Longtime readers of this Web log will remember Jacques, my thoroughly French friend from La Sorbonne. As luck would have it, he’s in Washington this week on business. I invited him over for dinner, of course, on Thursday, at my place in Great Falls, Virginia. My girlfriend Cerise was there, along with my dear sister Rose and her husband Hank. Hank’s brother and his wife Shannon had agreed to watch over both families’ large and boisterous Catholic broods for the evening at the home which, thanks to Wall Street, they all now share in Fairfax. Thus was it possible tonight for Rose and her hubby to enjoy some nice, refined experiences in the presence of other adults without a mob of screaming, squabbling brats swarming around them, taxing their patience and slowly pushing them into madness, distraction, despair, depression or perhaps into driving one of their SUVs, packed full of their spoiled and annoying progeny, right off a frigging boat dock somewhere with reasonably deep water. I gave Shannon a copy of Go the [Expletive] to Sleep for her birthday, and I’d bet a hundred bucks she drank a good, stiff Tullamore Dew on the rocks and started reading it to all of those kids under ten years old right about seven-thirty p.m., beginning with the youngest ones and working her way up to the nine-year-olds around eight-forty-five. Any of them older than that, all they need to hear from Shannon is the title, and they’re in bed, doing their best to fall asleep before she catches them awake after curfew. Yeah, by now, both sets of cousins have learned to respect and obey Rose, but make no mistake about it – they’re absolutely terrified of Shannon. As they should be. I think Shannon missed her calling – she ought to have been a parochial school nun.
“Ah, Mec, mon ami,” Jacques sighed, as he savored my best escargot en croute, “you are truly the tom cat who can cook, yes? What a shame such talent is wasted on Americans.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I smoothly responded as Cerise, Rose and Hank exchanged a mélange of bewildered and affronted looks. “Your savoir-faire has a certain je ne sais quoi.”
“And I,” Jacques grandly replied, “will take that also as a compliment. So we are even, yes?”
“As we always end up, my dear French friend,” I shot back. “How are you enjoying your sojourn in the US so far?”
“Quite a bit,” Jacques allowed. “As I always do when I visit your country. Like the Comte Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville, I am… fascinated by America, its people and its… shall we say… culture? Rather as if I am… how shall I put this? Ah yes, as if I am the inestimable Dr. Gilbert M. Grosvenor, of your National Geographic Society, exploring the farthest reaches of the wildest upper Amazon, and finding there such… captivating… and engrossing… natives.”
“With bones through their noses, I suppose,” Rose interjected with a touch of irony.
“With bars of metal through their tongues,” Jacques nodded, “and covered with tatoos, also. Tribal markings,” he illustrated, placing his glass of 1956 Chateau Margaux on the table to free his hands to gesture at his arms, face and torso. “Like a Maori, a Bantu or a Tuareg – except without their depth of meaning or significance, naturally.”
“Of course,” Cerise declared. “This is America, after all.”
“Oui,” Jacques nodded, eyeing me superciliously, “a place where, for example, people drink Chateau Margaux nineteen-fifty-six, simply because it is Chateau Margaux and because nineteen-fifty-six was a long time ago, despite the fact that nineteen-fifty-six is such an unexceptional vintage, even Chateau Margaux two-thousand-and-nine sells for three times as much.”
“Price,” I reminded him, “isn’t everything.”
“Such a statement, my friend,” Jacques proclaimed, “coming from an American, is so extraordinary, it is worth tolerating Washington, DC just to hear it.”
“Well, then,” Rose haughtily inquired as she took a healthy sip of 1956 Chateau Margaux, “if the French are so incredibly civilized, perhaps you would care to explain to us why Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn has been indicted by a New York grand jury for raping a… native woman, if you will… from Guinea-Conakry – a place which, by the way, is National Geographic country if I ever heard of it – while she was working as a chamber maid at the Hotel Sofitel in Times Square.”
“Actually,” Cerise corrected, “he hasn’t, in fact, been indicted for rape. It seems he couldn’t quite manage that. He’s charged with one count of sexual abuse in the first degree, one count of sexual abuse in the third degree, two counts of criminal sexual acts in the first degree, one count of forcible touching, one count of unlawful imprisonment in the second degree, and one count of attempted rape. Seven counts in all.”
“Seven?” Hank exclaimed. “Well, seven’s lucky, right? This wine rocks – got any more?”
“Certainly, Hank,” I told him, gesturing to my 1750 Chippendale sideboard. There’s another bottle next to the champagne bucket. Could you open it for us?”
