True Pleasures Read online

  I like to ponder that term: the gravity of art. It’s a perfectly valid idea, of course, but I’ll take the levity of art every time. Diderot was right, however, about the French gift for facility, variety, brilliance. No one could walk down this street without being struck by the French gift for selling beauty.

  Pompadour herself was a master at image-making – and image renewal. The early portraits portray the glamorous mistress, at her toilette or in a leafy bower. The later paintings show a change. In the Louvre there’s a portrait of Pompadour by Quentin de La Tour. There she is in her patterned silk dress with her globe and viola, volumes of the Encyclopédie, architectural drafts and letters. She is the late thirties woman of education and influence, although she still shows us her pretty ankle. Also in the Louvre is a wonderful sculpture by Pigalle: Madame de Pompadour en amitié. It portrays La Pompadour as a mythic virgin – a muse perhaps, or a temple priestess. It announces her changed but still privileged relationship with the King – from mistress of his heart, to companion, guide and trusted confidante. She created her own image, and periodically reshaped and updated it. In modern parlance, she re-branded herself. And see, as the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré turns into rue Saint-Honoré, here’s Gucci and Hermès and Dior – all busy updating their images to strengthen the value of their brands.

  Now I come across one of the most fashionable new shops in Paris, Colette, at number 213 rue Saint-Honoré. This is a modern style emporium that specializes, as they say in Colette-speak, in ‘styledesignartfood’. This shop is about beautiful things, and the aspirations of the people who buy them. It’s all light, fresh and bright here. I stroll downstairs, mistakenly finding myself in a stainless steel underground café. Too shy to leave, I sit and order a café crème which I don’t drink. I don’t like this place much; there are dozens rather like it in Sydney. And anyway, I always prefer old fashionable places to new ones.

  But the visit is worth it: a modern Brigitte Bardot enchants all the waiters as she lingers over a cigarette, her thick honey hair tumbling, long legs encased in tight jeans, complete with a tiny pink knitted sweater and pink kitten-heeled mules. I am captivated too, by her skin and eyes, by her sheen and gloss. She exerts absolute dominance over the room. Funnily enough, it doesn’t seem to diminish my femininity; somehow it enhances it. She is the overt manifestation of a force all women share.

  And then I cut back, take a right off rue Saint-Honoré and slip into the flattering shadows of teashop Ladurée at 16 rue Royale. This is more like it. I sigh with pleasure as I take a cup of tea and a macaroon alongside a couple of immaculate old French ladies and their toothless dogs in a pretty, painted room. For a while I sit peacefully, staring into space, thinking of the beautiful scarf I just saw, and wondering if I can ever justify paying so much for a small square of silk. Suddenly I realize that, in my happy daze, preoccupied with the beauty of the street and the shop windows, I’ve walked straight past two of the buildings I most wanted to see.

  Number 41 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré is the American Ambassador’s residence. Lots of worthy diplomats have no doubt lived there, but only one of them interests me: Ambassador Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, who reigned from May 1993 to her death in 1997. Pamela Harriman lived by a simple equation: she would give pleasure to men; they would reward her in return. An English nobleman’s daughter, she married Randolph Churchill, Winston’s only son, and spent World War Two learning about politics and power at Winston’s knee. During that time she had an affair with American President Roosevelt’s personal envoy, Averell Harriman. After the war, her marriage over, she drifted to Paris where she became, of all things, a twentieth-century courtesan. Her lovers included Aly Khan, Stavros Niarchos, Elie de Rothschild and Gianni Agnelli. Eventually she found another husband, the American theater producer Leland Hayward, and when he died she reunited with her old flame, Averell Harriman. He died leaving her immensely wealthy.

  Pamela was a chameleon: she reconfigured herself to be whatever her lovers wanted her to be. Gianni Agnelli wanted her to be sexy and elegant: she dressed head to toe in couture. Her mirroring was so assiduous that old friends giggled when Pamela answered her phone with a phoney Italian accent. Prrrrronto? she’d say. Elie de Rothschild liked a woman who was quiet in bed and lovely to wake up to, a woman of elegance and refinement: Pamela rigorously educated herself in antiques and nineteenth-century art. When Pamela married showbiz impresario Leland Howard, amazed visitors watched as she played the homespun partner, bringing out her husband’s slippers and gently sliding them on his feet. She travelled with Leland for the out-of-town tryouts, packing an electric frying pan so she could rustle up his favorite chicken hash after the show. With Averell Harriman, she straightened up into the model political wife – elegant, charitably inclined, gracious.

