Before I moved to Paris, there were so many things that I loved about France. The language, the food, the people, the culture. As a child, I had been steeped in books such as Le Petit Prince and films such as Le Ballon rouge. As a teenager, I read the expatriate novels of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and James Baldwin. My favourite poets and painters were French.

It never really surprised me that the love of my life turned out to be French, or that I would eventually leave London, the city that I adore and lived in for more than two decades, to have my much longed-for baby in a French hospital.

What was surprising was that I thought the transition would be easy. I had worked as a foreign correspondent for 17 years, mainly in Third World countries where I had no water, electricity or luxuries. I thought of myself as adaptable, relaxed, someone who could fit in anywhere.

In contrast to my chaotic single life, the world of motherhood and marriage in the 6th arrondissement was going to be sublime. Not! I never realised how difficult and often painful the move would be. Certainly, it would be more difficult than when I moved to Britain from the US as a teenager in 1982. Then I was young and that transition was pretty painless. But I was 40 when I moved to Paris in January, 2004, a few weeks before Luca, my son, was born. Arriving in a new country before the birth of a first child was probably not the cleverest move of my life. But nothing about the way my husband, Bruno, a journalist for French TV, whom I met in Sarajevo in 1993, and I lived was ever organised. We preferred spontaneity and impulse to order.

But our life in Paris was meant to be different. Bruno was returning from three years in the war-torn Ivory Coast. I had made a decision after five months in Iraq that I wanted to write from home and stay with my baby rather than travel. And Paris would be a great place to write, to explore and to live without complications.

It was freezing the night we arrived at the Gare du Nord after packing up my flat in London. The lift in our new flat overlooking the Tuilerie Gardens was broken: my first introduction to French strikes (which are constant) and terrible service (nothing ever gets fixed when you need it). I heaved my 60lb-heavier body up five flights of stairs, opened the door and burst into tears. Bruno took me by the hand and pointed across the Seine to the clock glowing on the Musée d’Orsay. “Look! See what a beautiful life we are going to have!”

The lift got fixed a few days later, and we painted the walls white and threw out the rubbish. We did make a beautiful life for ourselves, and moved to our own place across the river near the Luxembourg Gardens. When the baby was born I was thrust into perhaps the most difficult aspect of French life: French healthcare. It’s a myth that everything in France is better. The food and wine, perhaps, but give me my NHS GP any day compared with a French doctor who loads you up with drugs and prescriptions and insults you. All in a 30-minute consultation.

From the GP: “Must you Anglo-Saxons consume so much sugar? Get on the scales! My God, what a horror!” From the dermatologist: “Have you thought of a little Botox between your eyes? No? Why not?”

Mine was a high-risk pregnancy and I gave birth in the best maternity unit in France. It’s true that the guru of obstetricians, Professor René Frydman, delivered my son (almost free) and that I had no pain, no stitches and laughed and made out with my husband all through the labour. It’s true that my son was seven weeks premature and the hospital was so brilliant that he did not need an incubator. And that we stayed for ten days and got expert care and no bill.

But I had to bring my own pillows, kettle, teabags, food, sheets and towels. The nurses were cruel and bossy. Laughing when I was in tears over my newborn’s constant hiccups; refusing to help me breast-feed (“because it’s not good for the baby”), making rude comments behind my back about “l’Anglaise”.

The other shock about the French is the weird way that they mother their children. They have the second-highest birthrate in Europe behind the Irish. There’s a reason: French women like to show off their fecundity and the State gives out huge payments for having children. Being a nation of freeloaders, the French like their benefits.

Another shock is that they make no room in their lives for their children. They return to work almost immediately. The crèche system is so good (and free) that they feel no guilt at dumping a baby of three months at a daycare centre with a stranger. They are more committed to getting their bodies back to perfection; getting their husbands away from their secretaries; and getting ahead on the corporate ladder. As well as having enough time to get groomed at Carita and buy more shoes at Christian Louboutin. I abandoned my trainers when I moved to Paris.

