Paris Dreaming

by Katrina Lawrence

  All of this Rabelaisian madness must have pained the poet François de Malherbe, who was born a couple of years after the lewd writer’s death, in the midst of the raucous century. By the turn of it, Malherbe had scored the gig of official poet, and unofficial literary critic, of the royal court, and set himself the almighty task of ushering in a new epoch of language purity. The eloquent aristocrat was passionately averse to such extraneousnesses as synonyms. He argued for the use of elegant yet also simple, clear and precise language. Both a stickler and a snob, Malherbe’s official position and friendship with two kings gave him major social clout. Contemporary authors fell in line by writing according to his dictates, and literary salons hung onto his every declaration — and this is how his philosophy, and style of language, came to lie at the very core of the French Academy.

  Malherbe’s prim and proper ways notwithstanding, French is the language of romance. Literally. At its roots, it’s a Roman language, which is why it’s known by linguistic types as a Romance language. But there was a time when the word romance didn’t convey thoughts of red roses and long walks on the beach. In Old French, romanz was the everyday speech of French people. While Latin remained the lingua of religion, science and philosophy, romanz was used to tell the tales of chivalry and heroism so beloved by medieval courtly types. The word morphed into roman, which to this day means a novel. And when post-Revolution novelists, disillusioned by the failure of the Age of Enlightenment and all its now-tarnished talk of rationality, began to pen their sweeping, emotional sagas, it made sense to call them Romantiques.

  The term ‘romance novel’ today brings to mind bodice-ripping reads of the Mills & Boon variety, but French Romantic types were not necessarily concerned about the heady ups and downs of love affairs. They did, however, tear off a corset of their own — that of strait-laced Classicism, which was too starched for them to fully express their emotions. The Romantics were all about feelings over logic, and they explored new terrains in the form of imagination-charged historical novels or tales of the emotional journeys of everyday heroes. Romantic literature rode a rollercoaster of sentiments, from swooning depths to soaring heights, before plunging once more into the next literary trends: gritty Realism (think Balzac) and dark, disillusioned Decadence (where my poet-crush Baudelaire eventually, despairingly headed).

  The Romantics were rebellious at the time, but their names are now some of the most esteemed in French literature. They might have been ridiculed for their excessive emotions, but their passion has always been undeniable, and seductive even to modern readers. They certainly inspired my own amour fou with the French language.

  My parents gave me an hour to myself, and I ambled by the Seine, stopping at every bridge and pouting theatrically, for no particular reason. I was in a moody mindset at this stage in my life, much to the chagrin of my poor, ever-patient father. Hormones were wreaking havoc on my emotions, for one, but it was mostly a textbook case of teenage-girl malaise. Fast growing out of girlish fantasies, I could no longer pretend to be some leading lady in a film (even despite the cinematic setting of Paris). Nobody was going to dress and direct my character, nor map out a neat plotline for my life. Perhaps that’s why I gravitated to books about women. I was searching for heroines who could guide me on how to script my life.

  Paris’s second-hand book dealers, the bouquinistes, have been plying their trade from their weather-beaten, wagon-green quayside boxes for over a century. Among the trash-and-treasure trove of trinkets and fluttering displays of posters, you can find most classics of French literature. One in particular called to me that day, with its melodramatically plaintive title, Hello Sadness.

  Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, the publishing sensation of 1954, tells the tale of teenage Cécile and her widowed, libertine father, who have escaped the bourgeois boredom of Paris to live it up in the South of France. The father has his young trophy girlfriend and Cécile embarks on an affair of her own. When a friend of Cécile’s late mother comes to stay, assuming the maternal, disciplinarian role, Cécile hatches a plan to restore her old way of life, with fatal consequences.

  Over the next few weeks, I ploughed my way through the novel, with my French travel dictionary at my side. I still have the copy; almost half of it is highlighted — yellow for phrases that moved me, pink for words I intended to translate and transfer into the long-term file of my memory. And I returned to the beguiling opening line over and over — with its haunting melancholy and beautifully grave sorrow — as I got to know the precociously worldly Cécile. By book’s end, I felt an odd envy for her sadness. I wanted a source of my own dolour, something that would justify a life hedonistically devoted to beachside holidays and chichi cocktail parties.

