On reaching Place de la Madeleine, I sat myself down on the steps of the church it’s named after. You could be mistaken for thinking the colossal colonnaded Église de la Madeleine has time-travelled in from Ancient Greece. Originally designed as a temple to the greatness of Napoléon’s army when the antiquity trend was in full swing, it was later consecrated as a church dedicated to Mary Magdalene, the patron saint of repentant prostitutes, which is fitting, as one of history’s most celebrated courtesans prayed in this very church. Marie Duplessis was the real-life Lady of the Camellias, the prostitute with a heart of gold made famous by Alexandre Dumas, fils, who mythologised his former lover in his bestselling La Dame aux Camélias, a book that in turn inspired La Traviata, one of the most iconic operas, and has triggered the tears of countless French-learning school girls. The flower in the book’s title was Marie’s symbol. She would carry a bouquet of white camellias, except for those days of the month she was ‘indisposed’, in which case the camellias were red. Only a Parisienne could come up with such a pretty yet witty way of warning guys to keep the hell away.
Marie Duplessis wasn’t your usual frills-and-feathers kind of courtesan. She dressed modestly, cladding her slender frame in understated gowns of black or white, and saved the bells and whistles for her glamorous apartment. Marie was both stylistically and intellectually ahead of her time. She could mix it with the smartest of men, having taught herself to read (and read all the classics at that) and she could hang at cafés with leading editors, writers and musicians, and keep the cultured conversation flowing. It’s not difficult to understand the enchantment. Like a ballerina, her dainty demeanour veiled sheer grit. No wonder the book Marie inspired was reimagined as a ballet. She was the ultimate Romantic heroine, her deathly pallor enhancing her otherworldly beauty, her premature passing a tear-jerking tragedy.
Marie was the precursor to the fabled French woman, the subject worshipped in so many future books and articles. The literary genre that could be termed Gallic Chic didn’t exist back when I was still learning the true story of the real Lady of the Camellias. I and the rest of the world were still clueless about how these French women, so alluringly sexy yet also stylishly demure, managed to carry off such je ne sais quoi. But I was starting to appreciate that Parisiennes rarely show their true colours; they don’t wear their hearts splashed on their monochrome sleeves. In Paris, love, like fashion, is a subtle game of strategy, with a dash of intrigue thrown in for good measure.
I was, of course, a mere rookie when it came to games of l’amour. What’s more, I was competing in another language; even if there had been instructions, I probably wouldn’t have been able to interpret the subtleties and unspoken codes. But what was the point in strategising when I only had limited time to play? If I wanted to make another move, it had to be now or never. I returned to Marc’s boutique later that afternoon.
After having psyched myself up with a glass of champagne in a nearby café, I walked through Marc’s door with a force that was pure bubbly bravado; inside I was still quaking in my boots. Marc, nestled in a corner, swung around at the sound of said boots marching in, and a look of pleasure — or was it amusement? — flickered across his face. ‘Ah, BB,’ he said, with a smile. ‘You returned.’ He didn’t sound at all surprised. Nor seem sheepish that I’d found him tête-à-tête with another girl.
‘I, uh, wanted to, uh, say hi,’ I stammered, failing miserably in my plan to act cool and collected.
‘Hi, I’m Lulu,’ said Marc’s friend, walking towards me with a friendly smile, and earning my eternal gratitude. She must have been ten years older than me, and undoubtedly felt sorry for the gauche Australian girl sweating it out before her.
Lulu was a gorgeous slip of a thing, lithe as a ballerina in black leggings matched with a caramel cashmere sweater, and Parisian style personified. Her long curtain-fringed chestnut hair swung like silk around the chiselled frame of her face, her eyes were defined in inky liner, and her lips pale and pouty. She had the whole breezy Jane Birkin thing going on and I, dolled up like a poor-man’s Brigitte Bardot, suddenly felt horribly overdone, like I’d arrived at a fancy-dress party having misinterpreted the theme.
‘Marc told me about you,’ she said. ‘We love Australians!’
