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Is there an uglier church in Paris than La Madeleine?
Though the demented meringue of the Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre looks like a pastry chef’s idea of Byzantium by way of Disneyworld, at least it’s got a certain hysterical élan. But this pompous faux-Roman temple looming sullenly at the end of the rue Royale doesn’t seem to know whether it is the National Assembly, the National Library, the Stock Exchange or the Opera. In fact, it almost became all of those things between 1763, when Louis XV laid the cornerstone, and its inauguration by Louis-Philippe in 1845. There was a project to turn it into a temple to the French Revolution, then to the glory of Napoleon’s Great Army; in 1837, there was even talk of making it Paris’s first railway station. In the end, it was returned to its original destination as a church but, frankly, there couldn’t have been a worse mausoleum to house the relics of Mary Magdalene. It is as though the triple chastity belt of snarling traffic, cast-iron railings and Corinthian columns had been expressly designed to contain the overflowing femininity of the sexiest saint in history: stiff male virtue, whether it is revolutionary, imperial or bourgeois, rising up to keep the erstwhile courtesan in her place.
* * *
I’ve stepped into La Madeleine on a sudden impulse after realizing I’d never once set foot inside despite living in Paris for over two decades, an oversight that can only be explained by its ugliness because, for a miscreant, I’ve certainly spent a great deal of time in churches. When I was travelling around Europe with my parents, we didn’t pass one without at least peering into it. My mother and I would sprinkle ourselves with holy water of dubious bacteriological status and light candles, dropping pesetas, liras, guilders or francs into tinkling brass boxes, setting Europe ablaze with our wishes.
I’ve never entirely shaken the candle habit and, as Bertrand is tackling his duende, it seems like the right time to have a word with Mary Magdalene. After all, she is the patron saint of perfumers, as well as glove-makers and apothecaries (a logical extension of her speciality since both of the latter tradesmen were the original perfumers), but also hairdressers, gardeners, penitent sinners and converted prostitutes.
Before he decided to build an expiatory chapel in 1815, King Louis XVIII considered consecrating La Madeleine to the memory of his brother Louis XVI and sister-in-law Marie-Antoinette. The match between the tragic queen and the patron of perfumers, hairdressers and harlots would have been particularly fitting: in the slanderous pamphlets that circulated before the French Revolution, Marie-Antoinette was berated for her love of luxury and her unbridled lust, which sucked the country dry of its riches and vital forces.
Both lust and luxury, as it happens, are coupled in the same Latin word: luxuria is one of the seven deadly sins and one to which women, given their weak, vain nature, were thought more vulnerable. But if the fashion-mad Marie-Antoinette could have stood accused of spending too much on her baubles, she was never the sexual ogre libels made her out to be. Of course, that wasn’t the point. What spurred on the slanders or, more specifically, their pornographic nature was an age-old fear of female sexuality. The lure of beauty, set off by costly and deceitful adornments, could lead men to material and moral ruin but, more frighteningly, suck them into a vortex of erotic voracity. A man’s desire waxes and wanes. But how can a woman, whose pleasure is never certain and whose receptive capacity is potentially infinite, ever be controlled? And what then could be more terrifying than a queen in the throes of luxuria, whose power is unchecked by an impotent husband, as Louis XVI was thought to be? To the authors of the pamphlets, Marie-Antoinette was but the latest in a line of lustful queens that started with the wife of the stuttering idiot Emperor Claudius, Messalina, said to prostitute herself in brothels out of wantonness. The violent and fantastic nature of the accusations was directly proportionate to the terror aroused by the erotic power of women.
The fate dealt out to Mary Magdalene by the Catholic Church may bear witness to this fear. She started out in the Gospels as a beloved disciple of Christ. She ended up a whore, albeit a penitent one.
* * *
Perfume was part of her story from the outset. Her emblem in Christian iconography is the alabastron, the vase of alabaster containing precious aromatic substances. And her earliest known representation, in a Syrian fresco dated AD 232, is as one of the myrrhophores, the women bearing myrrh to Jesus’s sepulchre to embalm his body, as the art historian Susan Haskins explains in Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor. In Mark’s Gospel, she is the first, along with Mary mother of James and Salome the Virgin’s sister, to discover the sepulchre open and empty. She is also the first to see Christ resurrected in the garden of Gethsemane. She bears the news to the other disciples, thus becoming the first apostle (the word comes from the Greek meaning ‘messenger, person sent forth’), in fact the apostle of apostles. She is also identified by Mark and Luke as the woman ‘out of whom went seven devils’, and those devils may well have sealed her fate: surely they were embodiments of the seven deadly sins, and surely luxuria must have prevailed in a woman.
In the four canonical Gospels, Mary Magdalene barely utters a word. But she plays a very different role in the apocryphal Gospels of Philip, Thomas and Mary (the latter supposed to be the Magdalene) suppressed by the Church as it eliminated its competitors by labelling them heretics. In this parallel tradition, Mary Magdalene is the bearer of teachings Christ imparted solely to her.
