Farewell My French Love

by Nadine Williams

  When Oli and I visited Versailles, La Galerie des Glaces (the Hall of Mirrors) was being restored and so, today, when I see it for the first time, I’m enthralled by its glamour. By a stroke of luck there are few tourists. Jane and I reunite and we are lucky to be able to view the majesty of this gallery, so glorious I hardly know how to take it all in. Opened by Louis XIV on 1 December 1682, one side is a great bank of wide windows and on the other? Acreages of gilded mirrors (seventeen huge arched panels each five metres high and two metres wide) create a spectacle of shimmering glass in which the whole magnificence is reflected. The painted domed ceiling above us reflects the glory of seventeenth-century French decoration. Entitled The King Governs for Himself by the gifted Charles Le Brun, its thirty compositions of the Sun King’s military victories are as unique as the Sistine Chapel. The gallery is further embellished by gilded statues holding candelabras and the huge original, restored crystal chandeliers sparkle like diamonds in the viewfinder of my camera.

  Past the king’s bedchamber, we reach Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s iconic portrait of the queen and her three children, which hangs in Le Salon du Grand Couvert. It shows the elder little boy, the Dauphin, Louis-Philippe Xavier, alongside an empty cradle, his older sister the princess alongside the queen and their younger brother Louis Charles on his mother’s lap.

  I look into Marie Antoinette’s porcelain face with its fixed expression and think about her suffering immeasurable emotional pain and grief.

  I wonder if she senses my sympathy for the tragedies that would soon unfold to rip apart her perfect family. The cradle was empty to reflect that her fourth child, a princess, named Sophie-Beatrix, died just before she turned a year old. All I can think of is a mother’s relentless tears.

  Two years later, when their older son, Louis-Philippe, the Dauphin of France, died of tuberculosis in the spine at seven years of age, the royal couple were inconsolable.

  I wonder if there is a greater grief than mine, that of losing two little children. I think I know the depths of sorrow, but Marie Antoinette may well have suffered more than me.

  Historians believe the couple’s profound grief played a role in their behaviour during the following events, which fanned the French Revolution. Only two weeks after they buried their son, the first meeting of the National Assembly was held on 17 June, a precursor to the end of the French monarchy.

  We reach the queen’s bed chamber, which is a gorgeous feminine room draped in sumptuous, floral fabrics, exquisite silk hangings and pretty bed linen. I glance around the opulent room with its gilded railing separating the frilly bed from where we stand. The guide points out the side door by her bed where she fled to the king’s chambers the night the Parisian people scaled the gates of Versailles. It was October 1789. They were forced to return to Paris and virtually imprisoned in the Tuileries, which was still a king’s castle then.

  As I step out of the château, which was Marie Antoinette’s home for twenty-three years, Jane is waiting for me.

  ‘You’ve been very quiet,’ she says.

  But I merely ask her if she wants to join me visiting the gardens. ‘There are forty-three kilometres of gardens at Versailles and countless statues.’

  ‘No, no, you go on. I want to return to the café where we are to meet the others.’

  I do wonder why she doesn’t walk with me and share these glorious gardens when she has come so far. But my disappointment is tempered by my reflective mood. And I walk quite a distance alone admiring the floral plantings, lawns and statues until I arrive at the great fountain and its masterpiece—the statue of the god Apollo in his chariot of the sun. Gazing back at the palace, I mull over the pandemonium which brought a dreadful end to Marie Antoinette’s tragic life. Zweig reports that during that harrowing journey to the guillotine in the roughly-made tumbril, Marie Antoinette’s pale face remained imperturbable. She showed no emotion even when Grammont the actor, dressed in his National Guard uniform, rode a few paces beside her shouting: ‘There she is, the infamous Antoinette! She’s done for at last, my friends!’

  I read how when the soldiers took her to the Conciergerie, she was so afraid her hair turned white overnight. I wish I could have told her that when Olivier died, my dark hair also turned white soon after. Today, I feel proud to be a kinswoman of the queen, however remote the genetic connection, and in a strange way I’m empowered by her story of suffering and how, at the end, this supposedly frivolous woman showed enormous courage and faced death with dignity.

