True Pleasures (27 page)

And I too take a great interest in the topic. I realize that it's impossible to
plan
the way you die. But I do have some clear preferences. I would very much prefer
not
to die by animal. This applies particularly to shark or crocodile attack, which seems to me a most humiliating way to go. Humanity has spent an awfully long time overcoming nature, and I feel I would be letting the team down were I to slide down the evolutionary pole to the bottom of the food chain, being munched alongside plankton and seaweed. Rachel reckons she doesn't mind how she dies as long as it's not of lung cancer. Her reasoning is that if she tells her family and friends she has lung cancer they will secretly think it serves her right (or, more specifically,
serves her right stupid bitch!
) for smoking. This would be more than she could bear. On her death bed Rachel wants people to be nice to her – and mean it.

Some people prefer a quick death. My present preference is for a slow one, with time for tender goodbyes and little speeches and farewell parties, and, well, last words, and final says on the matter. Whatever the matter might be.

So here I am standing at Place de la Concorde. As usual I have the best intentions of strolling around and looking at the gorgeous, gilded sculptures and flowing fountains. As usual I find myself paralyzed at the thought of moving anywhere off this bit of footpath for fear of the traffic that swirls in a chaotic frenzy. So I shall just swivel and gaze and think.

Even with the traffic, this is still one of the most beautiful and famous locations in Paris. Place de la Concorde means harmony and amity and peace. Ceremonial festivities are still held here. But this is also the killing field of Paris; this place is stained with blood.

During the Revolutionary Terror, from 1793 to July 1794, no less than 1, 119 people were executed here. But you wouldn't know it. There are plaques everywhere in Paris commemorating all kinds of people and events. But there is no plaque here to remind us of the shaved heads and tied hands, the ugly open tumbrel, the jeering crowds, the smell of stale blood, the sweat and fear on the platform. Perhaps it was just too horrible.

In those dark days, it was fashionable to laugh at the guillotine. People were careful with their final words. On approaching her death, Manon Roland, one of the republican salonnières, cried out magnificently:
‘Sweet Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!'
In a different style, the revolutionary Danton quipped roguishly to the executioner:
‘Show my head to the people!
–
it is worth the trouble.'

But not everyone was like that.

On 15 October 1793, Queen Marie Antoinette was brought here to die. She had spent her final days in solitary confinement in the Conciergerie prison on the Ile de la Cité. If you have been to the Conciergerie you'll know just how surprisingly awful it is. It makes you shiver. It makes the hair stand up on your neck. And it's not just the cold. Even after two hundred years, the pale stones reek of horror.

Just after 11 am the executioner arrived at the Queen's little cell. He tied her hands behind her back and hacked off her hair. She climbed awkwardly into the open tumbrel. The wooden benches were hard beneath her thin
white gown. The cart rumbled over rough cobblestones down the length of rue Saint-Honoré. At rue Royale it turned left to reach the open Place. The revolutionary artist Jacques-Louis David was living in rue Saint-Honoré and saw the Queen pass by. He quickly sketched what he saw: an ugly, shrunken and devastated woman.

After she died, the Queen's surviving friends were haunted by thoughts of the long, lonely hour she endured in the cart. What was she thinking as she confronted the taunts and stares of her former subjects? As she was carted like cattle to her death?

Along the route the Queen glimpsed reminders of other days. She passed the rue Royale apartment she had kept for her private visits to Paris. Maybe she remembered the fun of those jaunts to masked balls and the opera, the company of friends, the thrill of escaping court duties.

As she turned into this Place, she may have recalled her very first public event in Paris after she married the heir to the throne and became
Dauphine
. It took place in May 1770 when this was known as Place Louis XV. Nearly 300,000 had turned out to greet the newlyweds, but the event was badly managed and 132 people died in the crush. Marie Antoinette's second visit to Paris was more successful. The crowd cheered the young couple and the Duc de Brissac told the young
Dauphine
that all of Paris had fallen in love with her. Marie Antoinette wrote about the event to her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, remarking complacently how little seemed required of her in order to please the crowd. Her mother wrote back and sharply told her daughter not to take anything for granted. Mother, it turned out, knew best.

But perhaps Marie Antoinette had other, more somber recollections in mind. After all, she had changed a lot over
the past few years. From a spoiled, haughty creature she had transformed into a strong and loyal woman. She stood by her husband, refusing to leave the country without him. She had comforted him and cared for their children with a steadfastness that few who knew her thought possible. But her husband, the King, was now dead, guillotined in January. She had been humiliated during a show trial when she had been accused of all kinds of crimes, including incest with her own son. The little boy had been removed from her care. She had heard him swear and curse as the guards had taught him, and sing revolutionary songs in the courtyard.

Whatever her private thoughts, Marie Antoinette retained her aristocratic
hauteur
to the end. She held her head high. As she crossed to the guillotine she inadvertently stepped on her executioner's foot.
‘Pardon, Monsieur,'
she said, with Hapsburg precision,
‘I did not do it on purpose
.' It may have been a statement about her whole foolish, tragic life.

Of course, the death of a queen lends itself to drama. And I have a literary turn of mind. I am all too inclined to elevate small incidents into grand gestures, to read Shakespearean significance into events which are no more than the sheer bump and accident of life.

