I’ve always felt the great importance of getting into the right set at once on arrival in Heaven. The thing is, one must be careful in a new place not to get into uncongenial company.
Nancy Mitford
I’VE BEEN THINKING a lot about death. Oh, not in a negative way, quite the contrary. I’ve been thinking about death as the final act of the human narration, the ending that explains the beginning and the middle, the resolution that sorts it all out. It’s a natural outcome, I guess, of thinking about women’s lives, their whole lives, from beginning to end. In life, as in all good detective stories, it seems to me that a good ending can make sense of a messy plot, weaving all those loose threads and strange knots into a very satisfying whole.
Death is an honorable business in Paris. There are at least three cemeteries within the périphérique. Père Lachaise is a major tourism destination, where little girls still put flowers on Marcel Proust’s grave and young men make the pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s tomb. Parisians go there too. They like a good death – it suits the logical and pessimistic side of their nature.
And I too take a great interest in the topic. I realize that it’s impossible to plan the way you die. But I do have some clear preferences. I would very much prefer not to die by animal. This applies particularly to shark or crocodile attack, which seems to me a most humiliating way to go. Humanity has spent an awfully long time overcoming nature, and I feel I would be letting the team down were I to slide down the evolutionary pole to the bottom of the food chain, being munched alongside plankton and seaweed. Rachel reckons she doesn’t mind how she dies as long as it’s not of lung cancer. Her reasoning is that if she tells her family and friends she has lung cancer they will secretly think it serves her right (or, more specifically, serves her right stupid bitch!) for smoking. This would be more than she could bear. On her death bed Rachel wants people to be nice to her – and mean it.
Some people prefer a quick death. My present preference is for a slow one, with time for tender goodbyes and little speeches and farewell parties, and, well, last words, and final says on the matter. Whatever the matter might be.
So here I am standing at Place de la Concorde. As usual I have the best intentions of strolling around and looking at the gorgeous, gilded sculptures and flowing fountains. As usual I find myself paralyzed at the thought of moving anywhere off this bit of footpath for fear of the traffic that swirls in a chaotic frenzy. So I shall just swivel and gaze and think.
Even with the traffic, this is still one of the most beautiful and famous locations in Paris. Place de la Concorde means harmony and amity and peace. Ceremonial festivities are still held here. But this is also the killing field of Paris; this place is stained with blood.
During the Revolutionary Terror, from 1793 to July 1794, no less than 1, 119 people were executed here. But you wouldn’t know it. There are plaques everywhere in Paris commemorating all kinds of people and events. But there is no plaque here to remind us of the shaved heads and tied hands, the ugly open tumbrel, the jeering crowds, the smell of stale blood, the sweat and fear on the platform. Perhaps it was just too horrible.
In those dark days, it was fashionable to laugh at the guillotine. People were careful with their final words. On approaching her death, Manon Roland, one of the republican salonnières, cried out magnificently: ‘Sweet Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!’ In a different style, the revolutionary Danton quipped roguishly to the executioner: ‘Show my head to the people! – it is worth the trouble.’
But not everyone was like that.
On 15 October 1793, Queen Marie Antoinette was brought here to die. She had spent her final days in solitary confinement in the Conciergerie prison on the Ile de la Cité. If you have been to the Conciergerie you’ll know just how surprisingly awful it is. It makes you shiver. It makes the hair stand up on your neck. And it’s not just the cold. Even after two hundred years, the pale stones reek of horror.
Just after 11 am the executioner arrived at the Queen’s little cell. He tied her hands behind her back and hacked off her hair. She climbed awkwardly into the open tumbrel. The wooden benches were hard beneath her thin white gown. The cart rumbled over rough cobblestones down the length of rue Saint-Honoré. At rue Royale it turned left to reach the open Place. The revolutionary artist Jacques-Louis David was living in rue Saint-Honoré and saw the Queen pass by. He quickly sketched what he saw: an ugly, shrunken and devastated woman.
After she died, the Queen’s surviving friends were haunted by thoughts of the long, lonely hour she endured in the cart. What was she thinking as she confronted the taunts and stares of her former subjects? As she was carted like cattle to her death?
Along the route the Queen glimpsed reminders of other days. She passed the rue Royale apartment she had kept for her private visits to Paris. Maybe she remembered the fun of those jaunts to masked balls and the opera, the company of friends, the thrill of escaping court duties.
