Paris Dreaming

by Katrina Lawrence

  Passion can bring out the best in us, but it can also make us crazy, as Camille only too well found out. Lust might razzle and dazzle, but it soon crashes and burns, leaving the unwitting scarred. Love blazes for longer, but the real secret to a well-stoked relationship that glows for a lifetime is, quite simply, Like. There’s perhaps good reason the French use the same word (aimer) for love and like. You can’t genuinely love someone if you don’t, deep down, like them, warts and all. You’re there for the good times, but also the bad ones. Rodin couldn’t leave Rose — his faithful companion of fifty years — because, when it came down to it, maybe he just liked her too much. If only Camille could have found what Rodin already had, she would have been nurtured for life. Everyone needs a Rose.

  Roses are the most contradictory of flowers. From furled-up buds through to full-blown langour, they symbolise the spectrum of life — and yet they’re infuriatingly short-lived, a sign of the fleeting nature of our time on earth, too. In English, we seize the moment with a chant of ‘carpe diem’; the French have poet Pierre de Ronsard’s famous quote in mind: ‘Gather the roses of life today.’

  Roses, for me, seem so emblematic of Paris, and her live-in-the-moment, stop-to-smell-the-flowers beauty. A contrast of soft ruffles and thorn-barbed stems, they nicely symbolise Parisiennes, too, also a paradox of feminine allure spiked with razor-sharp wit. No wonder then that Paris is redolent with rose-blooming florists and rose-drenched perfumes, revelling in a floral obsession that can be tracced back to one of history’s most seductive Parisiennes.

  Several days later, I walked through the wrought-iron gates of Château de Malmaison, once the cherished estate of Emperor Napoléon’s first wife. There Joséphine loved nothing more than to potter about the fragrant gardens of her country manor house, nestled into pretty parklands a seven-mile carriage ride away from the stenches and stresses of Paris. She had a particular fondness for her roses, cultivating hundreds of varieties, enlisting painter and botanist Pierre-Joseph Redouté to catalogue them. His intricately detailed watercolours are technically precise, yet painted with such passion that the lush petals seem to want to burst from the paper. He was surely inspired by the elegant yet disarmingly voluptuous lady of the house, who grew roses not just for scientific purposes — but so she could fill her home and adorn her hair with her favourite flower. One of her more extravagant dresses was pink, covered entirely in rose petals.

  I traipsed along the gravel-strewn path lined with signature rosebushes and topiary cones echoing the high-pitched roofs of the seventeenth-century château. Perfectly proportioned, it’s both grand and intimate — a reflection of Joséphine herself, who treasured her private life, while graciously submitting to the public persona that destiny forced her to wear like a heavy ermine robe.

  Joséphine and Napoléon ushered in the age of post-Revolutionary France, of an expanding French empire, and passing over the threshold of Malmaison — an entrance styled like a striped military pavilion — is akin to stepping into that new world order. The impeccable Joséphine hired the best architects of the day to fit out the house’s interiors with the latest in neoclassical style, a design trend that complemented France’s endeavours to rival history’s great nations. Pompeiian frescoes decorated the walls and ceilings, mini obelisks and sphinxes added touches of Egyptian exotica, and the marble columns would have looked at home in a Roman villa belonging to a Caesar.

  Malmaison also saluted a modern hero, Napoléon, who saw himself as a second Alexander the Great. Tent motifs abounded, which must have made the warrior, ever on the march of war, feel right at home. Rusty tones suggestive of the Egyptian desert reminded him of how far he had ventured. Detailing inspired by military trophies celebrated his prowess on the battlefield and stroked his healthy ego.

  The personal elements of Malmaison are undeniably touching. I could well imagine Joséphine gliding over the black-and-white tiles while directing the designers in every detail. And yet . . . it made me cringe. This was her own personal retreat, which could have been a haven of feminine comfort; instead she turned it into a shrine to Napoléon. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t fair to be so judgemental. Hers was another age, a time when a woman’s survival often meant learning how to please men.

