“I shall be working late” was once voted in France as the sentence between husband and wife least likely to be true. A controversial new French Web based service, recognising the temptations outside married life, has opened to help would-be adulterers escape the scrutiny of their spouses.
The Alibila site has a range of support services that start from a modest twenty Euros, offering fake excuses for a husband or wife to be absent from home, including spurious wedding invitations and conference agendas. Alibila can also act as the intermediary for an illicit rendez-vous, create fake bills and receipts that attempt to prove the adulterers were engaged in a legitimate activity at the time, and buy chocolates and flowers for paramours that would otherwise appear as suspicious items on a credit card statement.
The site is the idea of Régine Mourizard, a 50-year-old mother of two and former private detective who specialised in divorce cases. "It can sometimes save marriages", said Mourizard, having been divorced herself just over two years ago.
Most of Mourizard’s clients are in their mid-40s but some are as young as 25 and others nearly 60. Among those she has helped is ‘Géraldine’, not of course her real name, a married driving school owner desperate to see an ex-boyfriend, the love of her life, who was passing through Paris. For a thirty-Euro fee, Regine telephoned her home and spoke to Géraldine’s husband, pretending to be a client who needed a last-minute extra lesson before a driving test the following day. The husband was so convinced, he even offered to get the car out of the garage for his wife.
Régine herself has a new husband, whom of course she trusts completely. "If he were cheating", she said, "I’d need only a split second to find out".
According to new research by a French women’s magazine, the old saying ‘le cinq à sept’, the time of day devoted to adultery, is now out of date, and should be renamed ‘le deux à quatre’. It showed housewives are just as likely to take lovers, but have to be home by 4.30 p.m. to greet their children from school. Businessmen find traffic levels too high to fit in a mistress between work and the commute to eat dinner at home, and instead skip lunch in favour of an amorous early afternoon break.
October 2007
