PARIS
A woman called Sylvie — no last name, for reasons that will soon be clear — was talking. "I love to be touched by other men," she said. "It makes him very jealous, but then it makes him very passionate later on."
The masculine pronoun in the preceding sentence belonged to a man called Jean-Charles, same surname as Sylvie. The two are married. They live on the outskirts of Paris. They have been partners, matrimonially and otherwise, for just over 13 years. For the past 18 months Jean-Charles and Sylvie have had a standing date with each other, and also with a changing cast of instantly made new best friends, at a private club in central Paris called Cléopâtre.
They meet there regularly for evenings of what in French is called échangisme, the term for a practice based on seeking sexual gratification with people that, in many cases, one has just met. First, being French, they eat.
On a cool spring evening at Cléopâtre, Jean-Charles and Sylvie sat down to a meal of white asparagus with béarnaise sauce, lobster and a nice bottle of Chablis, then slipped their matrimonial bonds, climbing the carpeted stairs of the club and entering one of a series of chambers where they were to share their affections with a man named Patrick and a woman named Marie, and then a number of other people whose names, at a certain point, it became impossible for this reporter to ascertain.
This all occurred in an atmosphere whose velvet hush and civilized air of decorum was broken, inevitably, sometime after midnight by an opera of primal grunts and sighs.
"Our philosophy has always been sexual freedom, free from restrictions, free from shame," said Hervé Béhal, the owner of Cléopâtre, which opened in 1978 and eventually evolved into a haven for swingers. "Women, as much as men, want to indulge all their senses and still feel respected. Here, a woman loses no respect if she decides to have sex with four different men."
Whether or not this is so, it seems pretty clear that, as Sylvie said, "the good thing about the échangiste scene is that people come to these places knowing what they want." What is that? "To have fun," she said, "and to make some love."
Paradoxical as it seems, at a moment when an extreme right-wing politician, Jean-Marie Le Pen, can garner nearly 17 percent of the vote in the early balloting for the French presidency, and when the clichés about the conservativeness of French cultural life can easily strike a foreigner as apt, Paris is enjoying a wave of libertinism that makes New York look as though it were being run by the elders of Salem.
Statistics are not easy to come by. And visitors are in little danger of mistaking contemporary Paris for San Francisco during the Summer of Love. But it is increasingly clear that activities that once seemed the concern of a small sexual fringe have made inroads into the French mainstream, with both the French press and government health officials remarking the arrival of France's new class of libertines.
"There has been a tremendous increase in the number of commercial venues for all these activities," both in Paris and throughout the country, said Yves Souteyrand, head of the office for social science and public health at the French National Agency for AIDS Research, referring to the back-room sex now said to be common in straight and gay clubs throughout the capital.
"It is a big phenomenon right now," added Carine Roitfeld, the editor of French Vogue, whose March issue featured a story on the rise in échangisme that deemed it more "a la mode" than ayurvedic massage or aromatherapy.
"It is very, very fashionable for some reason," Ms. Roitfeld said.
More than 250 heterosexual échangiste clubs currently operate in France, according to the editors of Couples, which bills itself as "le magazine des échangistes." Nearly 50 restaurants, clubs and saunas in Paris openly cater to heterosexual adventurers. In addition, 35 gay bars and clubs operate so-called back rooms, in nearly all of the city's 20 arrondissements, according to Jean-François Chassagne, the president of S.N.E.G., a trade group for gay businesses in France. "When I moved to Paris in 1983, there might have been five back rooms," said the novelist Edmund White, whose 2001 book-length essay, "The Flâneur," neatly diagrams three centuries of French sexual laissez-faire.
Compared to the licentious antics at most échangiste clubs and back-room gay bars in Paris, New York's current chasteness seems eons away from its steamy pre-AIDS incarnation, when Plato's Retreat was so fashionable it rated a cover story in New York magazine, and when gay sexual adventurers made obligatory pilgrimages to such grotty local fleshpots as the Anvil or the Mine Shaft, where patrons were expected to check their clothes at the door.
Like any worthwhile movement, the new French libertinism has its designated journals (Purple Sexe, Couples and the English language Deliciae Vitae), its documentarians and its bards. The novelist Michel Houellebecq's 1998 novel, "The Elementary Particles," sold more than 300,000 copies in France, less, perhaps, on the merits of its deadpan prose than on its obsessive depictions of group and anonymous sex. "La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M.," a memoir by Catherine Millet, a feminist critic and editor, rocketed to the top of the sales charts last year on the strength of the author's sexual résumé, a flatly depicted chart of acts performed in parks and clubs, in automobiles and underpasses, and in serial human combinations that might have exhausted even de Sade.
Guillaume Dustan, too, was transported from small-press obscurity to cultural lightning rod when a mainstream public got hold of his novels "Dans Ma Chambre" and "LXiR," which uninhibitedly celebrate frenzied, anonymous and potentially lethal sex. Mr. Dustan is now a controversial regular on French talk shows — largely, complains Didier Lestrade, a founder of Act Up-Paris, "on the basis of this big concept that, after 20 years of AIDS, the only thing we French have left is our freedom, so we can do whatever we want."
