True Pleasures Page 5

  This was the event that triggered Hortense’s flight from her husband. Soon after, she put on men’s clothes, collected her jewels, packed up her bags and left on horseback. Her distraught husband woke Louis XIV at 3 am to tell him the news. But by then the King had lost patience with this proselytizing bore. ‘And why did the Archangel Gabriel not give you warning?’ the monarch asked irritably.

  Hortense simply walked out on her own life. She left behind wealth, privilege and a social position at the heart of French society. Not to mention four young children. Given all the more immediate and personal causes her husband had given her to leave, it seems to me both striking and appropriate that an act of aesthetic destruction triggered Hortense’s flight. For some reason, this impersonal attack on beauty was, for her, the final blow to her marriage. Thereafter she was ardent in pursuit of the beauty and pleasure her husband had sought to destroy.

  I wander through the library a little longer, and then head for the nearby Galerie Colbert, a gorgeous nineteenth-century arcade or passage, where the library has a small bookshop. As I stroll I have to admit to myself that, though I like to dwell on Hortense’s glorious escape to freedom, this is, of course, not the whole of her story.

  As for so many women, life got harder for Hortense as she got older. With the death of Charles II, she became vulnerable. She had money worries. Her husband kept pursuing and tormenting her. She never formed a stable romantic relationship, though she still had many friends and admirers who thronged her salon. She took to drinking a little too much. Even her epicurean capacity to live in an eternal present failed her at one stage. She hung her apartments in black and thought about going to Spain and entering a convent with her sister Marie. St Evremond wrote her a long letter explaining that such extreme options were suitable for the ugly and foolish only: When [they] throw themselves into nunneries, it is a divine inspiration. He urged Hortense to remember her assets: You were brought up as a Queen and you deserved to be one.

  I can imagine Hortense nodding and smiling at this. And obviously her natural optimism reasserted itself, for in 1696, at the age of fifty-one and just three years before her death, Hortense wrote to St Evremond simply: Never was I in better health; never was I handsomer in all my life.

  A few hours ago, back at the Institut de France, as we strolled across the courtyard to the chapel in the other wing, Monsieur looked at me and asked rather a disconcerting question: ‘Why are you interested in Hortense Mancini?’

  I could have replied with the predictable caveats. I could have said that I admired Hortense because, even though she was really rather shallow and terribly vain and absolutely foolhardy, well, she was very brave. But that would not have been quite true. The truth is that Hortense’s shallowness, her vanity and her foolhardiness were essential to her courage. These were the very character traits that gave her the capacity to escape. A more thoughtful woman, an introvert, a worrier, a sensitive soul, simply could not have made the wild break for freedom that Hortense did. And survive. And flourish. It was far too difficult to explain that I didn’t admire her in spite of her faults: I admired her because of them. So I smiled and tried to look scholarly. ‘She was an important Frenchwoman,’ I said. Monsieur nodded. At the Institut de France, the guards understand that kind of thing.

  Now I am truly exhausted. I head off home, via rue de Bretagne. I buy salad leaves and melting cheeses and bread and wine and some headily fragrant strawberries and devour a solitary spring feast as I pore over an old map. Then I fall into bed and dream of airports with high painted ceilings and airport queues lined with broken statues and in the midst of it all a baby girl with a wisp of dark hair and luminous eyes, gazing at her future.

  5

  Le Grand Véfour

  Paris is a great beauty. As such it possesses all the qualities that one finds in any other great beauty; chic, sexiness, grandeur, arrogance, and the absolute inability and refusal to listen to reason.

  Fran Lebowitz

  LIKE A BLAST of fresh air, Rachel is back. She looks fantastic: her severe suit and stark jewelry set off her white skin, diamond-shaped green eyes and fine curling hair. Rachel is smart, really smart. She can be intimidating. She doesn’t walk, she stalks. She rarely smiles, though she often laughs. She’s also one of the most generous and thoughtful people I have ever met.

  We rapidly consume a bottle of champagne and then take ourselves to a tiny little restaurant around the corner called Chez Nenesse. On Rachel’s instruction I order the onion soup. She swears it will be the best I’ve ever had. She’s right, it’s delicious – a murky, rich, stringy broth.

