It took another century or so and a few fashion icons to convince the powers-that-be that pants could be feminine and so very French. Think Juliette Gréco slinking around Saint-Germain in sleek black, Jane Birkin breezing through the 1960s in lithe jeans and a clingy T-shirt accessorised with a simple straw basket, and Jean Seberg’s Patricia in a pair of capris on the big screen in Breathless.
So I should probably have bought myself some pants, but like Patricia I was mostly dreaming of designer dresses. I couldn’t afford her Dior, of course, although I sometimes wandered along Rue Saint-Honoré, the celebrated high-fashion street of the Right Bank, and looked longingly into the glossy windows. It was the era of the long slip dress, cut on the bias for a serpentine effect that gave the illusion of curves. I tracked down a high-street version in black satin, which made it look much more expensive than it was; simple yet sophisticated, it was one of the most grown-up items I had ever bought. It was the perfect thing to wear to my birthday dinner.
‘It’s not every day your only child turns twenty-one,’ responded my mother, when I questioned the extravagance of their trek to Europe for the occasion. Not that I was complaining. When I’d bid au revoir at Melbourne Airport six weeks earlier, I fancied my maturing self as a free spirit flitting off to her spiritual home, but in the time since I’d come to crave the comforts of home, both physical and emotional, much more than I expected. I’d never been away from my family for more than a fortnight, and the initial exhilaration of freedom soon became a sensation of free fall. So much for existential independence. I realised that I relied on my parents for advice much more than I’d thought. So on meeting up with them again, my world suddenly tilted back onto its rightful axis. I felt realigned and rebalanced, as though our small triangle-shaped unit had been neatly put back together, with three perfectly equilateral sides.
I’d temporarily shacked up in my parents’ room at a nearby hotel — so much plusher than my sad, cold little chambre de bonne — and Mum and I devoted a good chunk of the afternoon to preening for dinner, shopping for the just-so shade of red lipstick, lavishing on face masks and blow-drying our hair. My dad patiently sat in the foyer bar sipping sherry, having long ago given up complaining about the time-consuming tribulations of women’s beauty rituals. And anyway, this was no ordinary night out.
We were on our way to La Tour d’Argent, at the time the Parisian pinnacle of fine dining, which is saying a lot given that this is the city that invented haute cuisine. La Tour d’Argent means The Silver Tower, named after the mica-flecked stone fortifications that once stood at the same location — on the river’s edge upstream from the islands — glittering in the sun. The restaurant also shone with a three-star Michelin rating. Ever since the Michelin Guide launched in 1900 — the tyre company’s genius way of enticing the French to take road-trips — chefs have sweated it out for this ultimate accolade. The pressure to serve up culinary perfection, not to mention a night to remember, is intense.
As we approached the curlicued, wrought-iron door, it swung open grandly and a man in black-tie greeted us with a slight bow. A woman wearing a gleaming gown, who could easily have passed for a model, stepped forward to take our coats. Someone else ushered us into the lift — operated by yet another suavely suited type — and we whizzed in reverent silence to the top floor, on which the restaurant is perched. As we stepped into the warm glow of the dining room, we were welcomed yet again, and led to our window table, where a trio of waiters held out velvet-seated chairs for us. It was quite the entrance.
‘Mademoiselle, you must be la végétarienne,’ said the maître d’, as we sipped champagne and nibbled on a selection of amuse-bouches, literally mouth-amusers — scrumptious morsels presented before the entrée to tickle the tastebuds and delight the senses.
‘Oui . . .’ I replied. ‘Je suis désolée . . .’ I’m sorry. After all, I’d come to a restaurant so famous for its pressed duck that on ordering the signature dish you receive a postcard marked with the bird’s serial number; over a million of these cards have been given out.
‘It’s no trouble at all, Mademoiselle.’
Surprise at my dietary requirement had been expressed when Mum rang to book, but if the chefs weren’t thrilled at having to limit themselves to plant food, it didn’t show. My main course — revealed with a flourish as the waiter lifted the silver cloche — was a veritable city of vegetables. Seriously, little houses had been constructed out of teeny sticks of carrot, mini buildings made from brick-cubes of fried potato, and it was encircled with towers of asparagus, while rivers of sauces meandered here and there, herbs and micro-blooms sprouting along their pea-sprinkled banks. To this day, I’ve never seen a more exquisite plate of veggies.
Beyond the glass, we looked down to Notre-Dame. The cathedral was lit up from below with a golden light, and the spiky framework of flying buttresses wrapped around its back shone like a medieval crown, a diadem of Gothic glamour. As the barges streamed up and down the Seine, they would momentarily illuminate the night sky, and we watched the newly falling snowflakes swirl against a violet-blue velvety backdrop. It was such a chimerically wonderful moment that I wished I could bottle it up in my very own snowdome. I silently thanked the Parisian heavens for the evening.
‘Will you come to Notre-Dame with us tomorrow?’ asked my father. ‘We should give blessings that you’ve made it to twenty-one. Or that we got through it!’
