Farewell My French Love

by Nadine Williams

  Then she became cook for an American couple living in a château in Burgundy until they moved to the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. ‘After six months with them, I became very lonely, so I connected with my meagre little list of French contacts back in Paris. When someone said the Austrian Ambassador to the OECD needed a chef I had the right background. The former chef and I had worked in the La Varenne Cooking School after Tours.’

  She hesitates: ‘I loved it and stayed for twenty years deciding all the recipes for very special diplomatic occasions.’

  ‘What a coup!’ I exclaim.

  Paris’s diplomatic circle was a convivial environment, she explains. ‘The Austrian Ambassador would sit next to the Australian Ambassador at most meetings and at official dinners. In due course, they would invite each other to their homes, so the Australian Ambassador had tasted my food in both situations,’ she recalls.

  Then in 1990, the Australian Embassy in Paris needed a new chef.

  ‘The ambassadors spoke about the issue and I got the job.’

  ‘Your story is the stuff of books, Kaye.’ I’m enthralled with each revelation. I’m also intrigued about her domestic life in Paris, knowing already that she lives alone. But where in Paris does she live?

  ‘Home is a deux pièces, dining room and bedroom,’ she replies. ‘And I have another mini pièce, a half room or an en suite. The kitchen is like a cupboard. I can cook, wash up and be in the refrigerator without moving and that’s how French apartments work—they have been there for centuries.

  ‘French women don’t cook anyway. They buy everything from the traiteur—caterer—and they don’t have bathrooms, they have closets. Anyway, I’m too frazzled now to cook … even thinking about cooking for oneself or for pleasure …

  ‘I don’t have the time to run around looking for ingredients. I used to take my little shopping trolley on the metro all over Paris seeking out that special ingredient. When I was working for the ambassadors, if it was a really important meal they would give me a chauffeur. I would spend hours on recipes,’ she explains. ‘I would never go to the supermarket and buy whatever was available there.’

  Isabelle doesn’t like to cook either. I thought she broke every stereotype of the contemporary Parisienne, but now Kaye confirms they don’t cook.

  ‘I stayed at the Australian embassy for eleven years.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’

  ‘The pace was exhausting. There are many things that I cannot talk about, which would grind away.’

  Kaye begins to laugh and I ask her what’s so funny.

  ‘I’m thinking of all those Australian ministers who came wandering into my kitchen and I’m trying to remember the name of the minister who came in and stuck his finger into my soup,’ she says. ‘That’s unheard of in Paris. I know it’s probably the thing in Australian country kitchens, but this was haute cuisine in the cuisine capital of the world—a dish for ambassadors who represent whole countries! I was working very hard and I was always very nervous before an official dinner. It’s all about timing, presentation, that teamwork with the waiters.

  ‘Anyway, the Foreign Affairs Minister sticks his finger into my soup!’ Her voice still carries indignation.

  Then she returns to my previous question. Why stay?

  ‘Why do I do what I do now at Cordon Bleu? I do it because France is losing something so precious: its food culture. Le Cordon Bleu is trying to preserve France’s unique food heritage by educating a whole new generation of chefs worldwide. Once they learn the French techniques, they can then go back and apply it to their own culture.’

  Light rain begins to spatter on the windowpane, just like our last dinner here in 2010 and I suggest to Kaye that we have coffee here instead of going somewhere else.

  ‘Good idea,’ she concurs. ‘But I have an umbrella. A Parisienne never goes anywhere without an umbrella in autumn.’

  Then it begins to pelt down. Rivulets streamed down the windowpane the last time I was here with Olivier and I am overcome with a fierce desire to see the face of the stranger one more time. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom.

  Once again the stranger takes my breath away. But this time he is the one staring at me. My heart is quivering like a frightened baby bird. It’s obvious he has been waiting for me to return because as I pass his table, he asks in a mellow voice like molten honey, ‘Est-ce que nous nous connaissons?’ Do we know each other?

  He is speaking to me in French! He is engaging me! I frantically scramble through my mind to try and understand what he has said. I stop by his table and splutter an unimpressive, ‘Er, er, non, mais …’

  With the softest hint of a smile, he rescues me in impeccable English. ‘You can speak English if you like.’

  I’m relieved that he does not have that awesome baritone voice of Olivier, but a more moderate sound. Yet he exudes the same convivial style. Most important, though, like Olivier, this stranger is drop-dead gorgeous for a mature man. His short beard and moustache are neatly trimmed into perhaps four days’ growth and his black eyebrows have also been trimmed ever so lightly. This observation makes me smile remembering the way Olivier would hack at his bushy brows.

