Paris Dreaming

by Katrina Lawrence

  My unabashed adoration of Disneyland began when I was four years old, when my parents took me to the original theme park in Los Angeles. I can still recall it in technicolor memory: Alice in Wonderland in her sky-blue dress, the orange fur of Pluto as he enveloped me in a big bear hug, the pastel-pink turrets of the castle with their golden trim. Disneyland infused me with a sense of wonder about life (not to mention a penchant for pretty sparkly things) that lingered for years. And this was the magical wand of a baton I was hoping to pass on to my boys — although I didn’t kid myself it would be pink and glittery.

  But before we could enter, we had to deal with wands of another kind — the metal detectors now ubiquitous at major French attractions, following a year in which Paris had been rocked by terrorism. It was a sign, for me, that the world has lost some of its own wonder. Fortunately, the boys were still at the age when they believe that life is magical. Watching them skip down Main Street in their Mickey Mouse ears, towards the fantastical castle up ahead, filled me with an emotion I couldn’t quite put a finger on at the time. I now realise it was the joy of watching them live their own future, happy, technicolor memories.

  Taking two energetic yet jet-lagged young boys to Disneyland in peak tourist season comes with its own special challenges. ‘We’re at the Happiest Place on Earth and we’re having Fun!’ I’d enthuse-slash-demand over the three days we were there. They weren’t always convinced. After snaking along a slow-moving queue for sixty minutes, we boarded a barge for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, where we glided by a series of creaky-looking characters. ‘Wow,’ cooed the boys on cue, but you have to wonder how long Disney can stay so low-tech in a digital world where children conjure up all sorts of technological wizardry at the press of an iPad button.

  On the final day we lunched back in the hotel, in a restaurant where Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Daisy wandered from table to table. By now, the boys were taking it all in their stride, totally unfazed to find life-size rodents and ducks among their dining companions. ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ Noah greeted Minnie as we walked in. I’d given him some fundamental French-language lessons on the aeroplane, but stressed the most important of all: ‘Being polite gets you far in life,’ I said. ‘And the French expect you to always says “bonjour” to them.’

  The French are sticklers for civility, especially in children who are taught the importance of ‘bonjour’ from the get-go. Inspired by my French baby book, I’d long nagged my sons to be courteous to adults. ‘How do I say “I am Noah” in French,’ Noah asked me on the first day of our holiday. He proceeded to announce ‘Bonjour, je m’appelle Noah’ to anyone in earshot. I was still trying to teach him the codes regarding which strangers you addressed, and which not, but in Disneyland, heightened politeness seemed to suit the surroundings. ‘Enchanté,’ would be the invariable response; when the French want to say ‘Nice to meet you’ they literally say ‘Enchanted’, like some spellbound character from a Perrault tale. I’ve always loved this about the French — who doesn’t want to be enchanting, after all?

  Driving into the French capital was somewhat of a reality check. Before reaching the fairyland that is central Paris, we had to make our way through the outer suburbs. These are not the picket-fence-style suburbs of Australia, mind you. In Paris, it’s mostly the wealthy who live centrally, while everyone else dwells beyond the Périphérique highway that rings the city, separating the haves from the have-nots. Each city has its socioeconomic issues, of course, but there’s something about the contrast of classes in Paris that makes things seem all the more jarring, where people often refer to the suburbs as ghettoes, a description that seems sadly apt.

  As we turned off the Périph to head towards the 5th arrondissement, the grey, grim buildings began to transform into gleaming bright ones. Paris was doing what she has always done best: cast a magical spell over visitors. Locals might moan about the Disneyfication of their city, that it’s little more than a historic tourist park with its set itinerary of rides (Seine cruise), sights (Mona Lisa) and thrills (Eiffel Tower climb). But what’s the world to do? France could surely not have built such an beguiling city and expected us to resist its lure. Parisians, after all, know the power of beauty more than anyone.

