It occurs to me that this is part of the reason French women enjoy the reputation they do—for sexiness, coolness, confidence. It's not just a matter of personal temperament but of public policy, the fruit not only of individual style but of country and culture.

"A toast for the baby girl!" exclaims a man at the table opposite. "What would you like to drink?"

"A kir?" I offer, thinking it a modest suggestion—made as it is with crème de cassis and a simple sauvignon blanc.

"But it has to be with Champagne," he hollers—and presently the waiter delivers a bubbly glass of pink.

In America, I think, I would have been ignored, sitting as I am with an infant. At any moment, after all, I might suddenly have spit-up on my shoulder. "But even President Sarkozy picked a woman with a child for his new bride!" says the beauty next to me, when I offer this remark to her. "It's true," I say. "If he were a public figure in the States and the sort of man people claim he is—vain, a show-off—he'd have picked a twenty-year-old trophy girl. As it is, he chose a fortysomething with an eight-year-old boy in tow."

"And the woman he really wanted," my neighbor says snidely, "has three kids—two of them in their twenties!"

I hope for Sarkozy's sake that he no longer pines for Cécilia, the ex-wife who left him. That having been said, there's not a Frenchman around who blinked at the fact that the femme fatale of France's most powerful citizen is the mother of two adults.

Women age better in France, and they are better admired as they age. One worries about being objectified by pornography, but the danger of being objectified by maternity is far greater, it seems to me. Hidden behind Hummer-size baby carriages and camouflaged in colorless sweat suits, mothers can become shadow people. Americans go for books like Amy Richards's Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself. The French have such books internalized.

"What a lucky man!" exclaims the waiter, as the mother at my side relishes the last of her cheese platter and reclines into the arms of the man I assume is her husband. "He in no way deserves you."

I flinch in spite of myself. "Of course I don't," rejoins the man.

"No one here does. That's why she's settled for me"—he beams at his wife—"at least for tonight, n'est-ce pas?"

"For tonight," she says coyly. The two reach for coats and scarves, plant a hasty kiss on Eurydice's nose and my cheek, and dash like interlopers into the night.

Were they illicit lovers after all? I wonder. "That was Madame et Monsieur Dauteville," says the waiter, as though reading my mind. "My son plays with their kids every Saturday."

Climbing up the thick-carpeted red stairs later that evening to my high-ceilinged room at the Hôtel Relais Christine, I muse about the magic of all this sexual ambiguity. Waiters routinely make gallant remarks to taken women—thus reminding their partners of their perpetual appeal to rival suitors. What would be counted an insult in more macho countries, like Greece or Italy or the United States, is considered simple civility in France. Sexual relations in this country are fluid and unregulated; you are not out of the dance just because you have children, or indeed because you are married. Moralists can argue that this is a problem—but I wonder if it's not also, in some ways, a solution. The members of long-standing couples in France flirt with each other. They labor to impress one another. They seem to understand that love is complex; it is free; it answers to no law, however reasonably imposed. Relationships, therefore, become balancing acts, feats of imagination, works of art. Nothing is taken for granted, so everything is earned.