He laughed again. ‘I’m just teasing. Hey, I’m just about to close up. Let’s go grab something to eat. You can practise your French.’
I nodded, cheeks still flushed, heart fluttering; I didn’t know the right words to say in English, let alone French.
Café Costes was an impossibly hip restaurant with an ice-cool interior courtesy of the enfant terrible of design Philippe Starck. We sat outside, en terrasse, and Marc ordered two kirs royales — champagne tinged with crème de cassis, just as a tint of pink infused the grey of the cool winter light. The sky was steadily darkening to jet-black, and soon the lamps flickered into action. The heady romance of the moment would have whirled my senses into overdrive had the champagne not already done so.
‘That is the Fontaine des Innocents,’ Marc said, pointing to the square before us, in the middle of which was a sort of triumphal arch, set upon a tiered, illuminated pedestal down which water cascaded. And then he chuckled: ‘Innocent, like you.’
‘I’m not that much of a child!’ I exclaimed. ‘Okay . . . maybe a little,’ I conceded, in answer to his raised eyebrow.
‘Don’t worry, I’m a true gentleman,’ he said, at which he lightly took my hand, and bobbed his head over it so that his lips hovered just above, close enough that I could feel his breath on my skin.
Marc might have gone on about the 1960s, but like many French men, his in-built codes of behaviour can be traced to long before then; he is a product of centuries of traditions and customs. As I’d find out that evening, he was proud of his city’s heritage, weaving historical tidbits into his wide-ranging conversation.
‘It’s the oldest monumental fountain in Paris,’ he continued, one of the many facts I’d learn on our evening’s tour. ‘It actually used to be called the Fontaine des Nymphes — see the sculptures?’
‘Of course it was,’ I said rolling my eyes. ‘You French and your naked women.’
‘We just like to celebrate the beauty of the female form,’ he murmured, leaning back in his three-legged bucket chair, as though to take in more of me.
‘Some gentleman!’ I joked, trying to make light of the situation, but he continued to stare. Instinctively hugging my coat around me, I shivered, perhaps a little too dramatically. ‘It’s cold,’ I declared, partly in attempt to change the course of conversation.
‘Really? It’s hot where I’m sitting. Or maybe it’s just this heat lamp.’ He was clearly enjoying the situation. Parisian men probably didn’t get to toy with naïve Australian girls all that often.
‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ he said, laughing. ‘Everyone flirts in France. It’s a national game.’
Marc had used the term flirter. The French borrowed the term from the English, although they’re flirts from way back, because the English word was pinched from French in the first place. In Old French, fleureter meant to talk sweet nothings. You can still say conter fleurette — to talk of little flowers. It’s one of my favourite French expressions, bringing to mind a hand-in-hand walk through a field of daisies. Speaking of which, when the French pluck daisies, they don’t simply alternate between ‘he loves me’ and ‘he loves me not’. Plucked petals correspond to one of the following: Je t’aime un peu (I love you a little), Je t’aime beaucoup (a lot), Je t’aime tendrement (tenderly), Je t’aime passionnément (passionately), Je t’aime à la folie (madly) or Je t’aime pas du tout (not at all). Matters of the heart are not noir and blanc in French. Love is a much more nuanced game.
The curious thing about French flirting is that there might not even be a particular aim in mind. The French, I’ve learned, naturally like to charm, and in their language, la séduction is not the same cold, hard calculated play that it is in English; it’s about pleasing for the sheer joy of both parties. Men make an effort to talk to women, and not because it’s a means to a certain end. Often dialogue is the end in itself.
Like the water trickling down that nymph-adorned fountain, our stream of conversation flowed naturally. Marc spoke slowly so that I could understand him, and jotted down words I didn’t know on a serviette.
‘So what do you want to do with your life?’ he asked.
‘I have no idea. I’m still recovering from the exhaustion of school.’
‘I know what you mean. School in France is fierce, too. How you perform affects the rest of your life, the jobs you get. Luckily I knew what I wanted to do, so I didn’t let the pressure get to me.’
‘I was solely responsible for my pressure,’ I said. ‘But I think I burnt myself out. I’m not quite sure I’ll ever be able to work that hard again.’
