Free La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life by Elaine Sciolino

Americans (one reason Americans sometimes attract attention in public places). Private coaches can be hired in Paris to teach professional women how to rid their voices of chirpiness and men how to cultivate lower tones.
    Several years back, the French writer Alice Ferney wrote a novel about infidelity called La conversation amoureuse . It tells the love story of Pauline and Gilles. Pauline is a beautiful, happily married, twenty-six-year-old mother who is expecting her second child. Gilles is a worldly, successful, forty-nine-year-old writer of made-for-TV movies whose marriage is ending.
    The most sensual passages in the novel are the phone conversations between them. “A voice can hold things just as a body can,” Pauline says to herself. “It can enter deeper inside you than a man’s sex. A voice can inhabit you, lodge in the pit of your stomach, in your chest, right by your ear, and nag away at that part of you that so badly needs love, stoke it, whip it up as the wind whips up the sea. Am I in love with a voice?”
    If I were to fall in love with a voice, it would be the voice of Jean-Luc Hees, the chief executive of Radio France. When a profile is written about Hees, more often than not it refers to him as a grand séducteur . I asked him once what that meant, and at first he played coy and pretended not to know. Then he talked about the voice. “When I listen to the radio, I know who has the power of séduction ,” he said. “It’s the first thing I hear. I can feel that someone wants to be desired, wants to be listened to.”
    Hees’s voice is deep and soft, like too many velvet cushions on a sunken sofa. When he arrived years ago as a young radio correspondent in Washington, which is where we first met, he knew only the most rudimentary English. His voice compensated. At a dinner one evening, he chatted with a beautiful American woman sitting next to him. When they said good-bye, she said to him, “It was like opera. I understood nothing. But the music, the music was wonderful.”
     
     
    The kiss, the next natural weapon in seduction, is subject to its own rules of engagement. The most social kiss is the bise , the kiss on each cheek. I always have considered the bise a straightforward ritual that the French feel compelled to use when saying hello and good-bye. It’s so routine that children are required to give it when meeting the adult friends of their parents, even when they are perfect strangers. It drove my young daughters nuts.
    But then Florence Coupry and Sanae Lemoine, my researchers, ganged up on me and explained how cheek kissing could come with extraordinary power. “Okay, you can give la bise to say ‘hi’ to people you know, and there would be nothing special about it,” said Florence, trying to be deferential. “But what a potentially wonderful ground for a game! Let’s say that one day, kissing a dozen friends hello, I also kiss someone I’ve been dreaming about. I feel my heart beating weirdly and I’m so close to him for a second and I think I’m going to faint, and it will be absolutely delicious and maybe troubling. Maybe only I know what’s happening, or maybe I let him know. Or maybe he guesses it and then what could happen?”
    Sanae chimed in: “Sometimes his lips will touch your cheek, or he’ll try to come as close as he can to your lips and touch your waist lightly with his hand. La bise allows you to get intimate. It allows you to come close to someone you don’t know at all, so close that you can smell the other.”
    Beyond the social bise , the French take their kissing seriously. In the Forum des Halles mall in central Paris one Saturday morning, shoppers were offered a lesson in cross-cultural kissing. Two actors, Lise and Gaëtan, were led through the demonstration by Sophie Kerbellec, their acting teacher. A crowd stood and watched.
    “So now we are going to try the ‘French kiss,’ where you really put your lips together, one mouth on the other,”