When French Elle editor Sophie Fontanel recently argued, by way of her sensual but anti-carnal book The Art of Sleeping Alone, that the French make better celibates, it seemed as if we may have skimmed the outer reaches of the French ideal. For decades, books about how to master the French way of living, or, quite simply, being—living implying an ungainly dose of effort—have boasted that the French cook better, eat better, dress better, and love better than you and I do. More recently, the genre has managed to outdo itself by also claiming to raise children better and, as Fontanel showed us, abstain better.
But lest one think the depths of French superiority have been fully plumbed, the latest addition to the incessant genre, Ann Mah’s Mastering the Art of French Eating, shows us it’s bottomless. When her diplomat husband is called away to Iraq at the start of their three-year post in Paris, Mah, a journalist, decides to dedicate herself to French cuisine. Gleaning inspiration from another diplomatic wife, American chef and author Julia Child, she goes on a culinary field trip across France, sharing stories and recipes she finds along the way. Brewing beneath Mah’s mouthwatering descriptions of boeuf bourguignon and soupe au pistou is the same insinuation propping up this entire genre: that the French not only live well but better: “And yet, there was something else, a European exoticism that captivated me—a cheese course before dessert, shops shuttered in the afternoon heat, a game of boules playing in the dust of the village square,” she writes of a weekend trip to Provence.
The answer to why we idolize French women lies in the pages of the books themselves, which are chic and refined and which titillate and seduce—an antidote to our harried American obsession to “having it all.”
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