True Pleasures (7 page)

I can imagine Hortense nodding and smiling at this. And obviously her natural optimism reasserted itself, for in 1696, at the age of fifty-one and just three years before her death, Hortense wrote to St Evremond simply:
Never was I in better health; never was I handsomer in all my life
.

A few hours ago, back at the Institut de France, as we strolled across the courtyard to the chapel in the other wing, Monsieur looked at me and asked rather a disconcerting question: ‘Why are you interested in Hortense Mancini?'

I could have replied with the predictable caveats. I could have said that I admired Hortense because, even though she was really rather shallow and terribly vain and absolutely foolhardy, well, she was very brave. But that would not have been quite true. The truth is that Hortense's shallowness, her vanity and her foolhardiness were essential to her courage. These were the very character traits that gave her the
capacity to escape. A more thoughtful woman, an introvert, a worrier, a sensitive soul, simply could not have made the wild break for freedom that Hortense did. And survive. And flourish. It was far too difficult to explain that I didn't admire her in spite of her faults: I admired her because of them. So I smiled and tried to look scholarly. ‘She was an important Frenchwoman,' I said. Monsieur nodded. At the Institut de France, the guards understand that kind of thing.

Now I am truly exhausted. I head off home, via rue de Bretagne. I buy salad leaves and melting cheeses and bread and wine and some headily fragrant strawberries and devour a solitary spring feast as I pore over an old map. Then I fall into bed and dream of airports with high painted ceilings and airport queues lined with broken statues and in the midst of it all a baby girl with a wisp of dark hair and luminous eyes, gazing at her future.

Paris is a great beauty. As such it possesses all the qualities that one finds in any other great beauty; chic, sexiness, grandeur, arrogance, and the absolute inability and refusal to listen to reason.

Fran Lebowitz

L
IKE A BLAST
of fresh air, Rachel is back. She looks fantastic: her severe suit and stark jewelry set off her white skin, diamond-shaped green eyes and fine curling hair. Rachel is smart, really smart. She can be intimidating. She doesn't walk, she stalks. She rarely smiles, though she often laughs. She's also one of the most generous and thoughtful people I have ever met.

We rapidly consume a bottle of champagne and then take ourselves to a tiny little restaurant around the corner called Chez Nenesse. On Rachel's instruction I order the onion soup. She swears it will be the best I've
ever had. She's right, it's delicious – a murky, rich, stringy broth.

‘I'm going to take a few days off,' Rachel says. ‘Wander around with you as you look for your girls.'

My first instinct is doubt. Rachel has possibly the lowest boredom threshold of anyone I know. ‘It could be incredibly tedious,' I warn. ‘The other day I spent the morning looking for the non-existent tomb of Hortense Mancini. This whole trip could be spent looking for things that don't exist.'

‘That's OK. You need me anyway. I have a sense of direction.'

True.

‘Plus,' Rachel went on, ‘I need a rest. My heart beats too fast. I'm not sleeping well. It'll be good for me just to lope around with you. If I get bored I'll come home or do a few practical things like getting the dry-cleaning done or shoe repairs.'

I am a little surprised. ‘Is Paris wearing you down? To me, of course, it always looks as though this is the one perfectly civilized place left in the world.'

Rachel snorts. ‘Civilized? French women are completely neurotic; they're all on several kinds of pills. And even though they won't do any exercise, they are obsessed with their weight – they starve themselves. They smoke to suppress their appetites.' She pauses and looks at her own cigarette. ‘Whereas I smoke because I'm addicted.'

I look down at a soupspoon full of cheesy melting bread. ‘So you mean my current diet of three enormous French meals a day isn't going to make me lean and lithe?'

Rachel ignores me. ‘I've heard of doctors telling perfectly normal pregnant women to cut back their food
intake because they were putting on too much weight. I tell you they're obsessive about it.'

This is all a bit lowering. ‘The story goes that the French live wonderfully sane lives. And that French women are beautiful because they eat a balanced diet and go to the seaside for two months a year and invest carefully in nice underwear, shoes and bags …

‘ … And plastic surgery and the rest,' Rachel adds. ‘The effort is not so obvious because French women don't walk around in track-pants like Americans do and tell everyone how hungry they are and how often they go to the gym.' Rachel stabs out her cigarette. ‘Which we have to admit is a great blessing.

‘I mean, they do spend a fortune on grooming. It's why I took to doing my nails – I couldn't get any respect otherwise.' She holds up her white hands tipped with very un-French blood plum nail polish. They look great.

Rachel pauses. ‘Still, they have the best shoe shop in the world, Robert Clergerie. And Paris may be a museum theme park, but it's beautiful. And at their best, French restaurants are
the
best.'

‘Good,' I say, ‘because I've reserved lunch for us tomorrow at Grand Véfour.'

Later that night, I lie in bed as a ray of blond moonlight streams into my room. Rachel is right. Paris is not a relaxed city. Standards are high. It is not that French women are glamorous; in fact, they tend to be understated in appearance. Their clothes are conservative. Heels are not usually high. They are exceptionally well groomed, but in a subtle way. It looks effortless, but of course it isn't. And it's damned hard to copy.
Beauty without grace is a hook without bait
, said Ninon de Lanclos. They seem to have found grace.

Way back in 1804, the American writer Washington Irving wrote home to his brothers:
If the ladies of France have not handsome faces given them by nature, they have the art of improving them vastly, and setting nature at defiance. Besides, they never grow old: you stare perhaps, but I assure you it is a fact
. I can imagine Irving's brothers reading this, looking across their austere living rooms to their faded American brides, and sighing with repressed regret for these ageless Gallic sirens. Irving added passionately that French women,
set fire to the head and set fire to the tail
.