  ‘I’m going to take a few days off,’ Rachel says. ‘Wander around with you as you look for your girls.’

  My first instinct is doubt. Rachel has possibly the lowest boredom threshold of anyone I know. ‘It could be incredibly tedious,’ I warn. ‘The other day I spent the morning looking for the non-existent tomb of Hortense Mancini. This whole trip could be spent looking for things that don’t exist.’

  ‘That’s OK. You need me anyway. I have a sense of direction.’

  True.

  ‘Plus,’ Rachel went on, ‘I need a rest. My heart beats too fast. I’m not sleeping well. It’ll be good for me just to lope around with you. If I get bored I’ll come home or do a few practical things like getting the dry-cleaning done or shoe repairs.’

  I am a little surprised. ‘Is Paris wearing you down? To me, of course, it always looks as though this is the one perfectly civilized place left in the world.’

  Rachel snorts. ‘Civilized? French women are completely neurotic; they’re all on several kinds of pills. And even though they won’t do any exercise, they are obsessed with their weight – they starve themselves. They smoke to suppress their appetites.’ She pauses and looks at her own cigarette. ‘Whereas I smoke because I’m addicted.’

  I look down at a soupspoon full of cheesy melting bread. ‘So you mean my current diet of three enormous French meals a day isn’t going to make me lean and lithe?’

  Rachel ignores me. ‘I’ve heard of doctors telling perfectly normal pregnant women to cut back their food intake because they were putting on too much weight. I tell you they’re obsessive about it.’

  This is all a bit lowering. ‘The story goes that the French live wonderfully sane lives. And that French women are beautiful because they eat a balanced diet and go to the seaside for two months a year and invest carefully in nice underwear, shoes and bags …

  ‘ … And plastic surgery and the rest,’ Rachel adds. ‘The effort is not so obvious because French women don’t walk around in track-pants like Americans do and tell everyone how hungry they are and how often they go to the gym.’ Rachel stabs out her cigarette. ‘Which we have to admit is a great blessing.

  ‘I mean, they do spend a fortune on grooming. It’s why I took to doing my nails – I couldn’t get any respect otherwise.’ She holds up her white hands tipped with very un-French blood plum nail polish. They look great.

  Rachel pauses. ‘Still, they have the best shoe shop in the world, Robert Clergerie. And Paris may be a museum theme park, but it’s beautiful. And at their best, French restaurants are the best.’

  ‘Good,’ I say, ‘because I’ve reserved lunch for us tomorrow at Grand Véfour.’

  Later that night, I lie in bed as a ray of blond moonlight streams into my room. Rachel is right. Paris is not a relaxed city. Standards are high. It is not that French women are glamorous; in fact, they tend to be understated in appearance. Their clothes are conservative. Heels are not usually high. They are exceptionally well groomed, but in a subtle way. It looks effortless, but of course it isn’t. And it’s damned hard to copy. Beauty without grace is a hook without bait, said Ninon de Lanclos. They seem to have found grace.

  Way back in 1804, the American writer Washington Irving wrote home to his brothers: If the ladies of France have not handsome faces given them by nature, they have the art of improving them vastly, and setting nature at defiance.
Besides, they never grow old: you stare perhaps, but I assure you it is a fact. I can imagine Irving’s brothers reading this, looking across their austere living rooms to their faded American brides, and sighing with repressed regret for these ageless Gallic sirens. Irving added passionately that French women, set fire to the head and set fire to the tail.

  I once asked Ellen what she thought about French women.

  ‘Yes, I like them very much,’ she said.

  ‘But don’t some people find them, you know, uptight and competitive?’

  ‘Oh, they are,’ she said. ‘But you know,’ she added, in that low sinuous way of hers, ‘I’m a bit like that myself. I’m more of a man’s woman.’

  She looked at me with her knowing smile. ‘They play games, you know? They’re complex and interesting. And they’re not girly,’ she concluded with satisfaction.

  It only occurred to me later that Ellen had used the word girly as an insult.

  As I drift off to sleep a last, fleeting thought: I’m fairly sure no one has ever observed that Australian women set men on fire.

