Paris Dreaming

by Katrina Lawrence

  We were staying on Rue du Dragon, the street of the dragon, so called because it once linked to the Cour du Dragon, one of the nostalgia-filled crevices photographed by Atget. The cobbled courtyard — a passage of workshops, where coppersmiths and blacksmiths hammered out their trade — escaped Baron Haussmann’s knife as he sliced through the area to make way for the nearby Rue de Rennes and Boulevard Saint-Germain, but it gradually crumbled to pieces, until a demolition warrant rang its death knell in 1934. Fortunately, most of Saint-Germain was sturdily built and well maintained, having been the stomping ground of mule-clad socialistas before the boot-wearing beatniks came along, and our building dated back to the district’s early urban days, an eighteenth-century townhouse now carved up into a warren of abodes. Our apartment was jammed in a back corner, over the top two floors, the bedroom nestled into the rooftop. It was crooked and creaky yet so romantically redolent with character, and was the perfect home for a pair playing at Parisian coupledom.

  On our first morning — warmed up by Café de Flore’s buttery croissants and creamy hot chocolate, and layers of thermals and scarves — we wound our way towards the Seine, stopping here and there to surreptitiously lean against old coach doors in the hope that they would creak open and offer up a glance into the worlds within. When you holiday with an interior designer, you find yourself constantly peering up through windows, peeping into old keyholes cut in elaborately carved wooden gates, and discussing what wonders could be behind ivy-clad stone walls. Paris, I found, only intensified Andy’s obsession, because as much as the streets are alive with cafés and lined with architectural gems, Paris is at heart an internal city — especially so in winter — reflecting those rich inner lives of her inhabitants.

  We found ourselves at the Pont des Arts, the city’s first steel bridge, built by Napoléon in 1803. A span of seven dainty arches, as airy and graceful as ballerina leaps, the bridge perfectly demonstrates the lightness of French design, even when working with hefty materials — it’s as though some sort of engineering alchemy has transformed base metal into lace. At the time, the Pont des Arts was dealing with another weighty matter: love locks. The trend for couples to clip a padlock, scribbled with their heart-framed initials, onto the railing of the bridge before throwing the key into the waters below, had only started the year before, but already the bridge seemed to groan under the excess load. Parisians, too, groaned at the touristy trend. You see, the French prefer their amorous declarations to be — like their bridges — light and elegant. It’s that ability of theirs to treat even the most substantial of subjects with breezy aplomb. Even Napoléon, that war-mongering engineer-minded soldier-turned-emperor, had a tender inner romantic who wrote gushing passion-soaked prose to his empress. A Parisian, I expect, would prefer a love letter to a love lock any day.

  The passionate padlock trend, of course, seems fitting for the self-confessed city of love. But then, Paris is also the city of beauty. And this was the bridge of arts not hearts. Parisians, being rationalist romantics at core, must have sighed with relief to hear, in 2014, that the locks were threatening the structure of the historic bridge, hazardously weighing it down with all the emotional baggage. So in the end, the decision between art and heart was made for them: the authorities lopped off the locks and replaced the wire railings with glass panels. Not quite the fade-out happily-ever-after ending, but then Parisians know that love is never easy. You only need to watch a couple of French films to understand this.

  Andy and I were still in the early act of our particular script, but we’d finished the awkward scenes, where you’re still getting to know each other and work out if in fact you really do like each other, and we’d moved into the second act, where you can sit together for hours, often wordlessly so, just content to hang around in one another’s company. The Pont des Arts is the ideal location for such scenes to take place. With its perfect panoramic views — the baroque gold-domed French Institute on one bank, the eternal Louvre on the other, the Eiffel Tower piercing the air downstream, the islands jutting towards you upstream — and the hypnotic sounds of the Seine below, this is where you can experience one of those time-suspended sensations. It’s just you, him and one wonderful world.