  By the time we take a seat in La Méthode Bistro, the restaurant next to Le Petit Café, for an early dinner, I’m famished. We survey the menu in silence.

  ‘I’ll have the soup of the day,’ says Jane, without enquiring what it is.

  ‘Be careful, it might be turtle soup,’ I say with a chuckle. ‘I’m having the menu du jour for seventeen euros. That is so cheap for three courses, Jane—a choice of gratinée, terrine or tartare for entrée, the plat du jour and my favourite crème caramel.’

  ‘I’ll stick to the soup.’

  ‘Well, I could eat the table I’m so hungry.’

  I’m happy to have Jane sit with me for dinner; she can eat anything. Snails … cockles even.

  ‘Do you want wine?’ I ask.

  ‘Bien sûr,’ she replies, smiling like the sun at her first words uttered in French.

  Jane watches me as I eat and as I finish off my delicious crème caramel she asks if I want coffee here or at the hotel.

  ‘Good grief, no! Let’s have it here, the place is beginning to fill up,’ I answer.

  ‘I wonder why it’s called La Méthode?’ she asks, looking around the small restaurant for any clues.

  Then something extraordinary happens.

  A French man who has been sitting behind us leans over and taps Jane on the shoulder.

  ‘La Méthode, to acquire knowledge, was a famous work of René Descartes, who was a French philosopher in the seventeenth century,’ he says in perfect English.

  ‘Ah, so that’s the connection—this restaurant is on Rue Descartes,’ I say.

  ‘He who said “I think, therefore I am,”’ states Jane.

  My learned friend has always been a walking encyclopaedia, and I feel slightly embarrassed that I know nothing about Descartes.

  ‘Yes, Descartes wrote that in 1641, outlining how to use good sense or reason,’ says the French man.

  ‘He believed reason or making meaning is the only thing that distinguishes us from the beasts,’ adds Jane.

  He is much younger than us and is hanging over the back of his chair talking to Jane, who has angled her chair towards him.

  ‘Come and join me,’ he says, patting his table. ‘I’m here from the country for a few days to do some business. I’ll order a platter of fromage and we can share a bottle of red wine. Yes?’

  I think, what a pleasure to be invited to share a stranger’s table in a French café on the Left Bank! Who in their right mind would say no? This is an example of the Frenchness I saw in Olivier: French men admire all women and love to socialise with them. Of course, the downside is that a high proportion of married French men and women engage in affairs and their marriage breakdown rate is higher than in Australia—fifty-two per 1000 compared with forty-three per 1000.

  Here we sit, nibbling like mice at the cheese, utterly engaged in discussing our feelings engendered by visiting Versailles with the stranger.

  ‘I haven’t visited Versailles for many years,’ he says. ‘I have a young family—three small children under ten and my wife of course—so when I’m not away on business, I like to stay at home.’

  ‘What do you think of Marie Antoinette?’ I ask. ‘Did she deserve her public execution?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ he answers. ‘The French people will forever be ashamed of what happened to our queen. I feel that shame, even now.’

  His response is so unexpected, yet so sincere. ‘It is a black mark on our nation. We cannot wipe it clean because it is the darkest
chapter of our history.’

  Then I bring up the political scandal of the moment—French president François Hollande moving his mistress into Élysée Palace and bestowing on her the title of Première Dame.

  ‘That’s for him to decide. It’s his private affair,’ he says, quite non-judgemental. ‘In France, we do not involve ourselves in the private lives of our presidents. We French could never understand that hoo-ha about Monica Lewinsky. So what? It happens in politics. It’s true that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.’

  ‘But Valérie Trierweiler’s affair with Hollande broke up a twenty-five-year relationship and it was so dreadful for his former partner Ségolène Royal, the mother of his four children,’ I continue. ‘Now, we know she gave him an ultimatum and when he refused to give up Trierweiler, they split at the time she was trying to be elected as the first female president of France.’