  It’s a fresh clear day and Rachel and I are all high-heeled and dark nail-polished and shiny-haired. We climb out of our taxi, strut along the arcades of the Palais Royal and present ourselves at the wood and glass doors of Le Grand Véfour, one of the oldest and best restaurants in Paris. It seems the entire lunch sitting has arrived together. There’s a gratifying whooshing and whirring as we are guided to our table and ushered along the cherry velvet banquettes and large menus are flipped open and corks are pulled and popped. With floor-to-ceiling murals of classical maidens and curling vines and bowls of fruit, Le Grand Véfour is less like a restaurant and more like an intimate salon.

  In our sharp suits, Rachel and I are rather ill-matched to this ridiculously pretty and convivial room. I can’t help thinking that we should be dressed to suit the late eighteenth-century days when those doors first opened. Women’s fashions were sexy – very low-cut, high-waisted, ultra-sheer gowns set off by lace-up sandals revealing ankles and legs. Hair was often short and curled around the face, goddess-style, and cameos were popular as jewelry. Fashionable women revived this Hellenic style to signal a renewed hope in the Revolution. Paris, the optimists hoped, would be the new Athens – democratic, open and sophisticated.

  But instead of becoming a noble Athenian democracy, Paris degenerated into a frontier town. The city was flooded with a strange brew of émigré aristocrats, army contractors, black marketeers, revolutionaries and speculators. Spiralling inflation and a downgraded currency produced great bargains for those with foreign cash. It was a time for people on the make. Political power was in the hands of a corrupt and opportunistic Directory of five men. At the head of the Directory was one Paul Barras. His mistress was a thirty-something widow with two children. Her name was Rose de Beauharnais. One day she would become Napoleon’s Josephine and the Empress of France.

  Rose de Beauharnais was all woman. Her teeth may have rotted from the cane sugar of her native Caribbean island, but with her soft voice and languid walk, tilted nose and curling eyelashes, she was intensely, marvelously feminine. Much like this room, in fact, where she regularly dined. Perhaps she sat right here, sipping champagne. In her position of influence, she was able to scam some money herself, by petitioning and trading on arms contracts. It helped her pay the debts to her dressmakers.

  Our waiter now approaches. He inclines his sleek head gravely. ‘An apéritif, Mesdames?’

  We hesitate. ‘Well, we would like a glass of champagne to start and, what do you think? We were thinking of drinking champagne right throughout our meal.’ An approving nod, a smile.

  ‘Certainement, Mesdames,’ he responds. ‘Perfectly proper, and may I suggest the Deutz.’

  He recommends the daily menu fixe; we accept. He pours our first champagne; we sip. He brings us the first of a sequence of delicious dishes; we tuck in. We are enjoying the rare pleasure of passivity, for we are in the hands of experts.

  One dish I will always remember. I think it may be a work of art, or philosophy. Three mouthfuls are carefully dispersed on Limoges china: a tomato sorbet, a tomato mousse and a tomato terrine. Three colors, and, on the tasting, three textures. Each mouthful reveals a slightly different aspect of the fruit – here’s the sweetness, then the slight zing and finally, the warm basenote. It’s a discourse on tomatoness, both subtle and exquisite. And swiftly gone.

  Every now and then passersby, on their stroll around the arcades of the Palais Royal, stop and peer through the lace-covered windows. They want to see this famous room, and I can understand why: I’ve done it myself. Now that I’m inside, of course, I’m trying not to look at them looking in at me.

  In the heady summer of 1795, many more visitors wandered the Palais Royal looking for entertainments both pure and impure. Paris was in the grip of an extended, dissolute, after-the-Terror party. The excesses of the guillotine were over. The fanatic Robespierre was dead. People no longer needed to look fearfully over their shoulders. Instead they overcame the horror of recent deaths by an exuberant embrace of life. Women danced with narrow red ribbons around their necks to symbolize the severed head.

