Paris Dreaming

by Katrina Lawrence

  We walked down the Hall of Mirrors, the central gallery of the palace. Its inner wall is lined with seventeen arch-shaped mirrors, while sunlight streams through the arcaded windows opposite, flickering around the chandeliers before bouncing off the mirrored glass. You can almost see the reflections of spirits of partygoers past, their festooned wigs tickling the crystals suspended above as they twirl around the parquet floor in glossy ball gowns and flashing jewels. But there’s an unbearable lightness to it all. With the vaulted ceiling above, heaving with gold and paintings of the glorious Sun King, living there must have felt like fluttering around in a gilded cage.

  It’s not until you turn into Marie Antoinette’s official bedroom that you really sense the suffocating splendour, the abundance of dazzling gold and full-blown floral fabrics, magnified in mirrors, that comes so very close to the edge of crassness. The throne bed, the central feature, is as extravagant as the queen herself must have appeared. The bed is covered with gown-worthy upholstery of rich brocade woven in roses, ribbons and peacock feathers, and just like Marie Antoinette’s towering wigs, up top looms a heady canopy, with a riot of golden imperial eagles and white ostrich plumes.

  Feeling somewhat overwhelmed, we ventured outside for fresh air, and wandered by the lush green carpet of lawn leading down to the grand canal, every now and then taking a detour and turning into a maze of hornbeam hedges to come across a dancing fountain or a party of statues. Still, there’s even a constricting formality there, an overly contrived precision to everything. It’s no surprise that the word etiquette can be traced to this very spot. The story goes that the Sun King was so annoyed by guests trampling his lawn or jumping in the fountain that he had his gardener place little signs everywhere, telling people what to do — and not. In Old French, estiquette was the word for label, and une etiquette still means that, as well as the prescribed social protocol that reached peak craziness at Versailles, where only certain ranks could sit on stools or pass the king his gloves.

  You can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief as much as delight as you amble into the queen’s private park, where she would run to escape the pressures of palace life. The gardens there are as pretty as a pastel tapestry of an English pastoral scene; Marie Antoinette favoured a landscaping style far removed from the orderly nature of typical French parks, with their neat flowerbeds and rows of trimmed hedges. Here and there is a gorgeous folly, such as the Temple of Love, its domed roof held aloft by a dozen columns encircling a statue of cupid. Over by the lake perches a pretty octagonal pavilion, known as the Belvedere, the queen’s music room; its classic exterior, sweetly adorned with a garlands-of-fruit frieze, is beautifully offset by a finely detailed interior of marble mosaic flooring and floral wall motifs. You swear you hear the old harpsichord still at play. Nearby is a rugged rockery complete with grotto — the very one in which the queen was said to be found when the ravenous mob was marching to Versailles.

  And then we stumbled into one of the reasons for that mob’s anger towards their queen. The Hamlet was Marie Antoinette’s hobby farm, inspired by her idealisation of Norman rural life: a cluster of life-size doll houses, decorated with beams and bricks, prettied up with flowering vines, and topped whimsically with thatched roofs. The queen must have felt pure unadulterated happiness when wafting through there in her soft muslin dress and sun hat, so out of touch with reality that she had no idea the rest of the world thought she was making a mockery of them.

  ‘She just really wanted the simple life,’ I reflected. ‘Even if simple is a relative term.’

  ‘An earth mother after my own heart,’ said Janey, who loved the beauty world but ultimately craved living in a country cottage with a brood of babies.

  ‘You can have your farms,’ responded Karlie, having grown up on one. ‘I could totally get used to living back in that palace.’

  We met up for dinner with friends newly arrived in Paris, at a restaurant–nightclub that just happened to be located on the old site of Le Grand Mogol, the fashion boutique of Rose Bertin, Marie Antoinette’s designer. More fitting still, across the road was once the opera, famed for its masked balls where the queen, liberated from the trappings of her public role, would anonymously party and flirt the night away, often until dawn was breaking.

  ‘If Marie Antoinette were alive today, I wonder if this is the kind of place she would party at,’ I wondered, looking around at the ruby-hued, moodily lit room.

