True Pleasures Page 3

  The Paris of my imagination is a site of pleasure and history and beauty. It’s a place to recharge myself as a woman. Each time I come back here it’s like greeting an older woman friend, one who is rather grand and imperious – a great dame, in fact – who likes me to look my best, to have my wittiest conversation to hand and to be on my toes all the time.

  I finish my morning coffee and gaze back across to Notre-Dame, the greatest dame of all. But her fixity, her grand monolithic bulk, doesn’t enchant me. It’s the flesh and blood women who fascinate: women in flux, in progress, in self-discovery, in the act of creation.

  3

  Place des Vosges

  As life is an art in France, so woman is an artist.

  Edith Wharton

  EVEN IN PARIS, one of the world’s most beautiful cities, Place des Vosges in the 4th arrondissement is so beautiful I want to laugh out loud. I step off teeming rue Saint-Antoine into l’Hôtel de Sully, linger at the overflowing bookshop, dogleg through the courtyard, and, voilà! here I am. It’s late on a spring morning a few days after my arrival, and the Place presents itself to me like a gift.

  It’s not that Place des Vosges is either grand or intimidating. In fact, with its rose and cream bricks, its shady arcades, its quadrangled garden, Place des Vosges is built on a decidedly human scale. I come from Sydney, a new place, where old buildings are routinely condemned as dysfunctional. Yet this piece of urban design, at nearly four hundred years old, works beautifully. Thirty-six houses stand tall, slim and solid around the square. The galleries and arcades below provide shelter for strolling and space for art galleries and boutiques. There’s a Michelin three-star restaurant at one end of the Place and a luxury hotel at the other. On the garden benches are the usual lovers, the mothers gently rocking their prams, the old men with their newspapers. A clutch of tourists look around with pleased expressions, as if the square had been designed exactly to their careful specifications. It’s that kind of place.

  I thread my way across to a corner café, Ma Bourgogne, where I order a glass of soft red wine, and settle down to watch and to daydream. I am gazing at the present, but I am thinking about the past. Here, I think, here is where it all began.

  When foreigners want to understand the French, they generally head to Versailles. That’s because at Versailles, it is said, Louis XIV, the Sun King himself, invented French culture. He commenced renovations on a family hunting lodge in 1661, and he progressively moved the court there from Paris from about 1674. Louis XIV made Versailles a gilded cage for his captive aristocrats. He kept the ruling class entirely occupied with pleasure and ceremony: he made his courtiers so busy that they had neither time nor inclination to plot against him. The Sun King established an elaborate social code, which, through war and conquest, he exported to the rest of Europe. But Louis XIV didn’t invent French culture; he just borrowed it.

  Over here on my left is number 20 Place des Vosges. This is where a bride arrived from Italy to stay in the house of her father-in-law, sometime around 1590. Her name was Catherine de Vivonne, the new Marquise de Rambouillet. From courtly Italy with its chivalrous traditions she had landed in rough-hewn France. Place des Vosges, then known as Place Royale, was still under construction. Its primary use was as a rowdy military parade ground. Residents awoke at dawn to the metal clashes of duellists fighting for sport or honor. Life in Paris was altogether medieval and martial. Worst of all, thought the young bride, the houses! Grand homes were designed like feudal hunting lodges, with drafty baronial spaces and blood-red walls.

  So la Marquise commissioned a house, a perfect house. Her blue, white and gold reception room was intimate, scaled down, with little alcoves to encourage private exchanges. La Marquise, in her lilting Italian accent, called the reception space her salone, and it became, of course, the first salon. The guest list was pruned to privilege talent, beauty, honor and wit: only the greatest artists and writers were invited; the bravest soldiers; the most beautiful, pious women. Wives and husbands were not automatically included – no free riders, thanks – and this no doubt contributed a flirtatious element to the conversation. For the first time, women became socially central. Their role was to guide, to instruct, to inspire, to elevate – the most refined were known as les précieuses. Men aspired to become honnêtes hommes – honorable, cultivated, natural and, most important of all, socially graceful. At the core of this little society was a new idea – the art of living itself, savoir vivre.