  Joséphine, who came to embody sensual French femininity, was actually a self-made Parisienne. Having been born in French-ruled Martinique to a noble yet poor family, she ran wild and free on the sun-soaked island until the age of sixteen, when she was sent to France to marry. Joséphine immediately fell for her dashing Alexandre de Beauharnais, who in turn looked down his patrician nose at the unsophisticated girl before him. The marriage was not a happy one. After two children — produced despite his many long absences — the serially unfaithful Alexandre separated from his young bride, banishing her to a convent.

  It was at this unlikely place that Joséphine learned the arts of feminine wiles. Her fellow boarders, high-society Parisiennes taking shelter from reality for various reasons, were some of the most graceful women she had ever encountered. She studied and emulated the way they sat, walked and talked (low and soft, diluting her Creole accent). She mimicked their style of flattering, low-cut muslin gowns and suggestively wrapped shawls; and she started to wear rouge, which gave her face a flush that managed to be both girlish and sensuous. In short, Joséphine made herself over into a Parisienne.

  The seductive makeover, malheureusement, didn’t win her back her husband: he was guillotined during the Terror years of the Revolution. But it did help her to get through those turbulent times (including an emotionally scarring stint in jail) and, as a penniless widow and mother of two, to secure some wealthy protectors. A star of the salons, she was as smart as she was enticing, the ideal French woman. No wonder Napoléon saw in her his perfect future empress.

  The trouble is, when you start a relationship atop a pedestal of perfection, it’s all too easy to topple off. Women’s magazine tirelessly run articles on not just how to get a man, but also how to keep him — and it makes for exhausting reading. This constant pursuit of pleasing someone else comes at a cost: your own pleasure.

  Joséphine soon found Napoléon increasingly hard to please. As his successes mounted, so too did his arrogance, and the dynamics of their relationship changed. While Napoléon still loved his wife, often passionately, she wasn’t the Joséphine he had envisaged: one who could give him an heir. Heartbreakingly, Joséphine’s need for Napoléon only intensified as his for her diminished.

  It’s an age-old story, of course. Man meets woman, woos her, wins her over, loses interest. Or how about this one: man trades in wife for younger model. Napoléon divorced Joséphine so that he could go in search of a fresh and fecund new empress, and his former wife retreated to her roses. Like her signature flower, she had bloomed with sensual beauty, but all too easily wilted from the ravages of life, drooping under the weight of her worries and wrinkles, and fading fertility.

  While walking around her gardens one day, in one of her diaphanous muslin gowns — so ephemeral they have dissolved into the past, leaving little physical trace of the style icon for museums to showcase — Joséphine caught a chill, from which she would never recover. Perhaps it felt an apt way to go.

  You can walk through the very bedroom where Joséphine lived and loved, and see the actual bed in which she took her last breath, with her desolate son by her side. The circular room was draped in red fabric to mimic a tent, again to appeal to the warrior emperor’s military tastes. The canopied bed is surmounted by the imperial eagle: Napoléon’s powerful presence forever hovering over Joséphine’s life. I wondered what her final thoughts were. Did she ask herself if it was worth dying for this love, when there was still so much more to live for?

  I blithely whiled away most of my final day in the Jardin des Tuileries, happy for no reason other than the beauty of living. The Tuileries are at their most gorgeous in the springtime, when you can laze on the green chairs scattered throughout the park, admiring the garden beds brimmi
ng with tulips and pansies, and bask in the light glowing through blossom-laden trees. The hours there seem to melt, and it’s all too easy to indulge in this fluidity of time. If you stay until the last burst of sunshine, everything appears to dissolve before your eyes into golden dust, and you fully appreciate why the Tuileries were a favourite subject of Impressionist painters.

  At one end of the Tuileries is the Musée de l’Orangerie, nestled into a neo-Renaissance-style pavilion that takes its name from its Second Empire life as the greenhouse that supplied the gardens with orange plants. It morphed into an Impressionism museum, then one devoted to twentieth-century art. The Orangerie well merits a visit, because eight huge panels of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies remain.

  Monet was the père of the Impressionists, the late nineteenth-century group of artists who portrayed life as their own optimistic eyes saw it: a celebration of colour, movement and sunlight, painted with love and joy as much as with soft, dreamy pigments. Impressionists loved the beauty of the simple life, and of nature, which is why they were drawn to pastoral scenes, but ‘this giddy-fying Paris’ especially enchanted.