The other strange thing is that French women don’t breast-feed. My friend Catherine screeched a few weeks before I gave birth: “You will ruin your tits! Then you’ll have to get a boob job.” She then gave me the name of the best plastic surgeon in France. “Eventually, you’ll need him, anyway,” she whispered.

La vie de la couple, la vie de la couple,” was all I ever heard in the first few weeks after I gave birth. Think about your husband. Think about how quickly you can restore your sex life. How quickly you can dump the infant with his grandparents and go away for a romantic weekend. I was still woozy with the epidural a day after the birth when a prescription landed on my bed. It was for a bizarre treatment dating back to the First World War and beloved by French women, called rééducation périnéale. “What is this?” I demanded of the nurse.

“It’s for your husband,” she winked. I will not go into the medical details, but you are paid by the State to go to a physical therapist to get your pelvic floor in shape. You also get 20 training sessions to get your tummy flat again, with the same physical therapist. Free.

The next shock of life in France, I found, was the relations between men and women. France is a country where men never leave you alone. It does not matter if you are old, wrinkled, enormous or married. You will get stared at.

At first, it’s flattering. Then it gets annoying, because you can’t slip out of your house to get the papers in your tracksuit. You always have to be on top form. I learnt this the hard way in the first few weeks after the birth. Unkempt, teary, breasts swollen to footballs, I got more male attention than I ever have in my life (aside from when I lived in Italy). The chicken man at the rôtisserie would flirt so outrageously and stand so close to me that I would blush. The oyster man would stare down my cleavage with no embarrassment, grinning like a moron.

The waiters at my local café brought me steaming cups of café au lait in the morning and called me “ ma jolie”. Couldn’t they just leave me alone? Even an old boyfriend (French, now married) would send e-mails with such graphic details of our past love life together that I deleted them before I finished reading them. It seemed no one in France can get enough of sex, or at least the idea of sex. The flirting might not be such a bad thing. As one sixtysomething French beauty pointed out to me, to live in a nation where women grow old beautifully, and where they are still desired, is marvelous. But this flirting has its price: pressure. I met an American girlfriend for lunch recently. She’s married to an Englishman. She wore jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt and looked comfortable and happy. I was riding my bike, but dressed like Dita Von Teese in a curvy 1940s-style dress, red high-heels and a fur wrap cinched with a belt.

“My, you always look so turned out,” she said sweetly. (A Frenchwoman would tell me that my hair needed cutting, or my shoes were all wrong, but more about that later.)

“Well, I have a French husband,” I answered without thinking. And it’s true. My husband may go around in the same ripped trousers, a leather jacket and four days of stubble, but he’d have a fit if I did not try to look sexy most of the time.

Even at home, at night, even if I wanted to, I could not schlepp around in flannel pajamas with unwashed hair. The minute I moved to France, I went to Laurence Tavernier, the Frenchwoman’s secret nightgown specialist, and bought two beautiful dressing gowns and a handful of silk nightgowns. Then I went to La Perla. It cost me nearly €1,000 (£700), but there was no option. My next introduction was to French sisterhood. I have many terrific French girlfriends in Paris. But the strait-laced, bourgeois Frenchwoman would hardly let me into her home (or her life) because most French women have their friends sorted out by the time they are 16.

The second aspect of French sisterhood is that there is none. There is no role model of feminism as there is in England or America. No Germaine Greer, Rosie Boycott or Gloria Steinem. There was Simone de Beauvoir, but would you call her a feminist? She financially supported Jean-Paul Sartre’s other mistresses and sobbed herself to sleep when he did not give her enough attention.

The competition here is fierce. From the time a Frenchwoman is very young, she is brought up to view other females as rivals: for men, for places at school, for attention. It is no coincidence that they are so bony. It’s not to fit into those drainpipe jeans. It’s to have sharp elbows to push you off the pavements.

