Paris Dreaming

by Katrina Lawrence

  By the break of the following century, however, time had worn some lustre off the Ritz, and the cool new hotel on the block (well, just back on Rue Saint-Honoré) was Costes, where we decided to head upon realising the time: ‘kir o’clock’, as Karlie put it. So intimidatingly glamorous is this hotel that you almost need to have a fortifying drink before you enter through its glossy black doors, although once you’re in the lush pomegranate interior — the air scented with roses and spices, and buzzing with Costes’ signature electronic lounge music — you’re as at ease with the opulence as Pompadour in her palace. We slunk into the plush bar and ordered a round of bellinis from a waitress whose mix of beauty and boredom suggested that she didn’t see this as her ideal day job.

  ‘Have a look: all the waitresses could be models,’ whispered Janey. ‘It kind of puts you off your food!’

  ‘Not me,’ exclaimed Mel, perusing the bar snacks menu. Before she had turned beauty editor — and self-confessed gourmande — Mel was a makeup artist, and working in such proximity to beauty had normalised it for her somewhat.

  I too had become accustomed to models and their freak-of-nature gorgeousness. Flocks of long-legged, long-lashed gazelles would linger for hours in the magazine office, in the hope of being cast for the next fashion shoot. I’d also interviewed many supermodels, getting so close and personal that I could attest to their perfect poreless skin. At first it depressed me no end. But I came to realise that it was simply their job to look beautiful; mine was to write. And this gave a new perspective to beauty editing for me, a realisation that my pages should try not to over-promise. Because a face mask and concealer and the right shade of red lipstick will make you look a whole lot better, sure, but you’re only truly going to look like a top model if you were at the front of that particular DNA queue to begin with.

  The occasional acquaintance has asked me if I worry that magazines sell unattainable glamour. It’s a tough one. Because I know that some women feel inadequate in the face of the type of beauty that usually graces glossy pages. But I also know that most women like looking at beautiful things. And I do believe that women, complex creatures as we are, are smart enough to pick and choose what we take from magazines, which are not purely about beauty, but are a whole package — like women ourselves — with looks being just one element. If you’re into beauty, great: read those articles and buy the mascara. If not, no problem: flip past to the career section or the food pages.

  A gazelle of a waitress clattered our dinner on the table — all too eager to offload the kilojoule-laden plates, as though she was fearful of ingesting fat vicariously — before turning on her vertiginously high stilettos and strutting off. ‘Somehow I don’t think she’s a foodie,’ observed Mel, spreading a chunk of foie gras on a tartine. ‘Although I wish I wasn’t one myself sometimes. I’m trying to be careful because there’s not much give in the dress I want to wear for the wedding.’

  ‘You know you’re practically eating pure fat, right?’ Karlie asked. ‘Foie gras is French for fatty liver.’

  Mel froze, the pâté-laden toast hovering just below her mouth, a look of panic in her eyes. ‘But I thought I was just eating protein, a kind of Parisian version of a can of tuna. I even had it for dinner last night!’

  ‘I don’t think the Parisians even have a version of canned tuna,’ said Karlie, laughing. ‘You have to watch this French food, it can be sneaky if you’re not careful. You know, all of JF’s French friends, the girls, they hardly eat meals. Perhaps a salad. And they just pick from their boyfriends’ plates.’

  ‘Oh, I thought I was being so Parisian,’ sighed Mel. ‘I’ll go for a run tomorrow to make up for it.’

  ‘Now that’s most definitely not Parisian,’ I said.

  ‘I know, but I’m determined to go home looking more French. And a pot belly is not exactly the ideal accessory.’

  Some time during our blur of bellinis, Mel talked me into being her jogging partner the next day, a pledge I desperately regretted at 8 a.m., when I was woken by a perky and persistent knock on my hotel door.

  ‘Remind me why I agreed to this,’ I puffed, ten minutes later, as we jogged towards the Seine.

  ‘Because I can’t speak French, and what happens if I meet a gorgeous Parisian but I don’t understand that he’s telling me he’s just fallen hopelessly in love and wants me to move here with him at once?’