“Sure,” Hank enthusiastically vouched, quickly rising to do the honors.
“Tell me Mec,” Jacques requested, “is it not true that your American grand juries, they indict the ham sandwich?”
“While the grand jury system was originally conceived of as a mechanism to protect citizens’ rights,” I conceded, “in the United States, it has essentially evolved into a tool for prosecutors. In order to deliver an indictment, the members of the grand jury usually need to be told that an eyewitness picked the ham sandwich out of a lineup; that the police successfully tricked it into making self-incriminating statements after reading the sandwich its Miranda rights; or, that the forensics unit found ham DNA at the crime scene – but it’s not essential.”
“And, so,” Jacques pursued, “is it not possible – if, of course, any of those alleged crimes actually occurred, which is by no means certain – that a ham sandwich committed them?”
“It’s definitely not very likely,” I opined.
“But you cannot prove,” he insisted, “that it is not so.”
“Nope,” I admitted, “I can’t.”
“And the remarkable thing here,” Rose observed, “is that so far, the defense arguments advanced by Strauss-Kahn’s attorneys aren’t significantly better than the one Jacques is proposing.”
“That’s right,” Cerise chimed in, ticking the points off on her fingers, “A. He wasn’t there when the maid cleaned the room. B. If he was there, no nude encounter occurred. C. If he was there when the maid cleaned the room, and a nude encounter occurred, it was accidental and the maid’s fault. D. If he was there and there was an accidental nude encounter that was the maid’s fault, she was overcome by lust at the sight of him and the sex was consensual. E. The whole thing is a conspiracy.”
“Your Gallup Poll,” Jacques pointed out, “just reported that fifty-seven percent of French citizens interviewed about the case believe DSK has been, how do you say,” he inquired as he mimed a large rectangle in the air before him, “put in the frame, yes?”
“Who,” Rose demanded with a skeptical tone, “would want to do that?”
“Who?” Jacques echoed back with his own tone of incredulity. “Who indeed! Until all this business, DSK was a favorite of the Socialists to run for President of France! How about the opposition parties? Could that be who? Or perhaps even rival members of the Socialists are behind it! And until he had to resign this week, DSK was the head of the International Monetary Fund. Now look at what is happening: China is saying that the next leader of the IMF should not be another European. But if it is not another European, the IMF cannot guarantee favorable terms for the European economic bailouts, or even the stability of the Euro! And who outside the European Union would not want to bring the Euro to its knees? Everybody, that is who!”
“So you believe someone did what – paid the maid to fabricate a case against DSK?” Rose challenged.
“Perhaps,” Jacques shrugged.
“But how could anyone possibly expect to get away with it?” Cerise objected. “Here she is, a poor West African immigrant, cleaning hotel rooms for a living. Then, suddenly, she starts spending piles of money? The IRS would be all over her like white on rice even if nobody else was, and believe me, I know Washington well enough to tell you the FBI would never pass up something as juicy as that! And besides, whoever would try something along those lines ought to be smart enough to figure out that DSK’s lawyers, accountants and detectives would start digging around for evidence of it starting on Day One.”
“Maybe somebody blackmailed her,” Hank suggested as he began freshening up our wine glasses. “Like from an episode of Law and Order or something.”
“There, you see,” Jacques chided, “your husband demonstrates great insight.”
“And more than a little imagination,” Rose countered.
“What I don’t get,” Cerise wondered aloud, “is how somebody who calls himself a Socialist can justify staying in a luxury Times Square hotel suite that costs three thousand dollars a night.”
“And what I don’t get,” Rose added, “is how come he had three grand a night for a hotel room, but was too cheap to shell out another five hundred for an hour with a call girl, if that’s what he wanted.”
“In fact,” I clarified, “the suite only lists for three thousand a night. Members of the French government, French diplomats and military, as well as persons with allied positions, get to stay there for only eight hundred.”
“Pffft!” Cerise scorned. “What a bargain! A mere eight hundred dollars a night for a hotel room! As I said – this guy’s a Socialist? What’s up with that, anyhow?”
“Yeah – the only Socialist we have in the US Congress is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont,” Rose informed Jacques, “and I guarantee you, he doesn’t stay in eight-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel rooms when he travels, discounted down from three thousand or not.”
“The European concept of Socialism,” Jacques surmized, “is somewhat different from yours, I think. We have also very wealthy Communists in France, and nobody – how do you say – bats the eye. But here, you shoot them on sight, no?”
