Too Proud to Be Jealous
L’Express asked Sinclair in 2006 if she suffered from her cheap tiffany jewelry husband’s reputation as a “seducer.” “No,” she replied, “I’m rather proud of it.” The word “proud” comes up again in the new book by Renaud Revel and Catherine Rambert, Madame DSK: Un Destin Brisé (“A Broken Destiny”). “Too proud to be jealous,” they write, “she has applied herself with all her might to repress this feeling that she does not accept.”
The reactions in France were revealing. The editor and founder of the magazine Marianne, Jean-François Kahn, declared of the Strauss-Kahn Sofitel case, “Ce n’est qu’un troussage de domestique” (“It’s no more than tumbling a servant”). He had to resign from his own magazine. Jack Lang, minister of culture under François Mitterrand, said, “Il n’y a pas mort d’homme” (“No one got killed”) and has kept a low profile ever since. The august Robert Badinter defended DSK with the same passion he had used to abolish the death penalty. Laurent Joffrin, the editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, challenged him on TV: “You have not had one word of compassion for the victim.”
You can’t begin to understand Anne Sinclair unless you understand that France is a highly sexualized society, where even rejection has its own rules and rituals. Young women know how to play the game of what is called “seduction”; journalists sleep with important men because it’s fun, they say, and keeps the sources happy. “I’d have done him,” more than one woman says—“what a lark.” Girls know how to deflect an advance with a joke or a metaphorical slap. The “droit de cuissage,” or right to deflower any maiden, was a prerogative of men in power, and still is. The tumbling of servants has its own term: “les amours ancillaires.” The events in Room 2806 provoked the same hilarity as the plays of Feydeau, in which the master does the maid between doorways while the mistress awaits in one room and the wife in another.
In a less sophisticated setting, only the man has fun: secretaries tiffany necklaces service the boss in factories and gas stations to keep their jobs. What is delightful Feydeau to those with the references is grim reality without the comforts of culture.