‘Well, I can tell you studied your French — you speak like a textbook! Very formal and 1800s, it’s rather sweet.’
It was around this time that I realised I’d been addressing Marc as vous — the formal form of ‘you’ — while he had been using the familiar tu all along. That might not seem such a big deal in English, where everyone is the same kind of you, but in French, tu versus vous is a serious power semantic. (So much for all that égalité.) Adults tutoyer kids, who in turn vouvoyer their elders. At the office, your boss would probably be a vous, and you a tu. But it gets tricky when you’re closer in status and age. If you start off with vous, changing to tu is a huge jump; you’re moving into a new level of intimacy. But what did it suggest, I wondered, that Marc saw me as tu from the start — and was happy to be a vous. He considered me to be young, that was obvious. I couldn’t work out if it was also a respect issue. Should I be offended? Or should I just be a grown-up and simply tutoyer him back. But I just couldn’t bring myself to say tu. Perhaps he awed me with his apparent worldliness. Or maybe I was still overly governed by the rigid rules of high-school French. Interestingly, Marc never suggested I tutoyer him. He probably liked that subtle imbalance of power.
After dinner, we wandered around Les Halles. As I tried to keep up with the ever-veering subjects of Marc’s conversation, I soon lost my bearings around the swerving streets. I wondered how geography shapes a person’s outlook on life. My home city was a neat and tidy grid, with one best way to get anywhere, and I was used to linear lines of discourse. In Paris, you could choose any number of interesting routes to reach the one destination. Could that be the reason the locals flit so easily from one seemingly random subject to another?
As we stepped into a particularly lively street, I leaned closer towards Marc, trying to make out his barely audible words. And then a little closer still. And before I knew it, he had turned me around and pinned me against a wall, right between two cafés filled with outdoor diners.
‘Embrasse-moi!’ It was my first French kiss and it was magnifique.
‘Let’s keep walking,’ Marc said, after a few minutes, ever so nonchalantly. I felt like a hot breathless mess. I looked around selfconsciously, but nobody was staring. Nobody else’s world had spun off its axis. We hadn’t put anyone off their meal. Scenes like this — which I’d usually only seen in movies — obviously happened all the time in Paris.
Marc continued chatting, as before, but he’d taken my arm in his. I noticed that he made sure to always walk on the street side of the footpath, which required fairly regular arm-holding rearrangements. It was a little clumsy, but also endearing — his commitment to an apparent vestigial custom from the days when the muddy Parisian streets would play havoc with women’s dresses.
French chivalry dates back to the Middle Ages, when the knights — les chevaliers — ritualised a new romantic love for a new kind of woman, one who craved worship. With their lords away fighting the holy wars, ladies took charge of their castles, which lent them an erotic new prominence for the younger, more handsome nobles left behind. Adultery was officially a no-go zone, but that didn’t mean that star-crossed lovers couldn’t indulge in long lingering looks, and playful, if complex, rituals of courtship. Men had to prove their worth and devotion in new and entertaining ways, from music to jousting. Courts became the centre of attention, their ladies sitting upon throned pedestals, adored by their
fans and serenaded by troubadours, whose love stories were recited and sung all over France. This new style of romance became known as courtly love; its rules developed at court, but it was also very much like a game that two might play on another kind of court, batting bons mots and eyes at one another. Its modern-day descendant is courtoisie — courtesy: men opening doors for women, and the like.
‘Come, I want to show you something,’ said Marc, taking my hand and leading me down a cobbled street. We stopped before a huge wooden porte-cochère, which creaked open after Marc punched in a door code.
‘You live here?’ I asked, somewhat hesitant.
‘No, I just know the code. There is the most beautiful hidden garden.’
‘But that’s illegal.’ I knew I sounded lame, but a mild sense of panic had flicked on my flight-or-fight sense, and I was starting to think I might need a getaway strategy. And a hefty coach door would not have been helpful to the situation.
‘Ah, the law is not so serious here. We are the land of liberté, remember?’ Spoken like a true citizen of a city where pedestrians race across the road at any given time, regardless of the risk that a car might be zooming the wrong way down that one-way street.
