Springtime in Paris. The daffodils, roses, magnolias and linden trees simply bursting with heavenly colours and smells make April in Paris so perfect that not even an attentive and loving husband could ruin it. It reminds me of the first enchanted spring days of my childhood at La Paumardiere, when I used to watch my father caring for the horses, rams and bulls, and I'd hop up and down like a little bunny and beg "Papa, please let me use the emasculator." And it has been a stellar time for France, with victories at home-Nicolas' triumph over a creepy foreign enemy at the National Livestock Show (Foreign Enemy: "Don't touch me, you soil me when you do." Nicolas, ever the grand statesman: "So get lost, mother fucker." (www.youtube.com/watch)-and abroad: after conquering America with an Oscar, we conquered England with a brilliant visit in late March, and I haven't felt such a bounce in my step since last year's fashion week in Paris when I saw American Vogue editor Anna Wintour's ten-foot black pashmina get caught under the revolving door at the Ritz and watched her being dragged around repeatedly to bloodied unconsciousness before finally being spewed out onto the place Vendôme during the garbage strike and I rushed to her and said "Why bangs?"

 

I hadn't been to England for several years and was rather surprised at how the land of pomp and circumstance has so quickly turned into a land of binge-drinking louts who'd just as soon slit your throat as look at you; and that's just the royal family. It is, however, perhaps a good thing that the royals-and notably the Queen, who, legend has it, at the tender age of thirteen discovered the Fountain of Old Age-are much less formal than before. At Heathrow, we were met by the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, who greeted Nicolas with the stirring-the-pot-with-both-hands move and "Lookin' fly, nigga!" Then they started stirring counterclockwise as they turned to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and said "'Sup, bitch?" They accompanied us to Windsor, where we found British officials charming but perhaps a trifle less sophisticated than what we're used to. When Nicolas was introduced to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and said "Bonjour," the archbishop replied "Well, la-di-da, look at Mr. Fancy Pants pretending to talk 'French'!" repeating the phrase as, his miter tilting wildly, he tiptoed with quick little baby steps around the presidential couple.

 

But perhaps what surprised us most was the fact that, in private, both the Duke of Edinburgh and Her Majesty have Cockney accents.

 

"Oy! Yew! Come 'ere!" shouted the Queen across the beautiful lawn as we got out of the car in Windsor. As we walked past the black-faced sheep and drew closer, we saw that she and Prince Philip each had a cigarette in one hand and a can of beer in the other. "Well, if it int de froggers," said Her Majesty, whereupon she kicked Nicolas in the groin.

 

"Yew seen me, dincha?" she said as she looked with doe-eyed affection at the Duke of Edinburgh, who popped open another can of felony-generator, swilled it, then spit.

 

"Well done, luvvy girl," said the Duke, "ya gived it to 'im roih in de ol power drill." Charles and Camilla had now joined the Queen and Prince Philip and they helped throw Nicolas, Carla and me to the ground, then kicked us and burned us with cigarettes and smashed their beer cans on us and took turns peeing on us as they shrieked "Welcome to Great fucking Britain, you bloody foreign buggers!"

 

To be perfectly fair, the royal family were probably still under the shock of Prince Charles having been arrested twice within the past month, once for "defibrillating a penguin for non-medical purposes," a serious crime in England, and then again when the Prince was discovered at 2 a.m. at the London Zoo with his entire head inside a zebra's ass, claiming when questioned by police that he thought he'd fallen into a sewer with his sunglasses on, an argument that did not prevail.

 

I was housed in the most scrumptious room and could almost have been back at La Paumardiere if it weren't for the electric kettle next to the bed and hearing Her Majesty and Prince Philip bickering through the paper thin walls at night over who got to sing the high part on "I'm Glad I'm Not Pretty." The Queen looked in on us and we were pleasantly surprised to learn that Her Majesty, her somewhat rustic manners notwithstanding, is bilingual, and she made a point of making us feel at home by speaking French. "Are you comfortabeau?" she asked Nicolas. And then to Carla. "And you are comfortabelle?"

 

And Nicolas replied, "If only my English were as good as your French!" and this seemed to please the Queen.

 

And then Her Majesty asked how it was that, being French, I spoke such perfect English. And I told her that I had learned the language at boarding school in Switzerland with the offspring of British and American millionaires for whom l'Etourneau has proudly served for over one hundred years as a dumping ground and an incubator for lifelong addictions, chronic mental illness and careers in the financial services sector. My children, I told her, are all at least bilingual, and two of my sons actually work in London. Thibault-Pepin works for Christie's, where he is head of the price-fixing department, and Foulque-Sixte is a disc jockey, i.e., has his own crack and ecstasy dealership; and my only other child old enough to be out of school, Amboise-Hanus, is also bilingual, which comes in handy, I told Her Majesty, as he sells used châteaux to the Americans and the Japanese in France's suicide mecca, the Cotentin peninsula.

