Paris Dreaming

by Katrina Lawrence

  Enter Héloïse, the teenage niece of Canon Fulbert, who agreed to board Abélard on the condition that the celebrated teacher instruct his precious ward. Héloïse was already proficient in Latin, Greek and Hebrew at a time when most women could not even read their own language. She was also as sensual as she was intelligent, and the inevitable occurred.

  As Héloïse’s lessons fell by the wayside, so did Abélard’s classes. His students grumbled that he’d lost his mojo; at the time, scholars were expected to stay celibate to keep their minds sharp and focused. Eventually everyone knew about the clandestine couple — except Uncle Fulbert. The jig was finally up when Héloïse fell pregnant. Far from ashamed, Héloïse named her son Astrolabe, after the old tool of astronomers and astrologers — a sure declaration of her transcendent love.

  The fuming uncle nagged the couple to marry. They finally agreed on the condition that it would be kept a secret. Even so, it rankled with Abélard, who wasn’t much into the mundane realities of an official relationship. ‘In marrying, I was destroying myself; I was casting a slur upon my own honour,’ he (so gallantly) remarked in later life. It must be admitted that Héloïse — who was worried domestic life could extinguish their passion — wasn’t a fan of the marital institution herself: ‘If the name of wife appears more sacred and more valid, sweeter to me is ever the word friend, or, if thou be not ashamed, concubine or whore.’

  To take the edge off the tension in the household, Abélard temporarily sent Héloïse off to a convent. It was the final straw for her uncle, who saw this as banishment. And so the canon plotted his ultimate revenge: one night, when Abélard was sleeping, two thugs were let into his room with the order of castration. It was a shocking act even in those tough medieval times.

  Abélard, however, came to see the crime as divine punishment; he recuperated in the lap of religion, holing himself up in monasteries to refocus his mind. Having regained his physical and mental strength, the once-more celibate Abélard returned to a brilliant teaching career.

  As a renowned abbess, Héloïse’s career also thrived; still, she was never completely fulfilled by an existence she had not wished for herself. When the couple began corresponding fifteen years later, Héloïse was still in mourning for the loss of that more passionate parallel life. ‘Why after our entry into religion, which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you? . . . It was desire, not affection which bound you to me, the flame of lust rather than love.’

  Over time, they made peace with each other, and she with her lot. But, heartbreakingly, they never saw one another again, and nobody knows what happened to Astrolabe, the cosmic love child.

  While the ups and downs of Héloïse and Abélard’s story make for delicious Gothic tragedy, I couldn’t help wishing for a less dramatic — and more romantic — ending. For someone celebrated for his radical thinking, couldn’t Abélard have found a way to coexist with Héloïse, who was unique and inspiring in every way, and who believed their love had the capacity to rise above the ho-hum of convention.

  But perhaps, like so many women, Héloïse was asking too much. Her love was all-encompassing, but his love was limited in scope; hers was spiritual, which expands over time, his physical, which only fades. Men’s brawn-over-brains take on love is still a dilemma women fret over (my magazine certainly wailed about it a lot), and perhaps that’s why Héloïse resonates with us to this day. She speaks so eloquently of the anguish we feel when love is taken from us too soon, and too suddenly.

  ‘Bonsoir, Madame,’ trilled the waiter, as I sat myself down in a café back near my hotel.

  I’d possibly been called ‘Madame’ before, but its significance suddenly hit me like a sucker punch. Madame is French for Mrs. Which I was decidedly not going to be any time soon. And here’s the rub: Madame is also a form of address for a woman too advanced in age to be considered a Mademoiselle. While it’s a courtesy — and probably one many French women appreciate — the title can be shocking for a non-Parisienne who still sees herself as very much a youthful Mademoiselle. The realisation that I was now a Madame was not going to help ameliorate my quarter-life crisis any time soon.

