Paris Dreaming

by Katrina Lawrence

  ‘Shall we go chez nous?’ I asked, once we had bought our bags of juicy clementines, crisp apples and pears, and earthy-hued root vegetables begging to be roasted, drizzled in oil and sprinkled with truffle salt.

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting things like, I don’t know, toilet paper and washing powder?’ asked Andy. ‘You can’t just live on chocolate and cheese, you know.’

  Perhaps it was useful that Andy had such a practical domestic mind, after all.

  Andy had displayed an admirable capacity for living in the light of rosy chandeliers, and nibbling dainty cakes in velvet-lined, ruffle-trimmed rooms, but at heart his ultimate design aesthetic included the adjectives ‘modern’ and ‘minimal’, not ‘Belle Époque’ or ‘chintzy’. So, lest the feminine frivolities of this city overload his system like a surfeit of macaron-induced sugar, causing him to reach peak Paris too early, I suggested we venture out to the business hub La Défense, for a design detox of sorts.

  La Défense — situated on the western outskirts, beyond the height restrictions that help to give inner Paris her village-like feel — was originally planned as a quasi French Manhattan, an orderly and harmonious take on an international business district. From the 1970s, however, forces of globalisation started to take hold, and the race to the top (although some say bottom) saw buildings clamour to scrape the sky. It’s estimated that some 180,000 workers descend on La Défense each day. At best, you can say it serves a purpose; at worst, it’s a soulless concrete jungle.

  We walked along the central esplanade, a tree-averse track paved in ponderous grey, past buildings shaped every which way, some twisted, some tapered. Andy explained the feats of engineering behind the contortions but I found it difficult to even feign interest. On the cloud-dense day, the glass-and-steel creations appeared cold and sullen, and there was none of the limestone that gives central Paris its celebrated luminosity.

  We walked towards the Grande Arche, the cavernous cube of an arch in the midst of it all. When you stand at its foot and peer longingly back towards Paris, you can see the original triumphal arch, perfectly aligned on the horizon kilometres away — the midpoint of an axis that stretches all the way to the pretty little pink arch at the Louvre. La Grande Arche de la Défense was one of President François Mitterand’s pet projects of the 1980s; another was the glass pyramid at the Louvre. Like many past Parisian kings, Mitterand dreamed of leaving his majestic mark all over town, which explains the big shiny pomp of so many of his monuments. Andy pointed out the arch’s glossy white carrera marble surface, explained how it was fashioned from four concrete frames, and noted that it was an office building as much as urban sculpture — but all that struck me was the starkness of the void.

  ‘I’m not sure what artistic statement it’s making,’ I said. ‘It literally has no substance.’

  ‘But design is as much about what’s there as what’s not,’ Andy countered. ‘I mean, you don’t have to cover every single space with flounces.’

  Much to my relief, we were soon back on the other, frillier side of the Périphérique, the ring road that separates inner from outer Paris, old from new. The sun had started to shine across the ice-blue sky, the snow underfoot slowly melting to a glistening memory. Our feet were holding up, cushioned in three layers of socks snuggled into boots, so we pushed on with our architectural walking tour, to roam around Passy — a former rural village annexed and made over by Haussmann, and also the site of some seminal twentieth-century architecture.

  We started at the foot of Avenue Foch, searching for the building where Andy’s mother Carolyn had lived in the early 1960s. Avenue Foch is basically the millionaires’ mile of Paris. Veering off the ‘grand axis’ at the Arc de Triomphe, the wide chestnut-tree-lined boulevard sweeps down towards the Bois de Boulogne, the city’s largest gardens. Two ribbons of lawn unfurling its full length make the avenue seem as much a park itself as a thoroughfare, and you can well envisage the glossy carriages of the Belle Époque rolling to and fro. It was once called the Avenue de l’Impératrice, in homage to Empress Eugénie, which is a rather more fitting name for such a splendid strip. Avenue Foch (named after a French Great War marshal) is at least better than Avenue Boche, its nickname during the Second World War, when the Gestapo commandeered buildings there for various operations, interrogations and much, much worse.

