True Pleasures (4 page)

As I sit here with my notebook and a list of magical addresses, it now seems hard to believe that in all those previous visits to Paris it never once occurred to me to track down the haunts of my favorite women writers. Ellen once pointed out Colette's home in the Palais Royal, but I felt no particular surge of connection or recognition. I guess at that stage I had no idea what the interior of the building looked like: there was nothing in her remark for my imagination to take hold of. (Today, of course, I can vividly imagine the close, cozy room with its red walls and mirrors and colorful glass paperweights – and the purple-maned lioness lying on her divan.)

Paris is one of those cities you could unpeel for a lifetime and still not succeed in uncovering all its variety, its multiple personalities. There's seventeenth-century Paris, revolutionary Paris, Bonaparte's Paris, existentialist Paris,
avant-garde
Paris. The real Paris, modern Paris, with its
clochards
and dog poo and ethnic vibe and snobbery and local corruption, lives in complex partnership with the Paris of yesterday, the Paris of many yesterdays. And the Paris of many imaginations, for Paris is an idea as much as a place.

In the early nineteenth century, when George Sand arrived in Paris from the provinces, she moved several times
until she found just the location she had in mind. For she, too, was searching to realize a personal idea of Paris.

I … was soon settled on Quai Saint-Michel in one of the garrets of the big house on the corner of the block, at the end of the bridge, opposite the Morgue. There I had three small, very clean rooms leading to a balcony from which I had an extensive view of the Seine, and where I could contemplate, face to face, the gigantic monuments of Notre-Dame, Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie, Sainte-Chapelle, and others. I had sky, water, air, swallows, rooftop greenery; I did not feel too much part of modern Paris, which would not have suited my taste nor my resources, but more so in the picturesque and poetic Paris of Victor Hugo, the Paris of the past
.

George Sand sought the Paris that corresponded to her emotional state and her artistic aspirations. In her little Gothic attic she found the perfect place to invent herself as a Romantic heroine and to explore Paris, liberty and love. And Paris made space for George Sand, adjusting to accommodate her. It eddied and swirled, widened its flow. It gave her room to change.

The Paris of my imagination is a site of pleasure and history and beauty. It's a place to recharge myself as a woman. Each time I come back here it's like greeting an older woman friend, one who is rather grand and imperious – a great dame, in fact – who likes me to look my best, to have my wittiest conversation to hand and to be on my toes all the time.

I finish my morning coffee and gaze back across to Notre-Dame, the greatest dame of all. But her fixity, her grand monolithic bulk, doesn't enchant me. It's the flesh and blood women who fascinate: women in flux, in progress, in self-discovery, in the act of creation.

As life is an art in France, so woman is an artist.

Edith Wharton

E
VEN IN PARIS
, one of the world's most beautiful cities, Place des Vosges in the 4th
arrondissement
is
so
beautiful I want to laugh out loud. I step off teeming rue Saint-Antoine into l'Hôtel de Sully, linger at the overflowing bookshop, dogleg through the courtyard, and,
voilà!
here I am. It's late on a spring morning a few days after my arrival, and the Place presents itself to me like a gift.

It's not that Place des Vosges is either grand or intimidating. In fact, with its rose and cream bricks, its shady arcades, its quadrangled garden, Place des Vosges is built on a decidedly human scale. I come from Sydney, a new
place, where old buildings are routinely condemned as dysfunctional. Yet this piece of urban design, at nearly four hundred years old, works beautifully. Thirty-six houses stand tall, slim and solid around the square. The galleries and arcades below provide shelter for strolling and space for art galleries and boutiques. There's a Michelin three-star restaurant at one end of the Place and a luxury hotel at the other. On the garden benches are the usual lovers, the mothers gently rocking their prams, the old men with their newspapers. A clutch of tourists look around with pleased expressions, as if the square had been designed exactly to their careful specifications. It's that kind of place.

I thread my way across to a corner café, Ma Bourgogne, where I order a glass of soft red wine, and settle down to watch and to daydream. I am gazing at the present, but I am thinking about the past. Here, I think,
here
is where it all began.

