The Flore was my destination that morning, a shrine at which to worship the legacy of my French feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir, one of the café’s most fabled former customers. My mum had passed on her adoration of SDB, who famously proclaimed, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ Mum had once told me that the quote helped her ‘question how far to buy into femininity’. As an up-and-coming businesswoman she had more to prove than the male majority of her colleagues. To play men at their own game, she couldn’t afford to commit too much time to feminine frivolities; she preferred to spend her mornings reading the newspaper rather than battling with hot rollers.
Madame de Beauvoir might have had pride of place on the shelves and in the hearts of my household, but she was considered old hat at university, where I studied feminist philosophy for a while — until I decided that my mother was my best teacher.
‘You can’t take French feminists like de Beauvoir seriously,’ one fellow student declared during class. ‘They live in the shadow of their men.’
‘Not to mention the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, that ultimate phallic symbol,’ added another.
‘But how could a tower not be phallic?’ I countered. ‘I mean, it has to be tall and skinny for practical design purposes.’ I was ignored. We were all girls on the verge of womanhood, vacillating between confidence and confusion, but most of my classmates seemed to prefer to dwell at the angrier end of that spectrum.
‘And they wear so much makeup,’ said another, with a roll of an unadorned eye. ‘De Beauvoir must have spent hours on those updos of hers.’
I didn’t respond, as I was also letting the sisterhood down on the hair and makeup front. I’d rarely leave the house without a few layers of lipstick and shiny, iron-straightened hair. I was a feminist firmly entrenched in the camp of Naomi Wolf, the author of The Beauty Myth, who had insisted women can wear makeup without a finishing dusting of shame. Wolf would defend her book from being charged as anti-beauty with these stirring words: ‘For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech . . . we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution . . .’ Or Doc Marten boots, I assumed.
I hovered outside the Flore. The waiters must have seen my type countless times before: starry-eyed students dreaming of other worlds, either utopian ones of the future, or those long gone, when SDB and her philosopher guru of an unconventional life partner Jean-Paul Sartre would hold court at this very café, their personal office during the Second World War, when they spent days and nights working by the heat of the pot-bellied stove.
I reverentially took a seat by a heater in the enclosed terrasse. The air seemed electric, and I was awestruck by the realisation that I was not only in such close proximity to the ghost of SDB, but also sitting in the very café that had incubated Existentialism, the philosophy that had recently jolted me out of a rather big university funk.
I’d never really got into most of my philosophically minded subjects. I didn’t want to spend hours wondering whether I really existed. It was enough that, to me, I did exist. So the real question became: what on earth was I going to do about that? I needed my life and myself to have meaning. Having become disenchanted with religion, I’d stopped attending church, even though I was envious of my parents’ ongoing faith, their peace of mind in the acceptance of a higher power, in the knowledge that God was guiding them where they were meant to go. But I craved something more empowering. And then I started studying Existentialism. It was like a light bulb went ping! in my mind. Life suddenly looked different; it felt more real.
Basically, Existentialism states that we are all free to choose our own path in life. In the seminal essay Being and Nothingness, written at this very café in 1943, Sartre came up with the catchcry that would define his new philosophy: ‘existence precedes essence’. We are not pre-programmed in any way, it’s in our power to become whoever we want. And the journey is ongoing. We’re all works in progress, open to continual reinvention. Of course, we’re all in certain situations, and some are more spoilt for choice than others, who might be constrained by societal expectations, morality, religious beliefs, finances . . . Nevertheless, we can all determine how to act within our personal parameters. Don’t be a victim, in other words. Be who you want to be in this short and precious life, and make it count.