 

On the other hand, most of my compatriots believe that speaking English fluently doesn't really require learning to do it so much as wanting to do it. Which is why our government’s five official scientific advisers on English are not linguists but two judges, two pediatricians and a transsexual dentist Catherine-Christopher “Nobody Nose” Miller. To prove just how easy it is to master the sub-cultural language of the Americans, one of the judges even gave a lecture in English in which she described her job as "Judges Training," ( /www.pogar.org/activities), proving that English Talking is really just a matter of People Wanting to sound like Charles Barkley and George W. Bush, as do our effortlessly bilingual pediatricians, who summarize their most recent book thus: "This collection deal with the child development and interaction with their environment and with the appearance of thought.". (www.odilejacob.com) (Gullibility is, alas, the wart in the middle of the collective French face. I remember a mailman who once knocked on my door here at 60, rue de Varenne and I had just got up and was sitting at the baby grand in the library playing the twenty-first Goldberg Variation wearing only my rings and so leapt up and grabbed a chinchilla throw off the sofa and held it with one hand fanning out on my chest and a cigarette holder in the other, answered the door and there he was standing between my ball laurels and he said "Are you the concierge?" And I said "Darling, if you believe that, you'll believe anything.")

 

Nicolas blames his former teacher, Ms. Glatigny (who is still around and still telling children things like "Computers cannot make mistakes," which sounds like something a Sputnik era B-movie scientist might utter right before having his lungs sucked out through his nose by the computer) for the poor English grades that prevented him from getting into the Political Science Institute, which is widely regarded as the fourth greatest institution of higher learning within six blocks of the Café de Flore. But while Nicolas is angry with the English language, he refuses to be bullied by it and speaks it fearlessly, and likes to pepper his conversations with English expressions, such as "Better to have one bird than two bushes," and "Two heads are certainly smarter than one head is by itself," and is even unafraid to serve, in a pinch, as an interpreter. Camilla approached him before dinner and said "Oh Nicolas, I was just trying to tell Mlle. Tour de la Blatte here how much our pichi dwarf armadillo loves crowberries, nannyberries and lint, but I don't know how to say it in French."

 

"Facile," said Nicolas gallantly. "Le nain de madame du Barry adora son corbeau." ["Easy. Madame du Barry's dwarf loved his crow."]

 

And Prince Charles chimed in and said that he adored the painting of Madame du Barry hanging in the Louvre that commemorates how she worked her way up with help from the pimp Jean du Barry to become the mistress of Louis XV, and praised the Louvre as a magnificent display case for colourful illustrations of the hags-to-bitches makeovers that are, to him, the essence of France. And Carla said she hopes that both she and Nicolas will one day be hung in the Louvre, and Charles said "Madam, if only you knew how many people would love to see both of you hung."

 

Before being seated, we stood chatting amiably and I could not help but admire once again the famous British eccentricity as an elderly twenty-five-year-old woman standing near me drew no attention whatsoever from the English guests even though she was wearing only false eyelashes, a tiara and a stole made from a live three-toed sloth. She spoke very movingly of the recent passing of "Daddy," no doubt another Royal, who "had died here in this very house. His gout-ridden foot had gangrened so badly that the doctor said it would have to be amputated but Daddy was a body snob from way back and refused and we watched him liquefy and the Princess Royal observed how a cannibal, turned dainty, 'could have eaten him with a spoon,' but finally the smell got so bad that we all agreed that he wouldn't want to continue reeking that way so we buried Daddy in the garden even though he was not, strictly speaking, dead, but Daddy had always felt the Americans had the right idea about health care and this way he was getting to experience it almost first-hand and being English, all that he asked was to be buried with a live schoolgirl, and so Prince Harry knocked one off her bike with a brick and then we threw her into the grave with Daddy and the noise she made as she hit the liquefied body, sounded, Camilla had said, 'like a vat of celery puree being poured from a third floor window at the Ritz onto Picadilly,' while Charles claimed that it made 'exactly the same sound an arrow shot from a crossbow makes when penetrating nasal cartilage at close range, not that I've ever witnessed such a murder at Highgrove on Boxing Day in 1998,' and we covered them up and what is amazing is how you can put someone four or five feet under the ground and it takes care totally of the smell but you can still hear them whining and complaining for several hours, and then I guess they just run out of air, poor Daddy, he has gone to a better place." And I almost shouted you're tellin' me, sister, but instead chomped into one of the hors d'oeuvres that looked like little human phrenicolienal ligaments, and were.