We had walked through a vaulted entryway, into a cobbled courtyard, a wonderland of fairy lights, topiary trees and statues of nymphs (but of course). A row of lean and elegant, leafless trees stretched to the sky, their stark branches making patterns with the exposed beams of one of the buildings, while a stone building opposite was covered in a luscious coat of glossy green ivy. The semi-shuttered windows looked down upon us with window boxes of chrysanthemum, valiantly a-bloom despite the winter chill, in vibrant oranges and yellows. It would have been delightful had I not been so suddenly overcome with nerves.
‘I want to show you what’s down the end here,’ said Marc.
And that’s when I knew I had to get out. I can’t remember what I said, but I stammered every excuse under the stars why I shouldn’t be there — in frightful franglais, as my French vocabulary is only accessible when the rest of my mind is totally calm and clear.
Eventually Marc gave up trying to lead me down the garden path (literally), and emitted a huge Gallic sigh. ‘Okay, let’s get you back to your hotel. I told you I am a gentleman.’
Oddly, we reverted to our previous banter, as though nothing untoward had just occurred. Perhaps this was simply part of the French game of love. I had a sneaking suspicion that an Australian guy, in the same situation, would have stormed out.
We finally found ourselves in front of my hotel.
‘So, can I come up?’ asked Marc, pouting his lips, cocking his head and generally trying to be as irresistible as possible.
But I had a visceral need to feel in control of my life once more. ‘I have to get to sleep,’ I replied artlessly, feeling every bit the unsophisticated Australian.
‘Tant pis pour toi,’ he muttered, turning on his shiny heels and walking off into the night. Too bad for you.
So much for chivalry.
I woke the next morning with that same hazy sense of disorientation you have after a dream that has spun out of control — you know, those ones that begin well enough, yet suddenly go off in strange and random directions, and you find yourself saying or doing the exact opposite of what your higher self is screaming. And then it dawned on me that what I was unravelling and replaying in my mind had actually occurred. A one-two of mortification hit me in the pit of my stomach, and I instinctively curled into the foetal position, pulling the bedspread over my head in a kind of denial reflex.
Not that I thought I should have invited Marc up to my hotel room, or stayed in that secret garden of his. I didn’t regret saying non. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had taken a misjudged turn at some point, said the wrong thing, failed some kind of test. I felt gauche, like a silly kid playing dress-ups, acting at being worldly and seductive. And perhaps I’d falsely advertised myself, with my thigh-skimming dress and knee-high boots. I wondered how a Parisienne would have acted. She probably wouldn’t have worn vinyl, for one. And then never got herself into a situation she didn’t want to be in. She would have been one step ahead — which is always easier when wearing little ballerina flats, of course.
From my observations of Parisiennes in their natural habitat — what they wore, how they chatted with men in cafés — I was starting to enviously sense that these women might have the right balance of seductiveness and self-preservation. Just like those medieval ladies, they were active and equal players in the court of love, but always in control — knowing when to lean in and when to pull back. How much to reveal, how much to hide.
As decidedly non-Parisian as I felt that morning, I didn’t think it was something I couldn’t learn, that these subtle seduction instincts were exclusively innate to Parisiennes. I had a hunch that courtship remained very much a coded affair; when there are rules, anyone eager enough can learn how to play, with time and practice. I also needed to learn the secrets to Parisienne style, I sighed, as I slipped into a hot-pink pinafore, belted up a faux-leather coat and zipped on my high boots.
After stomping and scowling my way around the local streets, I took a turn onto Avenue de l’Opéra, looked up to see the old opera house and couldn’t help but smile. Every lovesick girl knows the feel-good powers of cake, and the Palais Garnier is like the most glorious gâteau you could dream up, a tiered and domed, marble-rippled confection, drizzled with mint icing and garlanded in gold. As a building, it’s voluptuous almost to the point of vulgarity. Its creator Charles Garnier, in the mid nineteenth century, mixed all sorts of design references to come up with an entirely new kind of architectural splendour, one to symbolise a new age where princesses and prostitutes continually one-upped each other in the glamour stakes, one where the nouveau riche gorged themselves on opulence. Garnier, a son of a blacksmith and a lace maker, was the perfect man to refashion the definition of luxury, setting the scene for the grandiose Belle Époque, where life was more a stage than the stage itself.
