Paris for Dreamers

by Katrina Lawrence

  The idealised Romantic woman tended to be a diaphanous waif, but George was no fainting maiden, even if she could look the part. She was, in fact, a force of nature. She had all the emotions, but all the strength, too — again, the feminine and the masculine, rolled into one full-bodied body. Like so many Romantic artists, she rode a rollercoaster of emotions, often descending into the depths of despondency, but she fought to control those emotions all life long, navigating numerous personal tragedies. If this proved difficult at times, she could, at least, control her professional destiny.

  Determined to be a writer, Aurore, as she was still known in 1831, left her family home in Nohant, in the Berry region, for the Parisian big smoke. The city was still celebrating the second overthrow of the ancien régime, hopeful once again for a future of universal freedom. It was the high-point of Romanticism, and Aurore threw herself right in. Before long, she was George, and an acclaimed author. Her 1832 novel Indiana, which railed against the repressed state of married women’s lives, was a sensation. Miserably wed herself, she soon managed not only to file successfully for divorce, but win full custody of her two children and ownership of her château — and this at a time when women had practically no legal rights.

  George is little known beyond Gallic borders, but for French women she is a symbol of feminist freedom, and also much more; she represents a woman’s fully realised potential. There are many Sandistes in France, as the author’s fans like to call themselves. I met one here once, sitting on one of the park’s famous green chairs. The elegant, silvery-haired grande dame explained that George proved to French women that they could be like men, yes, but women, too. She had demanded the right to live like a man, as well as a woman. She revelled in the full gamut of emotions and interests, from friends to family, intellect to intimacy. Refusing to limit herself to one narrow box of being, she espoused a full life, well-lived.

  Retrace your steps — noting the statue opposite George; fittingly it’s called La Bocca della Verità (The Mouth of Truth) — but walk towards the northern Rue de Vaugirard gates, winding along floral-edged paths and through chestnut-lined allées. George herself often wandered here, a park much loved by the Romantics. She adored walking anywhere, actually, in the pursuit of personal liberty. But it was a time when no respectable woman could take to the streets alone. Social judgment prevented it, as did the day’s fashions. If George did defy moralists, she nevertheless found that her outfit dragged her down, her hems heavy with mud, her feminine shoes slipping along the Parisian footpaths like a ‘boat on ice.’ And so she took to dressing in men’s duds — a long riding coat worn over trousers, accessorised with a hat, a flourish of a cravat, and hobnail boots, shoes that made her feel ‘solid on the pavement.’ It wasn’t for provocation, but practicality; by disguising herself as a man, she could run errands, arrange work meetings, attend the theatre, sniff out artistic inspiration, or just anonymously float through the streets, an ‘atom lost in that immense crowd.’

  Cross Rue de Vaugirard and head up Rue Rotrou, immediately ahead. You’ll soon see the Odéon Théatre de l’Europe on your right. Built in 1782 as a neo-Classical monument to the French classics (the current building is a reconstruction), the Odéon later shone the spotlight on the Romantics, and George enjoyed huge acclaim here, in a medium that was notoriously fickle and difficult to conquer. Stand on the piazza in front of the portico, and see how the streets radiate so harmoniously around Place de l’Odéon; it’s a uniquely open yet intimate space in the Parisian cityscape. After one memorable première, the crowd’s chants of ‘Vive George Sand!’ must have reverberated around this ring of streets.

  Now wander up Rue de l’Odéon, as George herself would have done many times, appreciating the presence of a footpath — this was the first Parisian thoroughfare to boast one. Most Parisian streets remained medieval in design until Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann got his hands on city planning in the mid-nineteenth century. Before Haussmann, the city’s streets were unevenly cobbled, with gushing waste gutters running down the middle. The beau monde mostly took carriages door-to-door to avoid tarnishing their satin slippers, but if they did have to walk, they would carefully step along the sides of streets, or tenir le haut du pavé (keep to the highest point of the pavement) — an expression that today denotes an elevated social rank. George may have come from a haut du pavé kind of world, but she was happy to move among the masses, too.

