True Pleasures (19 page)

Baker was another of those women who adopted Paris because Paris welcomed her. In America she was abused, reviled and discriminated against. In Paris she was worshipped as a stage goddess, sex symbol and a genuine artist.
I have two loves
, sang Josephine Baker,
my country and Paris!
They couldn't have been more different, yet it's nice to
think that Gertrude Stein also said,
America is my country and Paris is my home town
.

At the end of Avenue Montaigne is Pont de l'Alma, underneath which the English Princess Diana met her death. Rachel and I disagree about Diana. Rachel thinks she was a shallow publicity-seeking Sloane Ranger. I loved her, and still do. I cried when she died.

Sometimes I think of Princess Diana's last night on earth, and quite frankly, who could have had a better one? She was on holiday, having cruised around the Mediterranean on a beautiful yacht. She had just been taken to dinner at the Hôtel Ritz by a fabulously wealthy and attractive man who adored her. He had given her an enormous diamond ring as a gift. There must be many worse ways to go.

I'm at it again. I shouldn't be doing this; I know it's a weakness. But I submit to this guilty pleasure each time I come to Paris. Why? It's not as if I haven't been taught a few lessons. I have a drawer full of evidence at home in Sydney that reminds me:
Lucinda, you can't wear scarves the way French women do
. But here I am in a boutique in Place des Vosges and the old romance is reasserting itself. Oh, but this is Paris, where being a woman is special. Oh, and these scarves are works of art, richly textured and beautifully made. They are heirlooms, treasures.

The elegantly elongated saleswoman gently selects a scarf and brings it close to me. It's among the most daring; pale green silk backing an oblong of red velvet, brocade and silk. It's dramatic, almost heraldic. She carefully ties it for me, draping it across my body with strong, thin fingers.

‘Comme c'est chic,' she says solemnly, standing back to appraise her handiwork. I can't help it, I preen a little.

As I hurry along the colonnades I can feel the soft weight of the scarf in its elegant shopping bag, and I already foresee its double future. In one version, I too possess that easy French elegance. I take the scarf out of the drawer and drape it across my shoulders. Even in my regulation black suit, I am lifted, lightened and irradiated. In the other future, I fling and heave, I crush and crinkle, and what looks so silken and sinuous when tied upon me by a Parisienne merely looks lumpen when adjusted by me. So it appears destined to return, carefully folded, to my drawer, where it will nestle against the other scarves I have proudly brought home from Paris. Now I see myself, standing in front of the mirror, a soulless creature in a black suit, devoid of heraldic glamor.

I don't really understand how they do it, but French women still manage to convey the impression that they've got some indefinable ‘it' factor.

Consider Colette. Colette oozed a particularly French brand of feminine power. Now it needs to be understood: Colette had never been stylish. She was far too bohemian. She loved food too much to stay slim, so she got fat. She refused to wear shoes and wore sturdy leather sandals. She permed her hair so hard it stuck out from her head in a purple fizz. At one stage, mistaking her interest for expertise, Colette opened a beauty shop with the help of some rich supporters. As proprietor, Colette insisted that all her clients adopt her own distinctive look. Some of Paris's most famous blonde beauties emerged from Colette's salon aged immeasurably with rings of dark kohl around their eyes and fiercely blackened eyebrows. The business folded soon after.

But none of this mattered. Colette was the essential woman; she was the ultra-femme. Everyone who met her knew the legendary story of the lithe, gamine Colette whose husband, Willy, locked her in a room and urged her to write the saucy
Claudine
stories. Or the time she caused a riot by kissing her female lover on stage. And everyone had read the scandalous, captivating stories: about love between an old courtesan and a gigolo, opium dens and faked orgasms, strange
ménages à trois
and sad, cross-dressing lesbians.

When Colette was asked for guidance by aspiring writers, she always gave the same advice:
Look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you
. What Colette liked most was to look at women, herself included. She was a tireless and pitiless observer of the process – the business, even – of being a woman. And her observations make inspiring and sometimes excruciating reading. In
Chéri
one retired courtesan murmurs to another:‘
Heavens, how good you smell. Have you noticed that as the skin gets less firm the scent sinks in better and lasts much longer? It's really very nice.'
Ouch.

Nancy Mitford greatly admired Colette. So when she was asked to translate Colette's
Chéri
for the stage, it gave her the rare opportunity to spend one hour with the great writer, who was by then a frail seventy-nine-year-old. I imagine Nancy Mitford standing in the quadrangle of the Palais Royal, smoothing down the padded skirts of her Dior day dress. She fully expects to be scrutinized by those wide, slanting, ever-observant eyes. And, of course, she wants to please Colette's eyes, to receive her feminine stamp of approval. So Nancy Mitford mounts the wooden steps, perhaps carrying her copy of
Chéri
for the great writer to sign.

Colette receives Nancy Mitford from her high divan bed pushed up against the window in the Palais Royal, in what Colette called
the heart, the very heart, of Paris
. The walls are covered in dark red silk. The shelves of the room are lined with books and busts and her collection of brightly colored glass paperweights. There's a bunch of flowers sent by an admirer. The bed is red, and a fur blanket covers Colette's arthritic and useless legs. Under the blanket, her toenails are painted scarlet. A trolley carries her work-bench with its blue lamp and pages of sky-blue paper to write on, a phone, pens, bowls of colored sweets.

Colette herself – even old, fat and infirm – is a proud lioness, with her mane of hair, her eyes rimmed with kohl, her lips stained red. And as always, she wears a patterned scarf around her neck. It's not that she is more stylish or more beautiful or more feminine than Nancy Mitford, it's that over the course of her life, she has accumulated her femininity, analyzed and endorsed it, embraced it.

