Farewell My French Love

by Nadine Williams

  He chats as we walk the short distance to the street market and I enjoy his company immensely. He has a pleasant disposition and an open personality. He points out a building where he went to school for nine years.

  ‘Our main house in Binic was my parents’ home where I lived as a child and I came here for schooling. Since then, we have built an extensive second storey, for raising our own children,’ he says.

  ‘That is very convenient for me, isn’t it?’ and I smile warmly at him.

  The Saturday market is massive—as big as La Baule—and stalls meander down Rue de Rohan where wall baskets brim with autumn flowers. Music fills the air and as we walk the cobbled streets together from stall to stall, I find I’m enjoying the moment immensely. Then I realise with a start that for the whole time since we left Australia Jane and I have been in the company of women only. This is the first time I have spent time alone with a man in France. It’s a pleasant feeling and Louis reminds me of a certain manly presence that I’m beginning to miss. Conversation flows easily between us.

  Louis tells me he must choose tomatoes for dinner tonight. And we take time choosing from a tomato stall laden with unfamiliar varieties and colours.

  ‘Will you help me to select four types of cheeses? I would like to contribute,’ I ask.

  ‘Of course, and we need to choose olives, too.’

  So we choose a Normandy brie, a hard cheese and a blue cheese.

  ‘We also need goat’s cheese,’ I say with some authority.

  ‘Bien sûr! Chèvre.’

  Finally I choose a pretty flowering potted plant as a gift for Dany. Then I ask Louis if he would like a coffee. ‘It will be my pleasure to buy you one.’

  ‘No, no, I insist,’ he says. ‘We return to the apartment and I will make us coffee with our new coffee machine.’

  I shudder. Can I trust that lift again?

  Over tiny cups of espresso coffee, sitting in the spacious living room, Louis recalls his experiences in hospital in Mexico City. ‘It was terrible to be so far from France and its excellent medical care. I was sure I would die there,’ he says.

  The conversation leads naturally to asking him about his former working life. He had been an independent financier, linking banks with major urban developers.

  ‘It was a remarkable period of industrial development during the 1970s and ’80s in Bretagne,’ he explains. ‘Many of the new development plans, shopping centres, housing developments and office buildings in the bigger towns of Bretagne passed over my desk.’

  ‘After such an exciting career, did you have trouble adjusting to retirement?’

  ‘It was quite a shock when it all came to an end, but now, especially after the fall, I manage to enjoy everything about our life together.’

  He looks at his watch and says Dany had told him we must be home by lunchtime. ‘She likes to be alone in the kitchen when cooking for many people,’ he says.

  By 7 pm the household is in dinner-party mode. A red tablecloth is set with fine china and crystal and my blue flowering pot plant is centrepiece. Dany looks lovely with makeup and jewellery; Louis presents as the elegant host. Soon I meet Anne-Marie, Annie, Suzanne, Yves and Roger.

  Dany places a tray of exotic amuse-gueule—nine egg-cup-sized glasses—on the coffee table. Each glass contains a trio of tastes. So exotic to observe. I select a glass and a spoon and the evening unfolds as one of the most flavoursome gourmet experiences in a friend’s home. The delicate taste sensations include lightly fried prawns, peas in a green mash, a smooth pâté on the bottom. No wonder the living room is quiet while we eat.

  At the dining table, the sensual food experience continues. Entrée is a colourful gathering of rockmelon slice, three cherry tomatoes of varying colours, a piece of savoury loaf and a scattering of rocket leaves on each plate. Delicious fare.

  I taste with astonishing pleasure the fish, the lingue or ling, which is le plat principal (main course). I had watched Louis buy the fish this morning and here it is poached in wine sitting in potato mash. Similar to yesterday’s lunch, but it has a rich dab of crushed tomato puree garnished with basil leaves. A dribble of olive oil snakes over the plate. Dany has used quite simple ingredients to add an unexpected layer of colour to create surprise. All the vegetables and fruit are locally grown, the fish caught in local waters, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the butter is churned locally.

