Paris Dreaming

by Katrina Lawrence

  The big health buzz at the time was French Women Don’t Get Fat, the best-selling book by Mireille Guiliano that would initiate a new literary genre: lifestyle guides devoted to the secrets of Gallic chic, everything from tying scarves to keeping silhouettes trimly intact. Guiliano, the then New York-based head of Veuve Clicquot, had had her own excess-baggage issue during her first stint in the States, and learned to retrain her body à la française — it’s these French time-honed health tricks that are outlined in her book. Through her, I worked out how to lure out my inner Parisienne: to shop at markets; to commit to three good meals a day, lots of them soup; to ritual-eat, sitting down at a table; to aim to feel enriched rather than stuffed after a meal; to go for quality over quantity, enhancing flavour satisfaction with fresh herbs; to nibble on a square of dark, rich cocoa, rather than gobble down a sugar-packed chocolate bar. I was searching for a more balanced life, but through Guiliano I realised you also had to have equilibrium in your body. ‘The key to continued weight loss,’ she writes, ‘is keeping one’s compensations just slightly ahead of one’s indulgences.’

  Believe it or not, there was actually a time when French women did get fat. When the Marais was coming into its fashionable own, the most stylish women around were what you could call Rubenesque, the adjective inspired by the volupté-loving artist. It’s telling that embonpoint, the word once used by French and English speakers to describe plumpness — the kind seen in Peter Paul Rubens’ paintings — comes from the old French for ‘in good condition’. The look was all about almost spilling out of your dress with an excess of pale, pillowy skin. It was a sign that a woman could afford to eat — and eat a lot — and that she didn’t have to run around town in clogs; the maximum effort her dainty satin slippers had to exert was stepping up into a gilded carriage. It was only early in the twentieth century that French women become obsessed with sleekness, remodelling their bodies into lean, mean modern machines.

  I’d been attempting to convert my own body, from fat to muscle, into a slimmer model, by way of yoga. But when, on that first morning in Paris, I unrolled my yoga mat, I found that it didn’t sit right — literally and figuratively. I couldn’t find the floor space to lay out the mat with an appropriate Zen-like smoothness, but what ruffled me more was that yoga suddenly seemed so foreign, so out of sync with its Parisian surroundings. Yoga was my refuge from New York, but Paris, I realised, was my retreat. It’s a place for meditating as you meander around cobbled streets or along tree-lined boulevards, for losing yourself, as much as finding yourself. But it’s much more than a symbolic journey; pounding the pavement, as Guiliano notes, is the most effective form of Parisian exercise — because it doesn’t seem like exercise at all.

  Parisians are programmed to love walking because their city has been designed as such a stroller’s delight. Relatively smooth in surface and small in size, Paris can be easily criss-crossed; there are seemingly endless ways of getting from ah to bé; and any route you choose is a picturesque one. No wonder it was the French who invented the term flâner, which means to walk without any particular purpose, to immerse yourself in your city. The flâneur himself is such a classic Parisian character and concept that the word doesn’t directly translate to English — nor does the act of flânant feel quite as satisfactorily the same anywhere but Paris.

  After exploring my inner vision in the Billettes Cloister, it was time to get back into the real world, so I set out to search for other nooks and crannies of the Marais. I soon found that there’s only one thing that will hamper the happiness that is roaming the streets of Paris. Let’s just go with the French word for starters, as the French language has a way of making everything seem so much nicer: crotte de chien. ‘Merde!’ I muttered, rather aptly, as I looked down to see one of my wedge shoes in a hot brown mess. There are some 200,000 dogs who call Paris home, and it is estimated they leave sixteen tonnes’ worth of souvenirs behind them every day, causing some 650 people to slip on the stuff and break a bone each year. At the very least, it’s a serious risk to your footwear. Even Carrie Bradshaw had just trod her white Louboutins in Parisian canine crotte in the Sex & the City finale. I decided to look at my predicament as an auspicious sign of sorts: that it was time for a new pair of shoes.

  ‘Are those sandals in the window made of leather?’ I enquired on entering a nearby boutique.

