''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. ''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.
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. And visitors are in little danger of mistaking contemporary Paris for San Francisco during the Summer of 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. 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.'' Here, a woman loses no respect if she decides to have sex with four different men.'' ''Women, as much as men, want to indulge all their senses and still feel respected.
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''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. 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.
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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. 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. 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 have been partners, matrimonially and otherwise, for just over 13 years. The masculine pronoun in the preceding sentence belonged to a man called Jean-Charles, same surname as Sylvie. ''It makes him very jealous, but then it makes him very passionate later on.''
''I love to be touched by other men,'' she said. A WOMAN called Sylvie no last name, for reasons that will soon be clear - was talking.