“Not quite,” I admitted, “but close. The only places in the United States where it’s safe to openly be a Communist are Manhattan, San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts. And actually, even in those places, it’s usually prudent to say you’re a Marxist instead. It sounds more intellectual and abstract that way.”
“But in France,” Jacques explained, “the Socialists are a major political party which is the direct descendant of the French Section of the Workers’ International, and it has always been the party of the Workers’ Movement.”
“All right, then, so tell me,” Rose implored, “how could a good French Socialist like Monsieur Strauss-Kahn run naked out of the shower and force himself sexually on a member of the Working Class?”
“Excusez-moi, Madame,” Jacques declared with an air of satisfaction, “but now, you are arguing in my favor! Indeed, how could a good French Socialist do such a thing? The answer is, he could not! He would not, and he did not! Jean-François Kahn, the famous French journalist; Jack Lang, a prominent fellow Socialist; André Vallini, another Socialist, and Président du Conseil général d’Isère; Robert Badinter, who was Justice Minister under Francois Mitterand; and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the great French philosopher, have all said this, too! Those who know DSK, they cannot accept these accusations – even his wife does not believe them!”
“I’m sure his wife,” Rose confidently asserted, “wants desperately not to believe it.”
“To be completely accurate,” Cerise noted, “what Jean-François Kahn said was that, even if he did have physical contact with the maid, it was only a case of ‘lifting the servant’s skirt,’ and that’s okay in France. Well, Jacques, is that okay there?”
“Comme ci, comme ça,” Jacques replied with blasé nonchalance. “C’est bonnet blanc… et blanc bonnet. In France, we do not have this… Puritanical streak, I think you call it, running down our backs as you do here. Nobody forces a woman to become the bedroom maid, you know. And if, perhaps, she sees a rich, powerful, handsome man with no clothes on in that bedroom, maybe, here I don’t know. But in France, nature may take its course, yes?”
“What!” Rose exclaimed. “In France, the chamber maids come with the hotel room? They’re an… accessory, like a vibrating bed or a jacuzzi?”
“In France, with a five star hotel,” Jacques allowed, “one expects… a full range of… amenities.”
“Damn,” Hank cut in, “they sure know how to live over there, don’t they?”
“In America,” Rose fumed, looking daggers at Hank, “domestic workers are not the erotic playthings of their employers – or, in the case of hotels, their employers’ patrons!”
“Oh, is that so?” Jacques smiled. “Then what is this I hear about your California governor, the movie star, this Schwarzenegger? Did he not have a child with his servant?”
“He’s getting what he deserves,” Cerise confidently asserted. “When the divorce lawyers get through with him, Arnold’s going to be one flat broke, has-been action hero!”
“That,” Jacques sniffed, “is a far crying away from what your New York prosecutor has in mind for DSK, I think. The big muscle-man movie actor, he pays some money to the Kennedy woman, while you Americans, you want to lock DSK in prison and throw the key out the window with the baby’s bath water, no? Oh, yes – very, very, bad rich French politician, but not so bad rich California politician, n’est-ce pas? So, as you said, Mademoiselle Cerise – What’s up with that?”
“Sure beats me,” Hank told Jacques as he killed his second Chateau Margaux 1956 and poured the rest of the bottle into the glass. “Have you seen the pictures of Schwarzenegger’s maid? I mean, if she looked like Jennifer Lopez or something, it might make sense, but instead, she looks like one of the lunch ladies at my high school back in Newark, Delaware! Why would somebody with all of that money, all of that fame, all of that power, and, on top of everything else, married to a Kennedy, no less – want to hit that, for God’s sake?”
Jacques considered Hank’s question carefully, pursing his lips, contemplating the ceiling. After a long moment, he spoke. “La plus belle fille du monde ne peut donner que ce qu’elle a. Les fruits défendus sont les meilleurs et c’est dans les vieilles marmites qu’on fait les meilleures soupes. On a souvent besoin d’un plus petit que soi. Il n’y a que les montagnes qui ne se rencontrent jamais. Peu importe le flacon, tant qu’il y à l’ivresse?”
At that, Rose and Cerise, who both speak French, gazed heavenward and shook their heads. Hank, who doesn’t, surveyed the ladies’ reaction carefully, then turned to me with a completely mystified expression. “Uh, what’d he say, Tom?”
“Basically,” I summarized, “he said that you don’t look at the mantelpiece while you’re poking the fire. Dessert, anyone?”