Which brings me to a very different death. Two months after the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette, Louis XV's mistress, Jeanne du Barry, followed the same route from the Conciergerie to this Place. She too had begun her career here. She was a pretty twenty-year-old mingling in the crowd on the day they unveiled Louis XV's statue in 1763. It was, by coincidence, the day that Madame de Pompadour made her last public appearance. The beautiful blonde successor to Madame de Pompadour was spotted by Jean
du Barry, cardsharp, impresario, dealer and pimp. He would marry Jeanne, introduce her to the top men in Paris, and eventually take her to Versailles to captivate Louis XV himself.

But, on the way to her death, the sunny, racy past must have seemed an eternity away to Madame du Barry. It was a freezing December afternoon. Snow was falling and the light was dim. Most of the crowd had given up and gone home. But the bloodthirsty and the curious stayed to gawk at the famous beauty who had captivated the former King. What they saw was a plump, frightened fifty-one-year-old woman. Even this hardy crew was shocked and disturbed by her frantic moans and sobs. An anxious murmur started up.

Right up until the very last moment, Madame du Barry couldn't believe this could happen to her. She had loved life, and life had been rich and full of glories undreamt of for a little Parisian girl. She couldn't believe it would end like this, why should it? Was she not simply one of the people? Until the last moment, she begged and bribed and pleaded.
‘I'll show you where my jewels are, there's more to tell, wait,'
she said. The night before her execution she ate an enormous meal, as if she couldn't get her fill of life's sustenance. The next day when they came to get her she was amazed.
‘This can't be happening, it's a mistake, wait, please.'
As they placed her in the tumbrel she stumbled and wept. She was a woman who loved life and wanted to keep on living, no matter how briefly. As they rumbled over the cobblestones she moaned and begged. As they pulled her onto the platform she struggled and pleaded and wriggled. As they lay her down, positioning her head in the crevice of the
guillotine, she said – and these were her last words:
‘Wait, Monsieur, I beg you
…
just a minute more!'

I don't take a moral view about how a life should be lived or ended. If anything, I take an aesthetic view. I realize it's impossible to control the circumstances of death. But a good death surely lends poetry to a life. Marie Antoinette's death was moving because she was a woman who transcended herself at the end. Madame du Barry's death was touching because she didn't.

I turn and stroll back down the rue de Rivoli. At the Galignani bookshop I stop and idly turn to a table of French-language paperbacks on sale. A title catches my eye:
Amoureuses du Grand Siècle
(Gallant Women of the Great [17th] Century). Mmm, interesting. I turn to the table of contents. Here is Ninon de Lanclos. Here is Madame de Lafayette. And here is the woman whose ultimate fate has eluded me, Hortense Mancini, la duchesse Mazarin.

I flip to the relevant chapter, and then straight to the last page. It says:
He
[her husband]
deposited her coffin next to that of her uncle Mazarin in the funeral monument in the College of Four Nations founded by the Cardinal, today our Institut
[de France]. This is nothing new. I knew this. But I went to see, and the body's just not there.

I read on:
One would like to imagine the ghost of the joyous Hortense presiding over the debates of our Académiciens
. Yes, that's right, I think. One
would
have liked to imagine the ghost of Hortense at the Institut. But she wasn't there.

And then, with leaping heart:
But in 1793 her remains were thrown into the Seine by the sans-culottes
[revolutionaries].

I am transfixed, rooted to the spot, electrified by this bulletin. So
that's
what happened to Hortense. I can hardly breathe.

It happened in the exact same year that Marie Antoinette and Madame du Barry died. At the height of the Terror. Just over the river the rabble must have somehow stormed the Institut and extracted the – the what? coffin or bones? – from the tomb and thrown them into the Seine. (I wonder why they didn't do the same to the remains of Cardinal Mazarin?) And then the bones must have just flowed down through the city like so much debris. Perhaps the remains of Hortense mingled with the blood of those who died on the guillotine. Strange to think that Hortense Mancini played a part in French history – nearly one hundred years after her death.

I look around, wishing there were someone here to tell. All of a sudden I feel very emotional. I feel as if I too am part of this flow, this river of life and death, this beauty and this futility, these women.

If history were an emotion, perhaps this would be the feeling.

Père Lachaise is not what I expected. I imagined it would be quiet and peaceful. But it certainly doesn't feel dead. In fact, it's alarmingly alive. Everywhere I look the head-stones have cracked and the rubble is piled up and green growing shoots poke through the dirt. It's as if a slow-moving earthquake were underway. In fact, it's rather as if the dead themselves were restless, shifting and squirming under the earth, gradually easing their way to the surface. A few staff members stand around with shovels. They have
a helpless expression, as if overwhelmed by the struggle to keep the buried in their rightful place.

And looking at the list of inhabitants here, I can see why. These were larger-than-life figures – larger than death too. Here's the taboo-breaking Colette lying under a short square slab, with fresh flowers on her grave. Here's Edith Piaf, the heartbreaking and heartbroken singer. Maria Callas, who died of sorrow when Ari Onassis married the widow Kennedy. The great actresses Simone Signoret and Sarah Bernhardt. Cléo de Mérode, the nineteenth-century
cocotte
who befriended the young Colette.
Gloria in excelsis Cléo!
her lovers would sing appreciatively. Marie Laurencin the painter: Coco Chanel once commissioned and then rejected a portrait by Laurencin; the artist portrayed Chanel as soft, sweet and dreamy – quite unlike the woman herself. Marie d'Agoult who ran off with Franz Liszt. Dancing Isadora Duncan who died of a scarf. All these women are buried here. Even so, they don't seem quite dead yet.