‘So you are more bourgeoise-bohème than bohémienne, I see,’ chuckled Louis. It was true: I was Bobo, not Bébé. I laughed along but couldn’t shake the feeling that he was disappointed in the reality of his little australienne. We were worlds apart — eras, too.
Darkness was falling, the pale pearl-greys of a Parisian winter’s day morphing into shades of slate and charcoal. Pleading lingering jetlag, I said goodbye. I didn’t want to use the term au revoir, which means see you again. Instead, I used adieu. Literally, ‘to God’. I’d leave it to fate as to whether we’d catch up once more.
My language school was situated down a charming little lane. So I was somewhat taken aback by the utilitarian classrooms and mechanical approach to teaching. I’d imagined us lolling around on lounges, sharing nuggets of wisdom while nibbling on caramel éclairs. Instead, we spent our days under fluorescent lights, taking dictation while watching documentary shows or wearing bulky headphones as we listened to disembodied voices drone on about the weather. I wondered if it would have been more effective to enhance my French by attempting to dissect the meaning of life with the city’s waiters.
My fellow students were mostly older, retirees clutching their bucket-lists to their cashmere-clad bosoms, ecstatic to finally make it to Paris and polish up their rusty high-school French. But a cluster of us in our early twenties were drawn to one another. Our shared desire to live the Parisian dream seemed to make the possibility more real. There was Lucia, an Italian knockout à la Sophia Loren, with glistening dark-cocoa hair, scarlet lips and a figure that defined the word voluptuous. She tried to dress in a subdued way — cable-knit jumpers and denim jeans — but she couldn’t camouflage her inner siren; everywhere we went heads would turn and tyres would occasionally screech. Martin was from New York, but looked as Gallic as they come: a swish of hair, pastel shirts and corduroy pants, always a scarf wound around his neck. And then there was Hugh from Canada, the scruffy, anguished artist who dreamed of being a writer, and had come to the place where aspiring authors have long pilgrimaged.
By Friday, we were the firmest of friends and made plans to meet up that evening in Montparnasse. Situated south of the Latin Quarter, Montparnasse started its ascent to legendary heights in the late nineteenth century, when creatives such as Picasso moved from the overly fashionable, and expensive, Montmartre, converting the stables and sheds of the pastoral Montparnasse into light-filled artist studios. Soon the place was teeming with talent from all corners of the globe. After the war, which shattered the old ways of thinking and doing, the avant-garde of Montparnasse boomed. Writers flocked there, too, and cafés competed to attract the coolest crowd. Arguably the birthplace of Modernism — ironic for an area so recently rural in character — Montparnasse was populated by those who spent their days exploring novel ways to express and enjoy themselves.
We met at the Carrefour Vavin, the intersection of boulevards Raspail and du Montparnasse, which was the very heart of the social universe back in the 1920s, and gravitated towards the ruby warmth of the fabled Café La Rotonde, where we squeezed into a booth and ordered a bottle of wine in a shade matching our surroundings.
‘I’m so awestruck right now,’ sighed Hugh. ‘This is the very place Ernest Hemingway wrote about in The Sun Also Rises. Henry Miller used to hang here, too.’ Hugh certainly had the Henry Millers about him. That night he was wearing a crumpled mackintosh coat and a black brimmed hat.
‘I read that the owner used to let artists and writers stay here for hours for just the cost of a café crème’ said Martin. ‘He loved all of the creatives who moved here to make the most of the cheap franc, although the locals called them Parisites.’
‘Which is I guess what we are,’ I noted. At the time the franc was as cheap as pommes frites against many other currencies.
‘Montparnasse is still a bit too dirty for me,’ said Lucia with sniff. She was staying just over the river, in an apartment that I enviably pictured to come with a luxuriously usable shower, going by the unfailingly shiny bounce of her hair. ‘And how hideous is that tower?’
