Of course, I did end up back on the work treadmill, and got better at juggling the various curve balls life threw my way. But I was constantly plagued with the fear that I wasn’t a particularly wonderful mother. The more I read about parenting, the more I realised there was to learn, and the more I felt I fell short. I was totally aware of the phenomenon of mother guilt, but being able to theorise my emotions didn’t allay the reality of them. Still, it didn’t stop me from wanting to add to the family. When a miscarriage put those plans temporarily on hold, life suddenly seemed in free fall, less in control than ever. I felt sick with a hollowing heartache and gut-wrenching guilt; it wasn’t a joyful time. ‘I think you need to treat yourself to a trip to Paris,’ said Andy out of the blue one morning. I’d booked my ticket by lunchtime.
The Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the 7th arrondissement, on Paris’s Left Bank, is a rarefied world unto itself. A faubourg is a suburb, although the word derives from the French for ‘false’ and ‘borough’, and it really is like a town within a town, where you feel almost as though you’ve stepped into a parallel Paris. There’s nothing faux about this bourg, though. This is where serious money and power dwell, with Hermès Kelly handbags at every ten paces.
The district flourished in the eighteenth century, when wealthy Parisians abandoned a démodé and densely packed Marais for the fresh lands and air to the west of the city. Old Paris was a hodge-podge of people, with aristocrats, shopkeepers, workers and servants living in the same buildings, stratified vertically according to social importance. But as Paris boomed, the city sprawled out, and developed horizontally so that well-to-do types could live without their style being cramped, in grand urban châteaux. Most of these mansions now belong to the government and various foreign embassies, but the area still has a sense of neighbourhood, even if not of the usual picket-fence variety.
I’d chosen to stay there for the vicarious thrill of living somewhere a little la-de-da, but I think, also, I didn’t want to simply be a visitor, checking into an obviously touristy part of town. I needed to actually play at being someone else for a couple of weeks, to remove myself completely from the mindset of my usual existence, and its associated stresses. My mother had cleared her diary to come along with me. ‘We can pretend we’re a Parisian mother and daughter,’ she said. ‘If we’re going to play the part convincingly,’ I told her, ‘you know you’re going to have to finally buy yourself the Chanel jacket you’ve been talking about for years.’
Our taxi swept along the Seine, glinting in the springtime sunshine, past the National Assembly — whose pre-parliamentary (and pre-colonnaded) life was as the Palais Bourbon, a palace so sumptuous it set the tone for the area — before curving around to Boulevard Saint-Germain, its bristling plane trees filtering through a soft aureate light. We turned off to snake our way around a series of narrow streets, all solemnly lined in beige buildings punctuated by wooden doors painted navy, maroon and jade, the deep hues adding a sense of mystique to what lay behind. On reaching our address, we saw a time-stained stone façade hung with mottled shutters. But we knew Paris well enough by now not to judge a book by its cover. Even the dustiest of jackets can open to reveal flashes of brilliance. Sure enough, once we’d made our way through the black-and-white tiled foyer and chugged up in the wrought-iron lift, we stepped back into the halcyon heyday of Faubourg Saint-Germain, into rooms filled with upholstered Louis XV chairs and dollhouse-pretty tables, the walls covered in paintings of pastoral landscapes, the marble mantelpiece heaving with Chinoiserie and the herringbone floors decorated with Persian rugs.
Paris is a city of hidden delights, a place that only gradually reveals herself to true, and patient, lovers. At first, her discreet ways can prove frustrating. Mansions with high walls and thick doors steadfastly keep the world out and shutter-clad buildings close their gaze to outsiders, just as many locals assiduously avoid eye contact. But I’ve often wondered if this public wariness, this reticence to connect with strangers, harks back to the Revolution, when you couldn’t trust even your neighbour. Parisians, especially in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, kept their heads down and jewels locked up. Being stealthy about their wealth was a life and death matter, so it’s little surprise that they instilled a sense of secrecy, a fear of opening up and showing off, in following generations.
