Ransacking Paris (6 page)

It's the opposite of my reaction to Montaigne, whom I'm happy to admit I adore. When Montaigne argued that we couldn't change our essential natures, we could only try to cover them over and hide them, I felt myself breathe out at last. It wasn't an excuse, just a truthful observation. But I owe Rousseau, because it wasn't until I started examining my reaction to him – he's a revolutionary hero and a defender of the imaginary life, I should be bowled over by him, so why was I disliking him? – that I started to see what it was. Perhaps it was Montaigne's looking-glass I needed to gaze into.

For coffee with Rousseau I selected Les Chant des Voyelles in the rue Lombard because I thought the name, The Song of Vowels, a poem by Rimbaud, would appeal to him. He orders a
t
isane
, a herbal tea. His hair is slightly longer than the fashion and he wears a cream shirt and a violet velvet coat like the one he once bought in Lausanne when he started work for the Archimandrite of Jerusalem. He doesn't look much different from the way he did in the eighteenth century, a bit retro late-1960s, a cravat and waistcoat, gentle features, soft brown eyes. In London or Melbourne he'd hardly be noticed, but here in the dark chic of Paris he looks as if he is trying to draw attention to himself. True Parisians don't do that; it's gauche to so obviously signal who you think you are.

‘Tell me about living in England,' I begin, thinking we could share our experiences of being in a different culture. But he darts me a suspicious look and I remember that when he was in exile there he often believed people were attacking him. I change approach.

‘But I should tell you about myself first. I come from Australia. As a lover of nature, you might be interested to know there are many plant species in my country that don't exist here – banksia, eucalypt, bottlebrush.' I know he has made a study of botany.

He relaxes and tells me all about living near Annecy with Madame de Warens and how he loved to walk across the hills and observe nature. He says that living in the natural world and a natural upbringing is best for children, who are all ‘born free'. I'm tempted to ask him about putting each one of his five babies on the stone at the foundling home, but it would be pointless. I'd have no patience with his justification that he was saving them from a poor upbringing in his mistress's family. Instead, I ask if he would discuss
Of the Social Contract
, which expands his theories on the relationship between the natural man and the State, and he becomes passionate. This is his Big Idea. I tell him there's a street not far away named after him, rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and he tries to hide how pleased he is. Although he is trying to be humble, I feel a surge of irritation – he's driven by ego just like the rest of us. It makes me feel less tolerant of even his brilliant ideas. We part with no arrangement to meet again. I suspect we don't like each other that much, our mirrors too self-reflective.

*

The day after the hammering was Patrick's nineteenth birthday. He was born on a cold August day in the Blue Mountains and every year it had been a rugged-up celebration: rosy cheeks, fires burning, mittens, wild children running through the bush, swarming in like birds to be fed and flying out again. It felt strange to wish him a happy birthday on a hot midsummer's day from the other side of the world. Strange not to see his face. I remembered the first time I had seen him lying on my belly, coated in vernix, the purity and sweetness of his being.

I woke before dawn in the rue des Trois Fr
è
res with the pang of missing both Matt and Patrick deep under my ribs, an aching pang. I lay in the dark on the mattress under the low ceiling and wondered what I was doing on the other side of the world so far from them. What if a crack opened up in the earth and they were on the other side of it and I could never get across? The planet may as well hurtle off its orbit because nothing else would matter anywhere in the world. The before-dawn thoughts settled as the greyish light came in from the courtyard; they were young men now and they were going their own way as they were meant to. And they might come my way again. Patrick had applied to study at university in Amsterdam because his course in international politics required a year's study overseas, and Matt wanted to come and visit, but he had no money.

When I woke again I felt unformed, like a runny sea-creature without a shell. I got up and wrote until lunch but in the afternoon I cried. It wasn't sadness or distress, but almost as if I had become liquid. My sons had grown and my body was losing its capacity to ever make children again. I didn't want any more babies
–
babies and children were relentless hard work
–
but a fundamental ability was leaving my body and would never come back.

