We made up for our extravagant dinner by eating baguettes by the river for the remainder of the holiday, but I lived off that grand meal for months. It had nourished more than my appetite, and had been an exquisite taste of the French philosophy of pleasure — something worth fighting for, saving for, in this complex world. Life, I was learning, was as layered as French pâtisserie — but this only gave it more flavour and richness. I would have to contend with all sorts of contradictions and complications in the future, and I might not always have the answers, no matter how many notebooks I filled in Parisian cafés, in search of inner enlightenment. That fabled happy ending was going to be harder work than anticipated. But the point, I was sensing, was not the destination but the journey, and how enjoyable, how picturesque, I could make it.
CHAPTER 2
JEUNE FILLE
jeune adj young; fille nf girl
In which, aged sixteen, I fashion a Parisian alter ego for myself.
Having finally reached the fabled age of sixteen, I was desolate to find I hadn’t blossomed overnight into a fragrant bouquet of femininity. I was still the same shy, awkward teenager whose social life extended as far as my weekend job: I worked at the local deli, serving up soggy coleslaw, slices of sweaty salami, and fried-crisp chicken, the carcasses of which I had to string onto the rotisserie. Forget Sweet Sixteen — life seemed positively unsavoury at times.
I had an inkling that the key to the life I wanted to live, the woman I wanted to be, would be found in a certain city on the other side of the world, where girls wore smart pinafores and plaits fashioned from long silky hair, and grew into beautifully styled women who wrapped themselves in scarves and trailed alluring fragrance.
French girls don’t tend to celebrate a Sweet Sixteen, I’ve found. Their coming of age is, rather, a graceful evolution that begins with the tender moment mamans start to teach their mini-mes how to groom. My part-French mother was genetically programmed to pass on a few beauty pointers early on, but her escalating workload meant that I was mostly left to my own devices, to experiment with my look as I saw fit. While I appreciated her unerring belief in my ability to self-express, my clumsy attempts to style a more mature, glamorous me usually misfired. (A geometrically tiered bob, anyone?) I began to count down the days to our next trip to Paris, dreaming of the future me I would discover there.
It was late autumn, and the golden leaves of the Parisian plane trees rippled in the light breeze, the shimmering effect making the city seem all the more lustrous. On days like this, Paris seems ephemeral, as though you’re in a hazy, glazed dream. You almost pinch yourself to check she’s real.
The city proper is divided into a twirl of twenty districts, and we were staying in Passy, in the 16th arrondissement. Once a hilly hamlet of winding pathways and fields lush with grapevines and thermal springs, Passy came into its own in the mid nineteenth century, becoming home to many of the grand buildings that now define Paris — the Haussmannian apartments, named after Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the prefect charged with modernising the city.
‘Your beloved Baudelaire would have hated Passy,’ Mum commented as we explored the area on our first day, pointing to the apartment blocks, all variations on a classic beige theme.
Forget boy bands; my crush at the time was Charles Baudelaire, the lyrical genius of French Romanticism. Nineteenth-century Romantic poems — gloriously exotic creations that I could only semi-decipher after flicking through my Collins Robert French dictionary multiple times — were what made me really fall in amour with the French language. It was by sounding out the heart-pounding verses that I learned how to deliver French, so apt for discussing things of beauty, with a suitably passionate tone. I also eventually worked out how to navigate my tongue around the various Gallic growls and purrs — no mean feat when your mouth is packed with heavy-metal braces.
But how could any sixteen-year-old suburban girl not be seduced by France’s answer to Lord Byron? An arrogant aesthete who was living it up on a well-endowed trust fund, the velvet-suited Baudelaire carried off urban cool and bohemian chic thrillingly well, stalking the seedy streets at night for inspiration. He was a party guy and a lady’s man, but he was also a boy genius. By the age of twenty-one, he had already penned many of the poems that would one day be collected and called Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil).
