It should be remembered, too, that in the eighteenth century pleasure was not regarded with the cold disapproval of our dismal age.
Nancy Mitford
MANY COUNTRIES have a great house, a place that symbolizes the nation state in all its authority and power. There’s the White House in Washington. There’s Number 10 Downing Street in London. In Australia, far less grandly, there’s the Lodge in Canberra. In Paris, of course, there’s the Palais de l’Élysée, 55–57 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, at the corner of Avenue de Marigny. This is the home of the French President.
But as I stand across the road, gazing at the immaculate guards and the high gates of the Élysée, I am not thinking about the grandeur of this place. I am thinking how delightful it is – how quintessentially French it is – that the French President should live in a home owned and decorated by a courtesan, the famous Madame de Pompadour, mistress to Louis XV and the most gifted woman of her age.
This house was designed purely for love and pleasure. I’m sure France is the only nation in the world to permit such a feminine, romantic – and let’s face it, decadent – association to contaminate a position of national authority. Well, it could never happen in America. Or Australia. Which is not to say that, even in France, everyone was comfortable with the idea. When General de Gaulle became President for the second time in 1959, he resisted moving into the Élysée. Apparently he thought the romantic frescoes on the ceilings were decidedly un-statesmanlike. Not to mention the cherubs in the Presidential office.
I would give anything to tour the Élysée, but of course it is closed to the public and heavily protected. Sometimes I see President Chirac and world leaders on television, important men posing for the camera with their heavy frames perched awkwardly on dainty Pompadour couches.
Nancy Mitford introduced me to La Marquise de Pompadour through her biography, published in 1953. She wrote about Madame de Pompadour with such intimacy and affection, I felt as though I knew her myself. Critics said that Nancy Mitford had created Madame de Pompadour in her own image, which may explain my intense affection for both author and subject. When she finished writing her biography, Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh: I have lost the poor Marquise … & I miss her fearfully, my constant companion for nearly a year.
The ‘poor Marquise’ hosted her very last party in this house before she died of tuberculosis at Versailles in 1764, aged forty-five. But the ghost of Madame de Pompadour hovers gracefully not only over this wonderful house; she is the presiding genius of this whole area. With a mental nod to the Marquise, I am about to take a stroll down one of the loveliest streets in the world, a street whose keynote is femininity.
Madame de Pompadour loved beautiful things – music, ideas, clothes, paintings, household objects. A gifted, middle-class, sensible Parisienne, she would surely have become a salonnière had destiny not stepped in. When she was a little girl a fortune-teller told her she would be the great love of a king: teasingly, her family nicknamed her Reinette. The dream, remarkably, came true. King Louis XV fell in love with the charming bourgeoise and swept her off to Versailles. Together they pursued their shared passion – the art of graceful living.
La Pompadour became the tastemaker of her age. Hers was perhaps the only time in history that a young woman presided over a major art movement – the rococo – with unashamed femininity as its keynote. Like François Boucher’s rosy breasts and bottoms, it was light, lavish and shamelessly decorative. This was not grand or monumental art, it was charming and domestic, art embedded in the details of everyday life.
A hundred years after Pompadour’s death, the Goncourt brothers, journalists and critics, described it this way:
When Louis XV succeeded Louis XIV, when a gay, amorous society emerged from a ceremonious one, and when, in the more human atmosphere of the new court, the stature of persons and things diminished, the prevailing artistic ideal remained factitious and conventional but it was an ideal that had descended from the majestic to the charming. There was everywhere diffused refined elegance, a delicate voluptuousness, what the epoch itself defined as ‘the quintessence of the agreeable, the complexion of grace and charm, the adornments of pleasure and love’.