 

Even for a Frenchwoman used to Chambord and Versailles and I daresay La Paumardiere, the table at Windsor, the largest in England, is impressive, with the royal silver gorgeously laid out on the immense white linen table cloth and every single can of beer on the table perfectly chilled by its rubber sleeve bearing the Queen's coat of arms. The food is so beautifully presented that it looks almost edible, and we had the grandest time trying to guess what the voluminous pale pink meat that looked, from the front, like a naked, headless Dolly Parton from behind, actually was, and we weren't totally surprised, as the British are all exotica-loving "foodies" nowadays, to be informed that it was a platter of neotenic mole salamanders in tar salsa, which was followed by shar pei en croûte. As I said to Her Majesty, "We in France have always envied British cooking, almost as much as we have envied British teeth."

 

As we entered the great room, Nicolas whispered playfully to Carla and me, "Ladies, go dazzle," and Carla said "You, too, mon petit Nicolas," and told me how lucky she had been to be able to get Nicolas' gold lamé crocodile Gucci for Tweens! loafers out of layaway just in time for the trip. Still, at one point, I overheard Carla telling Her Majesty that she was not only a singer but an astronaut, and I whispered "Carla, that's not true." And she whispered back, "I know, but I hate what I'm wearing."

 

To my right sat the Prince of Wales, and to his right Ms. Amy Winehouse, whose beaming face had "welcome to England" and "group A streptococcus," written all over it and she was understandably bubbling as she had recently swept the Grammys with what one newspaper hailed as "her peppy dismissal of drug counseling." I told Amy that while my children love her music, they are in no danger of being influenced by her dangerous message, as I have taught them from an early age that hard-core drugs are only good for people who are into soft-core sex. In France, I told her, where people tend to like their Jews assimilated, self-loathing and medium well, we love Amy for her beautiful voice and performer's skills, but above all as a constant reminder, along with rabbinical faith healer Bernard-Henri Levy, that Jewish people can be dismally stupid, too. Unfortunately, Amy's boyfriend, Blake, couldn't attend the dinner because he was in jail, where Amy told me he passed the time placing bets on www.whenwillamywinehousedie.com, but I told Amy, whose first two questions on a date are "You're not a cop, are you?" and "Does this smell infected to you?", that she is lucky to have a boyfriend at all.

 

I had Prince William, who is a darling, sitting to my left, and to his left Aryan Nation spokeswoman Ms. Tilda Swinton, who looks the way British cuisine tastes, sat frowning throughout dinner, but everyone was still all a-flutter about the incredible courage she had displayed when she grudgingly accepted her Oscar with the words "Only my agent could convince me to come to America, with its Negroes, Mexicans and poor white trash," but then said that "the only thing good about America is hip hop music," although with its infectious rhythms and clever lyrics calling for the extermination of uneducated black women serving to unite its rich, black authors and rich, white consumers, what's not to like?

 

It is helpful, when thrown together at state dinners, for long-standing enemies like the English and the French to find some shared hatred, and so we all talked about the Americans, and I was so glad to be able to tell Tilda that Carla and I had been sent to Hollywood by Nicolas as part of the French delegation to the Oscars, where we saw a Frenchwoman win for a biopic in which she embodies our national treasure Edith Piaf, who had the beauty of an aye-aye and the voice of an eagle.

 

And you won't believe it but we were at a post-Oscar Mexican-themed poolside party at the Beverly Wilshire, where we were staying, when who should come up to me but Patrick, Carla's horrid American boyfriend from downstairs at 60, rue de Varenne! To say that I was startled to see him would be like saying I was startled to look in the mirror and find my head inside a bar-coded block of Swarovski crystal in the lobby of Caesar's Palace. Anyway, he speaks several languages, but apparently all at the same time and all with a ghastly Texas accent, and he put a plate of Mexican food in my hands and says "Hereyago, priddy ma'am, I wintngotchacuplatacos, Anna Breedo," and then disappeared into the darkness with Carla and I wondered what he'd said as I looked around in vain for any sign of Ms. Breedo.

 

Everyone wanted to know which of the new pawns of powerful criminal networks we thought the Americans would finally elect to answer the phone at 3 a.m.: the pair of equal opportunity Ivy League quota lawyers; the pair of hillbilly Ivy League lawyers; or, just when years of education and outreach had finally started to chip away at the stereotype of the evil albino, John McCain, and all of us, Brits and French alike, agreed that being European we believe in change you can spend, but the royal family all know how to steer the conversation away from such taboo table talk as politics and Princess Ann said "I see that Michelle Obama is on a best-dressed list."

