I must look like an open-mouthed fish in a goldfish bowl, but she continues.
‘César had taken over Man Ray’s apartment and he and Father enjoyed each other’s company. Maman died eight years ago,’ she says.
I cast an eye around the biggest room I have ever seen in Paris and I guess that the décor is the same as when her parents lived here. There are two huge portraits—one of a handsome man and another of a beautiful woman in a low-cut red silk gown. There is a smaller portrait of the same woman in another low-cut gown and in the dining area, a teenager with a horse, which I assume is Isabelle.
A huge crystal chandelier hangs from the high ceiling and over the marble mantelpiece is a large ornate oval-shaped gilded mirror. Everything is supersized to match the room.
‘It’s a gorgeous space,’ I enthuse.
‘This is a very special building,’ she says. ‘It was known as le bel immeuble de céramiques. This apartment was a studio space specially designed for the artists and sculptors who lived in Montparnasse,’ she explains. ‘All of the floors are the same. People do not understand that Montparnasse was the vibrant artists’ quarter of the early twentieth century—more important than Montmartre. It was more international than Montmartre and the artists, painters and sculptors who all lived around these streets were known as Montparnos.’
Surely, she senses my amazement at where I find myself in Paris.
‘Modigliani’s workplace was at number 3, Rue Campagne Première, at the other end of the street. He would charge five francs to do drawings on the tablecloths at La Rotonde restaurant because he couldn’t pay for his dinner.’
All I know about Modigliani, I learnt from Oli, who showed me the book The Masters Series: Modigliani featuring fifteen plates of his best works. He brought it out when I began studying Madame de Pompadour, showing me Modigliani’s slightly irreverent portrait of her.
‘Before this building was built, many French artists and sculptors, who became famous, lived in the Hotel Istria next door,’ she continues. ‘The American photographer Man Ray was already a strong celebrity when he moved here in 1926. Do you know Man Ray?’
I shake my head.
‘He was famous as a photography surrealist from 1921 to the 1940s and he didn’t hesitate to install his companion, who was the sparkling Kiki of Montparnasse, here. Kiki’s real name was Alice Prin; he made her the first nude model in Paris to be photographed, and she posed for him in his studio here.’
I have never heard of Kiki of Montparnasse either, but I’m awestruck nonetheless.
She rises and picks up a book from the sideboard. ‘When you have time, read this history.’
I flick through the book to find Man Ray had taken many iconic photographs from that era. I recognise his photograph of Coco Chanel as the one still used extensively today. Others are of Picasso, Giacometti, who studied sculpture in Montparnasse in the 1920s, and Gertrude Stein.
It’s good to see what she really looked like, I think. Woody Allen did a great job of casting Kathy Bates as Stein in the popular movie Midnight in Paris.
‘Man Ray was a magnet to the great artists when they were struggling to be discovered in Paris,’ Isabelle adds.
Then I recall a one-liner in Midnight in Paris, ‘I see a photograph!’, which must have been Man Ray. Producer Woody Allan scripted an intriguing film revisiting all of the great musicians, actors, artists and writers of Paris in the 1920s through the eyes of a contemporary would-be writer. It’s so intriguing that I find myself staying in Man Ray’s own apartment building.
Olaf staggers in and collapses into another doggie bed placed against the wall.
‘I will just tend to Olaf before I settle,’ she says. ‘He’s very old for a Labrador.’ She ties a plastic bag around his private parts and says, ‘He knows what to do.’
I could never have imagined the doggie scenario where I find myself—in Paris! The question is, will Olaf survive for the two weeks I will be here?
‘He is the dog of my life,’ Isabelle says. ‘Although I have my horses, Olaf has been such a great companion. Now that he is so old and disabled after a few strokes, I must care for him.’
She has horses?
‘I have never known a renowned horsewoman.’
‘I breed horses. I like to select specific bloodlines to breed jumpers for competition. I train now, but I don’t compete anymore. I have eight horses and they are kept close to Versailles. I spend the weekend with the horses and I take the dogs with me.’
