The mornin’ sun touched lightly on the eyes of Lucy Jordan, In a white suburban bedroom in a white suburban town, As she lay there ’neath the covers dreaming of a thousand lovers, Till the world turned to orange and the room went spinning round. At the age of thirty-seven she realized she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair.
‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’, Marianne Faithfull
ON A SPRING morning in 1944, Nancy Mitford was lying in bed feeling sorry for herself. At the age of forty, she disliked her life. Her marriage was a failure. She had written three minor novels, but their poor sales meant she was forced to work as an underpaid assistant in a London bookstore. She wanted to leave her job and write another novel, but couldn’t quite afford to. War-time food rationing had left her dangerously thin, and now she was laid up with a severe bout of laryngitis.
On that day in London – bored, bed-ridden, frustrated – Nancy Mitford wrote her mother a letter. I need a holiday, she wrote. I am so underpaid. Then, out of the blue, she declared: I am angling like mad for a job in Paris. She emphasized that such a plan was all very nebulous – but you can tell that this is just a daughter’s strategy to hose down a mother’s mounting alarm.
It’s the one-liner that really gives the game away. There it is, the next sentence all alone on the page, a single row of words like a song lyric: Oh to live in Paris! I’d give anything. And so Nancy Mitford gave voice to the ambition that would change her life.
Today, at dawn on a spring morning more than a half-century later, I stumble, drained and pale, through the plastic tubes of Charles de Gaulle airport. I’ve just stepped off a 24-hour flight. My skin is paper, my hair is wire, my travel-wear limp and stale.
A regal Algerian in his early thirties is my taxi driver. We talk a little; I try to energize my lazy Australian mouth to perform the acrobatics of French vowels and diphthongs. ‘Australia?’ he remarks. ‘That’s a long way away.’ And, ‘You love Paris, uh? Everyone loves Paris, of course.’ Then, ‘Me, no, I don’t live here, it’s too expensive – I commute here every day. It’s OK.’
All of a sudden he says, shyly, tenderly, ‘My wife has just had our first baby. A girl.’ He holds up a small Polaroid – I lean forward to admire a coffee-colored baby with wisps of dark hair.
‘She’s beautiful,’ I say. ‘What is her name?’
‘Scheherazade.’
I roll back in delight. ‘The storyteller?’ Of course. ‘The raconteuse. How do you say her name again?’
He repeats the word with melting slowness, as if honey is rolling in his mouth: ‘Sché-hé-ra-zade.’
It sounds so wonderful, so feminine and exotic, I repeat it after him and I see him smiling at me proudly in his rearview mirror.
‘Perhaps she will grow up to tell wonderful stories about her own life.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘My wife believes so.’
Our conversation lapses as we draw closer to the city center. I wind down the dewy window as Paris resolves itself before my glad eyes: the sweep of the Seine, the creamy buildings, the domes and spires of the great monuments. Is it my imagination, or can I already smell the bittersweet coffee and buttery croissants?
We pull into rue de Normandie in the ancient Marais district. My destination is actually a little shop, converted into a tiny house. My friend Rachel is away at a conference in Brussels, but she has forwarded me her spare key. I fiddle awkwardly with locks and suddenly, I’m in.
The scene is comfortingly familiar: here are Rachel’s red glass tulips, her American novels, her collection of black and white photographs … I knew them in Canberra, saw them again in her apartment on rue Maître Albert when I visited several years ago, watched the accretion of beautiful things. Even when we first met, two junior officers in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, even then, Rachel had flair.
That’s new, I see, that fabulous white chaise longue.
Like me, Rachel did not stay with the Department. We left Canberra within a year of each other following the election defeat of 1996. From the office of the vanquished Deputy Prime Minister, I went to Sydney to work for a management consulting firm; she came to Paris to work for the OECD. Now she advises global companies on trade issues.
On the dining table is a message in Rachel’s black round hand on heavy white paper: Dear Lu, If you are reading this you’ve made it! She gives me careful instructions on the lights, the heating, the TV, the nearest Metro station and the local food markets.
A narrow curved stairway leads up to the bedrooms. My bed is dressed in lemon-scented white linen, big fluffy pillows for reading, space in the cupboard for my clothes and books, even flowers and a quaint history of the Marais district on my bedside table.
It’s getting warm. I take a shower, and the steam lifts the airplane’s stale odors from my skin. Then I lie on the white bed as the muted Parisian light flickers through the window and the progressively more purposeful street noises rise up.
When I joined the management consulting firm, I sailed in on a tide of stockmarket excess. Business was booming and the partners were feeling benevolent. They were in the mood to talk about quality. They were ready to be excellent. So I was employed to help the management consultants communicate more effectively with their clients: together we would make a team of compelling communicators.
