Chanel girl Vanessa Paradis talks about why women attack her in the street THE latest so-called incarnation of the young Brigitte Bardot is sprawled on a London hotel bed with her delicate face squashed up sideways against the wall. There are dark shadows under her eyes that look like sunken bruises. She is dressed in the ubiquitous corduroy jeans so beloved of the suburban French teenager, and a skinny-ribbed top which emphasises her lack of bosom. Perhaps it's all an act and she wants you to feel sorry for her. But I don't think so. She struck me as a textbook case of a girl who has grown up too fast; unusually mature and not particularly happy. At 19, Vanessa Paradis is both a booming national industry and one of the most reviled women in France. Recently, she was attacked in the street by dozens of young girls. It happened outside a Paris hotel where a mob of 1,000 girls were waiting for New Kids On The Block. She kept her eyes on the pavement and waded through. But one of them recognised her. 'Then suddenly there were dozens of them all on my ass, pulling my hair, spitting on me, calling me a whore,' she says. 'It happens all the time. People think: 'She's so young, we can say and do anything we like.' What can you do? At one point, I would get aggressive and fight in the street, most of the time with women. I was pretty good with my fists. Now I just ignore it.' All the same, she has already won the French equivalent of an Oscar for playing a teenage temptress who is seduced by her teacher, and she has pumped out three sexy albums featuring a breathy little voice. Magazines do cover stories on her pout. But in this country, Vanessa, the official face of Chanel's Coco perfume, is better known for her Chanel TV commercial where she swings from a trapeze in a gilded cage like some sinister bird of paradise. Now she is about to go international with an English language album of pop songs, called Vanessa Paradis, produced by the hip American singer/producer Lenny Kravitz. MTV has already locked on to the video of the first single, Be My Baby. It pans up close on her extraordinary upper lip, a kind of Napoleon's hat which inverts upwards to show gappy front teeth. The video also has her stroking her inner thighs and locking bare legs around a diving board. Subtle it is not. Vanessa claims she isn't acting in her pop video and stresses that sexiness comes naturally to her, that it's part of her nature - just like the Chanel girl. I say: 'Pull the other one, Vanessa', and she gets quite cross. 'I didn't say to the director I want to do a very sexy video, blah, blah, blah. This is just how I am. I can be sexy if I want to be. Anyway, I think a sexy image goes with pop music. I know exactly what I'm doing.' Vanessa was brought up by middle-class parents, both of them interior decorators, in a suburb of Paris. They did not employ a nanny, preferring to take her everywhere with them, including sophisticated dinner parties where she recalls often falling asleep on the table. She was encouraged to talk about sex and drugs and other adult matters before she was in her teens. Within limits, she was also encouraged to do precisely what she liked. 'Okay, these are the choices, Vanessa; what do you want, what do you think?' 'My parents never said I was too young to understand life. I think they were wonderful. It's stupid to decide people are adults at 18. You have to be able to make decisions about your life as soon as you're able,' says Vanessa. One of her decisions was to appear at the age of six on a French TV show, through an actor uncle's contacts, lisping a song whose first line roughly translates: 'I am pretty Emily . . . ' At 14, with the help of the same uncle, she was a pop star. She was also a deeply unhappy little schoolgirl. 'I'd just changed to a new lycee and I wanted to be treated like everybody else, to make friends,' she says. 'But the girls thought I must be arrogant so none of them talked to me. For two years. That was horrible and yes, sometimes I cried. Children can be so cruel. Ever since I was little, I've always preferred to spend time with older people and it's true most of my friends are men.' Reflecting on the extreme reaction she provokes in people, especially women in her country, she says: 'Reactions to me are always extreme. People love me or they hate me. But the people who hate me still come to me and touch me and tell me about their hatred. I think this is either jealousy or love, not hate. Love and hate are so close. 'France is my country and it feels I belong to it so it can criticise me. It is the same for Madonna, who is really criticised by the Americans, but loved in France. 'But when you're only 14 and having to deal with all this love and all this hate, it is just so confusing. I am called Lolita but I never felt like one. I haven't even read the book though I should, because so many people talk to me about it. 'There were times when I was going to meetings in a car and I would put my head in my bag to try and be invisible. Things were running too fast for me. It was a shock to realise that people around me never, but never disagreed with me. I was really mean, really capricieuse to them sometimes just to see how they'd react. 'I'd go to a TV studio and pretend to be really angry, demand some food like caviar, whatever. I would think: 'Okay, this time they will get pissed off and react.' But they didn't. You kind of forget who you really are, the real sensations, the real emotions and relationships with people.' At 16, she left school and moved in with a 30-year-old French singer, Florent Pagny, for three years. Her parents were worried but they liked him, she says. 'It was a turning point. I would have grown up anyway but it would have taken longer. 'I learned to live with a man, to share half and half. He taught me lots of things. When I met him, I was a shy person and very, very wild. I didn't like people; I thought they were cruel. He taught me to open up a bit and I really needed that. 'He also protected me a lot. We would go out in groups of 20 so nobody could attack me. Sometimes he would say: 'Let's stay in our world', and we didn't go out at all. So I did have an adolescence but it was different from most people 's.' The affair with Pagny is over now and she does not have a boyfriend at the moment. 'That bothers me,' she admits. Then she muses: 'If I did have one, he would be so unhappy because I'm hardly ever at home. But I need to be in love, I really need that. Life is not so exciting without it. I guess it gets harder to meet people when you're famous. And I'm a very difficult girl, very hard to please.' Above all, Vanessa wants babies. Lots of them. And she thinks she'd 'better start soon' when the right man comes along. This is not an idle teenage wish. She is serious. 'I think a baby is the most beautiful, pure thing in the world. I know it would be true love. 'I would love him and he would love me and the two of us would be strong in front of the world. We would be so very strong together that we wouldn't have to run after love. Everybody is always running after love, aren't they? And also, my life is so unstable that having a baby would be the most wonderful thing.' Teenage sex symbols usually laugh and gesture towards their thirties when you ask about motherhood. On the other hand, damaged adolescents who see salvation in the unqualified love of a baby, are all too common. She may light up like a 150 watt-bulb for the cameras today, but she looks an exhausted young girl in need of a cuddle. She says she only feels pretty when she's in love or wearing lots of make-up. 'I guess I hate my teeth, I hate my nose and I would like to be taller.' She'd also like to sound like her heroine Aretha Franklin. 'I don't sing because I like the sound of my voice, I sing because it gives me pleasure. I've still got a voice like a baby and it always shocks me.'