Far from being clandestinely situated, a majority of Paris's sex clubs — Chris & Manu, Yacht Club, L'Abys, to name three of the more popular straight ones — are as frankly self-proclaiming as theme restaurants. Some, like Cléopâtre, are theme restaurants, offering, for a $50 cover, dinner service and a clothing boutique as a supplement to the prime attraction, which is sex.
"Basically, my wife and I come because it is good for the relationship," Jean-Luc, a Cléopâtre regular, said recently. "When you play outside the customary roles, you see your partner in a different way, and you can combat the inevitable boredom of marriage."
As for Jean-Luc's wife, Sybille, échangisme is, she said, "something more interesting than the movies" to do on a Saturday night.
Movie theater receipts are not getting help from the gay clubs of Paris, either. The city's back-room bars have become, said Têtu, France's largest gay and lesbian magazine, the new supermarkets of sex. "Back-room sex has become the French gay national sport," Alexandre Frédéric, a filmmaker, claimed not long ago in an interview in a sex zine.
Using a hidden camera and infrared film, Mr. Frédéric made a documentary, "Night Shot Paris," in the back rooms of Paris's thriving gay sex clubs, places like Le Mec Zone, Les Docks and the notorious Dépôt, a bar that has become, Mr. Frédéric asserted, the second stop on many hip tourist itineraries, after Colette.
By contrast, a sex-club scene that once thrived in New York now survives mostly clandestinely, despite, as Sandra Mullin, a spokeswoman for the City Health Department, explained, "the strict state sanitary codes" forbidding its existence.
In France, back rooms operate legally, flourishing under the accepting gaze of a system whose Gaullist puritanism eased when, in 1981, François Mitterrand's Socialist government was voted into power and the police stopped prosecuting homosexual acts.
Among the apparent results of two decades of liberalization was the election last year of Bertrand Delanoë as the first openly gay mayor of Paris and the recent booming success of places like Le Dépôt.
This 15,000-square-foot establishment looms over the Rue aux Ours, a side street that is five minutes' walk from the Pompidou Center. During the past year, according to Mr. Chassagne of S.N.E.G., the gay-business trade group, the number of patrons for Le Dépôt has reached 20,000 a month.
An $8 door charge at Le Dépôt buys patrons a drink ticket, a condom and admission to a multilevel establishment with a clothes check, a vast dance floor and an underground labyrinth with walls of cinder block and camouflage mesh curtains draped across cubicles where strangers engage in activities that would not have been out of place in Fellini's "Satyricon."
"Why do I come here?" a glazier named Hassan said on a recent night at Le Dépôt. "You can meet anyone here, from any class — it's not an issue if someone is a bourgeois or from the suburbs."
When Jean-Christian Bourcart, a documentary photographer, began taking the pictures that became "Forbidden City," a 1999 book exploring the échangiste scene, then still new, the heterosexual swingers he caught on a camera hidden inside a jacket pocket were "definitely from the suburbs or the countryside," he said. As the scene grew, Mr. Bourcart said, the range of participants seemed to shift, and the échangiste landscape began to draw "more of the elite, more fashionable-looking people," making it, he said, "more impressive as a phenomenon in terms of scale and meanings, sociologically."
Those meanings are perplexing, but the one that most concerns French social scientists has been termed "le relapse," a coinage created by the French press after epidemiologists observed a spike in rates of gonorrhea and syphilis following the introduction, in 1996, of life-extending AIDS drugs.
Even decades into the AIDS pandemic, France still has no system for the reporting of new cases of H.I.V. infection, and statistics on the disease tend to be "estimations," said Marie-Christine Simon, the spokeswoman for the National Agency for AIDS Research. "We don't have the incidence of new cases," she said. "We have only indirect measurements that show there will probably be an increase in new H.I.V. infections, based on the number of new syphilis cases we have seen."
Reports show that syphilis has been making a comeback in France. "People get syphilis if they don't use condoms," Mrs. Simon said. And people who don't use condoms are at higher risk for H.I.V.
"The fact is that, after the treatment revolution in antiviral therapy, people in France felt different about their sexual prospects," said Christophe Martet, a writer for Têtu, the gay and lesbian magazine.
"In the 1980's," when AIDS first appeared in France, Mr. Martet said, "gay people, certainly, began to take measures to limit their sexual activities, the number of partners, and to have less sex."
But soon after the new therapies appeared, he added, France's young people, both homosexual and heterosexual, began to act as if AIDS were over.
"The data that exist anticipate an increase in less preventive behavior" in all populations, especially the young, said Mr. Souteyrand of the National Agency for AIDS Research. "The heterosexual population is somewhat less exposed than the gay population, but with so many heterosexuals practicing échangisme, to be frank, we can't tell where the disease will go."
People are "fed up" with prevention and with the social and moral confinements of safe sex, Mr. Souteyrand said. Or, as Jean-Charles, at Cléopâtre, put it: "Americans worry too much about these things. You have to live freely, to live for the moment, because, let's face it, sooner or later everyone is going to die."