The two women spend an hour together. How I wish I knew what they said to each other, the sensual bohemian and the witty aristocrat. All we know of their conversation is derived from a few brief lines that Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh after her meeting with Colette. Of the translation work, Nancy said little, and in the end nothing came of it. But she was overwhelmed by the privilege of meeting
Colette whom I admire more than anybody – any woman at least
. And possibly she was intimidated, a little daunted by the great dame:
I felt very shy
, she recalled. Then she added these revealing, tell-tale words:
But she admired my clothes so that was nice
. Such was the extraordinary authority of Colette, and the mystical power of the French woman.

Colette was not only charming; she understood the uses of charm. Her flattery similarly disarmed American author Anita Loos. In 1951 Loos visited Colette to talk about the stage adaptation of
Gigi
. Colette met Anita in Le Grand Véfour: Anita had prepared a little speech in tribute to the great author. She was just warming up when Colette brushed her comments aside with her hand.
Where had Anita found those adorable shoes?
Anita, of course, raced home to note down the compliment.

Thinking on these things, on the pitfalls of being in Paris and trying to wear clothes in the French manner, my confidence plummets. I privately vow not to wear my scarf in Paris, but wait until I get home to Sydney.

Then another thought: perhaps it's wisest if non-French women don't wear scarves at all. One, after all, killed American Isadora Duncan. After years of living in Paris, one day the avant-garde dancer hopped into her sportscar on the Riviera, wound a long chiffon scarf around her neck and cried,
I go to my glory!
as she sped off. Then the scarf caught in the car wheel and she strangled herself.

Women run to extremes; they are either better or worse than men.

La Bruyère

I
T'S AN OVERCAST DAY
as I stroll along rue de Castiglione towards Place Vendôme in the 1st
arrondissement
. Here, say all the guidebooks, I will confront one of the masterpieces of Paris. And last time I saw Place Vendôme I adopted the official line: it was stunning, beautiful,
god, of course!
a masterpiece. Dazzled by Paris, in awe of its grand monuments, it never occurred to me that any alternative opinion was possible.

Rachel changed all that over breakfast this morning. Face obscured behind the
International Herald Tribune
, coffee cup moving expertly from table to mouth, she scanned the latest United States political news while I looked at notes and guidebooks and planned my day
which included, I added aloud, a visit to Place Vendôme and the Hôtel Ritz. As she turned the page and re-crossed her legs I suddenly heard Rachel's voice above the crackle, ‘Always thought Place Vendôme was ugly.' She raised her right hand, short dark nails clashing dramatically with her Cartier tank ring, a plain gold band crested by a square golden citrine. ‘That's why I bought
this
in Cartier's Left Bank store instead.' Still engrossed in American politics, she doesn't notice my astonishment at her casual heresy.

Now, as I turn from rue de Castiglione into Place Vendôme, I experience this place as if for the first time. The first thing I notice is the temperature. It starts to drop. Everything seems cold – from the blue-grey buildings set in a massive octagon, to the black unyielding asphalt which covers the huge central square. The sky itself seems lower here, a watery grey sponge pressing the slate rooftops. Squeezed up through the middle of Place Vendôme is the greenish, rusty Vendôme column: now I see that this long thin spire lacks the necessary scale and power to dominate the space.

Place Vendôme is where cold hard cash meets the beautiful things that money can buy. JP Morgan and the Banque National de Paris nestle against Cartier, Bulgari, Boucheron, Armani and Chanel. It's all very impressive, as it should be, for this square was built to impress. Here is the
Roi Soleil
's absolute authority embodied in architecture: magnificent, orderly and harmonious. Instead of whole buildings, the architect simply designed uniform facades, giving Place Vendôme the atmosphere of a stage-set, a theater for the display of wealth and power. From an aerial view it would be exactly the same shape as a square-cut diamond – and on the ground it has the same bright cold hardness.

There are no cafés here, no garden benches, no perches to prop against and no little nooks from which to stare or daydream. So I do what all the tourists do: I crawl around the edge of Place Vendôme, looking in shop windows. I walk past the Gianmaria Buccellatti jewels and Giorgio Armani suits and Mikimoto pearls and Patek Philippe watches. Like everyone else I am reduced to making clownish ooh-aah faces as I press my face against the glass windows. A perfect suit, a string of matchless pearls, ooh, aah. My face blanches in the cold bluish reflection of diamonds.

Now I arrive at number 12, opposite the Ritz, where Chaumet jewelers displays a single magnificent necklace of rubies, pearls and diamonds. The collar rests insolently upon its velvet bed. On my reflected face I see conflicting emotions. There's admiration and awe, certainly. There's also uneasiness at the blatant excess of the gesture.

Next to the shop is an elaborate entrance to the apartments above. In October 1849 Europe's most adored Romantic composer, Frédéric Chopin, lay dying up there, in the exquisite gold and white salon of a financier's borrowed apartment. At only thirty-nine years old, he was dying, some said, of a broken heart, and all due to the woman who had been his companion for ten years, who had dumped him two years earlier by what his friend, the artist Eugène Delacroix, called
an inhuman letter
. That woman was, of course, George Sand.

A bevy of Poles and artists and society ladies walked through these heavy iron doors and climbed these curved stairs to pay homage to Chopin. An opera singer sang for him. Eugène Delacroix gently talked to him. Fashionable women flocked for the privilege and social cachet of sobbing quietly at their idol's side. Chopin, conscious and
unconscious by turns, lay lightly on his death-bed. He moaned and prayed and slept and whispered. The society ladies' sobs turned to recriminations when Chopin murmured, weakly,
She said to me that I would die in no arms but hers
… before expiring. His love affair with George Sand had been the major relationship of Chopin's life.