True Pleasures Read online

  As I breathe the cool air, I feel my chest expand and my heart lift. I have always looked persistently forwards at life, peering anxiously into the void. Too often I’ve rushed headlong towards it. In this, I guess, I’ve been a creature of my times. Modern society is all about negating the past. We are encouraged to abandon whatever is old, or used, or private, or can no longer be measured in dollars. Instead we are enjoined to live in a state of nagging dissatisfaction, downgrading our personal belongings and experiences in order to seek out new and better ones in the marketplace. Even our own ageing bodies are subject to this relentless rejection of that which isn’t fresh and new. Our eyes are raised to a golden future, purchased over and over again, and yet never, quite, achieved.

  But now I feel myself easing back from this anxious modernity. It seems I am beginning to learn the solace and the lessons of history. These past few months of reading have lengthened and clarified my perspective. History takes life backwards – and allows us to see the future in a different way. Within its grand schemas individual lives seem less important, and yet somehow, or perhaps for that very reason, more beautiful. History humbles and ennobles us all at the same time.

  On this morning in Paris, among the timeless shopkeepers and the eternal streets and the ancient buildings, I can thank the women of Paris for another insight. For many of them, like me, things didn’t necessarily make sense from day to day. Life was a mysterious and elusive business. But they held their nerve, and time vindicated their courage.

  It’s springtime, and the season unfolds with orderly beauty. I relax.

  What a great old dame she is. Weaving my way through the crowd outside Notre-Dame Cathedral, I pause and gaze upwards at the vast stone facade. She has been thoroughly cleaned in recent years and the facelift has worked wonders for her. Even the gargoyles look happier. I don’t go inside the church – it’s all a bit too gloomy and bats-in-the-belfry for my taste (I prefer the delicacy of Sainte-Chapelle) – but I wander behind her great bulk and cross over the bridge. Here’s a very traditional café from where, in a window seat, I can look across to the back of Notre-Dame. From this angle I can see the old lady’s flying buttresses, the boning and corsetry and stiffened petticoats which keep her aloft and intact.

  This great dame resides in the historic and geographic heart of Paris, at the center of a city which, like a magnet, has attracted grand women from around the world. The roll-call in the past century alone includes Maria Callas, Nancy Mitford, Edith Wharton, Jane Birkin, Olivia de Havilland, Charlotte Rampling, Petula Clarke, Anaïs Nin, Lee Miller, Isadora Duncan, Mata Hari, Marlene Dietrich, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes … each of these women migrated to Paris at some time during their lives, and many of them made their permanent homes here.

  Why did they come to Paris? Love, of course, has always played its part. She met a Frenchman, she fell in love, she moved to Paris. (Many times, of course, she came to Paris to find love with a woman.) Nancy Mitford’s love of Paris became a passion after she commenced her love affair with Frenchman Gaston Palewski. But there was always more to it than love alone, I think. Paris provided a space for women to free themselves, if they chose, from the tangled web of romantic and familial relationships. It was where they could be free to be themselves. Free even to reinvent themselves.

  Gertrude Stein put it this way:

  And so I am an American

  and I have lived half my life in Paris,

  not the half that made me but the half

  in which I made what I made.

  The chance to make whatever you choose of your life – that’s the promise Paris offered to Gertrude Stein and other women. This was a city in which a woman might define herself, and be accepted by society at her own definition. It’s a captivating idea – that you can transcend your past, your genealogy, your childhood experiences, or even the heavy weight of your own culture.

  But it took me some years to understand the special and feminine allure of Paris.

  The first time I came to this city I was a junior Australian diplomat on my way to a first posting in Belgrade. It was winter, and even though I marched briskly along the boulevards, my body seemed to be freezing upwards from my feet. Far from being the tenderly romantic city of fame, Paris was even colder than I felt. Those neutral walls seemed indifferent to the eager tourist. They weren’t elaborately worked like New York skyscrapers, inviting you to tilt back your neck and admire. Nor were they low enough to encourage a little discreet peeking. I trudged for bland miles past those damned Parisian walls, designed, it seemed, for one purpose only – to keep the uninvited (me) out.

