Hugh smiled, a little too much with relief for my liking. ‘You know, I wouldn’t be the best boyfriend anyway. I’m always running off to write, or lurking around looking for new inspiration. I can’t stay put because what kind of boring story would that be?’
I didn’t answer ‘a love story’. It clearly wasn’t his genre.
At least the tension in the air had evaporated. Hugh ordered us two glasses of wine, flung an arm around me, and proceeded to bury his nose in a book: Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert, a nineteenth-century novel about a selfish womanising socialite. It was all I could do to keep from rolling my eyes. Hugh really should have lived in his beloved 1920s, or earlier, I thought, when men could more easily get away with being so cavalier.
No Parisian education — sentimental or otherwise — is complete without a few trips to the movies. The French love their films, which is not surprising given that cinematography was invented in France (by the suitably named Lumière — light — brothers), and the heavily subsidised industry more than holds its own against the might of Hollywood. Of all global cities, Paris boasts the most big screens, and its art house cinemas double as temples to Gallic culture, worshipping classic French films on eternal rotation. There’s also little better to do on a blustery Parisian day than bunker down in the velvety-red cushioned chairs of a cosy cinema, head preferably resting on a manly shoulder.
The Latin Quarter, as you’d expect, is spoilt for art house cinema choice. Over the next couple of weeks, Hugh and I worked our way through most of the theatres, often skipping classes in the justification that we were still focusing on our aural comprehension. On a Saturday night, we found ourselves at Le Champo, where we bought tickets for A Bout de Souffle — or Breathless. Released in 1960, this was the star of the so-called New Wave, a generation of films that rejected the traditional rules of movie-making as much as the old, pre-war world altogether. For Breathless, director Jean-Luc Godard worked with hand-held cameras, edited with jump cuts for a jagged, sometimes dizzying effect, and wrote the script only on the very morning of a day’s shoot; the result was a documentary-like realness. He also created totally new, amoral characters: youthful but disaffected, both narcissistic and nihilistic. This was the dark side of Existentialism, where it’s all too damn gloomy to see the point of living.
Michel is a cop-killing car thief, whose only emotions seem to be the ones he fakes in the mirror. Patricia is an American who’s supposed to be studying at the Sorbonne, but is instead selling copies of the International Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées, while dreaming of spending her money on a Dior dress. He’s attracted to her gamine style, she digs his whole gangster bad-boy vibe, and the two hook up despite little shared interest beyond a fondness for chain-smoking and an inclination towards sociopathy. Spoiler alert: it all ends pretty badly.
‘He has to be cinema’s first antihero,’ said Hugh later, as we ordered a bottle of wine at a nearby bar. ‘I mean, they’ve been in books for centuries, but I can’t think of a cinematic one before 1960.’
‘She wasn’t much better,’ I pointed out. ‘I mean, she only turned Michel in to test whether she loved him or not, not out of moral duty.’
‘But imagine how liberating this film must have been back then,’ said Hugh. ‘To see all of the supposed rules of life being questioned and rejected.’
‘I would have been depressed by it.’
‘I would have loved it.’
‘Of course,’ I said, with a laugh. ‘You would have run out and bought yourself a jaunty hat at once!’
‘You know me too well,’ he replied. ‘But I don’t just mean stylistically. Imagine how amazing it would have been to live at a time when everything was being rethought. I just feel like everything in the 1990s is recycled and retro, like everything has been done before.’
I could have talked to Hugh all evening. He was a hoarder, filling his mind with all sorts of trivia as much as he stuffed his pockets with ticket stubs, logo-laden coasters and matchboxes nabbed from bars, and articles ripped out of Le Monde. He was endlessly interesting but I sensed he was about to bring today’s particular chapter to an end, and rush off to document his latest thoughts, or venture out in search of more interesting fodder.
‘Let me walk you home,’ he said, standing up. And sure enough: ‘I can’t stay though.’
I didn’t see Hugh again until Monday morning, back at school. I went to walk over to him, but froze when I saw him deep in conversation with a new student. A particularly pretty female one.
‘Everyone, say bonjour to Kinari, from India,’ chimed our teacher as class began. ‘Kinari, comme un canari!’ Like a canary.
