Animalic? you say . . . Look, there’s no poetic way to spin this, so here goes: musk comes from a gland situated in the nether regions of the musk deer; similarly, civet is a secretion produced in the perineal glands of the catlike animal of the same name; castoreum is what beavers, like civets, use to mark their territory; and ambergris is a faecal mass expelled from the sperm whale. Not for the faint-hearted, in short.
Heavy animalic fragrances went out of fashion after the Revolution, when perfume had a stench about it of aristocratic airs and libertine licentiousness. But animalic notes eventually pawed their way back into perfume bottles — interestingly, particularly once Parisians had started bathing regularly. Was it a subconscious strategy to reconnect with their olfactory heritage, to put back some of the grit that washing had cleansed away? There’s a particularly vivid scene in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, in which the antihero Grenouille, who has no odour of his own, concocts a human scent for himself, using extracts of cat poo, vinegar, decomposed cheese, rancid sardines and rotten egg, to name a few ingredients, along with castoreum and civet. In a similar way, I imagine modern perfumers finding a somewhat perverse pleasure in lacing their fragrances’ base layers with such base ingredients. But it’s more than an in-joke. Perfumers know that a few animalic drops not only help to prolong a perfume’s power — creating that so-Parisian sillage, the scent trail wafting behind a woman like a long silken scarf — they also imbue fragrance with warmth, depth and sensuality. That’s why most classic Parisian scents feature animalic notes (albeit, thankfully, in synthetic form these days) somewhere in the base of their bouquet of beautiful floral or gourmand notes.
Not that most brands will admit to it, mind you. A major fragrance company once threatened to pull its advertising from a magazine I worked for when it heard I was planning to include its top-selling scent in a feature on animalic fragrance. Dirty-edged perfumes are the French fragrance industry’s dirty little secret, which I find fascinatingly ironic. Here we are, dousing ourselves in bestial secretions (unwittingly or not), when perfume is meant to be a sign of civilisation, one of the things that separate us from beasts.
If animalic notes are French fragrance’s little secret, then French love’s petit secret is adultery. The aroma of dirty lingerie, so to speak, has long lingered, despite a concerted effort by the nineteenth century to clean things up — with perfume as much as with relationships.
Mum and I had spent much of the day in Musée d’Orsay, and were walking along the quais, stopping by the bouquinistes to flick through their piles of vintage books. I bought myself a few French classics, including Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the ultimate cautionary tale against adultery. (Read not too much into this, please. I was mostly taken by the illustration of a French woman wearing a beribboned bonnet and furtive look on her lovely pale face.)
We’d only just been admiring Madame herself, in a way. One of the first sculptures you see as you walk into the light-drenched central vault of the Musée d’Orsay is James Pradier’s Sappho, a marble rendition of the lyric poetess of Ancient Greece. There’s a mesmerising swirl of emotions in her stillness, like the ripples of her draped dress, and the meditative melancholy of her finely chiselled features transfixes you to your spot. The model was Pradier’s lover, the beautiful Louise Colet, also a prize-winning poetess, and it was in his studio, just down the road on Quai Voltaire, that Colet met, and embarked on a passionate affair with, the up-and-coming author Gustave Flaubert. Like the future Emma Bovary, she was a gushing romantic who had married to escape provincial life but cherished bigger dreams. Flaubert, on the other hand, was very much a realist and, in Madame Bovary, he warned of the dangers of living in a fantasy world. Colet was a perfect muse — and also provided literature with one of its steamiest scenes by throwing herself on Flaubert during a bouncing curtain-drawn carriage ride around the Bois de Boulogne.
Flaubert was put on trial for obscenity but, in reality, the women were always punished in matters of adultery. In researching Madame Bovary, Flaubert had also taken inspiration from another mistress, Louise Pradier, who had been thrown out of home by her husband (yes, the sculptor James; these were socially incestuous times) for an earlier dalliance, losing her children along with most else. No matter that Pradier was a serial cheater himself; men were expected to have affairs (if discreetly). Women, however, were severely punished for transgressing any boundaries of feminine propriety — as Emma Bovary did, unforgivably neglecting her kind, if boorish, husband and young daughter for the pursuit of impossible dreams.
