True Pleasures (11 page)

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.

For Edith Wharton the salon represented the very best of France in all its urbanity, gaiety and intellect. Above all, it represented the triumph of the intellectual woman.

The famous French ‘Salon', the best school of talk and of ideas that the modern world has known, was based on the belief that the most stimulating conversation in the world is between intelligent men and women who see each other often enough to be on terms of rank and easy friendship. Think what an asset to the mental life of any country such a group of women forms! And in France, they were not then, and they are not now, limited to the small class of the wealthy and fashionable. In France, as soon as a woman has a personality, social circumstances permit her to make it felt
.

I very much doubt if Edith Wharton is right when she says that access to salons was not limited to a small class: by their nature they were elite. But it was true that money and status weren't enough: to make the grade in the salon you had to contribute something special to the discourse.

I gave up early on a career as salonnière, but it seems to me now that I have spent a lot of time trying to find an analogue. The search for the best conversations led me down some curious paths. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation was one. As a university student I was a part-time research assistant in the rural department and later, briefly, worked on an international current affairs program. I imagined men and women of noble intent, carefully distilling truth and disinterestedly conveying it to the nation. And I did meet some men and women like that, but mostly I found a lot of tired male sexists with seventies' hairdos who were still banging on about their pet causes. The modern world seemed a faraway place in the laminated corridors of Gore Hill.

I was accepted into the Foreign Affairs Department in 1987. This was quite something, a sign that I was on a career path at last. On our first day in the great old building in Canberra, one of our lecturers was a former High Commissioner to Fiji. He was still wearing his pale green safari suit with a shark's tooth around his neck. I was shaken but not deterred. The next day our training course topics included
Diplomatic dinners: how to make people feel at home who you wish were at home
and
What to do when Australians send their mad relatives to YOUR post
. Mmm. Eventually, of course, I did get to eavesdrop on serious conversations, but not nearly as often as I had expected.

Things got a lot better when I joined the Prime Minister's Department, and worked in the international affairs area. This was the real deal. I wrote briefing notes for the Prime Minister, I attended his meetings, I tiptoed the corridors of power. I got to listen in on a really high class of conversation. The first Gulf War happened during my time in the Prime Minister's Department, and the Dili
massacre in East Timor. Serious matters were at hand, the national interest was at stake, I played my own small role.

I would like to say that working for the Deputy Prime Minister was the most intellectually fascinating time of my life. It
was
amazing in many ways. But as a rule, stimulating and equal conversation between men and women is not a Labor Party strong point,
maaaaate
.

And as for the management consultants … but that, of course, is why I am here.

The philosopher David Hume, one of those enlightened Scots who found France so delightful in the eighteenth century, relished the difference between the British and French approaches to women and society. An evening in England generally concluded with the ladies gracefully exiting the room, leaving the men to cigars, port and politics. In France, by contrast, men and women
mixed
in all circumstances of life. Women were considered indispensable to the creation of fine society. Women and men were equally expected to step up to the conversational mark – to be familiar with the great ideas, issues and arts of the age – and to be able to discuss them with wit and intelligence.

David Hume knew a lot about French women because he was lucky enough to attend the greatest salon of all. In some respects Madame du Deffand seems an unlikely candidate for salonnière. Separated from her provincial husband, modest in title and means, she lived most of her life on the generosity of others. At fifty she went blind. Yet, through the force of her intellect and personality, she rose to become the greatest salonnière in history.

Night after night, year after year, from 1746 until her death in 1780, in colored silks, satin shoes and matching stockings, with their powdered hair and beauty patches, aristocrats and scientists, authors and diplomats, foreign
visitors and local wits came gratefully to Madame du Deffand's dramatic gold and crimson salon. Perched on pretty chairs, they flirted, joked, played cards or discussed the latest books. Benjamin Franklin came by, as did Horace Walpole and yes, the delighted Scot, David Hume. One of the assembly might read aloud a letter from one of Madame du Deffand's many correspondents: the French ambassador in Constantinople sending tales of Turkish splendor; her good friend Madame de Choiseul with insider gossip from the court at Versailles; best of all, the great Voltaire himself, firing philosophical bombshells and political
bons mots
from the safety of his estate in Switzerland.

Framed like a statue in her winged chair, the sovereign of this tiny kingdom of pleasure was Madame du Deffand herself. Having slept all day, she was ready to sit up all night. As her guests arrived, Madame du Deffand's blank eyes would turn towards them and her knowing fingers would roam in light greeting over their faces, as if to dissect the personality within. And her guests needed their composure, for Madame du Deffand's salon was no place for the socially feeble. This was the peak of the eighteenth century, the age of wit and ridicule, brilliance and
bel esprit
, and most of all, reason. Not earnest, cardigan-wearing, look-at-all-sides-of-the-question kind of reason, but sparkling, kitten-heeled, stay-up-all-night and fuck-you kind of reason. Madame du Deffand's restless hands once paused lightly on the heart of the reserved man of letters, Monsieur Fontenelle.
There too, lies a brain
, she said, approvingly.

