The Academy of Architecture eventually merged with those of painting, sculpture and music, and, as a school, came together under one (ironically rather flat) roof, the École des Beaux-Arts, which is located on Rue Bonaparte. ‘I love how the French say beautiful arts, not fine arts,’ I remarked to Mum, as we stopped by the gate, which has welcomed the likes of Delacroix, Ingres and Degas, watching the new generation of scruffy-faced guys and messy-haired girls pass by. ‘It must remind creatives that their purpose is to beautify their environment, not be too crazy or irreverent.’
I pointed out, just to the right, an old church that was not quite what it seemed. The ornate façade, in actual fact, was tacked on later, having been ripped off the Château d’Anet, to the west of Paris. If you look amid the tiers of columns, you’ll see the interlinked initials H and D, the insignia of King Henri II and his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, one of the most celebrated beauties in French history. And here’s where the story gets juicier: the church behind these bold declarations of love was commissioned by Henri’s daughter Marguerite (of La Reine Margot fame), who lived on this site in the early 1600s. No, the princess didn’t have Diane’s château destroyed as payback for breaking the heart of her mother (Catherine de Medici, who was hopelessly, unrequitedly in love with her husband). Rather, it is one of those quirky twists of only-in-Paris history. Before the city’s premier fine arts school moved in, this was the site of the Museum of French Monuments, established to house various treasures displaced during the Revolution — one of which turned out to be a frontispiece from Diane’s old château. You couldn’t make this up.
This one slice of Paris alone serves up everything I love about this city: the history is so deliciously rich, it has more layers than a mille-feuille pastry, and the stories are so intricately interwoven over time that if they were threads, they would create a tapestry to rival the finest Gobelins. Nothing is what it seems — and it’s usually more wonderful. No matter where you turn, you’re always two degrees, possibly one, away from a story so fabulous it should be made into a movie. Paris might have mostly been built by men, but Parisiennes are her soul and spirit, infusing every stone with their stories.
Most of Marguerite’s palace — once spread sumptuously over the old fields (prés) of Saint-Germain — has long gone, but her presence gave the district a megawatt jolt of vitality, making it the place to be. One of the first of the glamour-set to build there, in 1608, Marguerite filled her home with music, parties, ballet, fashion and conversation. Her life, up to this point, had followed the plotline of a Gothic novel: a passionate, sensual, gorgeous heroine born into a diabolical family who abused her in most ways imaginable. Married against her wishes, the naturally free spirit spent much of her life on the run — or held in captivity, like a caged exotic bird. When, finally, she was free to live back in her beloved Paris as an independent woman, she thrived. One of Marguerite’s favourite poets was friend Pierre de Ronsard, he of the mantra ‘Gather the roses of life today’ — and she was determined to make the most of the rest of her days, taking time to both gather those roses, and smell them, too.
But even before Marguerite had set a dainty-slippered foot on the fields of the Left Bank, her father’s lover, Diane de Poitiers, another connoisseur of all things beautiful, had fallen for its charms. Her city residence could be found a few blocks away from where Marguerite would settle, in the Cour de Rohan, a picture-perfect cluster of three ivy-dripping, bloom-bursting courtyards. The space is locked these days, theoretically for the use of private residents only, but loiter a little and you’ll eventually be able to slip through one of the swinging grille gates. Then, wander over the cobbles, through to the middle courtyard, and look up — you’ll see a red brick building, patterned with cream stones and topped with a high-pitched black-slate roof, giving off a pretty provincial air, which is further enhanced by the tumble and jumble of flowering plants. So romantic is the scene that you almost expect Diane to poke her lovely head out and sing for the gorgeousness of her life. When Henri built this love nest for his mistress, in 1550, it was a new look for the medieval city — yet to be standardised in pale stone — and it gives you an idea of the exquisite tastes of Madame de Poitiers.
