Mother, author, emissary: the busy Clara Gaymard

As France’s ambassador for international investment, Clara Gaymard jets around the world at least two weeks of every month, on a mission to convince CEOs that transplanting their businesses to her country would benefit their bottom lines. A wife, mother of eight, high-profile careerist and bestselling author, with another novel in progress, she somehow finds the time and energy to roller-skate, swim and ski with her husband and her children, who range in age from 7 to almost 18.

Fictionalized, she would represent the Parisian version of the protagonist in the Allison Pearson novel “I Don’t Know How She Does It All.” In reality, she personifies Mireille Guiliano’s bestseller, “French Women Don’t Get Fat.” At 45, Gaymard is petite and mince, which is defined literally in French as slim or slender, and colloquially as looking really good, really fit.

Stylish, during a recent visit to Los Angeles she wears an elegant chocolate pants ensemble and an au courant dark butterscotch leather jacket cropped to show an enviable figure.

Charming, she parries in fluent English with business leaders. Armed with reams of positive economic data regarding foreign firms already in her country, she works to contradict a U.S. perception that strong employee protections, inflexible unions and routine strikes make France far from the friendliest place for foreigners to turn a profit. She can expertly make a case in French, English or Danish; her mother is from Denmark.

But Gaymard really comes alive when she talks about her passion: writing.

She had to write after the death of her father, Jerome Lejeune, who discovered the cause of Down’s syndrome.

“When he died [in 1994], I was expecting No. 6. He died 10 days before she was born,” Gaymard says. “I wanted her to know him.”

Her first book, “Life Is a Blessing: A Biography of Jerome Lejeune -- Geneticist, Doctor, Father,” which she wrote as Clara Lejeune-Gaymard, is a collection of essays. Published in 1997, it has been translated into English and Spanish.

Her second, “La vie est un bonheur,” is another essay collection. Published in 1999, it captures the small and important moments of happiness in women’s everyday lives.

Her third book, a novel, transformed one woman’s life.

Hers.

“S’il suffisait d’aimer” is published under just her first name, Clara. The 2003 book, whose title she translates as “If love was enough,” has sold more than 20,000 copies. It is in its fourth reprint and publisher Fayard plans an English translation. On the book jacket, a young woman with long, wavy hair and big eyes stares without a smile. It is a portrait of Gaymard’s oldest child, Philothee, then 15. Her image hints at the secret of this story.

Gaymard says she “started with the idea that we all have three lives. We have one official life, one personal life and an interior life.”

Writing in the voice of a young man, in love with the daughter of someone he admires, Gaymard delves into the unfinished business of an aging and ailing former ambassador, a lover who has many wives, a dying man who needs a favor. His request reveals that he is not the man his future son-in-law thinks he is.

The book poses a philosophical question: Are any of us who others think we are? Or do we all have something to hide?

The book’s popularity, its resonance with readers who write to Gaymard, and her television appearances, radio shows and publicity tours have changed her public image.

“I was a civil servant with a husband who was more famous,” she says. “I was considered like a wife with eight children.”

How does she do it all?

She does not write on schedule or every day. She doesn’t outline, make detailed character sketches or create in sequence from beginning to end.

“It comes as a need. I put it on the paper like a puzzle,” she says. “I write when it comes, and it comes very often.” Sometimes when she’s in a boring meeting pretending to take notes. Sometimes when she’s traveling.

When she must go to India, China, Australia, Hong Kong or wherever, she leaves on Monday and returns Friday, if possible, to spend time with her children.

“I never accept an invitation at night, when I’m in France. We have friends over, but we never go out,” she says.

She has help, of course -- a butler and cook for state functions; a housekeeper five days a week. At least she did when she left for California.

Last Friday, on her final day in L.A., her husband, Herve Gaymard (who had been considered a possible future prime minister), resigned as France’s finance minister, a position he had held since December. He also, according to French news reports, gave up the expensively renovated duplex apartment where they lived (briefly) at taxpayers’ expense as controversy boiled: over the rent, nearly $18,500 (U.S.) per month at a time when their mentor and friend, President Jacques Chirac, has called for public belt-tightening; over the size, about 6,500 square feet; over the location, near the Champs-Elysee in one of the best areas of Paris, far from the finance minister’s headquarters but closer to the children’s public schools; over their property despite his emphasis of his humble beginnings as a shoemaker’s son; and lastly, over his public albeit false statement that he did not own a Parisian apartment. (It is currently rented to friends.)

“I’m very sad. And I’m sad not to be with him when that happened,” Clara Gaymard said on the day he resigned, before heading to a luncheon with Southern California’s French business elite at the Beverly Hills home of Consul General Phillippe Larrieu.

Where will they live?

“I have no idea,” she answers. “We have a lot of friends, thank goodness.”

The children are out of school, so the family is skiing in the Alps, staying in their country home near where Herve Gaymard grew up. After their holiday, Clara Gaymard doesn’t know what’s next -- or whether her husband’s resignation will affect her career.

“In France, we push the woman to work, to have children.... There is a fiscal incentive,” she says. “There is help. You are not a bad mother if you go to work again. On the contrary. A lot of women are doing the same thing I do. Maybe they don’t have eight children. Maybe they have two or three children. It’s not so easy. But what life is easy?”

Gaymard takes life a day at a time. Nothing causes her to lose sleep, binge on chocolate or chain smoke; she puts it all in perspective.

“Our mothers, our grandmothers didn’t complain about stress because they didn’t have a choice. They had to work at the farm. They had to work [at whatever] because they didn’t have any choice,” she says.

“When you choose to work, it’s not easy every day,” Gaymard adds. “When we are women, we always want to do things in a perfect way. We are not perfect. When we accept that, it is easier.”

To do it all.