Madame du Deffand was a martinet about gaiety. She banned the serious, the didactic, the
improving
. And in this she rendered herself a conservative, for the world around
her was changing. As the gay and refined Age of Reason headed towards its revolutionary climax, Madame du Deffand clung to the old codes. She and her friends scoffed at the encyclopedists' faith in progress; they derided the new vogue for sentimentality. They wore their licentiousness and cynicism with ancient pride.

A night at Madame du Deffand's was a festival of one-liners.

When Monsieur de Plessis-Chatillon lamented his first wife's death to his second wife, she replied, quick as a flash:
‘Let me assure you, Monsieur, no one regrets that tragedy more than I.'

When an ageing admirer humbly admitted to the Duchesse de la Vallière that he had long loved her without having the courage to declare himself, the equally decrepit libertine laughed out loud.
‘My God, why did you not tell me?'
she mocked.
‘You could have had me like all the others.'

Madame du Deffand was the hardest and funniest of them all. Once she was invited to supper at the home of Madame de Marchais. Madame du Deffand replied that she would need to spend time with her lover of nearly fifty years, Monsieur de Pont de Veyle, who was very ill. She agreed, however, to try to stop by for a moment before going to her friend's sickbed. Madame du Deffand arrived promptly for the party at nine o'clock. To everyone's surprise, she announced gaily:
‘I've come to have supper with you all
.' Of course, the assembly asked for news of her lover.
‘Oh
,' said Madame du Deffand, airily,
‘he died. If he hadn't, I wouldn't be here
.'

These anecdotes are all well-documented, for Madame du Deffand's gatherings and guests regularly featured in a select newsletter sent to Enlightened monarchs around
Europe, including Frederick of Prussia, Catherine the Great in Russia and Gustav III in Sweden, all of whom hungered for news of Paris, the capital of the world. Imagine the grateful guest storing mental notes and arriving home to record the
bons mots
in the pale light of dawn.

One of the great pleasures of salon life lay in promoting your friends and feuding with your enemies. Madame du Deffand and Voltaire shared a particular loathing for the fashionable philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau claimed that man was better off in a state of nature than in sinful human society. Madame du Deffand hated this concept: her entire life had been devoted to getting as far away from nature as possible. Voltaire was outraged by the idea, which he saw as turning back the clock on human progress.

On receiving Rousseau's
Discourse on Inequality
in 1755, Voltaire wrote to the author.

I have received your book against the human race. I thank you for it. No one has ever employed so much intellect in the attempt to prove us beasts. A desire seizes us to walk on all four paws when we read your work. Nevertheless, as it is more than sixty years since I lost the habit, I feel, unfortunately, that it is impossible for me to resume it
.

There was another thing about Rousseau. He, along with other important intellectuals like Diderot, was promoting an essentially bourgeois ideal of women's behavior. These philosophers wanted women to be stoic mothers, moral guides and patient, silent, faithful supporters of their men. It was the intellectual equivalent of the artistic gulf between the frivolous aristocratic
Boucher and dour bourgeois Chardin. As vigorously as they advocated the rights and liberties of men, they simultaneously endorsed stricter limitations on women. Madame du Deffand's rigorous adherence to the aristocratic model was, in its way, a defence of the existing social order that guaranteed her own freedoms.

A few years ago, French intellectual Mona Ozouf explained this paradox, arguing that the
ancien régime
was good for women:
In a monarchical society, every man's passions are exerted in defending his privileges, holding and marking his place, which opens a wide field of action for women's savoir-faire, the sureness of their psychological sense, the fertility of their imagination … It is therefore not surprising that they reigned in France
.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was well aware of the importance of Madame du Deffand, so much so that he tried to explain away their lack of social connection.

I at first began by being very interested in Madame du Deffand, the loss of whose sight made her an object of pity in mine, but her way of life, so unlike mine that one of us rose almost as the other retired, her unlimited passion for the trivialities of the
‘bel esprit',
the importance she attached, good or bad, to the least scribblings which appeared, the despotism and passion of her judgements, her exaggerated infatuation with things or hatred of them which caused her to speak of everything convulsively with unbelievable prejudice, her invincible stubbornness, the unreasoning enthusiasm into which she was thrown by the obstinacy of her passionate opinions; all that soon discouraged me from giving her the attention I had wished
.

He concludes on a note of high vanity.
I neglected her and she noticed it. That was enough to put her into a rage and
although I sense how much a woman of her character was to be feared, I preferred to expose myself to the scourge of her hatred than that of her friendship
.

No one was fooled – whatever illusions he may have comforted himself with, friendship with Madame du Deffand was never an option for the sexist, dullish Mr Rousseau.

There's the real Paris and there's another Paris, a three-dimensional model formed in my mind's eye after months of looking at maps. This Paris is compact, neat, with a twisting Seine, the spiral swirl of the
arrondissements
, the white bump of Montmartre, and the cartoon pop-ups of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. Now, as I wander down the seemingly never-ending rue Saint-Dominique in the quiet Faubourg Saint-Germain, I'm reminded again that the real Paris always comes up bigger and grander than my imaginings.