Farewell My French Love

by Nadine Williams

  Our guests roared with laughter and as their mirth subsided, Olivier added ‘I know better now, but I still love her.’

  We took to the dance floor for the bridal waltz, and, with a miraculous synergy, instead of my usual clumsy self, we moved as one. Never once did I step on his shiny black shoes. My lovely French man, who four years earlier had seemed so remote and frozen in grief after the death of his wife, Colette, now shone with happiness.

  The band played on and suddenly I noticed there were only a handful of couples left on the dance floor. I never wanted to leave.

  Later, as we arrived at the Sebel Radisson Hotel on North Terrace, it occurred to me that this was the hotel where I had first met Olivier, at the annual general meeting of the French Australian Business Club in 2001. As cultural issues writer, I attended such events for stories. Those two minutes, when he introduced himself and his wife, changed my life, but I didn’t know it at the time. Two years later in May 2003, Colette died of ovarian cancer.

  Seven years had passed since our first meeting and Olivier was opening the door to our bridal suite. There on the king-size bed was an enticing glossy white box, bowed with blue ribbon. I was still in my full bridal regalia, but I could not wait, or even remove my fascinator with its delicate fluffy feathers. I pulled at the bow, opened the lid and there peeping out from tissue was a pair of black see-through bras, scalloped with pink embroidery with pink ribbon bows on their straps. Such a sexy, suggestive wedding gift and I loved it. Drunk with joy, I held them up to the lace bodice of my wedding gown. I felt as shiny and fresh as a newly minted coin—utterly unspoiled by past life events.

  ‘Chérie,’ he murmured, ‘take off your gown and let me see them on you.’

  But he didn’t wait, deftly unzipping the dress and slipping it off my shoulders. And so began our marriage, which dripped with love, and dare I say it, lust.

  Now I am alone. However, as time passes month by month, memory, which was so painful in the beginning, is becoming a pleasant experience. Like childbirth and how naturally the memory of excruciating pain falls away, over time, the human spirit prevails over grief too. The Bible in Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount says ‘Blessed are they that mourn’. But, at the time, it is hard to believe when deadening grief voids the mind. When life has no verve and time becomes a blank continuum.

  Yet, step by small step, each day as I worked in my memorial garden, or planned, almost like a zombie, to join the family on a camping trip on the River Murray, or attended a monthly girlie lunch organised by a dear friend, the mourning lifted a little.

  And now here I am in September, in Paris, more than a year later, recovered enough to enjoy my time without him.

  I enter the iconic Shakespeare and Co bookshop looking for Jane, but she is nowhere to be found. I hang around for ten minutes, surveying the thousands of books for sale—all in English. How I love bookshops and this famous store has an amazing collection of books of every genre piled from floor to ceiling.

  I want to buy a book in memory of my journey with Jane. One hard-covered book in particular calls out to me from the jam-packed shelves. It is Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, a restored edition from 1964. Its front cover features a handsome young Hemingway and the blurb states it captures him experiencing the exuberant mood of Paris in the 1920s. I am thrilled with my purchase.

  But where is Jane? That feeling of distress is rising the same as at the airport in Singapore. I stand outside the store under the tree like a sentinel watching every person who enters the shop. By 3.25 pm, I begin to sense disaster.

  I go into the shop once more, but there is no bird-like lady who emits understated elegance and only ever wears the same pair of tiny Georg Jensen earrings. I return outside filled with anxiety.

  I am about to rush back to the hotel, when Jane sashays out the front door of the store clutching a pile of books. She clearly cannot discern my tightly drawn face, because she beams from ear to ear.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asks.

  ‘Where have I been?’ I reply in disbelief.

  ‘I was waiting for you to turn up inside.’

  ‘Where inside? I searched everywhere inside at three o’clock on the dot,’ I say, almost weeping with relief.

  ‘Right down the back and I was reading the most interesting book …’

  But I cut her off. ‘I have been worried sick about you, standing out here watching everyone going into that shop. I thought terrible things: that you were run down by a car, that you fell somewhere and knocked your head, carried off unconscious. Do you have the address of the hotel in your bag if anything happens to you?’