As the Church gradually pushed women back from the positions of ministry they had held in early Christianity, Mary Magdalene relinquished her initial status as the apostle of apostles: to all ends and purposes, she was gagged. Her morphing into the figure of the penitent whore sprung into motion in the third century, as she was gradually conflated with two other female figures in the Gospels, whose common point with Mary Magdalene was perfume.
The first is an unnamed ‘sinner in the city’, supposed to be a prostitute or an adulteress. She washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, wipes them with her hair and anoints his feet with fragrant ointment in the house of Simon the Pharisee, in a sensuous gesture that almost seems to be the feminine equivalent of baptism. The second is the sister of Martha and Lazarus, Mary of Bethany, who also anoints Jesus by pouring precious spikenard over his head in a pre-figuration of his embalmment rites (‘against the day of my burying hath she kept this’).
It was around this triple Mary Magdalene that the legend formed throughout the Middle Ages. She became the heiress of the castle of Magdala, descended from kings, and the bride of John the Apostle, who abandoned her immediately after their wedding at Cana to follow Jesus. Out of spite, she threw herself into prostitution, adorning herself with jewels, rich fabrics and perfumes the better to flatter her senses and entice her lovers, until she saw the light, repented her past sins and followed Jesus too. One version of the legend has her living out the rest of her days in a grotto in contemplation and penance, having forsaken all worldly goods, clad only in her long tresses: this time, she was conflated with the 5th-century Mary of Alexandria, a former courtesan who had retreated to the desert of the Holy Land.
As a penitent harlot, Mary Magdalene was invaluable to the Catholic Church. She symbolized the redemption of Eve and was an easier female figure to identify with than the Virgin Mary. If Jesus could forgive a whore, take her into his fold and even grant her the privilege of being the first to see him after his resurrection, then any sinner could be saved, even women who, like her, had given in to luxuria. And thus she became the protectress of reformed prostitutes in the charitable institutions founded to save them from their life of sin. Not to mention a favourite subject for painters. Her penitence in the grotto, clad only in the unfurling waves of her golden hair, pert breast darting out between vine-like tendrils, was an excellent excuse to paint beautiful naked women in the guise of religious art, especially after Renaissance artists revived the tradition of the classical nude. But not everyone was fooled. Susan Haskins quotes a Florentine nobleman, Baccio Valori, who told Titian that his Magdalene in the desert, though she had been fasting, ‘was too attractive, so fresh and dewy, for such penitence’. The canny Titian ‘answered laughing that he had painted her on the first day … before she began fasting’. By the 18th century, most of these penitent Magdalenes, some of which were portraits of famous courtesans and royal mistresses, had turned into thinly disguised erotica.
* * *
When Sister Aline tackled her story in my high-school catechism class, the Magdalene was also an excellent excuse for teenage girls to talk about sex. Sister Aline was pretty cool about that. This was the 70s and Quebec had thrown off the shackles of the Catholic Church to fast-track itself into nationalism, feminism and the sexual revolution. But I don’t remember Sister Aline telling us that the Church had cleansed Mary Magdalene’s reputation in 1969. The unnamed sinner and Mary of Bethany had resumed their discrete identities, which the Orthodox Church had always staunchly maintained: Mary Magdalene was no longer the ‘penitent saint’ but one of Christ’s disciples. Perhaps Sister Aline thought of this as a demotion and preferred the sexy Magdalene of her childhood?
I know I do. The woman whose ‘sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much’, is the one I sought out in the churches and museums of Europe, from Bernini’s Penitent Mary Magdalene in the Chigi Chapel of the Siena Duomo, marble made swirling ecstatic flesh, to Christ and the Magdalene in the Musée Rodin, of which the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote ‘like a flame tormented by the wind, [she] tries to embed and hide the ineffable suffering of this so greatly loved body in her own broken love.’
It is to her that I have come today at La Madeleine. To the fallen woman who bore perfumes, and who has ever since fascinated men and women into spinning her myth until it was as inextricably woven with passion and sensuality as her hair was around the feet of the Saviour. To the woman whose sorrow was as luxuriant as her sins; whose tears were sweeter than the essence roses yield in distillation, ‘sweating in a too warm bed’ in the 17th-century poem by Richard Crashaw. Who could know more about duende than the Magdalene, who found her beloved arisen from the dead only to have him refuse her embrace? In Latin, his words to her in the Garden of Gethsemane, Noli me tangere, mean ‘Touch me not.’ But the original Greek in John’s Gospel, mê mou haptou, could be better translated as ‘Stop clinging to me’ or ‘Cease holding on to me.’
As I watch the wick catch and the flame flicker feebly in the chilly dankness of the cavernous church, I wonder whether ‘Stop clinging’ couldn’t be my own motto. Perhaps pride supersedes luxuria in my soul? I neither cling nor let myself be clung to. My body has been touched, and my heart clawed bloody by many hands as I tore myself from embraces or threw myself into arms that drew me in before pushing me away, as I knew they would. So I have forged myself an armour – remove the ‘r’ and you get amour – out of words and adornment: the leather and silk, the black that frames my eye, the seashell curl of my lip, the velvety powder that stretches over my face like a veil. The stilettos punching patterns in the ground while their red soles beckon, in a 21st-century equivalent of the soles of courtesans’ sandals in Ancient Rome, which printed advertisements for their wares on the sand they trod.
