Our Man In Paris: End of the affair

The French may be a treacherous people who (shock horror) insist on a right to disagree with us, but they have one thing in their favour: they have, as every Briton knows, a relaxed attitude to sex and marriage. Every French man has a mistress, or probably several, but their wives do not care because they have multiple lovers of their own.

Actually, the statistics suggest that this is no longer true, if it ever was. Only 36 per cent of French men and women admit that they have had sex outside marriage, compared with 42 per cent of Britons and 50 per cent of Americans. The French are doubtless lying but so, probably, are the Americans and the British.

All the same, the French are more laid-back about these things, aren't they? They do not make the silly fuss about extra-marital sex that we do.

That may be another stereotype which is wrong, or changing. Here are two stories:

The first concerns our friend Carole, who is in her early 40s and has three children. She was walking down the street near her flat in Paris the other day when she bumped into her estranged husband, pushing a loaded supermarket trolley. With him was his 30-something girlfriend – the woman who caused the break-up of their marriage.

"How sweet," Carole said to the girlfriend. "He never used to push the supermarket trolley for his wife and children."

"You tart," the girlfriend shot back. "How dare you parade around here in those vulgar leather trousers?"

Carole retorted: "You might like to know that those trousers were bought for me by my husband, when I had one."

The two women let fly at one another for several minutes, while the husband cowered behind the supermarket trolley. Later, he telephoned Carole to tell her that she, and her leather trousers, must leave the area.

A few months previously, he had offered to remain with her, as long as he could still see his girlfriend. Carole refused. She says that French women of her generation are no longer willing to put up with humiliating "arrangements" of that kind.

This may partly explain why a high proportion of divorces in France (over 60 per cent) are initiated by women. Carole herself has been reluctant, until now, to get into the notoriously byzantine business of the French divorce law – of which more later.

Here is the second story:

A man in Nancy, the owner of a canine beauty parlour, has been ordered to pay €3,000 damages to his ex-wife and her lover. The aggrieved husband had used the scrolling, electronic message-board in his shop-window to denounce his rival, who happened to be his wife's bank manager.

One of his trailing messages read: "Ladies, open an account at [such and such a] bank. Monsieur [Leblanc] will deal with you up close – and for a long time."

Originally, the husband was ordered to pay €7,622 in damages but this was reduced on appeal. He and his wife are now divorced.

Divorce, French-style, can be an expensive and complex business. Under the present law there are five ways of ending a marriage. French lawyers are often accused of steering their clients towards the more fee-generating options.

The last, Socialist-led, government planned to make divorce procedures in France among the simplest in the world. One partner would have been able to end a marriage, without proving any "fault" on the part of the other.

The Socialists' draft law was hated by the Catholic church and the family lobby, perhaps with reason. It was ditched by the new centre-right government last year. Nonetheless, President Jacques Chirac has announced in recent days that he wants to see divorce simplified in France.

Though no paragon of fidelity himself, the president has nothing to fear from a change in the law. Bernadette Chirac said in an outspoken autobiography last year that she detested marital misbehaviour. However, she also said that (unlike our friend Carole) she felt obliged to ignore many things, because of her grande-bourgeoise upbringing and her Catholic faith.

The anti-cancer message goes up in smoke

President Jacques Chirac has made road safety, help for the handicapped and the fight against cancer the three pet themes of his second presidency. Worthy subjects all. On road safety, there are signs that the French are beginning (finally) to get the message.

On cancer, the message is a little confused. Experts are supposed to be preparing a national plan for intensive anti-cancer research. At the same time, according to an Irish friend who is a senior cancer researcher in Paris, the French national budget for the study of cancer is being stealthily cut and researchers are being laid off.

Another message that has struggled to be heard in France is the link between cancer and tobacco. Sir Richard Peto, professor of epidemiology at Oxford University, displayed some startling charts at an anti- cancer conference in Paris last week. The number of deaths from lung cancer among middle-aged men in Britain has been falling since the early Sixties. In France, it is still rising.

The number of smokers in the two countries today is very broadly the same (34 per cent of men smoke in France and 28 per cent in Britain). However, the French only started to give up smoking in large numbers relatively recently.

Peto believes that doctors have been partly responsible for spreading the early anti-tobacco message in Britain. Less than 6 per cent of British doctors smoke; they are increasingly intolerant of patients who do. In France, he pointed out, more than 30 per cent of doctors refuse, or have failed, to give up fags themselves.

Don't take this joke lying down

I thought I had made a wonderful joke at the Anglo-French summit in Le Touquet the other day, but none of my colleagues thought so. Puns are like your own dreams or your own children. No one else appreciates them.

Here is the joke anyway. The deputy spokesman for President Jacques Chirac is called Frédéric Desagneaux, which means literally "of the lambs". Spokesmen for both the British and French delegations agreed to reveal nothing of what was really said at the summit about Iraq. I said that this must count as a case of "le silence Desagneaux" (the silence of the lambs). Get it? Oh never mind.

While in Le Touquet, an old friend told me that spokes-persons in the European Commission are no longer, as they used to be, restricted to talking on a single subject. They are now authorised to comment on a whole range of issues and are therefore officially know as "horizontal spokesmen". Now that is funny.