I once asked Ellen what she thought about French women.

‘Yes, I like them very much,' she said.

‘But don't some people find them, you know, uptight and competitive?'

‘Oh, they are,' she said. ‘But you know,' she added, in that low sinuous way of hers, ‘I'm a bit like that myself. I'm more of a man's woman.'

She looked at me with her knowing smile. ‘They play games, you know? They're complex and interesting. And they're not
girly
,' she concluded with satisfaction.

It only occurred to me later that Ellen had used the word
girly
as an insult.

As I drift off to sleep a last, fleeting thought: I'm fairly sure no one has ever observed that Australian women set men on fire.

It's a fresh clear day and Rachel and I are all high-heeled and dark nail-polished and shiny-haired. We climb out of our taxi, strut along the arcades of the Palais Royal and present ourselves at the wood and glass doors of Le Grand Véfour, one of the oldest and best restaurants in Paris. It
seems the entire lunch sitting has arrived together. There's a gratifying whooshing and whirring as we are guided to our table and ushered along the cherry velvet banquettes and large menus are flipped open and corks are pulled and popped. With floor-to-ceiling murals of classical maidens and curling vines and bowls of fruit, Le Grand Véfour is less like a restaurant and more like an intimate salon.

In our sharp suits, Rachel and I are rather ill-matched to this ridiculously pretty and convivial room. I can't help thinking that we should be dressed to suit the late eighteenth-century days when those doors first opened. Women's fashions were sexy – very low-cut, high-waisted, ultra-sheer gowns set off by lace-up sandals revealing ankles and legs. Hair was often short and curled around the face, goddess-style, and cameos were popular as jewelry. Fashionable women revived this Hellenic style to signal a renewed hope in the Revolution. Paris, the optimists hoped, would be the new Athens – democratic, open and sophisticated.

But instead of becoming a noble Athenian democracy, Paris degenerated into a frontier town. The city was flooded with a strange brew of
émigré
aristocrats, army contractors, black marketeers, revolutionaries and speculators. Spiralling inflation and a downgraded currency produced great bargains for those with foreign cash. It was a time for people on the make. Political power was in the hands of a corrupt and opportunistic Directory of five men. At the head of the Directory was one Paul Barras. His mistress was a thirty-something widow with two children. Her name was Rose de Beauharnais. One day she would become Napoleon's Josephine and the Empress of France.

Rose de Beauharnais was all woman. Her teeth may have rotted from the cane sugar of her native Caribbean
island, but with her soft voice and languid walk, tilted nose and curling eyelashes, she was intensely, marvelously feminine. Much like this room, in fact, where she regularly dined. Perhaps she sat right here, sipping champagne. In her position of influence, she was able to scam some money herself, by petitioning and trading on arms contracts. It helped her pay the debts to her dressmakers.

Our waiter now approaches. He inclines his sleek head gravely. ‘An apéritif, Mesdames?'

We hesitate. ‘Well, we would like a glass of champagne to start and, what do you think? We were thinking of drinking champagne right throughout our meal.' An approving nod, a smile.

‘
Certainement
, Mesdames,' he responds. ‘Perfectly proper, and may I suggest the Deutz.'

He recommends the daily
menu fixe
; we accept. He pours our first champagne; we sip. He brings us the first of a sequence of delicious dishes; we tuck in. We are enjoying the rare pleasure of passivity, for we are in the hands of experts.

One dish I will always remember. I think it may be a work of art, or philosophy. Three mouthfuls are carefully dispersed on Limoges china: a tomato sorbet, a tomato mousse and a tomato terrine. Three colors, and, on the tasting, three textures. Each mouthful reveals a slightly different aspect of the fruit – here's the sweetness, then the slight zing and finally, the warm basenote. It's a discourse on tomatoness, both subtle and exquisite. And swiftly gone.

Every now and then passersby, on their stroll around the arcades of the Palais Royal, stop and peer through the lace-covered windows. They want to see this famous room, and I can understand why: I've done it myself. Now
that I'm inside, of course, I'm trying not to look at them looking in at me.

In the heady summer of 1795, many more visitors wandered the Palais Royal looking for entertainments both pure and impure. Paris was in the grip of an extended, dissolute, after-the-Terror party. The excesses of the guillotine were over. The fanatic Robespierre was dead. People no longer needed to look fearfully over their shoulders. Instead they overcame the horror of recent deaths by an exuberant embrace of life. Women danced with narrow red ribbons around their necks to symbolize the severed head.

Amid this excess, the Palais Royal was the headquarters of pleasure. All the cafés, restaurants, theaters, brothels and gambling houses were filled to bursting. But there was a lonely figure among the revelers. He was an obscure young soldier named Napoleon Buonaparte, newly arrived in Paris from the provinces. At twenty-six years of age, he was pale, intense and silent, but even then he was an acknowledged genius on the battlefield. Born in Corsica, Napoleon was essentially Italian; he was as tough, clannish and ruthless as a mafia godson.

This macho soldier, obsessed with the acquisition and exercise of power, was understandably surprised when he figured out the real sources of power in Directory Paris. He wrote home to his brother Joseph:

Women are everywhere – applauding the plays, reading in the bookshops, walking in the Park. The lovely creatures even penetrate to the professor's study. Paris is the only place in the world where they deserve to steer the ship of state; the men are mad about them, think of nothing else, only live by them and for them. Give a woman six months in Paris, and she knows where her empire is, and what is her due
.

When Napoleon met Rose de Beauharnais he confronted the apogee of this new woman: she was graceful, untruthful, influential, extravagant and amoral. She was as unlike his thrifty, virtuous, domineering mother as it was possible to be. But her very faults made her
une vraie femme
, the very essence of femininity, her charms as delicate as gossamer.