You have to pick and choose your Rousseau. The French, for instance, have obviously ignored the vegetarian bit, and of course most of them nowadays live in cities where they happily partake in the finer things in life. Then again, the French also display admirably utopian sensibilities, and Rousseau can take major credit for that (even though his talk of the common good and general will has been appropriated for evil by not a few dictators). I also have to laud his fashion eye; he might have been a committed misogynist, but his call for women to break out of corseted clothing into breezy gowns fit for a divinity has sparked many a dress trend I’ve happily bought into.
‘Do you want me to read a goddess card for you?’
See, having an astrologer friend really does have its benefits.
Yasmin shuffled a deck of cards and placed them in front of me. I drew Aphrodite.
‘Ooh nice,’ she nodded. ‘This is a card for a woman, not a girl.’
‘In other words, it’s time to grow up?’
‘It’s more that you need to pamper and bring out your inner goddess.’
‘I think I can do that.’ (I had already lined myself up a deluxe facial.)
‘And you should let yourself have fun — wear a beautiful dress and go out dancing.’
‘Already on it!’
On the evening of the summer solstice, Elsa, Yasmin and I met for dinner. Despite its traditionally French name, Chez Marianne is the multicultural Marais in a melting pot, an exuberant tasting platter of vibrant colours and flavours from ailleurs: eggplant caviar, hummus, tarama, stuffed peppers, felafel, and more. For all three of us, of course, Paris was our ailleurs. It surprised locals that we could speak French well enough in this increasingly Anglophone era. Once was a time, back when the Marais was the centre of the social universe, that French was the language to speak, no matter where you lived. By communicating in the words of the salons, you proved that you knew not only how to converse well, but also how to live well, because the French at the time defined civilisation, manners and style — and they conspired to perfect the French language, as almost everything else they created, into a thing of beauty: as seductive as a silken gown, as effervescent as champagne, as polished as a crystal chandelier, as delicious to roll around the mouth as velvety-thick hot chocolate.
Now, of course, the world largely communicates in English, a fact that the French have taken a while to accept — because it’s a sign of not so much globalisation as Americanisation. With every visit to Paris, I’ve noticed more locals willing and able to speak English whenever I struggle to express myself, although admittedly, they seem considerably more eager to do so when they discover I’m not American.
‘Ah, you’re Australian,’ exclaimed our waiter. ‘It’s my dream to open a restaurant in Palm Cove.’
File it under: everyone has an ailleurs.
‘Why do you think women love Paris so much?’ I asked Yasmin and Elsa. ‘Apart from the obvious beauty of it.’
‘One thing I think women adore about this city, and that I really love,’ said Yasmin, ‘is that it seems to welcome you, as a woman, with open arms, no matter who you are, or your age or your style. Paris loves women.’
I thought about my many times there: I’d skipped in the snow like my childhood girl-crush Madeline; as a teenager, I flounced around the streets like some silly baby Bardot; I’d come to Paris to commemorate the end of school and university, to prepare me for the next stages of life and help hone my sense of self; I’d had occasional flings and flirtations there, and overcome my first major heartbreak; and I’d shopped and partied way more than should be legal. But whatever role I was playing at the time, Paris provided the perfect backdrop. And now? I wondered what stop in the itinerary of life I had come to, and how Paris would redirect me from here.
Yasmin had already fallen head over heels into her next life stage, her grand amour, and was quickly en route to the following one: maman. Elsa had also just met the guy she would go on to marry. ‘He’s Australian and wants to go back home,’ she sighed, but not wistfully, as though she’d happily resigned herself to the wisdom of destiny. ‘But I’m sure I’ll be back. I don’t think it’s a place you’ll ever feel old in.’
‘I’ll totally be here as an old maid,’ I shot back, with a laugh.
‘Oh, Kat,’ tutted Yasmin. ‘I have absolutely no doubt you’ll find someone.’
It’s always reassuring when an astrologer believes that your tall, dark stranger is around the corner, but at the time I truly didn’t mind when, perhaps even if, he’d turn up. I guess I’d placed myself in the hands of fate, too, or of some higher power. Sure, it would be lovely to find a life partner — my mum and dad, after all, were poster parents for marriage — but I had to find myself first (as trite as that sentiment might sound), or at least my inner woman.
The French word femme means both woman and wife. In my university days, I would grumble that this implied a woman’s unquestioned fate was to marry, or that you weren’t inherently womanly if you didn’t have a rock on your ring finger. But in later years I came to look at it from another angle: being married doesn’t change who you are — you are still, above all, a woman.
I had also begun to believe that you didn’t even need love — in that tall, dark stranger sense — to have a great life. ‘We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us,’ wrote Romantic author, Germaine de Staël, but even she came to scoff at the whole ‘you complete me’ notion of love. Anyway, Romanticism — a term she, incidentally, popularised — didn’t at the time mean torrid, all-consuming affairs (although she did have her fair share of those); it was about living and feeling the full scale of human emotions. Realism might technically be a separate school of literature, but there was something very rational about Germaine’s passionate approach to life; she was as true to her big heart as her brilliant brain, and threw herself into everything — mind, body and soul. She was as much sense as sensibility.