  Under one roof, La Marquise de Rambouillet brought together all the elements that we associate with Paris today: the elevation to art of food, conversation, clothes and love. The historian Vincent Cronin said of Place Royale: This square can be said to mark the change from the rough masculine society of Henri IV to the witty society revolving around certain gifted or beautiful women which still prevails today.

  Just over on the other side of the square at number 1 is the birthplace of la Marquise de Rambouillet’s most famous guest, Madame de Sévigné. Madame de Sévigné sparkled. She was funny, spirited and worldly. Later she lived around the corner in what is now Musée Carnavalet, appropriately the museum of Paris history. Her letters embody the French idea of esprit – wit, intellect and spirit combined.

  Time for another wine, and now I look directly across the square to where it exits to rue du Pas-de-la-Mule. Just around the corner lived the most influential courtesan of the seventeenth century. She used to ride into this square on a little sedan-chair carried by her menservants. Her name was Ninon de Lanclos.

  Ninon de Lanclos wasn’t like the précieuses: she wasn’t elevated or precious. She was an epicurean – a philosopher of judicious pleasure. All good sense should lead in the direction of happiness, she believed. Unlike the pious women of la Marquise de Rambouillet’s salon, Ninon demanded all the liberties and responsibilities available to men. Her motto was: Make me a gentle man [honnête homme], but never a chaste woman …

  One of Ninon’s early admirers was Cardinal Richelieu. He lived here in Place Royale too, at number 21 – just behind me in fact, and, see, there’s a plaque on the shop-front. He offered Ninon a fortune to become his mistress. She declined: the outrageous sum of money was too much from a lover but not enough from a man she didn’t love.

  As she matured, Ninon became so respectable that society ladies would send their sons to study at her school of gallantry. We can thank Ninon for the Frenchman’s romantic reputation: she turned gauche young men into ardent and skilful lovers. It takes a hundred times more skill to make love than to command an army, she used to say.

  But the wittiest men in Paris gathered in Ninon’s salon for the conversation alone. Playwright Molière was her close friend, maxim writer La Rochefoucauld a regular and she was the first to recognize the genius in the boy Voltaire, leaving him a bequest in her will. Each of these men, whose fame in the English-speaking world eclipsed hers, hurried through this lovely square to visit Ninon de Lanclos in her home around the corner.

  Centuries later Simone de Beauvoir wrote:

  The Frenchwoman whose independence seems … the most like that of a man is perhaps Ninon de Lanclos, seventeenth-century woman of wit and beauty. Paradoxically, those women who exploit their femininity to the limit create for themselves a situation almost equivalent to that of a man … Free in behaviour and conversation, they can attain – like Ninon de Lanclos – to the rarest intellectual liberty.

  So it was here, in and around Place des Vosges, that a group of women took charge, creating a society which valued beauty, love, sex, art and culture. What strikes me now, as I sit here in this perfect, unchanged space with the strolling couples and the playing children and elegant shops, is how intensely urban it is. And it’s curious, because I’ve noticed lately how often the idea of the ‘art of living’ is associated with retreat from the city, with a pastoral fantasy: a villa in Tuscany perhaps, or a charming shack on an unspoiled beach. But in the seventeenth century, l’art de vivre was an urban idea, and the women who embraced it we
ren’t the least bit interested in retreating from the world; far from it. They were re-shaping the social order, placing themselves at the center of civilized life.

  When I first began reading about the salonnières I couldn’t suppress some disbelief. Come on, surely not, could these women really have enjoyed so much freedom? But they did. Many of them lived as single, independent people with a rich circle of friends, social activities and civic engagement. One salon hostess was Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who wrote popular romantic novels. She never married; indeed, she never aspired to: I should have been deeply chagrined had I ever been faced with a union, she said bluntly. Madame de Sévigné was wealthy, beautiful and widowed at twenty-five. She point-blank refused ever to marry again. Another resolute spinster was the cousin of Louis XIV, La Grande Mademoiselle. Louis XIV exiled his stubborn cousin several times from Paris because she refused to marry the candidates he selected for her; she too died a single woman.

