‘You’ll still be here on June 21st?’ Elsa asked.
Suddenly my brain clicked into compute mode: I realised the date would be exactly four months after my thirty-third birthday . . . which would age me at exactly a third-of-a-century. I’d never heard of a third-of-a-life crisis before, but I now believed in its plausibility.
‘Ohhhh,’ I groaned. ‘I think I’ll need more than downward dog to get me through that day.’
‘Don’t worry,’ laughed Elsa. ‘We’ll go out drinking and dancing, too. Remember, life’s about balance — and I don’t mean tree pose.’
I sat down for breakfast on the terrace of a café on Place des Vosges, a site of almost impossible loveliness. Around the square-shaped park of pruned, lined-up linden trees and lush manicured lawns, four sets of townhouses sit pretty above colonnaded arcades and beneath sloping slate roofs. The symmetry of it all, after the skinny winding streets of the Marais, makes for a surreal sensation; its colours, too — the whimsically patterned red bricks of the façades popping against the garden greens, so bright in contrast to the time-darkened stones of the rest of the district. You feel almost as though you’ve stumbled onto a film set, a concocted fantasy of French urban culture — which in many ways it is, having been conceived as the first city square, something that would not only beautify Paris but enhance civic life. While there’s a cloister quality to the vaulted perimeters of Place des Vosges, its sun-filled scope encourages open-hearted optimism rather that a retreat into introspection. It’s places like this that surely restore Parisians’ faith in a harmonious world, which must be why the park is filled with humanity at all hours of the day, with people celebrating the simple beauty of breathing in life.
My hot chocolate arrived, true to old-fashioned form: dark and plush, more or less thick molten cocoa. I was no longer able to drink coffee, to my eternal chagrin; ever since my Manhattan detox, its taste and smell made me want to retch. Not that this was much of a loss in Paris, mind you, where the coffee was bafflingly woeful. Why, in a city that does almost everything with such delicious panache, could one not get a decent caffeine fix? And why, when café culture was so full of richness and life, was the café itself so thin and bitter? The French had perfected the fine fragranced art of tea, and they had taken hot chocolate to a place of pure decadence, but their dubious excuse for coffee made even the most fervent Francophile somewhat question the extent of this nation’s exulted commitment to bon goût.
As I sipped my chocolat chaud, I looked at the buildings around me, the roofs high-pitched like natty hats. It’s apt that there’s an openness to Place des Vosges, as it was built at the dawn of the 1600s, what the French call the grand siècle, a time when Paris welcomed in the world, and became worldlier for it. Naval exploration and maritime trade brought back a universe of new aromas and flavours (chocolate, tea and coffee represented newly explored continents, and the taste of the exotic ailleurs) as much as a head- and world-spinning array of ideas and inspiration.
I scrawled out a few postcards, and thought about Madame de Sévigné, France’s beloved letter-writer, who was born on this very square in 1626. A well-read girl who grew into a woman whose brains vied with her beauty (almond eyes, rosebud lips, creamy skin, halo of tendrils) for society’s attention, she was totally of her time. Her mind buzzing with novel ways of looking at life — helped along, no doubt, by her taste for the newfangled hot drinks of the time, particularly chocolat chaud (which would, she swore, make ‘the most unpleasant company seem good’) — Madame de Sévigné really came into her own at twenty-five, when widowhood happily relieved her of a rake of a husband (he died duelling over a courtesan), and gave her the legal status of independence. She was now gloriously free to devote her time and energy to herself.
Madame de Sévigné’s epistolary skills are as clear as black and white, and at first you might think what a wonderful journalist she would make in today’s world. Curious from a young age, she developed impressive investigative prowess — being plugged into all sources of information, both low and high, straddling the realms of gossip and intellect — reporting the story of seventeenth-century Paris in the countless letters that survive her. It was her cherished daughter’s devastating move to the South of France that prompted most of the correspondence, but you sense that Madame de Sévigné’s need to write was akin to that of breathing, it came so naturally to her.