That evening I went to Mozart's
Requiem
at La Madeleine, the Greek temple church with its Corinthian columns and tympanum, built by Napoleon III. Apostles and saints circled the base of the dome, and below it, at the back of the altar, a marble Mother of God was supported by two gloriously winged angels. It was a monument to Church and State power, a long way from the tin church in a paddock I'd knelt in as a child. The glorious music poured through me, the sound of earth and heaven, the soaring voices and the heartbeat of violins, and again I felt as if I'd become liquid, as if I could be poured into a mould and remade as anything at all. I breathed in and out, conscious my breath was in rhythm with the music. I had not realised before that having babies had kept me solid. For them, I was the origin of being, cells, blood, breath. If I'd come to learn the difference between real and imaginary, then right now everything else was imaginary.

Still, the weather was always real. It's what we've all had to share from the beginning: sun, rain, wind, storm. August was humid and there were storms often in the afternoon. Paris is in the basin of the Île-de-France region, and in summer the hot air is held in it like a bowl of soup. The heat rises and the air molecules become electrically charged as they rub past one another and then late-afternoon thunderstorms crash around the stone buildings. Because I'd not heard thunder echoing and re-echoing off stone buildings before, storms were much louder than I was used to. I loved watching from the safety of shelter, high up in a building like a bird in a cliff cave, but one day on a busy Friday afternoon in town, I was caught outside. Anthony had had a meeting in another
quartier
and when he finished he'd sent me a text to join him.

‘Rendezvous place Colette 4 pm near Acad
é
mie Française.'

I finished writing for the day. It was inching forward into detailing how life continued after Dina's death as it does after everyone's death. The ordinary, even the banal, keeps on happening. Annie Ernaux wrote of her mother's death and was stunned to see how the ordinary phrases suddenly had power: ‘the first springtime she will never see, sensing now the force of ordinary phrases, even of clichés'. Theo had often gone to sleep on my lap, had nosebleeds, played soccer with Patrick, been sad and bewildered. Each morning in the dim under the mezzanine I breathed in another time on the other side of the world – and often the rest of the day seemed a review of the morning as fragments of times, weather and places floated through me.

Map-book in hand, I caught the Metro to Concorde and walked down alongside the Tuileries and crossed over the street in front of the Louvre. I waited on the edge of place Colette, standing in the shade by the colonnade. Beyond the Louvre the south-western sky had darkened. The heat had become moist and even while I stood still my skin was damp, clinging in the way I loved when I was naked in Anthony's arms. Sexual weather.

Within a few minutes the dark sky shadowed overhead. A breeze swirled bits of rubbish, pages of a newspaper blew off a café table, and then a flash of lightning followed too quickly by a loud crack of thunder made me jump. It rolled loud and long, seeming to crash from building to building. Large drops of rain began to smack onto the cobbles and onto my arms, slow-motion explosions of water. Because of the dim light, this memory seems to be without colours, like a black-and-white photograph, more convincing in its detail as memories are often more convincing than life.

The lightning zigzagged, making my heart thump in anticipation of the ear-piercing thunder each time. I felt like a cave dweller attacked by terrifying lights and explosions, but it only lasted about twenty minutes. Anthony found me a few minutes after the storm finished and we held hands and laughed like kids.

To recover ourselves, and for me to dry off, we had a drink in L'Entr'acte, behind the Comédie Française. It was an ordinary bar restaurant where actors probably came after the show. Perhaps Molière came here for a wine between acts. Legend has it that he died on stage right behind us in the oldest theatre in Paris – like Shakespeare he was an actor as well as a playwright; it seems to have been usual in those days – but in fact he collapsed on stage then died at home not long afterwards. Like St Denis carrying his head over Montmartre, preaching as he went, a good story grew into a better one.