  And there was Ninon herself, Mademoiselle Libertine, who had a son but never married. She only slept with one of her five rich payeurs if and when she felt like it. Even into old age she had a stable of martyrs from which Ninon would occasionally select a robust and handsome favori – her affairs usually lasted no more than three months. As Ninon said: A sensible woman must never take a husband without the consent of her reason, nor lovers without the advice of her heart. It seems Ninon, in common with a number of women of her era, never quite found a good enough reason to marry. In our modern society, life as an older single woman carries some social disadvantage. But in those days in Paris, for women of a certain class, it was the route to moral, intellectual and social liberty.

  Louis XIV grew up in Paris in this world of witty, diverse and sure-footed women. And when he established Versailles as his seat of power, he crystallized the feminine values nurtured in Paris salons into a system of etiquette, establishing the foundations of modern social discourse. Later, Versailles ossified into sterile ceremony under the King’s long reign, but in Paris the salons continued to sparkle and evolve under the guidance of a few exceptional women.

  Now, warmed by the wine and the sunshine, I stroll around Place des Vosges. I can feel the spirit of the past all around me. There’s number 1, where the high-spirited Madame de Sévigné was born; and number 6, where another courtesan, Marion Delorme, introduced Ninon to society; and there’s number 21 where Cardinal Richelieu lived. I can feel the heavy silks of cardinals and courtesans. I can hear the quiet laughter and bons mots and the whispered plans for assignations. The murmurs in my head mingle with the laughter from a young couple on a park bench.

  And I remember something else about the salon-nières. They were fascinated by human nature. They liked nothing more than to analyze and describe the complex workings of the human heart. In each other’s salons they polished their ideas until they shone. Open a book of aphorisms and you will find it full of maximes, epigrams and bons mots by Madame de Sévigné and her cousin, Bussy-Rabutin; La Rochefoucauld and his mistress Madame de Lafayette; Mademoiselle de Scudéry and La Bruyère.

  A jealous man always finds more than he is looking for, murmurs Mademoiselle de Scudéry. When a plain-looking woman is loved it can only be very passionately; for either her influence over her lover is irresistible, or she has secret charms more powerful than those of beauty, whispers La Bruyère. If love is judged by its physical effects it looks more like hatred than friendship, sneers La Rochefoucauld, who took a dark view of human nature. It gives me a shiver of ghostly pleasure to hear these wise, worldly, tart voices relay their thoughts direct to me from the seventeenth-century salons. It’s an injection of moral sophistication, a relieving antidote to modern simplifications.

  I like to imagine I could hold my own in a conversation with these sharp talkers, but I suspect I would come out badly. Modern life makes you sloppy and self-indulgent. We tend to think that self-revelation constitutes good conversation. But even though I might find the demands of this group alarming, I would welcome the tonic. I’d try to be swift and subtle. I’d try to be lucid and unflinching. I wouldn’t succeed, but it would take me up a few notches.

  Up the road from here, in rue de Beauce, which was then – and still remains – one of the less fashionable parts of the Marais district, lived Mademoiselle de Scudéry. She created a strange, marvelous work of art. It is a map, with a broad river running horizontally across the top, a stream splitting the map vertically, and, dotted here and there, lakes and villages. But this is no battlefield plan – or perhaps it is, for it represents a survey, an inquiry into the very nature of love. The supreme destination at the bottom of the map is the Kingdom of Tenderness, and the direct path to this goal tracks the downward flowing stream, traversing peaceful villages like Grand Coeur, Sincérité, Billet-doux and Tendresse. But there are by-ways and pitfalls too, traps for the foolish or faithless traveller, like Perfidie, Complaisance, and the Lac d’ Indifférence.

  When I first saw a picture of La Carte de Tendre I thought: how astonishing, with its bivalved structure, it looks rather like a map of the heart. Later I looked again, and this time, to my surprise, it appeared to resemble the left and right sides of the brain. And finally, to my amazement, I realized that, more than anything, the map seemed to me like a woman’s reproductive organs – the broad horizontal river representing fallopian tubes, the stream as birth canal and vagina, and the lake and sea suggestive of ovaries. The Kingdom of Tenderness was located at the site of sexual union and eventual birth. So what was born? Courtly love perhaps, sophisticated love, love independent of marriage, love which brought together mind and heart, reason and passion, conceived and brought to life in and through a woman’s body.