 

And I said darling, I suppose that for the wife of a man who says Massatoosetts and whose chief fashion rival, Attila the Hen, wears outfits that would be fit, in Paris, only for rat catching-are they really called Pan Suits?-anything other than overalls would get her on someone's list. At least Hillary has the ability to shapeshift according to her audience, and I found her black person's voice (http://youtube.com/watch?v=6FlpbRFXC9E) was simply squirming with negritude, but she really outdid herself before a predominantly blue collar Wasp audience in Mississippi, where she began a speech with "There's nothin I like better than whoppin some squirrels over the head with my Bill Dukey and pressin me up a mess of furless paninnies on my George Foreman," and I do wonder how many more final gs Hillary will be droppin in her campaignin, a habit I find almost as revolting as Meryl and Gwyneth doing their ghastly "accents" and if I had only one hour left to live I'd summon all three of them to my bedside and dig my fingernails into their cheeks until the good Lord whispered "Loulou, it is time."

 

The British react to the topic of sex in one of two ways: tittering or murder, and we were a bit surprised to see that they were all still sort of tittering over that governor of New York with the call girl kerfuffle, and I was happy to have had a little anecdote about that, too, because on Monday, March 24, Cecilia, Nicolas' ex, remarried in New York, and as Nicolas had asked me to attend I stopped over on the way back to Paris. Well, who was going up in the elevator to Cecilia's new home but ex-governor Spitzer's wife! The poor thing was still wearing her ashamed and confused, whore-in-the-kitchen, cordon-bleu-in-bed look, and she had attempted to tie her Hermes scarf à la parisienne with offensive results, and I said, "Why not just use a goddamn stapler?" and she sort of teared up and I thought naughty Loulou you shouldn't have said that as she's been through so much, so you just make the poor little darling smile, and so I said "Knock knock" and she said "Who's (sniffle) there?" and I said "Silda," and this little half smile took hold of her haggard face and she said "Silda who?" and I said, "Silda envelope 'n give it to da ho," and I think she had been holding it in for several days because she fell down on all fours and just sobbed with her face against the carpet and it must have felt good and Camilla commented that it must certainly have made me feel good, too, to know that I had somehow facilitated such a release and I said yes, it had.

 

I turned to Prince William and told him that I remembered how upset I had been on the morning I heard about his mother's death because I had been planning to get out of Paris through the tunnel at the Pont de l'Alma and her mangled car was still blocking it and I'd had to cut back over to the Left Bank and William gagged and I changed the subject, sort of, and said what nonsense I found all that Al Fayed conspiracy to be.

 

And William goes "Quite. I mean it's not as if France had a history of organizing murders and covering them up."

 

And Carla blurted out, "Oh, yes it does! Omigod, when contaminated human growth hormone made from rotting pituitary glands kept at the Pasteur Institute in unrefrigerated jam jars killed dozens of innocent French teenagers several years ago, we had the victim's parents, i.e., the plaintiffs, diagnosed by state contract psychiatrists as insane, ditto for the mad cow victims."

 

As if on cue, the main course arrived and it was identifiably beef and the Queen noticed without seeming to notice that many of my fellow French guests hesitated and she said "I've been eating British beef for eighty years," and that was enough to convince everyone to dig in as Her Majesty continued "and there's absolutely nothing wrong with moo."

 

"And when," Carla continued, "this like foreign human rights guy claimed that anyone with €20,000 can buy a recently orphanized child in Paris and that this little sideline has made France richer than God, who Nicolas says made most of His money the same way, Nicolas had his lawyer Micheline Cahen call him 'someone with no morals whatsoever' and 'the most dangerous man in France' and had judges remove his children and hand them over to pediatrician Olivier Murry who had had his own children removed from his abusive care by an unsealed ruling handed down by the Paris Court of Appeal's 24th chamber, section C on March 30, 1995; forge his signature on a forced confession and strip him of the right to gather evidence or to press charges so now the big baby wants his human rights back and Nicolas says they'll probably just go ahead and kill him and that not a month goes by that he doesn't have to murder some scumbag whistle-blower, usually to protect high-profile child abusers, especially magistrates-just Google Christian Jambert, Karim Christian Kamal, Nicolas Giudicci, Katoucha Niane-but Nicolas says that's how we keep France pretty."

 

"Carla?" Nicolas whispered loudly.

 

I tried to come to the rescue and jumped in and said that for Easter we'd made a quick but wonderful two-day trip to the Holy Land, where we stayed overnight with the French ambassador at his beautiful residence in Jerusalem, and he gave us the most wonderful tour of the city and showed us the thousand-year-old official city motto still visible on a crumbling pre-medieval wall and which translates as: "Come for the humus, stay for the humuside!" and we had a lovely time learning all about the history of the place, but Carla ploughed on.