Hanging along several of the bouquiniste sheds were fashion plates ripped from old magazines, the very type that Emma sighs over. Magazines have long been accused of distorting women’s expectations of reality, but there’s a certain type of personality that lives beyond the realms of life’s probabilities. There’s a French word for it: bovarysme. It’s the syndrome whereby you live life as though you’re in a romance novel, in continual denial of reality, which will only eventually fall short, crashing irrevocably down.
Another bouquiniste favourite is La Princesse de Clèves, the best-seller of 1678. Considered the first psychological novel — Edith Wharton wrote that it kicked off modern fiction — its author Madame de Lafayette, like Flaubert, argued for reason over romance, sense over sentiments. Set in the royal court late in the reign of King Henri II — his wife Catherine and mistress Diane are also characters — La Princesse tells the fictional story of a beautiful, virtuous girl who’s thrown into a world of intrigue and affairs. Determined to honour her new and adoring husband, whom she respects but doesn’t love, the princess is mortified to find that she has fallen passionately in lust for the ladies’ man Duc de Nemours.
No matter how many times I read La Princesse, I can’t help shaking my head that (spoiler alert!) she ends up resisting the dashing Nemours, even when the death of her husband leaves her fancy-free. But once I overcome my initial annoyance at the lack of a they-all-lived-happily-ever-after ending, I find the book actually leaves a refreshing aftertaste. And I think that’s because we all know that life, really, isn’t a simple love story. It’s hard work; marriage, too. ‘You need to put effort into being a spouse, just like you do with any other role in life,’ my mother once told me. When the honeymoon is over, it’s just the two of you, trying to make sense of the new world order, pay the bills and maybe raise some babies. You have to balance the romance with some hard-nosed realism for a successful partnership, it’s not something to be taken lightly. Affairs, to me, seem an easy way out, shortsighted escapism, to a place of no good. So that’s why it’s novel to see a romantic heroine thinking with her head, not just her heart, to be reminded that there are other grand abstract notions to live by, such as trust and respect. And perhaps that’s why something written almost 350 years ago has resonance today, and is still studied by French students. It’s a cool, calm and collected counterpoint to the messiness that can ensue when love unravels. And every French person knows that the opposite of order is chaos. Just, hopefully, neither option nowadays need entail driving your husband to a miserable death, or retiring to a nunnery.
In translating La Princesse, English author — and devoted Francophile — Nancy Mitford wondered, in her introduction, at the ‘curious shrinking from happiness’ of the novel’s heroine. Wharton, too, had evidently felt a certain exasperation at the ‘story of hopeless love and mute renunciation’. But the princess was not simply denying herself joy; she was also protecting herself from future misery, from eventually being abandoned by a libertine lover. And that’s an interesting take on the pursuit of pleasure; surely it’s as much about seeking bliss as avoiding its flipside: sorrow. Anyway, Mitford knew all about keeping her emotions in check. At the age of forty-something, she moved to Paris to follow the amour of her life, who turned out to be the textbook French philanderer, the very type the princess was worried Nemours would reveal himself to be. But like the princess, Nancy refused to let herself fall apart. A stickler for decorum, s
he put on a brave face, lipstick too, and lived as elegantly as possible. Her residence of many years was not far from where Mum and I were staying, and Nancy led a glamorous existence in the faubourg, partying it up in Dior at night, writing her enchanting biographies and elegant, witty novels during the day. She chose, very consciously, to make peace with her lot, to not let love, with all its potential clutter and confusion, ruffle the rest of her very full, quite beautiful, life. Wharton, incidentally, also suffered through a tumultuous amour fou in her early Paris years, only to have to pull herself, and her frayed emotions, back together. So perhaps, by the time she wrote The Age of Innocence, she was somewhat philosophical about passion, and sympathetic to such a character as Newland Archer, who ultimately chose head over heart. Wharton knew firsthand that some pairings weren’t meant to be.