  ‘Mais, oui!’ the salesman exclaimed, as though I’d queried whether the world was round.

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame — I’d rather not buy leather,’ I explained. To answer the question writing itself into his furrowed brow, I added: ‘I’m trying to go vegan.’

  ‘But what is “végétalienne”?’ the man asked, more incredulous by the second. By the time I explained that veganism eschews not only meat but any ingredient or material that can be traced back to an animal or insect, he was looking at me as though I had three heads.

  ‘Oh là là,’ he was muttering, as I thanked him and walked out the door. ‘To not eat meat . . . pas normal!’

  Just down the street, I spotted a Bensimon store, and bought myself a pair of the iconic tennis sneakers. They were so comfortably conducive to walking that I soon figured I’d earned myself kilojoule credit for afternoon tea. La vie was all about balance, non?

  Parisian tearooms, or salons de thé, flourished in the late nineteenth century, when women began to take tea in town, in the pretty new cafés designed to mimic their own salons (reception rooms): walls gleaming in polished wood and ornately framed mirrors, ceilings frescoed in pastel scenes and lit by chandeliers, marble tables decorated with porcelain tea sets and plates glistening with bijou pastries. Tea is an unashamedly feminine ritual in France; delicate infusions, basically warm perfumed water, are particularly popular. It’s also serious business: tea menus can read like wine lists, and a sommelier du thé might be at hand to guide you to your perfect palate match.

  My favourite salon de thé is the Marais’ Mariage Frères, with its French colonial air that harks back to the brand’s heritage: the original Mariage brothers claimed to have introduced tea to France, at the court of Louis XIV — a time when commerce with the East was opening up a tantalising new world of sensory pleasures — and later generations of Mariage men traded tea in this very district.

  I sank into a rattan chair beneath a burst of palm fronds, as waiters in creamy-white linen suits scurried around. Once you make a decision from the 500-plus concoctions on offer, there are all sorts of complementary cakes to choose from. I ordered a spice-infused black brew and slice of tea-tinged tarte tatin, the famous upside-down apple tart invented, albeit by chance, by the Tatin sisters. If the French adore tea for its taste of the elsewhere, their pastries are proudly patriotic, celebrating the fruits of their famed terroir (soil); they might sigh over the ailleurs, but their hearts and stomachs rarely leave home.

  Terroir is a word that French people, especially Parisians, say in a somewhat dreamy tone. The concept takes them back to their literal roots, their ancestral region, and the provincial tastes of childhood. ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are,’ asserted France’s original food writer, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Most French people now live in big cities, but they crave one kind of ailleurs above all others: their regional homeland. That’s why homey dishes like tarte tatin (and, on the savoury side of things, ratatouille) are held in such esteem, and perhaps why French chefs load up food with butter and cream, each being a direct expression of the land of a particular region. Cheese, too; think of President de Gaulle’s lamentation, ‘How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?’ The terroir of France is incredibly fertile and varied, with each region boasting its own taste and specialty, yet it’s paradoxically a unifying force: all of the ingredients swirl together in one big copper pot and reduce to the rich essence of France.

  French cooking is intensely nationalistic (some might say this is what has kept it stuck in a rich, saucy rut), and eating in France is not only personal, it�
�s political. There might be 246 cheeses (in actual fact, there are many more), but they’re all fiercely, profusely, fragrantly French. To eat as your ancestors did is to take a stance against globalisation, to stick up for the stubbornly small-time French farmers, still rattling around on their rusty tractors, and stick it to the American conglomerates. But eating à la française can be as fattening as doing so à la américaine, if you don’t approach it in the way Parisiennes do: eat sparingly in the first place, then walk the rest off.

  I was also coming to suspect that my particular personal style preference for floaty dresses had played a major part in my weight drama; my clothes had literally lost touch with my body. Parisiennes, on the other hand, seem to appreciate the figure-checking powers of a sartorial waist. Their fashion history has taught them to be wary of even such a seemingly innocent garment as a tea dress.