I was well into my state of lapsed Catholicism, but I agreed. The startling splendour of the cathedral always made me gasp in awe and breathe in that familiar, comforting aroma of musky incense. It was all too easy to sense the divine inspiration this church must have struck into medieval Parisians, beneath the series of arches ascending to heavenly heights, where light glowed through the kaleidoscopic windows. Sadly, our parish church, with its 1970s suburban aura and hues of orange and brown, had the effect of dulling, not heightening, my senses. I was pretty sure that if Notre-Dame was my local, I’d be much more pious in my commitment to Catholicism. Perhaps that seems superficial . . . although why would the French Church have built such glorious edifices in the first place if they didn’t appreciate the power of beauty?
The next morning, after my parents had the chance to literally thank God they’d seen me through to adulthood, we crossed the Pont au Double bridge between Notre-Dame and the Left Bank, and ambled around the sinuous streets of the Latin Quarter.
‘These were once completely paved with cobblestones,’ remarked Mum. ‘Sadly, most of Paris’s cobbles have been tarred over.’
In May 1968, towards the end of the decade that was supposed to belong to the youth, the students of the Sorbonne began to protest. At first, they were lamenting their cramped, decrepit campus conditions, but the rebellion quickly swelled into demonstrations against an increasingly capitalist society, and into a crippling country-wide strike of millions of workers. In the Latin Quarter, the riot police clashed violently with students, who dug up the quarter’s old cobbles for barricades and weapons.
‘I remember sympathising with the students,’ said Dad. ‘It was ten years after Charles de Gaulle had become president, and they were disillusioned. He was seen as old and old-school, and he had too much power.’
‘Would you have joined in if you were here?’ I asked, recalling old black-and-white photos of a rebellious-looking Dad rocking a black leather jacket and slicked-back hair.
‘I became too much of a law-abiding citizen early on,’ he replied, with a slightly rueful sigh. ‘That’s what happens when you study law! Still, I’ve always warmed to the French for their willingness to take to the streets, and support the workers.’
‘I love that there’s this beating rebellious heart beneath the calm French surface,’ I mused. ‘Like the old cobbles that are still lying beneath the asphalt, just waiting to resurface.’
One of the most poetic chants of the 1968 protests was ‘Sous les pavés, la plage’ — ‘Under the cobblestones, the beach.’ The cobbles were indeed embed
ded in sand, but the students were alluding to the paradisiacal freedom they hoped was around the corner.
We meandered our way to Café de Flore for lunch, and the conversation headed in a direction I’d been anticipating.
‘So, what are you thinking about life after university?’ asked Mum, as casually as possible, as though enquiring into my intended meal order (goat’s cheese on toast, for the record). I was well aware that my mother, who had perfectly planned and executed every step on her career ladder to date, was sometimes a little bemused by the wafty, winding life path that her daughter seemed to be taking. ‘As you know, an arts degree is vague and doesn’t lead to a specific job, but I thought we could have a look at public service opportunities when you’re back.’
I screwed up my nose. ‘You know, the French believe it’s an honour to work as a civil servant,’ Mum replied huffily. ‘I wish more people thought like that back home.’ At the time, Mum was running Melbourne City Council, relishing the opportunity to serve the town she so loved.
‘I still want to write for a paper,’ I shrugged. ‘Probably politics. It’s a public service too, you know.’
‘True . . . But you seem to be reading a lot of fashion magazines for someone supposedly into political journalism.’
Yes, I had started to fantasise about seeing my by-line on glossy magazine pages, so I knew I’d have to choose sooner or later, before another existential crisis risked setting in. Still, I didn’t think the two interests could be mutually exclusive. I believed I could be passionate about matters of state as much as matters of style, just as Saint-Germain was fast becoming a luxury, as well as a literary, haven. In France, the land of beloved binary opposites, contradictions can coexist and it’s totally fine to flip between them, as though between two sides of a centime.
One of my best loved movies is Audrey Hepburn’s Funny Face, and it shows how a girl can easily fall into fashion in a place like Paris. Audrey plays Jo, a shy, bookish type discovered by a fashion magazine editor who is looking for a model who’ll give a fresh-faced jolt to a photo shoot of the latest French collections. Audrey agrees to a trip to Paris purely as a ticket to pay homage to her philosophy icon — she eventually meets the Jean-Paul Sartre-like character while clad in the intellectual uniform of the day: beatnik-black turtleneck and slimline pants. But it’s high fashion that wins out in the end. Divinely dressed by Givenchy, and shot against a backdrop of Parisian landmarks, Jo learns how to really express herself. And find Monsieur Right, of course.
It’s obvious and sappy and clichéd and all that, but isn’t it every girl’s dream to go to Paris and fall in love — at least with a designer frock. I hadn’t found my own Monsieur Right, but I had faith that my opposite was out there somewhere, and would appear soon enough.
At least I’d fallen for a few new dresses, and a particularly shapely pair of boots — long and lace-up, and so much sexier than my manly Doc Martens. Mixing up my feminine and masculine suddenly didn’t feel right. I was happy to de-grunge myself and delight in feminine frills, without worrying too much about the wrath of the sisterhood. I could wear the pinkest of lipsticks without fearing that my feminist talk was mere lip service. I had rather taken to the French definition of feminism, where you can be both equal and different. This, of course, being the land of opposites, where feminine and masculine (albeit a pink-shirted masculinity) are as hand-in-hand as SDB and JPS, left and right, la baguette and le fromage.