  I’m seated next to Anne-Marie, an English as a Second Language teacher and the only person other than Louis to speak English. Anne-Marie tells me she is recently divorced after a long marriage, but happily single again. ‘I survived a five-year battle with stage-three breast cancer and at the end of that, it was obvious my husband didn’t love me anymore,’ she says without any emotion. ‘So three days after I turned fifty, I asked for a divorce.

  ‘I have bought recently a nice apartment for myself in Saint-Quay-Portrieux,’ she says. ‘That is the real reason I did not come to Australia; my finance had not come through and I could not disappear for three weeks.’ Details of her divorce slip painlessly out of my head. This whole food experience is too delightful to focus on the unpleasant ‘D’ word.

  Louis pours me a glass of Château Laborde des Bossuet to accompany the platter of cheeses.

  ‘It comes from the appellation Lalande-de-Pomerol, in Bordeaux from the 2009 vintage,’ he says.

  I cannot help feeling nostalgic for the many times Olivier followed this very French formula at our own dinner parties. Salad and fromage with red wine before dessert.

  Later Dany presents her two homemade desserts—un gâteau fromage (cheese cake) on a stemmed cake plate and a crusty fruit pie—which have filled the kitchen with the delicious aroma of browned butter. I salivate at the very sight of them and ask to take her photograph. It’s such a relief to enjoy the sensual pleasure of food again. Olivier implanted in me his food ethos that eating is not just to satisfy hunger but to celebrate life. I knew I had to come back to France to reconnect with France’s love affair with food, to be reinspired to enjoy everything about the gift of food. After all, the French enjoy les plaisirs de la table like no other nation on earth. Olivier, who hadn’t cooked before Colette died, had refined the basics of French cooking as a new widower before I met him. Then like any French fellow, he became an expert ready to impart his new-found knowledge to me. I soaked it up.

  ‘Food, using fresh ingredients and presented with flair with accompanying wine, is our raison d’être,’ he had said early in our relationship. ‘And taste is the measure of a successful French meal.’

  What could I do, but learn quickly how to tackle the better known French dishes. Within no time, I could prepare a whole French-inspired dinner party including accompaniments such as jus. For the first Father’s Day that I knew him, I cooked three ducks for his large family. That set a high standard. He was like an encyclopaedia about France’s proud cuisine history. ‘Auguste Escoffier is, of course, the Empereur des Cuisiniers,’ he would say. Once more, he showed his engagement with his French culture, sharing it daily with me.

  And he would continue my life lesson: ‘Escoffier was trained in the grand représentant de l’ancienne cuisine française, but he led a profound change to a simpler nouvelle cuisine in his forties.’

  When he died in 1935 in Monte Carlo, his guide culinaire became a legacy built on by a new generation of French chefs.

  Of course, Olivier’s lessons reached right back to Antonin Carême, who became the proponent of haute cuisine française as the chef for the Minister of Foreign Affairs under Napoléon. His five volumes of L’Art de la Cuisine au XIXe Siècle remains the reference of grand French cuisine. Olivier, although self-taught in his sixties, was typical of all French people who remain pedantic about le système gastronomique français and practise it as if they have a whole culture to uphold.

  But all of this lifestyle of nourriture (food) fell away as his health deteriorated along with his taste-buds as a result of the chemotherapy. And my caring role became all-c
onsuming of my time. So, I followed his mother’s example and bought quality tinned and frozen food to allow quick meal preparation.

  ‘Red wine tastes tinny, and it’s not pleasant anymore,’ he once said.

  After he died, I had no desire to eat. It did surprise me that I didn’t fade away, but I put on weight because of chicken, Chinese and fish takeaways. I couldn’t be bothered preparing food anymore.

  Once in bed and packed for the train tomorrow, I think of Dany. Such a gift to lovingly prepare great food to please the palate. Such creativity and hospitality is at the heart of French cooking. C’est la vie en France.

  I’m enjoying my last breakfast with Louis and Dany when grief clutches me again. Dany leaves to look for a pen to write down my train departure time. When she returns, she stops behind Louis’ chair, puts her hands on his shoulders and lightly kisses the top of his head. The spontaneous gesture is so typical of what Olivier would sometimes do to me, and my own gestures to him, that I begin to weep softly.