  Monet spent his final years just outside Paris, at his house in Giverny, surrounded by the gardens and ponds that so inspired him — and in turn seem to be his very art brought to life. If you can’t make a day trip to Giverny, an early-morning pre-crowds stint at the Orangerie is an alternative oasis for the senses. Sitting before the entrancing Water Lilies, their cool tones of blue and purple glimmering with iridescence beneath the glass roof, you can’t help but be lulled into a meditative mood — a zen state that is otherwise difficult to attain in a city where all senses are continually overstimulated.

  Monsieur Monet would have loved that spring day in Paris, I thought, as I sat down for afternoon tea at one of the park’s cafés. Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘April in Paris’ was crooning in my head. ‘Chestnuts in blossom. Holiday tables under the trees . . .’ And there, under the flowering chestnut trees, I nibbled on a chocolate éclair, its wispy pastry shell and whipped-cream filling so light I swore it couldn’t possibly contain a single kilojoule. It was Paris in a dessert: sweet, frothy, feminine and so very satisfying.

  It was approaching a respectable hour for my final Parisian flute of champagne — and this time it would be for reasons of celebration not commiseration. I walked along the Seine, pulling my pashmina around the fluttery straps of my sundress (how very à la Joséphine of me), as the crepuscular sky slowly tinted the atmosphere a moody lilac blue.

  L’heure bleue is one of the most celebrated times in this city of so many lights; it’s that enchanted hour suspended between day and night, a sliding-doors moment where you have the chance to drift into another world, and explore the mysteries of nocturnal Paris. You can almost hear the footsteps and sense the quivering nostrils of Baudelaire’s ghost.

  Another synaesthete, Jacques Guerlain, so loved the blue hour of Paris, and the new moods and aromas that bloomed with the descending darkness, that he bottled it. He, too, had been walking along the Seine one dusk, and noted how Paris turned herself into an Impressionist painting, all aglimmer in Monet-worthy blues and purples. In Guerlain L’Heure Bleue — one of the first thematic fragrances, capturing the complexities of a mood — he interpreted this vaporous quality with powdery iris. Yet the blue hour promises so much more — a lush, velvety after-dark — which is perhaps why Monsieur Guerlain soaked the base of the perfume with a heady musk, making for a sillage — or perfume trail — so entrancing it would have had Baudelaire’s nose in absolute thrall.

  My favourite place to be when Paris is awash in blue is Place Dauphine, on Île de la Cité, as its hushed otherworldliness is only enhanced when seen through such a nostalgically toned filter. (Perhaps this is why the author Colette ordered her sheets of paper in a pale-blue tone from the Papeteries Gaubert, which still sells her favourite old shade.) When you walk through the western tip of the triangular piazza, you feel as though you’re stepping into Paris past. The red brick buildings trimmed in stone hark back to regional French architecture of the sixteenth century, giving Place Dauphine a rustic, village-like quality.

  I sat outside — en terrasse — and inhaled a rosé champagne along with the aroma of the pink blooms that were bursting from the chestnut trees dotted over the triangle of a ‘square’ before me. Surrealist writer André Breton once named Place Dauphine the ‘sexe de Paris’ due to its suggestive shape, and indeed it’s a most intimate and feminine oasis.

  Maybe I wasn’t meant to share Paris with a guy, after all, and maybe the reason I was so drawn to this city wasn’t even to meet un homme — it was to get to know myself. Instead of the romantic itinerary I’d devised — long since torn up — I’d had ten days of chaste solitude, walking any and every which way around town, my long-term vision distracted by the live-for-the-now beauty of the city around, and above, me. Paris is a place that trains you to look up, I thought, which seemed apt, as I felt like I’d lived much of life with my head in the proverbial clouds, that I didn’t spend enough time taking careful, strategic steps, or watching for signs that scream ‘Danger! Turn back!’ I knew where I wanted to go, I realised, but didn’t map out how best to get there. As you can imagine, it made for much time-consuming meandering and quite a few dead-ends — yet also pleasant views and surprises along the way. Which is, when you think about it, reflective of the Paris experience. There are all sorts of monumental destinations to tick off your to-do list, but no one perfect way to reach them. Paris is for walkers and wanderers, as much as for drifters and dreamers. It’s the city that allows you to find your own way — and yourself.

