Bernard-Henri Lévy is a Left Bank intellectual with a personal fortune and a perfectly coiffed mane, whose affair with the avant-garde aristocrat Daphne Guinness has shocked le tout Paris. Christopher Silvester on an

intriguing tale of couture, philosophy, scorned wives and amour fou

He is a French intellectual known for his suave good looks and inherited wealth. Indeed, Bernard-Henri Lévy is so famous in France that he is referred to merely by the acronym BHL. She

is an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and fashion muse known for her outlandish but imaginative taste (and inherited wealth). BHL once told Daphne Guinness: ‘You’re no longer a person, you’re a concept.’ Until recently, she was the lady he spent time with when he was away from Paris. But now her status may be about to change, for BHL has let it be known that he is parting from his wife of two decades, the French film actress and singer Arielle Dombasle. Will Daphne step up to the role of official consort? And how will Parisian society greet her – with froideur, indifférence or rapturous enthusiasm?

In Paris, of course, it will always be BHL who looms larger. He has been part of French public life ever since his appearance in 1977, as a young academic attacking the inherent corruption of Marxism, on the television discussion programme Apostrophes. You can find bootleg video footage of this historic moment on the internet. Wearing a white open-neck shirt, its collar spread across the lapels of his black jacket, with his chest exposed and a lit cigarette in his hand, this nouveau philosophe cut a dashing figure. His flowing locks, aquiline nose, delicate features, dark eyes, perfect complexion and cool, serene gaze put one in mind of a French aristocrat at the court of Louis XIV rather than a Left Bank socialist intellectual. The programme moderator’s daughter reported back to her father that all her friends thought the 28-year-old Lévy was the new Rimbaud, the late 19th-century poet and libertine who achieved renown at an even younger age. The myth of BHL was born.

Although the toad-like visage of Jean-Paul Sartre, the ultimate French public intellectual, never deterred female admirers, BHL has

enjoyed the added advantages of his appealing looks. The Frenchman he most closely resembled back in the 1970s was the beetle-browed romantic singer Charles Aznavour. Indeed, you can cut out a picture of Aznavour’s features, place it over a picture of BHL and hardly tell the difference. And his signature sartorial uniform of black suit and white shirt does not come cheap. Both are from Charvet, a swanky French tailor. Those shirts are specially designed so that their collars never curl and they cost £265 each.

Francis Wheen, the biographer of Karl Marx, watched BHL in action at an Intelligence Squared debate in London. ‘His opponent, Christopher Hitchens, made a point of thank-ing all the men who had attended because they would serve as a counterweight to all the women swooning over BHL. He’s everybody’s

fantasy of what a French intellec-tual should look like. He is vain and self-regarding, of course. He already had a torrid love life and having a British aristocrat as a mistress adds to that. He’s not an ivory-tower person, he travels to dangerous places – he was at the siege of Sarajevo, for example. All French intellectuals are thought

to be Marxist, but BHL isn’t from the tradition of Sartre. He’s non-Marxist and non-Maoist.’

Lévy was born in Algeria in 1948, but moved to Paris with his parents a few months later. His father André, a Sephardic Jew, had fought with the Free French Forces in Italy during the Second World War and afterwards founded a company, Becob, which specialised in import-ing rare African woods. Bernard-Henri was educated at the university for the French elite, the Ecole Normale Supérieur, where he studied under the philosophers Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida. But from early on he felt the need to be engaged in the world; his first book (he has written more than 30) was a work of reportage about the Bangladesh civil war.

Through his books and newspaper columns, BHL has adopted many courageous and nuanced positions, variously attacking the French predilections for fascism and anti-Semitism on

the Right and for ideological conformity and anti-Americanism on the Left. He has spoken up against fascism in Argentina, communism in Poland, genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, and Islamic terrorists everywhere. He has defended the state of Israel while pressing for a Palestinian state, and he supported the war in Iraq. He has lambasted the US government for its pursuit of the director Roman Polanski over a sex crime with a 13-year-old girl, arguing that Polanski had already served a six-week sentence 33 years ago, only fleeing the jurisdic-tion when the judge reneged on a deal.