Existentialism initially went hand-in-hand with a decadent lifestyle — beautiful young black-turtleneck-wearing things dancing to jazz in the smoky basement bars of Saint-Germain, drinking their grim wartime memories to obliteration — and that’s what gave the movement its depraved reputation. It also had a certain darkness to it if you looked for the shadows. You could take from it the idea that we’re all alone in this world, which is inherently devoid of meaning. That could be an anguishing thought, as the implication is that every choice we make weighs on our conscience alone. Therein lies the much-discussed angst of Existentialism: the price of freedom is incessant anxiety. Personally, it didn’t bother me too much. I’ve long felt that this life we are so lucky to have should be taken seriously, that a little bit of fear propels us to be our best. And I found it inspiring that Existentialism believes we humans can make the right decisions. When you scratch the seemingly dark surface, there’s a bright optimism at the core, because Sartre himself was unwavering on the ethical front: a devout atheist, morality was his religion; a committed humanist, authenticity was his goal.
JPS was not technically handsome. He was excessively short, and his crumpled face featured bulging lips and protruding eyes that seemed to waver in all directions. Yet once his ideas got under your skin, he was utterly alluring, then as much as now. ‘Alors, who will you be?’ I’d imagine him whispering to my higher self, in a gravelly growl. The realisation that I had complete control over my answer was terrifying, exhilarating and liberating all at once.
I watched the Flore waiters glide around, taking their jobs suitably seriously, and recalled what Sartre once wrote about waiters. He said that those who come across as too typically waiter-ish are merely playacting, submitting to a predefined role and therefore rejecting their innate freedom. In adopting such false values, these waiters demonstrate what Sartre called bad faith. For Sartre, we live in bad faith whenever we are not living up to our unique potential. Don’t be a fake, in other words. Was I pretending to be someone I was not, or being true to myself, at that moment in time? Was I a one-dimensional cookie-cutter or a fully-fledged three-dimensional being? Was I dumbing myself down? It would become something I asked myself again and again over life, throughout my future career in women’s magazines.
Existentialism was out of date at the time. At university, everyone flocked to Postmodernism, seduced by its sardonic, ironic take on life, and blinded by its glitzy catchwords. I didn’t understand most of it; my main take-home was that we are pastiche-like products of our environment, pure social constructions. But I didn’t buy its pretentious world-weariness. Because, really, where would that get us? After the heavy, shoulder-padded conformity of the 1980s, the 1990s needed a rebellion and refreshment of thought as much as dress. Grunge was a kind of counter-cultural bohemianism that attempted to live a more authentic life, but in urging you to opt out of consumer society, it was hardly a realistic philosophy. What if you wanted to stay in the real world? How would you navigate it, especially given the escalating level of pressure, expectation and choice in that world? Perhaps it was time to bring back Existentialism and take life excitedly back in our own hands; to re-evaluate our realness and rediscover the joy of living; to experience the exhilaration of freedom and self-empowerment of options. As an only child whose parents had mostly let her determine each step of the life path she was forging — despite occasional potholes — Existentialism made perfect sense.
I was deep in thought — and, yes, I’m well aware that I might have merely been playing the role of a postulant intellectual in Paris, and thus displaying an egregious amount of bad faith. But it wasn’
t as pretentious as it might sound. Affectations such as long, thoughtful stares into one’s black coffee, or furious scrawling in one’s Moleskine notebook, feel completely normal in Paris, because the French love to think they think. This is the birthplace of ‘I think, therefore I am’, don’t forget. French intellectualism traces its illuminated roots to the days of the Enlightenment, when philosophers questioned the status quo, but it was after the Revolution that intellectualism became the new religion. Ever since, all high school students have had to undertake compulsory philosophy studies. Writers and even artists are expected to double as intellectuals; politicians pen deep and meaningful books in their spare time. On French television, there’s a mind-numbing amount of time filled with panels of clever people talking over each other. And all this highfalutin’ intellectualism filters down to the street, to the footpath terraces of cafés, where even the average French Joe has high-minded ideas on each and every subject.
‘Merci, Mademoiselle,’ said my waiter, after noting down my order. I would one day yearn for the days of being a ‘Mademoiselle’, but back then it irked me that I was defined by my marital status. You see, there is no Ms in French. You’re Mademoiselle until you’re either married or a certain age, at which time you graduate to Madame.