  This sounds perverse and bratty, but it only turned out to be a short, confused phase of my teenage life. At the time, I didn’t realise how fortunate I was to have a stable home. I translated the steadiness of my life as boredom, sometimes fantasising about what might happen if my neatly tied-up existence began to fray or unravel, and how this would plunge me into a rollercoaster of emotions, from ennui to exhilaration, in true Romantic heroine style. At first I figured Bonjour Tristesse appealed because it held the key to a more interesting life. But true joy, I came to realise, was closer to home than I had imagined. I needed to redefine happiness, and I think that’s why a book about sadness beckoned to me that day, from the thousands of other books lining the banks of the Seine.

  The French philosopher Montesquieu once remarked that France excels at doing frivolous things seriously, and serious things frivolously. That’s perhaps why the bouquinistes so seamlessly sell old fashion and celebrity glossies amid the high-brow literature. I certainly had no problem with this. I’d started to buy women’s magazines myself, dreaming about the day my life might be as glamorous as the world within their lavish pages. So I spent some time flicking through the various piles of vintage Vogue and Paris Match, with their impossibly glamorous cover girls. One in particular took my breath away; she had quite possibly the most beautiful face I had ever set eyes upon. Two capital letters in bold gave the clue to the 1959 cover star: BB.

  I was instantly smitten. Brigitte Bardot was everything I suddenly wished I looked like: large eyes elongated with inky-black liner for a feline effect; pouty lips painted rosy-pink; a bouffant of blonde hair that glistened in the sun’s rays and cascaded past shoulders bared by a low-cut gingham dress.

  When you pronounce the curvaceously feminine letters BB in French, it sounds like bébé. Baby. It was the perfect nickname for Brigitte, who was often described as a femme-enfant. Woman-child. Indeed, she was a heady mix of girlish sweetness and womanly ease, and seemed to me the very personification of the transition from fille to femme, the one with which I was having so much trouble.

  Most women adopt a style icon or two along the way to honing their own look. I’d occasionally, and lamely, attempted to emulate a fashion or beauty trend I’d spotted in a magazine, but I didn’t really have a personal style to speak of. I was still trying to figure out who I was — or who I hoped to be. But suddenly I had a clear idea of how I wanted to try to look; I had the first image for my inspiration wall, which would soon be covered in posters of Brigitte.

  Over the coming years, I would commit myself to the cause of bardolâtrie: slicking and smudging kohl along my lashes, piling pink lipstick on my mouth (which was forming itself into a suitably pouty protrusion after years of braces), teasing and tonging my hair into Brigitte’s famous bedhead style. And I became a self-appointed expert on the subject of the woman herself.

  Brigitte was born in 1934, into a typical Parisian bourgeois family. They lived in — where else? — Passy, and holidayed annually in the South of France, following the upper-class tradition of summering out of the city. The heat in Paris in August can be stifling. For this reason, Parisian aristocrats used to up and leave for their country châteaux, not returning until at least October. The bourgeoisie made the ritual their own, taking fancy
new trains to seaside destinations, such as Biarritz or Saint-Tropez, where the Bardots occasionally stayed. In a neat plot twist, Brigitte would one day put the quaint fishing village on the glamour map, after a stint there in 1956, when she worked on her breakout film Et Dieu . . . Créa La Femme.

  . . . And God Created Woman was the creation of director Roger Vadim, who also happened to be Brigitte’s new husband. He had spotted the young ballerina-turned-model on the cover of French ELLE, dressed in the role of perfect Parisian daughter; ironically, this shoot had caught the eye of the very man who would help Brigitte break free from her bourgeois existence. Vadim had picked up early that Brigitte ‘was a girl who seemed to be ahead of her time’ — as he wrote in his modestly titled Memoirs of the Devil — ‘in rebellion against her parents’ morality and milieu, endowed with an innate instinct for love’. Inspired, he transposed Brigitte’s own character onto her on-screen alter ego. Juliette is an eighteen-year-old orphan who slinks around the Saint-Tropezien streets like a kitten on heat, looking for love in all the wrong places. In the final pivotal scene, she performs the mambo barefoot in a basement bar, her skirt unbuttoned and hair free-flowing, whipping the air as her steps become increasingly frenetic. Dancing like nobody’s watching (except they are, utterly entranced), her message is: it’s my life, and I’ll move to my own beat if I damn well want to.