  As heart-warming as our view was, the iciness of the air soon brought tears to our eyes, blurring the rose-tinted vision. It was time to get walking again, and briskly at that. We cut through an archway in the riverside wing of the Louvre, to Place du Carrousel. To our right was the once controversial glass pyramid in the museum’s courtyard, to our left the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, which aligns with the more famous Parisian triumphal arc up there on the Étoile, the star-shaped ‘square’ at the end of the Champs-Élysées. Unlike its big sister, however, which serves as a kind of grand statement of welcome to Paris, the petite Carrousel arch, with its pink-marbled columns and tiara of statues, does little more than sit pretty in a park.

  ‘A gateway to nowhere,’ remarked Andy. ‘This seems very French to me.’

  The French penchant for decoration for decoration’s sake, to not just paint a lily but gild it, was not quite to Andy’s taste. He demanded a reason for everything, and the reason had to be more than ‘It looks pretty’. I got the importance of practicality — and that architect I.M. Pei’s pyramid-capped museum entrance did indeed make the Louvre experience less stressful — but I just couldn’t forgive a structure any ugliness, no matter its function or effect. As for things that are all style, no substance, well perhaps I’m a little more lenient there.

  Anyway, I explained to Andy, the Carrousel Arch did once serve a purpose: it was the gateway to the Palais des Tuileries, which ran between the two tips of the Louvre’s wings. The Renaissance palace, built by Catherine de Medici, was destroyed in 1871, during the fiery clashes of the Paris Commune, when so much else of Old Paris was consigned to the dustbin. On the upside, the Louvre now opened out to the old palace’s gardens, giving us that glorious arch-to-arch vista that is surely one of the world’s most stunning urban stretches.

  The Tuileries Garden bursts with joy in the warmer months, as their celebration of life’s simple pleasures seems to bring out the happiest in people. But in the eerie starkness of winter, it’s easy to get a sense of the world in which the so-called Black Queen lived. Catherine, a scheming power player at court, was brought up reading Machiavelli, and dark rumours of plottings and poisonings constantly swirled around her. When the park is drained of colour and the trees have been stripped back to spikes, I can well imagine Catherine cutting a foreboding figure there, her heavy black robes swishing the grounds as she paced around her parterre gardens.

  To my delight, it had started to snow, and we walked glove in glove past phantoms of Old Paris loitering in the scattered green chairs. It was almost as though we were moving through one of Atget’s photos of the Tuileries, images hushed of humanity and moody with melancholy. Even the sky was tinted an Atget-esque shade of purplish-brown, speckled with flecks of white. If only you could bottle up such moments, encapsulate them in a snowdome, ready to reactivate and relive with a shake.

  The snowflakes fluttered down, droplets of water crystallised into elaborate jewel-like structures, and the black branches seemed to reach out for them, as though desperate for adornment. The French author Stendhal used the term crystalisation to describe human beings’ habit of embellishing loved ones with the properties we’d ideally like them to have. Okay, so he was talking specifically about salt, but I also see an analogy with the rough diamond complex — the belief that we can polish a guy of all his faults, shine him up into a flawless gem. Perhaps Andy and I, having met in our late thirties, were old enough to know we couldn’t substantially change the other, that we had to accept one another without the trappings and trimmings.

  This, however, has never stopped a girl from giving a guy fashion advice. ‘Are you going to buy yourself a new coat?’ I asked, attempting to sound as subtle and casual as possible.

  ‘What’s wrong with this?’ asked Andy, somewh
at defensively, looking down at his second-hand army jacket. ‘It’s actually quite cool, you know.’

  Granted, everyone was wearing the look back in Bondi, where Andy technically lived, but Bondi Beach is to Paris what hobo is to boho: quite another thing altogether.

  ‘I’m not saying you should start wearing pastel cashmere and beige trench coats,’ I persisted. ‘But the whole Aussie casual thing doesn’t always translate to Paris.’

  Cue slightly moody silence. Quickly remembering Andy’s need for reason and justification at all times, especially when battling an issue of aesthetics, I tried a different tack, pointing out that perhaps military fashion is culturally inappropriate in a city that has experienced the horrors of war.

  Andy looked thoughtful. ‘I guess war would have a different context here,’ he agreed. ‘Okay, you win. Let’s go shopping tomorrow.’

  See, relationships are about finding common ground — and victory by diplomacy over warfare.

