Ransacking Paris (8 page)

There were cone-shaped trees on the other side of the Carnavalet garden and low roses between the clipped hedges, all perfectly ordered. In the quietness I started to recognise my reaction to the terrible events recorded on the wall. I had felt it before; it wasn't a desire for pain or suffering, it was story-envy, a hungry desire to be in a story, no matter how dreadful. Growing up on the raw and sunny side of the world, I had no such stories of my own. It was almost as if I felt having such stories could compensate for such loss. I was outside these horrible tales, watching where they had flooded by, the bodies of ghostly children tumbling past me.

Sarah Kofman wrote: ‘9th February 1943, eight in the evening. We are in the kitchen having some vegetable broth. There is a knock. A man enters: Go into hiding immediately with your six children. You are on the list for tonight. And he hurried away.'

What can be done with the pain of other people's stories? And why do I seek it?

I had creeks to play in, German soldiers in comics, straggling eucalypts to swing from, wheat fields, our horses Flicka and Beetlebomb, a well with a corrugated- iron cover, almond trees to climb, long droughts to dream of rain, arguing brothers and sisters, flies and bees and ants to watch, Baron Rock, a rocking chair for reading books. My mother and father never had their children snatched from them at school one day, never yearned until their last breath to see us again. The sun shone, my father came home when the sun went down, we ate lamb and potatoes and peas with tomato sauce at tea-time, and we slept through the night. In the morning we heard magpies and kookaburras and the sun was shining again.

By the time I got up to go inside through the museum entry in the rue de Sévigné I felt the slow drift of calm. Perhaps I was condemned to be the powerless witness of other people's stories. Had I travelled from the other side of the world to accept that I could only say, ‘Yes, I see what has happened here to you'? It wasn't resolution, and it could have been only the result of warm sun and an ordered garden; in these ways it becomes possible to continue.

Inside the museum there were hundreds of rooms and corridors with displays of street signs, maps of sixteenth-century Paris, gilt furniture and paintings, historical documents. I looked longest at the paintings of Montmartre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was where I lived! A steep wooded hill, windmills, orchards, vines, a fountain, a crooked village street, a stone fence. I read gallery notes, slowly. The people who lived there were uncouth, rural, dirty. Later, criminals and revolutionaries hid out on Montmartre and gangs known as the Apaches roamed about kicking in a head or two. I wondered how many years had to pass before violence and horrors became dramatic and romantic tales.

I stood in front of the original Declaration of the Rights of Man, and to my surprise, tears of admiration welled. People sticking up for their rights, however dodgy it becomes in practice, has to be a good thing. The museum guard noticed my tears and talked to me about the Declaration with pride. He showed me the rope ladder used to scale the Bastille on that fateful 14 July in a nearby glass case and I gladly believed it was the very rope.

I saw the cork room of Marcel Proust, cork to keep out annoying sounds and smells – he was a sensitive type – and the desk of Madame de Sévigné. It was a dainty black and gold Chinese lacquered writing desk in a light and airy room with a parquetry floor. I imagined she sat with a quill pen and creamy paper, writing in her clear but not excessively neat hand to her beloved daughter and friends.

In the painting above her desk she is a pretty woman with full lips, large dark blue eyes and an aristocratic nose. She looks sweet-natured, but judging from her
Letters
, I don't know if I'd trust her after I'd left the room at one of her salons. She had a sharpish eye on everyone around her. After one evening at a friend's gathering she wrote, ‘A pyramid [of pastries] wished to come in – the sort of pyramid that makes people have to write to one another from one side of the table to the other (not that one grieves that over here, on the contrary one is only too glad not to see what they hide) – that pyramid, with a score of china dishes, was so completely knocked over in the doorway that the noise silenced the violins, hautboys and trumpets.'

I was drawn to her though. I liked her humour and directness and her admissions about herself, especially her intense love for her children. She seemed obsessive about them, but then, I wonder if she was only trying to be honest about a love that most women know is too terrifyingly deep to reveal. Don't let the Fates know how much my boys mean to me.