I was grateful for this task because it brought me home to Sydney and restarted my life. I made good money. Sometimes I had the opportunity to travel: I ran training courses in Japan and China. Unfortunately, however, I knew deep down that the job didn’t matter a damn. I helped the consultants spin a good yarn for the clients, but I didn’t believe a word of it. I just couldn’t think of anything better to do.
After a couple of years, the atmosphere at work changed. The tide of largesse was ebbing. Luxuries were being cut back, and I was, well, a luxury. As the human resources manager reminded me sourly, I was not a profit center, but a cost center.
One day, about a year ago, my boss called me into his office.
‘I’d like you to think about taking on a change of role,’ he said. ‘Moving into the consulting stream.’
I nearly burst out laughing. ‘Become a consultant? Me? But I can’t count!’ (It was bad enough working for the Deputy Prime Minister, who also happened to be Finance Minister; I couldn’t even wield a pocket calculator with confidence.)
He dismissed this reservation with an imperial wave of the hand. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You’ve got the brains. You’d be the boss, the strategist; the junior consultants would crunch the numbers.’
‘You know,’ he added, coaxingly, ‘you would be on track to become a partner. You could make a lot of money. I mean, a lot,’ he concluded. I could see he felt this argument was highly persuasive. He didn’t know that as far as I was concerned, I was already making a lot of money.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let me have a think about it.’
But thinking about it just made me feel tired. I recognized the signs. Another phase in my life was coming to an end, which simply meant I had to prepare myself for more change, more new beginnings. This was not a cause for exhilaration, but, at thirty-five, for weary deflation. More of the same old quest – if only I could put my finger on what the quest was all about.
One useful insight was revealed to me by that unsettling conversation with my boss. Even though I really liked the idea of a lot of money, money just wasn’t enough. It seemed I was greedy: I wanted more than money.
Gradually, things began to stir inside me. I came to understand that this time it wasn’t going to be enough for me to find a new job, or change cities again, or scale my ambitions up – or down – a notch, or even just mark time. All my life, it seemed, I’d been trying for something better than this, something bigger than this.
Most of us, I guess, when contemplating a life change, turn to the accepted sources of advice in the modern world: friends, family, mentors, colleagues, therapists, career advisers, self-help guides. And so, during this period of professional and personal stalemate, did I.
But it didn’t seem to work; I felt I was crawling blindly within the same old parameters of discussion. There was only so far I could get with conversations about career choices; about men, marriage and babies; about Sydney property values; about work–life balance. At the back of my mind I couldn’t help but suspect that this seemingly endless conversation was, itself, part of the problem. I felt a bit like that character in The Truman Show, wondering if, somewhere out there, real life started from a completely different set of premises.
So – and it seems inevitable in retrospect – that’s when the reading started. Or perhaps I should say resumed, for at first I turned to some of my oldest friends, to Colette and Nancy Mitford and Edith Wharton. I re-read their novels and their memoirs, their biographies and their essays. The retreat to books had always consoled me, and these writers in particular had always had something to say to me about being a woman, about crafting a beautiful life. Then, almost without pausing, I moved on to their life stories. And I rediscovered that these three had created their works of art within a few miles of each other, in the heart of Paris. Why hadn’t I thought about this before?
The life stories of these Paris-based writers led in turn to the women of Paris whom they had admired: there was Madame de Pompadour, immortalized in biography by Nancy Mitford; George Sand, who fascinated Edith Wharton; and the notorious nineteenth-century courtesans, inspirations to Colette. And through these came others, a parade of Parisiennes. They began to fascinate me, these women, so much so that their past soon became a lot more interesting to me than my present.
On early morning plane trips to Melbourne, business travellers would prominently peruse the Financial Review: I was buried deep in Mademoiselle Libertine: A Portrait of Ninon de Lanclos. Friends looked surprised when I told them I hadn’t yet read Martin Amis’s prizewinner, but that I could warmly recommend The Duchess Hortense: Cardinal Mazarin’s Wanton Niece. One day a senior colleague discovered me in a café with The Passionate Exiles: A dual biography of Mme Récamier and Mme De Staël. He could barely smother his alarm.
Through this strange period of reading and working and contemplating their past and my future, the women of Paris – wild, noble, brave, bad, strong, foolish – came to represent important things to me: the grand scale that an individual life can achieve; the beautiful arc that a finished life can describe; the radiant, limitless scope of female potentiality.
And I found that the individual stories of these women’s lives did not exist in isolation, but connected across time and space, like threads in the grand narrative tapestry that is the story of Paris itself.
And so, at last, I find myself light and tired on the spare bed at Rachel’s place. I quit the job, of course: my diary is empty. But my heart feels full. I roll onto my side, but I can’t sleep. The tingle of adrenaline floods my veins. Like Scheherazade’s wakeful emperor, I crave the stories.