As she turned into this Place, she may have recalled her very first public event in Paris after she married the heir to the throne and became Dauphine. It took place in May 1770 when this was known as Place Louis XV. Nearly 300,000 had turned out to greet the newlyweds, but the event was badly managed and 132 people died in the crush. Marie Antoinette’s second visit to Paris was more successful. The crowd cheered the young couple and the Duc de Brissac told the young Dauphine that all of Paris had fallen in love with her. Marie Antoinette wrote about the event to her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, remarking complacently how little seemed required of her in order to please the crowd. Her mother wrote back and sharply told her daughter not to take anything for granted. Mother, it turned out, knew best.
But perhaps Marie Antoinette had other, more somber recollections in mind. After all, she had changed a lot over the past few years. From a spoiled, haughty creature she had transformed into a strong and loyal woman. She stood by her husband, refusing to leave the country without him. She had comforted him and cared for their children with a steadfastness that few who knew her thought possible. But her husband, the King, was now dead, guillotined in January. She had been humiliated during a show trial when she had been accused of all kinds of crimes, including incest with her own son. The little boy had been removed from her care. She had heard him swear and curse as the guards had taught him, and sing revolutionary songs in the courtyard.
Whatever her private thoughts, Marie Antoinette retained her aristocratic hauteur to the end. She held her head high. As she crossed to the guillotine she inadvertently stepped on her executioner’s foot. ‘Pardon, Monsieur,’ she said, with Hapsburg precision, ‘I did not do it on purpose.’ It may have been a statement about her whole foolish, tragic life.
Of course, the death of a queen lends itself to drama. And I have a literary turn of mind. I am all too inclined to elevate small incidents into grand gestures, to read Shakespearean significance into events which are no more than the sheer bump and accident of life.
Which brings me to a very different death. Two months after the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette, Louis XV’s mistress, Jeanne du Barry, followed the same route from the Conciergerie to this Place. She too had begun her career here. She was a pretty twenty-year-old mingling in the crowd on the day they unveiled Louis XV’s statue in 1763. It was, by coincidence, the day that Madame de Pompadour made her last public appearance. The beautiful blonde successor to Madame de Pompadour was spotted by Jean du Barry, cardsharp, impresario, dealer and pimp. He would marry Jeanne, introduce her to the top men in Paris, and eventually take her to Versailles to captivate Louis XV himself.
But, on the way to her death, the sunny, racy past must have seemed an eternity away to Madame du Barry. It was a freezing December afternoon. Snow was falling and the light was dim. Most of the crowd had given up and gone home. But the bloodthirsty and the curious stayed to gawk at the famous beauty who had captivated the former King. What they saw was a plump, frightened fifty-one-year-old woman. Even this hardy crew was shocked and disturbed by her frantic moans and sobs. An anxious murmur started up.
Right up until the very last moment, Madame du Barry couldn’t believe this could happen to her. She had loved life, and life had been rich and full of glories undreamt of for a little Parisian girl. She couldn’t believe it would end like this, why should it? Was she not simply one of the people? Until the last moment, she begged and bribed and pleaded. ‘I’ll show you where my jewels are, there’s more to tell, wait,’ she said. The night before her execution she ate an enormous meal, as if she couldn’t get her fill of life’s sustenance. The next day when they came to get her she was amazed. ‘This can’t be happening, it’s a mistake, wait, please.’ As they placed her in the tumbrel she stumbled and wept. She was a woman who loved life and wanted to keep on living, no matter how briefly. As they rumbled over the cobblestones she moaned and begged. As they pulled her onto the platform she struggled and pleaded and wriggled. As they lay her down, positioning her head in the crevice of the guillotine, she said – and these were her last words: ‘Wait, Monsieur, I beg you … just a minute more!’
I don’t take a moral view about how a life should be lived or ended. If anything, I take an aesthetic view. I realize it’s impossible to control the circumstances of death. But a good death surely lends poetry to a life. Marie Antoinette’s death was moving because she was a woman who transcended herself at the end. Madame du Barry’s death was touching because she didn’t.
I turn and stroll back down the rue de Rivoli. At the Galignani bookshop I stop and idly turn to a table of French-language paperbacks on sale. A title catches my eye: Amoureuses du Grand Siècle (Gallant Women of the Great [17th] Century). Mmm, interesting. I turn to the table of contents. Here is Ninon de Lanclos. Here is Madame de Lafayette. And here is the woman whose ultimate fate has eluded me, Hortense Mancini, la duchesse Mazarin.
I flip to the relevant chapter, and then straight to the last page. It says: He [her husband] deposited her coffin next to that of her uncle Mazarin in the funeral monument in the College of Four Nations founded by the Cardinal, today our Institut [de France]. This is nothing new. I knew this. But I went to see, and the body’s just not there.