  It was the Sun King’s legendary mistress, the fabulous Marquise de Montespan — the very definition of lavish embonpoint — who originally championed comfortable, corset-free dressing for modern times. Such a style of dress conveniently camouflaged her weight fluctuations, caused by a ravenous appetite as much as a scandalous succession of half-royal pregnancies. Although some tut-tutted that looser gowns hinted at relaxed morals, fashion began to lighten up, the stiff and heavy satins swapped for ethereal muslins. Such déshabillés were mostly worn at home, when friends came around for tea, an Anglophile ritual brewed to fullest strength in the Belle Époque, when it was known as ‘le five o’clock’. But the trend eventually ventured outside — one of the first examples of innerwear as outerwear, perhaps? — so there was something inherently erotic in this traditionally private dress, and provocative in its challenge to the definition of formality. By the early twentieth century, these ‘tea gowns’ were flimsier than ever, little more than a flurry of chiffon. But soon most French women reverted to trim tailoring; the slim silhouette was here to stay, but if the corset wasn’t coming back, they had to have some way of keeping their physiques in check.

  Flirtatious feminine dresses no longer indicated any flimsiness of moral fibre, but I sometimes wondered if they gave the impression that the wearer doesn’t take herself so seriously. And perhaps the way I dressed was a subconscious self-sabotaging strategy, a subliminal way of telling the world I didn’t want to power ahead in confident pant-clad strides. Not that I saw this as a weak thing necessarily. The reason I fell so in love with dresses was that they made me feel free — and maybe not just in the physical sense, but also in terms of expectations. Every now and then a friend would comment on my girlish wardrobe, suggesting that I mature my style, and dress for the next job on the rung. Well, perhaps I refused to do so because, deep down, I was still working out what I wanted to do, or be, as the proverbial grown-up. And yes, if I started to get around in sleek dark jeans and neat little jackets, I’d probably look more sophisticated — and oh so Parisienne. But I’m pretty sure that I’d feel like I was simply playing dress-ups. As much as I craved the celebrated je ne sais quoi of a Parisienne, evolving into her lookalike was proving to be a lifelong journey.

  That night, I met up with my friend Elsa, one of those enviable women whose inner Parisienne surfaced at an early age. The Sydney-based makeup artist had just moved to Paris, where she looked every bit the local: tousled hair, complexion bare save for a smudge of black kohl around the eyes, and a long and lean frame, with cigarette-slim legs, that carries off even the simplest clothes — blue jeans, a buttoned-through striped shirt — to glamorous heights. She is the incarnation of the term au naturel, although the French themselves probably wouldn’t choose this expression. In English, it means someone who is naturally beautiful, who has no need to resort to much artifice, while in France it tends to refer to food that’s free from seasoning and sauce (quelle horreur!). Plus, the French know that, when it comes to beauty, there’s no real thing as au naturel. (I mean, do you really think the nation that built a multibillion-dollar industry around lipstick and perfume truly believes that beauty comes easily?)

  ‘I feel so at home here it’s a little spooky,’ said Elsa. ‘It’s like, I don’t have to explain myself anymore, what I do is accepted and even celebrated. Makeup is considered an art form, for one, but also it’s serious work: you’re part of one of France’s largest industries.’

  I confessed, with envy, that I’d been struggling to see the value of my job in recent times. ‘I think what Paris reminds you,’ said Elsa, after some thought, ‘is that beauty is, above all, about taking care of yourself. It’s the whole ‘You’re worth it’ thing — a tagline that, of course, belongs to a Parisian brand.’

  ‘I totally get the personal aspect,’ I replied. ‘It’s also as though the French feel they have a social responsibility to look good.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Elsa agreed. ‘They’re not just beautifying for themselves, but for others; it’s the same for guys here. Looking good is a form of politeness in Paris. Women never run out the door in the morning dishevelled and wearing chunky trainers, then apply makeup in the train and change into work shoes at the office. They show their best face to the world the second they step outside. The footpath is a stage here.’

  ‘I just love how the French have a way of validating so much in life, even things other cultures might dismiss as trivial. There’s an acceptance here that beauty is important, or at least not unimportant.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s of utmost seriousness,’ insisted Elsa with a laugh. ‘Beauty is one of the self-evident joys in life, and every Parisian knows this.’