  I was staying with colleagues in the Australian Embassy residence in the 15th arrondissement, a modernist building designed like a military bunker complete with slit windows. Not only did these low-slung windows eliminate all traces of sunshine from the apartment, they formed, a resident said sourly, perfect machine gun nests if ever we wanted to target the enemy buildings on the Right Bank.

  Of course, I visited the famous tourist spots. Impressive though they were, they didn’t appeal. New Year’s Eve under the Eiffel Tower was metallically cold, made worse by loud youngsters popping firecrackers. The Louvre seemed far too big and too intimidating for me to absorb. Even Mona Lisa’s smile seemed more like an anxious smirk directed at the flashbulbs of Japanese tourists.

  But there were compensating pleasures. There was a bistro on the Left Bank with its blackboard menu and white cloths and bustling Sunday lunch. There was Angelina’s on rue de Rivoli with its faded murals and elegant, tiny old ladies. The hot chocolate was so soupy and the Mont Blanc so chestnutty-sweet it nearly made winter worth-while. There was a visit to Australian friends living in a furnished apartment. I was struck by the dilapidated elegance of the creaking lift and the threadbare tapestry chairs and the big-nosed nineteenth-century ancestors staring disapprovingly at me from faded gilt frames. This worn-out grandeur was amusing, and appealing. Even so, I didn’t feel that I had connected with Paris: I didn’t, somehow, get it.

  Which was curious in a way, because I had studied French at school and university. I should have felt more at home than I did. On the other hand, whatever I learned, it left me supremely unfit to appreciate Paris.

  I remember a sun-filled classroom of schoolgirls led by Sister Jude, a tiny Catholic nun dressed in the old-style habit with long black veil and tiny black lace-up shoes peeping out from under her long robe. She was, intermittently, teaching us the French language, but more often became carried away by her enthusiasm for French culture. Or at least, one aspect of it. ‘Just think, girls,’ she would murmur, her smooth face shining, ‘just think of the French and their love of God.’ Inward groans all round.

  ‘Wherever you go in France, even in the poorest villages, you will see a beautiful church. Because no matter how poor the peasants were, they cheerfully gave their money to the priests. They wanted to build the best house in the village for the Lord …’ French peasants were thereafter regarded by all of Sister Jude’s students as exceptionally silly.

  A few years later I was a first-year student of French at Sydney University. Semiotics and deconstruction were the rage – we didn’t read French history, we deconstructed narratives; we didn’t savor French literature, we analyzed texts. It was Barthes not Baudelaire. Lacan not La Roche-foucauld. In fact, it was a nightmare. Studying French at Sydney University nearly put me off France for life.

  I learned a lot of things from my education – I even learned passable French – but I didn’t learn the first thing about the history and culture of Paris. I had no real basis for understanding this great, complex urban organism. When I first came to Paris, I was just another tourist, with slightly better French.

  Some years passed before I returned. By now I was nearly thirty years old, and feeling bruised by life. I had a good job, working as an adviser and speechwriter to the Deputy Prime Minister, but I was not entirely at ease in the role. There was something depressing
about politics a lot of the time. I had a nice boyfriend, but it was a difficult relationship, and often strained. In fact, I felt so raw and fragile I asked my friend and former colleague Ellen to meet me at the airport at 7 am – a huge request, in hindsight. There she was, a serene figure in the early morning hubbub, greeting me in her beautiful low voice, shepherding me through the crowd.

  Because Ellen was an Australian diplomat, I was back staying in the Australian bunker and, though I was incredibly grateful for the privilege, it had to be admitted that it was as depressing as ever. Ellen, however, had filled her flat with dramatic modern art and Perrier Jouet champagne and red-corseted Yohji Yamamoto suits and pleated Issey Miyake shirts. Her stylishness didn’t redeem the building, but it enlivened the dark, cavernous apartment.