When foreigners want to understand the French, they generally head to Versailles. That's because at Versailles, it is said, Louis XIV, the Sun King himself, invented French culture. He commenced renovations on a family hunting lodge in 1661, and he progressively moved the court there from Paris from about 1674. Louis XIV made Versailles a gilded cage for his captive aristocrats. He kept the ruling class entirely occupied with pleasure and ceremony: he made his courtiers so busy that they had neither time nor inclination to plot against him. The Sun King established an elaborate social code, which, through war and conquest, he exported to the rest of Europe. But Louis XIV didn't invent French culture; he just borrowed it.

Over here on my left is number 20 Place des Vosges. This is where a bride arrived from Italy to stay in the
house of her father-in-law, sometime around 1590. Her name was Catherine de Vivonne, the new Marquise de Rambouillet. From courtly Italy with its chivalrous traditions she had landed in rough-hewn France. Place des Vosges, then known as Place Royale, was still under construction. Its primary use was as a rowdy military parade ground. Residents awoke at dawn to the metal clashes of duellists fighting for sport or honor. Life in Paris was altogether medieval and martial.
Worst of all
, thought the young bride,
the houses!
Grand homes were designed like feudal hunting lodges, with drafty baronial spaces and blood-red walls.

So la Marquise commissioned a house, a perfect house. Her blue, white and gold reception room was intimate, scaled down, with little alcoves to encourage private exchanges. La Marquise, in her lilting Italian accent, called the reception space her
salone
, and it became, of course, the first salon. The guest list was pruned to privilege talent, beauty, honor and wit: only the greatest artists and writers were invited; the bravest soldiers; the most beautiful, pious women. Wives and husbands were not automatically included – no free riders, thanks – and this no doubt contributed a flirtatious element to the conversation. For the first time, women became socially central. Their role was to guide, to instruct, to inspire, to elevate – the most refined were known as
les précieuses
. Men aspired to become
honnêtes hommes
– honorable, cultivated, natural and, most important of all, socially graceful. At the core of this little society was a new idea – the art of living itself,
savoir vivre
.

Under one roof, La Marquise de Rambouillet brought together all the elements that we associate with Paris today: the elevation to art of food, conversation, clothes
and love. The historian Vincent Cronin said of Place Royale:
This square can be said to mark the change from the rough masculine society of Henri IV to the witty society revolving around certain gifted or beautiful women which still prevails today
.

Just over on the other side of the square at number 1 is the birthplace of la Marquise de Rambouillet's most famous guest, Madame de Sévigné. Madame de Sévigné sparkled. She was funny, spirited and worldly. Later she lived around the corner in what is now Musée Carnavalet, appropriately the museum of Paris history. Her letters embody the French idea of
esprit
– wit, intellect and spirit combined.

Time for another wine, and now I look directly across the square to where it exits to rue du Pas-de-la-Mule. Just around the corner lived the most influential courtesan of the seventeenth century. She used to ride into this square on a little sedan-chair carried by her menservants. Her name was Ninon de Lanclos.

Ninon de Lanclos wasn't like the
précieuses
: she wasn't elevated or precious. She was an epicurean – a philosopher of judicious pleasure.
All good sense should lead in the direction of happiness
, she believed. Unlike the pious women of la Marquise de Rambouillet's salon, Ninon demanded all the liberties and responsibilities available to men. Her motto was:
Make me a gentle man
[honnête homme],
but never a chaste woman …

One of Ninon's early admirers was Cardinal Richelieu. He lived here in Place Royale too, at number 21 – just behind me in fact, and, see, there's a plaque on the shop-front. He offered Ninon a fortune to become his mistress. She declined: the outrageous sum of money was too much from a lover but not enough from a man she didn't love.

As she matured, Ninon became so respectable that society ladies would send their sons to study at her school of gallantry. We can thank Ninon for the Frenchman's romantic reputation: she turned gauche young men into ardent and skilful lovers.
It takes a hundred times more skill to make love than to command an army
, she used to say.