The melancholy poet despised what Haussmann was doing to his beloved Paris — remaking the medieval maze of dark and winding lanes into a big city of broad avenues and bright, cheery façades. ‘My dear memories are heavier than stone,’ he wrote mournfully. It is to Baudelaire that the expression épater les bourgeois (shock the bourgeois) is usually attributed. And Passy, by most accounts, is still considered Bourgeois Central.
The word bourgeois derives from bourg, Old French for a fortified town, which Paris once was. As France morphed into a capitalist economy, Paris boomed and bankers, merchants and artisans prospered. The aristocrats, whose power had been guillotined during the 1789 Revolution, scoffed at the nouveaux riches (which is why the term bourgeois came to have an accent of insult to it), but as the industrial age cranked into gear, the middle class became richer than ever.
In English, we quip: ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’ The saying was originally French, coined by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, a critic and journalist, in 1849, at the very height of the French bourgeoisie’s influence. Monsieur Karr might well have had in mind the uppity pretentions of the middle classes, who pored over old etiquette manuals that instructed them on how to behave to the château born even if they lived in a city apartment — the bourgeoisie took to aristocratic habits like they were going out of fashion. Speaking of which, dresses were billowing back out to wide-hipped proportions not seen since the heyday of Marie Antoinette. Women wore crinolines — hooped petticoats made from horsehair (crin) — under dresses drenched in the vibrant new dyes of the age, creating the appearance of full-bloom flowers. It was a gilded corseted cage, however; women had fewer legal rights than ever before, and their role was little more than ornamental.
As we meandered around Passy, I imagined the ghosts of these women a few floors above, curled up on chaises longues in the steamy greenhouse rooms that were all the bourgeois rage at the time, dreaming of a more exotic life under the teasing fronds of palms while wrapped up in their Indian shawls. I wondered if they also read Baudelaire, and yearned for his lands of ‘luxury, calm and voluptuousness’. Perhaps that’s why I, too, swooned over Baudelaire; he was an escape from bourgeois boredom.
There’s a French term I love: jardin secret. Secret garden. Marcel Prévost was a society novelist at the turn of the twentieth century who was adequately in tune with his feminine side to specialise in the subject of women’s psychology. One of his books, Le Jardin Secret, tells the tale of a woman who comes across her old diaries and realises that she left her real self behind upon marrying her cheating husband. After pages of inner struggle, she decides to present a brave face and keep her true self — and feelings — hidden away.
Le Jardin Secret didn’t go on to become a cult classic, but at the time it tapped into the zeitgeist enough to give its name to a new expression, one that denoted someone’s inner life — their private realm of unexpressed thoughts, greatest fears and wildest dreams. The French believe one’s private grounds, so to speak, are what create a sense of allure and mystery. The exterior might appear classic, but lurking just behind that discreet façade are all sorts of verdant nooks and crannies.
If you wander off the beaten tracks of Passy, you come across hidden emerald-green gems, literal secret gardens — leafy enclaves and vine-embossed laneways that seem to wind back into Old Paris. Mum and I were on our way to one such gateway: Maison de Balzac, the literary museum and only remaining abode of one of France’s most revered writers.
A man of his age, Honoré de Balzac was particularly suited to reporting on the rise of the bourgeoisie, being obsessed with money and its effect on society and
individuals. Balzac himself certainly lived a swish lifestyle. Continually on the run from the creditors knocking at his various Parisian doors, he ended up moving to Passy in 1840, which was at the time just beyond the city of Paris, and thus the reach of its law. The wily writer had not once worked in a legal office for nothing.
