Ransacking Paris (5 page)

I flipped open the
Pariscope
and started looking through the concerts. I had grown up with almost no music. Neither of my parents was musical although my father sometimes tunelessly sang ‘Home on the Range'; we had no musical instruments and I don't recall a record-player in the house until some of my older brothers and sisters were teenagers and started listening to rock'n'roll. There was the radio, or wireless as we called it, but it was turned on for the news and the Argonauts Club, an on-air club for children, and for weather and stockyard reports, not for music.

As a child Montaigne woke to the sound of a spinet, a type of harpsichord, but he didn't like musicians playing at dinner because it disturbed good conversation. Madame de Sévigné often mentioned musical performances she had heard: ‘The music was indescribable, Baptiste [the composer] has done the utmost with all the King's musicians … I don't believe there can be any other music in heaven.' But music was just part of her intellectual life, a few lines here and there. Of the other memoirists, only Rousseau was deeply interested in music. Before he became a writer, he taught music, composed a few pieces including an opera, wrote theoretical discussions on music and came up with a new system of musical notation to make music ‘easier to write down, easier to learn and much less diffuse'. He presented it to the French Academy of Sciences, but while versions of it were eventually used in various countries, it wasn't accepted at the time.

When people say that music was important in their childhood I still feel a pang of envy. There is a world of patterned sound inside them that is silent in me and I know their souls have been refined in ways that are too late for mine. I have a friend in the Blue Mountains, Peter, who once told me he heard whole symphonies, note for note, inside his head when he was gazing out over the escarpment or at work at the writers' centre he ran, or even just when he was driving along the highway. He said he didn't know what the world was like without a musical accompaniment, what it was like to gaze over the cliffs and valleys filled with eucalypts and not hear Bach. Dina too lived inside music, although for her it was the beat of rock'n'roll, raw and energetic. Her voice was throaty, the music in her body rather than her mind, the sound and beat of blood and the throb of sex. I felt as if I had been shut out of a vast room in myself; there was flat silence in me where they had a detailed landscape of chords and notes and songs.

I would not be able to fill in all the silence, but at least I might be able to hear a few notes, pattern some scenes in Paris with music. There were pages of concerts in the
Pariscope
, every day of the week, and on Sundays performances in churches which were free or only cost a few euros: string quartets, solo sopranos, piano recitals, choirs, symphony orchestras, organ recitals, cello and violin duets, all over the city. I circled the notice for Mozart's
Requiem
at the Madeleine Church and thought of Dina, long dead. There had been no requiem for her. Just a strange scratchy funeral in a modern cemetery chapel before the coffin slid behind the curtains, her pale-faced little boy looking as if the whole world had become a vast and terrifying blank. Music and singing and death were beginning to mingle in my story in a way that I hadn't planned but which seemed inevitable. Death – and love too – has always needed music it seems. Words take us to the edge of their vast territories, but music can take us right through them; it can delineate the shape of every strange mountain and lost valley in those landscapes.

I stretched out in the midday heat. As I extended my arms I felt a twinge in my shoulder; I must have been crouched in front of my laptop for too many days. I'd give the man with the
marteau
a little longer before I headed back to the studio.

After leaving Madame Curie, I zigzagged through the narrow streets of the fifth arrondissement, along the rue Tournefort where Balzac's characters in
Père Goriot
lived, and along the rue du Pot de Fer where George Orwell was down and out, and into the place de la Contrescarpe where Hemingway drank in the cafés. The streets were narrow and silent and occasionally smelled of piss but I felt a delicious sense of a world shivering into place around me, a pleasure that was soothing and exciting at the same time. The streets were not just ordinary three-dimensional roadways and apartment buildings and shops, they existed as stories, as places inscribed. Here was where Orwell heard ‘the desolate cries of street-hawkers' and where Balzac's fictional Rastignac began his long ascent into society and where Hemingway held up the zinc bar in the Café des Amateurs. Even though I'd never seen any of these streets before, I was aware of a curious sense that they were more real to me than the streets of my hometown. I could read these streets as well as walk them. They had been imprinted in my brain already and as the written image slipped over the actual, each street and café became imaginary. It was pleasurable, as if I were seeing a landscape unfold itself out from an open page and become real. I nearly laughed aloud – the world had become a 3D fold-out book and I was living inside it.

