Cuissage Is Not A Myth!

If you just follow the American media's propaganda about public morality and religiosity and ethics, you will certainly resist the phrase I am about to use: 'sophisticated moral intelligence.'

According to the Christian Right and the pharisee tradition of the modern American-style media, morality has to be plain dumb, and anything different to that is likely to be the 'work of the devil.' Thus to add the word 'sophisticated' to 'morality' is almost to qualify it with something evil.

Cuissage...

Yet I have often wondered why it is that everything that is said to be to do with this very popular fellow (i.e. 'the devil') has this touch of the inherently exciting, even whilst it is also most assuredly bad and dark and horrid. And everything, by comparison, that is numinous, is rather dull and boring.

We watch movies like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and become glued by the sections of utter vicious violence; well, at least I did when I watched it!

Admittedly this particular movie is not completely gratuitous in its inclusion of extreme violence as a theme.

However I must warn that I am intending to proceed from the immediate prior post about 'values,' and move the subject along to the idea of the application of values in the hands of wealthy adults. Now I say 'wealthy' adults very deliberately because I wanted to suggest that unless one is not careful, it is all too easy to become dissolute when a lot of time and money falls into one's hands. And this is largely because of a habit that tends to be formed when one is not necessarily so very very facilely um, loaded. The discipline that enforces itself onto spending habits and lifestyle habits due to modest means, is in many ways, a good thing; but it is a 'false' discipline...

One finds so many instances in which commentary regarding some fashionable place, or tourist destination, or upscale (we say 'up-market' among the British over here...) restaurant – splashes criticism around lavishly. The food was overpriced/the service was pushy/you were tried to be 'sold' on stuff/you were not respected/something or other was 'over-rated...'

The very beautiful -
Plaza Athenee entrance

And so let me say something now about going out to a Michelin Three Star table in the context of having anything at all to do with the receipt of service. Servants, are not things you have; they are participants in your lifestyle and they are part of a set of relationships. And your part, as the receiver of service, is that you are performing a role. Literally.

I see people who speak of these things saying that the droit de cuissage (the right over the thigh), is but a myth that some French aristocrats propagated. But it is not. Nevertheless, it entails, as I say, a high and a sophisticated moral intelligence. On the surface of it, a lord of some estate or other, is supposed at some point in the distant past, to have possessed the right to have sex with any of his serf's virgin daughters. Or some such thing along those lines. I know my father often spoke of our family's tendency to have infused itself with 'good peasant stock' from time to time.

But you must understand the impoverished humour of the aristocrats of my ken.

You see these things are not true in the way the words are employed to talk about them. But they are true in very much more sophisticated ways than the common popular media will be able to understand or explain to you.

Here's what I mean: perhaps you go to the Plaza Athenee in Paris, and have read a review in which they go on at length about how over-priced, and how over-serviced, and how unmemorable, the food was...

Ah but you see, for me to go there at all is a performance – by me. At least as much as I expect it to be a performance by the staff there.

And, they will comprehend, if not others, the allusion to cuissage that I make, if I subject my companion to having to wear the thing you see in the picture here. It's a Dior outfit, on the actress Jennifer Lawrence, and I understand all, or most, of the media and entertainment critics carried on at length about her wardroom malfunction, sufficient to make Dior put out a statement.

Jennifer Lawrence,
Also 'Cuissage' but by Dior

But it is not a malfunction.

If you go to, let's say, some Michelin Three Star establishment that you have heard be less than celestial in its service and substance, and offer this Dior'd get-up on your arm, as you alight from your taxi or Rolls Royce, to the doorman, and thence on to the Maitre d' and so on, I am reasonably sure that the placement of her dinner cloth onto her lap, either by the staff or without stares from them when she does it, will break all the rules about dining.

And I am reasonably sure, that you will have a very pleasant evening, and completely forget all about criticisms of the service that you were not 'getting' for your money, because as I have said before, money is not the be all and end all of it. As Karl Lagerfeld says, 'yes it is true; if you are cheap, nothing helps.' But if you are sophisticated, you do not need to be violent, or obviously armed with money, to get your way.

And getting your way, may I remind you, leads us right to the money afterall. The art of getting your way, qualifies the meaning of moral intelligence in ways that only the sophisticated may know about. And I don't think, the devil, is as sophisticated, as an English gentleman – not that I have come across an English gentleman, for many a good long year, and the only real person that I can think of in living existence right now who can fit into the mold, is Hugo Jacomet, and he is French. As far as I know.