Farewell My French Love

by Nadine Williams

  I think upon my own body and its ample rolls of flesh. Here is a great artwork which validates voluptuous woman as an object of admiration. Certainly, it is not the prevailing look of the French friends I know—all of whom are slim. So is Jane.

  The statue brings to mind Jane’s comments about my weight. True or false, here in the Tuileries, I need to make peace with my body. Once I was as frail as a fairy and I was slim for many years of my life. The enjoyment of food was so fundamental to Oli and I must admit to myself that I ‘wear’ the consequences. I could whip myself mercilessly because I have been unable to lose weight—and have actually gained weight during and after Olivier’s illness—or I can do something about it. Genes do play a role, of course. My mother was a big woman of Germanic descent but she wasn’t that much older than me when she died prematurely of heart disease. When I get home, I will try to lose a few kilos. For health reasons.

  I promenade for about an hour with many other people along l’allée centrale, responding to the strange allure of the public garden, under the avenues of trees, past its rectangular ponds dotted with statues, past the lawns on which we cannot walk, to the grande rond. It is encircled by a host of people tilted back in unique Parisian green park chairs and a few children’s boats float by in the large pond. The perfect line-up of mansard rooftops of Paris peep over a huge hedge to my left and ahead of me Le Louvre is a striking presence. Around about here there was another cold, old palace where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned with her children. Now there is a huge statue of the Good Samaritan.

  A quaint pavilion has no spare seats for coffee, so I take one of those countless Paris park chairs. I lean back into its angled slatted backrest and gaze up at the canopy of trees, their leaves glistening with the peeping sun. I can hear the flurry of humanity, the chatter and laughter of the families, lovers and older couples, but with the warmish afternoon sun on my shoulders, I close my eyes and—in the middle of a public park in Paris—I drift off to sleep.

  An hour later, feeling refreshed, I’m stepping off the tourist bus at the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, which herald the Champs-Élysées. Ahead is the glorious Alexander III bridge, as Parisian as the Eiffel Tower, with its gilded winged horses. Behind me is the striking statue of Charles de Gaulle in striding pose. The sheer glory of this Parisian spot on the Right Bank has me thinking deeply. In the French film Diplomacie, the German governor of Nazi-occupied Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, mocked that Germany walked into Paris’s ‘legs wide open like a whore’ when the Vichy government of France capitulated without a shot being fired in June 1940. And British comedians down through the years have mocked the French with tired jokes such as, ‘How many men does it take to defend Paris? We don’t know; it’s never been tried.’

  Whatever the jibes, the capitulation saved Paris. Five years later, as the Allies advanced to liberate Paris in May 1945, Choltitz disobeyed Hitler’s frantic orders to blow up Paris and these beautiful palaces, bridges and irreplaceable monuments were preserved. Some years later, he received the ultimate French honour—La Legion d’Honneur.

  TWENTY

  LAST LUNCH AT LE DÔME

  ‘The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realises that there is no answer to the question “who am I” except the voice inside herself.’ Betty Friedan

  The lush green corridor of trees along Boulevard Raspail have no sense of mid-autumn and neither do the birds twittering their chorus of summertime song. I, too, carry that sense of high summer as I stride along under powder blue skies. Yet, this October morning, there is a certain chill pervading Paris. I wind my woollen scarf around my neck tucking its tassel into my trench coat. This multi-coloured scarf is cosy with love caught in each stitch. I had watched my friend Sheryl knitting up this nondescript bundle of wool on the nights I stayed over at her house when Olivier was in the hospital. (I needed to meet the oncologist each morning at 7am.) I was touched when she presented me with her handiwork, knitted in a simple pattern in a melange of orange, yellow and brown.

  I likened it to my own loving act when I was in my twenties and in love, knitting a bulky cable jumper for my first husband, Rick. A decade later, I knitted another, very difficult pattern, in fine wool for my second husband, Graham. I was once an accomplished knitter, I think. Love had taken flight each time. Such painful divorces, like wild animals let loose in my life. These complex memories fill me with deep melancholy. Yet they remind me that I do recover from catastrophe. As Anne, my longtime friend from college days, said once, ‘Nadine, you are such a chameleon! Whenever something terrible happens in your life, you simply pick yourself up, dust yourself down and reinvent yourself.’

