“Grow old with me. The best is yet to be,” wrote Robert Browning. Yet we hate growing old now, we are terrified of wrinkles and bedpans, of food dribbling down our chins, of forgetting our children’s names and having to pluck stray hairs from our chin.
The French are even more horrified by the idea of losing their looks. Charles de Gaulle called growing old a shipwreck and the country has one of the highest rates of elderly suicides in the world. But Marie de Hennezel, now 64, has become a national treasure after writing a bestseller on how to age gracefully. Her advice in The Warmth of the Heart Prevents Your Body from Rusting doesn’t involve Botox or facelifts, but embracing your achievements and your relationships and having an active sex life.
“Ah, I knew the British would be fixated on the part about sex,” she says, laughing, when I meet her. “But this book is not just about having affairs and the British should think about ageing. In your country you care more about animals than your grandparents.”
De Hennezel is immaculately turned out in black, with a blonde bob and red lipstick. As she sips her water, waiters half her age are immediately drawn to her animated, lined face. “I wrote this book for my generation, the baby boomers,” she says. “They are obsessed by what is going to happen to them next. Ageism is rampant, they look at old people and see that they are put aside and they start to panic. The majority of my contemporaries will live to nearly 100, so when you are 60 and realise that you still have 40 years left but without your looks and your job, it causes huge fears.”
De Hennezel, one of France’s best known clinical psychologists, says that there is no point in trying to fend off old age until our dying days. “We worry about being in great shape, having taut skin, being competitive at sport and successful at work. But our image must change,” she says. “Our faces and bodies will alter, there is no point in resorting to chemical peels and fillers; we have to learn to embrace the ageing process or we will be very unhappy.”
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Only 100 years ago old age was revered. “Rembrandt’s portraits show the elderly in a positive light and we are still fascinated by pictures of gnarled old faces from Africa or India. But not our own elderly — we hide them. I think that is why we resort to plastic surgery, but the more we tamper with our faces, the more we lose our real beauty. Artificial beauty is terrible, the face no longer has any expression or life or interest.”
Learning to become dependent will be even harder for the baby boomers, she says. “These postwar babies are tough and driven, they have forged the way in so many areas. They are used to setting the agenda and looking after everyone else and will hate to be a burden on their children and the state. They see it as a weakness.” They are also more likely to be lonely. “We have smaller families and many of us are divorced, we have often moved geographically and socially through our lives and we don’t know where we belong any more.”
It sounds grim. Although de Hennezel is well known in France as the psychologist who helped President Mitterrand to come to terms with his approaching death from cancer, she fell into a serious depression after her own 60th birthday. “It was a very difficult transition. My husband had just left me and my children were involved in their own lives. I had just started researching old age for this book and was overwhelmed by the negative information. I couldn’t see anything positive about growing old so I just stopped writing.”
A horse ride with her granddaughter changed her life. “We were in the Camargue and my horse got stuck in a hole in the marsh. We were sinking down, floundering. But I decided to let the horse find a way out and it did. In three huge jumps it scrambled out and I realised I could get myself out of this hole if I trusted myself.”
She began the book again. “I realised I could see the bright side as well as the dark side. I started meeting old people whom I admired and I realised that I could choose the way to grow old. Our generation have a different hand of cards, we didn’t have the war, we have benefited from exercise, cosmetics and good diet and we don’t drink and smoke as much. Our bodies will slow down but we have pain relief and advanced medicines.”
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Her advice now is deceptively simple. “You need to look after yourself, eat well, drink sensibly, exercise moderately, sleep well and wear a little make-up. But it is important to be serene about it and calm and accept what you cannot change.”
Stress, she says, is particularly bad for ageing well. “I asked the doctors of the oldest woman in France, who lived to 120, how she did it and they said that she could cope with stress, she didn’t get bogged down by life. It is something we can all learn. If you have a tendency to see the bad side of everything, moan and be a hypochondriac, it is not too late to change at 60 but it is probably too late at 80.”
What really matters is your relationships. “It is easier to grow old if your life has been successful, you have been popular and you have achieved everything, but few people feel all that. They need to try to reconcile things in their life and forgive themselves for things that have gone wrong. You can learn to stop being bitter and regretting. You can actually do a lot of new things when you are old and you have time to concentrate on friendships and discover things about yourself.”
She thinks you can appreciate life in a different way when you slow down. “Small things can be more satisfying when you are old. One woman I know discovered poetry, President Mitterrand enjoyed sitting on a bench on a sunny day. You can learn a new language, or painting or the piano. You need to find new things and form new relationships as well as nurturing the old.”
Our bodies may wear out but the warmth of our hearts can prevent us from rusting, as her title suggests. That means, sex, too for all you prudish British men, de Hennezel says. “Sex and relationships can be just as important for the old as for the young. It is ridiculous to pretend it doesn’t happen and we should celebrate it. When you talk to carers in old people’s homes, they all say that there are love stories and there is sex. It is obvious that many still desire and want to love physically and emotionally.”