  Oh dear! They look at me in amazement and don’t know what to say. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I blubber. ‘The way you show your affection for each other reminds me of how Olivier and I were.’

  Then I explain, ‘It’s so nice to see a longtime-married couple still show their affection for each other.’

  I miss terribly that affectionate touch.

  When we first married, I bought a little booklet entitled Recipe for a Good Marriage, written by Cheryl Saban, and in it I found a quote from the founder of the Lutheran Church, Martin Luther, who married a former nun and started the Reformation in the sixteenth century: ‘There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.’ We would read that book occasionally, sitting up in bed together, to learn how to shape our marriage. As the book suggested, Olivier really was my very best friend. I laugh as I remember one night, he chuckled and said: ‘I can sum that book up in three words. Sex. Sex and more sex.’ ‘Typically French,’ I retorted. However, the best message I picked up was that heady mix of love, passion, friendship and unconditional affection. We had all of those qualities in my life with him.

  FOURTEEN

  ISABELLE

  ‘Since the war, Montparnasse had become a place of freedom, where it was possible to find cheap lodgings and studios, and where writers, artists and their models (including the famous Kiki, later a singer and painter in her own right), critics, dealers and art lovers, all rubbed shoulders day and night.’ Vincent Bouvet and Gérard

  Durozoi, Paris Between the Wars, 1919–1939

  The taxi pulls up at 31 Bis Rue Campagne Première in the fourteenth arrondissement in Paris. It is a fancy four-storey building, and the whole facade is ornately covered with coffee-coloured filigreed ceramics. Unlike any Paris building I’ve seen, it’s as if it’s wearing heavy cake makeup.

  On the telephone, Isabelle, my host while I attend Alliance Française, had told me I would find it easily. ‘It’s a striking Art Deco building designed by architect André Arfvidson in 1912 specially as live-in studios and it became very famous with many artists, sculptors and painters taking up residence,’ she explained. ‘Ceramist Alexandre Bigot decorated its facade with unusual ceramic floral filigrees of grès flammé ocre and chatoyant, very reminiscent of the Belle Époque,’ she added. ‘However, it became very upper class after World War II.’

  So, I expected an upper-class lady as my hostess. However, a slim middle-aged woman, wearing jeans and a cropped summer jacket, approaches me as I alight from the taxi.

  ‘Are you Nadine?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes, I am. You must be Isabelle.’

  I’m nervous at how this risky venture will turn out, but relieved that she’s a similar age to me. As we push my luggage into yet another lift the size of a broom cupboard, she laughs lightly.

  ‘Your bags are almost as heavy for this little lift as my three dogs,’ she says in a lovely musical manner.

  ‘You have three dogs?’

  ‘Yes, they’re expecting you.’

  First impressions are vital and I instantly like the quiet, yet confident manner of Isabelle, who has pulled back her mass of streakedblonde hair into a fur band. She is a handsome woman with high cheekbones and striking eyes, yet a soft, curved mouth line hints at vulnerability.

  The dreadful wire-cage lift chugs its way upwards, slow enough for a conversation.

  ‘Usually you will get off on the third floor, but my apartment is two-storey and the bedrooms are on the fourth level with access to the lift, which is very handy for luggage,’ she says. ‘You need to remember this lift has no memory so if anyone gets off at, say, the first or second floors, you will need to press the third-floor button, or it will just sit there.’ I make a decision not to use the lift, but to walk up and down those three flights of stairs.

  She steers my red bag through a bedroom onto a landing and then into a gorgeous big room with a marble fireplace and a large ornate gilt mirror. The room’s striking feature is the soft-grey patterned silk fabric on all walls.

  ‘This is my bedroom, and it is yours while you stay with me,’ she says. ‘I have moved my things downstairs because a Japanese student is in the other bedroom. You are my first guest through Alliance Française, so I didn’t want to turn you down even though I had just taken on the student. You won’t see her because she feeds herself in her room and rarely leaves it.’

  She looks at me gauging my reaction before continuing.

  ‘But it does mean, three of us will need to share the one bathroom.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you to let me have your bedroom,’ I say. ‘I’m very touched.’

  ‘The third level has another bedroom and a second toilet, which I can use,’ she adds.