  Walk towards the Pont-Saint-Michel, with no particular method in mind. You’re now following in the meandering footsteps of the flâneur, that time-honoured Parisian character who ambles around the streets, any and every which way, to take in their much-loved city’s details, being part of the crowd yet also playing the observer. Early flâneurs were often artists, in search of creative inspiration, like poet Charles Baudelaire. But these days, every Parisian seems to be a flâneur. Locals love to wander their streets, seeking out signs of their city’s history, following the well-trodden trails of their ancestors. It’s like walking grounds them, connects them to their city sole to soul.

  From Pont-Saint-Michel, look back to the riverfront façades of the Left Bank, a strip that was one of George’s stomping grounds. It was along here that she shacked up with her first Parisian lover, in a fifth-floor apartment overlooking Notre-Dame and the world that fellow Romantic Victor Hugo had written about so evocatively in his ode to the famous cathedral. Hélas, George’s real-life love story was a short one; she discovered her amour in the arms of another woman and promptly moved downstream. Her top-floor apartment at 19 Quai Malaquais — her beloved mansarde bleue (blue attic) — was soon the scene of a passionate personal life as much as a productive professional one. It was here she met poet Alfred de Musset, the boy wonder of Romanticism, and embarked on a relationship appropriately filled with all the emotions. ‘The only truth is love beyond reason,’ Musset wrote. But even insanity has its endpoint, and the relationship finished in a suitably dramatic way for these two Romantic rock-stars, with George lopping off her hair and sending it to Musset in a skull.

  With the theme of moving on … cross the Pont-Saint-Michel, and head across the Île de la Cité. As with George’s Quai Saint-Michel residence, much of the old buildings on this island area disappeared during Haussmann’s modernisation of Paris — or vandalism, depending on your viewpoint. Romantics certainly have never forgiven him for erasing so much of Paris’s medieval past. Walk over the next bridge, to the Right Bank, and through to Place du Châtelet, past the two Belle Époque theatres there; veer left, over Rue de Rivoli, and up Rue des Halles. Again, this is mostly Haussmann’s Paris, beige buildings for a classic and clean effect, lined along wide streets that allowed for better access to the city’s markets.

  Les Halles (pronounced ‘Lay Ahl’) no longer exists in its nineteenth-century form, the graceful glass-and-iron sheds torn down in a moment of twentieth-century modernist madness. So as you traverse the park here, you’ll find it difficult to conjure up the colour of the old marché. Fortunately some old market streets remain, still redolent of a more romantic time. Head for Rue Montorgueil, once the go-to for oyster merchants, and now a lively pedestrianised strip of specialist grocery stores and terrace-trimmed restaurants.

  It’s near impossible to walk along here without working up an appetite. If you’re due for lunch, order a seafood spread at Au Rocher de Cancale, a favourite foodie hang of Honoré de Balzac, who gobbled down countless Cancale oysters here. Balzac was a dear friend of George’s. They were both prolific writers — and both adept at the suspenseful serial novel, which popularly appeared in the era’s newspapers — although he worked more at the Realism end of the spectrum. ‘You seek man as he should be; I take him as he is,’ Balzac once told George. In La Comédie Humaine, his multi-volume collection of novels, Balzac compiled a social record of sorts, exploring the patchwork of people who made up Paris’s labyrinthine, multi-layered world. But George was becoming increasingly interested in politics, and social justice, which would become anot
her shared passion for this pair with a voracious appetite for all facets of life.

  At the top of Rue Montorgueil, turn left onto Rue Réamur, then right at Rue Montmartre. Continue straight, and across the boulevards — Montmartre to your left, Poissonnière to your right. If this were a movie, you’d start to hear music about now, specifically a piano concerto, suggestive of an impending plot twist, because a new character is about to make himself known: the Polish pianist Frédéric Chopin. He moved to Paris in 1831, sheltering in a shabby two-bedder just back down Boulevard Poissonnière, before renting a furnished apartment in Cité Bergère, the doorway to which is just on your right, opposite the famous Chartier restaurant. Chopin moved around the area for the next few years, upgrading his personal decor in line with his enhanced professional acclaim, before he and George found themselves in one another’s orbit and, soon, thrall.