She was referring to the Tour Montparnasse, a 58-floor monolithic shaft of black starkness. Opened in 1973, it was so instantly and passionately reviled that it triggered an urban planning ban on city-centre constructions exceeding seven levels.
‘I think it’s totally fitting to have such a monument in the spiritual home of Modernism,’ remarked Hugh.
‘I wouldn’t call it Modernist, but a failed attempt to capture the future,’ argued Lucia. ‘Everyone hated it from the start, and they still do, which proves that they got it wrong.’
‘Unless the architects are so ahead of the curve that we all start to love it in another twenty years,’ said Martin. ‘Good art is about shocking people.’
‘I disagree,’ I said. ‘I think it’s about seducing them. Giving them what they don’t know they desperately want.’
‘But art also has to serve a need sometimes,’ argued Martin, a New Yorker at heart beneath his Parisian-inspired clothes. ‘A true international city needs skyscrapers or it becomes a fossilised museum that can’t work in modern times. It’s crazy that Paris sends its workforce so far out of the city every day.’
‘But that’s exactly why I love Paris,’ said Lucia. ‘Here it’s about living aesthetically above all.’
‘The way Paris needs to go forward is to find a way to merge the practical and the beautiful,’ countered Martin.
‘That’s so un-French of you,’ responded Lucia, laughing.
France is a country of extremes, and Paris a city of polarities. Binary opposition was how a linguistics teacher once explained it to me. The French, it’s said, love to think in black and white, to divide everything in two; everything has a perfectly contrasted partner. Paris is, after all, the hometown of the Left Bank and Right Bank, not to mention the city that created the concept of left wing and right wing. The desire for duality explains the strict Gallic delineation between public and private lives — and why French women only venture outside once immaculately groomed and dressed. But the ultimate coupling is the mind and the body; equally important, each requires TLC and attention, which is why Parisians hang around cafés for hours, chatting and eating — they’re dining on food for the soul as much as the stomach.
It was René Descartes, the père of modern Western philosophy — the guy who originally proclaimed, ‘I think, therefore I am’ — who crafted the concept of mind–body dualism, back in the seventeenth century. The maths buff’s brand of thinking was sceptical rationalism, and he argued along the neat lines of deductive reasoning. Cartesian thinking is all about elegance, clarity and confidence. It has a mathematical organisation to it, and it has long shaped the Gallic view of the world. I’ve never quite got my irrational, romantic, non-lawyerly, maths-failing mind around the notion, especially as my introductory French philosophy classes seemed to sell Existentialism so much more effectively to me. And the core of Existentialism is basically the binary opposite of Cartesianism; instead of ‘I think, therefore I am’ it’s ‘I am not, until I think’.
Certainly, any attempt at Cartesian conversation was a dismal failure that evening. It was fortunate that Lucia spoke English well, because even though we all started the night trying our best to converse in French, our efforts, and grammar, deteriorated in direct correlation to the amount of wine consumed. Clear-headed Cartesian types would have reasoned that it wasn’t wise to keep drinking — and probably wouldn’t have ordered more than a couple of bottles in the first place. But we were still learning how to think French as well as speak it, and it seemed like a good idea to kick on for cocktails.
We wandered down Boulevard du Montparnasse to La Closerie des Lilas, named in homage to a nearby nineteenth-century dancehall that was set within a candelabra-lit, lilac-scented garden. A frenzy of cancan dancing and champagne bubbles, this is where the students of the Latin Quarter came to take their pick of the grisettes who so fragrantly decorated the leafy arbours.
Just as we were about to step inside, Lucia and Martin bashfully made an apologetic retreat. Hugh and I watched them walk off arm-in-arm into the wintry night. ‘I didn’t see that coming,’ he said. I hadn’t either, possibly because we’d been engrossed in one another. I didn’t find Hugh attractive so much as fascinating. He was a walking encyclopaedia on Paris, and his passion for the city was infectious.