The rue Mouffetard wound up from the place de la Contrescarpe. It was lined with cafés and there were more people about because it was lunchtime and the rue Mouffetard was a tourist street, noisy after the silent summer heat of the backstreets. A market was just beginning to pack up and vendors were crying out their best prices to get rid of the last of their raspberries and strawberries. There were lettuce and other vegetable leaves everywhere on the cobbled street, and the smells of salmon and prawns and cheeses, mouldy blues and Normandy camemberts, were overpowering. One man was selling honey and honeycomb and I stopped to look at the neat hexagonal shapes of the cells. How had creatures come up with such a precise way of making and storing their nourishment, stealing nectar so arduously from hundreds of flowers – it takes 150 flowers to fill each bee's nectar basket – and then storing it in matching hexagonal cells until they needed it or until it was stolen by the beekeepers? It seemed a kind of alchemy, to turn flower juices into liquid gold.

I decided to head back to the studio; the hammerer no doubt would have stopped for a long lunch by now. On the way I passed the Panth
é
on where Rousseau and other
Grands Hommes
, famous men, of France are buried and then I was back in the rue St Jacques walking down by the buildings of the Sorbonne, quiet now with all the students away for the summer. Even the street was empty of traffic. It was hot and still. I suddenly felt that I was the only person out in Paris, that everyone had gone somewhere they all knew about and were laughing and talking under shady chestnuts by the water. Somewhere along the Seine out in the country. Or by a beach under sunshades. No-one knew I was here in this street. In this city of millions I didn't know anyone at all, not even a casual acquaintance, certainly no-one who needed to tell me what they were doing or where they had gone. I'd thought I was absorbing daily life but this was all show and the real people had gone elsewhere. I was standing in a street where people had walked with donkeys and ridden in coaches for more than a thousand years, where scholars and poets and musicians, medieval François Villon and Rabelais and twentieth-century Serge Gainsbourg and Coluche had laughed and drunk wine, and where travellers from the south came to see the great capital, but now I was the only one here. I wasn't part of this place. I was like a ghost, unseen. My imaginary world had become real and solid – I could feel the cobbles under my feet – but I had become invisible. Had I come so far to disappear?

*

When Jean-Jacques Rousseau first saw these streets on his way into Paris from the south, he didn't like them at all: ‘I saw nothing but dirty, stinking little streets, ugly black houses, a general air of squalor and poverty, beggars, carters, menders of clothes, sellers of herb-drinks and old hats.' That was nearly 300 years ago, and most of the buildings were still medieval, crooked and falling down, with no sanitation, and it was a much poorer area than it is now, but Rousseau wasn't keen on towns anyway. He was more of a hippie really – the original hopeless romantic. He was happiest when he lived with Madame de Warens in the country near Chamb
é
ry in the Alps, wandering through the woods and wildflower meadows, gardening, making honey, taking care of chooks and pigeons and cows: ‘I strolled through the woods and over the hills, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I lazed, I worked on the garden, I picked the fruit, I helped in the household and happiness followed me everywhere.'

In Paris, like me, he was an outsider. He came from Switzerland and he was a Protestant – although he converted to Catholicism for a while – and it was difficult to find his way in. He recognised that ‘nothing is achieved in Paris except by the help of ladies' and was regularly received at their homes, but he was often slow in conversation, and, unfortunately for him, the essence of French society for a long time had been quick and witty conversation. Madame de Sévigné, a hundred years before Rousseau, was a mistress of the art and mixed in all the highest circles, but Rousseau was afraid of quick wit and ‘women who prided themselves on their brains', especially those who employed the ‘trick' of asking lots of questions without giving anything away of themselves. I don't think Rousseau would have liked de Sévigné's famous account of an investiture at Versailles where two courtiers got their ribbons and swords and lace so tangled up with each other, ‘they had to be torn apart by force and the stronger man won', and, even less, her brutally amused tone as she tells the story of Vatel, the chef at Chantilly who killed himself because the fish he had ordered for the king's banquet had not arrived.