  ‘They certainly have some delicious desserts,’ sighed Mel, looking longingly at the menu.

  ‘Hey, did you know that she didn’t ever say ‘Let them eat cake’?’ I asked. ‘But the French hated her so much that they attributed it to her. The fact that they thought she could say it was enough.’

  ‘All I’ve ever heard is how superficial and vain she was,’ said someone else. ‘A party girl, like the Paris Hilton of her time.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ cried Janey at the mention of the Californian heiress famous for being famous. ‘She doesn’t deserve the name Paris.’

  ‘You have to read the book, it’s eye-opening,’ I added. ‘Marie Antoinette did party, but she was young and not prepared for the role she had to take on. She reacted by rebelling, and for a while she was just this frivolous girl who liked fashion and big hair and pretty things too much.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t sound familiar at all!’ said Janey, laughing.

  ‘Some of us are growing up and getting all married and mature,’ Mel said, poking Karlie, who was already yawning, unsure if she’d make it to the dance floor in the basement bar.

  ‘You know, Marie Antoinette did grow up,’ I noted. ‘She became really motherly and tried to simplify her life, but it was too late. France was already on its way to revolution and they never forgave her for being that party girl.’

  ‘Well, I totally do,’ said Janey, getting ready to disappear downstairs.

  Later on, I wondered about the impact, on France, of Marie Antoinette, arguably the most famous French woman in history — even though she wasn’t born French. For a while the queen was accepted with open arms. She played the Parisienne to perfection, her frilly dresses and festooned hairdos slavishly copied. But the forces of destiny were against Marie Antoinette, and she couldn’t step up when history required it. She hadn’t been brought up to be so multifaceted. The youngest of many daughters, she wasn’t expected to be a wife to anyone important, and so she wasn’t educated beyond dancing and harp-playing. The French might be starting to see their former queen in a more flattering light — through the sympathetic eyes of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun or Antonia Fraser — but back then she became the symbol of what a woman shouldn’t be. The French expect women to be more than just a pretty face, to have brains behind their beauty.

  The French talk a lot about savoir-vivre, the ability to live life tastefully and a modern form of etiquette — which spoon to use when, and so on. Developed after the Revolution as a code for civil behaviour, savoir-vivre was a cloak of politeness to keep the rebellious tendencies of the French in check. So to-the-letter have the French defined the concept that we use their expression in English, rather than the literal translation: to know how to live.

  A subset of savoir-vivre is savoir-faire, and it generally means, in French, what it does in English: know-how. You might have amazing savoir-faire when it comes to, say, making a macaron or applying blush. But I like to take the literal translation: to know how to do, to make. You see, what I’ve learned from the French is that you can’t have savoir-vivre without savoir-faire. You can’t live without doing something good, making something of yourself. You can’t just be a bon vivant, a good liver (and I don’t mean the foie gras kind). You have to be a person with a rich inner life, too, one that translates into a full outer life.

  I was still in the midst of my bonne vivante phase, and I made no apologies for it, because I knew it wouldn’t last. I hadn’t been born into overt luxury and frivolity — I was simply lucky enough to have landed a job in a glamorous world, one o
f perfume parties and Parisian lipstick launches. But I knew that it was ephemeral, like the youthfulness my industry so loved to celebrate. I knew my parents expected me to be more, do more, and I would expand, like so many other women do, lucky as we are to live in times that have freed us from the gilded cages and corsets of the past, that allow us to write our own stories. My next chapter was around the corner. Maybe it was marriage, as it was for Karlie. Perhaps a promotion. I knew I’d have to progress in my career at some point soon. But for now, I was having too much fun to worry about it. As I might very well have proclaimed: let me eat macarons.

  CHAPTER 7

  FEMME

  femme nf woman

  In which, aged a third-of-a-century, I find my place in the world.