Dinner that evening was at the home of Mum’s friend Sophie, who had moved from Sydney to Paris two decades earlier. Whenever I’m in town, I check in on Sophie, and have long been enthralled by her increasingly glamorous existence. She has lived in a succession of apartments, each one a little bigger and grander, filled with ever more gilt-edged antiques and elaborate lamps. Having worked her way up to a position as a top executive for an advertising agency, Sophie had moulded herself into the quintessential Parisienne (as Edith Wharton, Nancy Mitford and many others have shown, some of the best Parisiennes weren’t even born French), a stylish women of un certain âge as you can only find in this city.
We arrived at her latest abode — this time in Saint-Germain — punched in the digicode at the street entrance, and made our way upstairs, in what was once a private mansion. Sophie was waiting by her door, in a little black dress and Christian Louboutins, very much the lady of the manoir. She greeted us with requisite double-kisses, and gratefully accepted the bottle of champagne and bouquet of flowers we had brought by way of congratulations. Sophie had just celebrated her French citizenship and I couldn’t help feeling a little verte with envy, especially as we made our way inside, which was both cosy and intimate, and styled to home-magazine perfection. Sophie, too, manages to be both warm and grandiose. Her favourite word is amazing — which she adores so much she makes the most of it: ‘ahhhhmayyyzing’ — and her life seems to embody this, with its frenzy of friends, socialising and jet-setting.
Every time I visit Sophie, I experience — in addition to the mild pang of jealousy — an odd spine-shivering sensation that is not so much the ‘already-seen’ of déjà vu as the ‘could-see’ if I were able to peer into a parallel universe. I can’t help but wonder if this might have been my life had I stayed in Paris any of those earlier times. When you’re young, your ‘what ifs’ are future possibilities, countless tickets to new and exotic destinations. After a certain age, the ‘what ifs’ have mostly expired, like wistful sighs, and it’s with no little regret that you sometimes wonder where those journeys might have taken you. Bovarysme is in part about the lure of Paris, which has, for centuries, for so many women, represented the very essence of civilisation, the epitome of a good life. Just as Emma traces her fingers dreamily over a map of Paris, I have often walked around the city on Google Street View. But I decided a while back that I wanted to keep my feet firmly on my native soil, that I wasn’t going to flit off like some character in a Romantic (or a chick-lit) novel. I’ve very much chosen to be happy with life at home.
‘Riddle me this,’ I said to Sophie, after mentioning my day’s literary purchases. ‘If two of the greatest French classics are cautionary tales about the dangers of affairs, why do the French have a reputation as a nation of adulterers?’
‘It’s in their genes,’ Sophie replied. Adultery in France has centuries of court culture behind it, from the torrid love affairs of troubadours to the glamorous mistresses at Versailles to the libertine aristocrats with too much time on their wandering hands. After the Revolution, when laws made divorce near impossible, adultery became something of a new form of social rebellion, and was a particular pastime of bored bourgeois men. These days, however, adultery seems to be the domain mainly of politicians — which doesn’t bother the French voters, not so much because they believe in free love but in the sanctity of private life.
‘No, seriously,’ Sophie added, ‘you do get your cheaters everywhere, as in any country, but the committed adulterers tend to be those in a certain social milieu. Like my neighbour. He has his official family, with his three legitimate children, then his long-term mistress, who lives with their daughter across the river, and he’s also now apparently seeing a third woman. You have to be wealthy to live like this!’
‘And stressed,’ noted Mum.
‘I don’t know how his heart keeps up! He’s always scurrying in and out, fatigue etched all over his face.’
‘And he’s never been found out?’ I asked, incredulous.
‘I actually think they all know about each other, but just pretend not to.’
‘I guess that’s one way to preserve the status quo,’ I remarked.
‘You’ve hit the nail on the head. The French like to think they’re passionate creatures but, in reality, they’re very discreet. It’s all about keeping up appearances.’