  ‘I don’t think French men hit on joggers. Otherwise women would be running all over the place instead of swanning about with their perfect sweat-free skin.’

  Sure enough, as we turned into the Tuileries it became clear that running was not one of this city’s pastimes. Women were striding (if en route to work) or strolling (if wheeling their prams over the gravel paths) or ambling (if walking their impeccably groomed dogs), but they were most definitely not sprinting, racing, jogging or anything that was technically pacier than a walk. There, more than most places in Paris, the usual mode is not much faster than that of the park’s statues, figures of antiquity and ancient mythology whose stone faces wear a look of scorn for less-evolved souls who can’t stop and smell the roses — or foxgloves and delphiniums, as the case might be.

  ‘Then how do Parisians stay so goddamn skinny?’ asked Mel.

  ‘They don’t eat fatty liver?’ I suggested.

  ‘Ugh, don’t remind me.’

  Half an hour later, Mel decided that she’d adequately cleansed her own liver, and I gratefully agreed to head back. After such a virtuous start to the day, it seemed illogical to break our fast with croissants and hot chocolate, so we stopped at the market across from our hotel for a fix of fruit (which, until now, had only appeared on our menus in the form of alcoholic grape juice and bellini mixers). As we lined up to order our punnets of berries, two elderly, dignified French ladies in front of us turned around, simultaneously looked us and our workout gear up and down, and swivelled back while shaking their perfectly coiffed, pearly heads. ‘Les Américaines,’ one muttered to the other, who tut-tutted in agreement. We had evidently let the city down by airing our sweaty tracksuits in public.

  Luckily, today was another designated shopping day, and we could make up for our insolent lapse in style. Better yet, it was sales time, which was fortunate, as this was one of my first trips to Paris paying with the newly introduced euro — and the city was suddenly as expensive as it looked. With an economy dominated by the forces of fashion, les soldes are serious business in France; the powers that be even set strict dates for the sales, which can occur only twice a year. (If they could also designate the public display of tracksuits as a fashion crime, I’m sure they would.)

  I was becoming quite adept at this thing called shopping. For the past six months, I’d worked overtime to help launch Australia’s first shopping magazine. It was a period when the so-called fast-fashion of the high street was picking up speed, driven by the world wide web’s relentless output of red-carpet and catwalk images, yet the internet had not yet spread to e-tailing, so there was an accelerating demand for shopping information. We filled that void, jamming every page with photos of the latest dresses, shoes and lipsticks that were hitting racks and shelves that month, and letting women know in which sizes and colours they came, and the number they could call to order instantly. Of course, all magazines are shopping aids in a way (we were just more direct about it, and had a lot less white space); even the word magazine derives from the French word for a shop, magasin.

  No self-respecting shopper can come home from Paris empty-handed — or footed; this is a city of shoes as exquisite as its cakes and jewellery, and heel heaven is Rue de Grenelle, an old and winding, whimsical street of the Left Bank that’s lined with townhouses from the eighteenth century. It was an era of intense shoe mania; Cinderella had been published in Paris in 1697, setting off a craze for fancy slippers. An old French word for slipper is mule, and this backless, slip-on style of heeled shoe became the must-have accessory of the 1700s. Once confined to the boudoir, it was now a fetishly sexy acce
ssory, suggestively easy to kick off. Have a close look at the floral hemlines in the Marquise de Pompadour’s portraits, and chances are you’ll see a minxy little mule peeking out. And to this day, you’ll find at least one pair of seductively pointed mules in most Parisennes’ wardrobes.

  Somehow, by midday, Mel, Janey and I had racked up thirteen pairs of shoes between us, everything from chunky raffia wedges to lace-up golden sandals to that must-have mule. We had trekked as far as the jewel box of a boutique that is Christian Louboutin, where we were trying on pale-pink pumps topped with powder-soft pompoms — the kind of rococo-esque accessory with which the Marquise de Pompadour loved to adorn her hair, thereby providing inspiration for its name. And then something in my mind clicked (possibly fear of the sound of my credit card getting cut in half). ‘Girls, I think we might have gone a little crazy,’ I whispered when the salesman was out of earshot. ‘I mean, these shoes are pretty up there on the wall like art, but do we really want to walk around with fluffy balls on our toes?’