*

What do I know about her? Madame de Sévigné was born Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, at 1b place des Vosges in Paris in 1626 and died seventy years later. She arrived in the world after Montaigne, whom she read, and before Rousseau, whom I suspect she would have given the sharp edge of her tongue. Her father died when she was a baby and her mother when she was seven. She married at eighteen, had a son and daughter, and was widowed at twenty-four when her husband was killed in a duel over another woman. Her husband and, years later, her son both took the same woman, Ninon de L'Enclos, as a lover. She was friends with many writers, such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Rochefoucauld, and political figures like Nicolas Foucquet, Louis XIV's finance minister, and Madame de Maintenon, the king's mistress. She became famous for the thousands of letters she wrote to her daughter about cultural and political life in Paris. And infamous for her ‘excessive' devotion to that daughter, who had married and moved to Provence, which, in those days, meant de Sévigné only saw her every several years. She was religious but had a sharp and witty eye for the absurd and for foolishness, and had a streak of melancholia. She went to see the plays of Molière, Corneille and Racine – she didn't think Racine would last – and loved to talk about books. She had many admirers but, apparently, she never took a lover after her husband died.

I was in de Sévigné's house several centuries later but it didn't feel like a house. It was too vast and too grand and I found it hard, even with her portrait in front of me, to see her as a thinking, feeling person. The elaborate silk gowns and jewellery and even more elaborate hairstyles of the time made women seem like ornate objects. It was only in her words that I could see who she really was. Or at least, see her version of herself.

She admits to occasional depression in her
Letters
: ‘When one goes to bed one's thoughts are only dark grey … and in the night they become quite black: I know how true it is.' I was startled by her honesty, especially in a time when wit and style were all that mattered. Depression and anxiety run through my family; my solid peasant-farmer father suffered from it. His way of life out on our few dry acres in the bush was as far from the mannered rituals of the Sun King's court and the literary salons of seventeenth-century Paris as possible, but he would have known exactly what de Sévigné meant if he had ever read her. Inheritance is a chancy thing, it dances like a bee, bestowing or skipping over at will; depression stung some of my brothers and sisters and flew past others. I was one of the ones who escaped its grey miasma; I'm more inclined to blind optimism and I'm drawn to sunny dispositions, but I've always both feared and been attracted to the shade and angles of depression.

Montaigne suffered from depression after his dear friend,
É
tienne de la Boétie, died, but he was essentially at ease, enjoying the pleasures and delights of life without anxiety; Rousseau worried about everything, was disturbed by everything, including his own passions; de Sévigné was, I think, simply sad.

When I looked again at the portrait of de Sévigné, a woman of beauty and intelligence, wealth and influence, I could see some hooded wound in her eyes. She once confessed to wishing she had died in her nurse's arms so as to have avoided the many sorrows of her life. Perhaps the wound was because, like Rousseau, she lost her mother when she was only a child. And like Theo too, whose mother died when he was three years old. It felt as if I was being given pieces of the mosaic I was making about him and his mother at home in my studio. A beautiful, gifted boy with panicked eyes trying to hide infinite loss.

The last time I saw Dina she was lying exhausted in the Blue Mountains hospital, only her eyes able to move as her gaze followed Theo's chubby body around the room. Then Theo came over and climbed on my knee and fitted his body comfortably into mine. Dina's eyes filled with tears and Theo patted her stiff hand lying on the bed cover.

Outside in the streets of the Marais, people lingered over a late lunch with a final cup of coffee, their purchases in shopping bags on the chairs beside them. I wondered if they knew about the 165 children taken from the school around the corner. Or about Madame de Sévigné missing her daughter so much she felt she would jump from the window of her grand house nearby. Perhaps they felt no absence in not knowing the stories surrounding them; perhaps they were fully immersed in their own rich weave and had no need to knot and tie themselves into other people's tapestries.