  I ordered champagne. After all, as Napoléon philosophised, you need it as much in the good times as the bad. With the first sip, I closed my eyes and let the bubbles burst over my tongue before an intoxicating warmth whirled around my head. Then, as the initial rush dissipated, I felt my tensions begin to dissolve. You see, if you sip champagne when in a dark mood, its frothy lightness will lift you out of any miserable emotional depths. At least for a while. So I ordered a second glass.

  I drank a third, promising myself it would be my last of the night, with my dinner-for-one, as the tables around me filled up with couples whose loved-up glow intensified in the luminescence of magic hour. Not that I was exactly unhappy on my own. As an only child, you learn early on to cherish your own company; your thick skin is the protective fortress you began building around yourself during idle childhood hours — the emotional equivalent of a castle for one, complete with fairy-tale turrets. This doesn’t mean that you never let the drawbridge down and allow some dashing knight to make his way across the moat. But mostly you’re more than happy in the ivory tower, watching the world from afar.

  Walking around Île Saint-Louis that night, my senses tingling from the champagne, it did indeed seem as though I was ensconced in a kind of fairy realm. The island still looks as it did in the 1600s, when it was made over from pastoral land into a model modern city in miniature. An exquisite little metropolis of light, its bright stone buildings positively glow during the day, and shine under lamplight at night, their windows transformed into framed tableaux of ornate, chandelier-lit interiors. Everything seems suspended in time, in a shimmering bubble floating on the Seine.

  Darkness had draped itself over Paris like a velvety cape, and the weight of the night felt both comforting and liberating. No longer exposed as a single woman trying to keep up appearances, I was free to be invisible, to skulk and scowl if I so wished. I imagined this is what it must have felt like back in the seventeenth century, when the fashion for going incognito saw women take to the streets holding black masks coyly over their faces.

  I’ve always loved night-wandering around Paris, claiming the quiet footpaths as my own, breathing in the calm, clean air, and soaking up the hazy glow of the street lights designed to evoke the halo-like aura of old oil lamps. The habit might sound somewhat risky, but my ever-present paranoia about what might be around the corner (literally and figuratively) has (so far) kept me safely on track, and I’ve somehow developed a sixth sense for not veering into territory that might be a little dicey after dark.

  Nevertheless, there are some streets in even the prettiest parts of Paris where you experience a frisson of chills, as though you’re walking over a grave, and you can’t help but get a sense of the shadowy secrets this city keeps. The eighteenth-century writer Restif de la Bretonne documented the dangers of his nocturnal city in his book Parisian Nights. Although it must be noted that Restif himself wasn’t the type of guy a girl would want to bump into in a shady laneway; he was also a pornographer and a shoe fetishist, who gave the heel-obsessed condition its official name, retifism.

  In the name of research, Restif roamed around the Parisian streets at a time the French call entre chien et loup — between dog and wolf. It’s an ancient expression that refers to the period when you can no longer distinguish between the two animals — and, once upon a time, wolves were known to roam just beyond the walls of Paris, so it also suggests a time of danger. A time when the Restifs of the world would come out to prowl and prey; when the light of day no longer kept men on a leash of civility, and the nightfall allowed them to explore their wild side.

  Charles Baudelaire, the Romantic poet I’d had a crush on as a teenager, was another inveterate nightwalker, often strolling the streets of this very island, where he once lived, long before syphilis and booze ravaged his features. Powerless to res
ist the erotic promise of a light-melting sunset, he would often be found lurking around a blackening Paris, his nostrils quivering with excitement as he sniffed out his next source of literary inspiration. Some believe the poet was a synaesthete, meaning his senses of sight, sound and smell would all whirl together. Perhaps, because his words are certainly uniquely evocative. But Paris, with her all-encompassing beauty, does this to you: heightens the senses, stirs the emotions. You feel as though you, well, feel things that bit more.

  My champagne-induced sugar rush slumped, dragging my mood down with it, and a surge of sadness overwhelmed me. A long, emotionally draining day was almost over, which was a relief, yes — but it also signified time to say goodbye. Not just to Zack, but to the life I would have led with him, the me I would have grown into.