Maison de Balzac, a green-shuttered eighteenth-century cottage perched upon a hill, recalls the pastoral Passy of old. The entry is via a stairway that winds down from Rue Raynouard to the terrace garden. Originally there was a building up at street level that camouflaged the front gate; a handy ruse when Balzac needed to slip out of sight from his numerous pursuers. Despite its sweet appearance, Balzac’s home was a serious fortress. Renting it under his housekeeper’s name, the author placed guards at various doors, who would only grant a visitor access if they uttered the correct passwords (say, ‘The plum season has arrived’). If all else failed, Balzac could scoot to the bottom level and flee through the back door and down the cobbled country lane in the manner of a shady character he might well have dreamed up himself.
The prolific Balzac, lauded as the father of Realism, was the man responsible for my mother’s love of the French language (of course my modern-minded mother was into the Realists, while I was all about the Romantics), and she often urged me to read his work. It wasn’t just for the language lesson. I spent countless hours scribbling angsty teenage musings in my diary, or lost in the soul-searching thoughts of the heroines of my preferred books — and Mum probably hoped that Balzac’s style of social commentary, his visual attention to detail, would inspire me to better observe the world around me, to look outwards more than inwards, to be more realist than romantic. All I really needed, it turned out, was a session at a Parisian café. There’s no better place to learn the art of people-watching.
Later that day, we pulled up a rattan chair at a nearby café, next to a group of girls who were alternating sips of black coffee and gasps of slimline cigarettes in a manner that made the dual vices seem the epitome of sophistication. They were about my age but seemed so much more poised, sure of their place in the world. Even the way they spoke to the waiter was with an adult-like confidence, but also with a touch of world-weariness, like they’d done so much and seen so much already. I envied their selfassuredness, if not necessarily their style. They wore blouses, blazers and trousers, accessorised with pearls and structured handbags, and were the very definition of bon chic, bon genre.
Literally translated as ‘good style, good sort,’ bon chic, bon genre is France’s version of preppy. It was immortalised in 1986 by a top-selling handbook to BCBG style, but the look had in fact been around for several decades. Another term could have been upper-class chic. True BCBGs inherited their fashion flair, along with their country château, from their aristocratic or haut bourgeois ancestors. Balzac would totally have aspired to being a BCBG had he been born a century later, especially as Passy was prime BCBG stomping ground. You could easily spot a member of the style tribe: men wore jumpers knotted over pastel shirts, while women threw an heirloom Hermès scarf oh so casually over a stone-hued trench coat. It’s perhaps because of this classic style of dressing, instilled from a young age, that many Parisian girls don’t seem to go through an awkward period. Transitioning from mademoiselle to madame is not a matter of before and after, it’s a continual evolvement of elegance.
A black-vested, white-aproned waiter loomed over us. ‘Mesdames,’ he muttered, peering down his carved aquiline nose, as stone-faced as a statue, eyes squinting as though in pain.
‘Un café au lait, s’il vous plaît?’ It was my best Parisienne impersonation, although my Australianness was unmissable, thanks to the loud addition of a question mark, and a large goofy grin. For my effort, I was rewarded with the mère of all eye rolls.
French waiters had quite the reputation for rudeness at the time. Looking back, I later figured that I’d committed a couple of social sins that afternoon. Firstly, milky coffee is usually only consumed at breakfast, often in a big bowl, into which one can dip a croissant or chunk of baguette. My other faux pas might be that I was too, well, Aussie. In Australia, we’re brought up to be appreciative of those who serve us. In France, where the ideal of equality sits perhaps a little uneasily with the industry of service, and all the subconscious associations of servitude, that extra dollop of polite can come across as condescending, even disrespectful. Rather, the server/servee relationship should be a matter-of-fact, professional transaction and, as a result, you’re meant to simply state your order, clearly and concisely, sans any supplementary sycophantic smiles or apologetic tones.
I evidently still had much to learn about the innate complexities and codes of the French language.
I have loved French from my very first class. It had me at bonjour. Something about the poetic way the short and snappy bon and the long, lingering, sigh-like jour met and flirted over that seductive zhhhhhh sound.
