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
LIKE 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.
From their first night together Napoleon was utterly infatuated with the elegant, alluring older woman, whom he possessively renamed Josephine:
I awake all filled with you. Your image, and the intoxicating pleasures of last night, allow my senses no rest. Sweet and matchless Josephine, how strangely you work upon my heart! … a thousand kisses, mio dolce amor; but give me none back, for they set my blood on fire.
As I gaze around this restaurant, it seems to me that feminine style still holds a special place in Paris. On the other side of the room is a table of imposing old men, lawyers or judges perhaps, chewing their food lustily. Perhaps it’s their monthly lunch. They are having a wonderful time. To Australian eyes it’s noteworthy: a group of powerful men choosing to dine in an atmosphere as feminine as a beauty parlor.
In Sydney, Rachel and I agree, there is no way a group of men lunching together would ever consent to eat in a room as pretty as this. They would feel emasculated by their surroundings. ‘Even gay men,’ I suggest to Rachel, ‘tend to prefer leather and stainless steel.’
At another table, absorbed in their own drama, are an American man and a much younger woman. He is suited, she is casually dressed, and her long legs are curling nervously around the legs of her chair. He keeps talking, staring at her intently. She looks distractedly away, flicking her long hair. I think: how curious, he finds this restaurant romantic and hopes its charms will seduce her (as he intends to); she merely finds it old-fashioned and is bored witless.
Rachel and I feel right at home. Glowing with champagne and fine food, caressingly administered to by our waiter, we are the last to leave, outstaying even the lawyers. The oldest is so infirm he has to be carried out by his colleagues, still waving his post-prandial cigar. Five hours after our arrival Rachel and I finally stumble out into the pale pink afternoon, blinking with woozy pleasure. ‘Now that,’ she says, ‘was a lunch.’
Next morning, as I peer out the downstairs window onto a drizzly sidewalk, Rachel’s voice rings out like a commandment behind me: ‘So where are we off to today?’
‘Well, I was thinking of looking for the place where Napoleon and Josephine got married, and checking to see whether Josephine’s cottage is still there …’
‘Right. When do we start?’
‘ … and really I am not sure whether I have the right addresses, because that part of Paris changed so much under the redesign of Baron Haussmann, and even the street numbers could have changed and it’s all a bit of guesswork but oh well if you really want to come …’
So off we go, taking the Métro from Filles du Calvaire to Opéra and winding our way down to rue d’Antin. On this cool wet day, the boulevards – once the legendary thoroughfares of carefree boulevardiers and flâneurs – are charmless, big, loud and impersonal. I can see that Rachel is already wondering what she’s doing here as she struggles with her umbrella.
Rue d’ Antin offers no compensation; it’s as drab and grey as the day. We count our way along the street to find number 3, which was once the local town hall but is now a rather plain-looking bank branch. It doesn’t matter to me. I feel childishly triumphant when I see a plaque; it’s as welcome as a personal greeting. Lucinda, it trumpets, you’ve come to the right place.
Translated the plaque says:
1796–1996
Commemoration of the marriage of
Napoleon Bonaparte
and
Josephine de Beauharnais
9 March 1996, Napoleon Foundation
This gold print on white marble bestows posthumous dignity on what was, in fact, a very odd occasion. The bride was thirty-three years old and wasn’t at all certain about this strange match she had reluctantly agreed to make. She had plenty of time to think about her decision: the groom was three hours late. When the twenty-seven-year-old hero Bonaparte bustled in, he shook the dozing registrar awake and the couple were united in a two-minute ceremony, following which they climbed into a carriage and rode to Josephine’s rented cottage in rue Chantereine. There, on their wedding night, Napoleon gave Josephine a gold locket on a chain inscribed To Destiny and Josephine’s jealous pug, Fortuné, nipped the bridegroom on the leg. Just two days later Napoleon went to command the French forces in Italy.
I’m gazing at the plaque and passing enjoyable moments wondering why it is dated 9 March and not 6 March, which is the date of the wedding according to my favorite work on this subject, Napoleon and Josephine by Evangeline Bruce. Why the discrepancy? I wonder. I smile at myself: I make an unlikely scholar. Then I look at Rachel’s face, which is a mask of boredom. Mmm, perhaps we’ll move along.
Rachel takes charge of the map and guides us on the short walk to rue de la Victoire, formerly rue Chantereine, to the site of Josephine’s little cottage and the couple’s first marital home. Oh dear. If rue d’Antin was disappointing, this is far worse. It’s a shabby street and all we find at number 6 is a decidedly sleazy-looking sauna next to a rundown gym, neither of which appear to have any patrons. ‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ asks Rachel, none too subtly, as the drizzle turns to an outright downpour.
I look around from under my drumming umbrella, hoping for a plaque or a sign, anything to suggest that this was once the site of Josephine’s charming little cottage where she was said to have all the luxuries and none of the necessities. Meanwhile Rachel’s foot is tapping impatiently under her black umbrella and I observe her nervy hand fumbling for a cigarette in her handbag. It’s true there’s nothing of interest to see here now, nothing at all.
But as I look down the street, the past easily slides over the present. Twice a day Napoleon’s envoys would gallop along here to deliver messages affirming the little General’s passionate devotion to his new wife. Here was possibly the greatest military genius in history conducting a major campaign, and yet, Parisians noted with wonder, Josephine received reports from the front even before Barras himself.
Napoleon wrote to his wife: Not a day passes without my loving you, not a night but I hold you in my arms … Whether I am buried in business, or leading my troops, or inspecting the camps, my adorable Josephine fills my mind, takes up all my thoughts, and reigns alone in my heart …
And: What art did you learn to captivate all my faculties, to absorb all my character into yourself? It is a devotion, dearest, which will end only with my life. ‘He lived for Josephine’: there is my epitaph. I strive to be near you: I am nearly dead with desire for your presence. It is madness!