 

 

"And Nicolas says that imagining a French magistrate with a sexual perversion that can only express itself in horrific violence against the helpless is as difficult as imagining Jesus without lederhosen, but that I must never tell people that when the FBI shut down some child pornography sites in the Landslide affair and credit card information led them to pedophiles in four countries and their judicial authorities turned over figures to let Interpol know how many lunatics they had, Switzerland had 1300, England 1300, Canada 2300 and France 0. And I asked Nicolas how come we don't get to have pedophiles like everybody else and he said there's no room because we've taken in all of Iran's non-existent homosexuals, but then he said just kidding and told me that when Operation Achilles arrested a couple of hundred buyers of child snuff films a few years back, 71 of them were French judges and prosecutors, and recently a judge of the Versailles court of appeals and former president of the magistrates' trade union, was caught running a pedophile ring; four judges in Burgundy were found to be involved in the disappearance, torture and murder of eight mentally retarded girls; and three judges in the south of France protected serial killer Patrice Alegre in exchange for the pleasure of torturing and killing the child prostitutes he provided. But Nicolas said it's unfair to single out judges Constantin, Leleux, Lempereur, Renard, Carle, Meyer, Marchais, Wolfrom-Perron, Croissant and Robineau for torturing children or just innocently violating their basic human rights because so many of France's 7,000 judges are authentic criminals that we were the first country to require an ethics commission to protect children from the judges who were protecting them (2003) or to have to impose, as of May 2008, psychiatric evaluations on all the future ones even if they will be evaluated by Valeri Pichard and Bertrand Glose, the same state contract psychiatrists who usually just falsify reports on human rights activists. And Nicolas says that none of these grown-up things are taught in either French or foreign schools, because if they were then Johnny Depp wouldn't live here or have married that giant forehead with the girl hanging down from it so it's better for everybody to limit serious study of France to The Image of the Squid in Jules Verne and Its Relation to the Frankfurt School and that sort of crap."

 

Nicolas tried to change the subject and told the Queen rather loudly that he is writing a memoir about his first term, and Carla whispered "Loulou,what's a memoir?" and I said "A memoir, darling, is a fictional account of someone's life told by the liar himself," and she took out her Mont Blanc and wrote it down on one of the menus that was wedged between the ketchup and mustard squeeze bottles. But then she started in again and Nicolas was glaring at me with bug-eyed desperation and I kicked Carla under the table and the Queen glared at me because that was her shin not Carla's but the Queen was very gracious about that just as she was gracious about (because I'm sure she saw him) Nicolas scooping all of his cutlery into his napkin and then into my bag.

 

"Carla?" Nicolas said again.

 

"Nicolas!" Carla shouted. "Carla is talking!

 

"Please?" he implored.

 

"Oh, all right then," she huffed, "but you must play it quietly," and she opened her purse and handed him his kazoo and he was happy for the rest of the evening and after dinner our hosts showed us that, even in Windsor, England truly is "Cool Britannia" and when "Mr. Lucky" by Elliot Easton's Tiki Gods came on, my word, I haven't seen people watusi like that since I was eight and maman and the chauffeur danced it only lying down in the flowerbed and with no music. But the evening was wearing on, and Nicolas nodded to Carla and me that it was time to leave and we were neither the first nor last to go, but Her Majesty, unfailingly polite, asked Nicolas if we really did have to leave so early, and Nicolas was so happy to be able to show off his English one last time and said "Your Majesty, it is with regret that we leave, but you know what they say: Early to bed and up with the cock!" and we adjourned to our lovely rooms and then returned to Paris the next day.

 

So sue me: as far as I'm concerned, 60, rue de Varenne is the center of the civilized world. God, it is so good to be back home with my lilies and roses and carnations and harpsichord and piano and books and electronics and wine cellar and gym and my bilingual cavalier King Charles. From my bedroom I can see George Vanderbilt's mansion at 58, next door, in which his neighbor from across the street, Edith Wharton, used to lease rooms for Henry James once James had retired from professional alligator wrestling in the Florida Everlades and moved permanently to Europe. It was here in my house that James read, for a gathering that included previous owner Robert de Montesquiou, Rilke, Rodin, Cocteau, Paul Morand and Proust, the first draft of the lyrics to "It Must Be Jelly (Cause Jam Don't Shake Like That)," and it was at the grand second story window through which I am looking now that they would stand and take turns spitting on pedestrians and a plaque on the façade of 60, rue de Varenne commemorates Ms. Wharton's invention of the water balloon.