  Despite all our thermal and woollen layers, our teeth had begun to chatter, so we took shelter in a booth of the Grande Roue, the Ferris wheel at the end of the gardens. We floated above Paris thanks to modern engineering, but it seemed an invention of pure magic, and I thought about the exhilaration the Robert brothers must have felt when they launched the first hydrogen balloon, from the Tuileries, back in 1783, rising above the heads of awestruck Parisians.

  The Paris skyline, of course, has greatly changed since then. Palaces have gone, arches and towers have shot up, names have been renamed, innocence lost. The Grande Roue sits by the magnificent octagonal piazza Place de la Concorde. Known as Place Louis XV before the Revolution, it was built to commemorate the king whose grandson would meet his gruesome fate there later in the century, at the bloody hands of Madame La Guillotine, when people flocked to the square not to watch balloons soar, but heads fall into baskets — so many that the streets were stained red.

  France might have freed itself of despotic royal rule and hosed down this square and given it a new name (and a random Egyptian obelisk as the central focus), but no matter how high and lofty its modern ideals, there you’re reminded that Paris has some serious ghosts. Concorde means harmony, and you have to wonder if the Parisian pursuit of beauty and order is so committed and intense because the alternative is just too shocking to return to.

  We treated ourselves to a late, long lunch up on the Champs-Élysées, at Ladurée, the famous salon de thé that was fast expanding its empire, fuelled by an insatiable appetite for its multicoloured macarons. Although this outlet had only been open for a decade or so, it was a portal into Paris of the mid nineteenth century, a time when French interior decoration was at its most flamboyant and frivolous, when anything went as long as it was ostentatious. Dining in the restaurant upstairs, we were surrounded by a swirl of marble and tasselled brocade curtains, sitting at a glossy porcelain-plated table on velvet-upholstered, gilded chairs, with floral carpet underfoot and chandeliers above.

  ‘Can you breathe okay?’ I asked the minimalism-loving man opposite me.

  ‘I’m only just coping,’ he replied. ‘I mean, it’s like they simply couldn’t leave any surface untouched. It’s obsessive-compulsive design.’

  ‘Well, I could happily live in a room like this.’

  ‘The things I do for you . . .’

  ‘Oh yes, life’s so tough right now!’

  ‘But seriously, I would never have come here if not for you — this place, but also this city. I hated it for years.’

  Andy had last been in Paris with a girlfriend who ended up skipping town with a mineral water millionaire.

  ‘You should have just eaten your way out of heartbreak — that’s what I did when I broke up with Zack.’

  Little soothes the soul like a Parisian pastry. For dessert, Andy ordered a selection of macarons, and I opted for an ispahan, a giant rose macaron sandwiching a ring of raspberries on a bed of rose water and lychee crème. Such concoctions are pure pleasure on a plate. Sure, there’s a matter of all the sweetness swirling endorphins around your system, but it’s more than that: Parisian patissiers have a talent for delighting the eyes and nose as much as the mouth, in a way that can’t help but make your heart smile.

  As our sugar highs descended to earth, we wandered back down the avenue as the footpath turned a whiter shade of pale. Beneath the greying sky, the fluted lamps flared up, the bud lights quivered like fire flies in the plane trees, the Grande Roue ahead whirled like a Catherine wheel, and the Christmas market glittered like tinsel, with its string of fairy-lit chalets. We stopped to warm ourselves with roasted chestnuts and mulled wine, before walking back to Saint-Germain. The snowflakes continued to form around us, but we didn’t need to embellish a thing. Life, at that moment, seemed crystallised to perfection.

  In an attempt to rein in our spending, we dedicated the next day to stocking up our kitchen. Granted, that sounds mundane, but in Paris grocery shopping is like an exhilarating treasure hunt. There are few megamarkets in the centre of town, because authorities encourage local merchants to thrive. This means more legwork, but the thrill of the chase is pure adrenalin rush, propelling you from one specialty store to another, cherry-picking everything from juicy berries to pungent cheese.

  ‘Let’s pretend we’re a Parisian couple doing our errands,’ I said, attempting to wrap a tablecloth-sized scarf around my neck in that je ne sais quoi way of Parisiennes.

  ‘Except I’m wearing my scruffy Bondi coat, remember,’ quipped Andy, his voice ever so tinged with indignation.

