Paris Letter/Lara Marlowe: France's intellectual caviar Left enjoy sumptuous apartments in Saint-Germain des Prés, clothes from the designer boutiques around the Deux Magots and the Place Saint-Sulpice.
And because none of them ever learn to cook, mega-tabs at the Café de Flore, just like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. There's even a French adjective for the species that rarely leaves its Saint-Germain habitat: the germano-pratins.
Justine Lévy, 29, provides new insights into this privileged world, in a barely disguised true-life fiction about heartbreak as a poor little rich girl. Lévy's husband left her for his father's mistress. It probably happens more than we realise in France, but since the people involved are celebrities, it's created a big scandale here.
That Lévy's book, Rien de grave ("Nothing serious") is the number one French bestseller, shows what a hold the lives of "beautiful people" have over the allegedly Cartesian French. For despite the all importance of appearance in Saint-Germain des Prés, its denizens really know how to suffer.
Philosophy is the root of the story. Lévy is the daughter of Bernard-Henri Lévy, the philosopher who became famous in the 1980s for tossing his dark mane of hair, wearing shirts open to the navel and making pronouncements on every conceivable subject.
When Justine was a child, she thought a philosopher meant someone who appeared on television. Her father is one of a handful of people in France known by their initials: BHL.
Justine Lévy's mother was a fashion model called Isabelle, one of many beautiful women who flitted through BHL's life. When Justine was four, her mother abandoned her, saying she'd be happier with Dad. Indeed, there were good times, like having breakfast with BHL and Francois Mitterrand at the Flore.
Lévy's first novel, published in 1995, told of finding her mother with a tourniquet around her arm and a syringe beside her, of seeing Mom in bed with men and women, and of visiting her in prison.
Like BHL, the philosopher's best friend and publisher Jean-Paul Enthoven was raising a child alone. Little Raphaël Enthoven and Justine seemed destined for each other. They fell in love as teenagers. When they decided to marry in 1995, their fathers were so thrilled they threw a big society wedding. "There were so many people there whom we didn't know that we left before it was over," Justine Lévy writes.
She got pregnant, but Raphaël didn't want the baby. He was afraid it would prevent him studying for his post-doctorate degree in philosophy. "We have time, he said, we have time. Time for what? Time to stop loving each other, time to separate, time to leave each other, the time to make this baby with another woman, the time to give him the first name that we'd chosen together," Lévy writes.
After the abortion - at five months - Levy found the amphetamines her father kept in a desk drawer for late night writing. She started a two-year addiction, and it took BHL's paternal love to save her.
Then the Levy and Enthoven families went on holiday together in Marrakech. Enthoven father brought his mistress, the supermodel and femme fatale Carla Bruni, formerly romantically linked with Mick Jagger and the socialist politician Laurent Fabius, among others.
In real life, Carla is a member of the rich, aristocratic Italian Bruni-Tedeschi family. In the novel, Levy calls her Terminator-Paula. "That girl, Paula, who was going out with his father, and who arrived like the world is mine and the guys too... He thought it was funny I was jealous. He said, but my love, she's my mother-in-law. You can't be jealous of my mother-in-law." Carla/Paula was seven years older than her "son-in-law", but that didn't prevent them leaving Marrakech together. Subsequent events have salted Justine Lévy's wounds: Carla Bruni's first CD was a smash hit. You can hear one of the songs she wrote, called Raphael, on any pop radio station. "He looks like an angel but he's a devil at love..." Bruni croons in her ingénue's voice.
Then Bruni and Enthoven had a baby boy named Aurelien, reminding Levy of the male child she aborted seven years ago. This month, when Bruni was named female entertainer of the year, the happy couple glowed on the cover of Paris Match.
Bruni said that by becoming a singer, she had "gone from emptiness to reality. This time I exist; I am no longer an image or a photo, and I have nothing to hide." She also thanked Enthoven "for watching our baby while I had fun making music". Asked what it was like to have the dirty linen of Raphael's marriage washed in public, Bruni said she'd noticed that "a broken heart doesn't prevent an acute sense of self-promotion". Bruni accused Lévy of deliberately publishing her book just as her own singing career was taking off.