  Resting my head against the cool stone of an ancient arch, I slowly exhaled. For the first time in so long, I felt re-centred. The Cloître des Billettes, with its graceful curves and cobbled courtyard, never ceases to inspire a sense of calm, silencing the white noise in my mind. Paris’s only remaining medieval cloister might be small, but the serenity is pervasive. When you step through the archway entrance, away from the overstimulations of the Marais (the crowds, the cafés, the bars, the aching hipness), you feel as though you’ve glided back to a time when there actually was time, to reflect and to hear your deepest thoughts. There was no better first stop for me on this soul-searching trip to Paris.

  My dilemma was my future in journalism, and in New York, where I’d moved a couple of years earlier, thinking that’s what I had to do in order to advance my career. But the media landscape was changing more radically than my personal horizons. Blogging was fast becoming the thing to do, with writers putting themselves front and centre, increasingly before a camera. This cult-of-self approach to media particularly suited America, and the me-me-me nature of Manhattan. It seemed as though everyone suddenly wanted to be famous, although I couldn’t understand why. Celebrity status only served to shove you, warts and all, into the harsh spotlight of an insatiable press, particularly the tabloid magazines and websites that were proliferating in practically every Western country.

  Except, that is, in France. I loved that the smutty trend for trash talk hadn’t yet sullied the elegant dark-green newsstands of Paris. There was a tone of civility to the press that was lacking in most other Western markets. Truth was, French privacy laws prevented journalists from delving too deeply into the lives of public figures. Some complained that this reined in investigative journalism, and diluted the power of the press. But that wasn’t my field. I was a beauty writer — the grittiest I got was when I dug into the issue of blackheads. And, of course, I wrote for advertisers as much as for readers. I belonged to the If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, Don’t Say Anything school of journalism. Which I didn’t mind at all. It seemed so very French, in line with a culture that believes dirty laundry, even of the designer lingerie kind, shouldn’t be displayed beyond one’s own secret garden, that place of shadowy retreat within every French woman.

  Or, perhaps, one’s inner cloister, the site of personal reflection. I, for one, preferred to work through my own issues in solitude. I’ve heard it said that confessional journalism best suits Protestant cultures, with their history of public confessions. Me, I was like France: Catholic, lapsed (I still believed in God; as Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century philosopher basically argued in his famous wager, what did I have to lose in doing so, really?), yet nonetheless still accustomed to a certain level of fear and guilt (some might say a love of suffering), along with a deep-seated sense of ritual and propriety. Part of this is that confession is a private affair: you spill all to a priest and — voilà — absolution. But even if you no longer make it to the confessional booth, sin feels like a subject best kept boxed in, not publicly aired and shared.

  The Billettes Cloister dates to an era when France was arguably the world’s most Catholic nation. Curiously Paris, having converted to Christianity well before so many others, was the first European city to de-Christianise. Not that she’s as secular as you might think — signs everywhere prove the lingering influence of Paris’s Catholic past. Point Zéro of France, the spot from which all distances are measured, the very heart of the nation, lies just in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral. The Panthéon, the resting place for France’s greatest men (and a scattering of women), is a deconsecrated church. Some argue that the French State, with all its pampering interventionism, is the new church to which subjects dutifully submit (and pay exorbitant taxes), and that the country’s beloved intellectuals are akin to clergy. The French still think in terms of good and evil, although they’re often accused of leaning to pessimism, fearing the future as their ancestors once dreaded the Apocalypse. Family is the new religion — witness many French people’s enduring commitment to Sunday clan lunches. In fact, the French seem to have an ingrained desire for social rituals.

  Oh, and they love a show of glamour and glitz, which is surely also some kind of sacred throwback; after all, few know how to do pomp and pageantry like the Catholic Church. I’ve sometimes wondered if the awe-inspiring baroque beauty of Catholicism was a key reason France eschewed the Reformation — with all its gloomy black garb and angry Calvinist talk — in the first place. Some say the country lost out by banishing its labour-intensive Protestants — tradesmen and merchants — who went on to power up England’s industrial age, and build America into global power-player status. The French, on the other hand, have always had a wary relationship with work and income, viewing flashy shows of material success as some sort of social sin. To this day, the French remain tight-lipped on the subject of money, whereas New Yorkers, say, have a knack for measuring your vital statistics — top of which is net income — within nanoseconds.