  After all, ‘C’est le pompon’ is French for ‘That takes the cake’. The pompom was a sign, perhaps, of our fuzzy minds, and that we needed to restore our blood sugar levels before trusting ourselves to shop any further.

  Ladurée on the nearby Rue Bonaparte is another one of those dainty boutiques that you only find in Paris, but instead of delectably trimmed shoes it sells treats of the confectionery kind, such as its legendary macaron. The first Ladurée, over on Rue Royale (right about where I flashed my g-string for all and sundry to see) is the original, and dates back to 1862 when it was a tearoom for women, but it wasn’t until 1930 that the head pastry chef struck upon the idea of sticking two almond meringue biscuits together with a creamy ganache filling. In the early 2000s, macarons had become the new cupcake, as food bloggers started spreading the word about Ladurée’s latest pâtissier, who was revamping the treat for modern times. When Pierre Hermé left to unveil his own eponymous pâtisserie down the road on the Left Bank, the macaron wars were on. The battle was for pastry perfection: an eggshell-thin surface that cracks to reveal a mushy meringue-esque texture and a butter-cream or jam filling. Hermé was getting tricky with experimental flavours like Szechuan pepper and salted caramel, while Ladurée stuck to its traditionally ladylike favourites, such as rosewater and raspberry.

  Ladurée is as much about satisfaction of the visual kind, its tearooms an homage to Parisian interior decoration (if the Marquise de Pompadour were alive now, she’d be a Ladurée kind of girl). We had flopped down in the blue salon upstairs, and were luxuriating amid its tasselled velvet splendour. It’s Parisian moments such as these that really soothe the soul — as much as sole.

  ‘Why did I think it was wise to go shopping in heels?’ asked Mel. ‘Oh, and then buy even more of them?’

  ‘Do you know, not one of us bought a pair of flats,’ I said. ‘It’s like we women are gluttons for punishment.’

  ‘Not here they’re not,’ said Janey. ‘Have you noticed how Parisiennes don’t wear heels during the day?’

  ‘They must just wear their heels out occasionally, like the way they eat foie gras,’ noted Mel, ever determined to crack the codes of Parisienne style. After our lunch of club sandwiches and salads — all served on pastel porcelain, naturellement — we wandered down the road to what we’d heard was the city’s best pharmacie. A world away from the Australian chemist, with its garish plastic tubs jostling for attention beneath fluorescent lighting, the French variety is both stylish and serious, selling all kinds of dermatologically tested formulations in appropriately subdued packaging, because French women shop for face creams with as much vested care and interest as they decide on their macarons.

  Seemingly found on every corner, a Parisian chemist can easily be identified by the green neon cross alight above its doorway — or else the larger-than-life-size posters of bare female butts in the windows. ‘As if I wasn’t feeling like a big enough loaf after scoffing down all of those macarons,’ said Janey, nodding towards a blown-up image of one such sleekly defined derrière.

  ‘Have you seen how many thigh-shrinking lotions and creams there are in here?’ asked Mel, after we’d spent some time fossicking around inside. ‘If only they knew about this ingenious trick called running, it would save them lots of money.’

  ‘You know, now that you say it, French magazines don’t seem to go into exercise like we do,’ said Janey. ‘It’s all detoxing pills and massage tools and leg gels. Maybe French women think they don’t have to work too hard at being beautiful.’

  Buying into the dream, we ended up purchasing a basket full of skin oils and lotions, and then turned our attention back to fashion, scouring the nearby Agnès B and Cacharel boutiques in search of that elusive sartorial je ne sais quoi.

  ‘I never knew how hard it would be to choose a stripy navy-and-cream top,’ remarked Janey later that afternoon, over a kir at Les Deux Magots. ‘Who knew it could come in so many variations?’