More like a bird of paradise. Kinari was exquisiteness personified. Her golden skin was lustrous, stretched over finely carved cheekbones, and her feline eyes were accentuated with sooty kohl. Framing her face was shining jet-black hair, cut into a long bob with heavy bangs, and she wore a black turtleneck sweater and black slim-leg pants. She was an exotic incarnation of Juliette Gréco, the chanteuse, actress and poster girl for Existentialism back in the days of smoky Saint-Germain jazz bars. Hugh, who had manoeuvred himself to sit next to Kinari, was obviously smitten. He had just found his next heroine.
After classes, Lucia and I dined at a cheap nearby pizzeria, the kind that caters more to clueless students than savvy bon-vivant locals. The Latin-looking waiters practically dropped their plates when Lucia walked in, and spent the night gaping at her much more than decency would usually allow. The chefs even took turns poking their toque-less heads out of the kitchen to see what all the fuss was about. They obviously agreed with the general consensus: when our pizzas came out, they were in the shape of a heart.
Appropriately enough, we had been talking about l’amour. Lucia listened patiently to my rant about Hugh, how he had treated me as a minor love interest, to help build momentum before the real heroine of the story came along. The one before The One, in other words.
‘Don’t be so dramatic,’ she smiled. ‘He’s a wannabe writer. He’ll be off looking for his next leading lady as soon as he needs more material. You never really liked him anyway, remember that. Don’t confuse a bruised ego with heartache.’
I wished I could be more like Lucia. She was only a couple of years older, but so much worldlier. And she had Martin wrapped around her elegant little finger. He had already taken her shopping and out to a couple of two-starred restaurants.
‘I like him,’ she shrugged when I asked how it was going. ‘But I wish he was more, well, American. He tries so hard to be French and French men are just too feminised for me. I mean, he wears more pink than I do!’
‘It’s better than someone in a musty old coat whose pockets are stuffed with dirty napkins and moody books,’ I pouted. I figured I could give myself a while longer to get over my heartache, or wounded pride at the very least.
A few hours later, I woke up in agony. Diagnosis: food poisoning. Culprit: one heart-shaped pizza. Now I could really say that love hurt. I stayed writhing around in bed the next day, wallowing in my freezing misery. Hugh was such a louse, I railed to myself, a try-hard Henry Miller out to prove his virility. Were all guys thus? Had literature — and now cinema — celebrated the badly behaving boy character to such an extent that the script was now programmed into male DNA? No wonder my mother’s generation of second-wave feminists had had to play men at their own game, with ballsy talk and brutish suits that mimicked guys’ broader, more powerful silhouettes.
I recalled Lucia’s observation about French men being too feminised. Perhaps that was why French women hadn’t felt the need to masculinise themselves; their better halves had already met them halfway, happily buttoning on pastel shirts and sipping champagne and discussing the latest haute couture catwalk shows over dainty hors d’oeuvres. Maybe I needed to find a French guy. Although I had a hunch that they, like their cinematic alter egos, might be just as adept at playing the scoundrel. They would just know how to do it more stylishly. With, say,
a jaunty hat.
Gaunter and paler than ever, I was back at school on Wednesday, where I tried to ignore Hugh as he snuggled up to his chirpy, golden canary. Needless to say, the situation did not aid my recovery. So on the Friday, I took a mental, as much as physical, health day. After a hearty breakfast (one omelette, two croissants, a hot chocolate and a look of disapproval from my waiter), I decided to do what Parisians do best: wander and ponder. It was one of those brilliantly blue winter mornings where you almost tingle as the sun energises your very cells with vitamin D. Recharged, I took a different turn from usual, heading uphill towards the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. I walked past the Sorbonne University, stopping momentarily to envy the students scurrying around dressed in black, their faces furrowed as though deep in philosophical thought. How inspiring it would be to study in a city that has for centuries shaped so much of the world’s learning. Australia could feel so far away from the heart of the action that knowledge sometimes seemed one-dimensional, something trapped in a book rather than connected to a wider world. But in Paris, I figured, theory would be as real as the ancient buildings around you, the stones of which seem to be living and breathing with the souls and spirits of generations of thinkers and dreamers. In this context, you’d have perspective on your place in the world; you would be part of an ever-evolving history, continually pushing the boundaries of thought and knowledge forward, for the benefit of the next generation as much as for the glory of your country. Because Paris, this city of grandiose domes and grand monuments, sure loves her glory.