  The movie shocked global audiences unaccustomed to women acting in such a pleasure-seeking way. When I discovered Brigitte, of course, times had long changed; women felt empowered to dance and dress as they saw fit. In this respect, Brigitte caused the first ripples of third-wave feminism, a wave that began to undulate all those years ago by the beaches of Saint-Tropez. Even Simone de Beauvoir took BB’s cultural impact seriously. The legendary mother of second-wave feminism, which swelled to a crest in the 1970s, thought Brigitte a truly liberated woman of the future, not just for her natural sexuality, but for her utter genuineness.

  It was that authenticity that spoke to me. The wild hair and the insouciant sundresses. The living life on her own free-spirited terms. The continual questioning of the status quo: she had first busted out of the bourgeoisie and freed herself of social constraints, and she then threw off the trappings of celebrity life to devote herself to animals. Brigitte was true to herself, regardless of the consequences, and so alluringly selfassured, too. She could well have been a Sagan heroine come to life.

  The author and actress were fellow social disrupters from an early age. Like BB, Sagan hailed from the bourgeoisie (and Passy), from which she too dreamed of breaking free. She wrote her first novel at the enfant terrible age of eighteen, when she was meant to be studying for her exams. Instead she spent her days at cafés filling her notebooks, then partying the night away at Left Bank jazz bars. Critics were torn between admiration for the nervy Sagan’s raw talent, and dread that her book would tarnish the good name of French women. Étiemble, the guy who wrote Parlez-Vous Franglais?, put her up there with Coca-Cola as ‘an evil of our time’. Sagan’s Cécile talks about love in a matter-of-fact, often cynical way that shocked French society as much as Brigitte’s breakout film did. Women — especially young, well-bred women — were just not supposed to be so savvy about sexuality, nor defy well-delineated social parameters.

  I’ve sometimes wondered why I came across both Françoise Sagan and Brigitte Bardot that day. What message of theirs did I need to heed? It’s not like I necessarily wanted to rebel myself, to fling myself into a world of wild hedonism. But there was something about these women that fascinated me. They had symbolised a new social era at the time, but their ongoing resonance for me was on a more personal level, in the way they had themselves transitioned from good bourgeois girls to self-assured, true-to-self women. In both a physical and emotional sense, they were inspirational muses, at a time when I was searching for the future me.

  Since my previous trip to Paris, I had developed a love of old things, riffling through countless vintage bookstores and bric-à-brac stalls, fossicking for anything with an air of faded glamour that suggested it might have hailed from olde-worlde France. My French ancestors’ heirlooms had, heart-wrenchingly, long disappeared, and perhaps on some level I was trying to locate a missing piece of the patrimony puzzle. I collected tufted velvet poufs and mirrors with gilded curlicue borders, even though I knew they looked ridiculously out of context in my suburban Australian bedroom.

  The flea market is called the same in French: marché aux puces — it was so named in the nineteenth century when a new appreciation of the concept of cleanliness (thanks to public hygiene pioneers such as Louis Pasteur) changed the way people looked at clothing. Suddenly fabric had to be fresh; anything that wasn’t brand-spanking new or regularly sent to one of Paris’s many blanchisseuses (laundresses) was tossed out, to become the rich pickings of French fleas and bargain hunters alike.

  The next day I hopped on the metro — Dad reluctantly along for the ride, playing security guard more than shopping partner — en route to Paris’s largest such infestation, the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen. Alighting at Porte de Clignancourt, we ventured north of the Périphérique — the ring road that encircles Paris — and veered up Rue des Rosiers, with its large airy halls brimful with antique dealerships as organised and ornate as miniature museums, and detours into alleyways tumbled over with ivy and a jumble of antiques. We wandered past curvaceous nymphs that would have once adorned flowering gardens but now served as handbag holders, precarious towers of Louis Vuitton trunks etched with the initials of glamouristas long gone, and veritable zoos of animals that had danced and pranced around carousels in their glory days.

