Smash hit

My heart racing from the embarrassment, I sat down again next to David, wondering whether I should tell him. I remember looking across the table at Laurent and trying to decipher whether or not he was aware of what was going on. A man emerged from the room and came over to whisper something in my husband’s ear. Laurent shook his head, rather as if he were declining a cigar. Then he looked across at me and gave me a cosy smile.

Poor Laurent drove home that night to the sound of David and me squealing like a couple of schoolchildren. What astounded us most was the fact that there had been no drugs at the party and no one had seemed particularly drunk. How had this understated debauchery come about without the usual disinhibitors?

What strikes me as uniquely French about that evening was not the fact of several people having sex together, but the rather elegant spontaneity of it all. There had been no need for such strategies of dissociation as the key game or strip poker, or any kind of erotic formalisation. It had just been a matter of allowing the charge that can come about when men and women are confined to a steamy room with good food and good wine to take effect.

For the Parisian bourgeoisie, good sex is the single most satisfactory method of raising oneself above the monotony of everyday life. For this reason alone, drugs and alcohol do not have the same hold here as they have in Britain.

The belief in this idea explains the comparative tolerance towards adultery, which filters down through all of society from the urban bourgeoisie and is reflected in literature, cinema and the media.

The French, led by the Parisian middle classes, are brought up to believe that if you’re lucky enough to find erotic satisfaction within your marriage, then so much the better, but if you can’t, then you’re entitled, so long as you remain discreet, to seek your fix elsewhere. As I would soon discover, even my mother-in-law held this belief.

Laurent’s mother, Madeleine, was a handsome and formidably intelligent woman from an aristocratic family. His father, Jérôme, was one of the nine stunningly beautiful Lemoine children of the 16th arrondissement, widely known in bourgeois circles for their parties, their small talk and their skill at dancing.

When Jérôme and Madeleine met, he was leading a wilfully vapid life scraping through an architecture degree at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, while she — one of the first women to be accepted by the prestigious school of political science, Sciences Po — was sitting in the cafes and cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, listening to Jean-Paul Sartre and Juliette Gréco.

After 10 years of marriage and soul-searching philosophical inquiry, Madeleine met a Hindu guru and became one of his first disciples. Every year she would leave their house in Normandy and go for a spiritual refill in India. In this way she was able to turn a blind eye to her husband’s chronic philandering.

One summer, when Madeleine had been away in India for six weeks, I noticed that her house seemed uncharacteristically clean. My mother-in-law was no domestic goddess, and I knew that the rows and rows of home-made marmalade in the larder could not have been her doing.

When one of the jars appeared on the breakfast table, I studied the label. “Iris,” it read. “Spring, 1985.” As it turned out, Iris’s excellent marmalade had been enjoyed year after year by Laurent, his father and his brothers — even by Madeleine herself — without their ever once alluding to the mysterious Englishwoman who had settled into the house for six weeks to make it.

When Iris fell ill with cancer, I watched my mother-in-law stand by in mute misery while her angry, grief-stricken husband spent night after night at the other woman’s hospital bedside. On one occasion only, Madeleine confessed her distress to me.

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