I eventually found myself in front of the Panthéon, the huge Greek temple-like edifice originally conceived as a church dedicated to Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris whose girl-power cred is up there with Joan of Arc (Geneviève saved the city from Attila the Hun, which is surely the very definition of kick-ass). It’s laugh-or-you’ll-cry ironic, therefore, that the building ended up a shrine to French masculinity. Seriously: the inscription above the portico entrance reads ‘To Great Men, The Grateful Nation’. (Okay, granted, four women, including Marie Curie, are now commemorated in this house of heroes, but that’s out of a grand total of seventy-five, people!) I refused to go in, on principle.
Instead, I made my way back to the Luxembourg Garden, just down the road. Entering this time through the Boulevard Saint-Michel gates, I turned left and soon stopped before a vision in ivory: a statue of nineteenth-century novelist George Sand. The queen of French Romanticism, Sand wrote books to shine a light on women’s rich interior lives, exploring an uncharted terrain of lush emotions, exotic dreams and shadowy fears. And in true Romantic heroine style, this sculptured Sand wears a flowing gown, a fluttering shawl and a pensive look on her pretty curl-framed face. But I was confused, because the little I knew of the author was that she was a trouser-wearing, cigar-smoking cougar. Intrigued, I scribbled her name on my mental to-research list, and over the next few weeks would discover just how enigmatic, controversial and iconic this powerhouse of a woman was. She more than deserved such a beautiful statue; her name should be up in lights in the Panthéon.
Sand’s novels are mostly forgotten these days, but they can be seen as the first feminist call to arms. She wrote about women’s hidden misery in a patriarchal society, their enslavement in unhappy marriages from which there was no legal escape, and her market was the growing number of female readers who could all too well relate. Sand might have dressed up her tales with the usual swoon-inducing trappings of Romantic fiction, but her message was loud and modern — just like Sand. Having been miserably married herself, to a boor of a provincial baron, she had moved to Paris to forge an independent existence as a writer and, extraordinarily, managed to get a court to grant her official freedom, along with custody of her beloved children and ownership of her country château. Her habit of wearing trousers to get around town — at a time when respectable women required a male escort — was not intended to be provocative. It was simply a practical measure, allowing her ease of movement. A woman with a lot on her plate, Sand had to make the most of her precious time.
The trousers might have seemed subversive to some, but it was Sand’s multifaceted personality that was truly rebellious. She didn’t just demand the right to live like a man, but like a woman, too. Just as she could flit between her actual name — the fabulous Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin — and her pseudonym, she could quickly fling off the suit and turn on the frilly feminine wiles. Many portraits show her in those early Parisian days, with pale porcelain skin, large soulful eyes, dark hair parted in the centre and spiralling down around her long face. In one celebrated painting, she demurely tends to her needlework while listening to her great love Frédéric Chopin tinkering away on the ivories.
But in the next breath, she would become a gender-bending man-eater, carousing around town with her artistic friends, and catching pretty boyfriends in the same way she might collect colourful butterflies. Attracted to young, elegant men — rather than the gruff old types women tended to be matched to — Sand both loved and mothered her partners. By celebrating and encouraging a more feminised version of men, she flipped gender relations on their head. But Sand was even more complex than that. She proved that a woman could be much more than a lover; she could also be a doting mother and grandmother, a homemaker, a committed professional and a dynamic intellectual. She was a fully realised human being, in an era when women were confined to small, narrow boxes.
But I didn’t know that at the time. All I saw that day in the park was a pretty woman. I sat down on one of the slatted chairs placed on the path in front of the statue. An elderly lady was perched on the other one.
‘Bonjour,’ I said, with a smile.
‘She was one of our first feminists,’ noted my neighbour, nodding her silvery-grey head towards Sand. She had evidently detected my accent and figured I’d need a back-story. Sand might be a heroine in France, but she’s little known beyond its borders.
‘She looks like a very French kind of feminist,’ I replied with a smile.
‘Yes, she was very alluring when she wanted to be. She had men worshipping her for her entire life. Even though she could do everything, love was always the most important thing to her. You know, in France, we feminists don’t hate men.’