  And, anyway, this time I was in a different Paris, summer Paris, a completely new city. And this was Paris seen through Ellen’s eyes, the eyes of someone who knew and loved the city. She took me on a journey through her Paris.

  But first Ellen had to make me presentable by giving me a few lessons in French culture. As we walked into her local boulangerie, Ellen leaned in to me. ‘Don’t smile,’ she murmured.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You smile too much: they’ll think you are an American.’

  This threw me. ‘And what’s wrong with smiling?’

  ‘The French think it’s infantile to smile at complete strangers; it’s like a baby looking for approval.’

  I felt a touch resentful. I wanted to say: so are you saying I’m infantile? Are you? Are you? But instead I confined myself to, ‘So, what, I should be cold and cool?’

  ‘You should be extremely polite. When you enter a shop you should say, very clearly, as the French do, “Bonjour Madame” or “Monsieur” and “Merci, Madame, au revoir” when you leave. The French keep a dignified and extremely civil distance. It’s French manners, and very good they are too.’ Yes, a smug tone was definitely creeping into her voice. But I dutifully changed facial gears from smile to neutral.

  A few hours later, I blurted: ‘Hang on, you were smiling non-stop at that waiter!’

  ‘Yes, I was, wasn’t I.’ Ellen arched her eyebrow and gently swished her wine glass.

  ‘Isn’t it funny, after a while, you don’t need to follow the rules anymore, don’t ask me why.’ I smarted at Ellen’s infuriating complacency, but the weird thing was, she was right. As soon as I stopped expecting French people to smile at me – they did. It was as if I had tuned into a perverse social rhythm.

  After I got the hang of not-smiling/smiling, after I had learned to enter and exit boutiques and cafés with brief but elaborate courtesy, Paris became a much more friendly place.

  In those few weeks Ellen took time off work and we walked for miles, criss-crossing bridges and detouring down lane-ways, poking around nineteenth-century arcades and emerging into great residential squares. We went to large famous shops and tiny specialist ones. We bought three pairs of Robert Clergerie shoes. We dined at a traditional brasserie where old ladies fed their dogs under the table, posed at a party with Japanese fashion designers and invaded a Cambodian noodle house for a late-night feast. We sipped kirs outside Deux Magots and watched the gay parade down Boulevard Saint-Germain. We ate lunch with Australian artists and dinner with French management consultants.

  In Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, heroine Linda falls in love with Paris when she sees it with her lover, Fabrice.

  ‘How fortunate you are to live in such a town,’ she said to Fabrice. ‘It would be impossible to be very unhappy here.’

  ‘Not impossible. One’s emotions are intensified in Paris – one can be more happy and also more unhappy here than in any other place. But it is always a positive source of joy to live here and there is nobody so miserable as a Parisian in exile from his town. The rest of the world seems unbearably cold and bleak to us, hardly worth living in.’

  I was beginning to get the idea.

  At one party Ellen and I encountered two young artists and formed an instant bond. Their names were Felix and Kim. Felix, with his dark eyes and curls was, I assumed, from the south of France; Kim, from Korea, was his smiling slender girlfriend. One night Felix took us to Les Bains, an ultra-chic nightclub owned by his brother. A party was being held to celebrate Jean-Paul Gaultier’s winter men’s collection. We were having a wonderful time, drinking champagne, mingling, checking out the beautiful models. At some stage late in the night Ellen was being monopolized by an Italian hairdresser who resembled a decadent Caravaggio youth, and I found myself chatting with Felix through a tunnel of dance music. I heard him mention Tunisia. For reasons I can now only ascribe to an excess of champagne, I assumed he was referring to Ellen’s recent unhappy holiday there.

  I pulled a dramatic face. ‘HELLHOLE!’ I shouted at him, helpfully.

  Felix looked a little surprised.

  ‘NEVER GO THERE, NO GOOD,’ I yelled. I clutched my stomach and writhed theatrically. ‘GET SICK AS DOG.’

  Felix leaned in close and put his lips to my ear. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I AM Tunisian.’

