Seduction

Paris will never leave you indifferent. Women will bath their bodies in sweet smelling lotions, cream their skins, climb into the finest lingerie, slide into a Hermes dress that covers just part of her cuisses, and seduce you sidling up on her high heels, a silk scarf round her long thin neck, and perfume you can drown in, on the trottoir. You're gone in a second.

But that much class is not always visible, available, or encountered in a run-of-the-mill evening out. Time is needed to understand the subtle code of French flirtation and seduction-- the etiquette of love.

The other day, at the Franklin D. Roosevelt metro station, I followed two young banlieusards in hanging pants and gimmy caps down the stairs to the quai. One of them smoking despite the interdiction. We made eye contact with a gaggle of three pretty girls from their neighborhood coming up. The shocker shouts: "ça va les filles?"

"Nique ta mere," replied the prettiest bun like a whip.

"Laquelle?" challenges the banlieusard without stopping, sucking on his butt, cracking the girls up.

"Des putes," he exclaims to his friend who's worried of being arrested by the swarming police forces.

Who was seducing whom? It certainly was hot.

Like in the Luxembourg gardens the evening, I tried catching the last rays of sun on a winter afternoon and watched the students of the Lycée Montaigne making out, like birds in trees.

"On commande des verres!" cried Elodie when I asked her about "la séduction" in Le Select, on boulevard Montparnasse. Thin, nervous, a brunette, Elodie was with her blond, svelte friend Maude in the back of the bar smoking cigarettes and going through the address books of their portable phones, wondering who to call. Both in their twenties.

They seemed overjoyed when I approached. At last, a man that was interested in them.

"Séduire... un homme... étant une femme?" Elodie took a long puff on her cigarette like in a movie, thinking. (You see, you never think when you seduce...)

"Les crétins: blouse, talons aiguille, minijupe et des choses comme ça; les hommes plus subtiles, en faisant l'humour et de l'intelligence!"

I knew it! The jerks, if you need one quick, you seduce in a blouse, high heels, a miniskirt, and perhaps she meant to forget the undies. The more sensible men, you seduce by being funny and intelligent. She was subtle and full of tricks.

Maude was slightly more impertinent. Her choice was: "La spontanéite - sur le moment. Il n'y a pas (des) de règles."

There are no rules, and "sur le moment" you're out on a foire forraine shooting stand: "Vous êtes d'où? Where are you from?" she bombarded me suddenly.

Being interested in a man is something that immediately caresses the ego and you succumb to spells you didn't know existed.

I said half jokingly that I was from an exotic place on an exotic planet. Amused and confused she was obviously concerned about my motives.

"Vous essayez de me draguer?"

Off my guard, my hesitation meant I was only asking for sex.

"Vous draguer!" Maude cried, proud for having unmasked me in public.

Accusing me of picking her up? I knew the next step would've been to ask her out to dinner and then home.

It's called "sortir".

"Sortir avec quelqu'un" means you are going to spend an evening of seduction together. Generally a dinner during which seduction is verbal as well as non-verbal, until a common consent is reached and it becomes physical in a warm dark room somewhere safe.

Seduction is the key to consent, therefore an important part of the étiquette of love.

Maud wanted my phone number and address when I decided to leave. I was convinced that she was dying to be seduced by me, but I didn't have the Jaguar, or income she's expecting to drive her out of town and into a golden future...

On a much more earthly level, just off the trottoir, I encountered Estelle at noon the other day when soldes shoppers were having lunch. The queen of this rue du Dragon shoe shop, Estelle is in her thirties, and the loveliest pinup - a magnet up and down the small narrow medieval street.

What about seduction?

She tells me her secret: "To be natural. To be natural, is best for seduction."

"And what do you do physically to seduce?"

"Physically?" She whips her long auburn hair over her shoulders and throws me a coquettish look. " The clef est, - the key is - I play with my eyes and try to smile a lot and try to make the man smile."

I smile, of course, oh, I smile! I've been trying to seduce Estelle since I first saw her coquettish eyes. But she's seduced me first.

Suspense is the essence of seduction. You are seduced by uncertainty, by the unpredictable.

It's all about ferramones, Coluche likes to say, "Seduction sends them surging."

Coluche told me the story of Napoleon returning to Paris and commanding his wife Josephine not to wash for three weeks before he arrived. That's also part of seduction - wild passions sprung out of healthy accumulated body odor.

The French perfume creators have come up with the right solution to any situation that requires spreading the soupçon of that wild body odor of a redhead riding naked on a bare steed for hours across the arid plains of the south. Perfume is made to reveal the senses, to make them drunk with passion. Perfume is seduction through memory and imagination, and if you were ever seduced by a scent, you know what I mean.

A few days ago I entered Le Tambour, a rue Montmartre bistro with a reputation of drunken nights and slaughter. Yet it's a normal café visited by students and intellectuals during the day, when the patron is sober. In the back was seductress Alix. She smiled and made me smile. Her perfume kept me spellbound. Intelligent talk and naturalness worked. I'd forgotten that literature could become as seductive as, well, anything...

But then Laure contradicted me yesterday when I questioned her in a rue Guenegaud galerie.

"I like to talk about sex", she said.

She loves fine lingerie that makes her feel good whatever she's wearing, but she's got her man already (who will make her rich as she confessed) and she's not really interested in discussing seduction.

Seduction is not just about sex. The art of seduction is class. Like turning the sky brilliant orange and the pont des Arts into a Hokusai bridge. Class is seduction without minijupe - the trend for this year, which will turn into omnipresent seduction on the trottoir.

Seduction is still something the French excel in. You just need to wait and see and you will be astonished like myself. Je suis étonné. And you will certainly not remain indifferent.