But the wittiest men in Paris gathered in Ninon's salon for the conversation alone. Playwright Molière was her close friend, maxim writer La Rochefoucauld a regular and she was the first to recognize the genius in the boy Voltaire, leaving him a bequest in her will. Each of these men, whose fame in the English-speaking world eclipsed hers, hurried through this lovely square to visit Ninon de Lanclos in her home around the corner.

Centuries later Simone de Beauvoir wrote:

The Frenchwoman whose independence seems … the most like that of a man is perhaps Ninon de Lanclos, seventeenth-century woman of wit and beauty. Paradoxically, those women who exploit their femininity to the limit create for themselves a situation almost equivalent to that of a man … Free in behaviour and conversation, they can attain – like Ninon de Lanclos – to the rarest intellectual liberty
.

So it was here, in and around Place des Vosges, that a group of women took charge, creating a society which valued beauty, love, sex, art and culture. What strikes me now, as I sit here in this perfect, unchanged space with the strolling couples and the playing children and elegant shops, is how intensely
urban
it is. And it's curious, because I've noticed lately how often the idea of the ‘art of living' is associated with retreat from the city, with a pastoral fantasy: a villa in Tuscany perhaps, or a charming shack on
an unspoiled beach. But in the seventeenth century,
l'art de vivre
was an urban idea, and the women who embraced it weren't the least bit interested in retreating from the world; far from it. They were re-shaping the social order, placing themselves at the center of civilized life.

When I first began reading about the salonnières I couldn't suppress some disbelief. Come on, surely not, could these women really have enjoyed so much freedom? But they did. Many of them lived as single, independent people with a rich circle of friends, social activities and civic engagement. One salon hostess was Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who wrote popular romantic novels. She never married; indeed, she never aspired to:
I should have been deeply chagrined had I ever been faced with a union
, she said bluntly. Madame de Sévigné was wealthy, beautiful and widowed at twenty-five. She point-blank refused ever to marry again. Another resolute spinster was the cousin of Louis XIV, La Grande Mademoiselle. Louis XIV exiled his stubborn cousin several times from Paris because she refused to marry the candidates he selected for her; she too died a single woman.

And there was Ninon herself, Mademoiselle Libertine, who had a son but never married. She only slept with one of her five rich
payeurs
if and when she felt like it. Even into old age she had a stable of
martyrs
from which Ninon would occasionally select a robust and handsome
favori
– her affairs usually lasted no more than three months. As Ninon said:
A sensible woman must never take a husband without the consent of her reason, nor lovers without the advice of her heart
. It seems Ninon, in common with a number of women of her era, never quite found a good enough reason to marry. In our modern society, life as an older single woman carries some social disadvantage. But in those days in Paris, for women
of a certain class, it was the route to moral, intellectual and social liberty.

Louis XIV grew up in Paris in this world of witty, diverse and sure-footed women. And when he established Versailles as his seat of power, he crystallized the feminine values nurtured in Paris salons into a system of etiquette, establishing the foundations of modern social discourse. Later, Versailles ossified into sterile ceremony under the King's long reign, but in Paris the salons continued to sparkle and evolve under the guidance of a few exceptional women.

Now, warmed by the wine and the sunshine, I stroll around Place des Vosges. I can feel the spirit of the past all around me. There's number 1, where the high-spirited Madame de Sévigné was born; and number 6, where another courtesan, Marion Delorme, introduced Ninon to society; and there's number 21 where Cardinal Richelieu lived. I can feel the heavy silks of cardinals and courtesans. I can hear the quiet laughter and
bons mots
and the whispered plans for assignations. The murmurs in my head mingle with the laughter from a young couple on a park bench.

And I remember something else about the salon-nières. They were fascinated by human nature. They liked nothing more than to analyze and describe the complex workings of the human heart. In each other's salons they polished their ideas until they shone. Open a book of aphorisms and you will find it full of
maximes
, epigrams and
bons mots
by Madame de Sévigné and her cousin, Bussy-Rabutin; La Rochefoucauld and his mistress Madame de Lafayette; Mademoiselle de Scudéry and La Bruyère.