  Jane roars with laughter so loud it would block out a Boeing 747 overhead.

  Finally she says, ‘Yes, mother.’ After a little chuckle, she adds: ‘You are such a strange character. You never left a stone unturned to get a good story when you were a journalist. But here in Paris, you didn’t look properly; I was there all the time.’

  Later that night, Jane and I are propped up in our beds with our noses in our new books. We have wholly different bed lives from our daily activities, sharing email messages from home, writing postcards or deciding our agenda for the next day. It is a fertile time of warm friendship, regardless of daily tensions.

  But mostly we read. Which is why I stop in disbelief when I reach page nineteen of A Moveable Feast. I read Hemingway’s words: ‘And I finished the oysters and the wine and paid my score in the café and made it the shortest way back up the Montagne Ste Geneviève through the rain, which was now only local weather and not something that changed your life, to the flat at the top of the hill.’

  ‘Jane!’ I call, oblivious to the fact that her bed nudges my own. ‘Listen! Hemingway also walked up our famous street.’

  ‘Read it to me,’ she asks.

  And I do.

  ‘That’s very special, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘To be in the same street.’

  After breakfast at our usual local café, we board the red bus again. Today the weather is warmer and we sit upstairs to savour from our lofty spot such delights as driving along the most beautiful avenue in the world —Avenue des Champs-Élysées in the eighth arrondissement. We turn left to drive between the gorgeous pair of buildings, the Petit Palais and Grand Palais. Instead of proceeding over Pont Alexandre III between the gilded goddesses with winged horses, the bus turns along the River Seine when I spot through the avenue of trees a street I know well. Cours Albert Ier contains a posh strip of apartments where Olivier and I stayed in the penthouse where his friend Sandrine lived. I will meet Sandrine later this week at Le Petit Café for dinner. I wonder if she still lives on this street.

  Later, as the bus moves up Avenue de l’Opéra, Jane shows no inclination to get out to see the Palais Garnier, but I ask her anyway. When she answers with another quiet no, I know action is needed. The next stop will be Boulevard Haussmann and I want to show her the glorious dome in the Galeries Lafayette, where customers shop under one of the most beautiful coloured glass works of art in Paris. I do not risk asking; I tell her.

  ‘Jane, we are getting off at the next stop because there is something special I want to show you in Lafayette, the famous department store,’ I say in a determined manner.

  ‘Okay,’ she replies, meekly picking up her bag. But I sense it is not okay. In fact, she must wonder at my choice because in our twenty-year friendship, I cannot remember that we have ever ventured inside a department store. Cinemas and theatres and bookshops by the score, but not department stores.

  The traffic and crowds on the footpaths are hectic and I take her hand racing across two sets of lights and into the store. Big, black security men greet us and we pass a line-up of Asian tourists outside the Chanel shop. I lead through to perfumery, where Olivier once bought me his favourite perfume Joy by Jean Patou.

  ‘Look!’ I smile and lift my hand up to the gorgeous glass dome. ‘Don’t you think it lights up the store like a thousand stars in the heavens?’

&n
bsp; And before she can reply I point out the elements of La Belle Époque—three storeys of ornate gilded galleries creating an extraordinary atrium with elaborate staircases.

  ‘It’s an absolutely glorious expression of the era,’ I gush.

  The first time I saw the dome with Oli, I gasped in admiration, and now I take delight in every elegant detail of this century-old work of art.

  Jane casts her eyes upwards and surveys the galleries, where shoppers are visible through the gilded flower-encrusted balustrades. But there is no response.

  When we turn to leave, I am fuming and wonder what game she is playing. I stop, and when she stops and turns around, I snap: ‘Look Jane, I’ve had enough of this. Whatever is the matter with you? Haven’t you got anything to say about what you have just seen?’

  She stares at me for a second before replying: ‘Nadine, you can’t see what I see, can you? Look over your shoulder at all those Asians in a frenzy of consumerism. They are waiting to buy, buy, buy something, anything with the label Chanel. That whole scene disgusts me and I was upset from the moment we walked in at the blatant commercialism of luxury labels.’