Diane was, stylistically, light years ahead of her era. When other women were wearing splashy gem-encrusted gowns in bright jewel hues, Diane stuck to black and white, which beautifully set off her luminous complexion. Unlike her contemporaries, she didn’t paint or powder her face. Her secret to flawless skin and rosy cheeks was a zealous wellbeing routine that involved plunging herself in cold baths every morning, drinking gallons of broth, taking regular exercise, and having early nights. Her discipline paid off; she was acknowledged as the most beautiful woman in the realm — if not the life of the party. But Diane had reason to work hard at her beauty routine: she was twenty years older than the king. She might have appeared the poster girl for ageing gracefully, but the abounding rumours about magic potions were partly true. In 2009, forensic experts examining her newly discovered bones found excessively high levels of gold and mercury, evidence that Diane regularly ingested a liquid gold brew of some kind, doubtless in the belief that it would ignite a glow from within.
Parisian women, I’ve come to learn, no longer resort to drastic measures in the pursuit of physical beauty, but some of their other anti-ageing tricks are remarkably Diane-esque: they regularly visit spas for the rejuvenating properties of fresh mineral-rich water; they walk as much as possible; they consume soup like it’s going out of fashion . . . Generally, they look after themselves, and don’t overdo things. There’s a commonly held French view that feeling great is the most effective way to look your best, all through life. This doesn’t, however, mean they don’t zealously fight the hands of time. Any visit to a pharmacie — jam-packed with bottles of vitamin-powered potions and beautiful Parisiennes alike — will attest to this. But a good skincare ritual, according to French women, is as much about a pampering excuse as the antioxidant powers. Beauty is not pain in France. Commitment and self-control, sure. But pain, non.
From my numerous interviews with Paris-based beauty experts, I’ve also gauged that French women aren’t as scared of ageing as Australian women seem to be. La beauté n’a pas d’ âge (Beauty doesn’t have an age) is a common French expression, and there’s something so glamorous about the idea of une femme d’un certain âge, also a familiar phrase, and one that just doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi in English.
‘Have you noticed how many women here don’t look as though they’ve had work done?’ I commented to Mum, as we approached the 7th arrondissement, an area in which you might expect to see skin as smooth and timeless as Hermès silk.
‘I definitely don’t feel as old as I sometimes do in Sydney,’ remarked Mum, ‘where you can feel out of date for not doing botox.’ Now, my mother is no slouch in the complexion department — her facialist is programmed into her phone on speed-dial, and her beauty cabinet puts even mine to shame. But Mum has, with every year and new wrinkle, adhered fast to her no-knives-no-needles policy, no matter how much such invasive procedures come to be commonly considered just another component of skincare.
‘I much prefer the au naturel way in which French women age,’ added Mum. But this, I’ve come to discover, is not quite true. France loves to have the rest of the world think its women don’t succumb to plastic surgery, that the facial exercising that comes with French vowel pronunciation is firming enough, and that everything else can be fixed with a good haircut. Truth is, while facelifts might be falling from favour, as they are in many countries, zaps and jabs (both fillers and freezers) are reported to be as common there as anywhere else. After all, it was a French man who invented the term plastic surgery, in 1798 (inspired by the Greek word for moulding: plastikos). A little over a century later, a French woman, plastic surgeon Suzanne Noël, would become the pioneer of the ‘mini-lift’, a less-is-more approach that has become the bedrock of anti-ageing philosophy in France.
&nbs
p; ‘I feel like, in Sydney, there’s this pressure to be ageless — it’s hard to tell if some women are thirty or fifty,’ I said. ‘Here, it’s more about looking good for your age than not your age at all. Coco Chanel once said something like, nature gives you the face you have at twenty, life shapes the face you have at thirty, but at fifty you have the face you deserve. But that’s not necessarily the case anymore, because there are so many tricks for cheating nature.’
I was, at that point, at a beauty crossroads. I’d gone as far as creams and serums alone would take me — and I could continue on that road to natural ageing, but it was fast going downhill, with potholes and bumps to boot. Or, I could take a sharp right and hit the superhighway of anti-ageing — with its smooth, new surface, yet regular, and exorbitantly priced, toll stations. I’d ignored the turn-offs to it for years, but as life became busier, its various stresses mapping themselves out on my face, I was increasingly favouring the short-cut high-tech approach to looking my best.