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Sex, she says, can be more pleasurable in later years. “Of course it will be different from 30, it is slower, more emotional, more about tenderness and being together, but it is no less fulfilling. In fact it can be better. When you are older you can be more sensual, more sensitive, it is less about image and more about what you feel. This kind of sexuality is very interesting.”
Is she talking from experience? She smiles. “Oh yes, I have had various relationships in the past few years and they have been very satisfying and more fun than when I was young. Old people shouldn’t decide they are finished. They may not think they have the energy but if they meet the right person it can happen. An 80-year-old friend of mine, who is blind, met a younger man on a music tour and had a wonderful affair.”
Children, she says, are the main hindrance. “They can’t cope with their parents having sex and complain to the care homes if they think their fathers are misbehaving. But the elderly should be given the privacy for romance.”
It is the idea of care homes and hospitals, with or without sex, that frightens most people. The stale cabbage, the blank faces looking at television screens. “That is the political problem that our generation must address,” de Hennezel says. “It is terrible the way the elderly are shunted aside in homes and hospitals. We need more carers and they must be qualified and trained. At the moment the average elderly person is washed in less than ten minutes.”
She thinks carers are often frightened by the elderly. “They see them as other and different. They can’t look them in the eye, they don’t realise you need to use soft gestures and be kind, they keep a distance. We need to humanise care. You can change everything so easily if you just touch and smile and talk to the elderly in homes and hospitals. It isn’t much more expensive as it doesn’t take much time.”
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It is even harder, she recognises, if you are poor to receive good service. “Money provides you with the best medical advice and helps to slow down old age but it can’t prevent it. If you have little money you can still grow old in a nice way. I know old people who have a very simple life but an inward peace, they have wisdom and a capacity to marvel at small things and to have pleasure and be radiant. I have met very poor elderly people who are so welcoming and open, and rich people who are closed and angry.”
She also suggests that the elderly should cultivate the young rather than being irritated by them as they scooter along the pavements and wail on buses. “The elderly benefit from children’s energy and the young benefit from an old person’s warmth, time and selflessness. They don’t notice the physical aspect as much but you must be welcoming and listen to them and stop grumbling at them. Instead tell them stories and chat with them — children soak up attention especially now that parents have become more frenetic.”
Her book has made me realise that we really become old only when we refuse to accept ageing and can’t move forward in life. “If you work at growing old, it won’t be such a shock but it takes years,” she says. “Charm comes from the ability to take an interest in others and in the world, to look at life with confidence, wonderment and gratitude. Looks and money don’t really matter. It’s not about being sickly nice and saying yes to everything, but it’s about thinking before you complain. If you can feel happy and fulfilled then you will be attractive and persuasive. If you can be genuinely interested in others that helps even more. So encourage the young in their pursuits, talk to the nurses about their families, engage with your carers as you age.”
She is not yet planning her own death. “But I have planned my old age. I try to stay in good health, I try to be at peace with others, nurture friendships and relationships with my family, children and grandchildren and I still see my husband. For the rest I trust life, I don’t know what is going to happen but I will embrace it.”
The Warmth of the Heart Prevents Your Body from Rusting by Marie de Hennezel, published by Rodale, £12.99
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The wisdom of French women...
. . . on weight
No calorie counting, no gym, just savouring smaller portions of good food. Parisian Mireille Guiliano’s The French Women Don’t Get Fat Cookbook became an instant bestseller in 2004.
. . . on love
French women don’t try to change men, they accept their insolences and extravagances, pigheadedness and seductions. They relish and expect flirtation with everyone from the boulangere to their girlfriends, approaching life with an alluring mixture of the carnal and cerebral, according to Debra Ollivier’s What French Women Know About Love, Sex and Other Matters of Heart and Mind.
. . . on office style
Don’t eat roast snails the day before an important meeting. Make-up “must light up your face without others really knowing where the brilliance comes from” and always remember to say “bonjour” to others in the company lift. The 248-page manners guide by Laurence Caracalla, Le Carnet du Savoir-Vivre au Bureau (The Notebook on Office Manners), is a bestselling guide to avoiding faux pas in the complexity of modern office life.
. . . on not having babies
“Your children will be baby-losers, destined for unemployment, insecure or low-grade work. They will have a life even less fun than yours. They have no future, as every baby born in a developed country is an ecological disaster for the whole planet.” The psychoanalyst Corinne Maier, author of No Kid: 40 Reasons Not to Have Children, argues against the idealised view of motherhood . . . on dating French women don’t date. Meet your man in a group of friends. Be moody — you are ze woman, he is ze man. You are passionate and life is more fun when you’re not trying to act sane. This is what American Jamie Cat Callan got from her French grandmother to put into French Women Don’t Sleep Alone: Pleasurable Secrets To Finding Love.