But regardless of her unique, expressive, entertaining voice, I doubt she would have taken to journalism, or even blogging. Such writing is essentially one-sided. Even when you present others’ opinions, you are still the one choosing and editing the information. Madame de Sévigné, however, thrived on exchange — and her letters were essentially that: one half of a witty dialogue, in ink form. Her writing is so lively because it is a living thing, something that is in constant flux, one gem in a conversation continually being embellished.
Madame de Sévigné, a dazzling socialite and brilliant raconteuse, positively shone in the salons of the day. It was her great friend, the Italian-born Madame de Rambouillet, who invented the concept of a salon, by inviting a distinguished group of guests from the artistic, literary and social elite to her salone, the famed ‘blue room’, for conversation and canapés, to play word games over goblets of wine. Everyone came together with one aim in mind: to refine their language and redefine their culture. It worked for all: aristocrats of the time, power and wealth diminishing, were searching for a new way to distinguish themselves; women wanted to find a voice, and in turn put their feminine touch on the French language; and anyone else was just happy to be welcomed into such glamorous company. A new high society was forming, and entry was determined more democratically than ever; if you used your words elegantly and wittily enough, you were in. Conversation was a way of connecting and equalising, regardless of place in the social hierarchy, and the epoch’s French writers — who to this day weave philosophical thinking into their prose — filtered the new codes of behaviour and the new style of language to the upwardly mobile people of France, who aspired to a nobility of mind and aristocracy of manners, if not access to a sumptuous salon with its silky chaises longues.
I’ve always loved that it was women who mostly hosted salons, at a time when society granted them next to no political or legal power. Being a salonnière was a stealthy, subversive and seductive form of authority, as only a Parisienne could appreciate. Hostesses used all their wiles and charms to attract the greatest men of the day, and then lure them into their world and way of speaking, so that French was moulded into the most feminine of languages. Music, incidentally, was the only art to not really take off in France (unless you also count the art of coffee-making). I’ve often thought it was because spoken French is melodic enough, all singsongy and mellifluous as it is. The fluidity of French suits conversation beautifully, flowing gracefully like a length of satin, its exquisite words strung together and presented like a jewel-encrusted necklace on a bed of velvet. No wonder so many women swoon over its sounds. I, for one, could happily listen to even a French plumber talk about blocked pipes all day long.
The French Revolution was the beginning of the end of the salon — aristocrats ultimately had to go and get a job, leaving precious little time to ponder puns — but Parisians still love to talk away, in that beautiful accent of theirs. In cafés all over town, plumbers and politicians alike come together over ideas (and, doubtless, bad coffee), in a national conversation that has been chattering on for centuries, making for a most sociable of societies. I doubted my French would ever be strong enough to partake in this particular dialogue, but I found it stimulating all the same. When at a café, I could lose myself in other tables’ conversations. Even if I couldn’t always follow every segue, I’d feed off the passion, the intensity and verve with which beliefs and bons mots were bandied about. I felt like I’d almost forgotten how to talk myself, or at least converse. I’d worked in solitude for so long, in an industry that was increasingly inward-looking, and I was living too m
uch in my own head, not in others’. The medium of conversation might not be recorded for posterity or branded with a byline — I’m sure Madame de Sévigné’s best work was in audio, words that swirled around the salons of Paris before dissipating into thin air and memory — but I had an inkling that bantering would satisfy me much more than blogging.
After breakfast, I wandered a couple of blocks west to Musée Carnavalet, which houses an overwhelmingly expansive collection of knick-knacks from Paris past (Roman remnants, medieval shop signs, toy guillotine), all sprawled throughout two Renaissance mansions. The museum showcases the private lives of Parisians over the centuries, with interiors from long-gone buildings. Sadly, Madame de Rambouillet’s blue salon didn’t survive the wrecking ball of architectural evolution, but you can still wander through some of the rooms of her great friend Madame de Sévigné, a former resident of Carnavalet; she smiles down from portraits in all her embonpoint-rich glory, her cupid’s-bow lips closed into a mischievous smile, her thoughts teasingly frozen to herself.