  ‘Well, best we begin with the most essential Parisian shopping item of all,’ I answered. ‘Fashion.’

  One sleek, buttoned-through, collared-up woollen coat (and new-look Andy) later, we popped around the corner from Agnès B to buy the next items on our hitlist: salted caramel macarons from Pierre Hermé, followed by chocolate (priorities, people). Anyway, at Debauve & Gallais chocolate is basically a health food. Its founders back in 1800, Messieurs Debauve and Gallais, were pharmacists who extolled the wellbeing benefits of cocoa for those whose bodies are their temples. Fittingly, the marble-columned boutique is like a shrine to cocoa, its revered chocolates grandstanding on the glossy counter, just waiting to be worshipped. It would be rude not to pay tribute.

  Our next place of pilgrimage was Poilâne, my favourite boulangerie in the whole of Paris. Bread, of course, is iconic in France; it — or lack of it — has even started a revolution. People usually picture Parisians wandering around with baguettes tucked under their stripy sleeves, but I personally can’t go past Poilâne’s signature whole-wheat sourdough boule: a large ball of miche with a P extravagantly twirled into its golden-brown crust that cuts into perfect slices of chewy carbohydrate goodness. I’d first discovered it in Sydney, at a French bakery that used to air-freight loaves in every week (before the term ‘carbon footprint’ was widely known), selling them — unsurprisingly — for an outrageous price, especially given the fact they were at least two days old.

  True, Poilâne bread is made to last a week or so, and its tanginess intensifies with time, but for me there’s nothing like buying it fresh. The red-brick Rue du Cherche-Midi store, which dates from 1932, even sells by the slice so you can stock up daily. I ordered ten tranches, salivating at the thought of the tartines I could concoct. A tartine is a slice of toasted bread with some kind of topping, but it’s also so much more: a cherished French snack that conjures up jam-smothered childhood memories, it can also make for a sophisticated meal when the likes of smoked salmon, crème fraîche, capers and chives are involved.

  ‘So, now we need our toppings,’ I declared to a bemused-looking Andy. The most important being, of course, cheese. I was still technically vegan, but I’d adopted my friend Elsa’s suggestion of a ‘Paris clause’ — one that would allow me to revert to vegetarianism whenever in Paris, a city where tofu was in short supply. They say you can live on love and air alone there. I, however, need cheese. The stinkier the better; I can sniff out a cheese s
hop from around the corner, and positively drool when out front. The French say window-licking instead of window-shopping and I swear whoever first came up with the term was a fellow fromage addict. My favourite fromagerie is Barthélemy on Rue de Grenelle. Its pretty façade painted with pastoral scenes makes the shop look like it has time-travelled in from a nineteenth-century French village. Inside, it’s a veritable cheese tour of France. Every variety from every corner seems to be available, jostling for attention, exuding its enticing aromas like come-hither pheromones. We ordered brie tricked up with truffles, a crottin de chavignol, which is a nutty, crumbly type of goat’s cheese, and a camembert from Normandy so runny that the rind could barely contain its exuberance.

  Our next stop was the greengrocer, set up like a market stall, with sweet little baskets of berries and boxes of glossy vegetables bursting with so much pigment and vitality that you could almost believe a plant-based Parisian diet could suffice. We hovered at the avocados, gently poking their rippled skins to check for ripeness. ‘Mais non, Madame!’ exclaimed the bewhiskered grocer, scurrying towards me. ‘I do this for you.’ He explained — in a voice mixed with honour, politeness and annoyance — that we were to let him know the fruits and vegetables we were after, and that he would then select our best options.

  I later reflected on the incident, and realised that by prodding around, we had stomped on the grocer’s raison d’ être. Shopkeepers in Paris take immense pride in their place of work, which has traditionally been a second home. Small family businesses are still a dream for many, which is why specialist or niche merchants are a national treasure, protected by legislation as much as cultural respect. As a result, customers are considered guests, and you’re expected to say ‘bonjour’ when entering, and ‘au revoir’ when leaving. Forget to greet, and you’ll risk icy stares and scornful service — or worse still, rock-hard avocados.