  I wasn’t sure what I was searching for, but found myself gravitating to the clothes strung up along the walls, rubbing shoulders with candelabras dripping with gems and eighteenth-century paintings of blush-cheeked shepherdesses cavorting with cherubs. I strolled past a timeline of French fashion: flapper dresses heavy with beads that would have jingled gorgeously to the Charleston; skirts in the full bloom of Dior New Look luxuriousness; short and shiny tunics of the swinging sixties, when Parisian designers experimented with space-age style. These second-hand clothes might have seen better years, but there was a glimmer of personality that appealed, a tease of an invitation to step into their previous owners’ shoes and live up to a former glory.

  And then I saw the dress that had been waiting for me to come along and breathe it back to life. Swaying from an old coat stand, it seemed to sashay its hips of its own accord. Held up by ribbons at the shoulders and along its fluttery sleeves, the dress then swooped downwards, cupping the chest and cinching in the waist, before flowing down to the knees. The flowering-vine print tried to give the impression of innocence, but I wasn’t fooled. She was a total minx, the Brigitte Bardot of frocks.

  I can trace my dress obsession back to this very moment. Dresses have a reputation for being fussy or prissy. But they’re actually the most practical clothing option around; one second and you’re dressed — literally. But you’re so easily undressed, too. And therein lies their subtle sexy charm.

  French women do dresses particularly well. It arguably began with Cinderella, who showed the transformative powers of a glamorous gown. Think also of Coco Chanel and her little black ones. Parisiennes of the 1940s who so stylishly survived wartime rations, pairing flippy little floral frocks with cork-soled wedges and painted-on ‘stockings’. And, of course, there was Brigitte in her flirty sundresses.

  One of Brigitte’s favourite labels was Chloé, the pioneer of prêt-à-porter de luxe (luxury ready-to-wear). Founder Gaby Aghion, a wealthy Egyptian who had emigrated to Paris high society, launched the label after tiring of being a lady who lunched. She herself dressed in haute couture (along with some couture copies whipped up by her local couturière, or dressmaker) but sensed that fashion change was in the air.

  After an initial offering of six pretty cotton-poplin dresses in 1952, Chloé came to define the modern Parisienne with a wardrobe that worked from
day to night, from smart office-friendly shirtdresses to light and frothy frocks perfect for dancing the night away. To this day, Chloé still creates the city’s most stunning dresses — and is for many women the ultimate in Parisian femininity.

  The story of prêt-à-porter is interwoven with that of the Parisian bourgeoisie, both having come into their own after the Revolution. Ready-to-wear could develop once the authorities dismantled the rigid regulations covering the city’s various guilds. Dressmakers and tailors, whether small-time or high-society, were the original designers, but as the industrial age took off, sewing techniques were enhanced. Production lines of seamstresses, cutters and fitters assembled themselves into workshops, and produced large numbers of cookie-cutter clothes, often copied from the big names of haute couture.

  Then came the department stores, which opened along the grand new boulevards and catered for the consumer age’s fashion-savvy clientele, the bourgeois Parisiennes who couldn’t afford haute couture, yet wanted to look the part and live the dream. Increasingly, anything could be imitated and mass-produced, from patterned shawls to porcelain cups to gilt-framed mirrors. The French might have invented luxury in the first place, but they have long excelled at faking it, too.

  We met up with Mum for afternoon tea at Musée Jacquemart-André — the place gilded in the type of luxury that could never be described as faux. The museum showcases the ultra-chic life of a Belle Époque star couple, banking heir Édouard André and society painter Nélie Jacquemart. The haut-bourgeois power duo obsessively collected art, especially of the Italian variety, and showcased it all in their Boulevard Haussmann abode — actually more a mini château, with staircases carved out of rippled marble, ceilings painted with scenes of celestial beauty, and flashes of gold at every turn.