  ‘I never knew how many shades of white there are in the world,’ said Karlie, who had joined us after her candle-seeking mission. ‘I have total DMF: decision-making fatigue. Or maybe it’s just plain old general fatigue — I feel like I haven’t slept in weeks and my dark shadows are out of control. Hey, can we go makeup shopping?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ I answered. ‘You’re in Paris with three beauty editors. Of course we’ll take you makeup shopping.’

  Sephora is to beauty lovers what a confiserie is to a French kid: a heart-fluttering, mouth-watering array of sensory overload. The first Sephora was founded on the Champs-Élysées, but we ended up in the store under the Louvre. ‘Only in Paris could you sell lipstick beneath the greatest museum in the world without it seeming like a desecration,’ noted Mel, Karlie’s official maquilleuse for the big day. Switching to artist mode, she examined the varying pigments and intensities of the blushes on offer as studiously as she would have viewed the French masterpieces above, and mixed creams together on the back of her hand, palette-like, until hitting upon the perfect peachy-pink, which she blended into Karlie’s cheeks. And just like that, all traces of weariness seemed magically to dissolve. ‘Now that’s what I call a work of art,’ she declared.

  Blush has long been a French woman’s secret to looking in peak form, a way to mimic the healthy effects of the outdoor run for which she never goes. It’s also one of those fabulous French paradoxes that something as seemingly giddily girlish as blush can, in the right hands, become a powerful weapon for a Parisienne. For the Marquise de Pompadour, rouge was the enduring symbol of her fabled charm, the very attribute that propelled her to power in the first place. She was more than just a pretty pink-flushed face; for example, she sweet-talked the king into endorsing the encyclopaedia (penned by her philosopher friends), which he had originally thought to be dangerously enlightening for his simpleminded subjects. Pompadour so believed in the life-enhancing powers of blush that she was still requesting it on her deathbed.

  The painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who came into her artistic own around the time the marquise was applying rouge for the final time, ushered in the modern era of blush with her dreamy pastel portrayals of the beautiful people of Paris. Her most famous subject was the ill-fated Marie Antoinette, and the portraitist doubled as the unpopular queen’s public relations minister, working hard to paint her in a soft and flattering light. Scarlet circles of blush had long been the exclusive stamp of aristocrats — with their preening, powdered ways — so a sheerer flush of cheek colour was one way to revamp the queen, make her appear naturally warm. Alas, sometimes even the greatest blush masterstroke isn’t enough to save a girl.

  Versailles is the ultimate symbol of Old France, and the glitzy majesty that came to be associated with Marie Antoinette. It was also a place of pilgrimage on our last official hens’ day (we would have made Karlie wear a princess tiara if she weren’t so elegant). We walked through the golden gates, over a succession of cobblestoned courtyards. A sprawl of classical magnificen
ce from afar, the pomp ramps up with every step because, even though the scale decreases, the elaborateness of detailing climbs to dizzy heights. Standing in the final courtyard, the cour de marbre — a square paved geometrically in black-and-white marble — you’re struck with the sensation of being on a set, a stage on which balletic glamour and operatic tragedy could unfold — and, of course, have. Columns of pink-swirled marble bolster a balcony decorated in yet more gold, glamorously framing the entrance. It was through these doors that the fourteen-year-old Austrian archduchess stepped — over the threshold into her new life as the next queen of France. And it was on the balcony above, nineteen years later, that she bowed to the angry, hungry women of Paris, pleading for calm while another mob found their way into her bedroom, slashing her bed and smashing her mirrors.

  I’d visited Versailles before, and experienced the contradictory sensations of both contempt for, and envy of, the luxurious lifestyle of Marie Antoinette, whose story I thought I knew (‘Let them eat cake’ and all that). But her tale was extraordinarily complex, as I’d only just come to appreciate on reading Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette: The Journey. So compassionate is Fraser’s take on the queen that I was in tears well before the final pages, when the author concludes that the accidental teen bride was a victim from birth, a pawn of her power-playing empress mother, an unintentional, untrained ambassador for the Franco-Austrian relationship, a misunderstood affection-seeker and pleasure-lover, a yearningly unfulfilled wife, a fiercely loving mother, and the ultimate scapegoat for the economic woes of France.