‘But beauty has never been an even playing field,’ shrugged Mum. ‘Just like life, really. And as with life, you have to pick your battles. You can’t have it all, at least not at the same time, and you’ll never be happy until you accept this. So beauty, for me, is a case of, which battles do I really need to fight? And right now, I don’t have time or energy to add anything extra to my beauty routine, without it taking away from my other routines, like seeing friends or reading or working.’
Only my mother could look at beauty as an issue of opportunity cost. But then again, beauty is very much about economics, something of which Suzanne Noël was well aware. The surgeon was also a fierce suffragist, which isn’t so remarkable in itself (after all, only in paradoxical Paris can femininity and feminism not be mutually exclusive), nor should it shock that she didn’t challenge what could be perceived as a patriarchal definition of beauty in the first place (there were too many other fights for women to take on at the time, such as the right to vote). What’s really fascinating is that Noël’s motivating factor was her resolute belief that women would better compete in the workplace if they looked younger and fresher. In this, her pragmatism was radically innovative; over a century later, studies prove that the beautiful are more highly paid and regularly promoted. Life was full of battles for Noël, too, and beauty, for her, was a potent weapon — so why not use it?
French women, of course, also know that they’re supporting a major local industry every time they swipe on a Lancôme lipstick or massage in a Guerlain cream. Beauty, which has many definitions in Paris, is, above all, big business. And let’s not forget that the French economy is boosted by the worldwide myth that Parisiennes, of all ages, are the most elegant earthlings of all, beauty lore that can be traced back to the days of Diane de Poitiers. Four hundred years on from the original femme d’un certain âge, another woman famous for wearing black and white, Coco Chanel, would further embellish the myth of eternally beautiful Parisiennes. ‘You can be gorgeous at thirty, charming at forty,’ she proclaimed, ‘and irresistible for the rest of your life.’
‘What would be the possibility of the ability to have my omelette served without the presence of ham?’ We were ordering breakfast at a local café and I realised that, in overcompensation for my rusty French, my language had not only reverted to textbook formality, but in trying to be so proper and polite, it had ascended to the realm of the abstract.
But I love French for its abstractions — its reverence for notions such as liberty, love, pleasure, grandeur. It’s an idealistic language, one refined in the seventeenth century, the time of classicism, and like the architecture of that period, it so stylishly and neatly packages up the often messy human condition. No wonder French was the language of diplomacy for so long; it has both a simplicity and grandiosity to it. The nitty-gritty has been abstracted away, leaving it clean, calm, ordered and harmonious — and a touch mysterious. Some say that French is too impersonal, detached, vague and lofty, that it hovers too high above reality and talks too nonchalantly, a little about a lot, rather than drilling down into details. But the French love to talk for the sake of talking. Dialogue is not about winning a debate, it’s about relishing language, rolling it around the tongue. Perhaps their abstract language allows the French to best deal with life — and who’s to say that generalising your outlook isn’t the best way to get your head around the complications of the modern world?
Take beauty, for instance. It’s technically an abstract noun, although in Australia — or Sydney, at least — it’s becoming increasingly concrete: detailed, a cookie-cutter mould in which to pour yourself. Beauty here is subject to continual redefinition, influenced by trends rather than a classic ideal. But, as I see it, beauty remains an abstract concept in France. There’s no set, must-try beauty look at any one time. Instead, beauty is malleable, and can be individualised. It’s about, simply and yet grandly, looking your best.
Denis Diderot, the philosopher star of the Enlightenment, wrote that ideal beauty was found in abstraction, taking away what is not beautiful rather than selecting what is. Which is precisely what good grooming is about in France: playing down the negative, subtly accentuating the positives. (It’s not for no reason that in English we use the French-inspired expression jolie laide — pretty ugly — which demonstrates that culture’s belief that anyone can be attractive by virtue of making an effort.) Diderot, of course, was referring to a grander kind of art than makeup; but then, this nicely illustrates the point that beauty is a bigger picture in France. Its definition is wider — encompassing art, food, architecture and more — and perhaps this helps to keep facial beauty in perspective. The business of makeup, skincare and fragrance might have appropriated the designation of beauty, but really, most French industries could be rolled together under this (ruffle-trimmed) umbrella term, such is the national commitment to aesthetics as much as abstractions.