  Then he roared with laughter as an expression of utmost horror spread across my face. After that we became firm friends.

  Felix and Kim turned up at Ellen’s place the night before I was due to leave and demanded that I stay in Paris an extra day so that both Ellen and I could attend their wedding. At the town hall of the 16th arrondissement, the ceremony took exactly two minutes. Afterwards, to my considerable surprise, the mayor in his splendid robes passed around a bowl for donations (for what? I wondered). Outside, Felix and Kim posed for photos in their matching white pant suits as the hot day glowed around them.

  The wedding party was held at the home of Felix’s brother. Within the bland creamy walls of a Parisian mansion, the courtyard was strewn with blossoms and the inside of the courtyard doors were painted vivid blue. Every now and then the blue doors would swing open and white-coated delivery men would surge through with another bunch of flowers, or trays of oysters and smoked salmon or a teetering croquembouche – the wedding cake. For the first time I had been invited – on my own account, and not just as Ellen’s friend – to participate in the life of Paris, to take my place on the stage and perform my bit part in the drama of the city. And it felt like theater: it was an occasion with the zest and unlikely joy of a Shakespearean comedy, with a multi-ethnic cast of photographers, fashion designers, tarot readers, makeup artists, ancient socialites and beautiful young things tangling themselves up in absorbing sub-plots over the course of a long summer night.

  Finally, Paris began to make sense to me. A city that was formal and frivolous, ancient and ageless, intensely conservative and furiously modern. That night, with the joyful newlyweds and the floating air and the music and the silly conversations in four languages, I felt a tender connection with the city. I knew that I would keep coming back.

  I left Ellen and Paris and returned to Canberra, to an election that the Labor Party inevitably lost. And then my boyfriend dumped me. But I had found a kernel of something special in myself again – a little bit of confidence, an ounce of hope.

  For, no matter what happened, and as for so many before me, the cliché was a treasure and a promise: I’d always have Paris …

  As I sit here with my notebook and a list of magical addresses, it now seems hard to believe that in all those previous visits to Paris it never once occurred to me to track down the haunts of my favorite women writers. Ellen once pointed out Colette’s home in the Palais Royal, but I felt no particular surge of connection or recognition. I guess at that stage I had no idea what the interior of the building looked like: there was nothing in her remark for my imagination to take hold of. (Today, of course, I can vividly imagine the close, cozy room with its red walls and mirrors and colorful glass paperweights – and the purple-maned lioness lying on her divan.)

  Paris is one of those cities you could unpeel for a lifetime and still not succeed in uncovering all its variety, its
multiple personalities. There’s seventeenth-century Paris, revolutionary Paris, Bonaparte’s Paris, existentialist Paris, avant-garde Paris. The real Paris, modern Paris, with its clochards and dog poo and ethnic vibe and snobbery and local corruption, lives in complex partnership with the Paris of yesterday, the Paris of many yesterdays. And the Paris of many imaginations, for Paris is an idea as much as a place.

  In the early nineteenth century, when George Sand arrived in Paris from the provinces, she moved several times until she found just the location she had in mind. For she, too, was searching to realize a personal idea of Paris.

  I … was soon settled on Quai Saint-Michel in one of the garrets of the big house on the corner of the block, at the end of the bridge, opposite the Morgue. There I had three small, very clean rooms leading to a balcony from which I had an extensive view of the Seine, and where I could contemplate, face to face, the gigantic monuments of Notre-Dame, Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie, Sainte-Chapelle, and others. I had sky, water, air, swallows, rooftop greenery; I did not feel too much part of modern Paris, which would not have suited my taste nor my resources, but more so in the picturesque and poetic Paris of Victor Hugo, the Paris of the past.

  George Sand sought the Paris that corresponded to her emotional state and her artistic aspirations. In her little Gothic attic she found the perfect place to invent herself as a Romantic heroine and to explore Paris, liberty and love. And Paris made space for George Sand, adjusting to accommodate her. It eddied and swirled, widened its flow. It gave her room to change.