Marc was strolling over, all snake-hipped in a pair of slim, striped trousers, worn with a matching waistcoat. Oh zut, I thought, my heart thumping and skin burning, he’s going to do that French-cheek-kiss thing. Sure enough, he took my shoulders and moved his lips towards my right cheek. I should have done the same. Flustered from failing to quickly recall the intricate Gallic greeting rules, I instead made for his left cheek, the result being that our foreheads clunked together.
‘Oh sorry!’ I exclaimed, my cheeks by now well and truly on fire.
Marc laughed. ‘You have lots to learn. In Paris, we faisons la bise by starting on the right cheek, and we kiss twice. And you never actually make contact with your skin,’
So now I knew.
‘We’re about to close up and go for a drink,’ said Lulu, with a sympathetic smile. ‘Come with us? We’re meeting a friend there.’
Awkward doesn’t quite do justice to how I felt, although fleeing the scene seemed like the more mortifying option. So I agreed to go for a (much-needed) drink. At least there would be four of us — I wouldn’t be the third wheel, or candleholder, as the French say.
As Marc locked up, Lulu led me around the corner, chatting away about everything she knew of Australia (Kylie Minogue and koalas was pretty much it), her manner so airy and nonchalant that I wondered whether my boots hadn’t stomped on her relationship turf after all . . . That, or I was not a threat in the first place.
We walked into a bar hazy with cigarette smoke. ‘Salut, Louis,’ purred Lulu to a boy who looked like the fifth Beatle. He wore pageboy hair, a stovepipe trouser suit and the dreamy look of all those who wish they’d been born in another era. He greeted me with the requisite double-kiss.
‘Isn’t she a mini BB?’ said Marc, as he arrived and pulled up a chair.
‘All French men love Brigitte Bardot,’ Louis said to me. ‘Sadly, not enough women dress like her.’
‘Bardot’s look is not very Parisian,’ declared Lulu. ‘It’s more Southern French. There’s a big difference,’ she told me, helpfully. Did I mention the bit about feeling like I got the dress code wrong?
Still, it was a pleasant enough evening. Lulu spoke English so she could help me navigate my way through the fast-paced conversation, which ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous in true Gallic style, debating everything from bidets to bouillabaisse.
‘We French are a complicated bunch, aren’t we?’ Marc said, with a laugh. That was one word for it. I still couldn’t work out if he and Lulu were a couple. However, I soon had the answer.
‘Alors, I must be going,’ said Marc, feigning a yawn.
On cue, Lulu stood up, too.
‘It was lovely to meet you,’ she said to me. ‘Keep up the French.’
‘Au revoir, BB,’ Marc said, placing a kiss on each cheek with each B. ‘Come visit me again.’ Even though he knew I was leaving in a couple of days.
I watched him walk down the cobbled lane, his arm casually slung over Lulu’s petite shoulders. Their slinky black silhouettes melted into the shadows, and my heart sank a little more with the beat of each step.
A dog was sitting by the table next to us, also peering out the window, and I suddenly felt like a pathetic puppy myself, wagging her tail for attention, desperate for the grown-ups to take her out. Snap out of it, I silently barked at myself. It’s not every night you get to hang in a Parisian bar practising French with a guy who looks like a cute young Paul McCartney.
Louis and I chitchatted a little more, but I just couldn’t hold it in. ‘Are they boyfriend and girlfriend?’ I blurted out.
He looked at me curiously, but worked me out within seconds, his face softening with sympathy. ‘Sometimes, yes.’
‘He shouldn’t b
e such a flirt,’ I scowled, sulking into my glass of wine.
‘That’s just Marc,’ Louis said, with a shrug. (French people love to shrug, the body’s way of saying ‘C’est la vie.’) ‘He’s living the dream. Le free love.’
‘I don’t think I could ever be so free with love.’
‘I prefer monogamy, too. I just haven’t found The One.’
‘What’s your type?’
‘I’m not really sure. She doesn’t need to look a certain way. Marc’s superficial like that, girls need to dress the part. But I’m open. She could be anyone. Australian even . . . Relax! I’m just joking. You’re too young anyway. Perhaps next time you visit?’
I was truly rattled by now. It was time to walk back to my hotel — alone — so I made to say bonne nuit.