  ‘That is not our experience together; we aren’t indulging in buying sprees,’ I say, having toned down my pitch. ‘I wanted you to enjoy something pleasurable, something beautiful and something which was created almost 110 years ago for women’s pleasure. And I wanted to show you an exquisite work of art, but you have destroyed the moment.’

  I mull over her feelings, but after some hesitation, I add: ‘Whether you approve or not, Lafayette is a fabulous women’s world of shopping, of retail therapy in Paris.’

  I take a breath, but Jane remains witheringly silent.

  ‘This is such an old beautiful building, so quintessentially Parisian, that I wanted you to enjoy the architecture. It’s certainly the excessive end of commercialism,’ I concede. ‘But I have had shopping sprees before because I felt terribly miserable and then I felt uplifted, and at its best, that’s what retail therapy can do for women.’ There is a long, painful pause, but I have said all I want to say.

  ‘I did enjoy the ceiling, it’s what is going on under it which is so distressing when there is such poverty in the world,’ she says.

  But I am disappointed in her lack of joyfulness and my own mood is dampened.

  La Belle Époque was an important social phenomenon, which had an enormous impact on not only Paris society but the elaborate architecture we enjoy today. The term itself evokes images of the late nineteenth-century Paris of music halls, cabarets, grand operas, actresses and courtesans, all wonderfully captured in the iconic posters of Toulouse-Lautrec. Even the Eiffel Tower, in its frilly grace, is a manifestation. And playwrights, authors, composers and the Art Nouveau movement were all swept up in this delightful societal mood. One element, obviously, was the opening of Lafayette with its extravagant interior.

  As the bus turns into Quai François Mitterand, I say: ‘Pity we can’t see the Louvre today, it’s closed on Tuesdays.’

  ‘Another day,’ she replies.

  SIX

  THE GILDED PALACE OF VERSAILLES

  ‘Have you not admired … those prodigious collections of rich and dazzling furniture and of rare precious vases, the marvellous paintings of the King … the most remarkable creations of the Gobelins … or those wonders of the goldsmith’s art …’

  Madeleine de Scudery, A Day at Versailles (1684)

  Jane and I are about to step from our tourist bus into the grand palace of Versailles, a magnificent monument to the Louis kings of France. It stands frozen in its era since the terrible night in 1789 when the mob scaled the gilded gates and escorted Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette back to Paris to await their fate.

  I had visited here with Oli and tried to absorb the astonishing history of French royalty that he shared with me. Louis XIV, the Sun King, and the greatest of French kings, had built Versailles in the early seventeenth century for his own glorification and to show that France was the greatest European power. And Louis XV and Louis XVI, the last of the Bourbon kings, followed him and resided here.

  But now, I’m only interested in the French queen, Marie Antoinette, and why? Because in my search for my identity following Olivier’s death, I had my DNA tested by Genebase, to make an astounding discovery. I share the same ‘stuff’ as Marie Antoinette—my DNA of who I am matches Marie Antoinette’s. I felt an immediate affinity with her and I wish Olivier were still alive to be able to share my excitement to be here again in this splendid palace where she led such a controversial life.

  Everything about Versailles reflects the folly of the French kings because they lived such a lavish life of extravagance and courtly intrigue that it had to end. And, of course it did, inciting the masses to such a fury that it triggered the French Revolution and the violent deaths of the last royal couple.

  Our tour guide is a knowledgeable chap and he tells us that Louis XVI ruled France from here for twenty years until 1789, and that the family’s apartments and servant quarters were also here.

  What he doesn’t mention is how Versailles had become a licentious ‘house of pleasure’ with Louis XIV setting the lustful tone of the court with a string of official mistresses over his seventy-year reign. All the Louis kings engaged in scandalous goings-on in Versailles.

  In 1678, one of the earliest of French women writers, Madame Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette, captured the hotbed of lust in the French court at Versailles in her novel La Princesse de Clèves. It is considered a masterpiece even today. She wrote: ‘There were countless interests at stake, countless different factions and women played such a central part in them that love was always entangled in politics and politics with love.’