On the advice of Madame Sandiste (as George Sand fan-girls are known in France), that afternoon I caught the train up to Pigalle, then zigzagged a little south to the Musée de la Vie Romantique: the Museum of Romantic Life. How could a girl in a sentimental frame of mind resist that call? At the end of a narrow, paved laneway I came across a pretty pavilion set in a garden that enchanted even in mid-winter, when the tearoom is closed and the twirly iron chairs are scattered forlornly among tangled thickets, the hydrangeas and hollyhocks are in hibernation and the only burst of colour is the pistachio green of the painted shutters. It was inside the jewellery box of a house that I found the exuberance, a treasure-trove of mementos that recall artistic life in the early nineteenth century.
The museum doubles as a tribute to George Sand. Portraits of Sand and her loved ones hang on the patterned wallpapered walls, and her cherished jewellery — a mix of heirlooms and trinkets — is displayed in glass cabinets, along with a mesmerisingly eerie casting of her right arm, pale and elegant as any self-respecting Romantic limb needed to be. A floral-carpeted parlour room re-creates the private world of Sand and you almost feel like you’re trespassing, your bulky boots committing sacrilege on a floor that has welcomed so many dainty slippers. It’s a most intimate museum, offering a peek into the interior life of the poster woman for feminine emotion.
Paris might be a city of well-known, much-loved monuments, I thought, but it was in the warm, cosy spaces that you felt most at home. Sand might have soared to the ultimate career heights and basked in public acclaim, but it was back in her private realm that her soul was nourished. She most treasured objects that were charged with emotional meaning, and she felt nothing without her family and friends; her collection of miniature painti
ngs of her ancestors in particular caused my heart to contract with a mixture of envy and longing and homesickness. It all moved me in a way that I was not articulate enough to explain, but as I walked back down the moss-flecked path, I sensed that my vision of my ideal future was shifting. I suddenly craved grounding in life. I wanted sturdy emotional roots along with the literal kind, a rambling garden that would perfume a home filled with love and laughter. And floral carpet if I could find a guy to agree to it.
I spent the next few weeks revelling in my personal space, lolling about in bed while eating chocolate and drinking wine, and disappearing into the worlds of George Sand and those of the various other novels I’d bought from the bouquinistes or at Shakespeare and Company, the legendary Latin Quarter bookstore. Occasionally, I’d return to reality and wonder about my own life narrative. I mean, yes, I knew I wanted the lovely house and all that, but as for the road I needed to take to get there, the job that would give me the money to make it materialise, that wasn’t so clear.
I guessed political journalism was still my best career bet. I’d struck upon the idea after dropping out of law. I knew that I wanted to write, after all, and felt that I got politics well enough, after years of absorbing my parents’ sometimes heated dinner conversations. So, hoping for divine inspiration, I’d buy myself the day’s Le Figaro and Le Monde on the way to school, and try to make sense of their lofty words over a croissant and coffee. When I’d drunk too much red wine the night before, I’d opt for the International Herald Tribune, as the clear English words wouldn’t hurt my brain as much.
But after a while, I found myself loitering by the women’s section of the newsstand, and soon my café literature consisted of Elle, Glamour and Vogue. I realised that I was no longer just trying to understand what the women around me were saying, I was also observing how they expressed themselves through their clothes. I was slowly but very surely developing a new obsession: fashion. Occasionally, Lucia would drag me out to a nightclub and I’d near swoon at the glamour of the Parisiennes in their tiny skirts and wispy dresses. On the street, I noticed that they opted for pants. This wasn’t surprising, given it was February, and the threat of rain hung heavily in the chilled air. I had managed to avoid pants myself, wearing layer upon layer until I was winter-proofed. Still dress-obsessed, I didn’t even own a pair of jeans, and wondered if it might soon be time to fill this gaping hole in my wardrobe. Pants, I realised, were a key ingredient of Parisian fashion. Pants allowed a Parisienne, like George Sand before her, to stride briskly around town. Granted, it took a while for the look Sand started to catch on — mostly because trousers were actually outlawed for women in 1800. Were men hoping to preserve women’s delicate image at the dawn of the Romantic age? Perhaps. More likely the patriarchy feared that women would get too swept up in all this post-Revolutionary equality talk — and it’s easier to march for women’s rights in pants than petticoats. Which goes to show just how radical the wonderful Madame Sand was.
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