Pompadour, the greatest mistress in history, was a specialist in creating the adornments of pleasure. Every woman who has relished a perfectly cut perfume bottle, or an exquisite gold box, or a vase of luminous and fragile beauty, enjoys the legacy of Madame de Pompadour’s aesthetic vision. Her personal collection was astounding: gold engraved snuff boxes, rock crystal perfume bottles with jewelled stops, musical clocks, dainty teacups, lacquered tabletops, candles of gold and entwined porcelain flowers, blue and gold dinner plates. There’s a Boucher portrait of Madame de Pompadour en négligé, applying makeup at her dressing table. She wears a pink ribboned wrap, there’s a blue flower in her hair, in her hand is her gold pot of rouge, on the table is her gold box and powder puff and there’s a cameo of her lover Louis XV attached to her wrist with lace. Here, you think, is a woman who understands that allure lies in the details.
Pompadour single-handedly created the French cult of quotidian beauty. It’s no wonder that France today is the world’s greatest maker and marketer of affordable luxury goods, small items of glamor that make women feel special. La Pompadour transmitted l’art de vivre through beautifying the sweet, small details of daily life.
Today the weather is cool and cloudy, perfect for a spring walk. I follow rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré as it winds and dips, and it’s going to be good exercise because I have to keep running back and forth across the road to savor every exquisitely presented shop window. Each turn brings another. The names on the canopies tell a story of craftsmanship as well as glamor – parfumerie Annick Goutal, beauty salon Guerlain, ultra-luxe emporium Hermès, couturier Yves Saint Laurent …
One of the shops stops me in my tracks. It’s a confiserie, the sort of place you will only see in France, in Paris. The boxes alone look good enough to eat. There are melt-in-your-mouth pâtes de fruit, rich golden abricots confits, nutty marrons glacés. Everything is shiny, tasty, tempting. And the pleasure begins here, in the anticipation, to be followed by each sweet’s signature smell and, at last, the climactic mouthful. There’s a discipline as well. You can’t eat too many of these sweets, or too often. If you did you would soon reach a horrible surfeit. They offer simple pleasures, perhaps, but represent complex experiences, created with utmost care.
Pompadour nurtured French craftsmanship. She revived the Gobelins carpet and furniture factory in Paris, restoring its reputation and commercial success. She was instrumental in setting up the famous porcelain factory at Sèvres. She once planted a winter garden of china blossoms scented with perfume – laughing with delight when her lover the King, deceived by the ruse, bent over to smell a flower.
Pompadour was not without her strenuous detractors. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau – the man who brought us ‘the noble savage’ – vehemently denounced the rococo and the high civilization it represented. These throngs of ephemeral works, he thundered, which come to light every day, made only to amuse women and having neither strength nor depth, fly from the dressing table to the counter.
These ephemeral works weren’t, however, antithetical to the Enlightenment spirit of progress; they reflected it. Pompadour’s aesthetic vision was bound up in the values and virtues of reason, learning, tolerance and good humor. One of the many ironies of the French revolution is that the reformist temperament was nurtured and came to flower in the very heart of aristocratic France. Pompadour herself owned two telescopes, a globe and possibly a microscope. As well as scientific journals, her library numbered over 3,000 volumes covering poetry, history, geography, novels and philosophy. Philosophe Dr Quesnay was her physician, and she steadfastly supported Voltaire, the single greatest figure of the Enlightenment. Pompadour is believed to have written the entry on rouge in the Encyclopédie. It was widely claimed that Louis XV plotted the path of the Seven Years War on maps laid out in Madame de Pompadour’s bedroom: critics said she used her mouches, or beauty spots, to mark out the key events.
Rousseau and others regarded the rococo purely in light of the decadence and despair caused by the excesses of the court. Diderot reserved particular venom for Pompadour’s favorite artist. Boucher’s elegance, he lectured, his affectation, romantic gallantry, coquetry, facility, variety, brilliance, rouged flesh tones, and debauchery will captivate dandies, society women, young people, men of the world, and the whole crowd of those who are strangers to true taste, to truth, to right thinking, to the gravity of art.
I like to ponder that term: the gravity of art. It’s a perfectly valid idea, of course, but I’ll take the levity of art every time. Diderot was right, however, about the French gift for facility, variety, brilliance. No one could walk down this street without being struck by the French gift for selling beauty.