  The surprise is down the spiral staircase, and as I navigate the narrow steps, she calls up to me, ‘I hope you like the dogs.’

  Too bad if I didn’t, because there at the base of the stairs are her three dogs and doggie beds, which clutter up the small entrance area. Two are big, black Labradors, one of whom lies in his massive bed.

  ‘Meet Olaf and Ursula,’ she says, her voice oozing warmth. ‘And this is Elly, she’s an English Cocker Spaniel.’ She bends and pats Elly, whose tail wags in delight.

  ‘She is only four years old and still mad like a puppy.’

  One of the big dogs has not moved from his padded bed and the other now moves cautiously over to her mistress. ‘Ursula is blind and she follows my voice. She is Olaf’s daughter. Olaf is a very old dog. I have had him since he was a puppy and he is now sixteen and quite disabled.’

  I don’t know what to do or say. Olaf is thumping his tail on the side of his bed and wriggling the top half of his body, clearly trying to get up.

  ‘I almost lost him in February,’ she tells me.

  She goes to him and hoists him up onto his four legs—separating the rear legs. ‘Come on, Olaf, come and meet Nadine.’

  He totters over to me and sniffs. He is a beautiful animal and reminds me of my own golden Labrador, Tyler, who died three years ago. ‘I’m very much a doggie person,’ I say to Isabelle. ‘I have almost always had dogs—we had two dogs, a Labrador and a Shih Tzu, for twelve years, but they have both died. Now I have Oscar.’

  Isabelle opens the double doors leading into the living room. ‘Bienvenue,’ welcome, she says heartily. It is a fabulous cavernous space, two storeys in height, accentuated by the windows that extend the width of the room and from floor to ceiling. A semi-circular mezzanine is suspended over a dining table and chairs against the rear wall. Buttercup yellow silk fabric lines the walls and rich red velvet curtains, which must be six metres long, drape either side of the windows. It is a breathtakingly beautiful Parisian apartment.

  Isabelle takes me to the glass door in the window wall and opens it. ‘Regardez!’ Look!

  From the open doorway I see the fifty-six-storey Montparnasse office block towering into the late afternoon sky. Its huge bulk, soaring over the tree-lined Bo
ulevard Raspail, is framed by the doorway.

  ‘C’est le ciel de Paris,’ she says. It’s the sky of Paris.

  ‘C’est magnifique!’ I state, talking about the view rather than the historic building. Regardless of Parisians’ poor opinion of the building, to me it is almost as spectacularly Paris as the other breathtaking window views Oli and I enjoyed of the Eiffel Tower at Sandrine’s apartment on the River Seine.

  I’m so blessed with unique experiences in this city, I think. No wonder Paris beckoned me to return.

  ‘Voulez-vous parler en français ou en anglais?’ Do you want me to speak in French or English? ‘L’Alliance me demande de vous parler en français, mais je peux parler anglais si vous voulez.’ Alliance told me that I must speak in French, but I can speak English if you want.

  ‘Oh, anglais s’il vous plaît.’ And to cement the request, I tell her immediately in English that I had to speak French during my sojourn with Danièle. ‘I do think four hours a day every day will be enough French for me.’

  She laughs and beckons me to sit down on one of the two red settees that are covered in white sheets.

  ‘Excuse the sheets, but I transported the settees by road to Italy to be covered in a striking red silk (she lifts the white sheet to show the self-patterned fabric). ‘It was très difficile to get the quality and colour I wanted and as you can imagine the dogs have always sat on the settees; they would never stay off them simply because they are silk. So they sit on the white sheets.’

  Then she asks, ‘Would you like a drink? It’s time for apéritif.’

  As we sip white wine, she tells me the story of her apartment. It was a unique early twentieth-century building in Paris, and had been her childhood home. Her father had been a high-profile economist so their apartment epitomised their status as the haute bourgeoisie.

  ‘My mother was a personal friend of the president’s wife, Danièle Mitterand, because they both came from Burgundy,’ says Isabelle. ‘When my parents had parties, they were such incredible gatherings … you would have a Nobel Prize winner mixing with government ministers and at one party the famous French sculptor César brought up some sculpture from downstairs.’