Young women who write seldom have much sense of moderation (neither have old women, for that matter).
Colette
I was one of those children who could always be found in the fork of a tree with a book. Books were insurance for me, a way of protecting myself against unpleasant realities. A dog-eared favorite would be discreetly propped up on my lap at meal times; my head rising for a bite of lamb chop and mashed potato and turning down again for another chapter. Novels came with me in the car to Mass on Sundays, to family reunions, to beach-side picnics. As family and friends set up post-lunch cricket, I’d retreat quietly to the car. ‘It’s so stuffy in there!’ my mother would protest, but I was cooling myself in the fresher airs of fiction.
Reading I loved, but re-reading offered the deeper pleasure. By the time I was fourteen, and still almost unnaturally innocent of life matters, my literary heroines were also soul mates. Isabel Archer, Dorothea Brooke, Lily Bart, Elizabeth Bennett, these were my ardent and misguided friends whose quest for a first-class life – a life of art, beauty, knowledge and true love – led them into peril. I would sob and toss at the punishments meted out to them for their high aspirations. And I, the bookish daughter of a Sydney suburban butcher, would carefully draw the lessons, cautioning herself never to be led astray by a sly American fortune hunter in Northern Italy or a reclusive pedant in provincial England or the dangerous glitter of New York society.
At school, however, the nuns had a powerful narrative of their own. Theirs was the story of the priceless value of virginity, and what a woman should be ready to do to defend it. Sister Paula would lovingly recite the gory details surrounding the murder of Saint Maria Goretti, a young virgin who told her potential rapist to go ahead and stab her to death rather than compel her to the sin of unmarried sexual intercourse. ‘And yet, she forgave him on her deathbed,’ she’d conclude reverently.
I grew to loathe Maria Goretti and all she represented. Why didn’t she choose to live? I wondered. Why didn’t she submit? (It was only sex after all, and how bad can it be?) Why didn’t she save her life instead of giving in to death? Martyrs no longer appealed to me, nor angels, nor victims. I wanted women who had the courage to live, not die.
So then I shed not my innocence, for I remained woefully inexperienced, but my willingness to remain so. I wanted to banish the burden of innocence; I didn’t like my perilous virgin vulnerability. Of course, in those days my answer to this need wasn’t to go in search of worldly experience: I merely changed my reading habits. And I gradually uncovered a new breed of literary women – women who weren’t tossed around by life, but grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and shook it hard. Heroines like Albertine in Nancy Mitford’s The Blessing, or Colette’s knowing courtesans in Gigi and Chéri, or even Anita Loos’s gold-digger Lorelei Lee of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, represented a new kind of femininity to me. These were vivid, wilful, forceful creatures. They wore their worldliness as a badge of honor. I still loved Dorothea Brooke and Isabel Archer, of course, but I grew rather impatient with their moral ditherings. My role models became the women who survived and prospered.
Now I pause on the river bank in my dark coat and bright lipstick and breathe the moist chilled air rising from the green Seine. The breeze rustles the dark leafy trees and cools the stones of the buildings. It lifts the coat-tails of walkers as they cross the Pont des Arts to the Left Bank.
The Left Bank, the quartier Latin, makes sense to me. For centuries this was the heartland of Parisian Catholicism, the home of the city’s convents and monasteries, churches and spires, saints and mystics. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as inexorably as experience follows innocence, the Left Bank transformed, becoming home to a new breed of Parisians – the taboo-busting artists and drug-taking bohemians, the alcoholic expatriates and the showy lesbians, the hot jazz babies and the cool intellectuals. On the Left Bank, sinfulness mingles with the sacred, and overwhelms it.
I wind down rue de Seine, stand with my back to a graffiti-covered cream wall and look across the narrow road to number 31. Above the blue courtyard door there’s a little plaque. George Sand (1804 – 1876), it announces, lived in this house in 1831. As I hesitate on the narrow sidewalk elegant people squeeze past me, on their way to the river perhaps, or another art gallery or antique shop. A car pulls up and blocks my view. But even in the hum of modern Paris, it’s still not difficult to call up the moment when George Sand, the Baroness Aurore Dupin DuDevant, arrived in Paris.
