The club’s many rooms, via its official Facebook page.

Les Chandelles is an upscale Paris swingers club—club privat or club exchangiste in the local parlance—that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is alleged to have frequented, according to local gossip and British tabloid reports.

You would never find Les Chandelles if you didn’t know what you were looking for. It’s located in an unprepossessing building at 1 Rue Therese, inhabiting a boring, rather flat quartier of the First Arrondissement with obscure boutiques and undistinguished Japanese restaurants, near the Bourse, the Paris stock market, and the Palais-Royal, the former home of Cardinal Richelieu.Typically, you have to go to Les Chandelles after midnight, and you first need to get past the unsmiling doorman, like Cerberus at the gates of the underworld, who allegedly turns away as many people as he lets in. Singles are not allowed, except during special daylight hours: lunchtime specials, so to speak.

But it’s not a pickup joint. If you and your partner are lucky enough to find an inviting hand on one of your arms, then you join in the fun. But no one forces you to do anything. You can stand and watch all night, or just sit at the bar and soak up the pheromones, watching the beautiful, rather spoilt-looking clientele at play. Or you can go in the back, with your partner, and join in. “It’s not threesomes,” a French friend of mine explained. “It’s x-somes. Meaning as many as you want.”

Although nothing happens at the bar, where the women keep their sexy little dresses and Louboutins on, the scene in the back room is a bit like something out of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, though without the funny masks and capes. There are some people partially dressed, some people in expensive lingerie, and some people completely naked.

Les Chandelles (“The Candles”) is not the only place in Paris for swingers, or libertines. There are many. And unlike in New York, where would-be swingers have to wear bathrobes à: la Hugh Hefner, or in London, where they have to be content to go to dingy “Rubber Balls” and S&M basements in Soho, in France, as anyone who has watched an Emmanuelle movie might suspect, they have comparatively elegant choices.

But Les Chandelles, like Madame Claude’s famous brother in the 1970s, is the club privat that everyone wants to get into, if that is what you are into. It’s discerning: it draws the best-looking libertines, with the most beautiful bodies. Some clubs let anyone in, which raises the old orgy fear: that you will be stuck next to someone who either looks like Mayor Bloomberg or smells, or both, and you are too polite to say no. One friend of mine reported going to a club privat near the Rue du Cherche-Midi, where, aside from seeing too many fat and red-faced German tourists, he also witnessed an old man using a walker to patrol the rooms.

This reporter went to Les Chandelles on a Saturday night with a high-ranking government official (not French!) in the name of research. I swear I did not inhale. My eyewitness report:

At the door, couples, well-dressed and seemingly wealthy, leave their coats and bags and wallets, give their first names, and check each other out. Downstairs, in the candlelit (naturally) mirrored (naturally) barroom, a bored-looking D.J. spins out Buddha Bar–esque sex music, but almost no one is dancing. The décor is the opposite of Laura Ashley: it’s dark, masculine, and Moroccan, with cushions and alcoves.

Once our eyes adjust to the gloom, we realize we can stare at everyone unabashedly because that’s what everyone else is there for. Watching. A dirty old man in a Prada suit has two young girls swilling champagne and dancing in their skimpy underwear on a table in front of him. But he’s bored. He’s eyeing the action in the other alcoves like a hungry wolf.