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Well, tomorrow is Valentine’s Day and therefore a day when lovers all over the City will be eating a little bit richer food, snuggling a little closer, and kissing a little longer. Who knows… maybe French men will even ogle beautiful women they pass just a little longer. Er, that’s more lust than love, non?

Paris’s best restaurants will have been booked up for weeks… but who to invite: the wife or the mistress? I have no long commentary to make on the way the French “do” love, but I do have many friends who have fallen under the spell of a French man along the way and now live life en France à deux. There is a certain charm about those Frenchies, but not the men alone. I, having moved to France time after time, am just as seduced by French women as I am the men. I mean, where else can women pull off hair that looks like a rat’s nest but with radiant skin and minimal but coupled with perfect makeup looks oh-so-chic?! And then there’s their clothes, often dark and dull in color but, again, beautifully simple and chic. I am beginning to understand the origins of that word, chic. Someone had to come up with a word for the je ne sais quoi of the French people, and voilà! a word was born.

And so, on this Valentine’s Day, with no individual to profess my love to, I send a great big loving bisou to the French whom I love so much.