I read on: One would like to imagine the ghost of the joyous Hortense presiding over the debates of our Académiciens. Yes, that’s right, I think. One would have liked to imagine the ghost of Hortense at the Institut. But she wasn’t there.
And then, with leaping heart: But in 1793 her remains were thrown into the Seine by the sans-culottes [revolutionaries].
I am transfixed, rooted to the spot, electrified by this bulletin. So that’s what happened to Hortense. I can hardly breathe.
It happened in the exact same year that Marie Antoinette and Madame du Barry died. At the height of the Terror. Just over the river the rabble must have somehow stormed the Institut and extracted the – the what? coffin or bones? – from the tomb and thrown them into the Seine. (I wonder why they didn’t do the same to the remains of Cardinal Mazarin?) And then the bones must have just flowed down through the city like so much debris. Perhaps the remains of Hortense mingled with the blood of those who died on the guillotine. Strange to think that Hortense Mancini played a part in French history – nearly one hundred years after her death.
I look around, wishing there were someone here to tell. All of a sudden I feel very emotional. I feel as if I too am part of this flow, this river of life and death, this beauty and this futility, these women.
If history were an emotion, perhaps this would be the feeling.
Père Lachaise is not what I expected. I imagined it would be quiet and peaceful. But it certainly doesn’t feel dead. In fact, it’s alarmingly alive. Everywhere I look the head-stones have cracked and the rubble is piled up and green growing shoots poke through the dirt. It’s as if a slow-moving earthquake were underway. In fact, it’s rather as if the dead themselves were restless, shifting and squirming under the earth, gradually easing their way to the surface. A few staff members stand around with shovels. They have a helpless expression, as if overwhelmed by the struggle to keep the buried in their rightful place.
And looking at the list of inhabitants here, I can see why. These were larger-than-life figures – larger than death too. Here’s the taboo-breaking Colette lying under a short square slab, with fresh flowers on her grave. Here’s Edith Piaf, the heartbreaking and heartbroken singer. Maria Callas, who died of sorrow when Ari Onassis married the widow Kennedy. The great actresses Simone Signoret and Sarah Bernhardt. Cléo de Mérode, the nineteenth-century cocotte who befriended the young Colette. Gloria in excelsis Cléo! her lovers would sing appreciatively. Marie Laurencin the painter: Coco Chanel once commissioned and then rejected a portrait by Laurencin; the artist portrayed Chanel as soft, sweet and dreamy – quite unlike the woman herself. Marie d’Agoult who ran off with Franz Liszt. Dancing Isadora Duncan who died of a scarf. All these women are buried here. Even so, they don’t seem quite dead yet.
Père Lachaise is also the final home of some of the important men in these grand women’s lives. As I approach Chopin’s grave I see a small group of people kneeling and crossing themselves as they reverently place flowers and a Polish flag. They look so upset, you’d think Chopin died yesterday.
I seek out the grave of Germaine de Staël’s lover Benjamin Constant. In Arduis Constans is carved on the tombstone. Constance in adversity. No doubt the motto is intended to signify a whole life, but I bet everyone who knew him thought it was an apt description of Constant’s love affair with Germaine de Staël.
I am glad Benjamin Constant has a telling phrase on his tombstone. Most of the gravestones are very dull, offering merely a date of birth and death. I rather like the idea of something witty on my tombstone, something to make people laugh, or think. In my deepest secret fantasy I imagine it also says something like: Here lies Lucinda Hold-forth – diplomat, author, showgirl. I have no idea how I am going to justify showgirl.
But if Père Lachaise is short on witty words, it does have some good visual jokes. Here’s President Felix Faure, who died in 1898 while making love to his mistress. He’s on his back, a life-sized statue reclining on his tomb. And he’s got a very pleased look on his face – it’s almost post-coital. Marshal Suchet was one of the bravest of Napoleon’s marshals. Above his grave is a busty angel caressing an erect cannon.
A well-dressed man minces his way down a path. He leads me unerringly to the defiled tomb of Oscar Wilde; gentle, brilliant, persecuted Oscar Wilde. Oscar loved Paris. The city revealed to him the flipside of beauty, the price to be paid for pleasure, and the exquisite moment when pleasure flirts with danger. The Parisian aesthetes inspired The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of my favorite books. Paris in the late 1900s was completely unlike triumphal, brutal, imperial London. Having been defeated by the Germans in 1870, Paris was a city at home with frailty. It had a vocabulary for failure. Delicate and painful emotions like tristesse, ennui, regret and even disgust could be explored in this city without shame. No wonder it was where Oscar Wilde retreated to die.
