True Pleasures (13 page)

Her comments weren't about some frivolous objective of social ease in the new Republic. At that perilous period of transition, Germaine de Staël recognized that a society's manners were an indicator of the health of the entire body politic.
Social conventions are the image of moral life
, she wrote,
presupposing it in any circumstances which do not give a chance of proving it: they keep men in the habit of respecting each other's options. If a state's leaders damage or despise these conventions, they themselves will no longer be able to inspire this respect, the elements of which they themselves have destroyed
.

Now, at the extreme historical end of Romanticism, we only have to watch reality television at night to recognize that today even reason is regarded with suspicion, morally
overthrown in favor of fleeting emotions and basic instincts. Sense has been dumped for sensibility.

Henry James and Edith Wharton were fascinated by these themes. Each of them contrasted American ‘naturalness' with European sophistication and worldliness. The curious thing is that, in their literature, both Henry James and Edith Wharton tended to deliver their verdict in favor of American innocence: my favorite Jamesian heroine is Isabel Archer, an American innocent most cruelly duped by corrupted Continental (or continentalized) sophisticates. But in life, good for them, Henry and Edith ran from barbarous America. They chose Europe and civilization; they chose sophisticated, worldly,
mannered
societies.

The Romantics forgot one thing: the city is vital because it is where
civilization
occurs. Critics talk about cities being cold, abstract, anonymous places. But it's a matter of judgement whether this is a prelude to vice or a blessed advantage. My mother couldn't wait to leave her poking and prying country town for the freedom of the city. She was suffocating in the wide open spaces: only on the crowded sidewalk could she breathe. Madame du Deffand felt the same. She was often unhappy in Paris but that wasn't the point. Only in Paris could she exercise her formidable powers – could she be herself, or more specifically, could she create herself. For Madame du Deffand, Paris meant society and civilization and personal freedom.
You need Paris
, said Voltaire helpfully to his friend.

The single advantage of the country, as far as Madame du Deffand was concerned, was that there you expected to be miserable:
In the provinces it is duller, but in Paris it is more unbearable. Here
[the provinces]
one expects nothing, one
has no pretensions, no desires and one is consequently without disgust or disappointment
.

I myself have nothing against nature. In its place. I agree that it's important, not least for humanity's own survival, and we should look after it. Aesthetically I take the eighteenth-century view: there's nothing wrong with a broad and wild vista that a whole lot of pruning, culling and an exquisite little temple pavilion couldn't rectify. I like cut flowers and good coffee and
Vanity Fair
magazine and Mozart and Duke Ellington and long, elegant shoes. I don't care for pets or camping. And I hope I shall not be maligned for this. Frankly, I think it's good news for the wilderness if some of us don't feel an urgent need to be in it and stomp all over it.

I think cities are where the best things happen. The city, manners, forms, society, the community – that's the trajectory I draw. You won't get the civic virtues anywhere else. You won't get the lurches towards freedom anywhere else.

I once read somewhere that etiquette is an extension of ethics. I believe this to be true. Manners impose a superficial conformity, but more importantly, they provide a framework within which we can all do pretty much what we want. Become who we want to be. Like Madame du Deffand, who used a framework of manners and society to lead a life of utmost personal and intellectual freedom.

Like me, in this city, in this little restaurant, alone and at peace, embraced by the distant courtesies.

Young women who write seldom have much sense of moderation (neither have old women, for that matter).

Colette

I
was one of those children who could always be found in the fork of a tree with a book. Books were insurance for me, a way of protecting myself against unpleasant realities. A dog-eared favorite would be discreetly propped up on my lap at meal times; my head rising for a bite of lamb chop and mashed potato and turning down again for another chapter. Novels came with me in the car to Mass on Sundays, to family reunions, to beach-side picnics. As family and friends set up post-lunch cricket, I'd retreat quietly to the car. ‘It's so stuffy in there!' my mother would protest, but I was cooling myself in the fresher airs of fiction.

