Chapter 4

Le Marais

NOW THAT I HAD A JOB, it was time to find an apartment. Displaying a level of indifference to my new workplace that I would work carefully to maintain in the months to come, I spent the better part of the first month of my employment at the ICC out of the office, scouring the streets of Paris for somewhere suitable to live. As a refugee of fringe-dwelling, hand-to-mouth living in London, I had only one criterion for my Parisian abode: it had to be central. Living in Paris, I reasoned, was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. If I was going to live here, I wanted to live in the dirty, sweaty, heaving heart of it.

The Marais was therefore earmarked as my neighborhood du choix. Otherwise known as the “trendy fourth arrondissement” or “le gai Marais,” it is to Paris what Soho is to London, the Village is to New York, or Darlinghurst is to Sydney. Except that it was infinitely more charming than all of the above put together. Filled to overflowing with an eclectic mix of young urban professionals, a community of Orthodox Jews, practically every gay man in the city, and a bolt of old grannies (who had lived there for eons and refused to move, no matter how much public male-on-male action they were inadvertently exposed to), the quartier had all the elements I was looking for. It was as central as it was possible to be in Paris without actually being in the Seine, it had gay men and rabbis living cheek by jowl, it was picture-postcard perfect, and it was heavily populated with bars, cafés, and restaurants that were packed at all hours of the day and night. Having undergone a wholesale gentrification twenty years previously, the quartier had been transformed from a working-class ghetto to some of the most sought-after real estate in all of Paris.

Called Le Marais after the swamp that Louis XIV drained to build stately homes for his court, my new neighborhood had some of the most stunning old buildings in the city. The Place des Vosges, the Musée Picasso, Les Archives, and the Musée Carnavalet were just some of the beautiful former hôtel particuliers that populated Le Marais.

Turning a corner and finding yourself in the Marais was not unlike stumbling upon a wonderfully decorated film set. It was a labyrinth of narrow streets, lined on either side by tumbledown buildings, hole-in-the-wall bars and cafés, old streetlamps, and massive, ornate double wooden doors opening onto secret courtyards and honey-colored buildings. Every now and then, as if paid by the city’s tourist officials to be there, an old woman would shuffle out of a boulangerie with a wizened old pooch on a leash and a baguette under her arm.

Coming as I did from a country where eighty-year-old inner-city row houses were as historic as buildings got, it didn’t seem possible to me that people could actually live in what was surely just an elaborate facade for a very expensive period drama. When courtiers lived here back in the eighteenth century, just up the river from King Louis’s modest pile the Palais du Louvre, the Marais had been a seething hotbed of drama and intrigue. Dangerous liaisons had gone on behind every door—heaving breasts, steamy boudoirs, tightly strung corsets, men in wigs, and sexually frustrated madames. Two hundred years later, not a whole lot had changed. But what had once been an eighteenth-century playground for kings was now a modern-day playground for queens.

Responding one morning to an ad in the real estate weekly Particuliers de Particuliers, I found myself waiting outside the large brown wooden doors of 18 Rue Sainte Croix de la Bretonnerie. As well as being one of the longest street names in all of Paris, it also happened to be one of the best-known streets in all of the Marais. If the Marais had a thoroughfare, this was it. If the Marais was the pumping heart of gay Paris, Rue Sainte Croix was its major artery.

Entering the digicode numbers as instructed by the old woman proprietor to whom I had spoken earlier in the day, I stepped through the doors and into a pleasant courtyard. As I started to climb the stairs of Escalier B to the second-floor apartment, I was met halfway up by a long line of people, each of them clinging to their own copy of Particuliers de Particuliers and each of them wearing the same haunted look as me, the demented look of the temporarily homeless. Having been well advised by workmates to arrive with a complete dossier—including bank statements, references, salary slips, a large wad of cash, and a document authorizing the handover of my firstborn child, as and if required—I waited my turn with only a hint of smugness.

When I finally entered the apartment, I was met by a scene so shocking it was all I could do not to turn and run. The apartment was perfectly situated. It had a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows in a living room that was flooded with morning sunlight. The bedroom was large, the bathroom was serviceable, and it was fully furnished, meaning I would have to buy nothing. But the walls! The walls! They were like nothing I had ever seen before. As a child of the seventies, I think I can safely say that I have seen my fair share of orange home furnishings. But these padded, russet-orange-fabric-covered walls—with a swirling white floral and paisley pattern—were something else again. It wasn’t so much that they dominated the room as they devoured it. Just standing in the middle of them felt like being trapped on some awful drug-induced trip from which there was no apparent escape. And when you looked closely, you realized there was none. By covering all access doors to the living room—be it to the kitchen, the bedroom, or the bathroom—with the same patterned orange fabric, the masterminds behind the decoration of this particular apartment had managed to achieve that highly sought-after interior design feel—the padded-cell effect.

And then there was the furniture. By virtue of having been purchased sometime around 1965, the bed looked like something straight off the set of an Austin Powers film. Its black-padded-vinyl headboard featured a set of built-in reading lights—or “bed headlights,” as I came to call them. The porn-star bed was perfectly complemented by a pair of black and orange conical swivel chairs. The apartment looked nothing more than uninhabitable.

But I had been searching for a home for three weeks and was now being turfed out of the hotel for which the ICC had kindly been paying. Besides, orange walls aside, it was certainly no worse than other apartments I had seen. The week before I had almost put a deposit down on a place that would have required me to climb a ladder and crawl into a hole halfway up the wall each time I wanted to go to bed. The walls I could learn to live with. I just needed a roof over my head.

Faster than the old biddy proprietor could say “But you’re an Australian blow-in with no rental record at all in France,” I flashed my winning smile, blurted out the three French real estate phrases I knew, and threw a wad of cash on the table. The deal was done.

Two days later I transported my paltry collection of belongings from the hotel to my new apartment. I distinctly remember the first night in my new home. Having taken a whole ten minutes to unpack my bag, I sat on the bottle-green velour sofa in the living room and watched with a rising sense of claustrophobia as the orange walls closed in around me. So this was it. My Paris home. A naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling cast a harsh yellow light over the room. The place seemed empty, cold, soulless. I put on my headphones and fired up my Walkman for distraction and comfort. But there was no escaping it. With the adrenaline of arrival fast ebbing and with the excitement of apartment-hunting over, it was now just me, in an empty orange room, in a job I wasn’t sure about, in a city full of strangers.

Outside it was freezing cold. A dark, rainy winter’s night in Paris. I could hear the hum of the metropolis outside, and standing at my window, I could see people walking in huddled pairs on the street below. I turned to look around my new apartment and suddenly felt very small, very alone, and very, very far from home.