It is a freezing January day in 1831. At twenty-seven years old Aurore Dupin has abandoned her husband, two small children and the responsibilities of her large country estate, Nohant, in the province of Berry. Impatient in her long skirts and high heels, she hurries through the blue courtyard doors to reunite with her lover, Jules Sandeau. In the nearly ten years since her marriage she has taken several lovers, but none like twenty-year-old Jules, with his angelic curls and pink and white cheeks and frail blond neediness. Later she exults to a friend: He was there, in my own room, in my arms happy, groaning, crying, laughing, beaten, kissed, bitten. It was a storm of pleasure the like of which we have never experienced before.
When Aurore next emerges from these courtyard doors she is unrecognizable. She and Jules look more like first-year students than lovers. She sports a long grey riding coat and tie, buttoned-up trousers and little black boots with sturdy iron heels. Her black satin eyes are still striking, but her shining black hair is pulled up under a cap. She is smoking a cigar. His cravat and vest are crooked. Together they roam the streets, attend the theater, dine at cheap restaurants and revel in down-at-the-heel, shabby, creative, bohemian Paris. They mingle with writers and artists, actors and musicians; even the great Balzac befriends them. How dear my Paris is to me, how sweet her liberty to live in love, and to be with my Jules who loves me so, crows Aurore.
Aurore has tasted freedom and she doesn’t intend to give it up. What she now requires is an excuse to justify the permanent abandonment of the provinces. To be an artist! she thinks, Yes, I want to be one. So, just like that, she makes her plans. She will be reborn as George Sand. Her first novel, Indiana, about a woman’s unhappy marriage and search for true love, will cause a sensation and turn her into an international celebrity. She will become a pin-up girl for Romantic singularity and wilfulness. And she will, of course, live in Paris, the capital of bohemian Romanticism.
As I stand here on rue de Seine, I am struck again by the force that was George Sand. As a young girl she was a convent student, living just a few streets away from here at rue Cardinal Lemoine. Whatever the nuns taught her, George Sand was clearly never convinced by the orthodox lessons. Her personal philosophy was alarming and subversive; whatever was good for her must, by definition, be good for everyone. She summed up this sublime self-centeredness: I never asked myself why I wanted this or that, she declared. The inner me always proudly answered: Because I want it. That said everything.
Thinking about George Sand and her monstrous, marvelous ego, a memory strikes me. A few months ago I became anguished as I contemplated quitting my job. There was a single moment when, all at once, a whole crowd of fears and anxieties came surging into my mind, like unwelcome partygoers. I couldn’t seem to eject them, these ugly concerns about money and security and risk and ageing. Shouting noisily in my head, tossing shallow insults and dark prophecies, these interlopers drowned out all sensible conversation.
So I found a psychologist near my North Sydney office and went to sit in her room. I briefly told her my situation. ‘I want to quit my job and I’m afraid,’ I told her. She questioned me, drawing me out. And what’s this telling you? she’d say. And what’s this telling you? She talked very slowly. But it became a weirdly circular conversation.
She:‘What does this anxiety tell you?’
Me, cautiously: ‘Well, I guess it’s telling me that I am afraid …’
She, very slowly now:‘And what’s the fear telling you?’
This is getting ridiculous.
Me:‘It’s telling me that I’m anxious?’
I soon realized the fear was telling me that I’d rather cope with any number of emotional gatecrashers than spend another minute with this particular psychologist. At the end of our session she told me that if I were to commit to a series of discussions she was really very sure she could help me. Eventually, she implied. I thanked her, paid and quit my job the next day. And the crowd vacated my head as suddenly as it had arrived, leaving air, space and freedom. Once I’d taken charge of my fate, the world seemed a lot simpler.
George Sand never once wavered, never doubted, never reflected negatively upon her own actions. She soon grew tired of little pink and white Jules Sandeau and calmly ended their affair. But he never got over her, and he always despaired at her casual repudiation. As an old man he was heard declaring bitterly: She is a graveyard. Do you understand? A graveyard. A succession of lovers would pass through George Sand’s life: there was Alfred de Musset, the Byronic dandy; Michel de Bourges, the married socialist lawyer; Charles Didier; Gustave de Gévaudon; the actor PF Bocage; the writer Mallefille; a disastrous one-night stand with writer Prosper Merimée; and of course, the composer Frédéric Chopin.