Reading I loved, but re-reading offered the deeper pleasure. By the time I was fourteen, and still almost
unnaturally innocent of life matters, my literary heroines were also soul mates. Isabel Archer, Dorothea Brooke, Lily Bart, Elizabeth Bennett, these were my ardent and misguided friends whose quest for a first-class life – a life of art, beauty, knowledge and true love – led them into peril. I would sob and toss at the punishments meted out to them for their high aspirations. And I, the bookish daughter of a Sydney suburban butcher, would carefully draw the lessons, cautioning herself never to be led astray by a sly American fortune hunter in Northern Italy or a reclusive pedant in provincial England or the dangerous glitter of New York society.

At school, however, the nuns had a powerful narrative of their own. Theirs was the story of the priceless value of virginity, and what a woman should be ready to do to defend it. Sister Paula would lovingly recite the gory details surrounding the murder of Saint Maria Goretti, a young virgin who told her potential rapist to go ahead and stab her to death rather than compel her to the sin of unmarried sexual intercourse. ‘And yet, she forgave him on her deathbed,' she'd conclude reverently.

I grew to loathe Maria Goretti and all she represented.
Why didn't she choose to live?
I wondered.
Why didn't she submit? (It was only sex after all, and how bad can it be?) Why didn't she save her life instead of giving in to death?
Martyrs no longer appealed to me, nor angels, nor victims. I wanted women who had the courage to live, not die.

So then I shed not my innocence, for I remained woefully inexperienced, but my willingness to remain so. I wanted to banish the burden of innocence; I didn't like my perilous virgin vulnerability. Of course, in those days my answer to this need wasn't to go in search of
worldly experience: I merely changed my reading habits. And I gradually uncovered a new breed of literary women – women who weren't tossed around by life, but grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and shook it hard. Heroines like Albertine in Nancy Mitford's
The Blessing
, or Colette's knowing courtesans in
Gigi
and
Chéri
, or even Anita Loos's gold-digger Lorelei Lee of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, represented a new kind of femininity to me. These were vivid, wilful, forceful creatures. They wore their worldliness as a badge of honor. I still loved Dorothea Brooke and Isabel Archer, of course, but I grew rather impatient with their moral ditherings. My role models became the women who survived and prospered.

Now I pause on the river bank in my dark coat and bright lipstick and breathe the moist chilled air rising from the green Seine. The breeze rustles the dark leafy trees and cools the stones of the buildings. It lifts the coat-tails of walkers as they cross the Pont des Arts to the Left Bank.

The Left Bank, the
quartier Latin
, makes sense to me. For centuries this was the heartland of Parisian Catholicism, the home of the city's convents and monasteries, churches and spires, saints and mystics. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as inexorably as experience follows innocence, the Left Bank transformed, becoming home to a new breed of Parisians – the taboo-busting artists and drug-taking bohemians, the alcoholic expatriates and the showy lesbians, the hot jazz babies and the cool intellectuals. On the Left Bank, sinfulness mingles with the sacred, and overwhelms it.

I wind down rue de Seine, stand with my back to a graffiti-covered cream wall and look across the narrow
road to number 31. Above the blue courtyard door there's a little plaque.
George Sand (1804 – 1876)
, it announces,
lived in this house in 1831
. As I hesitate on the narrow sidewalk elegant people squeeze past me, on their way to the river perhaps, or another art gallery or antique shop. A car pulls up and blocks my view. But even in the hum of modern Paris, it's still not difficult to call up the moment when George Sand, the Baroness Aurore Dupin DuDevant, arrived in Paris.

It is a freezing January day in 1831. At twenty-seven years old Aurore Dupin has abandoned her husband, two small children and the responsibilities of her large country estate, Nohant, in the province of Berry. Impatient in her long skirts and high heels, she hurries through the blue courtyard doors to reunite with her lover, Jules Sandeau. In the nearly ten years since her marriage she has taken several lovers, but none like twenty-year-old Jules, with his angelic curls and pink and white cheeks and frail blond neediness. Later she exults to a friend:
He was there, in my own room, in my arms happy, groaning, crying, laughing, beaten, kissed, bitten. It was a storm of pleasure the like of which we have never experienced before
.