  We’ll get to that soon … For now, keep marching to the music, continuing up what is now Rue du Faubourg Montmartre — faubourg meaning suburb, because this was once beyond the boundaries of the city proper. George made this part of Paris, semi-pastoral back then, her home in the late 1830s; having flitted for some time between the city and her beloved Nohant, she was doubtless attracted by the village feel. While the rural pockets might have now been filled, some of George’s old ’hood remains. Stop at À la Mère de Famille, which has been selling sweets since 1761. I like to picture George popping in to treat herself to a coffret of chocolates, her favourite snack to fuel frenzied late-night writing sessions. If you, too, need an energy boost, follow the author’s ghost behind the glossy green-and-gold façade, and order some of the deluxe chocolates displayed like jewels behind glass.

  Rue du Faubourg Montmartre becomes Rue Notre Dame de Lorette just behind the church of the same name. We’re now officially in La Nouvelle Athènes (New Athens), the area that became an instant creative hub after its 1820s development, artists attracted to its clean, airy spaces. George’s friend, the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, had a studio on this street, where George’s son would apprentice. He and his boss surely found it easy to find models … the street was renowned for the number of up-and-coming courtesans it attracted, ambitious types who would come to be known as lorettes. It was probably around here that one of Paris’s most famed future courtesans, the Russian-born Esther Lachmann, began her social ascent, catching the eye of pianist Henri Herz, and then a succession of protectors. Soon Lachmann was calling herself La Païva, and could proudly move into a Parisian mansion of her own.

  Just up at Place Saint-Georges, the cobble-swirled roundabout, you can see La Païva’s old sculpture-encrusted abode, at no.30: part neo-Gothic, part neo-Renaissance, and all-glamour. It overlooks the central statue of illustrator Paul Gavarni, a contemporary of La Païva’s, who enjoyed sketching a lorette, but came to prefer depicting a wider spectrum of social types, in true Balzacian style. Just opposite, you’ll notice a more classic style of Parisian mansion; it belonged to Adolphe Thiers, the aggressively ambitious politician who inspired Balzac’s notorious character Eugène de Rastignac (to call someone a Rastignac in French is to accuse them of social-climbing, and a common insult). The Fondation Dosne-Thiers is mostly only open for private events, but its former back garden is now an enticing public park, Square Alex Biscarre, where you can laze on a bench by the wild roses, or spread out on the daisy-strewn lawn. Sit here for a while. It’s the perfect place for us to pick up the story of when George met Frédéric …

  By 1836, George was living nearby with friends: another celebrated pianist, Franz Liszt, and his partner Marie d’Agoult, a Romantic author who went by a masculine pen name, Daniel Stern (sound familiar?). George had been enamoured of music for a while now, as most Romantic types were wont to be; she’d often lie under the piano while Liszt played, moved into ‘otherworldly states of ecstasy and rapture.’ When Liszt and Agoult introduced George to Chopin, by now the musical darling of Paris, I wonder if they knew they were masterminding what would become one of French history’s most legendary liaisons.

  It was a case of opposites attract. Chopin was painfully shy, a sensitive dandy, fragile and feminine. George, six years older, still dressed in men’s clothes, and talked, smoked and lived with gusto. But inside, they were both true Romantics. He saw past the tough suits, into her soulful eyes; she nurtured his inner strength, mothered him. He was a poet of the piano, infusing emotions into his ballades. George saw colour when Chopin played, famously a ‘blue note.’ Melancholy would tinge their time together, but so too would every other emotion.

  After travelling together — a rite of all true Romantic pairs — they settled back in Paris, just near here, in two garden pavilions filled with flowers, Chinoiserie and green furniture. Chopin tinkled away on the ivories all day, and George tended to her children (Chopin included). But she was not just a housewife; she wrote furiously all through the night. She needed to work to live in the style to which she had become accustomed, yes, but also to continue to strengthen and sharpen her voice. She was ever passionate about social politics, and the plight of the working classes, especially in the countryside. Her regional novels, at once utopian and realist, reflected her concern, while her folklore-inspired pastoral tales came from a place of nostalgia.