Despite having practically invented the luxury industry, the French have a reputation for disdaining money, especially talking about it. It’s considered a private matter, one to remain behind closed doors, where it tends to take the form of beautiful objects — just as their ancestors preferred precious metals moulded not into currency, but golden candlesticks and silver coffee pots, items that would hold their value as much as adorn their home. I’ve always adored this about the French: their preference for filling their homes with treasures rather than their coffers with coins. I’ve long believed that there’s little point having a bulging bank account if the price is a scant existence. At that moment, I was more money-challenged than I’d been in years (a Sydney mortgage and childcare costs will do that), but I’d nevertheless rarely felt richer. As much as the adjustment to my new role of wife and mother had its challenges, I cherished our home, filling it with love, and some pretty furniture, too. Interior riches, in France, equate with inner richness. It’s this redefinition of wealth — from the financial to the material and emotional realms — that, I believe, most inspires Francophiles, this rethink of what it means to live a good life.
Around the corner from our apartment, just down from Hôtel Matignon, the opulent mansion now home to the French prime minister, is the building in which American author Edith Wharton resided in the early twentieth century. She was the first in a succession of famous Francophiles to make Paris her home. In her previous life, Wharton had chronicled the showy lifestyles of high society in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York. Influenced by sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’, Wharton gently derided status-seeking behaviour, and the motivating forces of greed and vanity. She was well placed to know about living luxuriously, having been born into the very family that inspired the expression ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’. There’s no snappy translation of that expression in French, and the concept is not as well defined either, possibly because there’s not the same history of consommation ostentatoire. The French are, by and large, less flashy, which is probably why Wharton felt so at home in Paris. ‘Their thoughts are not occupied with money-making in itself, as an end worth living for, but only with the idea of having money enough to be sure of not losing their situation in life,’ wrote Wharton in her delightful 1919 essay French Ways and Their Meaning, where she also astutely observed, ‘There is nothing like a revolution for making people conservative.’
It’s easy enough to imagine the author, with her tailored skirt-suits and ribbon-trimmed hats, striding around the faubourg. She had quickly fallen in love with her new city, and was inspired by the Parisians’ time-honoured pursuit of pleasure and beauty, as much as their natural stylishness. ‘French people “have taste” as naturally as they breathe: it is not regarded as an accomplishment, like playing the flute,’ she gushed in awe. And she saw that taste on display at every turn of her head, whether she was out stocking up on gloves or admiring the sculptures at Musée Rodin down the road: ‘The artistic integrity of the French has led them to feel from the beginning that there is no difference in kind between the curve of a woman’s hat-brim and the curve of a Rodin marble.’
Accessories and art would have to wait a while. Mum and I needed to tend to a more mundane type of taste, and buy groceries. We set out past sparkle-filled antique dealers and bottle shops, designer baby wear boutiques and luxury stationery stores, headily scented chocolateries and fromageries, eventually reaching the crème de la crème of 7th arrondissement shopping: Le Bon Marché. The first true department store, Le Bon Marché is a shrine to style, where everything seems to be bathed in a golden light, courtesy of the domed glass ceiling above. Bu
t it’s the food hall next door, La Grande Épicerie, that is the true temple of good taste. We delighted to see olives in colours we didn’t even know they came in, bijou bread rolls threaded on sticks, platters of artfully designed hors d’oeuvres, and fruit tarts as glossy and intricate as Cartier brooches. While many Parisians prefer to shop at specialist stores, it’s at La Grande Épicerie that the French philosophy of food as a way of life is on dazzling display, and you appreciate that food should be as much a feast for the eyes as the tastebuds, almost too pretty to eat. Only almost . . .
Back in the apartment, we set the dining table with our various treats, arranged around a ribbon-tied basket of purple hyacinths we had picked up on the way home (for it did already feel like that: chez nous), and popped open a bottle of Ruinart Rosé. ‘May all our pain be champagne,’ I toasted, raising my cut-crystal coupe, and soon remembered how lovely life looks through Parisian rosé-tinted glasses.
