From France With Love: The Proper Way to Pucker

Bjorn Borg did it on the Wimbledon Center Court. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman did it on the silver screen. French people seem to be doing it everywhere all the time.

Kissing his trophy showed the cool Swede’s joy in his tennis victory, and the Grant-Bergman embrace in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious” ranks among the longest and most passionate kisses ever filmed. But for the French, the kiss is simply a way to say hello and goodby.

In a country where greeting a roomful of people can take five minutes by the time everyone’s cheeks get pecked, kissing is serious business. So serious, that a university professor and journalist have written a 294-page book on the subject.

“Le Baiser”--”The Kiss”--by Xavier Fauche and Christiane Noetzlin was published last month by Stock. It tells everything anyone might ever want to know about kissing, from first kisses, stolen kisses and warm-up kisses to the germ content of saliva.

Kissing and Cannibalism

Historical documents, literary references and scholarly opinions abound. In the chapter on maternal kisses, psychoanalyst Francoise Dolto warns that small children confuse kissing with cannibalism, so he cautions mothers against smothering.

The French may be Europe’s busiest kissers. Families kiss when they come down for breakfast and again before they leave for school or work. They greet friends with a kiss--two or three depending on age and region--and again when they part. And it starts all over when they get home and go to bed.

Young girls are trained to proffer the right cheek, aim away from the mouth and never make the first move. When it doubt, it’s forehead first.

The book also looks at kissing through the ages. In 19th-Century France, for example, maraichinage --a French kissing game something like spin the bottle--was a socially accepted practice that allowed young girls to try out the techniques of their potential husbands.

Public Intimacy

Held only on Sundays, it involved deep tongue kissing between at least 10 or more couples who changed partners weekly. In some parts of France, the “tongue dueling,” which often led further, took place outdoors, behind colorful parasols stuck into the ground. The authors describe it as “intimacy in public, outdoors.”

In other regions, maraichinage took place only in church, with couples sitting opposite each other on narrow benches. Clergymen banned the practice in 1864.

“Maraichinage was completely devoid of love. It was kissing for the pure pleasure of kissing,” Fauche and Noetzlin wrote.

Despite its suggestive title, much of “Le Baiser” reads like a doctoral thesis, with long chapters on kissing in sculpture, painting, opera and on the silver screen.