Brief Is Best

More than Beaujolais or Bordeaux or their passionately loved franc, the illicit love affair has always held a special place in the hearts of Frenchmen. The magnificent Chateau de Chenonceaux is Henri II's tribute to his mistress, Diane de Poitiers. French authors and artists--Emile Zola and Bonnard, for example--have immortalized their mistresses in their art. For the past 18 years the popular daily newspaper France Soir has run an illustrated serial titled "Famous Love Affairs." And now comes a bestselling survey of 93 French males entitled The Sexual Behavior of the Married Man in France.

In his book, Author Jacques Baroche, a poet turned investigator, confirms the legend of French wanderlust; 90% of the French husbands who talked to him admitted being unfaithful. But he finds that another Gallic institution has become oldfashioned: the pace of modern life has caused many a Frenchman to discard his pampered mistress in favor of the quickie sex act.

Vanishing Breeders. Mistresses are obsolete, one insurance agent suggested, because "only one thing counts in love--it is the brief encounter." Added a financier, "The principal quality of a woman is neither beauty nor charm nor intelligence, it is novelty." Equally unexpected is Baroche's revelation that the French lover of fabled expertise is a vanishing breed; many men were simply bored with the foreplay in lovemaking. "I have a horror of the preliminaries of love," one of them confided. "The process of taking off one's clothes becomes a handicap with habit." In short, the smooth French lover, typified for millions by Charles Boyer's 1938 role as the romantic Casbah thief in Algiers, is becoming extinct.

Some of Baroche's interviews verge on the implausible: he claims to have found one couple who learned to make love in a tiny Citroen "Deux Chevaux" auto--after they persuaded the man's dog to remain in the back seat. Serious social scientists are not sure that Baroche interviewed a sufficiently wide variety of Frenchmen to reach any valid conclusions. Still, he talked to enough to find one man who asked, "How does it happen that I have never deceived my wife?" then shrugged and answered his own question: "I don't want to complicate my life. I must be the exception that proves the rule."

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