This is another surprise.
Actually, Isabelle does look like a horsewoman, with finely honed angular features. But it isn’t until she shows me a photograph of her jumping a magnificent white horse, which she says is called Atlas, that I sense that she has been a champion rider. And I cast my eye around this opulent apartment and realise she must be very wealthy to also breed horses. Yet her persona is warm and soft and endearing. I decide my host is as unique as the building in which she lives.
‘I rode competitively for many years,’ she continues. ‘Until my present job in communications. I’m organising a very big conference on Thursday, so until then I will be quite stressed. I get the house cleaned each Wednesday and the cleaner cooks my meals and stacks them in the frigo, refrigerator. She comes every lunchtime during the week, too, to take the dogs out.’
I wonder if she is divorced. Again she seems to read my mind.
‘I have never married, and I have no children, but I have had a number of long-term relationships.’
She shudders. ‘Twelve years with one man. I think he was in love with his mother, not me. Our holidays were spent with his mother at her holiday house in Burgundy,’ she relates. ‘At the end, one weekend I excused myself from the usual visit and while he was away, I simply packed up and left him. It was such a relief. I was living my life focused on him and his mother.’
‘What about now?’
‘I have no one and I want no one.’
We have been talking non-stop for an hour and I feel comfortable in her living room and relaxed in her presence.
There is a loud knock on the door. ‘My friend Catherine wants to meet you and she has come to Paris from Normandy a day earlier, because tomorrow she leaves for Provence,’ she says.
While Isabelle is dressed in weekend leisure gear and wears no makeup, Catherine, now embracing me like a friend, is a power dresser. It’s Sunday, but she presents herself impeccably made up and groomed wearing black stretch tights with side calf zips, a shiny black jacket, white top and a bunch of knotted gold pearls. No stockings. Shiny black high heels.
In a wink she is sitting next to me on the sofa and, wearing a dashing smile, is telling me that she is a ‘travelling concierge’ for wealthy American clients. She is slim as a whippet and so chic with her grey hair pulled into a chignon. Her glamour image is enhanced by her classic beauty.
‘My clients buy properties in France and then they contract me to redecorate it and hire staff before they return to holiday there,’ she explains. ‘Tomorrow, I fly to Provence to prepare a manoir for new clients. They are arriving in three months and by that time the house must be redecorated and I will have hired a chef, a butler, a gardener and a housemaid. They pay very well for my services.’
‘How exciting! That’s a dream job.’ It sounds an incredibly powerful career.
I learn that she also has never married and has no children.
‘I’ve been running around France for thirty years; when would I have had time to marry and bring up children?’ she states. ‘I never wanted children. I always wanted an exciting life. And I have it. I work all over France and lately I have been looking at properties to buy for my clients. I have not done this before, so my business is growing.’
Curiosity is a prerequisite for a journalist, but here I must bite my tongue. I would love to know details of her love life, but she describes her relationships with vagueness and sweeping statements about men and peppers her conversation with the French favourite �
�poof’.
‘Many men.’ She winks. ‘You know. Looking for the right one for a long time.’
‘In Australia, when a friend’s relationship broke down, someone would invariably say “Next!”’ I quip. ‘I had a few “nexts” before Olivier.’
‘I have not had any man for a long time. I forget,’ says Isabelle, and I cannot discern if this is a good or a bad thing because she is not smiling.
‘We both forget, don’t we Isabelle,’ adds Catherine. ‘Men mean trouble, if not at the beginning, then definitely at the end. I cannot be bothered with the politics of sex anymore.’
At about this time, I ask to excuse myself to unpack and have a rest before dinner.
‘I must go in a little while, too,’ says Catherine. ‘But I will come again and have dinner with you both before you leave.’
‘Wonderful!’ and I kiss her twice, while Isabelle says the dinner will be ready at seven o’clock.