  By the time Carolyn arrived, post-war Paris was back in party mode, in full swing of her trente glorieuses, the ‘glorious thirty’ years that saw the French economy boom — La Défense was one outcome of this — and the standard of living soar. Carolyn had been hired as the au pair for the youngest daughter of an haut bourgeois family, who lived luxuriously over an entire floor of a Haussmannian apartment building. The older brother and sister were friends with everyone who was anyone in the Parisian jetset, Brigitte Bardot included. Another party pal was heiress Christina Onassis, who lived with her father Aristotle upstairs in the penthouse, where he would go on to shack up with new wife Jackie later that decade.

  At the time, of course, Jackie was Mrs Kennedy, the first lady of America. She had just come to town with her husband the president, who famously described himself as ‘the man who accompanied Jackie Kennedy to Paris’. Jackie, who had studied in Paris after college, was one of those women who are innately Parisian, even if their passports state otherwise. She could speak French fluently and flawlessly, her slender frame showcased slim Chanel suits to clotheshorse perfection, and few could carry off a pillbox hat like the flip-bobbed Jackie. It was her preference for Parisian style that brought French fashion to the international mainstream. She was wearing pink Chanel when her husband was shot and she chose black Givenchy for the funeral. Less than six months later, Paris honoured her late husband by changing the name of Quai de Passy, running along the Seine, to Avenue du Président Kennedy.

  I’d stayed in Passy as a teenager and delighted in the voluptuous apartment buildings there, with their grandiose domes and feminine curves, but I’d missed the more modern elements of the district’s architecture (possibly because I’ve tended to ignore anything newish when it comes to the arts for most of my life; most of my favourite books, for instance, were penned — or plumed — centuries ago). But, as Andy explained, Passy is a place of pilgrimage for architects the world over. Peppered with examples of modern design, it stands out from the rest of classic Paris, probably because its wealthy inhabitants have by and large been powerful enough to bend building codes, or bulldoze eighteenth-century country manors and erect architectural odes to modernity in their place.

  Just around the corner from the Président Kennedy train station is the famous Castel Béranger apartment building, from 1895, by Hector Guimard, the guy who designed the city’s various metro entrances, all sinuous and leafy-hued. Guimard was France’s leading architect of Art Nouveau style, with its feminine, flowery inspiration, which is why Castel Béranger is decorated with a swirling wrought-iron door, and various other flourishes glazed in green. Far from the uniform harmony of Haussmann’s buildings, ‘Castel Dérangé’ (as it was known by detractors) is a mish-mash of materials, making for a mélange of colours and textures. There’s something both madcap and magical about it. ‘Now this kind of modern I could do,’ I said.

  ‘Except it wasn’t that modern,’ replied Andy. Art Nouveau means new art but as Andy explained, it wasn’t anything truly groundbreaking, more a revival of the trend for decorative exterior embellishments, which is why it didn’t last. ‘It didn’t adapt to modern times.’

  The French state, I later read, sponsored the arts and crafts industry in the 1890s — protecting small business just like it does to this day — which directly led to the flowering of Art Nouveau, with its intricately carved and decorated details. But it was ultimately too much of an interior style to work out in the big bad world, when the era of mass production was looming like a huge concrete block. Paris might have been able to save her épiciers and chocolatiers, but many artisans and craftsmen didn’t make it out of Atget’s ghostl
y otherworld.

  ‘I just don’t get why Modernism must equate to minimalism,’ I sighed.

  ‘It’s essentially about refinement and using new materials and building methods,’ said Andy. ‘Moving with the times. Heard of that concept?’

  I admittedly, and happily, cling to trappings of the past — velvet sofas and crystal-adorned lamps and floral-etched crystal glasses that have a familiarity, even if they haven’t been in the family for generations, because they seem to transport you back into the comfort of a known time, not forward into an unknown future. I’d fashioned my apartment into a time capsule of sorts. Every time I walked through my door, I felt like I’d retreated into a rose-carpeted cocoon. I’m sure a Freudian analyst would have something to say about a subliminal urge to go back to the womb. But for me, it was more about creating a sanctuary. A home, I’ve long felt, should be a shrine to a life, to a family, filled with objects that hold memories, make your heart smile, remind you of your place in the world. And I think that’s why I mistrust Modernism. It wipes the slate clean, which begs the questions: Why do you want to forget the past? What have you got to hide?

  Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, who hit his career stride in the 1920s, was the father of Modernism, with his love of concrete and geometric forms. His name fills me with horror, quite frankly, for his (thankfully unsuccessful) plans to raze the Marais and construct a grid of superhighways and sixty-storey glass towers. For Andy, however, as for most architect types, he was nothing short of genius. One of Le Corbusier’s pioneering works, the Villa La Roche, in Passy, is open for public visits; tucked down the end of a quiet lane, where the unsuspecting would be little prepared for what lies ahead. Built in the early 1920s for a banker who required a suitable showcase for his Cubist art collection, Villa La Roche is essentially a white cube — concrete rendered ivory — with a whole lot of space within, around and through which units of rooms are geometrically arranged. The walls are bare, the furniture barely there. Again, it’s about what’s not there as much as what is — the very definition of minimal.

  ‘Now, this is my dream home,’ declared Andy.

  ‘This is my nightmare,’ I thought to myself.

  If we were ever going to end up living together, we were headed for some interesting décor discussions, which we mulled over that evening at Kong, a restaurant perched on top of an inner-city Haussmannian building that looks every bit like a glass spaceship, and its décor like something from the canteen of an intergalactic cruising spaceship of the future. It was the vision of the interior and industrial designer Philippe Starck, who shot to fame when Mitterand commissioned him in the early 1980s to furnish a private apartment at the Élysée Palace; ever since, he’s made a career out of his ‘philosophy of the less’.

  ‘There’s a way you can meld modern and romantic,’ insisted Andy. ‘Look at these seats.’ We were sitting on Starck’s now-famous Ghost chairs, his clear plastic rework of the classic Louis XV armchair, its rococo silhouette streamlined, yet still seductive. True, it was kind of old but new, feminine but masculine . . . ‘Kind of like us in a chair,’ I pointed out.

  After a blur of cocktails, we decided to sober ourselves up with a late-night stroll, and headed down the Rue de Rivoli. By the time we’d reached the Hôtel de Ville, or town hall, the glacial air had cleared our heads, but the scene had a misty quality to it nevertheless. When you look over to the town hall you can’t help but recall Robert Doisneau’s famous black-and-white photograph The Kiss. Taken in 1950, for a Life Magazine special on ‘Love in Paris’, the iconic image shows a couple pausing in front of a café for a heart-stopping embrace that seems to freeze everything around them, so that little else matters but that natural expression of affection. Few photographs so exquisitely capture the spontaneity of emotion that Paris can induce.

  Not everything, however, is what it seems. The Kiss, which appears to be a quintessential example of documentary street photography, was set up (although at least the models were an actual couple). C’est la vie, as the French might say with a nonchalant shrug, as rational as they are romantic. The fairy-tale castle of a building, too, while we’re here, is a remake. The original sixteenth-century town hall went up in flames around the same time the Tuileries Palace perished, but the authorities decided to immediately rebuild such an historic institution and symbol of civic power, and retain its elaborate Renaissance château allure, with its turreted roofline and sculpture-encrusted façade.

  The town hall was dramatically illuminated to Gothic effect that night, evocative of all the grotesque drama that has played out on the square before it. Once named Place de Grève (river bank), in reference to its Seine-side location, this was where unemployed labourers and potential employers met to negotiate daily work, transactions that could all too easily descend into rowdiness — which is how grève came to assume its more common contemporary definition of ‘strike’. For centuries, this was also the scene of public executions, and crowds flocked to cheer as supposed sorceresses and various other villains were burned at the stake, broken on the wheel or decapitated by guillotine.

  Like so many places in Paris, however, it’s difficult to reconcile the then and now, a gruesome past and a beautiful present. We stood by the flood-lit ice-skating rink, watching black-clad, beret-topped couples glide by, holding gloved hands and occasionally stopping to kiss, as though in their own personal Doisneau shoot. It was picture-perfect, like a scene from a movie. However, we decided against joining in; skating after several martinis hardly seemed a wise move, especially on a site where blades have already inflicted their fair share of damage.

  Early on the last day of the year, only hours before we crossed over into 2009, Andy and I set out for Pont Neuf, a bridge that also passes from old to new. Completed in 1606, it was the first stone bridge in Paris, paving the way for a novel, yet classic and enduring, architectural tone, and it was also the first structure to connect both banks. But it brought the city together in other aspects, by featuring wide footpaths — another first — that allowed for Parisians of all walks of life — aristocrats to acrobats, preachers to prostitutes, booksellers to bootblacks — to mingle. Alcoves running down the length of each side, instead of the usual strips of houses, enabled couples to coo admiringly at the riverscape, as they still do to this day.