Pompadour herself was a master at image-making – and image renewal. The early portraits portray the glamorous mistress, at her toilette or in a leafy bower. The later paintings show a change. In the Louvre there’s a portrait of Pompadour by Quentin de La Tour. There she is in her patterned silk dress with her globe and viola, volumes of the Encyclopédie, architectural drafts and letters. She is the late thirties woman of education and influence, although she still shows us her pretty ankle. Also in the Louvre is a wonderful sculpture by Pigalle: Madame de Pompadour en amitié. It portrays La Pompadour as a mythic virgin – a muse perhaps, or a temple priestess. It announces her changed but still privileged relationship with the King – from mistress of his heart, to companion, guide and trusted confidante. She created her own image, and periodically reshaped and updated it. In modern parlance, she re-branded herself. And see, as the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré turns into rue Saint-Honoré, here’s Gucci and Hermès and Dior – all busy updating their images to strengthen the value of their brands.
Now I come across one of the most fashionable new shops in Paris, Colette, at number 213 rue Saint-Honoré. This is a modern style emporium that specializes, as they say in Colette-speak, in ‘styledesignartfood’. This shop is about beautiful things, and the aspirations of the people who buy them. It’s all light, fresh and bright here. I stroll downstairs, mistakenly finding myself in a stainless steel underground café. Too shy to leave, I sit and order a café crème which I don’t drink. I don’t like this place much; there are dozens rather like it in Sydney. And anyway, I always prefer old fashionable places to new ones.
But the visit is worth it: a modern Brigitte Bardot enchants all the waiters as she lingers over a cigarette, her thick honey hair tumbling, long legs encased in tight jeans, complete with a tiny pink knitted sweater and pink kitten-heeled mules. I am captivated too, by her skin and eyes, by her sheen and gloss. She exerts absolute dominance over the room. Funnily enough, it doesn’t seem to diminish my femininity; somehow it enhances it. She is the overt manifestation of a force all women share.
And then I cut back, take a right off rue Saint-Honoré and slip into the flattering shadows of teashop Ladurée at 16 rue Royale. This is more like it. I sigh with pleasure as I take a cup of tea and a macaroon alongside a couple of immaculate old French ladies and their toothless dogs in a pretty, painted room. For a while I sit peacefully, staring into space, thinking of the beautiful scarf I just saw, and wondering if I can ever justify paying so much for a small square of silk. Suddenly I realize that, in my happy daze, preoccupied with the beauty of the street and the shop windows, I’ve walked straight past two of the buildings I most wanted to see.
Number 41 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré is the American Ambassador’s residence. Lots of worthy diplomats have no doubt lived there, but only one of them interests me: Ambassador Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, who reigned from May 1993 to her death in 1997. Pamela Harriman lived by a simple equation: she would give pleasure to men; they would reward her in return. An English nobleman’s daughter, she married Randolph Churchill, Winston’s only son, and spent World War Two learning about politics and power at Winston’s knee. During that time she had an affair with American President Roosevelt’s personal envoy, Averell Harriman. After the war, her marriage over, she drifted to Paris where she became, of all things, a twentieth-century courtesan. Her lovers included Aly Khan, Stavros Niarchos, Elie de Rothschild and Gianni Agnelli. Eventually she found another husband, the American theater producer Leland Hayward, and when he died she reunited with her old flame, Averell Harriman. He died leaving her immensely wealthy.
Pamela was a chameleon: she reconfigured herself to be whatever her lovers wanted her to be. Gianni Agnelli wanted her to be sexy and elegant: she dressed head to toe in couture. Her mirroring was so assiduous that old friends giggled when Pamela answered her phone with a phoney Italian accent. Prrrrronto? she’d say. Elie de Rothschild liked a woman who was quiet in bed and lovely to wake up to, a woman of elegance and refinement: Pamela rigorously educated herself in antiques and nineteenth-century art. When Pamela married showbiz impresario Leland Howard, amazed visitors watched as she played the homespun partner, bringing out her husband’s slippers and gently sliding them on his feet. She travelled with Leland for the out-of-town tryouts, packing an electric frying pan so she could rustle up his favorite chicken hash after the show. With Averell Harriman, she straightened up into the model political wife – elegant, charitably inclined, gracious.