  My mum had got it right, I thought. She’d met my dad when she was in her final year of school. By twenty-one she was a wife; by twenty-two, a mother; at twenty-five, she’d finished her first university degree and was on rung number one of her career. She was someone who had a plan, and made sure to stick to it. Her life was orderly and systematised and, it now hit me, exactly how I wished mine could be. I might have careered off course at varying times these past ten or so years, but I realised that lately I’d been hanging onto a subconscious hope that twenty-five would signal a turning point in life, taking me off the meandering scenic route I tended to prefer, onto a more direct life path that would get me to that place where everything came together. When I’d get married, take a promotion, grow up, all that. I suddenly wanted a plan, too.

  Back in my hotel room, I called Mum and blubbered out the sad and sorry story.

  ‘Do some deep breathing while I talk for a while, okay?’ she said, when I had finally come up for air. ‘You’re too young to settle down, there’s still the whole world to explore — which, believe it or not, consists of more than just Paris.’

  ‘But you had done so much by my age . . .’

  ‘It was a different world. Men were different, too. They didn’t get scared about growing up and moving into the next life stage as they seem to now.’

  It was true. Boys just wanted to, well, be boys. The Peter Pan Syndrome. We’d also written about that particular phenomenon in the magazine.

  ‘Then again,’ Mum added, ‘I don’t think girls should marry young either anymore. There are so many more opportunities now, but it’s also more competitive than ever. Focus on yourself and your career and where you want to go as a person. Now, it’s late there, so wash your face, go to bed, and things will seem a lot better in the morning. After all, you’re in Paris!’

  She was right, of course; she always was. And I should totally have taken her advice about going straight to sleep.

  If a fourth glass of champagne would not have been wise, a well-stocked mini bar at my disposal most certainly was not. If I were French, my well-honed sense of rationality — and commitment to quality over quantity — would have ensured that I stopped at three drinks, probably two. But I had far to go on my wishful journey to turn French by osmosis. Any Frenchness I had picked up certainly didn’t yet extend into the realm of drinking habits. So I uncorked a bottle of rouge, and methodically made my way through it while leaning out the window, sighing tragically to the night sky. The tiled and tinned roofs of Paris were glinting in the moonlight, and I imagined with envy the scenes of romantic domesticity being played out beneath them. All I needed was a beret and a packet of Gauloises and I was starring in my own personal French melodrama.

  In a way, Paris is as suited to sadness as to happiness. Just like champagne, it consoles as much as it exhilarates. Melancholy moodiness has been at home there since the brooding days of Romanticism, which idealised a world long gone. The French movement’s founding papa, François-René de Chateaubriand, in 1802 wrote of world-weariness as le mal du siècle. Literally: the sickness of the century. The new world, thought the Romanticists, made people ill. And it was chic to be sick. As Baudelaire wrote, ‘I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy.’

  Ever since, French intellectuals and artists have excelled at pessimism. Many French seem to consider an excess of happiness to be a sign of stupidity. Because if you really thought in any great depth, you couldn’t help but see the woes of the world, and that the best of times are behind us. French melancholy goes hand-in-wringing-hand with nostalgia. Which is fair enough: the French boast some spectacular past glories. But when you consistently idealise the past, the present can never live up.

  In signature paradox style, however, the French do value joie de vivre (of course, they invented the term). They just seem happier striving for happiness than actually attaining it. Because from the giddy heights of good times, of course, there’s nowhere to go but down. And perhaps melancholy and joy are simply, once again, opposite sides of the one centime; how would you truly know what pleasure is, unless you knew what it isn’t?

  The next morning, I experienced what the French call a gueule de bois. Wooden mouth. I’ve never quite got the hangover analogy. For me, the morning-after mouth is dry, sure, but the texture is more on the furry side of things. And that’s just the start. My whole head feels like it’s made of shattered glass, with jagged shards piercing my eyeballs. As my thoroughly disgusted body attempts to detox itself, acrid fumes ooze from the pores of my clammy skin, while my stomach churns, sending hot waves of nausea around my body.

