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

Kerbellec said. “You’ve got to throw yourselves into this kiss.” She told the couple to think of Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan in Marcel Carné’s 1938 classic, Le quai des brumes .
    The couple kissed. Their lips locked and then explored, softly.
    “Think about moving your heads! Voilà! Très bien !” Kerbellec continued. “See, hold her head. That’s very good! The back of her neck!”
    Their heads swayed. Their lips pressed. They seemed to be enjoying themselves.
    Then came an American kiss. “Now, what we are going to do are kisses that are a little more technically welcoming to the camera. They are going to simply move their jaws. It’s called ‘mouth eating.’ You have to have the sensation of eating the mouth….”
    As the couple opened their mouths and started chewing each other’s lips, I couldn’t help reflecting that in a mall in America on a Saturday morning, you would be more likely to find a demonstration of a device to cut potatoes in ten ways.
     
     
    Finally, the deal must be clinched. There are no fixed rules for making it happen. Christophe, a French man in his midtwenties who is both clever and handsome, devised a strategy he shares with male friends when they ask for advice. “I always play by the rule of the three Cs— climat, calembour, contact ,” he confessed to a young friend of mine.
    Climat is context. “You want to establish a specific atmosphere, which can be somehow magical,” he said. “You should not be too friendly. This ruins your chance to have her in the end. What’s important is to create a special ambiance. You can transform a random situation into an atmosphere where you feel you are going to kiss each other. Climat donc .”
    Calembour , which literally means “pun,” comes next. “You need to make her laugh,” he said. “But it has to be subtle.”
    The clincher comes with contact . “At the fateful moment, you manage to establish physical contact,” he said. “Not a big slap on the back. But when you’re saying something—a joke for example—you touch her arm. Or crossing the street, you take her arm. This is a very strong signal. And if she does not reject it, you can almost be sure you can at least kiss her.”
    He told the story of an encounter at a pharmacy where he was buying a medication late one afternoon. “The pharmacist was a beautiful young woman, alone in her pharmacy,” he said. “It was late. So there was climat ! I asked her if I could see her again. ‘Tomorrow?’ She said no. I insisted. ‘The day after tomorrow?’ I insisted, then insisted again. By now she was laughing. So there was calembour. But she said no. I left. Then I called information, to get the number of the pharmacy. I called and she answered.” He went straight to the point: “And tonight?”
    They had dinner that evening. Contact came a bit later.
    French magazines—news magazines as well as those aimed at women—regularly run articles decoding the mysteries of seduction, presumably with consummation as the ultimate goal. It is usually a multi-step process, not unlike Christophe’s with his three Cs. In a 130-page special issue on amorous encounters, the monthly Psychologies magazine revealed five “master cards of seduction” in the “great game.” First, “detachment vis-à-vis the gaze of the other,” or feigning indifference; second, “authenticity,” or being audacious, sincere, and vulnerable all at the same time; third, “coherence,” or inner harmony that rules out trickery; fourth, “self-confidence,” which starts with self-seduction; and fifth, “openness,” or giving of oneself with “abandon” so that others fall under one’s charm.
    For a more learned opinion, I turned to the sociologist Alain Giami, a French coauthor of a scholarly work from 2001 entitled “A Comparative Study of the Couple in the Social Organization of Sexuality in France and the United States.” He told me it often takes only a kiss to move straight to