Alone at last! Time to collect my thoughts about this new situation. These women live in the most beautiful city in the world, are wealthy beyond my comprehension and yet they don’t have a partner or children. It’s a stark contrast to my personal life, the legacy of three marriages. I cannot imagine my life without my adult children, their partners and my grandchildren. Three husbands cannot be dismissed like lovers with a ‘poof!’ because two of them were the fathers of my children. They had a profound effect on my life even if I had to suffer divorces each time. And in my middle years, Olivier brought such a glow to my life. I have lived a very different life, but now I need to learn contentment from my new-found friends as I step into their lifestyle of enjoying being alone.
I stand at the expansive window and stare over the zinc rooftops of Paris. All those upturned chimney pots as far as the eye can see. Pretty shutters, dormer windows, odd Juliet balconies spilling flowers and a church steeple in the distance. I soak it all into my very veins until the light fades and I’m enveloped in a feeling of utter contentment with being in the right place at the right time.
I’m in Paris!
FIFTEEN
AN ADVENTURE AT ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE
‘Grief, leashed as it is to death, instructs. It teaches that one must invent a way back to life.’ Kay Redfield Jamison
I stroll along the pavement on my first day at Alliance Française, with Isabelle’s bonne journée farewell resounding in my ears. A cool, early morning breeze cuts into my face and I belt up my trusty trench coat. The lush canopies of the chestnut trees—forming two columns either side of Boulevard Raspail—are still in summer mode a month into autumn. Birds make a racket in the small Square Yves Klein on the corner, which is filled with students from the hospitality school next door. They look like penguins in their black suits, white shirts and black ties. Their collective buzz is bright and infectious as they light up their cigarettes, send SMSes or chatter among themselves. Yet their youth causes a clutch of fear in my chest. God forbid I may be too old to learn, even when placed under the pump by an expert professeur. If they are teenagers straight out of high school, then I’m almost half a century older than them.
The horrid thought calls to mind an apt quotation I picked up in the charming book Paris Tales. ‘Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.’ I need audacity, again audacity, always audacity. It is audacious of me to be here in Paris by myself as a new widow to learn French. I’m about to discover if the secret to learning French is to submerge myself in daily lessons and to tackle the language removed from the distractions of daily living.
When Olivier died I promised myself that I would peg away at the French language, which had eluded me. For years I could not respond to elementary French conversations when I met French dignitaries as Olivier’s wife. Was I dumb? Or had I simply hit an impenetrable brick wall, unable to learn at my age?
He didn’t help. He refused to speak more than one sentence at a time to me in French and wouldn’t repeat it. ‘You must learn French grammar,’ he would say. I thought it terribly harsh of him, but he’d had one French-speaking wife, and perhaps that was enough. It wasn’t until we were married that he began to speak in English to his children in front of me instead of rapid French.
The French language institute, Alliance Française, is conveniently close at 101 Boulevard Raspail, about twelve minutes’ walk from Isabelle’s apartment building, which overlooks the boulevard. I am her first billeted student and it’s my first experience alone in Paris.
It never crossed my mind that I might be billeted beyond the periphery of Paris. Quelle horreur!
‘Many students are right out in the banlieue, the outer suburbs,’ Isabelle said last night. ‘And they must take the metro for a long time.’
Instead, I am strutting forth like a chirpy little bird when behold! The delicious smell of warm freshly baked bread wafts across my path. I turn my head to catch a whiff of rising dough and the rich allure of sweet caramel, baked hazelnuts and chocolate. Here is a boulangerie on the first corner! What can I do, but seek out pleasure?
I slip inside to experience this particular Parisian joy for the senses—all those fresh breads and baguettes of various shapes and sizes lined up on racks behind the sales assistant. The bakery is lit up like the sun and the glacés and icings glisten in the light. At one end of the glass counter there are rows of exquisite little packages, ornately decorated with icings, or dustings or lashings of cream, delightful petit squares topped with fresh raspberries, cocoa or crushed walnuts. Day one definitely calls for celebration. So I take time to choose a sugary pastry crescent studded with raisins and I pop it into my bag for morning tea break. Good grief, I hope there is a break! Four hours of French would be exhausting.