Germaine was a baby of the Enlightenment, sitting at the skirts of her salonnière mother, listening to the greatest thinkers of the time carve out and polish up new ideas. Her prodigious intelligence was evident from an early age, but there was also more to Germaine: a warmth and passion that lured people closer. She bloomed into a seductive conversationalist who delighted all in her circle, despite being considered gauche and ungainly. Her multifacetedness, too, was seen to be vulgar for a woman; a wife and a mother, a mistress and cherished friend to many, she wanted it all even though she was smart enough to know this was impossible (especially in those pre-feminist times), a thread that wove through her impressive body of essays and novels. Her awe-inspiring intellect thrived on political intrigue, and her morality-fuelled views caused her multiple banishments from her beloved Paris in the rocky years following the Revolution. ‘True pleasure for me can be found only in love, Paris or power,’ she said, but she never gave up on striving for all three, and so much more.
With age, I find myself more and more impressed by Germaine, inspired by her eternal liberal-minded optimism. She might never have found the mutual conjugal love she admired in her parents — I could empathise with the awe such a high standard must have struck in an only child — but she never gave up looking. And perhaps she loved the idea of love more than love itself, and who’s to say which is more fulfilling? Germaine was driven by the pursuit of happiness, the promise of a better future. She was constantly in flux — life being a journey, not a destination, after all — filling her days to the brim, especially with work, something for which she never apologised. One of Germaine’s biographers called her the ‘first modern woman’. Not just, I think, in the proto-feminist, superwoman sense. But she was also a femme according to my French reading of that word — no matter whether she was married (or separated, or in a clandestine relationship . . .), nothing altered her own true sense of self. Of course, being French, she could also do womanly in sartorial terms. Germaine wore flimsy muslin gowns that clung to her ample curves, and trailed a rainbow of colourful s
carves — a worshipper of goddess fashion just like her best friend, Juliette Récamier.
The French, I’ve often been told, don’t do girls’ or guys’ nights out. Since the days of the salon, socialising has entailed a mingling of men and women. The contrast of genders charges the atmosphere with seductive piquancy, inspiring feminine flirtatiousness and keeping men on their polished, gallant toes. It also makes for more varied, stimulating banter, one where all manner of subjects, from fashion to philosophy, are subjected to light-heartedly serious examination. As one of the earliest salonnières of the Marais, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, commanded: ‘I want great and small things to be spoken of, so long as they are spoken of elegantly.’
While I find it admirable that French men and women are so at ease with each other, I couldn’t survive without a sisterhood of sorts. This could well be because I don’t have sisters of my own (and perhaps that’s why Germaine, out of her many friends and lovers, found her kindred spirit in Juliette), but I do believe that, when given the dedicated time and space, women connect with each other in a soul-satisfyingly deep way. Anyway, I think Parisiennes have a secret sisterhood. These were the people, after all, who established salons in the first place to give women a voice, who perfected the art of letter-writing, and turned tea-taking into a long, languid daily ritual, all for the pleasure of relishing one another’s company.
Nourished by our flavourful food and rich conversation, high on rosé wine and bubbly spirits, Elsa and I kicked on to celebrate the remainder of the Fête de la Musique. ‘Go dance, get in touch with those inner goddesses,’ urged Yasmin, before taking herself, and her own inner supreme being, home to bed.
We padded through the paved streets of the Marais, the slowly setting sun shooting its final golden rays across a lapis lazuli sky, then turned into Place des Vosges, its street lamps burning their amber glow against the coral-hued façades. At the end of one of the vaulted arcades, we stepped through a wooden door, into a hidden gem, a literal secret garden. Not many know this back way to the Hôtel de Sully, one of the Marais’ grandest seventeenth-century townhouses. It takes you directly into a jewel of a garden that has been faceted into emerald-cut perfection, its four jade-green lawns edged by clipped boxwood hedges.
In front of the old orangery — one of the first in Paris, built to grow hothouse citrus fruit from Italy, the most fashionable ailleurs at the time — a stage had been set up, and under flashing fluorescent lights a singer from the French West Indies (there’s some more serious ailleurs right there) was mixing electronic beats, a folksy guitar melody and a velvety voice to captivating effect, entrancing the Parisians of all ages who were swaying before him on the gravel dance floor.
France struggled to find its musical voice for centuries. Sure, it has had its homegrown superstars and some have managed to translate to international cult status — think Édith Piaf and Serge Gainsbourg. But, for the most part, the domestic success of Gallic crooners has left the rest of the world scratching its head (Johnny Hallyday, anyone?). Since the 1990s, however, a new breed of French musicians, boasting diverse ethnic backgrounds, had not only found their own voice, but had also given classic French an alluring new accent, the poetry of the French language working magic when combined with the chants of rap and hip-hop.
We joined the throng of dancing Parisians, and were soon blissfully oblivious to the light summer rain sprinkling down. The cloud-rippled sky was a swirl of orange on blue, giving a tie-dyed effect that seemed to cast a spell of the exotic over Paris. It reminded me of the world out there, so many ailleurs, but one in particular that was beckoning me home.