 

Ah, the ghosts in this place! Sometimes it is all I can do to fall asleep when I think that my bedroom is the very room in which Marcel Proust would often spend the night when Robert's lavish parties would end late, and how he must have looked at these high white curtains which hid from the eyes the bed placed as if in the rear of a sanctuary; the scattering of light silk counterpanes, of quilts with flowers, of embroidered bedspreads, of linen pillowcases, this scattering under which it disappeared in the daytime, as an altar in the month of Mary under festoons and flowers, and which, in the evening, in order to go to bed, he would place cautiously on an armchair where they consented to spend the night; by the bed, the trinity of the glass with blue patterns, the matching sugar bowl, and the decanter; that very white guipure tablecloth which, thrown as an altar runner across the chest of drawers adorned with two vases, a picture of the Savior, and a twig of blessed boxwood made it resemble the Lord's Table (of which a priedieu, placed there every day, when the room was "done," finished evoking the idea), but whose frayings always catching in the chinks of the drawers stopped their movement so completely that he could never take out a handkerchief without at once knocking down the picture of the Savior, the sacred vases, the twig of blessed boxwood, and without stumbling and catching hold of the priedieu; so that this operation, in appearance so simple, of opening or closing the window, he never succeeded in doing and, doubtless moved by what, in his feelings very personal could not be described as melancholy and yet partook of that sadness so wistful whose companionship is almost sweet, seemed to be the church in which he lay, found himself praying that in the future those who would claim to love his sentences so insanely long that normal people just want to fucking hang themselves about a third of the way through, would form an elite club of physically and morally repellant snobs who could only date each other, and I remember reading how Marcel had sprung up from this very same bed in the middle of the night on January 26, 1919 and had got one of his pedicureless feet (ask me sometime about the horror stories my great-grandmother told me about the ethereal Marcel's little piggies) caught in the sheets and had smashed his face into the hardwood floor with a sound so loud that people at 56, rue de Varenne two doors down awoke with a start thinking it was German cannon in Paris again, and how the following night Robert de Montesquiou had invited neighbours Edith and Henry, who had only made things worse for poor, sensitive Marcel by short-sheeting his bed and then while he was remaking the bed and spewing convoluted invective, had stood in the corridor and placed a new tube of toothpaste on the floor with the capless tip under Marcel's door and Edith Wharton had jumped on it and that's when Marcel had the famous nervous breakdown.

 

I fell asleep, then awoke to the beautiful sound of blackbirds at the crack of dawn the next day around noon, put on a tight black asymmetrical skirt and a white organza see-through blouse and added a pair of eight-inch brass cuffs so that mistaking me for a waitress would be out of the question. Every year since our great friend Rudolph Nureyev's death in 1993, Carla and I and half a dozen friends drive out to the Russian cemetery at Sainte Genevieve des Bois in Fontainebleau Forest to commemorate not Rudolph's death but his life, and this year Nicolas wanted to come along. Nicolas' chauffeur pulled into the courtyard and out hopped Carla, looking lovely as ever but wearing jeans, and she came in and I looked in the mirror and said I'm not wearing what I'm wearing, took everything off and Carla, who is very impressionable, put her hand on the back of my neck, pressed her forehead to mine, said "Loulou, we're not women. We're super-vixens, built for sin," placed her lips against mine, and I said "Not now, darling," threw on a plum-coloured alpaca turtleneck and chocolate cashmere zoave pants with chocolate suede boots and we got back in the SUV and roared out onto the rue de Varenne, up to the Invalides, over the Alexandre III Bridge, across the Champs-Élysées and down to the presidential palace on the rue du faubourg Saint Honoré, 7 minutes door to door, with the sirens.

 

We went straight to see Nicolas in his wonderful office and before we'd even knocked we could hear Nicolas laughing through the door. I smiled at Carla and said "What's so funny?"

 

"Oh, Nicolas is alone with his pinwheel again," she explained.

 

We knocked and went in and there was my darling old friend, the President of France, the very picture of that otium cum dignitatem, or dignified relaxation, that we so love in France, sitting by the fireplace in a Louis XV armchair wearing a green tie with his grey suit, swim fins and sombrero and I said "Darling, you're in Prozac colours!"

 

And he said "Loulou! I've given it up!"

 

So I said "And how are we feeling this morning? Any desire to do harm to ourself or to others?"

 

And he said "Not any more! At my Friday morning session, my psychiatrist asked me if my thoughts sometimes assume the form of a large insect, and I had to laugh because I knew then that he could read my mind, so I strangled him, and now I'm happy all the time."

 

In the car on the way out to Fontainebleau, Carla was saying how exciting it was to be with a man who has nuclear power www.timesonline.co.uk whose every gesture says Almighty! She watched lovingly as Nicolas used his Blackberry, no doubt, she whispered, to send emails to Medvedev and Bush and that Chinese guy to tell them that France does not intend to do their bidding and they'd better watch out. About twenty minutes later, Nicolas held up his Blackberry and said "Look! I got Arceus! He's the hardest Pokemon to get!"