It must take a lot of effort to make oneself so attractive to men, a lot of self-discipline. To pander to their foibles and weaknesses, to laugh at their jokes, to turn away from the hurts and insults of those who always returned to their wives. Americans always sniggered at Pamela (the widow of opportunity, they chortled), the British had looked down on her, but the French very much appreciated this throwback to an earlier era. They appreciated the craft, the art, the self-discipline of the courtesan. Like all great artists, she made the hard work look easy.
When she became a rich and influential widow, Pamela got a facelift, put on a power suit and played the role of Ambassador with the flair she applied to all her performances. Naturally, she was very much inclined to whitewash her past: she never really finished a degree at the Sorbonne. I wish I’d looked at the Embassy closely: it must have been a secret thrill for Pamela to take charge of a former Rothschild residence, a balm to the wound she endured when Elie de Rothschild refused to marry her so many years before.
Once, when working in Paris as an Australian diplomat, my friend Ellen turned up at the American Embassy for a Christmas party. As she came through the security entrance, she saw the guards vetting a huge box filled with assorted perfumes and champagne: a Christmas tribute to Ambassador Harriman from President Mitterrand. At the end of her life, finally, it was Pamela’s turn to be courted and wooed.
The other house I walked straight past was 39 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the former Hôtel de Charost, now the British Embassy. This house belonged to Napoleon’s favorite sister, Pauline, who bought it in 1803. Metternich, later Austrian Chancellor, said of Pauline that she was as pretty as it is possible to be. She was in love with herself, and her only occupation was pleasure. For Pauline, pleasure consisted in her worshipping her own image. She once commissioned a life-size nude sculpture of herself in white marble: her mortified husband immediately hustled Canova’s masterpiece out of France to a basement in Italy. Pauline’s narcissism had a familial flavor; she adored her brother Napoleon, whose glories added shine to her beauty. When the tide turned against Napoleon, Pauline’s vanity became a virtue. She selflessly accompanied Napoleon on his first exile to Elba; she sold her jewels and houses to support him after his downfall; and she was still trying to improve living conditions for him when he died on St Helena. All her life, her only occupation was pleasure, and yet, at the last, she took pleasure in actions that were entirely admirable.
As I sit in the teashop with the old ladies, I think about La Pompadour and Pamela Harriman and Pauline Bonaparte. And I ponder on pleasure and the price we pay to give it – or to get it. Nancy Mitford saw pleasure as a kind of moral good. In her letters, thousands of them, she never dwelled on her times of loneliness or ill-health: in her view, such self-indulgence would only diminish the pleasure of the receiver. A woman’s allure, and her effort to retain that appeal, was also part of her necessary social contribution. Nancy Mitford appreciated La Pompadour for the pleasure she gave to others and for the incomparable legacy of beauty she left behind.
Nancy Mitford was close friends with successors to Pauline Bonaparte in the Hôtel de Charost, British Ambassador Duff Cooper and his wife, Diana Cooper. Aristocratic and eccentric, the couple created a golden post–World War Two era. Their parties were legendary: they imported a thousand red roses for one fête alone. Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau and Noel Coward were regular guests – as well, of course, as Nancy Mitford. Diana once organized a ‘Charles Ritchie Week’ for a junior Canadian Embassy official who had complained that nobody ever paid any attention to him, despite the very important things he had to say. At his every arrival a band played a tune specially composed for him. Nancy Mitford painted five hundred balloons with the slogan ‘Remember Ritchie!’ which were released from the Embassy courtyard with postcards attached asking the recipients to send them to Ritchie with their good wishes. Several came back from Eastern Europe; one from Norway.