When Aurore next emerges from these courtyard doors she is unrecognizable. She and Jules look more like first-year students than lovers. She sports a long grey riding coat and tie, buttoned-up trousers and little black boots with sturdy iron heels. Her black satin eyes are still striking, but her shining black hair is pulled up under a cap. She is smoking a cigar. His cravat and vest are crooked. Together they roam the streets, attend the theater, dine at cheap restaurants and revel in down-at-the-heel, shabby, creative, bohemian Paris. They mingle with writers and artists, actors and musicians; even the
great Balzac befriends them.
How dear my Paris is to me, how sweet her liberty to live in love, and to be with my Jules who loves me so
, crows Aurore.

Aurore has tasted freedom and she doesn't intend to give it up. What she now requires is an excuse to justify the permanent abandonment of the provinces.
To be an artist!
she thinks,
Yes, I want to be one
. So, just like that, she makes her plans. She will be reborn as George Sand. Her first novel,
Indiana
, about a woman's unhappy marriage and search for true love, will cause a sensation and turn her into an international celebrity. She will become a pin-up girl for Romantic singularity and wilfulness. And she will, of course, live in Paris, the capital of bohemian Romanticism.

As I stand here on rue de Seine, I am struck again by the force that was George Sand. As a young girl she was a convent student, living just a few streets away from here at rue Cardinal Lemoine. Whatever the nuns taught her, George Sand was clearly never convinced by the orthodox lessons. Her personal philosophy was alarming and subversive; whatever was good for her must, by definition, be good for everyone. She summed up this sublime self-centeredness:
I never asked myself why I wanted this or that
, she declared.
The inner me always proudly answered: Because I want it. That said everything
.

Thinking about George Sand and her monstrous, marvelous ego, a memory strikes me. A few months ago I became anguished as I contemplated quitting my job. There was a single moment when, all at once, a whole crowd of fears and anxieties came surging into my mind, like unwelcome partygoers. I couldn't seem to eject them, these ugly concerns about money and security and risk and ageing. Shouting noisily in my head, tossing shallow
insults and dark prophecies, these interlopers drowned out all sensible conversation.

So I found a psychologist near my North Sydney office and went to sit in her room. I briefly told her my situation. ‘I want to quit my job and I'm afraid,' I told her. She questioned me, drawing me out. And what's
this
telling you? she'd say. And what's
this
telling you? She talked very slowly. But it became a weirdly circular conversation.

She:‘What does this
anxiety
tell you?'

Me, cautiously: ‘Well, I guess it's telling me that I am afraid …'

She, very slowly now:‘And what's the
fear
telling you?'

This is getting ridiculous.

Me:‘It's telling me that I'm anxious?'

I soon realized the fear was telling me that I'd rather cope with any number of emotional gatecrashers than spend another minute with this particular psychologist. At the end of our session she told me that if I were to commit to a series of discussions she was really very sure she could help me. Eventually, she implied. I thanked her, paid and quit my job the next day. And the crowd vacated my head as suddenly as it had arrived, leaving air, space and freedom. Once I'd taken charge of my fate, the world seemed a lot simpler.

George Sand never once wavered, never doubted, never reflected negatively upon her own actions. She soon grew tired of little pink and white Jules Sandeau and calmly ended their affair. But he never got over her, and he always despaired at her casual repudiation. As an old man he was heard declaring bitterly:
She is a graveyard. Do you understand? A graveyard
. A succession of lovers would pass through George Sand's life: there was Alfred de Musset, the Byronic dandy; Michel de Bourges, the married socialist
lawyer; Charles Didier; Gustave de Gévaudon; the actor PF Bocage; the writer Mallefille; a disastrous one-night stand with writer Prosper Merimée; and of course, the composer Frédéric Chopin.

But no matter what turbulence she generated in her romantic life, George Sand herself was the calm in the eye of the storm. As the chaos roiled around her, she remained Buddha-like, unnaturally serene. She turned out novels as automatically as other people cook the nightly dinner. She wrote at night, starting at around midnight and finishing about 4 am before retiring. She never struggled to perfect her talents or polish her creations. Of her novel
Leone Leoni
she said:
I wrote this book in a week
[at Nohant]
and hardly read it over before sending it to Paris
. The lonely genius Flaubert once wrote to George Sand:
You don't know what it is to spend an entire day with one's head in one's hands, taxing one's poor brain in search of a word. With you, the flow of ideas is broad, continuous, like a river …
It was perfectly true. George replied:
I simply can't understand your anguish
.