 

We arrived in Sainte Genevieve, where once again we found ourselves standing by Nureyev's grave, exquisitely covered by a trompe-l'oeil mosaic kilim /www.nureyev.org/tombeau.php and we tearfully shared our favourite recollections of Rudolph: of the time he had vandalized Franco Zeffirelli's villa, defecating as he went and Franco following him around screaming "Terrorist!"; or how he'd broken the jaw of a teacher at the Paris Opera Ballet; how he'd simply dropped and injured a ballerina when he realized she'd gained half a pound; and dragged another across the floor by her hair. We toasted him as always, using Jerome Robbins' famous phrase "To an artist, an animal, and a cunt," knocked back our Grey Goose and said in unison "Good Fucking Riddance," as we smashed our glasses against his tomb and I felt like I do when I hear Mahler's heart-rending adaggieto, but I was taught to be strong and, however emotional soundtracks and weddings and funerals may be, to try my best not to laugh. Then we had lunch on the grounds of the château de Fontainebleau and we had lovely oysters and a nice little Entre Deux Mers we had picked up for peanuts in Barbizon and Carla turned to me and said with her mouth full of oysters: "Loulou, izhn't eating oyshterzh like French kishing the ocean?" and I went "Carla, gross me out."

 

That evening, the three of us drove out to the Bois de Boulogne, took the little barge over to the island where the Chalet des Iles sits on the edge of the water and sat by the fire, with peacocks leaping up to the window sill and peering in at us as we enjoyed venison and duck à l'orange with caramelized leeks and carrots with a case of 1999 Tuileries-Pagès followed by a chocolate tart, coffee and more chocolate. There were artists and writers and actors and four French cabinet ministers, and everyone tittered at the bons mots of writer and child killer Gabriel Matzneff; actor Patrick Timsit telling Down Syndrome jokes; star of stage and screen Michel Leeb doing his hilarious number about what black people look like, and comedian Dieudonné treated us to his Heil Israel! sketch. What an evening it was!

 

But then the tone changed as Nicolas wandered off to speak with his ministers and Carla huddled next to me. "Loulou," she said, "I've been wondering: do you think Nicolas really loves me?"

 

"Is the Pope Catholic?" I asked. "Is every 2-dimensional surface which is both compact and simply connected topologically a sphere? Did France actively sponsor the Rwanda genocide? Do Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom intentionally bankrupt their own clients? Hello? Of course he loves you, for now. Darling, you and Nicolas go together like diamonds and pearls, like fine wine and domestic violence, like Lamborghinis and foolish parenting!"

 

"Like loin cloths and Double Bubble!" added Carla, clapping her hands excitedly. "I'm so proud to be known as Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy. I mean, it's not like I had married General Pinochet or Mussolini!" (www.express.co.uk/posts/view/2706) But then her eyes filled with sadness, and she said softly "Loulou, when Nicolas asked me to marry him, I thought, you know what I've wanted ever since I was a little girl is to be loved by someone powerful, even if that means having to wake up every morning with Nicolas oinking "You are so beautiful" an inch away from my mouth. But now that I have his love, I feel like I've run to the car in the downpour in the dark and barely made it and locked all the doors and as you watch me all blurry through the windshield you just know he's going to start banging on the windows even though I just cut his head off with a chainsaw but then slowly he rises from the back seat and we realize that I've locked myself into the car with him!!"

 

Carla's crescendo turned several heads our way and the waiter came and asked if everything was all right and I said "No, everything isn't: champagne, and don't dawdle." I leaned towards Carla and said "It's like in "The Fly," when the mutating scientist's stupid wife asks him, 'Where has the cat gone?' Carla, a smart woman wouldn't wait for the answer. She'd get out fast and find someone with no calypters or scutellum."

 

"Oh, Loulou. I don't know what to do. We've made progress in our relationship. This morning, I finally convinced Nicolas to wear boxers and he said okay, but only Spiderman or Simpsons, no more Sponge Bob, and I still believe that I can turn Nicolas into a tantric sex god. But whenever we make love, and I'm lying back on the pillows looking at him with my half-closed, thank-you-in-advance eyes and all moaning and everything, Nicolas climbs on top of me and goes "Welcome to Galeries Lafayette. Goooowing up! Next stop maternity wear!" and then he just falls over sideways giggling and kicking on the bed.

 

"What? He does it every time?"

 

"Yes, both times. Oh Loulou, let's face it, I've never been lucky with men."