An equally beguiling Parisienne can be found reclining in another wing of the museum, in a ravishing portrait by François Gérard. Juliette Récamier was one of the Merveilleuses of post-Revolutionary Paris, a period known as the Empire, which gave its name to the sheer high-waisted dresses she wore to seductive perfection. The most celebrated salonnière of her time, indulged by her elderly banker husband, Juliette adorned her home with trend-setting furniture inspired by the idealised ancient world, and men flocked from all over town to wistfully watch her lounging about barefoot on her various sofas. In Gérard’s painting, she’s propped up on cushions as plump as her skin, in a pose as languid as her dress, and her charms are all too evident. You can only wonder at her conversational skills, of course, but her soft voice reportedly enthralled anyone who came into her orbit, transfixed by her angelic aura.
Juliette was commonly described as chaste, but that didn’t stop her from falling for François-René de Chateaubriand, the lauded founding father of French Romanticism — if an ice-queen is going to let herself melt, it might as well be for someone worth it — and their ongoing affair was suitably torrid. Chateaubriand, incidentally, is one of the reasons writing is taken so seriously in France, a place where writing has long had an intellectual, philosophical bent. But in the years leading up to the Revolution, there was a move away from the witty works beloved by the salon set, with authors of the new romans (novels) addressing the wider public. Victor Hugo was inspired to illustriousness, scribbling ‘Chateaubriand or nothing’ in his teenage diary; countless aspiring writers have since taken up this mantra, and still do. And perhaps this is one other reason French journalists by and large strive for greater literary heights than the gutter. If you must write — an act that will indelibly link you to your ink — do so with as much style as you can muster. You can always save the juicy gossip for your conversation.
That afternoon, I caught up with another friend who had left Sydney for Paris, Yasmin — an astrologer who wrote the horoscope page of a magazine I once worked for. I’d long appreciated astrology as a neat way of explaining away, even justifying, personality quirks (I was Piscean, therefore had the tendency to cry more than most, drink one glass of wine too many, and wear an overabundance of ruffly feminine dresses) — and it’s for this kind of zodiacal psychology that most people turn to the stars these days. But by getting to know Yasmin, I came to appreciate the old-school methodology of it all, which traces back to a time when astrology was structured by strict mathematical rules.
You might at first think there’d be little place for astrology in Paris, the home of harmonious order and rational thought. But France, of course, practically invented the paradox, and the French in fact harbour a fascination with the stars. The astrological craze was imported from the Middle East in the Middle Ages, and soon many French monarchs — including, suitably, the Sun King, Louis XIV — were hanging onto every muttering of their court astrologers. The trend reached its celestial heights in the Renaissance, when the Italian Catherine de Medici came to Paris to marry the future Henri II, bringing along her own personal astrologer. Catherine also fretted over the predictions of Nostradamus, one of which foresaw the gruesome jousting death of her husband, on the very spot where Place des Vosges would later materialise. The Age of Enlightenment and the Revolution might have attempted to usher in a new era of straight-minded seriousness, but the French have remained curiously open to occult sciences. Mysticism is akin to a new religion for many, with some 10 million French people said to be seeing a psychic or stargazer each year. Famously, the late president François Mitterand regularly consulted celebrity astrologer (and former Chanel model) Elizabeth Teissier, often phoning twice a day to check if the stars were aligning in favour of certain political, and even military, manoeuvres.
The French yen for matters of the mystical might seem irrational to some, but at heart it’s about searching for a reason. In a secular society, if you don’t have religion to assuage your fears about the meaning of life, the occult offers up some alluring options. The French, perhaps, for all their rationalism and cynicism — or, at least, nonchalance — deep down want to believe in something bigger than themselves, that there’s method to the madness of life, some kind of order in the whirling, chaotic universe. They might have their feet firmly on earth — their beloved terroir — but the French also have stars in their eyes.