Montaigne remarked that as stories are handed along, ‘the whole fabric is padded and reshaped so that the most far-off witness is better informed about it than the closest one'. He wasn't talking about the reshaping due to gaps in recall – which Stendhal describes as ‘large gaps in the fresco where only the brickwork of the wall is to be seen', the nature of all memory over time – he means the deliberate adding of detail. But I don't think there's any real intention to deceive in the elaborating of what happened. It's as if we can't help ourselves; it's in service of the story, it has to be embroidered, shaped, added to. Perhaps St Denis' hands involuntarily jerked outwards as he was decapitated by the Roman soldiers and the severed head brushed his fingers as it fell. By the end of the week the story was that he had caught his head in his hands and by the end of the next he had carried it over Montmartre. After a few months it was recounted as fact that he had preached a sermon as he went.

When we came out of L'Entr'acte it was still light, the sky was clear and the air was fresh with that clear electric feeling after storms I remembered from childhood. Out on the farm it had meant momentary relief in a drought and the pleasure of finding destruction: branches torn off, a water tank rolling across the paddock, a brown flood in the usually dry creek. Here in the rue de Montpensier there were only puddles of water and buildings that had been standing solidly for hundreds of years.

Not long after, I went to an exhibition of self-portraits at the Luxembourg museum. I had seen the poster for it in the Metro, ‘
Moi! Autoportraits du XXème siècle
', which showed a Norman Rockwell portrait – he was back-on as he looked in a mirror sketching his own face. I liked the ‘infinite mirrors' idea of it: the artist who paints self-portraits can never really be outside the frame, but it also reassured that the self was a fit subject to consider; it has always felt like a slippery slope.

The museum was on one side of the Luxembourg Gardens in the sixth arrondissement not far from Metro Odéon but, not yet knowing my way around that
quartier
, I came in through the opposite gate off the boulevard St Michel and walked up the gravelled path. Somewhere in these gardens, perhaps on this pathway, Simone de Beauvoir bowled a black hoop in childhood. The gardens where she had played were formal with paths and smooth lawns, statues and massed beds of Japanese wind-flowers, azaleas, amaryllis and lisianthus and, in the middle, a pond with green iron chairs scattered around it. People sat there and read and sunned themselves like cats but no-one lay on the grass; lawns were for beauty's sake, not for lounging about. Seated around the pond they looked as if they were in
Miss Brill
, my favourite Katherine Mansfield story about a woman watching the world go by in a park in Paris.

Up a side alley I came upon a group of people gathering around beehives near a summer-house. They were wearing white overalls and netted hats and gloves, as if they had stepped from a science fiction film or a Sylvia Plath poem. ‘I stand in a column/Of winged, unmiraculous women,/Honey-drudgers.' I was
puzzled – what on earth were beekeepers doing in the middle of Paris? The sight stayed with me: the loose, relaxed arms of the apiarists, their ‘moon suits and funereal veils', the wooden boxes like the bee-hives along Bushrangers Creek Road, the white gravel under their booted feet, the bright blue lavender and the pink roses behind them. Perhaps this was where the honeycomb in the rue Mouffetard had come from.

I headed back towards the museum. On one side there was an elaborate Italian fountain with marble statues and balustrades and a narrow pond, built in the seventeenth century by Marie de M
é
dicis, the widow of Henry IV. The Luxembourg museum had been her home, modelled on a palace in Florence, her hometown, and these were her Italian gardens. This was where nineteen-year-old de Beauvoir sat and argued about ‘pluralist ethics' with Sartre, who took her argument apart until she exclaimed, ‘I am no longer sure what I think, or if I think at all.' It was the beginning of her accepting Sartre's opinions as more valuable than her own. I looked at the fountain for a while, mesmerised by the statue of the fearsome Cyclops looking down at two lovers and the atmosphere of drama and myth, shady and mossy in the middle of summer.

In the exhibition there were self-portraits by Van Gogh, Duchamp, Matisse, Magritte, Monet, Degas, L
é
ger, Kahlo, Miró, Picasso, Mondrian, Klee, Hockney – and nearly everyone else I'd ever heard of. I studied them for much longer than I normally look at paintings, and took notes. They were memoirs in paint, observer and subject in the same tangled relationship.