 

It was all too true, too. Carla was only seventeen when her first fiancé had perished in a freak accident in which, after his having commented that "you're not really all that tall, you know," Carla had pointed a shotgun at his face and pulled the trigger and he had somehow been fatally injured in the mishap. Then, at eighteen, she had followed another dashing young fiancé with long flowing hair and eyes like the night, Bela, to Hungary to study the black arts. Bela's parents loved Carla and she loved them and even though Bela's father was a werewolf and his mother a large barrel of bikini wax they spent many carefree, wonderful hours together in the family castle outside of Kiskunfélegyháza. Carla was present on that tragic night when Bela, his naked body gleaming with flammable oil, was lighting candles in a pentagram during an impressive ceremony to call forth the Prince of Darkness, and he'd set his membrum virile on fire and the real tragedy is that he could have been saved if only his benighted minions had not extinguished the flames by resorting to an ancient but wholly inappropriate Hungarian folk remedy known as "stomping it out." I remember having taken frail, trembling young Carla in my arms and telling her "Maybe Bela's death is a sign that you weren't intended to be that kind of witch," but the experience had marked her nonetheless. And as if that hadn't been enough, Carla would later lose a third young fiancé, a promising French deputy minister of culture whom she had accompanied to the opening of the Gay Board Games in Menton. Accosted by a hoodlum as they walked home one evening, Jean-Claude had astonished Carla when, far from panicking, he had calmly pointed a Magnum right at the so-called tough guy's face and then smashed the hard, cold chocolate coating all over his nose, so the guy had of course killed him immediately and then had taken Carla, and even though Carla had begged him to just go ahead and kill her, too, and people half a mile away had heard her screams, the fiend had, for one entire, gruesome night, forced her to wear British clothing.

 

"Loulou, why do we fall in love with men who are no good for us?" asked Carla.

 

"Why do flowers bloom?" I asked. "Why do birds sing? Why do the accretion discs surrounding the nuclei of active galaxies emit relativistic jets along their polar axes? It's Nature! Carla darling, a relationship is based on trust; believing that someone else truly loves you is a matter of faith, like believing that God exists or that all nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function have a real part of ½."

 

"Oh, Loulou, you always make everything sound so simple, and I guess it really all does just boil down, as you say, to secretions and Polish hatchets and Catherine Zeta Jones."

 

"Tell me, Carla darling, could it be that Nicolas has a problem with your having slept with over 40,000 different men?"

 

"Not since he had a microbiology lab set up next to the bedroom. And he told me we have to practice safe sex, and I asked him what safe sex is and Nicolas said it's fantasizing about real sex. But Loulou, here's my real question: when the image of Nicolas stepping out of the shower seeps into my brain before I have time to get out of the way, is it normal for me to taste vomit in my mouth?"

 

"That's nothing, darling," I said, "it simply means that you hate him."

 

"But maybe it's not even hatred. Maybe it's just morning sickness."

 

"Oh, speaking of which, how's the baby?" I asked.

 

Carla lifted her blouse to show me a slightly larger pillow than the one she had belted around her waist last month, and with a new pattern by Pierre Frey.

 

"Loulou darling," said Carla, caressing the pillow with her hand, "I've learned things recently about my own love for my husband and his love for me, and now I am just so grateful and so relieved and I know that I want to spend the rest of my life with Nicolas Sarkozy."

 

I was stunned, and I said "Carla, what made you change your mind? Why relieved? Relieved about what?"

 

And Carla said "I am so relieved that Nicolas is gay."

 

And she put her forehead against mine and I said "Christ, Carla, life goes by prestissimo: one minute you're in your highchair, the next you're having to learn the Kama Sutra, then you're spending eighteen years warping your own children, then getting Alzheimer's and then working the night shift as a worm feeder. Carpe thingem, I say. Kiss me."

 

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© 2008 Louise de la Paumardiere

 

 

About LOUISE DE LA PAUMARDIERE It would be difficult to imagine anyone more purely French or a better embodiment of France and French values than polyglamorous Louise de la Paumardiere. Loulou's paternal great grandfather Andre Le Troquer, unfairly removed from office as President of the French Senate in 1958 for having run a pedophile network, and her maternal grandfather General Paul Ausseresses, unfairly stripped of his rank and thrown out of the Legion d'Honneur because of his role as a torturer in the Franco-Algerian war, are but two of her many famous ancestors. Author of From Foreign to French: 100 Makeovers in Stories and Pictures (New York and London: PLB Books, 2006), multi-talented and multilingual Loulou de la Paumardiere first came to public attention when several of the high-profile Paris-based foreign women on whom she performed makeovers committed suicide. Her family operates the majority of the uniquely French institutions known as Centres d'aide par le travail, or CATS, factories in which handicapped French citizens are employed at less than minimum wage because, as Loulou puts it with her typical Cartesian clarity, "they are handicapped." Her ancestral home, Château de la Paumardiere in Boilly-sur-Gui, an hour from Paris in Normandy, has hosted every head of state since Louis XIV and was a favorite haunt of Lully the Sodomite. She continues that great tradition of French hospitality on weekends in Boilly and during the week at her luxurious mansion at 60, rue de Varenne in Paris.