  We noticed, however, that the boulevards were not quite up to squeaky-clean Main Street standards, and remembered that the city had just experienced a spate of demonstrations and garbage strikes. The French were up in arms over a labour law President Hollande was about to push through, one that aimed to decrease unemployment by making it easier to hire, fire, and alter working hours — with the ultimate aim of creating a more flexible labour market to better suit global times. The French had long been suspicious of globalisation — which they view more or less as Americanisation — and it’s one issue that will get their inner revolutionaries back out on the streets. The French also love their rituals, and demonstrating is a serious social rite. Plus, there’s a passion to a protest, not to mention the tradition of historical romance; demonstrating connects Parisians to their beloved streets as much as to their riotous ancestors.

  But what I most love about the French style of strike — something that is usually anarchistic by definition — is that it’s actually quite conservative, because these days the French by and large protest not to change society, but to keep the status quo intact. French strikes promote harmony, in other words, which is so utterly paradoxical in the most Parisian way. But the French are evidently content with their cosseted way of life. They’re not quite living in Disneyland, as a trek through the outer suburbs will prove, but generally the French state looks after its citizens admirably well. Liberalists might say that France needs to get with the times, that it lives in the past, but like Disneyland, there’s a quaint loveliness to its pursuit of happiness above all else.

  After dropping off our bags in our apartment, we headed to the Luxembourg Garden for a late-afternoon stroll, taking the northern entrance and passing by the side of the Palais du Luxembourg, the current seat of the French Senate. It was originally built for Florentine Marie de Medici, Henri IV’s second queen, who nostalgically requested an Italianate palazzo, but ended up with something more like a typical French château, complete with formal gardens à la française, too. She at least got her grotto, although this has also been Frenchified over time. Now the Medici Fountain, the grotto sits at the head of a long basin of water that is shaded by plane trees, garlanded by ivy and dotted with urns of vibrant flowers. It’s one of the most whimsical of oases around. If you weren’t charged with keeping two lively boys entertained, you’d pull up a signature green chair and soak in the serenity.

  The perennially popular Luxembourg Garden was teeming on that blue-skied day. Couples sunned themselves by the octagonal pond, students lolled about drinking rosé on the emerald carpets of lawn edged with rows of pruned trees, and nannies weaved after their wards, circling the lace-trimmed bandstand and zig-zagging the grove of horse chestnuts, whose wonderfully lush leaves contrasted with the austerity of the gravel ground. Almost every one of the scattered chairs had been claimed, and their owners gazed dreamily over the flower-filled parterres, with nothing better to do than simply watch the world go by.

  I expressed envy of the lucky souls whose lives allowed them to laze around Parisian gardens all day long. Dad, pragmatic as ever, pointed out that perhaps they were simply out of work, the unemployment rate being at double digits at the time. Although in Dad’s view, a higher joblessness rate is perhaps preferable to a lower one that disguises the fact the many people are underemployed — as is the case in Australia. It wouldn’t surprise me if the French felt the same, as I see them as such dual-natured, all-or-nothing people who like clear-cut options. Either you have a job or you don’t — it’s noir or blanc, oui or non . . .

  ‘NO!’

  Otto — whose favourite line, along with the word no, seemed to be ‘Je m’appelle Poo-Poo’ — was doing his best portrayal of the opposite of a well-mannered French boy. (Ms Druckerman
would have failed me then and there.) He had dug his heels into the gravel foreground of an icecream stand, protesting at his grandmother’s refusal to buy him a treat. ‘You’ve had enough junk at Disneyland and it’s time to eat good food like a nice French child,’ she explained patiently.

  ‘NO!!!’