After his father’s death in 1995, BHL ran the family wood-importing business for a couple of years before selling it for hundreds of millions of francs to François

Pinault, the owner of Christie’s and Gucci. According to Capital magazine, Lévy is among the 100 richest people in France. He has a lifestyle to match, with a Sri Lankan butler and, since he has never passed his test, a chauffeur to drive his Daimler. There is also a palatial, fully staffed house in Marrakech.

His main job, the one he has held for the longest time, since 1973, has been at the publishing house Editions Grasset, where he commissions books from leading public figures. He has also benefited from the patronage of politicians. A favourite of President Mitterand for several years, he launched SOS Racisme, an anti-racist body that was seen by some as a means of garnering votes for the Socialist party, and for which he was rewarded in 1991 with the chairmanship of the government commission that hands out subsidies to French film-makers, giving him considerable power over his peers. Two years later, after courting the conservative prime minister Edouard Balladur, he was made chairman of the high-brow state TV channel Arte. His roles as recipient or dispenser of patronage seem to suit him equally well.

But there is a dark side to BHL. A biography published in 2006 by two investigative jour-nalists, entitled A French Impostor, challenged his intellectual credentials and questioned his

‘You’re no longer a

person, you’re a concept,’ BHL told Daphne

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Scandal on the Seine

The name is Lévy, Bernard-Henri Lévy, clockwise from above:

BHL in Paris in 1979; BHL on a diplomatic

mission to Afghanistan in 2002; his future wife

Arielle Dombasle, in 1981; BHL and Arielle at a Vanity Fair party

during the Cannes Film Festival 2007;

on their wedding day on the Côte d’Azur

in 1993

Homme d’affaires, clockwise from above:

Les derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire

manuscript by Bernard-Henri Lévy;

the wedding of Daphne Guinness

and Spyros Niarchos in Paris, 1987;

BHL and Daphne Guinness in Nice, 2010;

BHL meets President Jacques Chirac to

discuss Afghanistan at the Elysée Palace, 2002

ethics. His scholarship is sometimes dubious. Years ago he was derided for suggesting that Himmler had stood trial at Nuremberg six months after his suicide and earlier this year he was mocked for citing the 20th-century philosopher Jean-Baptiste Botul in a book about the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant – the trouble was that Botul and Botulism were a satirical invention of literary journalist Frédéric Pagès. A proposed indictment against him for tax evasion was quashed by Nicolas Sarkozy back when he was Minister of Finance. Although BHL refused to endorse Sarkozy for the presidency in 2007 – claiming that he still considers the Left to be his famille – he has always been careful to avoid directly criticising him.

It is BHL’s private life that has burnished his allure. By the late 1980s he was married to his first wife but leading the life of a libertine, sleeping with as many as three women in a single night according to a friend quoted in a magazine interview in 2003. He only requires four hours of actual sleep. When his current wife, Arielle Dombasle, first saw a picture of him, by her own account she thought he was Jesus Christ; and when he first met her, at a book signing, he was, to use his own words, ‘thunderstruck’ by her beauty.

A strawberry blonde actress who was born in America, Arielle’s father was a silk manu-facturing heir from Lyon, who indulged his interest in archaeology. After the premature death of her mother, Arielle was raised by her maternal grandparents in Mexico, where her

grandfather served as de Gaulle’s ambassador. Her grandmother was a poet who lived to the age of 101 and it is from her that Arielle took her professional surname. By the age of ten, she could drive a car, water-ski, parachute and

scuba dive. Fluent in four languages, she trained as a classical singer in Paris but switched to acting instead and in the course of a career that has encom-passed more than 100 film and TV roles, she has

worked with major arthouse directors, though especially with Eric Rohmer, while also recording several albums of

songs in different styles.Two years after their

first meeting, during which time BHL had divorced his first and married his second wife, Arielle met him again

in Milan and they spent a passionate night together.

She, too, was married – to a society dentist some 30 years her senior.

After a month’s separation, and after he had hired a private investigator to check her out, BHL began a surreptitious affair with Arielle – ‘Elevators and barmen were our only friends,’ each has said. It lasted seven years, until they eventually married in 1993. A few years later, she starred in a film Lévy had directed called Le Jour et La Nuit, with Alain Delon co-starring as a character based partly on BHL, partly on Arielle’s father and partly on Ernest Hemingway. It was a horror as far as the French critics were concerned. The distinguished magazine Cahiers du Cinema called it the worst French film for decades and BHL provoked laughter when he tried to explain what the film was about to an audi-ence at the Berlin Film Festival.