But no matter what turbulence she generated in her romantic life, George Sand herself was the calm in the eye of the storm. As the chaos roiled around her, she remained Buddha-like, unnaturally serene. She turned out novels as automatically as other people cook the nightly dinner. She wrote at night, starting at around midnight and finishing about 4 am before retiring. She never struggled to perfect her talents or polish her creations. Of her novel Leone Leoni she said: I wrote this book in a week [at Nohant] and hardly read it over before sending it to Paris. The lonely genius Flaubert once wrote to George Sand: You don’t know what it is to spend an entire day with one’s head in one’s hands, taxing one’s poor brain in search of a word. With you, the flow of ideas is broad, continuous, like a river … It was perfectly true. George replied: I simply can’t understand your anguish.
It’s a few short steps to the corner café, La Palette, where I order a beer and a plate of cheese at an outside table. It’s cool all right, one of those spring days that reverts to winter, but it’s good to sit here with my jacket pulled close around me and feel the bracing air against my cheeks and the sharp tang of the beer against my throat. And now, as the wind flirts with my hair, my mind steps through the years and down the street, taking a right at rue Jacob, where, on the third floor at 28, another famous Frenchwoman made her first Parisian home. The year is 1893, fifty years after George Sand’s flight to Paris. The woman is Colette, a twenty-year-old bride newly arrived from the provinces.
Unlike George Sand, the young Colette didn’t find liberty in Paris. The apartment on rue Jacob was small and dark, it had no light, no air; it was almost a poor man’s flat and profoundly melancholy. Nor did Colette find solace in the city; for this homesick country girl, Paris was an expanded prison: I did not wish to know Paris. The town filled me with dread.
Colette had married a wily, manipulative man fifteen years older than herself. Far from rebelling against him, she embraced her wifely servitude: There are many scarcely nubile girls who dream of becoming the show, the plaything, the licentious masterpiece of some middle-aged man, she said. Willy was a Parisian celebrity. He published titillating books, but a stable of writers secretly wrote them. His little country wife was in love with him, but Willy was not a good husband; he was neglectful, unfaithful and intermittent in his attentions. In the first year of her marriage Colette wilted like a plant deprived of sunshine; her illness became so grave that her mother came from the country and nursed her back to health.
When Willy told Colette to write down some of her school stories, she set about the task with agreeable indifference. She sat down in the gloomy apartment and dutifully filled the pages of her notebooks. Willy rejected her work, saying: I was wrong. It’s no use at all. He returned to his stable of ghost-writers, to his artistic feuds and his mistresses, and Colette returned, ‘relieved’ to her cat, Kiki-La-Doucette, to her divan and her books, to her correspondence with her mother, to her few friends. With her long, long plait, her pointed chin and dark blue eyes, Colette was rather like a princess in a fractured fairy tale, only half-aware of her imprisonment, unconsciously waiting for her release.
It wasn’t until one day five years later that Willy stumbled across the manuscript when he was cleaning out his desk. He opened one of the copy-books, turned the pages: ‘It’s rather nice.’ He opened a second copy-book and said no more. A third, a fourth. ‘My God!’ he muttered. ‘I am the bloodiest fool.’ He swept up the scattered copy-books just as they were, grabbed his flat-brimmed top hat and bolted to his publisher’s. And that is how I became a writer, Colette concluded, as if it were all so simple. Willy published Colette’s first Claudine novel (Claudine à l’ École) in 1900 under his own name and it was immediately a huge success.
I swallow a hard mouthful of beer with a bite of cheese and try to imagine how a born writer could spend five years of her life with her first major work tucked away in a drawer – forever, for all she knew. And then how this writer could endure a further five years in which her work was published under her husband’s name. Colette’s professed indifference seems remarkable: how could this woman have been so casual about her monumental gift? How could she have been so indifferent to her vocation? How could she have passively tolerated her husband’s domination?
Then, by pressing Colette to write for four hours every day, Willy was rapidly able to capitalize on Claudine’s success with three sequels – each published under his own name.