  Did France simply give up and in by rejecting the Reformation, filing it in the too-hard basket? And also, was I giving in by not working myself to my full potential? Because I had all but decided to quit New York and move back to Sydney. America had challenged me to succeed, to climb the proverbial ladder, and I had clawed my way up several rungs, which was exhilarating at times, but mostly it was tiring. One day I woke up and realised I wanted a good life, not a hard one, even if the latter brought the success I had originally dreamed of. It wasn’t because I saw success as an evil of any kind (my Catholicism is at an advanced state of lapse, remember) but it was just that I didn’t see it as my right. Actually, that’s wrong; it was a right — but no more than my right to a calm, tranquil life. And I alone could make the correct choice for me. I guess some people see successful as the definition of a good life, but good is such a malleable and personal notion. At the time, I craved a life that was happy, above all. I wanted to stop demanding more and more of myself — you usually end up only letting yourself down — and trust in a higher power than myself (not God so much as the universe) that everything would work out. And perhaps, yes, like France, I was taking the path of least resistance. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that, rather than speed along a concrete highway of life, I would be so much happier sauntering along quieter streets, enjoying the scenery — which, for the moment, would be Parisian.

  A marais was a swamp, or marsh, in old French, which is a rather unpromising name for a district, you have to admit. Nevertheless, this was the scene of intense aristocratic action in the seventeenth century, when nobles lavished the drained, fertile lands with mini urban châteaux. At the time, architectural style was transitioning from medieval to classic — why you might spot a Gothic turret or tower here or there — and it was in the Marais that the template for the French hôtel particulier (private mansion) was set in grandiose stone: a curtain wall complete with a hefty wooden door behind which was a courtyard large enough for a carriage to turn, along with said mansion and a pretty garden out back.

  My rental apartment (not a chandelier-lit manor but a beam-ceilinged studio in a poky walk-up) was just down from one of the Marais’ most legendary abodes, that of Pierre Beaumarchais. On the eve of the Revolution, the
overachieving Beaumarchais was working as a clockmaker and music teacher at the royal court during the day, and a subversive at night, supporting the American War of Independence and donating his own money to the cause, even before France officially entered the fray. Beaumarchais also played a role in his own country’s Revolution by writing, in this very mansion, The Marriage of Figaro, in which a valet chastises his count with the famous lines, ‘Just because you are a great nobleman, you think you are a great genius — nobility, fortune, rank, position! How proud they make a man feel! What have you done to deserve such advantages? Put yourself to the trouble of being born — nothing more.’ It was no less than a theatrical call to arms.

  Beaumarchais was a believer in meritocracy over aristocracy, and it was this individualistic spirit that animated the new world of America, the doctrine that everyone deserved a mansion if they worked hard enough, were talented enough. On the slim island of Manhattan, this can-do attitude can still be found at its most potent concentration. I loved the fact that, there, you could become whoever you wanted to be. Still, I could not see myself there — nor a version of the self I wanted to become. She was back home, or perhaps she was most at home in Paris. After I’d settled into my Marais apartment that first day, I noticed that the owner had hung a large black-and-white photo of New York on the wall. I couldn’t help but smile. ‘La vraie vie est ailleurs,’ claimed Arthur Rimbaud, the vagabond teen poet who inspired the Symbolists. ‘Real life is elsewhere.’ Everyone has an ailleurs.

  Paris might have been my personal ‘elsewhere’, but I had, for a time, lost my inner Parisienne. She was floundering about somewhere beneath my excess layers of American fat, a cumulative result of consuming the surfeit of sugars that lurk unexpectedly in so many American foods. I didn’t just have a muffin top but, as the French would say, a brioche — a bulge of belly. It rose up slowly but surely, until one day I couldn’t zip up my trusty LBD, my go-to frock for job interviews. As distressing as the dress episode was, there was a silver lining: it spurred me to delve deeper than skin-surface in my work, venturing beyond beauty into health journalism. Inspired as much as distraught, I eventually worked out how to eliminate toxins from my body. By the time I’d almost decided to leave New York, I had already juice-cleansed much of the city right out of my system.