- no last name, for reasons that will soon be clear -- was talking. "I love to be touched by other men," she said. "It makes him very jealous, but then it makes him very passionate later on."
The masculine pronoun in the preceding sentence belonged to a man called Jean-Charles, same surname as Sylvie. The two are married. They live on the outskirts of Paris in a suburb called Les Lilas. They have been partners, matrimonially and otherwise, for just over 13 years.
For the past 18 months Jean-Charles and Sylvie have had a standing date with each other, and also with a changing cast of instantly made new best friends, at a private club in central Paris called Cleopatre.
They meet there regularly for evenings of what in French is called echangisme, the term for a practice based on seeking sexual gratification with people that, in many cases, one has just met. First, being French, they eat.
On a cool spring evening at Cleopatre, Jean-Charles and Sylvie sat down to a meal of white asparagus with bearnaise sauce, lobster and a nice bottle of Chablis, then slipped their matrimonial bonds, climbing the carpeted stairs of the club and entering one of a series of chambers where they were to share their affections with a man named Patrick and a woman named Marie, and then a number of other people whose names, at a certain point, it became impossible for this reporter to ascertain.
This all occurred in an atmosphere whose velvet hush and civilized air of decorum was broken, inevitably, sometime after midnight by an opera of primal grunts and sighs.
"Our philosophy has always been sexual freedom, free from restrictions, free from shame," said Herve Behal, the owner of Cleopatre, which opened in 1978 and eventually evolved into a haven for swingers. "Women, as much as men, want to indulge all their senses and still feel respected. Here, a woman loses no respect if she decides to have sex with four different men."
Whether or not this is so, it seems pretty clear that, as Sylvie said, "the good thing about the echangiste scene is that people come to these places knowing what they want." What is that? "To have fun," she said, "and to make some love."
Paradoxical as it seems, at a moment when an extreme right-wing politician, Jean-Marie Le Pen, can garner nearly 17 percent of the vote in the early balloting for the French presidency, and when the cliches about the conservativeness of French cultural life can easily strike a foreigner as apt, Paris is enjoying a wave of libertinism that makes New York look as though it were being run by the elders of Salem.
Statistics are not easy to come by. And visitors are in little danger of mistaking contemporary Paris for San Francisco during the Summer of Love. But it is increasingly clear that activities that once seemed the concern of a small sexual fringe have made inroads into the French mainstream, with both the French press and government health officials remarking on the arrival of France's new class of libertines.
"There has been a tremendous increase in the number of commercial venues for all these activities," both in Paris and throughout the country, said Yves Souteyrand, head of the office for social science and public health at the French National Agency for AIDS Research, referring to the back-room sex now said to be common in straight and gay clubs throughout the capital.
More than 250 heterosexual echangiste clubs currently operate in France, according to the editors of Couples, which bills itself as "le magazine des echangistes." Nearly 50 restaurants, clubs and saunas in Paris openly cater to heterosexual adventurers. In addition, 35 gay bars and clubs operate so-called back rooms, in nearly all of the city's 20 arrondissements, according to Jean-Francois Chassagne, the president of SNEG, a trade group for gay businesses in France.
"When I moved to Paris in 1983, there might have been five back rooms," said the novelist Edmund White, whose 2001 book-length essay, The Flaneur, neatly diagrams three centuries of French sexual laissez-faire.
Like any worthwhile movement, the new French libertinism has its designated journals (Purple Sexe, Couples and the English-language Deliciae Vitae), its documentarians and its bards. The novelist Michel Houellebecq's 1998 novel, The Elementary Particles, sold more than 300,000 copies in France, less, perhaps, on the merits of its deadpan prose than on its obsessive depictions of group and anonymous sex.
La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M, a memoir by Catherine Millet, a feminist critic and editor, rocketed to the top of the sales charts last year on the strength of the author's sexual resume, a flatly depicted chart of acts performed in parks and clubs, in automobiles and underpasses, and in serial human combinations that might have exhausted even de Sade.
Guillaume Dustan, too, was transported from small-press obscurity to cultural lightning rod when a mainstream public got hold of his novels Dans Ma Chambre and LXiR, which uninhibitedly celebrate frenzied, anonymous and potentially lethal sex. Dustan is now a controversial regular on French talk shows -- largely, complains Didier Lestrade, a founder of Act Up-Paris, "on the basis of this big concept that, after 20 years of AIDS, the only thing we French have left is our freedom, so we can do whatever we want."
Far from being clandestinely situated, a majority of Paris' sex clubs -- Chris & Manu, Yacht Club, L'Abys, to name three of the more popular straight ones -- are as frankly self-proclaiming as theme restaurants. Some, like Cleopatre, are theme restaurants, offering, for a US$50 cover, dinner service and a clothing boutique as a supplement to the prime attraction, which is sex.
"Basically, my wife and I come because it is good for the relationship," Jean-Luc, a Cleopatre regular, said one early spring weekend. "When you play outside the customary roles, you see your partner in a different way, and you can combat the inevitable boredom of marriage."
As for Jean-Luc's wife, Sybille, echangisme is, she said, "something more interesting than the movies" to do on a Saturday night.
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