I had just read the best-selling book The Elegance of the Hedgehog. It’s an exquisitely written, philosophically powered work of literary art that is so very French, reflecting as it does on the nature of such abstract notions as beauty, art and pleasure. Set in a chichi apartment on the well-to-do Rue de Grenelle, also in the 7th, one of its heroines is Renée, the concierge, who conforms to clichés (stout, dense, unkempt) because life is easier for her that way. In reality, however, Renée’s shopping bags hide gastronomic treats beneath the turnips, and when she’s not cleaning handrails she’s ensconced in her back room listening to classical music, reading Tolstoy, savouring white tea and almond tuiles, and musing on the meaning of life. Beneath the hedgehog-like spikiness is a graceful soul who revels in a glorious inner life. Renée proves she has it within to groom herself to physical elegance, but by this time we already see her as a beautiful woman. So, while grooming — abstracting the blemishes — is one definition of beauty in France, it’s by no means the only one.
As a beauty writer, I love France’s abstract perspective on the subject in which I’m meant to be an expert. Beauty is all around, in all guises in this world, just as there are so many things to see and do and be. As much as I’d long been content to let my job define me, I was coming to realise that my title was in itself too narrow a definition, just as beauty itself should never be boxed in — no matter how prettily packaged.
Mum and I set off down Rue de Grenelle, for a day of research. I’d been commissioned to write an article on Parisian perfumeries — Paris and perfume being two of my favourite subjects swirled together in a bow-tied bottle. What I’ve always loved about classic French fragrance is that, just as certain scents can plunge you back into a specific moment in your past, it offers up an intriguing clue into the psyche of Parisian women, an olfactory subliminal message in a bottle. And there’s a fascinating paradox (yet another one!) to Parisian perfume. You might expect it to be exquisitely beautiful — and at first sniff, it usually is — but inhale a little deeper, wait for things to develop, for the diaphanous top notes to dissolve, to undress and reveal their base, and
you sense the force of the perfume’s true character. It’s the inverse of the hedgehog: elegance outside, spikes within; a leather-and-lace lingerie set worn under a classic outfit of blue jeans and white shirt.
Our first stop was the boutique Maître Parfumeur et Gantier — Master Perfumer and Glove Maker — so named in tribute to the original French perfumers, who were also tanners, specialising in leather accessories that had been scented to camouflage the stench of the urine-steeped tanning process. Catherine de Medici, while not considered a beauty, was a stylish trendsetter nonetheless, and fragranced gloves were just one of the phenomena for which she took credit. The ‘black queen’ had brought with her from Florence a personal perfumer, who conveniently doubled as a poison-maker. His Eau de le Reine, concocted in her honour, fell into the former category of work (fortunately, for both of them). A citrus-based, rosemary-infused perfume water, it must have reminded Catherine of home, and she would have splashed it on partly out of nostalgia, but mostly necessity; scent was, at the time, the only way to mask body odour — both your own and everyone else’s. Fancy gloves aside, Parisians reeked. Diane de Poitiers’ obsessive commitment to cleanliness was a rarity. Parisians, for the most part, viewed washing as unnecessary at best, unhygienic at worst. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that bathing (and bathrooms) became a regular occurrence in Paris.
It’s all relative, of course. And Paris, back then, also stank, so perhaps Parisians’ noses were partly inured to noxious smells. Nevertheless, the city was said to be the rankest in all of Europe, with piles of garbage rotting by the side of sewage-streaming roads, until well into the seventeenth century. And when the stink really hit the fan, all Parisians could do was douse themselves in yet more perfume — something that would hold well, that would be adequately heady to mask the funky skin beneath the frilly finery, and oomphy enough to build a protective olfactory shield around the wearer. Not even Queen Catherine’s poisoner-slash-perfumer could have formulated a brew as potent as the scents chosen for the job — because black magic has nothing on animalic fragrance.
Paris Dreaming Page 26