  It must take a lot of effort to make oneself so attractive to men, a lot of self-discipline. To pander to their foibles and weaknesses, to laugh at their jokes, to turn away from the hurts and insults of those who always returned to their wives. Americans always sniggered at Pamela (the widow of opportunity, they chortled), the British had looked down on her, but the French very much appreciated this throwback to an earlier era. They appreciated the craft, the art, the self-discipline of the courtesan. Like all great artists, she made the hard work look easy.

  When she became a rich and influential widow, Pamela got a facelift, put on a power suit and played the role of Ambassador with the flair she applied to all her performances. Naturally, she was very much inclined to whitewash her past: she never really finished a degree at the Sorbonne. I wish I’d looked at the Embassy closely: it must have been a secret thrill for Pamela to take charge of a former Rothschild residence, a balm to the wound she endured when Elie de Rothschild refused to marry her so many years before.

  Once, when working in Paris as an Australian diplomat, my friend Ellen turned up at the American Embassy for a Christmas party. As she came through the security entrance, she saw the guards vetting a huge box filled with assorted perfumes and champagne: a Christmas tribute to Ambassador Harriman from President Mitterrand. At the end of her life, finally, it was Pamela’s turn to be courted and wooed.

  The other house I walked straight past was 39 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the former Hôtel de Charost, now the British Embassy. This house belonged to Napoleon’s favorite sister, Pauline, who bought it in 1803. Metternich, later Austrian Chancellor, said of Pauline that she was as pretty as it is possible to be. She was in love with herself, and her only occupation was pleasure. For Pauline, pleasure consisted in her worshipping her own image. She once commissioned a life-size nude sculpture of herself in white marble: her mortified husband immediately hustled Canova’s masterpiece out of France to a basement in Italy. Pauline’s narcissism had a familial flavor; she adored her brother Napoleon, whose glories added shine to her beauty. When the tide turned against Napoleon, Pauline’s vanity became a virtue. She selflessly accompanied Napoleon on his first exile to Elba; she sold her jewels and houses to support him after his downfall; and she was still trying to improve living conditions for him when he died on St Helena. All her life, her only occupation was pleasure, and yet, at the last, she took pleasure in actions that were entirely admirable.

  As I sit in the teashop with the old ladies, I think about La Pompadour and Pamela Harriman and Pauline Bonaparte. And I ponder on pleasure and the price we pay to give it – or to get it. Nancy Mitford saw pleasure as a kind of moral good. In her letters, thousands of them, she never dwelled on her times of loneliness or ill-health: in her view, such self-indulgence would only diminish the pleasure of the receiver. A woman’s allure, and her effort to retain that appeal, was also part of her necessary social contribution. Nancy Mitford appreciated La Pompadour for the pleasure she gave to others and for the incomparable legacy of beauty she left behind.

  Nancy Mitford was close friends with successors to Pauline Bonaparte in the Hôtel de Charost, British Ambassador Duff Cooper and his wife, Dian
a Cooper. Aristocratic and eccentric, the couple created a golden post–World War Two era. Their parties were legendary: they imported a thousand red roses for one fête alone. Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau and Noel Coward were regular guests – as well, of course, as Nancy Mitford. Diana once organized a ‘Charles Ritchie Week’ for a junior Canadian Embassy official who had complained that nobody ever paid any attention to him, despite the very important things he had to say. At his every arrival a band played a tune specially composed for him. Nancy Mitford painted five hundred balloons with the slogan ‘Remember Ritchie!’ which were released from the Embassy courtyard with postcards attached asking the recipients to send them to Ritchie with their good wishes. Several came back from Eastern Europe; one from Norway.