  Amid this excess, the Palais Royal was the headquarters of pleasure. All the cafés, restaurants, theaters, brothels and gambling houses were filled to bursting. But there was a lonely figure among the revelers. He was an obscure young soldier named Napoleon Buonaparte, newly arrived in Paris from the provinces. At twenty-six years of age, he was pale, intense and silent, but even then he was an acknowledged genius on the battlefield. Born in Corsica, Napoleon was essentially Italian; he was as tough, clannish and ruthless as a mafia godson.

  This macho soldier, obsessed with the acquisition and exercise of power, was understandably surprised when he figured out the real sources of power in Directory Paris. He wrote home to his brother Joseph:

  Women are everywhere – applauding the plays, reading in the bookshops, walking in the Park. The lovely creatures even penetrate to the professor’s study. Paris is the only place in the world where they deserve to steer the ship of state; the men are mad about them, think of nothing else, only live by them and for them. Give a woman six months in Paris, and she knows where her empire is, and what is her due.

  When Napoleon met Rose de Beauharnais he confronted the apogee of this new woman: she was graceful, untruthful, influential, extravagant and amoral. She was as unlike his thrifty, virtuous, domineering mother as it was possible to be. But her very faults made her une vraie femme, the very essence of femininity, her charms as delicate as gossamer.

  From their first night together Napoleon was utterly infatuated with the elegant, alluring older woman, whom he possessively renamed Josephine:

  I awake all filled with you. Your image, and the intoxicating pleasures of last night, allow my senses no rest. Sweet and matchless Josephine, how strangely you work upon my heart! … a thousand kisses, mio dolce amor; but give me none back, for they set my blood on fire.

  As I gaze around this restaurant, it seems to me that feminine style still holds a special place in Paris. On the other side of the room is a table of imposing old men, lawyers or judges perhaps, chewing their food lustily. Perhaps it’s their monthly lunch. They are having a wonderful time. To Australian eyes it’s noteworthy: a group of powerful men choosing to dine in an atmosphere as feminine as a beauty parlor.

  In Sydney, Rachel and I agree, there is no way a group of men lunching together would ever consent to eat in a room as pretty as this. They would feel emasculated by their surroundings. ‘Even gay men,’ I suggest to Rachel, ‘tend to prefer leather and stainless steel.’

  At another table, absorbed in their own drama, are an American man and a much younger woman. He is suited, she is casually dressed, and her long legs are curling nervously around the legs of her chair. He keeps talking, staring at her intently. She looks distractedly away, flicking her long hair. I think: how curious, he finds this restaurant romantic and hopes its char
ms will seduce her (as he intends to); she merely finds it old-fashioned and is bored witless.

  Rachel and I feel right at home. Glowing with champagne and fine food, caressingly administered to by our waiter, we are the last to leave, outstaying even the lawyers. The oldest is so infirm he has to be carried out by his colleagues, still waving his post-prandial cigar. Five hours after our arrival Rachel and I finally stumble out into the pale pink afternoon, blinking with woozy pleasure. ‘Now that,’ she says, ‘was a lunch.’

  Next morning, as I peer out the downstairs window onto a drizzly sidewalk, Rachel’s voice rings out like a commandment behind me: ‘So where are we off to today?’

  ‘Well, I was thinking of looking for the place where Napoleon and Josephine got married, and checking to see whether Josephine’s cottage is still there …’

  ‘Right. When do we start?’

  ‘ … and really I am not sure whether I have the right addresses, because that part of Paris changed so much under the redesign of Baron Haussmann, and even the street numbers could have changed and it’s all a bit of guesswork but oh well if you really want to come …’

  So off we go, taking the Métro from Filles du Calvaire to Opéra and winding our way down to rue d’Antin. On this cool wet day, the boulevards – once the legendary thoroughfares of carefree boulevardiers and flâneurs – are charmless, big, loud and impersonal. I can see that Rachel is already wondering what she’s doing here as she struggles with her umbrella.

  Rue d’ Antin offers no compensation; it’s as drab and grey as the day. We count our way along the street to find number 3, which was once the local town hall but is now a rather plain-looking bank branch. It doesn’t matter to me. I feel childishly triumphant when I see a plaque; it’s as welcome as a personal greeting. Lucinda, it trumpets, you’ve come to the right place.