Willy’s domination lasted from his marriage to Colette in 1893 until their separation in 1906. First he persuaded his wife to accept that he would have his own mistresses. Then he encouraged Colette to pursue several lesbian relationships. Finally he pushed Colette to go on stage, laying the groundwork for her future independence. Colette, passive and unfocused, was well aware that she wanted to separate from her husband, but in the end it was he who delivered the final blow: … what I had heard was a dismissal. While I had been dreaming of flight, close beside me someone had been planning to turn me quietly out of the house – out of my own house. She recalled the humiliation of the marital split: I remember the flush that crept over my cheeks, I remember my stupidity. Deprived by fraud of something I had wished to leave by stealth.
Colette’s journey from innocence to experience is often portrayed as a story of calculated rebelliousness. Her many biographers absent-mindedly refer to the occasion when Colette left Willy – except she didn’t. In the frontispiece to Judith Thurman’s bulky biography, Secrets of the Flesh, the publisher Bloomsbury trumpets Colette as ‘the twentieth century’s first modern woman’. Except she wasn’t. Perhaps these assumptions persist because the later Colette – massive and self-assured – bore so slim a resemblance to the slight, timid Colette of her youth. Perhaps it seems impossible to believe in a passive Colette, a docile Colette. Colette re-invented herself, but she did so – at least at first – from necessity, not choice.
Far from being modern, it seems to me that Colette was entirely pagan. Hers was an ancient temperament. Content yourself, I urge you, with a passing temptation, and satisfy it, she told her best friend, the actress Marguerite Moreno, What more can one be sure of than that which one holds in one’s arms, at the moment one holds it in one’s arms …
When I was a little girl my parents lovingly led my little brother and me to the end of their double bed where we were encouraged to kneel and say our prayers before the image of the exposed and bleeding heart of Jesus. I look back on those occasions now with bewilderment. What is it about Christianity and its obsession with sacrifice and death? No doubt that’s one reason why I cherish Colette’s writings. She turned away from death. It didn’t interest her, she always said – not even her own. When her mother died, she refused to go to her funeral or to wear mourning. As for the meaning of life, Colette simply asked: Does one really have time to discover or create one?
When Colette was about thirty-three an idea occurred to her. I had become vaguely aware of a duty towards myself, which was to write something other than the Claudines. It was at this point, I think, that Colette began her process of self-invention, less in the conscious manner of George Sand, and more like the lovely organic unfolding of a flower.
Colette simply opened up to her own gifts. As she blossomed, she naturally drew upon the prosaic clutter, the here-and-nowness of the world around her: household pets and tangled gardens, the St Tropez seaside and the Palais Royal courtyard, messy desks and stale theatrical dressing rooms, her lover’s looks and her mother’s advice. No experience in her life was beneath inclusion in Colette’s art. And because Colette’s life took some extraordinary directions, naturally she wrote about some shocking matters. On more than one occasion a newspaper began serializing one of her works (The Pure and The Impure, The Ripening Seed) only to stop abruptly as it became apparent just how sexually exact and explicit Colette could be. It was as if Colette actively, warmly embraced the world, the flesh, the devil.
With the air whipping up more strongly around my face, I rise and pay my bill. I stroll down to 20 rue Jacob. In 1907 American heiress Natalie Barney, a beautiful and promiscuous lesbian, bought this house. She hosted parties for literary Paris, at the end of which the female guests would celebrate their femininity by donning diaphanous gowns and dancing in the garden temple, followed by a cup of tea. Colette performed naked for the assembled women on several occasions. A frustrated literary figure reportedly once pulled out his penis and waved it at the dancing women, shouting, Have you never seen one of these?
Colette and Natalie Barney had a brief affair, and a long friendship. Even when they were old ladies Natalie would climb the steps of the Palais Royal to visit Colette for a long gossip: two old dames remembering their glory days.
Standing on this gorgeous street, my heart surges as I imagine these extraordinary and gifted women making their way in this little corner of Paris. And even though George Sand died just three years after Colette was born, there’s a curious link between them. It’s one of those only-in-Paris six degrees of separation.
The house at 20 rue Jacob was built in the seventeenth century by George Sand’s great-grandfather, the soldier Maurice de Saxe. He gave it, complete with its ‘Temple d’ Amitié’ in the garden, as a love token to his mistress, the great and cultivated actress Adrienne Lecouvreur. In her short life, Adrienne Lecouvreur was a woman as remarkable and notorious as George Sand and Colette would become. She had many lovers. Voltaire was probably one of them. He adored her and, along with Maurice de Saxe, was by her side when she died.