  With Chopin still playing lyrically in your mind, zigzag southwards from Place Saint-Georges, zipping down Rue Saint-Georges and right into Rue d’Aumale. Turn left at Rue Taitbout, and look for no.80. If it’s a weekday, you’ll be able to walk into the gracious Square d’Orléans, a courtyard of creamy, column-clad façades overlooking magnolia trees and a splashing fountain. It may have been inspired by classic Regency London squares, but French Romantics adored it. Alexandre Dumas père, of Les Trois Mousquetaires fame, Marie Taglioni, the first ballerina to dance in a fluttering white tutu, and Charles Baudelaire were all residents. George and Chopin each took an apartment here in 1842; plaques mark the esteemed addresses. The square might look rather prim and proper — but just imagine the wining and dining that once went on.

  But for George, the party was winding up. Chopin was moody and ailing. The city was getting to her, with its sticky mud and gloomy light. She eventually left her pianist, and Paris too, and moved home to Nohant, where she could be surrounded by family and flowers, breathing in the fresh air and the freedom. Chopin, meanwhile, died agonisingly of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-nine. It’s not the most romantic of endings. Even if it was one of the era’s great Romantic sagas — which, of course, were rarely just about romance. They ran the gamut of emotions, and the story of George and Chopin had them all, suitably for a pianist whose notes vibrated with both bliss and sadness, and for a writer as adept at describing ecstasy as agony.

  Today’s tour, at least, has a happy ending. Head back up Rue Taitbout, turn left at Rue d’Aumale, right at Rue de la Rochefoucauld, left at Rue Bruyère and right at Rue Henner. Walk towards the horse chestnut tree you see at the very end of the street, shading the blink-and-you-could-miss-it entrance to one of Paris’s most delightful museums, the Musée de la Vie Romantique.

  Once the house of Ary Scheffer, George and Chopin would venture up this cobbled lane every Friday night, en route to the Romantic painter’s weekly gathering. The pretty storybook pavilion, shaded by pistachio-green shutters and tangled with grape vines, sitting at the end of the moss-flecked pathway, among pastel bursts of hydrangea and hollyhock, is now dedicated to showcasing the spirit and style of Romanticism, particularly its grande dame, George Sand. I couldn’t think of a more appropriate setting.

  What strikes you is how humble and homely it is. The patterned carpets make you feel as though you could be at your grandmother’s house, about to take tea in the parlour. George was a doting grand-mère herself, and the many family portraits, hanging in gold frames amid the tasselled drapery, are testament to her priorities in life. Her treasured heirlooms include the ruby-esque sapphire ring given to her grandmother by Louis XVI’s mother, which she wrote about in her best-selling His
toire de Ma Vie (Story of My Life). Among the pricier bijoux are numerous trinkets George treasured for the emotions and memories they evoked. You can imagine her caressing them with those delicate fingers of hers. And if you can’t remember back to the George we met this morning, with her comely hands, a moulding of her right arm will remind you. It’s pale and slender, as any self-respecting Romantic limb had to be. But at the same time, there’s an inner strength. This woman could handle anything.

  Treat yourself, and your no-doubt tired feet, to afternoon tea in the museum’s gorgeous salon de thé, Rose Bakery, set in the glasshouse, with wrought-iron chairs and tables scattered around the rose bushes. It’s a most romantic place, as it should be, a window into George’s life at Nohant, and it makes you all the more appreciate this complex woman who fought for women’s rights, knowing women could be just like men — but remain women, too. She knew they could have all of life’s emotions, and interests, too. They could cook and paint and sew and tinker and dote on grandchildren, as she did, but they could also launch into fierce philosophical discussions about social justice, as she also most certainly did. And she could write, of course. Not just to entertain but to inform and inspire, and also because, simply, it was the path she was meant to follow.

  Itinerary

  • Angelina: 226 Rue de Rivoli 75001; 07.30-19.00 (Monday-Friday), 08.30-19.30 (Saturday, Sunday, public holidays)

  • Librairie Galignani: 224 Rue de Rivoli 75001; 10.00-19.00; closed Sunday

  • Joan of Arc by Emmanuel Frémiet: Place des Pyramides 75001

  • Jardin des Tuileries: 113 Rue de Rivoli 75001; 07.30-19.30 (October-March), 07.00-21.00 (April-September)