  And so, in this woeful state, I tossed and turned in my twisted, sweaty hotel sheets all morning, in and out of consciousness. The bright Parisian sunshine was glaring through the gaps in the curtains, highlighting my state of messiness, so in contrast to the prettiness of my room, and the beauty of what lay outside. I finally woke to a sensation of relief, my system having mostly purged itself of the previous night. After showering, slipping into a floral dress and painting my lips pink, I headed out into the daylight, large dark glasses firmly in place.

  I wandered down a little side street, Rue le Regrattier. At the end, I looked up to find its original name etched into stone: street of the headless woman. Just above were the robed remains of a statue. I feel your pain, I thought. Turns out that the statue is not of a head-deprived woman, but of Saint Nicolas, who was hacked in half by one of the revolutionaries who ran around the streets of Paris, obliterating all signs of royalty and religion. As for the woman sans head, she was once the name and emblem of a tavern on this site, which no doubt served up goblets of ale that caused many a wooden mouth. My head was still throbbing. But at least I had one.

  I turned onto Quai de Bourbon, which runs along the Seine on the northern side of the island. The poplar trees dotted along the riverfront soothed with their dappled shadows, and the pink geraniums bursting from the window boxes above seemed to freshen my stale senses. This was surely the ideal place to mend a broken — or at least fractured — heart.

  Île Saint-Louis, for all its harmoniously balanced beauty, has certainly seen its share of emotional turmoil. At number 19, a plaque tells you that Camille Claudel lived and worked there from 1899 to 1913. ‘At this date, [she] ended her brief career as an artist and began the long night of internment.’ And because that doesn’t sound bleak enough, it ends with a quote from a letter Camille wrote to her once paramour, fellow sculptor Auguste Rodin, in 1886: ‘There is always something missing which torments me.’

  The French don’t say, ‘I miss you.’ They say, ‘You are missing from me.’ I had not before fully appreciated the strength of the sentiment, but it was starting to make total sense. When someone you love rips himself from you, it aches as though a very piece of you is absent; you are no longer complete.

  Perhaps Camille was articulating her agony when she smashed up years’ worth of sculptures in this very studio. Soon after, her family locked her in an asylum, where she would remain for the rest of her days, even against her doctor’s wishes. The thought of the creations that were destroyed, as well as those that never materialised — precious works of onyx an
d marble cut as precisely as a flawless diamond — is enough to make your heart pang. Let alone the thought of Camille’s pain as she pined her half-lived life away.

  This wasn’t the ending Camille’s story was meant to have. Prodigiously talented, she began modelling in clay at the age of twelve. Sculpting was considered a dirty, unladylike profession, but the beautiful Camille wowed everyone with her brilliant hands, including the legendary Rodin, who took her on as an assistant, a status that was swiftly upgraded to muse and lover. He was twenty-four years her senior and married by common law to the long-suffering Rose Beuret. Madly in love with Camille, he promised to leave his wife but never did, which infused their passionate relationship with an agonising, tormenting tension — as highly and tautly tuned as the muscular expression of their works.

  During the couple’s most ardent years together, they each sculpted a couple in embrace, and while the similarities are striking, it’s the key difference that’s most telling. In Rodin’s The Kiss, we see a man and woman hugging in a traditional manner; she is scooped beneath him, her lips raised to his as his manly physique curves protectively around her. In Camille’s Cacountala, however, it’s the man yearning upwards, on his knees in supplicant mode, begging for a kiss from his passive partner.

  Camille wanted more from Rodin than he could give. She needed a man to not only adore and worship her, but hand himself over to her completely. In her later autobiographical work, The Mature Age, a young woman — now the one on her knees — imploringly reaches up to an older man, who is being dragged away by a harpy of an elderly woman. The message is hardly subtle. But the utter rawness of emotion behind the sculpture snatches the breath; so twisted with pain and sorrow is it, you wince just looking at it.