  This memory stops me in my tracks. It may have been my saviour in the past, back when I was the ‘good wife’, who sewed all my own and my children’s clothes, who made jam from a box of over-ripe apricots or sauce from rotting tomatoes. It was the driver for that twenty-something woman who attended night school to pass matriculation English only to face a marriage breakdown months later. And it proved a strength when that young woman, so immature, so ill-equipped, had to grow up overnight as a single mother in her late twenties. And it was a bedrock for the woman who eventually metamorphosed into a professional life through almost a decade of tertiary study.

  But now my problem is I don’t want to change. I don’t want to ‘move on’—those glib words thrown about by my well-meaning friends. I cannot forget my third husband. I don’t want to lose my connection to our French life. Isn’t that why I’m in Paris learning French properly at last? That is why I’m enduring an environment where our teacher Claire has swept aside any notion I may have had of merely flirting with French.

  Now, in the second week at Alliance, there is no escape. Claire’s benevolence towards me has vanished and with a fixed stare she asks me my fair share of questions, which I manage to answer in rudimentary French. Some of the fear of speaking French has disappeared. I can cobble together words and miraculously pluck verbs out of the air, and although the conjugations are forgotten, the infinitive does the trick. Generally, I know what I’m trying to say. This is a language très difficile, which calls a bus a car, sneakers ‘baskets’ and a wounded person is ‘blessé’! I’m compiling a list that proves why French confounds us poor students. But I must focus now that I have reached class because on Thursday we have a test, and if I pass I get a certificate. I do feel a schoolgirl again.

  Even Isabelle, who was so obliging last week speaking English most of the time, is only speaking French now. But it has achieved its purpose. I can understand the nightly weather forecast on television and this morning I declare parrot-fashion that Paris is enjoying three extra weeks of summer, with October temperatures the same as the last few weeks of September. I’m exhilarated by these little milestones and to add to my euphoria, our class has bonded beautifully. We smile at each other with hearty bonjours and French courtesy abounds.

  At morning tea, I sit with my classmates, a veritable United Nations of young ones—a Venezuelan, a Norwegian, a Brazilian, my Indonesian friend Lucy, a Japanese newcomer, someone from Sri Lanka and always Fleur and Pedro. We fill up a whole table in the cafeteria and they consider me one of them.

  When class finishes, I go to the library and for the first time I avoid the listening stations and enter the main library. Right there inside the door is a book waiting for me to find it. It’s a thick hard-covered book named Kiki. Inside, in cartoon form is the story of Kiki’s life in Montparnasse and I begin to read it in French. When I talk to the librarian about her, she tells me that Kiki was the first woman to begin liberalising French women’s sexuality and it was Man Ray who photographed Kiki nude, the first French woman to bare all. I ask the librarian if I could speak English.

  ‘Bien sûr.’

  ‘They lived in the same building as I’m living now,’ I say, slightly ashamed that I cannot yet say it in French.

 
I tell her about my fascination with the way French women have shaped such a feminised society, but that I did not know about Kiki until I arrived in Montparnasse. She looks at me as if I have been sleeping in a cave for the twentieth century.

  I quickly elaborate about my list of the iconic French queens, mistresses and heroines, of which I’m very proud. She asks if I had included American-born writer Gertrude Stein.

  ‘No, she wasn’t French,’ I reply.

  ‘But she was an important feminist in Paris,’ she says, quite excited to impart her knowledge. ‘She lived right here on the back street of Alliance, Rue de Fleurus.’

  This snippet thrills me.

  ‘If you go out the back entrance and turn right towards the Jardin du Luxembourg, you will find a plaque very close on the same side at number twenty-seven.’