  I hadn’t visited any of the usual tourist landmarks, although I noticed many couples posing with them in the background, creating their own future soft-focused memories and wall art. While it made my heart lurch a little, I was glad that Zack and I had ended things elsewhere, that he had dropped me off just outside Paris. It meant that there were no bridges that would forever remind me of a past love that went nowhere, no monuments whose grandeur would mock old aspirations. Paris remained my own escape, a haven and sanctuary, where I only had to please, and learn to love, myself.

  I thought a lot about the woman I wanted to become on that trip. I wasn’t sure exactly who she was, but I knew who she wasn’t: someone who saw everything purely through the prism of attracting a mate. In short, the woman I thought I was writing for. Beauty, I now knew, was at least as much about feeling, as looking, good. It was about the rose-drenched fragrance that fills you with joy, the pretty lipstick that picks your confidence back up, helps you get out the door again, your head held high. The real beauty of life was in being happy with the face you showed the world, in not having to rely on too much artifice. That was how to avoid the real Impostor Syndrome.

  I was growing up, I figured; maybe this twenty-five-year-old business wasn’t going to be all bad. In fact, it was starting to feel quite liberating. I didn’t have a plan, but I could make any plans I liked. There are many tales of Parisiennes that teach the dangers of being one half of a couple at the expense of being one whole of a person. Of course, it was now an era when we didn’t need a man to live a fulfilled life. The world had drastically changed since my mother had clocked up a quarter-century; women could do almost everything — just, as Mum noted, not everything at once. There was a wealth of choice — yet another reason not to have a plan. Modern life required an open mind as much as an open road — just as I preferred to explore Paris without an itinerary. I decided I liked the meandering scenic route after all.

  CHAPTER 6

  BONNE VIVANTE

  bon adj good; vivante adj living; good-time girl

  In which, aged almost thirty, I learn the real secrets to savoir-vivre.

  The job of a beauty editor is a curious one. It’s as frivolous and fabulous as it sounds, yet seriously critical to the bottom line of magazines, which are propped up by the financial might of fragrance and makeup advertisers. In the same breath, a beauty editor
might find herself talking psychographic segmentation with a brand’s marketing team while cooing over the coral shades of a new blush collection. Many women have trouble reconciling the two-faced nature of the job — as pretty as the faces might be. But I’ve come to the realisation that to get your head around the sublime ridiculousness (or should that be ridiculous sublimity?) of beauty editing, you need to have the kind of insouciant outlook on life that allows you to see the little things as worthy of consideration, while keeping the big ones in perspective with a near-flippant nonchalance. In other words, you need to have a French way of thinking.

  I was nearing the grand age of thirty. I had not for the first time heard it said that perhaps I was growing out of my role. My mum didn’t tend to wonder out loud when I was going to get a ‘real’ job, but I sensed the question hovering permanently on her lips. Beautifully balmed and tinted lips, I might add. Mum relished helping me road-test beauty products, something that might have aided in her acceptance, if not understanding, of my chosen profession.

  My editor had taken me aside several times to ask if I wanted to move on and up, to ascend the masthead ladder, but I stubbornly dug my kitten heels into the beauty rung. My desk might not have had a corner-window view, but I could nevertheless see Paris on the horizon. I not only received regular parcels from the global beauty capital, but my work took me there on occasion, to interview a perfumer, test out some innovative haircolouring technique or celebrate a new lipstick range over afternoon tea. Tough gig, non?

  But my favourite Parisian event by far was the launch of my best friend into married life. I had met Karlie in my early beauty days, when she was working in a public relations agency that specialised in makeup and skincare. We bonded over more than just lip gloss. Both newcomers to Sydney, we helped one another navigate our adopted city, the urban jungle of office politics as much as the dim-lit intrigues of after dark. Karlie rode a lipstick-red scooter in those days, and must have caused countless cases of whiplash. It was evident to all that this head-turning beauty, who carried an immaculately penned Filofax in her glamorous bags, was going places. Karlie was the first among us to get engaged — to a French-Australian, no less, with a wedding to take place in a château in the South of France. At the time I didn’t think to bemoan the fact that our social group was starting to grow up. I was too damn excited, for one. And, as bridesmaid, I had the enviable task of seeing to a hens’ celebration in Paris.