School for scandal

Being both French (i.e., tending to constipation) and a woman, Jullien has nothing remotely like Cirillo's ingenious contraption, and when I tell her about it she goes ballistic. "He must have a bunch of basket cases as clients, guys in death throes, morbidly shy guys," she machine-guns. "I have normal guys."

As proof she shows me a few photographs and explains her methodology. The first thing she does when she meets you is conduct a frank interview. Then she gives you a questionnaire and sends it to a clinical psychologist.

After you've been profiled, Jullien, working with the shrink, devises a personal course of instruction. It might include everything from role-playing to field trips (pickup practice in clubs, cafes, parks) to lambada dance classes to appointments with a sexologist. "Some of my clients are virgins," she admits. "Others say they don't know how to put on a condom."

Typically, the beginning of a course is a sartorial and hygienic remake. She shows me before-and-after photos of a client transformed from a hopeless guy -- mismatched tie and shirt, baggy outdoorsy pants, unkempt hair -- to a snazzy hunk. The remade dude is wearing a gray suit and dark turtleneck. His hair is raked back. She calls the makeover a "re-lookage," a wonderful bit of Franglais. "I often use Alain Delon as an example of how to dress," she explains, telling me she believes that clothes make the man. "He's a successful role model. You might or might not like him, but he's not your run-of-the-mill actor, and he did it himself, so it means you can transform a man. When you work at it, when you have the will to change yourself, you can."

Cirillo may have his silhouette, but Jullien has two secret weapons of her own. Unwittingly, I've been smelling one all along and now realize the feral odor and snorting sounds I've been hearing emanate from a miniature black Belgian sheepdog. Parisians are dog-obsessed. Jullien lends her pet to clients so they can pick up dog-owning ladies.

The second weapon comes in the form of field trips to one of Cirillo's stomping grounds: Rome. Jullien met her husband there, she tells me, an Italian who picked her up in a cafe. This explains why she is convinced that Cirillo's clients are total basket cases. Just as I can't believe Parisians need her, she can't believe Romans need Cirillo.

"I take a bunch of Parisian men, we fly to Rome, we go to the center of town, and I and my women helpers are the bait," she says. "We sit at a cafe and demonstrate how Roman men pick us up. We get all dolled up, we sit down, with our clients nearby, and then we wait. And I assure you we don't wait long. Go sit at a Paris cafe -- and unless you're wearing a miniskirt pulled up to your panties, you can wait two hours before a guy will even talk to you."

So, leaving aside Cirillo's basket cases, the secret of being a great lover is to be Italian? I can just imagine the Bill Gates look-alikes at Jullien's future Silicon Valley campus exchanging their pen protectors for La "Dolce Vita" suits, worn boldly to help cyber Don Giovannis shark in on single gals slurping smoothies at the local strip mall.

"I'm not going to teach American men to pick women up like Roman men," she protests. "The essential thing is to be likable in the first seconds when approaching someone." Besides, she adds, seduction techniques are universal -- the winning smile, the bouquet of flowers, the self-confident yet sensitive charm. "Any man who knows how to pick up women, wherever he goes -- to a museum, an antique shop, a boutique, in the street, in a park -- will succeed anywhere in the world with any kind of woman, a German, a Dane, whatever ... Forget the intellectual psychology stuff -- a woman is a woman. She's got tits, an ass; we've all got 'em. A woman needs to be made to dream, to use her imagination."

It's obvious why Jullien's savvy imagination has been captured by California, a mother lode of dot-com nerds, luckless Bobos and geeks surrounded by post-feminist castratrices with pruning sheers, fat wallets and dating contracts. ("You shall not touch me until I specifically request you to do so ...") But is she qualified? She has traveled to, though she has never lived in, California. She speaks fluently flawed English with Parisian panache and demonstrates an original understanding of American culture.

"My impression," she confides, "is Americans don't know how to flirt. There isn't a single American who knows how to flirt, and I mean the mating dance, the seduction dance -- they don't know how to do it. They don't have good table manners, either. I'm not saying all Americans are like that -- some aren't of course -- but the guys in Silicon Valley, in front of their computers all day, they barely know how to hold a fork. American guys can be jokesters, bons vivants, and suddenly they reach out and grab your ass and say, 'I want to fuck you' or whatever. They're capable of behaving like real hicks. Whereas the bourgeois American guy is calmer, more puritanical."

Tits, asses and the urge to screw may be universal but, wisely, Jullien plans to surround herself with Americans conversant with the country's hick-puritanical heritage.

As I left her office and met one of her cringing clients, I came up with a quick crib of the Jullien method, in three easy steps: 1) If you're a man, have Roman-gene-implant therapy, memorize the script of "La Dolce Vita" and get a Mastroianni "re-lookage." 2) If you're a woman, fly to Rome and nurse your latte there. 3) If the first two don't work, buy a dog.

And don't bother coming to Paris. No matter what Jullien does, the women are viragoes, the men wimps.

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