  Then she adds: ‘The Jardin du Luxembourg is at the end of Rue de Fleurus.’

  From the cafeteria I buy a baguette, some yoghurt and a drink to take to the garden and I find the plaque at number 27 on Rue de Fleurus abutting Alliance. I know little about Stein except that she ran the most successful literary salon in Paris from this building in the early twentieth century and that she had a lesbian partner named Alice B. Toklas. A patron of the arts, she set up a weekly ‘at home’ literary salon each Saturday, and fledgling writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce flocked there to create a fertile nest of literary talent. Hemingway writes in A Moveable Feast: ‘It was easy to get into the habit of stopping in at 27 Rue de Fleurus late in the afternoon for the warmth and the great pictures and the conversation.’

  My Paris sojourn seems to be developing an ethos of its own beyond learning French. Although I never appreciated Stein’s personality, or her writing style, between her and de Beauvoir I do feel the strength of a clarion call. And I ask myself: ‘Will I let writing pass away the way I dropped knitting and sewing?’

  Heavy in thought, I wander into the glorious green world of Luxembourg, the same path as the dirt-poor young Hemingway who would often catch a pigeon here on his daily walk for his wife Hadley to make into a pie. I take a bench in the garden within a leafy pocket of manicured lawn, edged with shrubbery. And here among the pigeons, I eat lunch, and unfold my map to discover that Rue Vavin, which leads back to Raspail, is nearby.

  I wander along Rue Vavin’s eclectic shopping precinct until I reach the junction of Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs where Hemingway lived at number 113. There is a small triangular park where students are packed on benches and gathered around the bicycle rack. It is so quintessentially Paris with its newspaper kiosk, small fountain, tall clock and quaint lamp post—all shaded by lush old trees—that I stop to photograph it. And then I see an ice-white apartment block before me, covered in small white tiles with windows edged in blue. I almost quiver with excitement. This flâneur has stumbled across the rare early twentieth-century Art Deco architecture in Montparnasse that Isabelle said I must see.

  Then I’m strangely pulled back to Raspail and the median strip on Raspail opposite La Rotonde. I want to photograph Simone de Beauvoir’s first home, the first-floor apartment where red and pink geraniums spill out of window boxes. She lived here until she was eleven. I stare up at that first level, thinking of all the decisions she made to structure her independent life as a renowned writer.

  I wake up on Thursday morning filled with excitement. The week is closing in and it’s the day of our class test for the ‘attestation de niveau’, a test to determine level of competence. I’m apprehensive, but classes have become enjoyable and l feel I have a stronger grip on the language. But what has me springing into the day is that once the test is behind me, Isabelle and I are going out together for the first time, to a performance of Hymn to Piaf.

  These past two weeks have been such happy days spending time with French people who do not know Olivier that the shadow of losing him has slipped away somewhat. Until I hear a song on the television at breakfast. The haunting tune of Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, Je ne Regrette Rien’ pervades my peacefulness.

  ‘I don’t need to hear that this morning,’ I tell myself. A charming trio of disabled teenaged girls from the Tutti Ensemble sang Piaf’s signature song at Olivier’s funeral. Their voices were like a chorus of angels.

  ‘Quel est le problème?’ asks Isabelle.

  ‘Memories,’ I say. But then the reporter announces that Piaf died on 11 October 1963—Olivier also died on the eleventh day of the month, in May. A visual memory of that sad moment wells in my mind. Once more tears spill down my cheeks. Whenever will the tears stop? My friend Kathy, who lost her husband twelve months before Olivier, promised me the tears do dry up.

  An hour later I’m trying my best to decipher a hard French aural test. Yes! I understand the weather forecast. And yes, I’m ready for the anticipated environment question, but I can’t remember pivotal words. Wonderful! I zip through the written comprehension. And yes, the email in French about organising a birthday party is also relatively easy. I can safely write my response in French. As for conjugaisons des verbes conditionnels? Woeful! Nor do I hold any hope for the aural test about la République du Costa Rica …

  After such an ordeal, it’s sheer pleasure to be one of only four students for a lecture about Paris la Gourmande after lunch. Two teachers hand us papers which record the long and rich histoire de la cuisine. We are shown flashcards of photographs of French dishes and must describe the dish and the region it originates from. I know many of them darling Oli, and I thank him for all that he taught me about regional foods. It’s so wonderfully French to sit at a student’s desk learning France’s food history in the French language.