‘Bernard and Arielle are where fact and fiction meet,’ declared the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. Today, the Paris-based American fashion commentator Mary Deschamps sees them as ‘the intellectual Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of France’. ‘He’s part of what is referred to as la gauche caviar,’ she explains. ‘Meaning Left idealism but spending on bling-bling. He’s greatly admired as a champion of many causes. She’s kind of a ditzy blonde, totally redone cosmetically. They’ve been together for years and they were in all the magazines, but every-one sort of makes fun of them – the intellectual and the blonde bombshell.’

The new bombshell in BHL’s life, Daphne Guinness, 42, is sometimes described as a brewery heiress, although her family have been more involved in ownership of

land and other assets for many years. She is a peroxide blonde who has worn two dark badger stripes in her hair ever since her 1999 divorce from the Greek shipping heir Spyros Niarchos, to whom she was married for 12 years and with whom she has three children. She is said to have received £20 million in her divorce settlement in addition to her own family money. Her mother was French and counted the artists Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp among her friends, while Daphne prefers the world of haute couture fashion. With her slim figure, much-fêted poise and penchant for avant-garde creations, she was a muse to the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen and recently bought the entire clothing collection of her fellow muse, the late Isabella Blow, rather than let it be auctioned by Christie’s. She has given her name to a Comme des Garçons fragrance and has inspired a make-up line. Her use of such words as ‘crikey’ and ‘gosh’ in interviews betrays her upper-class origins, but one interviewer, Jim Reginato of American fashion magazine W, testified to her innate style and intelligence, saying that ‘she does diamonds and particle physics’.

In October 2008, the New York Post reported that BHL and Daphne had been ‘making out’

poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel – not exactly where one goes if one intends to be discreet. Several more sightings followed, in Toronto, London and New York, though significantly not in Paris. At the beginning of this year, David Patrick Columbia, who edits the New York Social Diary website, noticed Daphne and BHL lunching at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan. According to a witness seated at the neighbouring table,

the golden couple had stared at each other through sunglasses for a full five minutes before exchanging a word. Columbia had already seen them a few months earlier at Michael’s, a Midtown restaurant favoured by media big-shots. On each occasion they were a source of fascination to the other patrons. ‘People as clearly defined

intellectually and fashion-wise as this couple,’ Columbia wrote, ‘are rarely unaware of their surroundings.’ Only a couple of weeks ago they both attended the Another Magazine dinner at the Istancool Festival, which was held in the grounds of Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace. BHL looked on admiringly as the ‘concept’ that is Daphne went on stage to discuss the art of hat-making with Philip Treacy.

‘Hopefully for her, he’s in love,’ says Deschamps. ‘In any case, it looks like yet another display of trophy lovers. People are going to be pretty cynical. It’s the classic story. He’s dumped Arielle for a younger, prettier, richer girl. It goes back to the King of France. If the King could do it, others could, too. But I think this might mar his reputation as an intellectual. What will the French think? I don’t think the French are going to think much.’

Some commentators I spoke to declined to offer an opinion about the change in BHL’s domestic arrangements, possibly because they feared upsetting him or Arielle or Daphne, or out of the traditional Gallic respect for the privacy of the bedchamber. One French commentator would only say there was unlikely to be much of a reaction in Paris because ‘the French still don’t care about public figures’ private lives’. BHL is unlikely to be bothered either way. ‘I took the measure of the absurdity of the judgement of Paris a long time ago,’ he once said. ‘Whether it’s good or bad, it’s the same either way.’

In his 2003 book about the murder in Pakistan of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, BHL wrote a novelistic passage in which he speculated about Pearl’s last thoughts about his wife. ‘He thinks of Mariane, that last night, so desirable, so beautiful – what do women want, deep down? Passion? Eternity?’ BHL and Daphne will no doubt have many years of passionate interchange ahead, but perhaps she should avoid adopting wifely status. The late Sir James Goldsmith, who for many years had a wife in London and a mistress in Paris, once averred that a man who marries his mistress creates a job vacancy. Arielle should under-stand. After all, she was once the mistress.

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The golden couple stared at each other for a full five

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The fourth Mme BHL? Daphne Guinness,

June 2009

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