‘Sans talons hauts, on a le cul bas’: ‘Without high heels, your ass is low’ was the bit of advice passed on by Mistinguett, who reigned in French music-halls from the 1900s to World War II, to her junior, the raspy-voiced Arletty. I’ve heeded Mistinguett’s advice and freed my cul from the laws of gravity. Having done so, I am forever at risk of falling – a grating, a pothole, a puddle will trip me up. In truth, I tell you, I am a fallen woman just waiting to happen …
Whatever I believe or disbelieve, it all comes down to this: fallen woman. I may have cut loose from my Catholic upbringing, but I am still a Catholic by culture, the Virgin and Penitent Whore seared into my psyche. Is it any surprise that my path was bound to cross the Magdalene’s often? That I’ve ended up dedicating myself to the art she protects? And that I uphold the heretic tradition of the Magdalene by revealing the Gnostic secrets of perfumery?
I come bearing perfume, but I also bear words. Touch me not, then, but follow my steps, hear my voice, see my smile, bear my gaze, surrender to my perfume. It is my perfume that calls you and draws an invisible bond between what you breathe and what I exhale.
* * *
The Magdalene first beckoned to me in the late 80s, when I was invited to watch the rejoneadora Marie-Sara fight bulls on horseback in the village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, in the Camargue. This was where, according to tradition, Mary Magdalene landed after being cast off in a rudderless boat by the pagans. It is tempting to think that from there she went off to kick-start the perfume industry. But she didn’t make a beeline for Grasse: according to The Golden Legend, she converted the pagans in Marseilles before retreating to a grotto in the Massif de la Sainte-Baume to spend the rest of her life in contemplation and mortification. Again, it is tempting to imagine that the mountain took its name from her association with aromatic materials. But though baume is the French word for ‘balm’ or ‘balsam’, in this case it is derived from the low-Latin balma, which means ‘grotto’.
At Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Mary Magdalene’s cult has been superseded by that of Sara-la-Kali, ‘Sara the Black’, who is said to have been either the servant of Mary Jacoby or a local noblewoman who helped the Christian refugees, and is the patron saint of the Gypsies, who make a pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer every year on her feast day. But though it was Sara the Black’s image that was plastered all over the village, it was of the Magdalene I thought as I was carrying on a tipsy late-night conversation with Luis Rego in a bar near the small village bullring. Luis, a Portuguese-born singer and actor in slapstick comedies, was a soulful, serious man off-stage. I’d been up to no good in Seville and the stories had somehow reached Luis – or was I the one who told him? With the arrogance of a young woman – and a slightly miffed one, as Luis showed no sign of being aware of my charms – I boasted that, when I sinned, my sins were great.
‘Don’t be so pretentious,’ Luis answered. ‘Your sins are insignificant on the scale of things.’
I stood corrected, but not cured of my Magdalene complex. More often than not, as Mary Magdalene was to the Virgin Mary, I’ve been the Other Woman. At least, that’s what I was the last time I paid a visit to the sinner-saint.
* * *
Monsieur and I had just spent the night at L’Espérance, a luxury hotel just outside Vézelay, after gorging ourselves on the chef Marc Meneau’s truffled poularde de Bresse. When we left in the morning, I asked him to go through the town so I could pop into Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, the Romanesque basilica set atop a hill, where it was claimed the saint’s relics had been found (you could probably make up at least five Mary Magdalenes with the remains boasted by various churches). Monsieur’s mobile phone rang as he parked in front of the basilica, so I went off on my own to take a few steps up the nave. A small choir of Vietnamese nuns was rehearsing in one of the chapels. I’d already been there with the Tomcat as we were driving back from our honeymoon in Italy, but at that moment I wasn’t thinking of either of my men, the one I was still married to or the one who was married to another woman. Just surrendering to the light-headedness that comes from an evening drowned in wine and a few hours’ sleep at dawn; sated flesh dancing in a beam of sun under the tall graceful Romanesque vaults. That feeling of lightness, the soaring of a body redeemed by beauty – not my body’s beauty, but the beauty surrounding it, lifting it, carrying it upwards – was all that mattered. That day too I’d lit a candle, but as I hadn’t repented I asked for no favour: I wasn’t expecting the saint to bend the rules.
* * *
And now, here in La Madeleine, once I’ve dropped a coin in the alms box, I ask for none either. My business with Mary Magdalene is strictly professional. I ask for the perfume born from my memories of the celebrations of the Passion of Christ – of his night in the Garden of Gethsemane and of Good Friday when Mary Magdalene wept at the foot of the cross – to be as beautiful as I’ve ever dreamed it.
That’s a prayer I’m sure she can answer.