Natalie Barney knew about the romantic history of her house when she leased it. She, like George Sand, had a taste for an older Paris, a Paris of romantic associations. And, like George Sand, she was generous, placid and romantically ruthless. She once made separate dates with eighteen women for one night. She used to say: I love my life … I never act except according to my pleasure. It’s a stirring echo of George Sand’s wilful declaration: Because I want it. That said everything.
I head to the river, turning my back on the Left Bank of Paris, where the landscape binds up and subsumes all contradictions: saints and sinners, good and bad, society and individual, Christian and pagan. It’s as if the tensions of these opposing forces are forever constrained by the stones and the buildings and the enduring trees. And then there are the women who confronted these tensions, who found their own ways through them and beyond them. Who always rejected death and sacrifice in favor of life and art.
When Colette died in 1954, she was the most famous and revered writer in France. She was given a State funeral, the first time a woman had been so honored. And yet the Catholic Church refused to send a priest to preside at the funeral. Graham Greene sent a famous letter of protest – and tribute – from across the Channel, explaining, A writer whose books we love becomes for us a dearly loved person.
Several hundred years earlier, when Adrienne Lecouvreur died in the house bought for her by George Sand’s ancestor, the Church refused to give the actress a Christian burial. Like Colette, she had simply broken too many taboos. Voltaire protested, another male writer composing a passionate tribute to an artist he loved: This incomparable actress, who almost invented the art of speaking to the heart …
I hug all these thoughts to my heart, and my jacket more warmly around my chest, as I head back to the river and home.
A few hours later Rachel and I are shrugging off our coats in the doorway of Chez Omar, a restaurant on the rue de Bretagne. It’s close to Rachel’s place and convenient and cheap. ‘It’s also fashionable, don’t ask me why,’ says Rachel, as we survey the high-spirited crowd.
This shabby room toned in mustard and wood does seem an unlikely fashion hangout. Far from being glamorous, it’s warm and gently lit. Our host is Omar, a dapper old gentleman, whose shrewd eastern gaze rests upon us.
‘This is my friend Lucinda,’ says Rachel, hugging my arm. ‘She’s a writer, from Australia.’
‘I have many clients from Australia,’ says Omar in softly accented English. ‘Do you know John Waters, the singer? He always comes here. And the designer, Collette …’
‘Dinnigan,’ I say. ‘Yes, I know them. Well no, I don’t know them, actually. But I know of them.’
Rachel and I stand at the bar waiting for our table as we sip a tepid kir. Rachel is telling me about the latest conference she has been invited to address: she is leading the intellectual argument in favor of global free trade, she is proving – bravely, methodically, logically – that third-world poverty can only be eradicated if wealthy nations like France open their trading doors. It’s a message that many people don’t feel inclined to hear. I feel proud to be her friend.
Omar suddenly walks back down the bar to us. He looks across the wooden counter directly at me. He is fractionally shorter.
‘I would like to take you to lunch on Sunday.’
Rachel and I both know that Rachel is not included in this invitation.
‘Well,’ I say. This is something new. ‘Ah,’ I reply, ‘well, that’s very kind, let me think about it.’
Omar nods calmly, and then he shows us to our table.
It’s hard to surprise Rachel, but Omar has done it.
‘Christ, you get along here much more than I do. Have you thought about moving to Paris for a while, it suits you!’
‘Never. I’d find it even harder than you do. You need to be here for your work. I love visiting Paris, but I couldn’t live here, you know that. I’m bound hand, foot and heart to Sydney.’
We hunch shoulders and bump elbows with the stylish young things, we eat average couscous and lamb, we speak loudly over the cheerful noise.
Rachel says, ‘You should go to lunch, Lu, it’s part of the Paris experience. You are a writer, they respect that here you know.’ And, she adds, wanting to clarify, not wanting to be unkind, ‘Perhaps Omar thinks you’ll write about him and his restaurant.’
On the way out, Omar helps us into our coats and I accept his invitation. We agree to meet here on Sunday at 12:15.
As a gust of outdoor air hits our faces, Omar says softly, like a poem, like a gift, ‘I like you. It seems to me that you are ready for anything.’
Like the cool wind, the remark tingles. As if this stranger sees something in me that I don’t yet see myself.