‘Sorry, I embarrassed you. But I had fun tonight. I’ve never met an Australian. Shall we keep in touch?’ And so we swapped addresses and promised to be penpals. ‘You can practise your French with me and I’ll tell you all about what’s happening in Paris. And I promise I won’t mention Marc’s name.’
Sigh. Why do we never like the nice friend?
It was my final soirée in Paris. I decided to go out in style, albeit solo, and spend the evening — and my remaining traveller’s cheques — at the bar of the Hôtel de Crillon. Overlooking the Place de la Concorde — once the blood-soaked scene of the city’s most overworked guillotine — the hotel was home to nobility before the Revolution. Like the bars and dancehalls that proliferated just up the road, it eventually opened its doors to a new Paris, one where anyone could buy into a glamorous life, even if just for a night.
I perched at the mirrored bench and ordered a glass of Perrier-Jouët, which I proceeded to sip languorously while flipping through the French magazines I’d just bought down the road at WH Smith, once again attempting to decipher the secrets of French style and seductiveness in the models splashed over the glossy pages. The combination of the golden bubbles popping in my head and the exquisite world showcased in the glossy pages before me equalled pure intoxication.
Just as I had drained my glass, the bartender placed another flute of champagne in front of me. ‘From Monsieur over there,’ he said, and nodded to my right.
Sitting a few seats down from me was a dapper gentleman of sixty, give or take. He made a gentlemanly gesture, as though doffing an invisible hat.
‘Merci,’ I said with a smile. ‘C’est très sympa.’ That’s very kind.
He reminded me of the suave-as-velvet Maurice Chevalier. And there I was, a Gigi, waiting for my own Belle Époque to begin.
‘What are you celebrating, Mademoiselle?’
‘Life, I guess. I’m about to go home and begin it.’
‘Tell me, what kind of life do you want?’
‘I’m not exactly sure. I first need to work out if I’m on the right path.’
‘Ah,’ he smiled sympathetically. ‘I’m of the age where I can dispense wise words, so let me just say this: la vie est courte.’ Life is short.
And with that, my very own Monsieur Chevalier buttoned up his long woollen coat, swirled a long cable-knit scarf around his neck and walked towards me. Oddly — as I was barely practised in the art of French embraces — I instinctively held out my right hand. He reached for it while lightly bending forwards, and air-kissed it in the most dignified way imaginable. It could have been a signature Maurice move straight out of Gigi.
‘Au revoir, Mademoiselle. Never forget to listen to your heart.’
The French don’t blindly ‘follow’ their heart, as we do. They ‘listen’ to it, and try to understand its language. I was still deciphering mine, although I could make out a few words. And they most certainly sounded French.
CHAPTER 4
MADEMOISELLE
mademoiselle nf miss
In which, aged twenty-one, I discover you can be both feminist and feminine.
I dragged my suitcase up and around a spiral of stairs, the thwack! at each hollowed wooden step echoing off the cold musty walls. The building, with its façade of sooty stones and crumbling shutters, had evidently seen better days — some time back in the eighteenth century. I finally reached the top floor, dust particles dancing in the air of the past, and, guided by the dim wintry rays filtering through the skylight, I found the way to my door.
My apartment was once a chambre de bonne, a room for one of the maids employed to tidy and polish the fancier floors below. It was not hard to imagine the lives of my ghostly roommates. The studio furniture consisted of a single bed draped with a nubbly floral quilt, a wardrobe with a look of wilting grandeur, and a battered old desk propped by a dormer window under the sloping ceiling. The kitchen contained a bar fridge, microwave and a few rickety shelves. To the left, a door opened to a sliver of a bathroom (on seeing the tiny tub shower, I mentally calculated how little I could get away with washing my hair for the following few months); and to the right, a gas heater clung tenuously to the wall, as if unsure of its ability to warm up the chilly January air permeating the room.