But Rousseau did love France: ‘My continuous reading, always confined to French authors, nurtured my affection for France and finally transformed it into so blind a passion that nothing has been able to conquer it.' It's disarming the way he just comes out and admits it. There's nothing to defend in a blind passion, it simply is.

And he liked the French: ‘They are naturally obliging, kindly and benevolent, and whatever may be said, really more sincere than those of any other nation. But they are fickle and flighty. The feelings they profess for you are genuine, but those feelings go as they come.'

That may have had more to do with him than the French – he was hypersensitive and never really fitted in – but he did change France from the inside out. He literally made a revolution – many revolutions in fact – in politics, education, literature, in ordinary attitudes and way of life. For him, feelings, passion, nature and imaginary life overruled rationality and the practical world every day: ‘Never mind how great the distance between my position and the nearest castle in Spain, I had no difficulty in taking up residence there.'

I had no difficulty either. I was fifteen and lying on my bed reading one of Guy de Maupassant's nineteenth-century stories,
Clair de Lune
. A severe priest, fearful of sensuality and tenderness, is won over by the beauty of a moonlit night in his village. On the farm it was a hot January afternoon, the day flattened by the tedium of Mass that morning and by the sun heating the corrugated-iron roof until the rooms underneath were ovens. The day was still, curtains unmoving, the lilac painted bedroom walls and three china half-cups hanging on nails unchanging. Even my brothers and sisters were quiet, stunned by the heat. But I could hear distant nightingales as they ‘shook out their scattered notes – their light, vibrant music that sets one dreaming, without thinking, a music made for kisses, for the seduction of moonlight'. It was cool in that world and the full moon silvered a fine mist around a line of poplars.

I could easily take up residence in any imaginary village or town.

I don't suppose that people were only practical and rational before Rousseau, but he was the one who turned the life of imagination and creativity into a kind of cult. In fact, even though I didn't read him when I was young, and even though I don't think I'd like him if I met him now, it was almost certainly because of his strange stormy mind that I ended up in Paris, standing invisible in the rue St Jacques several centuries later.

I should really introduce him.

*

Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712 and died in 1778, ten years before the English came to settle in Australia. His mother died when he was born; his father read to him all night long when he was a child, which gave him ‘the strangest and most romantic notions about human life, which neither experience nor reflection has ever succeeded in curing me of'; he became passionately and often hopelessly attached to various women in his life; he liked to be spanked, a pleasure mostly unfulfilled; he believed that ‘Man was born free and is everywhere in chains'; he wrote
Of
the Social Contract
which revolutionaries carried in their pockets, and
É
mile
, a sensitive and natural approach to bringing up children; he had five children, every one of whom he forced his mistress, Thérèse, to put in a foundling home where they probably died; he was neurotic and became paranoid (‘After long being maddish, he is plainly mad,' said the philosopher Hume when he met him in England); he was the father of Romanticism; and he wrote
The Confessions
, in which he claims to examine his mind and heart with complete honesty: ‘I have bared my secret soul as Thou thyself hast seen it, Eternal Being', but there's something about him that I don't believe.

It's to do with a certain dissembling in myself, I know that much. I recognise something in him that I've struggled against for years without being able to name it. I've sensed it, rather, as a type of sticky coating on my mind and spirit. Rousseau said he struggled between weakness and courage, self-indulgence and virtue, but I think it was a struggle between self-deception and the desire for truth. At least that's what I've come to see in myself, a leaning towards self-deception. I suspect it comes from a desire to be thought well of, from caring too much about what other people think. Read the signs carefully, don't let anyone catch a glimpse into the narrow chamber of the soul.