In sartorial terms, the French way to keep up discreet, chic appearances is to wear a neat, tailored jacket — preferably signed Chanel. It took Parisiennes until the 1960s to co-opt men’s trousers, but man-style jackets have been in their repertoire for much longer. From the seventeenth century, aristocratic women would pair nipped-in styles with long skirts for riding outfits, and by the turn of the twentieth century, the look had become commonplace on city streets. But it was Coco Chanel who brought la veste into the modern age, making it wonderfully wearable with her cardigan style of 1925 and then, in 1954, her trim, tailored tweed version. One of the staples of contemporary fashion — up there with white shirts and blue jeans — Chanel’s short collarless jacket is the very definition of classic; it overrides all fashion fads, just as it can be worn with anything, by anyone, at any age.
Generally, Parisian women don’t follow the ups-and-downs of fashionable hemlines, or ride the rollercoaster of runway trends. They prefer to look steadily, consistently stylish. If the fashion one season is elegant, bon; if not, forget it. A Parisienne will especially not wear something that accentuates what she sees as her weaknesses — which is why Parisian style suits all in its sleek simplicity. Remember, beauty here is in abstraction. Coco Chanel, she who insisted that the definition of elegance is refusal, knew this better than anyone.
Chanel was responsible for many trends that stayed the course to become wardrobe classics. There was the little black dress, for one, and the Breton striped shirt (inspired by the fishermen tops Chanel saw when holidaying in Deauville) that has become a signifier of Francophilia the world over. But for my mum, it was ‘Buy a Chanel jacket’ that she added to her bucket-list years ago.
Because today was Chanel Day, we started off with breakfast at Angelina, the designer’s favourite café, and even managed to score her old table (No.10 — which somehow seems a little askew). We slowly savoured our hot chocolate, rich as dark velvet, and tried to picture Mademoiselle herself in this very spot. The café has barely changed in the past century or so, with its murals of Mediterranean scenes casting a sunny glow. While Chanel did love her seaside holidays (and the souvenir tans), Angelina seems rather lavish in style for someone who dressed so simply. But then, here’s where Chanel was quintessentially Parisian: her surface might have been austere (save for a touch of faux jewellery), like the façade of her building (with a pretty window box here or there), but when it came to interiors, she loved to glitz things up.
Instead of shopping at the iconic Rue Cambon store, as originally planned, we set off for the 16th arrondissement, the spiritual home of the Parisian bourgeoisie with their, doubtless, plush interiors and, according to Sophie, the go-to for designer vintage stores.
Sure enough, we soon struck Chanel jacket heaven. The saleswoman — dressed in a monochrome suit, her pearl
y-white hair twisted into an elegant bun — led us to an entire rack devoted to the fashion subgenre. There was almost every colour of the rainbow, along with the classic blacks, creams and navies, and each model ever-so-slightly hinted at its vintage, from the boxy pastels of the 1960s to the cool, clean pales of the noughties. Mum found herself drawn to a black one, adorned with gold-coin buttons. While it had the same sleekness as all the others, with the celebrated skinny sleeves and the genius gold chain weighing down its hemline, it somehow seemed a little sturdier, perhaps in the shoulders.
‘Zissss is from zeeee eighties,’ explained the doyenne of the boutique.
‘Of course it is!’ I exclaimed, giggling.
My mother hit her career stride in the 1980s, when shoulder-padded suits provided the armour in which women could battle it out with men in the workplace. It was a cape of a kind for the new generation of superwomen and made them feel empowered.
‘Well, I like it,’ huffed Mum, not a little indignantly. French women might have a national signature fashion look, but for the rest of the world, there’s a theory that we tend to settle on a personal style by reverting to the fashions in which we came of age, which helped to define us at such a formative time. That’s why, I think, Mum feels so at ease in a suit, even a structured one.
‘It’s surprisingly comfortable,’ Mum commented to Madame Doyenne.
Paris Dreaming Page 27