The maids eventually moved out — as fewer families could afford live-in help — and the tiny apartments were rented out to hopeful artists and students who came to Paris to live the dream, just like me. My building was nestled in the fringes of the Latin Quarter, an international mecca for graduates since the days when scholars still spoke that ancient language. The fabled Sorbonne University was founded back in the twelfth century, and a plethora of bookstores, printers and publishers followed suit. The quarter had another resurgence after the French Revolution, when education became the great social leveller — for men, at least. It was a rite of passage, even for sons of wealthy families, to slum it there while studying, warmed by their dreams and their latest dancehall grisette, a working girl of the fashion industry who dated in order to supplement her meagre income. Some students aspired to creative greatness, hoping for acclaim as a poet or painter. This was the birth of the myth of the struggling, suffering artist in the garret.
It’s no surprise that the opera La Bohème is mostly set in the Latin Quarter: the characters’ real-life counterparts who inspired the book (the 1851 Henri Murger novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème) that in turn sparked the opera, did too. Murger labelled the unconventional lifestyle of his protagonists as bohemian, a word that at the time evoked the Roma gypsies who originated from the central European region of Bohemia. He did such a great job of romanticising the image that the term bohemian was soon sugar-coated in sentimentality. Generations to come would fantasise about living à la bohémienne — at least for a few months.
So there I was, wrapped in a fringed shawl, my freezing hands desperately trying to fire up the heater, doing a great impersonation of Murger’s Mimi. I was cold, I was hungry and I was the happiest I had been in a long time.
I’d taken some time off university. My attempt to study law had been a dismal failure. All that got me through the first couple of years were my French classes and part-time job in a fashion boutique; in contrast, I just couldn’t get excited about constitutional complexities. When a favourite professor told me that I didn’t have a lawyer’s brain (in the nicest possible way) I didn’t need a second opinion. I quit the faculty the next day, and opted for all sorts of practical arts subjects like Gothic Literature. But after a couple of years of analysing the symbolism in Jane Eyre and debating the Postmodern-feminist agenda of fairy tales, I started to wonder the big Why? Not to mention What (was I doing) and Where (was I going)? I was about to turn twenty-one, and had to at least start pretending that there was some grand plan on my horizon.
The only solution: I took a term off and took myself off to Paris for a few months, under the official guise of intensive language studies. My real aim, however, was to spend as much time as possible pondering and musing anything and everything over endless cups of coffees in Parisian cafés. If you’re going to work through an existential crisis, it might as well be in the city that created the concept in the first place.
&n
bsp; After a tepid — at best — shower, I quickly dried off and layered myself in an outfit that seemed appropriate for the romantically woeful weather: tights and a thermal spencer, a long dress followed by a just-as-long cardigan, all of which was topped by a thick wrap. Let me point out that this was the era of grunge, a kind of bohemianism of the early 1990s. I laced on my Doc Marten boots and headed out.
I was walking in the steps of so many other cold feet, heading for the warmth of one of Saint-Germain-des-Prés’ famous cafés. The quarter is the spiritual French home of coffee, which was first consumed in public at the old Saint-Germain fair back in the 1670s. Once upon a time, the area was covered in fields (prés) where students would come to duel, but it eventually developed into a village-like neighbourhood of elegant apartments and colourful cafés, where students now had a new weapon — their mind — to sharpen with heated and caffeinated debates.
I stopped outside Les Deux Magots, the legendary café in the midst of it all. In its 1920s heyday, American author Ernest Hemingway spent mornings writing away over café crème, and held meetings over dry sherry in the afternoon. Just opposite the quaintly cobbled square is the oldest church in Paris. In such sacred grounds, the huge Emporio Armani across the boulevard looked as jarring as a priest swapping his black robes for bedazzled ones. Throughout my stay, I’d hear grumblings that Saint-Germain was no longer the hive of serious intellectual activity it once was, that the publishing houses were abandoning the area and leaving, of all things, high-fashion boutiques to take their place — Prada was nearby, and Dior and Louis Vuitton would soon materialise. Perhaps the real writers and thinkers had moved off to new pastures, finding fertile ground in less salubrious surroundings. But Saint-Germain still exerted a magnetic power over wannabe intellectuals, who dreamed of buying a book at the iconic La Hune and flicking through it at the next-door Café de Flore.
Paris Dreaming Page 8
