The instant that I saw these images of La Piscine-Musée d’Art et d’Industrie André Diligent in Lille, France, two other Paris moments blasted into my consciousness as perfect reminders as why I adore the French. In the first reverie Meeting Up with the Mona Lisa & a Classical Louvre Grave Yard, I wrote:

After meeting up with the Mona Lisa, I wandered around in search of classical statuary. I found it in the traditional halls, but what really got my attention was the “basement”, the statues that weren’t on display.

They stood “crumbled” and strewn helter skelter one floor down, but visible to onlookers. Peering down into the “graveyard”, I was entertained by blue strobe lights and classical jazz. The effect was totally modern, even if the subjects of my artistic experience were centuries old statues.

… The French are never literal in updating their monuments … the IM Pei modern design remains disruptive and unappealing to purists.

Seriously now, can you imagine for one moment Americans not tearing down a gorgeous but now dilapidated Art Deco swimming like this one in Lille to make room for a big box retailer? I can’t.

The real kicker, though, is imagining for one single minute, that America would restore this piscine masterpiece into a museum for classical statuary, at least one female with bare buttocks. Social Conservatives would bomb the place.

These images take me back to one of my first essays French Corruption of American Morality, which I wrote after seeing ‘Hell at the Library, Eros in Secret’ in Paris.

The huge, multi-story X-mark lit up the side of the National Library, inviting all of Paris to partake in its erotic pleasures.

Regular travelers to France know that the country is vastly more liberated than America, in all matters sexual. Can you imagine public funds in this country being used to doll up a metro station, announcing the coming arrival of a sex exhibit!

Originally built between 1927 and 1932 by the architect Albert Baert, the swimming pool had served the people of Roubaix for health and sensory pleasure for over 50 years. The always innovative French said let the pool serve the community in a new way, sharing its magnificent architecture with antiquities.

This fall on October 21, the museum will celebrate its 10th anniversary. Bravo.

Sense and Sensuality | France Understands Responsible Pleasure

Symbolically La Piscine-Musée d’Art et d’Industrie André Diligent in Lille makes a dramatic statement about the synthesis of sensuality and rationality in French culture. Granted, the French have their ooh la la sexual challenges, too, as we’re learning in the Dominique Strauss Kahn case here in New York.

In my earlier essay, I wrote:

Many American women have never examined their own physical anatomy “down there”, but the women of Hell are on display in the French National Library, legs flung open, inviting us to watch an adoring suitor probing, stroking, licking their public parts. Of course, what would you expect at the house of Mitterand, a man whose wife and mistress attended his national funeral together.

Nevertheless, the French possess a splendid vision about recycling, restoration with a new attitude, and generally treasuring their culture and history but with a mind towards the future. The fact that they do just about everything with a sensual twist of wit is in their DNA.

I love them for their bad-ass French attitude about protecting their own vision of the good life, even if we mock them for getting agitated over Grey Poupon vs French’s mustard. For the most part, our two nations just don’t speak the same language, when the topic is sensual living.

When one is lucky enough to have enjoyed France well over 250 times, the love affair is never far away, triggered today by Lille’s La Piscine-Musée d’Art et d’Industrie André Diligent. Anne