Towards the end of my stay, I was having lunch in a café, ploughing through my usual pile of magazines with my trusty dictionary by my side, when I gasped at the realisation that I could understand what everyone around me was saying. It was like the fuzzy radio music I’d been listening to throughout a long road-trip suddenly tuned into crystal-clarity as I approached home. Or like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when the screen switches from black and white to technicolor. Everything suddenly seemed vividly real. I was truly part of Paris, and that thrilling awareness dragged me right out of my insularity. It was time to stop living in my head, and get on with life — or la vie, as the case might be.
‘Voilà, Mademoiselle,’ said the waiter, placing my flute of champagne before me. ‘Merci,’ I responded with a smile, as much for my champagne as for calling me Mademoiselle. At that very moment, I felt like a French girl — and it was something to celebrate.
CHAPTER 5
MADAME
madame nf madam
In which, aged twenty-five, I find that champagne and cake can get a girl through anything.
To the surprise of nobody really, my plans to become a political reporter didn’t quite pan out. My inner hard-nosed journalist ventured off into a parallel universe, and one day I looked in the mirror to see, staring back in surprise, a beauty editor for a women’s magazine. I could not have found a more polar-opposite job in the publishing business.
I’d been seduced by magazines’ glossy, fashion-filled pages (so much nicer to the touch of a manicured hand than a newspaper’s ink-streaked stock) and had moved to Sydney in the hope of getting my pointy-toed, kitten-heeled foot into the door of this glamorous industry. For my first job, I managed the front desk and icy stares of the long-limbed, little-black-dressed editors at a high-fashion title. I tried my best to emulate their style, but eventually had to admit to myself that their world wasn’t for me. Fashion trends, by their very nature, constantly change, so to be in fashion you must be brave or self-assured enough to continually reinvent yourself, to carry off all kinds of shades and shapes and hem lengths. And fashion, I found, was not always pretty or flattering; sometimes it was downright ugly (camouflage cargo pants worn with heels, anyone?). So is it any wonder I gravitated to the world of beauty.
As the beauty and lifestyle editor of a mainstream magazine for twenty-something women, I was under no illusions — my primary task was not to dissect the active ingredients of lip balm, but to be amenable to advertisers. My secondary role: to give readers all the tools they’d need in their quest for locking down Mr Right. I dispensed every trick in the book: how to make your eyes more mesmerising (Smoky! Sooty! Sexy!), how to drop a dress size by Friday night (Broth is your friend!), how to small-talk in a beguiling matter (Ask him questions about himself! Act interested!) . . .
You can only work for so long in such a place before you become part of the system. I spent my spare time on the treadmill or in the nail bar, trying to become the girl I thought I had to be. I got better at the business of looking the part, and soon hardly recognised myself. ‘Your hair is amazing,’ my managing editor exclaimed one day as I rushed into her office to file copy, her eyes widening in surprise before narrowing once more. ‘I hate you.’
I’d spent four hours at a salon the previous evening, having my hair highlighted to shimmering perfection, and blow-dried long and lean so that the smooth cuticles reflected light for an even more lustrous effect. So yes, I knew that my hair did look amazing. As for whether said editor in fact despised me, I had little time to ponder; my taxi was waiting to take me to the airport, where a plane would then jet me off to Paris, where I’d meet up with my boyfriend.
‘Ooh, I wonder if he’ll propose,’ cooed the receptionist as I ran out the door. ‘It is the city of love, after all.’
Paris is indeed the undisputed capital of amour, the dream destination for hopeful lovers, heavy-breathing honeymooners and die-hard romantics, regularly topping the polls for the world’s most passionate city. Her heart-palpitating prettiness — the subject of so many misty-eyed posters on walls the world over — is part of it, sure. But I think the reputation for romance is also inspired by Parisians themselves. This is a city where women parade down the streets in a sleekly seductive manner, while men cast approving and appreciative glances. It is a city where the locals — warmed by a good verre of vin rouge, or the Roman blood that still races through their veins — feel no inhibitions about public, often lavish, displays of affection. When in Rome . . .
So that’s why you might feel quite at h
ome in Paris when strolling leisurely arm in arm while whispering sweet nothings into your lover’s ear; locking sugar-dusted lips on a bridge as the Seine, and the rest of humanity, gush by; feeding one another spoonfuls of melt-in-your-mouth salted-chocolate mousse; getting all weak-kneed and fluttery-tummied as you sip sparkling champagne together under twinkling lights.
I’m not totally naïve about this romance business. France has worked hard to style Paris as the home of love, peddling the notion that its women were the most beautiful and flirtatious long before the rest of the West caught up to the concept of equality of seductive expression. This amorous branding has been helpful to the French economy for centuries. And the beauty and fashion brands are in cahoots, of course; being linked to the world’s most alluring women is no bad thing for business, after all.
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