Nestled above the old stables of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés Abbey is the Musée Delacroix, where the Romantic painter lived and worked in the mid nineteenth century. For an artist celebrated for his larger-than-life masterpieces — sweeping scenes of death and drama — a visit there is a remarkably intimate experience. Scoot up the narrow, glossy wooden staircase, just as Delacroix did before you, and you enter what was once his cosy home, complete with furniture and trinkets. From there, you can amble out the back door to his former studio, which overlooks an oasis of a garden, lovingly planned by Delacroix himself. It’s a lesson in perspective, in more ways than one. Everything seems on a human scale. The paintings, even those inspired by religion or literature, somehow have greater authenticity for the compactness of their size. Delacroix himself seems more real, too. One piece of art was telling: a watercolour of three flowers — poppy, pansy and anemone. It was both whimsical and studied, proof that Delacroix — the guy who gave us the overpoweringly iconic Liberty Leading the People — saw beauty in the little everyday things, as much as the big momentous ones.
We walked back out through the cobbled entrance, the old stone archway leading onto Place de Furstenberg, surely Paris’s quaintest square. The four towering paulownia trees on the island in the middle — surrounding an ornate lamppost grandly holding aloft five globes — were in bloom, and cast a lacy lavender veil overhead. Some of their flowers were floating to the ground, the corollas shaped like long sweeping skirts, rippled at the hem, just as Mrs Wharton might once have worn. In the film adaptation of her 1920 book The Age of Innocence, the final, Parisian scene takes place in this very square. Daniel Day-Lewis’s Newland Archer, now an old man, decides against visiting Countess Ellen Olenska, the love of his life who got away many years before, leaving him to a socially acceptable, yet passionless, marriage. He slowly walks away, stooped with sadness — perhaps Wharton’s punishment for not having followed his heart. She was, when she wrote this, well and truly an honorary and spiritual Parisienne, so it’s not surprising she was won over to the cause of living in the moment. Like Delacroix, she knew that true romanticism was not about grandiose, splashy statements but to be found in life’s little pleasures, in stopping to smell the roses right under your nose.
We turned a few corners and ended up at Café de Flore, one of those classic institutions you end up visiting over and over when in Paris. Wharton would surely have approved of its timeless, time-honed traditions, having lauded France for its ‘instinctive recoil from the new, the untasted, the untested’, the ‘preciousness of long accumulations of experience’. She doesn’t seem to have frequented the café herself, despite the fact that it was a favourite haunt of writers by the late nineteenth century. Its most famous literary clients, of course, were Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, those fearless philosophers, social rebels and lifetime companions. Unlike the Flore, they were intent on trying the new, the untasted and the untested, doing their darnedest to prove that the freedom of their beloved existentialism could extend to relationships, too. Their unconventional love life was surely exciting at the time, but looking back, it’s somewhat feeble that such an awesome woman allowed her partner to live up to a tired old libertine cliché. Sure, she was allowed to have affairs, too (why, thanks JP), but her heart was never anywhere near as much in it.
We sat inside, at a table near where the power couple sometimes scribbled and pondered away for hours on end. The red moleskin banquettes and the golden Art Deco mirrors and lighting are still there, and the warm intimacy still makes for the ideal environment in which to shine a light on your own inner self, and reflect on the meaning of life and love. The colour therapy also seemed to influence our lunch: gazpacho, tomato salad and a bottle of rosé.
‘Did you feel a little let down by Simone de Beauvoir’s views on relationships?’ I asked Mum, who was avidly reading the French philosopher in her early twenties, as she was settling down with my father. Surely de Beauvoir’s feminist interpretation of the patriarchal system Mum was about to enter must have been somewhat confusing.
‘You know, I do remember feeling disappointed. Her relationship with Sartre seemed so contrived. Freedom and equality don’t have to mean the right to see other people. What might have been radical was if they’d found a way to make marriage work for modern times.’