  It’s true. Parisians conspire, whether consciously or not, to make their city the capital of beauty, from the women walking down the street, to the chocolatiers or florists decorating their windows, to the guys in bright-green uniforms picking up rubbish, to the chefs plating up their delicious delicacies . . .

  Our food arrived. I had ordered une salade de chèvre chaud, a favourite classic French meal of mine that’s found on most menus (which is lucky, as it’s usually the only vegetarian option). I looked down and smiled. It was the perfect mix: little square toasts topped with circular slices of gooey, honey-drizzled goat’s cheese, lounging on a bed of flouncy lettuce and cushions of tomatoes, with some other coloured crudités thrown in to trick you into believing that you’re eating an antioxidant-packed salad rather than hefty chunks of fat and carbohydrate. It’s easy to get hooked on this dish: the contrast between cold and warm, crunchy and soft, sharp and sweet, on its healthy-but-actually-not paradox.

  ‘You know, it’s strange,’ I mused. ‘I can’t understand why there aren’t more vegetarian or vegan restaurants, or even meals on the menu. It so suits the French: their need to be in touch with their terroir, and their love of staying skinny.’

  The French have a reputation, it must be said, for eating all kinds — and all parts — of animals, from horse steaks to duck livers to frogs’ legs. They’re avid meat-eaters from way back; aristocrats feasted on a veritable menagerie of food, but I’ve often wondered if Parisians really got their taste for zoological gastronomy during the Prussian siege of 1870, when a starving city actually did eat the entire contents of its zoo — kangaroos, elephants and all. Still, the much-vaunted nouvelle cuisine, which is at its best when brimming with organic vegetables in colour-popping hues, is to me pure Paris on a plate, the ultimate in terroir to table.

  ‘I think the whole plant-food thing is starting to happen,’ said Elsa. ‘There’s a vegan café near me, for one. Although, hilariously, the owner stands out the front smoking all day. I don’t think people go vegan in this city as a health strategy.’

  ‘In New York,’ I recalled, ‘there are juice bars and raw restaurants popping up on every corner.’

  ‘Diet is more about balance here,’ said Elsa. ‘The French don’t like to be told they can’t have something, especially if it’s something that gives them pleasure.’

  ‘I certainly get that when it comes to French cheese,’ I said. ‘My weakness for it is all that’s stopping
me from going vegan.’

  ‘What about if you included a “Paris clause” in your vegan contract,’ suggested Elsa. ‘So, every time you come to Paris, you can let yourself eat vegetarian — and get your year’s fix of fromage in one hit.’

  ‘That’s certainly one way to get my bum in check,’ I sighed. ‘Gosh, this whole ageing thing, it really is your butt or your face, isn’t it? I know I should start getting more serious about controlling my food intake, but I’m a little petrified that my face would shrivel up, too.’

  The oft-cited mantra that, past un certain âge, a woman must choose between the skin on her face and the size of her butt (basically, the price of a plumped-up complexion is a well-fed, well-rounded derrière) is usually attributed to Catherine Deneuve. One of France’s best-loved actresses, Deneuve was a silky slip of a woman back in her Belle de Jour days. Over the years, as her roles have become meatier, she has happily added some extra kilos to her frame, padding that has helped keep her complexion beautifully cushioned and satiny-smooth. Up on the high-definition big screen, she is as luminous as ever.

  ‘Just keep unrolling that mat, you’ll get there,’ answered Elsa, who grew up with a yoga instructor of a mother and has spent a cumulative total of months twisted into some improbable position. ‘Come to my summer solstice class with me.’

  The summer solstice, which marks the longest day of the year, officially replaced the Catholic Feast of Saint John the Baptist, a bonfire-lit bonanza that itself took over from pagan midsummer festivities — so it’s a neat illustration of the French cycle of worship. Lately, the solstice has been ostensibly devoted to the universal religion of music. It’s the day of the Fête de la Musique, when professional and amateur performers take to the streets of Paris, while everyone else dances the night away in a sometimes primal way that is perhaps not dissimilar to the moves their idolatrous ancestors might have once busted out.