  ‘Relationships run their course and that couple had a lot of stress as the glamour couple of the socialist party in France,’ says the French man, who has that ageless skin that enhances balding men.

  He enquires about the Australian attitude of ‘she’ll be right mate’. ‘It sounds very much like the French laissez-faire,’ he says.

  ‘Well, yes, we do have a wonderful laidback attitude to life in general,’ says Jane.

  ‘But Australians are not exactly laissez-faire about affairs,’ I add.

  ‘Poof, in France, it is par for the course of living a long life,’ he explains. ‘It does not change the way a man or a woman feels about their partner. It is like an apéritif only. The main meal is in the home.’

  And there it is. The universal attitude of French people to extramarital sex aptly explained.

  The conversation moves on to other topics and we discover he is in marketing and, far too soon, he advises that ‘unfortunately, I must depart as I have a big day tomorrow’. But as we reach for our bags to pay our share, he looks shocked. ‘Oh no, no, please. This pleasure has been all mine. I insist.’ He beckons to le garçon and calls for ‘L’addition, s’il vous plaît.’

  It’s only on our stroll back to the hotel that I marvel at the enchanting nature of the evening—exchanging lively ideas and opinions with a younger man. No wonder French women have acquired the art of attracting men and lively conversation. It is so pleasant to have a discussion with a man without any sexual innuendo. That is what is so wonderful about my friendship with Dominique. We have these kinds of discussions by email and that maleness adds another dimension to my mainly female circle of friends.

  Dominique has admitted that a man will possibly find his woman friend attractive, even desirable. ‘I don’t think a man can help that. The difference is that the friendship is safe in France because people value their friendship and follow the rules; no flirting, no touching and no kissing on the lips.

  ‘But, if seduction starts, then French men know the consequences of trouble and strife at home as well as a broken friendship.’

  When I see the street sign for Rue Descartes it occurs to me that our conversation and those countless words uttered formed the kind of ‘reason and meaning’ that the stranger said Descartes wrote about four-hundred-odd years ago.

  Then Jane begins to laugh. I look at her quizzically. ‘You tried so hard to impinge your moralistic attitudes onto him, but he wasn’t having any of it,’ she says. ‘He was far more in tune with my “live and let live” attitude than your strict social mores.’

  Do I detect a little snigger?

  ‘I think he personified that French laissez-faire attitude,’ I say. ‘I wonder if he has affairs when he is away from home.’

  Jane stops in her tracks. ‘Why would you think that? He never put a foot wrong.’

  ‘Of course he didn’t. But remember, I wrote about relationships at the paper weekly for almost a year; of course I would think that perhaps he might if it is so common in French culture.’

  ‘Not with us—as old as his mother.’

  ‘French men don’t worry about age; they are very attuned to intellect as well as the body. But what if we were his age, asking that question about La Méthode? Would he have made a pass at you? Obviously I wasn’t going to ruin a convivial evening by asking an embarrassing question if he, too, had “entrées”.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that! You do have a reputation for asking about people’s sex lives so I’m glad you didn’t tonight.’

  ‘He liked you, Jane.’

  She blushes ever so slightly. ‘What I liked about him was the intellectual way he presents his political thoughts; he doesn’t like Hollande, but there was no name-calling when talking about politics. He was a lovely intelligent man,’ says Jane.

  So she picked it up too. A certain, finely honed attention to her because she had asked that initial question about La Méthode.

  The French do engage in harmless seduction games that may or may not lead to actual sex. The fun is in the attraction and flirtation, or so I have been told. Blame it on La Belle Époque because it unleashed a delightful, frivolous society where sex was seen as lots of fun. And marriage was not a prerequisite. This merry mood somehow survived two world wars during which France was invaded. Perhaps the crux of it is that French men and women really like each other and they believe both sexes have the same intense sexual desires. Today, too, French men have more sex than any other nation on earth—I reported that fact when I covered the Sex in Australia report.

