France’s Secret Garden Isn’t Just for Cheaters

While we were finishing dinner during one of the stops this week, a French guide told me that her kid’s German teacher was sitting over on the other side of the restaurant with his mistress. She knew him because her husband is a doctor, and he’s treating the man’s parents who are gravely ill. She looked at him with scorn, but not intense scorn, more the sort of ‘well that’s too bad,’ kind of way.

She said that in France affairs are so common there’s even a name for it. “It’s the secret garden,” she said. “There was a study, saying that about 65% of the men and 45% of the women here have affairs. It’s just so common that nobody really cares that much. People here like to break the rules, and this is just the way it is.”

I thought about the teacher’s chuzpah, to just take his mistress out to dinner in a little town like we were in where people know each other…and talk. But it’s not all people running around on their spouses here in this romantic part of the world.

I looked down into the garden this morning from my apartment window, as the sun was just starting to return. The photo shows my little kitchen and the window I looked down out of.

The B&B owner and her husband were out there, and I saw him reach around and squeeze her ass. Just then she looked up at me, coyly, and I waved hello. Yes there is still love among the married here, like everywhere in the world.