  Duff and Diana were devoted to each other, so much so that they never denied each other their separate pleasures. At one stage Duff’s lover, French writer Louise de Valmorin (on whom Nancy Mitford based the character of Albertine, Charles-Edouard’s ‘intoxicating old mistress’ in The Blessing), moved into the Embassy with the couple. Diana remonstrated vigorously with her husband when he cheated on Louise. The great beauty of her day, Diana accepted lavish gifts from besotted millionaires: the coat of shame she blithely called her mink, gift of an admiring industrialist. Whenever Diana and Duff were apart they wrote magical daily love letters, and Diana was devastated when Duff died.

  Diana and Duff’s life together was characterized by their uninhibited pursuit of pleasure. But they lived in a serious age, and their brand of high frivolity was considered faintly immoral. Today we face an altogether different problem. We live in an era that glorifies self-gratification and we are constantly exhorted – instructed – to do whatever we want. Just do it! shouts the slogan. What’s more, we are bombarded with advertising images that purport to know exactly what it is that we want, what will give us pleasure. This car, this dress, that lifestyle.

  But an age of self-gratification is not, it seems to me, the same thing as an age of pleasure. Amid the welter of choices, sometimes it’s hard to detect and honor that which genuinely gives us delight. I suspect that one of the secrets to happiness lies in making this distinction.

  Edith Wharton has a wonderful description of the kind of pleasure the city of Paris can give:

  Her senses luxuriated in all its material details: the thronging motors, the brilliant shops, the novelty and daring of the women’s dresses, the piled-up colours of the ambulant flower-carts, the appetizing expanse of the fruiterers’ windows, even the chromatic effects of the petits fours behind the plate-glass of the pastry-cooks: all the surface-sparkle and variety of the inexhaustible streets of Paris.

  This description sums up for me the complexity and sophistication of the delights of Paris. And it takes us back to La Pompadour, a woman who knew that the art of giving and receiving pleasure lies in careful attention to detail.

  When Pompadour died on a cold January day in 1764, her body was carried on the road out of Versailles. The King stood on his balcony and cried for his lovely friend.

  As I head back to the Marais, I recall President de Gaulle’s complaint about living in Pompadour’s former home. Really, he said, I should have set myself up at the Louvre – the 8th arrondissement is not a place for making History.

  But then, of course, he was a man.

  Later, lying on my white bed at Rachel’s house, I reflect on the intensely felt pleasures of a day in Paris. You know, I don’t have some misguided fantasy that I would like to live here. First, foremost and forever I am an Australian citizen. Australia is my patch of the world. It’s where I belong, where I am, at least in part, responsible for what happens. But here in Paris I know I can let down my guard, because what happens here is not, even in part, my responsibility. Here, I take a holiday from citizenship.

  Americans have always honored Paris: they appreciate it as a bulwark against ugly modernity, it’s the anti-America, the place where beauty and reason resist the sterile blandishments of Hollywood and therapy and plastic surgery and consumerism and talk-show emotions. (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,’ chuckled Sir Thomas. ‘Really! And where do bad Americans go when they die?’ inquired the Duchess. ‘They go to America,’ murmured Lord Henry.)

  Australians don’t, on the whole, cherish Paris. When an Australian tells you you’re a Francophile, it’s generally less an observation, more an accusation. Just the term itself is loaded.

  Here’s how, in certain Sydney circles, a Francophile might be defined: a lightweight who buys sentimental books about house renovating in Provence and pays too much for French crockery.

  In Canberra foreign policy circles, a Francophile: a lightweight out of step with Australia’s strategic destiny in Asia.

  On the left, a Francophile: a lightweight who negligently ignores the evil history of French nuclear testing in the South Pacific.

  On the right, a Francophile: a traitor who ignores France’s disgraceful refusal to open its markets to Australian agricultural products.

  Pointless to say: but I don’t love France, I only love Paris. This only increases the crime, suggesting an atrocious refinement of decadence (oooh, so we only love PARIS, do we?).

  Some Australians can get away with their embarrassing little secret by affecting a witty postmodern ironic affection for Paris. But I can’t. I feel shamelessly pleased by Paris, captivated by it.

  Paris makes me feel better.

  7

  Salons

  … so equally minute is the care required, in preparing a soufflé or a salon.