I observed that she and Dad had done pretty well with the experiment of modern marriage. ‘The key, for me, is to rethink freedom,’ Mum said, after a few thoughtful moments. ‘I don’t believe it’s about complete independence; any relationship has strings attached but that doesn’t have to be a negative thing. It’s about how long those strings are. Your father and I have always kept busy, and kept up our own interests, which has given us room to breathe. Your partner should encourage you to be the person you want to be.’
‘You know, part of me wonders if it’s ideal to find your life partner at a young age. You’re less set in your ways so you can both grow in the same direction.’
My mother nodded. ‘It’s a good theory. But it’s not easy to know who’s right for you when you’re young. Your father and I were lucky. I’m sure if I’d married anyone else, I’d be divorced by now. There weren’t many men in those days who would have been happy to let me have the career I’ve had.’
I’d recently read that divorce rates in France were even higher than those in Australia (which were daunting enough). This surprised me for some reason. Perhaps my idealism of the French automatically paints them as happier than the rest of the world.
‘Modern marriage, where both partners work and share chores equally, doesn’t suit a lot of guys — I suspect traditional French men, too,’ mused Mum. ‘Remember, feminism didn’t evolve here to the extent it did in Australia, and perhaps men are clinging to the old head-of-the-household notion. Although a lot of macho Australian types would still be adjusting, too — luckily, your father was always happy to do his share of cooking and child-rearing.’
‘I guess I’d assumed that French marriages were much more relaxed. They don’t have the big overwhelming white weddings that we do, mostly just their small civil ceremonies.’
‘Well, civil marriage is still an institution,’ Mum noted. ‘And don’t forget that the French have a history of rebelling against institutions.’
But then, of course, the French also have a history of falling back into neat line, revering harmony and order. Perhaps then, they want freedom, but within certain limits — romance, within reason. While divorce might have been on the rise, so too were the so-called PACS, the civil unions introduced for gay couples, but taken to with gusto by straight duos, too. A French civil union is straightforward to establish, and to dissolve; while you’re in it, you enjoy most of the financial and legal benefits that marriage would confer. This might not sound romantic, but maybe it’s the modern type of marriage that balances the dual nature of the French: their reverence for tradition and their yearning for freedom. Because, remember, they don’t need a huge romantic wedding, some spectacle worthy of a Delacroix canvas. They love the small and intimate, a
s the painter did himself. Because life’s not about the big picture so much as the smaller details: the simple pleasures of the everyday, of smelling the roses, of sitting down with loved ones and eating juicy tomatoes or drinking sweet, silky rosé.
For a city of people who seek pleasure in all things, beauty is, not surprisingly, of utmost importance there, and it was in Saint-Germain that the obsession with living well, in every way, arguably originated. Saint-Germain, by the way, has none of next door’s faubourg-ness about it. For me, it’s the very essence of urban Paris, distilled, because it has housed such a cross-section of Parisians over the centuries, from pupils to preachers, philosophers to fashion designers, authors to artists. It was where Parisian shopping as we know it took form, back in medieval times at the Saint-Germain fair, and it was where coffee was first served in public, helping to energise conversation and enlighten pre-revolutionary minds.
It was also there, in the seventeenth century, that the various arts institutions were established, including the Académie d’Architecture, which set in stone, literally, the city’s new classically inspired style. Around the same time, height restrictions were imposed, and the traditional pitched gable roof was banned, leading the way for the elegant mansard roof to become a quintessential emblem of Paris forevermore. Saint-Germain is home to some of the city’s most whimsical rooflines, slanted every which way, dormer windows jutting out, others embedded like cut stones. Just as every Parisienne seems to know how to carry off a beret, adding her own touch — angled this way or that, accessorised with a brooch perhaps — so, too, does a Parisian building wear its crown with particular panache.
Paris Dreaming Page 25