  There is always emotional cost, however. Being a French woman brings its own bagful of issues. Generally, there is less of a feeling of security in marriage in France, which fosters intense rivalry over the attention and affections of men. A decade ago, I sensed that French women don’t embrace other women as friends the way we do in Australia. They behave differently, too, around men. British-born author Lucy Wadham, who has lived in France for many years, describes it in The Secret Life of France: ‘French women still act out coquettish submissive little roles for the amusement of men.’

  Despite the twin-edged sword of flirtation in France and its much freer attitude towards extramarital affairs and promiscuity, there seems to be a remarkable absence of gender conflict. Wadham also reports that ‘because French men enjoy the company of women’, there is no tradition of gender segregation as there is in Britain and Australia. We experienced this relaxed socialisation tonight. I found it refreshing in my marriage. I really felt Olivier’s equal emotionally and intellectually. It’s a very strong foundation for marriage.

  Dominique mirrored the same attitude one day he was in Adelaide claiming that there was no such thing as ‘gender issues’ in France. ‘Ridiculous concept, this whole talk about issues between the sexes,’ he said. ‘I see you as simply Nahdeen, then I see you as “woman”, not as a “female”.’

  This surprised me and I asked why he did not see me as female.

  ‘In French understandings, the words “female” and “male” carry animalistic connotations or, if you like, the human link with animals in terms of sexual desire and the drive to mate. The term “woman” carries all the understandings we hold—that a woman is different from a man in her anatomy, but equal.’

  I was still absorbing this revelation when he added: ‘I would hope you see me as a man, not male, because it would say something else about our friendship.’

  It was a valuable insight into the cultural attitudes of many French men.

  Thursday is a cooler autumn day in Paris. I sit impatiently with Jane on la terrasse of Le Petit Café until a tiny white Mini with a black canvas top snakes its way up Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève heralding the arrival of Véronique Matteoli de Rode, president of the Lyceum Club, Paris. I can hardly contain my joy when Véronique steps out of the car and we kiss cheek-to-cheek. It’s such an amazing manifestation of my desire to see Véronique again in Paris—only months ago, I met her in Adelaide with a group of seven other French women, all leaders of Lyceum Clubs in France. Although Véronique stayed with another family, each time we all met, her fashio
n and elegance took my breath away. It was difficult not to stare at the impeccable style reflected in her smart, tailored garments, stunning scarves and beautifully coordinated accessories. After the congress, we exchanged cards and then began emailing each other.

  Today, too, Véronique is a triomphe de style, wearing a superb long, fine grey wool hooded coat over black tailored pants. A luxury black plaited bag is flung over her shoulder and a long pure white loosely-knitted scarf completes her style.

  I introduce Jane to Véronique. She doesn’t kiss her, but clasps Jane’s hand in her own with warm words of ‘welcome to Paris’.

  ‘I have a day of surprises organised for you,’ says Véronique. ‘We are going to visit Malmaison, the Paris home of the Empress of France, Joséphine Bonaparte,’ she adds in a gleeful tone. ‘She was the great love of General Napoléon Bonaparte and we French feed our souls on love stories.’

  I gaze at her in amazement. Véronique knows nothing of my fascination with France’s iconic queens, mistresses and heroines and I’m about to step into Empress Joséphine’s private domain in Paris where she lived in the early nineteenth century. What joy!

  ‘Malmaison is only twelve kilometres from the centre of Paris, and the closest of the famous châteaux, situated in the western suburbs,’ says Véronique.

  My mind is abuzz comparing the difference between Queen Marie Antoinette’s harrowing story yesterday and Empress Joséphine’s today. How one was fiercely hated and the other was revered as the most loved Empress of France. The French people called her Joséphine la Bonne. They saw her as elegant, graceful, generous and kind-hearted—a legacy all French women have been bound to follow as qualities of the ideal French wife. Yet, until she became Empress of France she was a libertine in her sex life.