  Edith Wharton

  ONE OF MY FAVORITE rituals is to browse through the books and magazines at the WH Smith bookstore on rue de Rivoli, and then take afternoon tea at Angelina’s nearby salon de thé.

  This afternoon the main salon is full, as usual, of tourists and old ladies and couples and refined Englishwomen in pale trench-coats and neat Frenchwomen with their mothers-in-law. The room is big and high-ceilinged, yet painted, pretty and intimate. I set myself up with a fragrant cup of tea in one hand and a crisp new book in the other as the hum of conversation weaves a light blanket of sound.

  I always fancied the idea of hosting a salon, or even just attending one: of being part of a salon set. Just the word hints at a life both elegant and intellectual, which is possibly my ideal combination. I used to think inadequate funds or social status were the main barriers to my career as salonnière (and yes, starting out adult life in a reeking university shared house in Surry Hills didn’t help). But a minimal amount of reading soon revealed that even the most privileged have found salon-making hard work. So minute is the care required, as the meticulous Edith Wharton said. Sheer social determination was never enough; magic was also required, an alchemy, to bring the right people to the right place at the right time and spark them to genius.

  Of course, on paper a salon is simply a small society of people who meet ritually for conversation. The first salonnière was Madame de Rambouillet, who constructed her charming home at the beginning of the seventeenth century for that very purpose. It was located on the site of the present-day antique center, le Louvre des Antiquaires, just a bit further along from here, down rue de Rivoli, opposite the Louvre.

  But in practice a great salon is a rare thing, and, while people still talk about ‘salons’ in New York and London, in truth the salon as high art seems to have died out altogether.

  The most important principle governing the salon was that it was the political and social domain of older women. Their influence lay in the force of their individual personalities, not by weight of numbers. Edith Wharton, who had access to some of the last nineteenth-century French salons, thought the ideal ratio was five subtle and sophisticated women to every twenty men. Voltaire talked appreciatively of salons presided over by a woman who in her declining beauty shines by her awakening wit.

  And perhaps because older women are more sensitive to the effects of lighting, salons we
re sunset rituals, the conversation framed by candles and flickering fire and pale moon rays through slender windows. Nancy Mitford imagined the eager Frenchman ready to sit up all night with some brilliant and sympathetic hostess …

  For Edith Wharton, an indispensable feature of salon style was what she called ‘general’ conversation: conversation as collaborative performance. Raconteur is a French word but an English concept, and nothing deadens conversation faster than the bluff fellow with his long yarns and deferred punchlines. Worse still is the confessional type. At one dinner Mrs Wharton was mortified to find herself engaged by a fellow American in the monopolizing style so beloved by her countrymen. She squirmed with boredom and embarrassment: he had no idea how crude his one-on-one style seemed to his French hosts. Nancy Mitford explained that, if the salon hostess personally accompanied you to the front door, this was a silent but unmistakeable sign that you were not welcome again.

  By contrast, a good salon guest carefully calibrated his or her social value: the least witty should always give air-time to the most witty. Many hostesses had their great man – a writer or artist, usually – who at least nominally formed the center of the coterie and to whom the other guests deferred. Writer Félicité de Genlis, a salonnière during the heyday of salons in the eighteenth century, used to say that if you wanted to succeed in the world, it was necessary, when entering a salon, that your vanity should bow to that of others.

  One common misapprehension is that the provision of good food and drink will guarantee a display of wit and repartee. I can offer a number of my own dinner parties as clear evidence that this is a fallacy. She tried to found a salon, and only succeeded in opening a restaurant, wrote Oscar Wilde, pinpointing the grave social risk involved. In fact, some of the most famous Parisian salonnières were remarkably skimpy in their offerings. In the eighteenth century, Madame Geoffrin served omelette. In the nineteenth, Princesse Mathilde provided such dreadful food that her assembly of writers used to finish up their meals in the creepy grandeur of rue de Courcelles and then hotfoot it round to the Champs-Élysées house of La Païva, a courtesan who served high-quality food in a low, glitzy atmosphere. The famous Saturday evenings chez Miss Stein and Miss Toklas were also abstemious. Alice was a great cook, but she only served puritan tea to the great artists and their long-suffering wives.