  Otto doesn’t say no like most English-speaking children do — so it sounds like an ‘oh’, which almost seems to accept eventual defeat then and there. Oh no, Otto expresses denial with an almost Gallic accent, pronouncing his no like the French non so it’s vehemently thrust forward, through an insolent pout, and thrown down at the feet of the offending adult like a particularly weighty gauntlet. Not that, I’ve been told, French kids actually utter the word non all that often. French adults, on the other hand, love to say non, like the disobedient children they never were, making up for lost time and lost nons. You might hear a non when you pass the ice-cream lady a fifty-euro bill and she shakes her head, even though it’s 4 p.m. on a summer’s day and you know for sure she would have change. Or the non could charge out of the moustache-topped mouth of one of the park’s gardiens, as he runs towards you waggling his finger when you try to move some of the green chairs around. Non is a power play. As the authors Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau have pointed out, non is the everyday French person’s right to refuse, a privilege hard won during the French Revolution after centuries of subservience to the aristocracy. When a Parisian isn’t taking to the streets, he or she can still make a stand against the world in a small way, simply by saying non. It’s the particular default position of Parisians in the service-based industry, but if you’re polite and persistent, you can work around it. But maybe non.

  With Otto, distraction was a much more effective method than logic, anger or even punishment. ‘Let’s go find the carousel,’ trilled my mother, and the scowl melted from his face like ice cream in the sunshine. The carousel had been the boys’ favourite ride at Disneyland, which surprised me, given its floral femininity, as well as the fact that nothing much happens on a merry-go-round; you literally go around in circles, and don’t actually get anywhere, which doesn’t tend to suit my boys’ easily bored personalities. But then again, there aren’t too many opportunities in life to just sit still and enjoy the scenery around you. So perhaps in this way the carousel, as a loop of suspended time, stills a restless mind, and I was more than happy to indulge the newfound passion if it entailed a lesson in living in the moment.

  The merry-go-round at the Luxembourg Garden has not been Disneyfied (Paris purists will be happy to hear), but remains in its own cycle of time suspension, close to its late seventeenth-century state: a troop of creaky horses, along with some random wooden wildlife, cranking around under their bottle-green circus-tent top. The riders on the outer circle of animals take a small spear from the operator, who then stands by, holding a ring dispenser; as the kids approach, they must focus and aim their stick to try to detach and claim a ring.

  It’s all great for hand–eye coordination and various other buzzwords of twenty-first-century paediatric occupational therapy, but the exercise goes back to the ancient tradition of jousting, the star attraction of medieval tournaments. These knight games began in France around the same time that the myth of Sir Lancelot — passionate lover, brave fighter and all-round dreamboat — captured society’s imagination as the epitome of chivalry, the knightly code encompassing courage and courtesy. Inspired knights would compete at tournaments in all their finery to thrill the maidens. Jousting — where two knights on horseback would charge at one another at full speed, and each try to unhorse the other with his lance — could be a brutal affair, and was ultimately banned by Catherine de Medici, after her adored husband King Henri II was killed in the combat game. Tournaments were eventually replaced, in the seventeenth century, by a less violent, more elaborate version of equine extravaganza, known as un carrousel. Almost an equestrian ballet, a carousel was an intricately coordinated pageant of a parade, with horses and their riders elaborately dressed. Games included ring tilting (a noncombat take on jousting), and the prototypes of today’s merry-go-rounds were rudimentary devices that enabled young nobles to perfect their tilting skills. Voilà — now you know.

  Young French men might no longer jump through hoops — or spear rings — to impress the ladies, but their ancestors were the first Europeans to foster a culture of love, to create codes of conduct for wooing women, and the chivalry gene lives on in many modern French men, who can kiss a female hand like few other nationalities. Australian men aren’t, by and large, known for their chivalry, and they might blame this on some kind of mutant DNA, but I am a big believer in nurture over nature, and have spent countless hours talking to my sons about chivalry, reading them the stories of King Arthur and Sir Lancelot (the PC version), buying embroidered velvet costumes fit for a knight. To my chagrin (and to the amusement of Andy, who is of the boys-will-be-boys school of thought), I eventually realised that my sons wanted to play knights purely to get their hands on a sword. When their grandfather announced he was, in fact, a knight, having just been awarded a papal knighthood by the Vatican for legal work in the Catholic Church, they were most impressed — until discovering this kind of knighthood does not come with armoury of any kind. I tried to explain that the strongest men in fact don’t need a weapon, that manners and kindness are the way to win in life. For the moment, it’s an ongoing conversation.