If you go to a French party, you quickly learn two things. One is that the women don’t want to waste time talking to you (the men will be slobbering all over you). They want to talk to your husband. The second is that there is no drink. You will be given one glass of very good champagne. You look for the second, but there is none. Don’t even think of taking the bottle and pouring yourself a glass. You will be met with a stony silence and a look of horror.

It’s the same at lunch or dinner parties. One or two bottles of very good wine and an inch in your glass. I have sat at dinners for what seemed like hours, waiting for someone to pass the drink. Either there is no more, or they just don’t want to crack open the next one.

But it goes deeper than that. Aside from a few rare kindred spirits (usually French journalist friends who love whisky), the French don’t get smashed and they have a deep abhorrence of drunken women.

I could go on and on with the complaints, because I have picked up the most famous French habit, so different from the English stiff upper lip: the art of whining nonstop. Il faut râler, you gotta complain.

I could complain about the upcoming strikes, which mean no one goes to work; I could complain about the snotty mothers who wait outside my son’s schools and don’t say hello to me; I could complain about the educational system, which beats children into robotic, polite submission but kills their spirit.

But instead I will end by saying, despite it all, I love France. Even though I wrote in my will, “Please don’t bury me on French soil”, I am not sure, after four years, if I could go back to live in England. I often come and see my friends, go to my favourite restaurants thinking about how easy it would be to send my son to a school where the teacher had the same culture as me.

By the second day, I am ready to go home to Paris. I miss the speed of the Metro; I miss the vegetable seller at the market; I miss the flower-shop on the corner of Boulevard Raspail where my husband buys me ten bunches of flowers a week (for €10); I miss the beauty of the city that still knocks me out when I cross the Seine on my bicycle.

I walk through the Luxembourg Gardens most days and feel awed by the romance of the place. I see my son growing up bilingual (and well-behaved because of his strict French papa) and I think how lucky he is.

Because to live in France, for all its flaws, really is a gift. And besides, when I am away from Paris for a few days, I begin to miss my outrageous, flirtatious butcher.

What’s wrong with Englishwomen – where does one start?

Englishwomen have big feet and are always badly dressed. They don’t take care of their looks or their bodies. They’re either too fat or too thin. They are shy and awkward with people they don’t know and they are always apologising for themselves. They drink a lot, probably to help to get over the shyness. This makes them loud and unbearable. They seem masculine, especially what we call l’executive woman.

Englishwomen stick together and don’t like going out of their circle. It’s hard to make friends with Englishwomen, but that’s pretty much the same for any group outside their own country. English manners in upper society are even stricter than chez nous. Americans are friendly but not the English. They are very class-bound and contemptuous of anyone outside their circle. You get bored with Englishwomen at dinner parties because the men talk together and expect the women to withdraw.

With men, Englishwomen are not very entreprenante (adventurous), which isn’t a bad thing, especially if you have a good-looking husband like mine. They don’t jump at him like Frenchwomen, who are never content with their own guy. It’s good with English waitresses and salesgirls because my husband always flirts with them and they don’t respond. Frenchwomen show everything. Englishwomen must be the same as us in private and must enjoy going to bed with men, like us, but they’re Protestants, like the Swiss, so they’re rigid and stuffy.

You don’t see children much in London. I don’t know where they hide their kids. It’s a bit like in Japan. They seem to hide the children because they’re untidy. The Americans are the opposite. Their kids are everywhere.

English houses are always cold, especially the bathrooms. The insides of the homes are usually a tasteless mess, a bit shabby, with old carpet that smells of dog. They have no lightness, it’s all heavy with things hanging everywhere. And they have fake wood fires fuelled with gas. Don’t even start me with their country houses, which the English are obsessed about.

And let’s not talk about the food. The English think they have learnt about cuisine lately, but it’s made things worse. They never stop talking about cooking, but it’s still fatty sauce and potatoes and odd vegetables thrown together.

Christine de Bellefonds
(A publisher’s editor and resident of Paris, who lived in London 1992-97)