  Now it’s time to wander around the corner to 36 rue des Tournelles to see the exterior of Ninon de Lanclos’s house, the home she lived in for forty-eight years, from 1657 to her death in 1705. It’s small and modest, a sign of Ninon’s commitment to financial freedom and independence.

  Just a few doors down from Ninon’s house I come to a bridal shop. This is no snooty rue Saint-Honoré boutique. Nor is it a daring young designer’s atelier, increasingly common in the Marais district. I peer in the dusty window. A puffy white wedding gown fills the grey space. As I look at it, I can’t help but conjure the young woman who will buy this flouncing frock. I imagine her to be a conventional type, for whom the wedding day is an expression of social status as much as a ceremony of love. Nothing courtly or sophisticated, I smugly conclude, about this bourgeois love affair.

  But if I were to be honest – if I were to apply to myself the ruthless standard of truth that the salonnières liked to apply to each other – this is not the only thought that runs through my mind. I must admit that the wedding dress indicates a certain sense of purpose that I most definitely lack. Matrimonial closure isn’t my strong point. I seem to have spent most of my adult life passionately in love with someone or other, consumed by the idea of exalted romance, but paradoxically too distracted or disorganized to make any relationship succeed, let alone proceed to marriage. I could list many grand gestures I’ve made in the name of romance: costly visits to lovers in Iran or Mexico; exaggerated enthusiasms for hobbies (New York underground! Zen Buddhism! Surfing!) that secretly bored me; embarrassing scenes of self-abasement when relationships turned rocky; bleary red-eyed despair when they finally ended. But now I can hardly remember most of those men who once seemed so singular and essential to my happiness; in my mind they’ve become interchangeable, versions of each other. I discover, with a twinge of shame, that they were mostly bit players in my own personal drama. And there was nothing courtly or sophisticated about my romances, either.

  I suspect if Ninon de Lanclos were around she might have a few thoughts on this. Curious to consider that, so long ago, certain women were far more sophisticated about human relations than we pride ourselves on being today. Ninon would surely mock the social competitiveness of the modern middle-class bride – after all, she herself eschewed ostentation and e
xcess. But she might equally laugh at the over-inflated sagas of the modern romantic – at someone like me. Ninon would never be so shallow as to judge the success of a romance by the length of its duration. Nor would she condemn a woman for her many abbreviated – others might say, failed – relationships. On the contrary, three hundred years and a universe of worldly wisdom away, she would remind me with sly and elegant lasciviousness: The woman who has loved but one man will never know love …

  4

  The Academy

  One day the Abbé de Châteauneuf discovered [La Maréchale de Grancey] all red with indignation. ‘What is the trouble, madam?’ said he. ‘I opened by hazard,’ she replied, ‘a book which was lying about in my cabinet; it is, I believe, a certain collection of letters. Therein I saw these words: Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands. I threw the book away.’

  Voltaire

  CROSSING THE PONT DES ARTS, I am wondering whether I could possibly feel any worse. The weather is too warm. The sky is too bright. My clothes are too heavy for this balmy day and my feet are already swelling. I’m uncomfortable, and, it surprises me to detect, I’m nervous.

  I look across to my destination, the Institut de France, which rises in classical austerity above the Seine on the Left Bank. Louis XIV’s first prime minister, Cardinal Mazarin, commissioned the building as a finishing school for provincial French aristocrats. It was designed by the great architect Le Vau and completed in 1688. In 1805, Napoleon decided it would become the Institut de France, the home of the various French Académies of science and culture. The gilded white cupola of Cardinal Mazarin’s chapel now looms over the ceremonial meetings of France’s most prestigious academy, l’Académie Française. The Académie’s task is to protect the French language, and, by extension, French culture. This is a sacred site in France. No wonder I feel nervous.