In the end, turning a third-of-a-century wasn’t so much a crisis point as a turning one. I suddenly had a new direction and vision, with New York in the rear-view mirror. Paris would, as ever, be my ailleurs, my constant detour, and perhaps I would live there one day; but for now, it was time to get in touch again with my own terroir, go back to my roots. I wanted to reconnect with place as much as people, to take care to converse — I craved communication through more than the written word, even though I still had much to write in this changing world of journalism. The concept of beauty, too, was evolving for me, with age. I wanted to stop being so hard on myself — how I looked and how much I weighed, as much as what I was going to do next with my life. It was time to live in the moment, go with some kind of flow, learn to be chez moi in my own skin. Because no matter where you go or live on this earth, the most important home you live in, as much as the temple to worship, is the one you carry around with you.
CHAPTER 8
FEMME
femme nf wife
In which, aged thirty-six, I find that I’ll always have Paris.
You could take the girl out of Paris . . . but I was still there in a way, because I’d styled my Sydney apartment into my fantasy of how a Parisienne would live: musky-pink carpet, rose-crystal chandeliers, antique furniture painted in faded pastel hues, flowers and framed photos everywhere. Paris, after all, practically invented interior decoration, polishing it into a fine rococo art. It was there that boudoirs were first fashioned — the original rooms of one’s own; exquisite writing tables, too, on which Parisiennes could scribble their innermost thoughts. No place loves amassing and displaying beautiful objects quite like Paris, and I’ve long thought this was because, in a city of classic, sometimes staid apartment buildings, interior spaces have become the realm for self-expression, places in which Parisians can retreat and truly be themselves.
So I was very much at home, living by myself in my Parisian-esque boudoir, a reflection of a contented inner existence. I’d happily taken a break from romance for the past year, choosing to nurture myself after some dismal dating experiences. And then Andy came knocking. Andy, I must preface, is an interior designer, but his idea of domestic style is as far from mine as Sydney is from Paris — he would basically be happy living in a large concrete box. I’m actually surprised he didn’t run a mile on first glimpse of my pink apartment. But while we were opposites in the aesthetic sense, we somehow clicked, the feminine and masculine balancing each other out. Our relationship instantly felt easy and comfortable, like sinking into my big cushiony cream sofa — even though his ideal couch would be black, leather and sharply edged.
The sofa, incidentally, was also created in Paris, when the pioneers of the interior arts played around with new ways of bringing people together. The two-seater was initially considered a little risqué, and author Joan DeJean has noted that the term tomber amoureux — to fall in love — was coined around this time, perhaps as a sign of the emotional, as much as physical, impact of this new intimate furniture. To this day, however, every couple needs a good couch — it’s therapy without the therapist, the ideal way to relax in one another’s company, to unwind after a day, to work through various stresses. Andy and I spent many evenings ensconced in said cream sofa, taking turns to choose the night’s movie. I, of course, would opt for something vintage or French. Andy would nominate a war movie, which surprised me at first, given his pacifist leanings. ‘What is it about guys and war movies?’ I asked. ‘What is it about girls and pink?’ he shot back. We eventually found something we both loved: Casablanca. Equally a film about war and romance, you also can’t beat it for dialogue. No prizes for guessing my favourite line: ‘We’ll always have Paris.’
Every couple, I suspected, would also benefit from having Paris in their life, and Andy and I soon had the opportunity. I won a trip there for a fragrance article I’d written, and traded my business-class ticket for two economy ones (‘You must really like him, to give up your French champagne for sparkling wine,’ a colleague quipped.) We flew out the day after Christmas, wondering if it was slightly crazy to spend a fortnight in Paris in her wintry depths. But twenty-four hours later, as our taxi neared the City of Light in all her glimmering glory — set against a mauve-grey sky that seemed on the verge of dissolving in a flurry of snowflakes — we knew there was no place in the world we’d rather be.
But scratch the classic surface, sniff down alleyways into the past, and you’ll find that Paris has indeed transformed over time, the ageing grande dame that she is, with tidy nips and tucks or a spruce-up of paint, and sadly the occasional scarring botch job, too. A quick perusal of any postcard shop will have you yearning as much for the Paris of today as that of yesterday. I’ve always collected cards displaying the photographs by Eugène Atget, who recorded his beloved Paris of the early twentieth century, as the city struggled to adapt to a brutal new century. An inveterate flâneur, Atget was a street photographer avant la lettre, although unlike today’s urban snaps, most of Atget’s images are devoid of people. In Atget’s work, it’s the stones of the buildings and roads that are alive, vibrating with history and longing to be heard. Atget referred to himself as an author–producer, telling the story of Old Paris, freezing it into sentimental shades of warm sepia and cool dusky violet. He photographed not only the grand monuments and majestic parks, but also the shady nooks and decaying crannies, and you swear you can see, floating in the nebulous mist of his lens, the ghosts of Parisians past.
Paris Dreaming Page 21