  By Louis XVI’s reign during the later years of the eighteenth century, Versailles had become an artificial, gilded world of power and privilege, utterly remote from the misery and starvation of the people of Paris.

  Marie Antoinette was pivotal in my musings when compiling a list of iconic French women. Oli had bought me Viennese author Stefan Zweig’s biography Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman before we married, signing it ‘With love, chérie.’

  The more I read about her, the more I was filled with compassion. Marie Antoinette became queen at nineteen years of age and her fifteen-year reign in the French court changed her from an insignificant Habsburg princess to the most notorious French queen, supposedly wicked enough to spark the French Revolution, to be beheaded, an insane act that turned her into the ‘martyred queen’ of France forever.

  She came to Versailles as a fourteen-year-old bride to the Dauphin and within four years, she was Queen of France. Her life in this amazingly opulent setting began badly when the young couple ignored each other. The marriage was not consummated for seven years until King Louis XVI had a small operation to his genitals. However, their first daughter was born soon afterwards and when their son, France’s Dauphin, Louis-Philippe Xavier was born in 1781, the king and queen became devoted parents. Two more children brought much joy, but tragedy lurked in the wings.

  At first the people loved her for her pleasant personality and beauty, but fifteen years later they were calling her ‘L’Autrichienne (Austrian woman), but also ‘chienne’, which in French means ‘bitch’.

  I have always admired Jane’s fine capacity for silence, but now I wish she would say something. She has uttered not a word in this glorious place. I want to engage with her, to pour forth with my views of Marie Antoinette, to quote Zweig, to fill in the guide’s blank spaces.

  ‘Queen Marie Antoinette gambled away a fortune and was very unpopular with the French people,’ I comment.

  ‘It was also that she lived such a ridiculous life. She would escape with her children to this specially built Normandy-style village in the grounds of Versailles,’ responds Jane.

  ‘Quite the opposite of the royal palace, with all the majesty of the French court,’ I add, delighted that she is engaging with me.

  ‘Marie An
toinette played at life and set up an ideal farm with well-groomed animals called Le Petit Trianon,’ continues Jane. ‘The sheep had to be snow white and she had a beautiful white Swiss horse, too.’ She pauses before adding, ‘It was so artificial for the Queen of France; she would wear a simple white dress and a big hat pretending she was a peasant.’

  ‘Like Little Bo-Peep!’ I quip and with a thrill I realise I’m reflecting Olivier’s wit, his very French play with words.

  Jane laughs. ‘Clever! I think she simply wanted some peace from the strict court life.’

  Our conversation is a delicious taste of what I want our holiday to be: conviviality, a sharing of experiences. I didn’t know that she knew so much about Marie Antoinette. So I have learnt something about Jane, too.

  ‘Even if Louis XVI’s reign triggered the French Revolution, it’s horrific to think that they beheaded their king and their queen,’ I state, eager to continue our conversation.

  ‘It’s astonishing,’ she replies. ‘Or should I say absolute butchery?’

  ‘Did you know she was executed as La Veuve (the widow) Capet on 16 October 1793? For Marie Antoinette, it meant that even though she was born a Habsburg princess, she died as a commoner because the monarchy had been abolished.’

  In French society, I’m La Veuve Foubert. I really like the fact that I have a title for being a widow. It validates my great loss.

  Jane and I remain close until our party of tourists reaches the Hercules Salon and then the crush of people separates us.

  Versailles drips in gold. Priceless tapestries, lavish furnishings, marble panelling and decorative ceilings create breathtaking splendour. We walk along old parquet floors en lozenges (laid diagonally) through rooms featuring mirrors, chandeliers, silver candelabras and exquisite clocks. Each space is furnished with richly upholstered antique occasional furniture, dating from the Louis kings.

  According to French interior designer and decorative arts historian Florence de Dampierre, the dazzling decoration of Versailles was a turning point in the evolution of French design. She writes in French Chic that Versailles established a certain standard of living, behaving and entertaining for une personne de qualité: ‘From then on, to have beautiful dwellings enhanced with fine comfortable furniture upholstered en suite, rare collections, and gardens to match, became the signs of a cultivated man or woman …’