Rachel has an interesting view of Parisian decadence. She thinks Paris hides her dark side, her twentieth-century failures, the stain of Nazi occupation and collaboration. Official, glorious, gilded Paris, she thinks, obscures the darker truths. In her blacker moments Rachel calls Paris the museum theme park or, even more cruelly, the real Euro Disney. She says these things with a scornful turn of her curved lips.
There are lots of people who think it’s unhealthy to dwell on death or dying or even the past. They reckon that the thing to do is to live for today and to look steadfastly into the future. And I’ve learned my own lesson about living in the past.
When my boyfriend left me after the 1996 election, I didn’t believe it. I was absolutely convinced that he had suffered some kind of brainstorm from which he would, eventually, recover. And when he recovered, I thought, he would hurry back to me and we would get married and live happily ever after. This belief was so strong that it was only slightly shaken when he went off on his diplomatic posting to Jakarta. Four months later I was still calling and e-mailing him, waiting with anxious but unquenched faith for the inevitable moment of his return.
One day a mutual acquaintance came to see me. He brought up the subject of my boyfriend. ‘Well of course it’s so lonely for him up there,’ I said. ‘It can be awful you know.’
‘That’s not what I heard,’ he replied, looking at me from under his eyelashes. Then he glanced down and added, ‘Of course, they’re still keeping it pretty quiet.’
I rushed around to visit two dear friends, a couple, on whose old blue couch I collapsed as great shiny tears spouted from my eyes. I couldn’t believe it. This man was my destiny! Joanne hugged and consoled me. But her husband took a different approach. ‘So let me get this straight,’ said James, leaning forward, pushing his glasses back on his nose. ‘You say that you and this guy were meant to be together. But you say he’s not only left you. He’s left the country. He’s got another job. And now you are telling me he’s even got another girlfriend.’ James looked straight at me, with an incredulous look on his face as if he couldn’t quite believe he was about to state something so obvious. ‘I mean, face it: it’s over.’
Once I stopped crying I felt a lot better. And I started to recover almost immediately.
But if personal history can be unhelpful, History with a capital H is entirely meaningful to me. I suspect it has replaced literature as a way for me to learn what it means to be human. Today we lead formless lives. We live with limitless freedom in a world without contours. History, and her sister, tradition, offer us the shape and style of human experience. It’s the standard against which we can choose to measure ourselves, or rebel.
There’s another reason. It’s only when you understand history that you can appreciate how culturally determined we all are. Things which we tell ourselves are ‘natural’ are often nothing more than behavioral fads. For example, I am, historically speaking, a late Romantic, that’s my historical fate. But it doesn’t mean I have to confine myself to the limits shaped by my age.
I once made the mistake of telling my boyfriend that I didn’t want a small, meager life but dreamed of a big one. At that time I really didn’t know what I meant myself. If I could have expressed it I would have said it wasn’t about a grand style of living, or travelling widely, or even about doing adventurous things. In fact, it wasn’t about external things at all. It was about a desire for an enlarged sense of life, an internal spaciousness, a capacity for fullness of experience and response.
My boyfriend simply scoffed at me, he thought I suffered from a bit too much self-esteem. He came from an upright Protestant family which prized financial security and modesty and solid achievement. He thought I was a grandiose Irish Catholic with jumped-up views and romantic delusions. Perhaps he was right.
Wandering and dreaming, losing myself in the alleys and corners of Père Lachaise, today I sense a deep connection to the women of Paris. I am grateful to the city that nurtured them and welcomes me.
This Paris, the Paris I love, feels handmade to me, delicately stitched together through time. It’s like a lovely collaborative work of art, initiated by the seventeenth-century salon hostesses, enriched by their eighteenth-century successors and embellished in turn by their nineteenth- and twentieth-century descendants. Each generation of women adding to the legacy before handing it on. Like a beautiful tapestry woven by dozens of hands over hundreds of years.
I stand here suffused with memories not my own, and yet it seems that they belong to me as well.
At the end of my long walk around Père Lachaise, I come to the top of the hill. Here is Gertrude Stein’s grave. It is massive, plain and strong, like the woman herself. GERTRUDE STEIN spell the big gold letters. After a moment I walk around the back. There, in much smaller letters, is the other name. Alice B. Toklas.
I’d heard about this grave, and, no doubt like most people, I thought how appalling it was that Alice was relegated to afterthought status. But in fact, the inscription was at her express request. Which suggests a kind of pride in modesty. It’s as if Alice is saying to us: Behind every great woman, there’s … another great woman.