Duff and Diana were devoted to each other, so much so that they never denied each other their separate pleasures. At one stage Duff’s lover, French writer Louise de Valmorin (on whom Nancy Mitford based the character of Albertine, Charles-Edouard’s ‘intoxicating old mistress’ in The Blessing), moved into the Embassy with the couple. Diana remonstrated vigorously with her husband when he cheated on Louise. The great beauty of her day, Diana accepted lavish gifts from besotted millionaires: the coat of shame she blithely called her mink, gift of an admiring industrialist. Whenever Diana and Duff were apart they wrote magical daily love letters, and Diana was devastated when Duff died.
Diana and Duff’s life together was characterized by their uninhibited pursuit of pleasure. But they lived in a serious age, and their brand of high frivolity was considered faintly immoral. Today we face an altogether different problem. We live in an era that glorifies self-gratification and we are constantly exhorted – instructed – to do whatever we want. Just do it! shouts the slogan. What’s more, we are bombarded with advertising images that purport to know exactly what it is that we want, what will give us pleasure. This car, this dress, that lifestyle.
But an age of self-gratification is not, it seems to me, the same thing as an age of pleasure. Amid the welter of choices, sometimes it’s hard to detect and honor that which genuinely gives us delight. I suspect that one of the secrets to happiness lies in making this distinction.
Edith Wharton has a wonderful description of the kind of pleasure the city of Paris can give:
Her senses luxuriated in all its material details: the thronging motors, the brilliant shops, the novelty and daring of the women’s dresses, the piled-up colours of the ambulant flower-carts, the appetizing expanse of the fruiterers’ windows, even the chromatic effects of the petits fours behind the plate-glass of the pastry-cooks: all the surface-sparkle and variety of the inexhaustible streets of Paris.
This description sums up for me the complexity and sophistication of the delights of Paris. And it takes us back to La Pompadour, a woman who knew that the art of giving and receiving pleasure lies in careful attention to detail.
When Pompadour died on a cold January day in 1764, her body was carried on the road out of Versailles. The King stood on his balcony and cried for his lovely friend.
As I head back to the Marais, I recall President de Gaulle’s complaint about living in Pompadour’s former home. Really, he said, I should have set myself up at the Louvre – the 8th arrondissement is not a place for making History.
But then, of course, he was a man.
Later, lying on my white bed at Rachel’s house, I reflect on the intensely felt pleasures of a day in Paris. You know, I don’t have some misguided fantasy that I would like to live here. First, foremost and forever I am an Australian citizen. Australia is my patch of the world. It’s where I belong, where I am, at least in part, responsible for what happens. But here in Paris I know I can let down my guard, because what happens here is not, even in part, my responsibility. Here, I take a holiday from citizenship.
Americans have always honored Paris: they appreciate it as a bulwark against ugly modernity, it’s the anti-America, the place where beauty and reason resist the sterile blandishments of Hollywood and therapy and plastic surgery and consumerism and talk-show emotions. (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,’ chuckled Sir Thomas. ‘Really! And where do bad Americans go when they die?’ inquired the Duchess. ‘They go to America,’ murmured Lord Henry.)
Australians don’t, on the whole, cherish Paris. When an Australian tells you you’re a Francophile, it’s generally less an observation, more an accusation. Just the term itself is loaded.
Here’s how, in certain Sydney circles, a Francophile might be defined: a lightweight who buys sentimental books about house renovating in Provence and pays too much for French crockery.
In Canberra foreign policy circles, a Francophile: a lightweight out of step with Australia’s strategic destiny in Asia.
On the left, a Francophile: a lightweight who negligently ignores the evil history of French nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
On the right, a Francophile: a traitor who ignores France’s disgraceful refusal to open its markets to Australian agricultural products.
Pointless to say: but I don’t love France, I only love Paris. This only increases the crime, suggesting an atrocious refinement of decadence (oooh, so we only love PARIS, do we?).
Some Australians can get away with their embarrassing little secret by affecting a witty postmodern ironic affection for Paris. But I can’t. I feel shamelessly pleased by Paris, captivated by it.
Paris makes me feel better.