I stroll lackadaisically as I have half an hour to reach the school. The roar of traffic commands my attention as I approach the noisy intersection of Boulevards du Montparnasse and Raspail. I don’t immediately notice that I’m passing a restaurant until I see a solid bank of ice forming a frozen counter that juts across the pavement and continues in a semicircle around the corner. I recognise it instantly. I stand still as stone and stare in disbelief. Déjà vu! The restaurant faces the intersection and two waiters are beginning to assemble mountains of shellfish on tiered silver platters. I know this place! And I tingle in excitement.
It was here, or should I say there, across the road outside La Rotonde that Oli and I stood and discussed which restaurant we should patronise for our last dinner in Paris in 2010. Would it be the famous Le Dôme across the road or would we go to Le Bar à Huîtres sprawling diagonally across the other side of the intersection. ‘Le Dôme is very expensive,’ said Olivier. ‘Let’s go to the oyster bar.’
Back then, I didn’t memorise the name of the restaurant or that we were in Montparnasse. Nor did I know that those three restaurants defined Place Pablo Picasso, also known as Carrefour Vavin, the heart of old Montparnasse. But I do remember the relationship between the three restaurants.
The last meal with my darling French man in this glorious city was right here! Only I didn’t know it back then, three years ago. How could we have foreseen his dreadful impending fate, that heartbreaking stretch of time we would need to endure together before his demise. Oh, I’ve become overwhelmed with sadness. It soaks through me as if the cloudy sky above had opened up drenching me with rain.
I shudder with that familiar sickening melancholy and my lighthearted air dissipates. I’m like Lot’s wife, a pillar of salt. But I try and conjure up that feeling of how happy I was with him that night, with being in Paris and still being so much in love. We had been married two years and it was in September, a month after his mother had died.
Surely this isn’t just a play of coincidences to find myself here on the first day I venture out into Paris life alone? Incroyable!
We had taken a table alongside the sliding windows and I peer in at the very spot. It had begun to rain and we had asked the waiter to put up the window. The dinner was a tiered collection of she
llfish—oysters and mussels and crayfish claws and cockles. We tackled it with all the trimmings, the melted butter dish, the smooth yellowy aioli, the finely chopped shallots, the capers and the quartered lemons. Oli tucked in showing me how to use the utensil to dislodge the cockles’ flesh. We sipped white wine from some special French appellation, which he had explained. Oli was more reserved than normal reflecting upon his mother’s death. But ours was still that comfortable tête-à-tête of a committed couple, whose conversation bubbled along sporadically. As always, he discussed taste and the origins of the food we were eating. Here it was oysters—which ones were the best from which region of France. ‘To know all of this enhances the pleasure of sophisticated eating,’ he had said. Before Oli, I refused oysters, regarding them with the same disdain as eating slugs.
Am I meant to be here to revisit my past? Have I something else to learn about grief? About letting go? But what? Right now, I try hard to shrug off sadness as I turn my back to the restaurant and stand on the curb of these two grand boulevards of Paris. I need to focus on negotiating the three sets of green lights to cross this mother of all intersections with cars, motorcycles, buses and taxis racing by in a mad frenzy.
I walk on in a haze of thoughts on what this surprising coincidence means. Past a hairdressing salon on the corner, a mattress store next door and a Russian restaurant on the next corner. Onward past a handkerchief-sized patch of greenery where students jam up each seat. At the Notre-Dame-des-Champs metro station, countless students are pouring out onto the median strip, spilling across the road. I weave through the student throng on the footpath, smoking their last cigarettes. And I’m so focused on avoiding them all that I almost walk past the iron gate entrance to Alliance Française.
Farewell My French Love Page 23