TO KISS OR NOT TO KISS

THE QUESTION ON ALL LIPS

Robert Doisneau. Le Baiser de L’Hôtel de Ville (A Kiss at the Town Hall.)

Apparently the Croatian minister at some recent event made a faux pas by kissing the cheek of his German (female) opposite number.

Had he done so in France, it would barely have raised a murmur.

Paris is the kissiest city in the world. From Auguste Rodin’s lovers of Le Baiser, locked in their eternal white marble embrace, toRobert Doisneau’s  photograph of a smack snatched in a crowded street,  kisses are so promiscuously and publicly conferred that the entire city can seem bent on bestowing the Big Wet One. Even a footballer who has just netted a goal opens his arms to his team’s collective embrace.  Anglo-Saxon sportsmen who used to think this the limit of Gallic insanity are now doing it too. Can we expect it to appear even in more sedentary leisure pursuits? Billiards? Chess?

But if the French, particularly Parisians,  kiss without restraint,  it’s for a reason.  Like those other rituals – the nod to a neighbour, the eye contact with the concierge, the “Bonjour, m’sieur” with which one greets even the bus-driver and street sweeper – kisses lubricate the abrasion inevitable in a city where more than two million people occupy a space which, anywhere else,  would accommodate half that number. In the hive that is Paris, we bees,  rather than stinging one another,  create honey instead.

As in nature, females make the running. On first meeting a woman, it’s usual to shake hands, but on parting, if the meeting has not been drop-dead disastrous, she will offer her cheek.  Between females, two kisses are standard, a third indicates genuine pleasure, while enduring affection demands a fourth, and even, exceptionally, a touch on the lips. 

Among men, the kiss is reserved for close friends or relatives – “kissing cousins” – but also, paradoxically, for formal ceremonies:  weddings, funerals, the conferring of honours. In such cases, “sealed with a kiss” means what it says. As official as a rubber stamp, the kiss confirms legality.  Nobody watching Charles de Gaulle hinging his mantis-like frame to plant two smackers on the cheeks of a poilu  just presented with a Croix de Guerre could possibly imagine he meant anything more by it than comradely respect

“Do I really have to kiss him?”

After formal kisses, however, come the sexual kind. “French kissing” first appeared in English  around 1923 to describe a kiss that employed both lips and  tongue; something at which the French, traditionally,  were adept. Before long, however, it came to mean oral sex. When, in 1933, actress Mary Astor confided to her diary that taking an open carriage ride through Central Park with playwright George S. Kaufman permitted them to “pet and French right out in the open,” everyone got the picture. Incidentally, it’s not only in English that meanings change.  Time has also transformed the meaning of baiser,  once the French word for “kiss,”  but now, frankly, “fuck.” Today’s polite form is embrasse.

As with most human activities, effectiveness in kissing is measured less by the “what” and the “where” than the “why,” the “when” and, above all, the “whom.” However, certain Paris locations do, by repute, possess a sexual significance beyond the ordinary.  To slightly amend Andrew Marvell, “The grave’s a fine and private place/And some, I think, do there embrace.” Popular sites for a discreet meeting of lip and lip include the shared resting place of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre in Montparnasse  cemetery,  and that of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas in Pére Lachaise.  Gay couples bond by the tomb of Oscar Wilde in the same cemetery, which also contains a monument to Abelard and Heloise . This is less popular as a kissing location since it’s doubtful they are actually buried there. Also, Heloise’s uncle had Abelard castrated for seducing her, which can evoke negative thoughts of one’s potential in-laws.

Most lovers in Paris rightly prefer the open air, and an audience. What is the point of being in love unless everyone knows it?  Doisneau was right to show his couple embracing in bright day among indifferent pedestrians.  Nothing was lost by the revelation that they were models and the whole thing posed. Romance by its nature is calculated. What is the sexual act if not a show, with its décor and dialogue, its performances, even – regrettably – its reviews?

For outdoor romance in Paris, one can hardly improve on its parks, and, specifically, the Jardins de Luxembourg. Generations of lovers have scuffed hand-in-hand through the fallen chestnut leaves or nuzzled surreptitiously at the Fontaine de Medicis,  with its overarching plane trees and statue of one-eyed Polyphemus surprising Acis and Galatea in illicit embrace. 

But slip around behind this baroque reconstruction  (c. 1866) to the earlier, less opulent and thus often disregarded Fontaine de Lèda (c. 1807) .  From a shaded pool, a single column of water bubbles before Achille Valois’s relief illustrating how Zeus took the form of a swan to ravish the beautiful Leda.  The graphically drooping neck of the exhausted bird (which, since a recent restoration, spouts an impudent stream of water),  the figure of Cupid,  shrinking, almost aghast, from what has just transpired, and a languid Leda exhibiting what William Blake called “the lineaments of gratified desire” so shocked critic Amaury Duval in 1812 that he urged the fountain be hidden because “the ideas it calls to the imagination [make it] hardly a suitable subject for a monument placed before the eyes of the public.”  But hiding it here only made the fountain more aphrodisiac, a fact of which lovers take advantage among the trees that shade the pool,  indifferent to – even stimulated by –  runners panting by on the jogging track just a few metres away.

Yet no choreography, never mind how intricately constructed, can ignite a kiss. Passion, indifferent to circumstances, creates its own spontaneous combustion. One icy night, in the tiny park of the Vert Galant, at the tip of the Île de la Cité, with the waters of the Seine racing by, darkly invisible, at our feet, I kissed a woman as rats scuttled at our feet and a passing bateau mouche , jammed with tourists, pinned us in its spotlight glare, to their half-drunk laughter, shouts, and applause.

Not romantic?

I guess you had to be there.