He also dreamed of a past Parisian world, when a so-called Lost Generation found itself in the interwar period, a time of frenetic creativity and debauched denial. While I tended to fantasise about the languorous fashions and the subdued self-contemplation of the 1930s, Hugh was obsessed with the preceding decade known as the années folles (crazy years). ‘I like to party,’ he explained with a shrug.
We made our way into La Closerie, through a blur of Gauloises smoke, and sat down at a glossy mahogany table in the red-amber lushness of the piano bar, its burnished glow enhanced by glass bottles twinkling away against the mirrored wall. I ordered a French martini, Hugh a dry one, ‘just like Papa’.
Papa was the nickname of Ernest Hemingway, who would often write in this very bar, seeing as he lived around the corner. There, he met with a new friend by the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who read him some of his latest book, The Great Gatsby. ‘I mean, this is what I love about Paris,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s soaked with history. You can almost smell it, it’s palpable.’
I lost track of the time we spent singing the city’s praises, and suddenly I realised we were the last couple in the room. Should we have one last drink, I asked? Hugh scrounged around in his pockets, then shrugged. ‘I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.’
Uh, this was getting a little deep.
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t read Tropic of Cancer?’ he asked incredulously.
‘Ah, got it. Well, I do love Anaïs Nin and tried to read it when I got into her. And there are some beautiful sentences in there, but I just couldn’t get past the filth. I know I sound like a prude, but it just makes me feel ill.’
The feminist in me — even if she was a feminine one — hated the misogyny of the book, even more so because I suspected it was one big put-on. It smacked of a desperate attempt by Miller to appear manly and virile so as to cover up some Freudian neurosis.
‘So,’ Hugh whispered, leaning close, his gin-and-vermouth-scented smile lopsided and louche, ‘you’re not going to be my Anaïs?’
Nin had edited Tropic of Cancer for Miller. During countless bouts of passionate lovemaking.
I hadn’t planned on looking for l’amour; I was in a determinedly single — and self-reflective — phase. Hugh wasn’t my type; he was too cocksure, a little too brutally direct at times. And I had a hunch it would be a most unbalanced pairing. En amour, il y a toujours celui qui donne les baisers et celui qui tend la joue, goes one French proverb. It means that in love there is always the giver (of kisses) and the taker (who turns the cheek). But then again, perhaps it just meant we were binary opposites.
I woke up surprised to feel my skin against lemony-fresh, starched sheets. Turned out, Hugh was staying in a four-star hotel. So he wasn’t as much the struggling bohemian that I at first thought. I smiled. I guessed I was playing the part, too. Bad faith be damned.
Hugh was still asleep, the matted hair over his face barely stifling his drunken snores, so I got up and padded about for a while, enjoying the central-heated air and the plush carpet beneath my feet. I picked up Hugh’s coat, which he’d strewn on the floor, and noticed a book poking out of the pocket: The Outsider, by Albert Camus. He was a bit of a poseur, I thought, but rather adorable in his earnest pursuit of Frenchness.
I didn’t know much about Camus at the time, otherwise I might have wondered if this was a warning sign of sorts. In the cult book, the protagonist kills an unnamed man, and goes to trial, with a blood-chilling lack of emotion. The Algeria-born Camus was an Existentialist, but, unlike Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he never felt as though he fitted into the world, certainly not Paris. He disagreed with them, too, that life had real meaning — for him, human existence was no more than an absurdity. Not the happiest of chaps, in other words. But his scarringly tortured childhood goes a long way to explaining the grim outlook.
At the time, I thought, how apt. We were two outsiders, desperately wanting to belong. We were perhaps both a bit lost. I wasn’t sure I wanted to try to merge our particular Parisian dreams — my romantic, feminine one with his modernist, masculine one — so I made to leave. ‘I need some air. Our usual at twelve?’ I wrote on a piece of paper. While unsure that I wanted to meet up again so soon, I didn’t want to be rude to someone who could at least be an amusing friend. So I left la balle in his court.