‘It’s strange to see you so at home in Paris,’ I remarked, after meeting Yasmin in a bar in Saint-Germain. ‘You’re the quintessential Bondi girl to me.’
Yasmin used to live right by Bondi Beach, on the sands of which you’d often find her in meditation mode, looking every bit at one with the cosmos. But what you might not at first realise is that beneath the free-flowing curls and swirling gowns there’s a serious mind clicking away — precisely, mathematically — and it’s perhaps this dual nature that drew her to paradoxical Paris, that made it her ailleurs, too.
‘I love Bondi but I’ve also actually dreamed of living in Paris since I was fourteen, when I used to long for the smoky Left Bank jazz bars — I’d even burn Gauloise cigarettes instead of incense,’ she said, laughing. ‘And now it’s like my body has finally caught up with my head. I did a lot of meditating on and visualising coming to Paris before it finally happened.’
A year earlier, the universe had presented Yasmin with the opportunity to live in Paris for a few weeks. She arrived on the night of a new moon, the city shining extra brightly against the barely lit sky. ‘The first thing I did, after dropping my bags off, was to walk to the Eiffel Tower,’ she recalled. ‘That sounds really touristy, but I knew it would be the perfect conductor to send my wishes to the heavens. And so, I stood under the spire and wished.’
‘To stay in Paris?’
‘For Paris to become my home.’
She met Olivier a few months later and a year on, they were still inseparable.
‘Ooh, sounds serious,’ I sighed, after swooning over their amour story.
‘Sure is. So, guess why I’m not drinking?’ she asked with a grin.
I hadn’t noticed Yasmin’s baby bump hiding beneath her flowing dress (a fashion to which — like me — she was quite partial). After the requisite hugs and enquiries into her wellbeing, I had to get to the important stuff: ‘But aren’t you allowed to drink red wine here when you’re pregnant?’
‘I think I found the only gynaecologist in Paris who doesn’t let you drink wine or eat cheese.’
‘Nine cheese-free months sounds like a pretty good deal for what you’re getting in return. I mean, you’re living the dream. This is like something that only happens in books.’
‘You know, people say that to me, but I was living this as a literal dream for so long, now it seems like I’ve actually woken up and can get on with life.’
‘Get on with life — that’s something I need to get onto soon . . .’
‘So I did your astrological chart for you earlier today . . .’
Yasmin isn’t just great company; she also has some neat party tricks.
‘Okay, hit me. I can take it.’
‘There’s nothing to worry about, but you’ve been living a kind of chimera the past couple of years. I can see that you would have felt a bit lost, but it’s starting to clear. You just need to work out how to be true to what you really want.’
What do you truly want in life? It’s never a simple question, really. Especially as you’re usually at your most confused when you most need the answer. At the time, I wasn’t yet able to string my thoughts into a polished sound bite, but I had a few catchwords I kept going back to: home, health, happiness.
‘There’s nothing wrong with wanting a simple life,’ said Yasmin with a smile. ‘And we all need a Rousseau moment from time to time.’
It was French-speaking Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, back in the Age of Enlightenment, taught France the importance of home, of being faithful to yourself, listening to your transparent heart. The patron saint of earth mothers, he urged women to go back to nature and return to their terroir, and eat simple au naturel vegetarian food for calmer constitutions. His philosophy-laden novels waxed lyrical about the delights of rural life and sweet, spontaneous love. Rousseau had lived long enough in Parisian high society to know he didn’t belong, and it was with both disdain and bitterness that he launched himself on a one-man crusade against modern civilisation, with all its airs and graces, which he claimed corrupted human beings’ otherwise good selves. He was a bit of a party-pooper, in other words.
Paris Dreaming Page 20