  Then our teachers walk with us down Rue de Rennes to Boulevard Saint-Germain, where we visit historic Brasserie Lipp and Café de Flore before taking a table in the glassed-in terrace of Les Deux Magots. It is astonishing the importance the French pay to cuisine culture. Now I know that Paris cuisine originates from the regions of Bretagne, Alsace and Auvergne.

  A few days ago I picked up a pamphlet from the Alliance culture desk promoting the performance Hymn to Piaf this week. In that mysterious six degrees of separation, unexpectedly, I knew the French chanteuse, Caroline Nin. Olivier and I had sat in the front row when Caroline performed in the Adelaide Cabaret Festival seven years ago. But a more important connection is that Caroline is the partner of Michelle, who was bridesmaid at my daughter Serena’s wedding thirteen years ago. Caroline lived with Michelle in Australia before they moved back to Paris. She and I occasionally exchanged emails and I wrote about her performance in Adelaide for the Advertiser. I could hardly wait to get home and ask Isabelle to come with me. She was delighted and so, I telephoned Caroline and, announcing myself, booked tickets for her show.

  ‘Oh this is a very pleasant surprise, Nadine,’ she gushed down the landline. ‘It will be very special on Thursday night, because I will be commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Piaf’s death. Piaf actually died on the tenth, but it was announced on 11 October because her body had to be brought back to Paris.’

  Isabelle and I take a taxi to the Essaïon Theatre on the Right Bank. She didn’t have time for dinner, so we linger at the patisserie and buy a big slice of prune tart, which we cut in two. I can’t remember being this happy since Olivier’s diagnosis as we sink our teeth into the soft flesh of the dark prunes, sunken into the glossy flaky pastry. We share our events of the day and I tell her I don’t think I did very well in my test.

  ‘Just to sit for the test in French is an achievement, Nadine.’

  We reach the theatre down wide old stone steps leading deep underground into a cellar with an ancient thirteenth-century coved ceiling. It’s a tiny, intimate space under the streets of Paris with just forty chairs set out before a piano, a microphone and a double bass instrument sitting on the floor. It is almost full and I must sit in the front row, while Isabelle sits behind me. Then statuesque Caroline, bare shouldered with shimmering crystal eye makeup, enters quietly fro
m the dark shadows.

  ‘This is a very special evening to come and hear the songs of Edith Piaf,’ she says in a sultry French-accented voice. ‘Fifty years ago today she died. I hope tonight to give you a sense of her voice and her style which made her an internationally acclaimed chanteuse.’

  In the hushed space, she adds in a silken tone, ‘But mostly, I want to tell you her story because Piaf lived that rags to riches life in Paris. She became the singing voice of France, but she suffered such sadness, too.’

  She tells us Piaf’s songs were very much about difficulties of relationships and the insecure feelings that women suffer through love and betrayal. Then she begins to sing ‘L’Amour’, capturing new love. ‘Milord’, she tells her small audience, is a haunting ode to a forlorn older man who has lost a young love and seeks comfort from a prostitute.

  Caroline is so unlike the bird-like Piaf in appearance and demeanour, yet she engages us all. She wears a tight black-and-white strapless top, laced at the back. Her tight black leather skirt is split on one side and she wears fishnet stockings and high platform heels. She talks of Piaf’s days of hardship and drunkenness, of losing her great love Marcel in a plane crash and of her descent into drugs. Her loose living in ‘dodgy’ Paris was portrayed in the film Piaf, but here on the stage when Caroline sings ‘Legionnaire’, about her sexual encounter with a handsome French legionnaire, it is as real as a confessional.