  We turned at the equestrian statue of King Henri IV, and descended a narrow flight of stairs to the Square du Vert-Galant, a term that doesn’t directly translate into English, but more or less means ‘Old Charmer’, in homage to Henri himself, who was quite the ladies’ man: of such rugged masculinity that he was forgiven his stale-smelling skin and bad breath, said to reek of goat and garlic respectively. Within the cobbled ‘square’, which takes the tapered shape of the tip of the Île de la Cité, is a triangular garden, one of the city’s loveliest spots. In spring, its whimsical mix of trees — maples and walnuts, hornbeams and horse chestnuts, silver lindens and lilacs — come vibrantly and fragrantly alive. Winter doesn’t quite do the park justice, although it does have an alluring, shadowy Atget-ness to it. At the very end of the island, a delightful weeping willow spreads its canopy of leaves like a filigree parasol. I’ve spent countless hours sitting in its shade, admiring the view as though on the prow of a boat, anchored to my happy place.

  Too cold to linger, too weary to walk any longer, we bought tickets for a river tour. A suited attendant was on hand to greet us cordially and help us on board, his Gallic gallantry as much innate as a requirement of his job. Gallantry has major history in this city. Henri IV, that old Vert-Galant, and a poetry-citing, chivalry-minded Renaissance man, might have got the party started, but it was his grandson, Louis XIV, the Sun King, who refined it to a true art form. A dashing twenty-three-year-old when crowned, Louis was partial to dancing, and to surrounding himself with beautiful people and pleasant conversation. Galant originally meant courteous, and Louis’ style of galanterie was a continuation of the courtly ways of knights and troubadours: flawlessly cultivated m
anners, unerring politeness to others, especially social inferiors — women included. A stickler for etiquette, Louis was nevertheless willing to bend rigid court rules if it meant stopping a lady from slipping on the parquet floor, or allowing a pregnant woman to sit in his regal presence.

  It was all well and good in theory, but over time the aristocrats became blasé in the gilded cage of Versailles, and gallantry degenerated into debauchery: a pursuit of pleasure over politeness, a game of seduction rather than a way of life. Then came the raucous Regency, the era that redefined gallantry for the eighteenth century. The fun-loving Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, acted as regent for the future Louis XV for only eight years, but he made the most of his time in power. Philippe was a work-hard-play-harder type of guy, who turned the Palais-Royal — his Parisian headquarters — into a party palace every evening, hosting all-night candle-lit suppers for a flurry of rouged actresses and free-thinking friends. He was the very epitome of libertine — liberated in mind, body and soul.

  We floated under the Pont des Arts, dotted with couples whose arms were interlinked as tightly as the glistening padlocks beside them. Passion in Paris is now a very public affair, with unabashed displays of affection, because gender relations, at least in the realm of love, are balanced; men and women equally hold the keys to their own locks. But for a long time, gallantry was a man’s world. A femme galante wasn’t gallant in the default sense — she was an ‘easy women’, many rungs down the ladder of social acceptability. And pity the man who tumbled to her level, like the Chevalier des Grieux from the cautionary 1731 novel Manon Lescaut.

  Our boat passed by Quai Voltaire, which pays tribute to the famed intellectual, who was very much a ladies’ man, but more a student of the earlier, gentlemanly school of gallantry (in his 1764 Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire practically tut-tutted that a modern gallant had a certain ‘impudence and effrontery’). The embankment is one of my favourite riverside strips, because its beautiful buildings — classic stone Paris at her grandest, atop wood-fronted ground-floor shops selling artwork and antiques — belie the kind of behind-doors goings-on that would have had François Boucher (the rococo artist whose work doubled as the Libertines’ preferred soft-core porn of his day) in ecstasy. For starters, there were all the nude muses whom Pradier sculpted, Ingres painted and Baudelaire swooned over. Also, along there lived five blush-cheeked beauties, the celebrated de Mailly-Nesle sisters, four of whom became mistress to King Louis XV — a man who graduated with honours from the later school of gallantry. The king’s obsession with the sisters was eventually curbed by his head mistress Madame de Pompadour, although his irrepressible libertine spirit saw him continue through a succession of flings, including one with Marie-Louise O’Murphy, who shot to notoriety when Boucher painted her sprawled naked on a sinful sofa.