Maybe They Don’t Get Fat Because Being Catty Burns Calories

In the interest of settling the matter definitively, I called my sisters-in-law in Paris this morning. “Why don’t Frenchwomen get fat?” I demanded, routing the phone cord around my cinnamon Danish.

This was not going to be a difficult survey. First of all, French nationality is conferred only on those capable of pontificating. Secondly, I was appealing to the experts. My calls caught none of my svelte sisters-in-law halfway out the door to the gym (“a disgusting pickup place, full of Frenchmen and foreign women,” one sniffed) or with her nose in a diet book.

Thirdly, I was not asking why Frenchwomen are thin. I was asking why they are not fat, the implication being that someone else very much is. Diplomacy has its place in Paris; it belongs in the office of foreign affairs. Frenchwomen are renowned for their je ne sais quoi, their savoir-faire, their douceur, ostensibly untranslatable terms for which there is one perfectly good English equivalent: cattiness.

The first Frenchmen on our shores were charmed by the American experiment, puzzled by the American female. She had no wit and less conversation. More to the point, there was in the New World a disconcerting dearth of slim Parisian waists. Equally to the point, American girls had it all backward. They labored under the illusion that they were to be flirtatious until they landed a husband and paragons of virtue thereafter. The self-respecting Frenchwoman subscribed to the opposite approach.

By general consensus, American women were plump, plain and graceless. “They follow fashion,” observed one volunteer in our War of Independence, “but do not always use it to the best advantage.” Clearly, scarf-tying has never been indigenous to this country.

Boston women, it was noted, were “carefully dressed, but without taste, and do not understand how to arrange their hair.” We had no grace, little spirit; the best that could be said of us was that we were uncommonly clean. French fashion simply looked wrong on an American frame, which might explain that wardrobe malfunction I once encountered in my sister-in-law’s ball gown, something I had always taken for sabotage.

In the French opinion, too, we went to seed quickly. To 18th century eyes, an American woman was charming and adorable at 15, faded at 23, old at 35 and decrepit at 40, whereas everyone knew a Frenchwoman was 29 until she was 60. Which may explain why I called my eldest sister-in-law first. I had it on good authority that she was resplendent in a bikini as recently as last week.

Her answer was simple: Frenchwomen eat three meals a day; take only soup at night; avoid dinner with their kids. And they aren’t fussy about what they eat. “Even you are fussy about what you eat,” she chided, which is true. Already I had decided there was no way I was going to get a hazelnut cannoli at lunch if the plain ones were sold out. It made more sense to head across the street for a macadamia-nut cookie.

My sisters-in-law made no reference to dieting, rarely a bestselling topic in France. Only one such plan had crossed the family radar of late: Rumor had it that the lender of ball gowns had sworn by a creme fraiche and fromage blanc regimen. I ran this past the family beauty for corroboration. From Paris came a snort; it was savoir-faire all over again: Didn’t I know that diet had been a bust?

For half a second, I considered mentioning my sex theory; I’ve never heard anyone other than Frenchwomen speak of sex in terms of exercise. Instead I closed my eyes and thought about that ur-American, Abigail Adams. Transplanted from her Massachusetts hamlet to Paris, Mrs. Adams was awkward and unilingual, though not too inhibited to venture a sex theory of her own: The French seemed to have a propensity for the stuff. Among her 18th century anxieties: She despaired that she would never conform to French dimensions. And she feared that she was growing fat. By Parisian standards of course she already was.

Too late for Mrs. Adams, the beauty of the family volunteered her secret. Chain smoking helps, she conceded, but walking is better. And walking in high heels is best. It burns extra calories. Alas, it also happens to eliminate the possibility of eating a cannoli on the run.

As to what colonial America ate, well, let’s just say that at the birth of our nation no one accused us of being fussy. To the French mind, our cuisine was inedible, the wines abominable, the appetite of the American matched only by his ignorance concerning the meal before him. Which explains why I don’t cook for my mother-in-law, whom of course I consulted as well on this urgent matter.

“A Frenchwoman is at the coiffeur instead of lunching with her husband,” she intoned, sounding suspiciously like someone who knew where I had been yesterday at 1 o’clock. Or someone who had some advice to offer; I am still conspicuously a native of Massachusetts.

I forgive her though because she regularly feeds my children, half-breeds who in Paris elicit double takes along with the occasional, astonished tribute. “Ca, Madame,” offered an impeccably dressed gentleman in the Tuileries, speaking of my then 9-month-old, to whose head no French hat could be fitted. “Ca, Madame, c’est un bebe” -- “That, madam, is quite a baby.”

Here was a man who had met his first Great Dane in a city of poodles. From the stroller, my American-built baby saluted with a pain au chocolat.