And don’t get me started on the subject of gender in French. My female classmates and I had twisted ourselves in knots trying to work out why a knife was masculine (le couteau) and a fork feminine (la fourchette). After much deliberation over many glasses of red wine, our befuddled brains concluded that there’s no real rhyme nor reason nor conspiracy theory to it. Still, we abhorred the inherent sexism in a language that defaults to the male setting; if you want to say that both he and she are beautiful, you use the masculine beaux, not the feminine belles. We’d shake our heads in disbelief that France was the country that gave the world the wonderful Ms de Beauvoir.
As I drizzled honey (masculinely gendered, despite the sweetness that many would assume to be better matched to femininity) on my baguette (curiously feminine, given its phallic appearance), I thought about SDB, and how she had turned the notion of gender on its head. In her trailblazing tome of 1949, The Second Sex, she argued that woman is not a natural concept, that we women have been moulded in opposition to men for centuries, that we are a product of myths and tradition and, above all, a patriarchal society. She urged us to rethink our destinies and claim control of our lives, to work in order to support ourselves and our freedom, and she set the scene for the worldwide women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. SDB had articulated the anger and resentment of so many women who felt constrained in their roles as frail, frilly females. The book was nothing short of revolutionary, and certainly the most successful practical application of Existentialism.
With such a formidable founding mother, it’s surprising that French feminism gets a bad name. ‘It’s like the Revolution never happened in France,’ claimed one fellow feminist student. ‘Women seem so retro there, demure and deprecating.’ To be fair, French women haven’t had the easiest run; they’ve had to fight particularly virile patriarchal forces. Despite the pivotal part they played in the French Revolution, they were sidelined by the word brotherhood in the motto ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ — and relegated to the legal status of children by Napoléon’s Civil Code of 1804, which fortified the foundations of the patriarchy. The term ‘feminism’, coined in 1837, might have originally been French, but that century saw French women suppressed to such a degree that breaking the shackles proved arduous; they weren’t granted the vote until 1944 — 1944! — and men remained the official heads of Gallic households until 1970. Who could blame une femme for being exhausted after such a slog?
Or perhaps French women simply like to cling to some of the traditional womanly wiles, in true vive la différence style. ‘It’s more like feminine-ism,’ another classmate scoffed. Indeed, many French women consider themselves as feminist as they are feminine. They would never burn their beautiful lacy bras, for instance. SDB had written that elegance is bondage, that the definition of female beauty had been created by men for their own viewing pleasure. But the fine-featured aristocrat — who was rarely seen without her uniform of tailored chic complemented by lipstick and nail polish — admitted that the allure of glamour was difficult to resist. To me, the contradictions within her only made her more real. And also, she was a Parisienne, born in the global capital of fashion and beauty. Surely living up to the exquisite image of that city is a kind of civic duty?
As a young feminist who liked the feminine things in life, SDB also spoke to me with her more embracive style of feminism. She did not hate younger, prettier women. She had praised the liberated spirit and true-to-self honesty of Brigitte Bardot, which scored her major brownie points in my book. BB was not living in bad faith, because she was living for herself. She didn’t see herself as an object; she was in total charge of her image and life. Hardcore feminists often attacked the femininity of my two French icons, but it didn’t bother me that they obviously spent some time in the morning applying makeup and choosing an outfit that made them feel good. For me, it was what they did with the rest of their day that counted. As Existentialism asks, What are you going to do? With a postscript: Make it good.
That afternoon I stopped for food supplies on Rue de Seine, at the little market there just on the doorstep of Hôtel La Louisiane, an establishment so peopled with A-list ghosts you could faint from star strike. Just some of its past guests are the jazz gurus Miles Davis and Chet Baker, while Simone de Beauvoir lived there for a while. I wondered if she’d also shopped at these very stalls, indulging her appetite for life after the hungry wartime years.