  As the boys ran amok in the playground, I spent some time observing the other kids at play, and what struck me was not just how those with French accents tended to be less raucous (I already knew that would be so), but how the French girls were not kitted out like pink princesses or frothy ballerinas, as their Australian sisters so often are. Les filles in fact dress rather simply (albeit stylishly) overall — as do the garçons — and I find this curious in a place that is the spiritual capital of fairy tales, as well as ballet.

  Then again, French history has given women some kick-ass icons. Think Sainte Geneviève, Joan of Arc, George Sand, Marie Curie, Simone de Beauvoir. My personal favourite is twelfth-century duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine — partly because one of my French ancestors, the Comte de Borde, swore to serve and protect her on her father’s deathbed; partly because she was the original power woman, and a feminine-but-feminist icon for modern French mothers who also balance the demands of large families and full-time careers, all the while looking impossibly elegant.

  The beautiful, spirited, independent and strong-willed Eleanor was the catch of her age, with a huge expanse of rich feudal land to her name. She married the King of France, Louis VII, but soon tired of their spark-free relationship, and divorced him to unite with the future King of England, Henry II. The double-queen had ten children in all, but motherhood hardly slowed her down; she was constantly on the move to maintain order in the realm — except for the decade in which Henry locked her up, that is (theirs was a passionate but somewhat complex relationship). Eleanor came into her own in her sixties, and for the next twenty years proved herself an impressive leader, strategist and negotiator at a time when it was rare for women to have even a whisper of a public voice.

  Eleanor graced France with some much-needed femininity in brutal times. Born to a high-cultured family, she had grown up in a magnificent Aquitainian court that worshipped love, beauty and elegance, and was a hub for poets and artists. She inspired reams of romantic literature herself, and her daughter Marie of Champagne was the patron of writer Chrétien de Troyes, who was responsible for the romantic refashioning of Lancelot’s story into a handbook of chivalry. Eleanor not only shaped the psyche of Western Europe but also its history and politics. Her blood has flowed through generations of European royals, right through to Queen Elizabeth II.

  There’s an exquisite series of statues in the Luxembourg Garden, along the two terraces overlooking the main pond, depicting twenty French queens and famous women. The intricate marble drapings and detailings give a wonderful lesson in French fashion history, to say the l
east, but I always feel the absence of the formidable, incomparable Eleanor, who would surely have been the most gracefully frocked of all the femmes. Then again, Eleanor did abandon Paris for London, which would probably be an unforgivable transgression even today.

  We tempted the boys away from the playground with the promise of dinner, and made our way through a stand of yet more chestnut trees, over what was once the backyard of Marie de Medici, who was, appropriately, granted statuary immortality. Her son, the young King Louis XIII, would play there with his dogs, long before other Parisian children discovered the gardens as their own kingdom of pony rides and puppet shows.

  ‘En garde!’ yelled Otto, grabbing a stick from the ground and assuming battle position before us, every bit the mini musketeer.

  It was Louis XIII who, in 1622, founded les Mousquetaires, the troupe of musket-wielding soldiers made famous by Romantic novelist Alexandre Dumas, père over 200 years later. Not that Monsieur Dumas exactly imbued the musketeers myth with much romance; his men were brawlers of the first order, with a warped sense of honour that was both strong yet delicate, so that the slightest slur triggered a reflex physical response. The behaviour was probably closer to fact than fiction; by the seventeenth century fighting had gone professional. Where once there was a warrior caste of snazzily dressed knights — usually upwardly mobile minor nobles who were wealthy enough to buy their own warhorse and equipment — a centralised army now welcomed any man born with the battling gene. Little surprise then that old-fashioned chivalry, the gem-encrusted badge of honour once worn by every self-respecting knight, started to go the way of heavy medieval armoury. The musketeers, drawn from the lower ranks of nobility, were particularly renowned for their boisterous, hot-blooded ways, always ready to draw a sword in this golden age of duelling (even though Louis had officially outlawed such street violence). Such is the enduring legend of the musketeers that Hollywood seems to make a blockbuster of their story every twenty years, for a new generation of impressionable boys.