I decided to venture inside — it seemed like a suitably melodramatic thing to do, given the tortured, operatic drama playing inside my head. I knew that I was going to be wowed, but I was not prepared for how knee-weakeningly lavish the interior would be. You can barely breathe for the opulence: curvaceous bronze statues brandishing a galaxy of lamps, exotic mosaics underfoot and florid paintings above, a kaleidoscope of coloured marbles, gold paint and crystal-heavy chandeliers dazzling your eyes at every turn — and mirrors to multiply the sumptuousness all the more.
‘Zee Pariziens came ’ere not for zee show, but to zee an’ be zeen,’ the tour guide was saying. We stood at the base of the grand staircase, an exuberant sweep of marble and onyx that splits in two, ascending to a ring of gilded balconies. ‘Men came ’ere wiz zeir wives on a Monday, and zeir mistresses on a Friday. Or zey came looking for a mistress. ’Ere was zee best place in town to pick up. You can imagine how seductive zee ladies looked, walking up zeze ztairz wiz zeir robes à faux cul [bustle dresses — literally: fake-butt frocks], wiz zeir diamonds glitterrring on zeir décolleté, sparrrkling under zee chandeliers, non?’
The Palais Garnier had been the home of both singing and dancing until recently, when the Opéra de Paris had decamped to the Place de la Bastille. Twenty years later, I still haven’t been, partly because the hulking Modernist building leaves me cold — as does what goes on inside. Despite my mother’s impassioned efforts, I’ve never fallen for the opera. I mean, I get it if you feel like singing about love — but when your aria concerns what you’re going to eat for dinner, I can’t take that seriously. I’ve always been more of a ballet kind of girl. I’m a sucker for a tutu, for one. But I also love the mystique of ballet, the power of what is not said, the focus on the universal language of the body. Ballet for me has a subliminal poetry, elegant demureness and subtle force; it’s just more, well, French.
Sure, there’s French opera, but that’s really just a tweaking of what was ori
ginally an Italian import. The Italian language, so rhythmic in even everyday banter, naturally lends itself to the lofty highs and dramatic lows of opera.
But ballet is French at every pirouette, right down to its slipper straps. It was the French who originally thought to have women dance during the entractes of Italian opera, and this eventually spun off into its own art form of classical ballet. When we think of ballet, most of us imagine flutters of frothy white tulle, for which we must also say merci to the French; during the height of the Romantic era, ballerina Marie Taglioni so entranced with her turn in the ultimate ballet blanc, Les Sylphides, that we gush over this ethereal style of ballet to this day.
We were ushered into the red-velvet auditorium, lush and lustrous under the magnificent gilt-bronze and crystal chandelier (‘az tall az two ’ouses!’) and the capricious colours of Chagall’s painted ceiling. ‘Monsieur Garnier loved rrrred,’ our guide purred. ‘Eet waz a sexy new colour for a passionate new age. Not everyone waz ’appy at zee time, as eet iz zo sexy. Eet ’az a little of the bordello about it, non?’
Turns out, the Palais Garnier was very much the pick-up joint. For the price of a subscription for three seats a week, any rich top-hatted Parisian could buy his way in, and stalk backstage as though it were his very own hunting ground. Most of the ballerinas found themselves working double-shift at night for a patron. ‘Zay must ’av been exhausted,’ exclaimed our guide. ‘But art loverrrz were usually more lucrative zan zee art itself.’
The tour over, I wandered down Boulevard des Capucines, its simple stone façades soothing after the sensory overload of the Palais Garnier. The old opera house captured an outrageously over-the-top moment in time in the city’s history, but Parisian architecture soon reverted to its prevailing theme of classic chic. Parisiennes, too, began to eschew outward displays of showiness, a simple black dress masking a set of lacy lingerie in the same way that their deceptively plain windows belie a brilliant extravagance within. Parisiennes love their gold and glitz, but mostly in intimate settings.
Paris Dreaming Page 7