*

I arrange to meet Madame de Sévigné for a coffee in the Marais so she can see how much it has changed. ‘The Café des Philosophes,' I text, ‘on the corner of the rue Vieille du Temple – you can walk through place Royale where you were born, but it's called place des Vosges now.'

‘Let's sit outside so we can watch everyone walk past,' she texts back.

She orders a long black with Narbonne honey and then, seeing mine, wishes she'd ordered a
café au lait
. As far as I know she was the first French writer to mention coffee with milk. She is striking with her creamy skin and dark hair – everyone looks at her – but she takes no notice. She talks about members of parliament including government ministers, she knows them all, and various actors and artists. These days she writes well-informed and entertaining analyses of politics and social mores; she's always being asked to be a guest on various television programs. No-one feels safe from her clever and amused eye. She unsettles me at first – her beauty gives her an unnerving power – but she has a genuine warmth and also a sadness and I begin to feel that we are women together. She makes me laugh with her observations about people walking past and she listens to my stories with attention. I can tell she wants to win me over, that she does that with everyone, and I
am
won over.

*

In the Marais there are the ghosts of the Knights Templar tortured in the fourteenth century, wandering medieval streets past art nouveau synagogues. There is the shadow of Evelyn Waugh drinking at Au Père Tranquille, Balzac as a child in the rue Vieille du Temple, Victor Hugo magnificent in the place des Vosges, Rousseau and Madame Rousseau living simply in the rue Plâtrière. Here are the smells of silvery fish, oysters, runny cheeses, cabbages and the noisy yelling and arguing of Les Halles market echoing under a suburban shopping mall, and here is the dusty late-Gothic splendour of St-Eustache towering over the
quartier
; and there the coloured pipes of the Pompidou Centre shining like a giant plumbing works.

Over there, bikes bump on the cobbles along narrow streets, lines form for the best falafels in the world in the rue des Rosiers, pretty place du Marché St-Catherine looks like a village square, bees buzz in the hidden gardens of the Hôtel de Sully and Jardin des Rosiers, and a few metres of the twelfth-century wall of Paris protect kids playing basketball. The homeless camp with their eiderdowns under the arches in the place des Vosges, the hooded monks chant in St-Gervais, and in the rue des Mauvais Garçons, the Street of Naughty Boys, the name makes everyone smile.

*

It was mid-September. I had been in Paris for three months and it had to be faced: immersion as a way of learning French was not working. If it was supposed to soak in like dye into cloth, then I was an impermeable substance. The final evidence came when I was still in the backstreets of the Marais and a young woman said, ‘
Excusez moi
.'

I stopped. ‘
Oui?
' I said. I noticed she was staring straight ahead.

‘
Blah, blah rue, blahenblah?
' She was looking over my shoulder.

I suddenly realised she was blind – and I had no idea what she'd said. What should I do? She was blind and I was deaf and dumb. She said ‘
rue
' somewhere in there, maybe she was lost, but even if she was, I couldn't tell her where she was. I didn't know where I was myself and the words would not come and arrange themselves in the right order to explain any of this. I reddened and felt hot.

‘I'm sorry,' I burst out in English. She looked puzzled and worried. I think the sound of my voice was harsh. She was young, no more than twenty, and looked vulnerable. I turned and rushed away. I glanced back before I turned the corner and the young woman was still standing there, bewildered.

I told Anthony when I got home that I'd abandoned a blind girl in the street and that was it. No more wandering about thinking the words would soak in to me. I was going to go and enrol in French classes.

The following day I went to Alliance Française in the boulevard Raspail to ask about class times. The efficient girl, who seemed annoyed with people who couldn't speak fluent French, told me to sit down and do a written test to see what level to enrol in. It was late in the afternoon, I was tired, but I sat down as instructed. There were multiple-choice questions with a confusion of verb conjugations, but I recalled as much of Mrs Berman's French as I could and then waited while it was marked. After half an hour I was given a slip of paper saying I could enrol in an intermediate class, which started on the following Monday.