I quickly walked past the rotisserie of chickens, as my stomach churned in empathy. Ever since I had to work a similar device in a deli years before, I’d been vegetarian, getting my protein fix from bowls of chickpeas and tofu steaks. My previous trips to Paris had proved how difficult it was to eat well there meat-free. I once thrilled to discover a restaurant advertising lentil salad, only to have it served up on a layer of salami, so I’d come to accept that these few months might not be my healthiest. As a token attempt to nourish my body, I bought a bag of glossy clementines, hoping the vitamin C might stave off the chills. For no reason other than pure greed, I next chose half a dozen wedges of cheese from the fromagerie, which displayed its stinky wares on tables covered in red-and-white chequered cloths. And, of course, I added the requisite baguette. Oh, and a half-bottle of red wine. And that was pretty much the extent of my French diet for the coming while. Sustenance, I figured, also came in the satisfying form of joie de vivre.
For the past few years, I’d regularly corresponded with Louis, originally as a ruse to glean something of the life of his heartbreaker friend Marc, but eventually for the pure vicarious thrill of it. Remember, these were the days when other countries were shrouded in mystique. There was no Facebook connecting you with people on the other side of the globe, no digital pathways that allowed you to drop in on another city at a moment’s notice. Louis kept Paris tangible for me at a time when my classes theorised it, boxing it into a cultural study.
We met up for lunch the next day, Louis — who still looked like the fifth, French Beatle — doing a double take as he walked through the café door. ‘Mon dieu,’ he said after he had kissed each of my cheeks, shrugged off his duffle coat and sat down. ‘I almost didn’t recognise you. What are you wearing? What happened to our baby Brigitte?’
In one of his letters, Louis had asked, ‘Do you still have Bardot hair? You must be a bombe sexuelle by now.’ I didn’t mind having a Parisian guy see me as some kind of antipodean bombshell, so I neglected to respond that I’d stripped off the baby doll dresses and combed out the bouffant hair, deciding that I was not a convincing sex kitten, after all, and that I was trying on some new styles for size. Grunge, for instance. That day, I was wearing my chunky cardigan-coat belted over a footpath-trailing floral dress, cherry Doc Martens and a knitted be
anie pulled down tight. My hair was long and lank, framing a pale face punctuated by dark-brown lips. I loved grunge for its dark romanticism: it was feminine but with a feisty spirit that spoke to the university student in me; it was poetic in its nostalgia for past fashions, like 1930s tea-dresses, and angry in its defiance of the modern world. I hadn’t anticipated that the look would not translate to Paris, or at least the Latin Quarter. After all, grunge was basically the new bohemianism, a rebellion against bourgeois good taste.
Louis laughed, and said, ‘Le grunge hasn’t taken off in Paris. Even bohemianism isn’t what it used to be. You really should have lived in Paris decades ago.’
I agreed that, yes, I would have loved to have belonged to a past Paris, but isn’t Paris the city of always looking back? History hits you at every step of the foot and tilt of the head; you can’t avoid it. Anyway, he still looked to be very much into the 1960s, I pointed out.
‘Touché!’
‘So . . . how’s Marc?’ I asked, in my most valiant attempt at a nonchalant voice.
‘Ah, I wondered if you were going to ask me about him! He’s fine. Same old Marc. Juggling a couple of girlfriends at the moment.’
I couldn’t help but pout into my wine. And then he said the words that every guy knows to bring out, to console a girl whose heart has been a little bit bruised by his cad of a friend: ‘You’re too good for him anyway.’
We rugged up against the cold in our respective retro-inspired coats, and wandered our way around the Latin Quarter, my chunky boots clomping and his pointy lacquered shoes clacking along the cold cobbles.
‘Let me show you something that gives me goosebumps,’ said Louis. Or chicken skin, as the French say. We turned down the skinny, crooked Rue Gît-le-Coeur, with its lackadaisically sloping façades, a street that was first mapped out in the twelfth century, and stopped outside the seventeenth-century stone building that was number 9. Now fancied up as a four-star hotel, it was once the most squalid boarding house in town, and from 1958 to 1963 home to a cluster of American beat writers on the cusp of international stardom. It was there that these on-the-road cool cats with their scraggly beards and black berets cooked up some of their most acclaimed poems and books in an acrid haze of mind-bending fumes. ‘What I would give to have been one of them, indulging in the psychedelic craziness of life,’ sighed Louis. I crinkled my nose. My idea of bohemianism was one that involved clean sheets and perfumed air.
Paris Dreaming Page 9