And then there were the erotic letters: A kiss on your heart, and then another a little lower, much much lower. And:
I am going to bed with my heart full of your adorable image … I cannot wait to give proofs of my ardent love. How happy I would be if I could assist at your undressing, the little firm white breast, the adorable face, the hair tied up in a scarf à la créole. You know that I never forget the little visit, you know, the little black forest … I kiss it a thousand times and wait impatiently for the moment I will be in it. To live within Josephine is to live in the Elysian fields. Kisses on your mouth, your eyes, your breast, everywhere, everywhere.
I was enthralled when I first read these letters – blown over by them, by their ardent and earthy passion, and blown over by her, this woman who could inspire such outsize emotion. But Josephine was no needy modern lover. Napoleon’s burning letters would arrive – right here, where I am standing, in fact, or hereabouts – and she would absentmindedly put them to one side, to be read later: Qu’il est drôle, Bonaparte! she would murmur affectionately – What a funny thing he is. Often she forgot to read his letters at all. Her own letters to him were irregular, bland and brief, sending Napoleon into a frenzy: I get only one letter from you every four days! Once she forgetfully addressed her husband in the formal vous eliciting further howls of distress from the front.
And perhaps it is no wonder the neglectful Josephine was unmoved by her husband’s long-distance ardor: she was preoccupied by a passionate affair with a handsome young officer. Napoleon was a hero to France, but just a clumsy suitor to his wife. As we turn to depart, I marvel at Josephine’s careless power.
Rachel and I walk in single file along rue de la Victoire, crossing the street by which we entered. Ahead of me I see the sign of a little café, Café Chantereine. It’s a reference to this street’s original name. I nod and shrug: well, at least we came to the right street, even if there was nothing here. As I turn to suggest to Rachel that we stop at Café Chantereine for a commemorative coffee, my raised umbrella frames another sign still further along the road, a dirty old wooden shingle. Hôtel de Beauharnais, it reads.
On an impulse, I lead Rachel out of the rain and into the narrow dark hotel foyer. It’s the grimy boarding house of a thousand down-at-the-heel travel tales. At the front desk to our left, a woman is sitting with a phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Engrossed in her conversation, she takes no notice of us, assuming, I suppose, that we are some of her budget residents.
But as our eyes adjust to the dingy surroundings, we behold a surprising sight. Opposite the landlady, framed hugely in gilt, is Josephine herself. It’s an amateur copy of her famous Imperial portrait by Gérard. Even the rough paintwork cannot diminish the luminous subject. In her gold and white gown, Josephine’s delicate face is framed by her dark curling hair. As she gazes out of the painting she is gentle and regal at the same time. The copyist’s hand may be heavy, but he or she is alert to the delicate nuances of the original painting: the set of Josephine’s mouth is tentative, even apprehensive, and her eyes are dark with dread. Josephine never wanted Napoleon to declare himself the Emperor of France because she knew what would follow. The Emperor would want to fulfil his dynastic ambitions. To do so, he would have to divorce Josephine who was by then past child-bearing age. The day Josephine became consort to an Emperor was the beginning of the end of her marriage. In this portrait, the newly crowned Empress Josephine is looking into her future, and what she sees is sadness.
In front of Josephine’s portrait is a small table. It is covered with a lace cloth and a little cracked vase filled gently with roses, Josephine’s signature flower. The composition reflects an impulse so private, so tender, that we are quite taken aback.
Rachel’s green eyes shine like a cat’s in the gloom; for her, this appalling wet trek around Paris has gained human interest. The Paris of the past has all at once connected with the city she lives in today.
‘It’s a …’ I begin.
‘I know, it’s a …’ says Rachel.
‘It’s a shrine,’ we whisper with joy.
I look closely at the tired, tough-featured woman at the front desk. She seems an unlikely devotee of the fragrant Josephine. And yet, I am sure that she is Josephine’s admirer; that she finds some rare beauty in the woman who once lived on this street.
I would like to approach the woman, to make some connection with her and ask her about the portrait and her touching devotional gesture but she doesn’t choose to acknowledge us. She puts down the phone and instantly picks it up again, barking weary commands in hoarse French. So we leave.
‘Wow,’ sighs Rachel into the damp air.
‘I know,’ I reply.
If a vote were taken on the most popular queen in French history, Josephine might well win, for she was loving, lovable, beloved. She had a youthful spirit and a tender, wayward heart. At the age of thirty-three she captivated a hero. And through her grace as consort, she bewitched a nation. Her garden at Malmaison became an important scientific and horticultural center. She cultivated wildflowers from the newly discovered Australian continent. Black swans from Western Australia swam in her lake and emus ran through her forest. Her rose garden was recorded by Redouté in works of art as well as natural history. Napoleon is well known for his scientific and cultural interests, but his wife made her own major contribution to knowledge. Not bad for the daughter of a poor French settler in the West Indies, an indolent, dreamy girl, swinging on a hammock and rotting her teeth on sugar cane.
The rain recedes as we exit rue de la Victoire, street of the victory. Josephine’s textbook femininity is outmoded these days: the modern woman is a substantive and explainable being, not an airy and elusive creature. In her day, however, though Napoleon was the warrior, Josephine’s arsenal of emotional weaponry was equally powerful. Napoleon used to say, proudly, wonderingly, I win battles … Josephine wins hearts.
Napoleon divorced Josephine in 1809 in a formal, public ceremony. Josephine retained her famous, gentle dignity to the last. But her soon-to-be ex-husband wept openly. He sobbed, God alone knows what this resolve has cost my heart …