Like an enduring relationship, I just never got bored. At every turn, there was something new to delight in — an unexpected grammatical twist that would keep me on my toes. French is captivating for its pure whimsicality: quirky flourishes, like silent sneaky letters, that do little more than look pretty, and lovely lilting accents that might seem like a folly in today’s world of frantically bashed-out texts and emails, but finish things off like a ruffle on a dress.
Flourishes and follies aside, French is a surprisingly easy language to learn, speak and read once you get on a roll. The French are taught to talk the way they write, rather than write the way they talk. This makes it fairly easy for students of the language to understand the spoken French word. The flipside, however, is that you’re often corrected if your French is not textbook-perfect. Make a grammatical faux pas, and many a Parisian will visibly wince, as though in physical distress.
The next day my parents and I ventured into the heart of Paris to visit what could be described as the soul of the French language. The Institut de France is the baroque beauty that sits just over the Seine from the Louvre, with its soaring columns and gilded cupola. Its most famous tenant is the Académie Française, the legendary guardian of the French language. Originally a literary group that would get together over petits fours to talk poetry and puns, this fancy early version of a book club was eventually made official, and charged with the duty ‘to give clear rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent and capable of dealing with the arts and science’.
And so the Academy has filtered the French language of any nasties for over four centuries. The forty immortels — as the members are loftily called — meet regularly under the dome, in what was the old college chapel, to debate which new words are fit for consecration into French, as well as to work on the official Académie dictionary — which isn’t to record how French is spoken, rather how it should be spoken. And this, for example, excludes such Anglicisms as le jogging and le week-end.
My friends in French class and I used to joke about our ‘franglais’. If we didn’t know the French version of a certain word, we’d just go with the English, whacking a le or la beforehand, tweaking it with an accent or two, and hoping for le best. But in France, Anglicisms were no laughing matter. In 1964, a French scholar, René Étiemble, dropped a cultural bombshell with Parlez-Vous Franglais?, a book that raged against the Anglicisation — and particularly the Americanisation — of the French language.
Americana was influencing more than just French words at that time. Wardrobes, too, were falling under the New World spell. The grandparents of the 1980s BCBGs — like the girls I had admired in that Passy café — belonged to a generation that rejected the super-stiff tailoring of their parents, clothing in preference for the sporty separates worn so strikingly by the American tourists who flocked to Paris after the Second World War. By the 1980s, a simple white shirt and sleek indigo-blue jeans had completed their slow but steady one-way transatlantic journey, crossing over from trusty American workwear into the ultimate uniform of easy, modern French style.
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The French government could hardly ban blue jeans, but it could try its darnedest to stop its people from saying le blue-jean — a phrase that purists must have found particularly galling, considering that denim originated from the French city of Nîmes (de Nîmes). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, all sorts of acts had been initiated to control the borders of the French language, and make sure it didn’t stray into enemy territory.
The French language hasn’t always been so rigid. In Roman times, the original Gaulish merged with the new regime’s Latin to produce a kind of street-speak known as Gallo-Roman, which was in turn moulded and reshaped as various invaders, including the Franks, came into power and influence after the fall of Rome. France was in a state of chaos for centuries, reflected in the total absence of control over its language. Make that languages: there were as many French dialects as there were regional cheeses, each with its own distinct, often pungent and profuse, flavour.
In English, we sometimes use the word Rabelaisian. It means, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, something that is ‘marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism’. The adjective originates from François Rabelais, a French star author of the early 1500s. Keep in mind, this was an era before Paris was considered the global capital of refinement. She was a dark and dirty town back then (when she was still definitely a ‘he’), and Rabelais’ work echoed his world. He wrote with little grammatical care whatsoever, taking liberty to make up words and mess around with sentence structure, and he then spiced it all up with a copious dose of bawdiness. It was Rabelais who came up with the term bête à deux dos a good half-century before William Shakespeare (who experimented with English in a similar jocular way) would write about ‘the beast with two backs’ in Othello.
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