Later that morning, I cleared my head in the Luxembourg Garden, the icy air having a purifying effect. A light snow had just fallen over the gravel paths and the bare branches criss-crossed against the pale-grey sky, and I felt as though I was walking into an old black-and-white photograph. The original 1923 chairs were still scattered around the park in those days, and there was even the occasional design from earlier days, its delicately poised curves standing out from the more masculine sturdiness of the others, like a grisette amidst an admiring cluster of students.
I noticed a vintage set of scales but couldn’t get them to work. I’d later find out these machines used to be dotted throughout the gardens, installed in the late nineteenth century when the French were becoming weight-conscious; a few are now left purely for show. I officially weighed nothing, I decided with a smile, but realised that I did in fact feel rather flimsy. I’d barely eaten a proper meal in two weeks, let alone remembered to take my iron supplements — and I had a gaunt look, complete with moody under-eye shadows, to prove it. Back in Romantic times, pale and weak heroines were all the rage, and on a subconscious level my inner bohémienne was probably relishing the drama of it all, but I suddenly didn’t care about starving for art or anything else. I was too ravenously hungry.
A poor Ernest Hemingway used to come to these gardens when he was famished, sometimes to try to catch dinner in the form of an unfortunate pigeon, at other times to escape the tempting aromas of Parisian streets. He’d also take shelter in the museum there, which then showcased the Impressionists. Standing before the Cézannes when he was particularly ‘belly-empty, hollow-hungry’, the writer’s appreciation of the proto-Cubist and Fauvist painter intensified, and the heavy and structured yet bright brush strokes would influence his own art: prose filled with strong words and colourful action, yet sparse in adjectives.
Hunger had also worked for me — for a while. When I was at school, controlling my appetite somehow focused my mind on the main task. In my final year, I lived like an ascetic monk, eating little more than a daily bowl of porridge, studying in every spare second, and often falling asleep on a mattress by my desk. But I got over it, thankfully; Paris had helped me fall in love with food, as it did Hemingway, who blossomed into a great gourmand, if not a glutton of frivolous adjectives.
The café was just around the corner from our language school. It was one of those old neighbourhood bars known as un zinc, with a long metal counter displaying a stack of hard-boiled eggs, which could be bought for a few coins. In the morning, beret-topped locals would crack an egg on the bar and shake on some salt, then quickly gobble it up before downing a chaser of espresso. The authenticity stretched to old French men — crustier than fresh baguettes — arguing about politics. It was the perfect place to polish up our colloquial skills, and try to delve further into the Parisian psyche.
I had almost finished my cheese-smothered onion soup when Hugh walked in. I must have looked surprised. ‘Did you think I was going to poser un lapin?’ he asked with a laugh as he sat down next to me on the banquette.
‘Pose a rabbit?’
‘It means to stand someone up. Isn’t that great? I read it has something to with the days when men ran off on women without paying them their dues.’
I laughed uneasily, the prostitute reference not quite infusing the scene with romance. ‘So you’re not going to hop away on me?’
I winced at the needy undertone to my question, which I’d meant to come across as light-heartedly rhetorical. And then I mentally kicked myself for being such a girl.
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ There was a slight edge to his voice, I thought. He might have been trying to sound similarly carefree, but I sensed his wariness at where the situation was heading. But hang on, I ordered myself, did I really want to let myself fall for someone I didn’t think could return the favour? I knew from all of his bravado-packed talk that he was not the kind of guy you’d want handling a delicate heart. He was a writer who seemed to like total control of his own life’s plotline, who brought characters into existence only when he was ready for them.
This was all getting a bit too complicated to unpack. I decided it was probably best to leave our emotions locked up so early in this particular journey. After all, the only baggage I wanted to take home from Paris was of the sartorial, not emotional, kind.
‘Look, let’s just keep having fun, okay?’ I said after a few moments’ silence. ‘Whether we see each other much or not. We’re both on holiday — it’s not like we’re going to get married.’
Paris Dreaming Page 10