  And yes, he exudes a masculine sensuality that is alluring.

  ‘No, we don’t know each other,’ I say, emphasising the ‘know’, ‘but you are very familiar to me. You are the living image of my late husband Olivier, who was French. He died last year’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’

  ‘How long will you be staying here?’ I ask.

  ‘We are leaving now.’

  ‘Right now?’ My heart sinks.

  ‘Right now.’

  What had I imagined? That he would invite me to sit down at the spare table abutting his and interrupt his tête-à-tête with his woman friend, or wife? Like the stranger at La Méthode? Yes, that is exactly what I hoped.

  I push this fantasy out of my mind and grasp the reason for this astonishing exchange.

  ‘Wait just a moment, please. Let me show you a photograph of Olivier. He was a French man as you will see,’ I quickly add. ‘He looks very French.’

  ‘D’accord.’

  I turn and grab my bag and plonk it alongside him on the spare table. Out of my wallet, I pull out Olivier’s funeral card with the precious photograph of him and proudly thrust it forward. He was about sixty-five then and the stranger would only be a few years younger if not the same age, but well preserved like Olivier.

  He regards it with attention. ‘There are certainly similarities,’ he states.

  He then hands the card to his woman friend. I’m not introduced, so I do not find out if she is a friend, a wife, a lover, a sister or a business colleague. He is certainly a cultured, refined French man and I’m smitten.

  The woman breaks the spell. ‘I can see a definite likeness,’ she says in heavily accented English.

  Perhaps they are a French couple who have lived together for many years, but I don’t detect any air of romance. But then, how do I know how he views my signs of age; French men view older woman in favourable light. Perhaps the soft lighting of the restaurant strips off a decade. It matters not, because I feel beautiful before him as I did on the first New Year’s Eve when Olivier took me in his arms and kissed me.

  The stranger calls me back from my memories.

  ‘Where do you come from? You are not English,’ he asks. If I were a face reader, I would say he has a kind nature and he is clearly curious.

  ‘I’m Australian, but my husband was born in France and came to Australia with his family when he was thirty-five years old. He was a widower when I became involved with him nine years ago.’

  By now I realise the conversation is wrapping itself up and so are my daydreams about this wonderful man … this happenstance, which has lifted my spirits and sent serotonin rushing through my brain.

  This surely is coup de foudre (love at first sight). Not even Olivier sparked a coup de foudre, but a slower, smouldering fuse that burs
t into a fiery passion and wasn’t extinguished until the medications began to take their toll. My rational self knows that these feelings are not really for this man whose name I do not even know, but a desperate bid to feel once more the intense love and passion I felt for Olivier.

  However, meeting the stranger gives me one chance to forget those distressing images of Olivier in his dying months and to allow this French man to remind me how Olivier was when I first met him.

  There is no awkward silence because I then offer the information, ‘I return to Australia next week and I cannot tell you how much pleasure it has given me to see you.’

  Because I didn’t actually ‘meet’ him. He never introduced himself. The magic moment is over and I give him one last heartfelt happy smile.

  When I return from the bathroom, he is gone. We gather up our things and leave the restaurant five minutes later. Like the absence of Olivier, I will never see him again. I have enjoyed a moment of pure fantasy. Perhaps this is the final lesson I need to learn from a stranger. Olivier is dead. He will never be returning to me. I’m now a widow. And alone.

  But there is a welcome consolation. A reawakening. The stranger fired those first stirrings of desire that I haven’t felt since Olivier suffered pneumonia to add to his health woes in November 2011. The thought injects me with a ripple of pleasure. There is still a passionate woman hidden deep beneath all these layers of sadness.

  I can hardly wait to telephone Jane and tell her about him. But then I think, the big story for me tonight has been Kaye and her feisty independence and freedom to create such a world for herself. There was no man central to her success.

  It’s like a bolt to the brain. Because unfolding here are two entirely different ways of being into my future. Do I seek out another man to comfort me and be the companion I miss so much? Or do I channel my energies into freedom and independence—the way I did with my career before meeting Olivier? I face the universal problem for women—it’s so hard to forget about men and the magic they bring to our lives.

  I am thinking about intimacy with a man and appreciating his innate masculinity—that whole ethos Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus of Dr John Gray’s book, or in French culture, the simple statement of respect ‘Vive la difference!’ That connectedness of a committed couple and those fruits of caring, kindness and concern for each other. And, what I really valued with Olivier—friendship with a man. The marriage experts do espouse that when friendship is the core of the relationship, a healthy sex life is the reward.

  NINETEEN

  MY LAST WEEKEND IN PARIS

  ‘The one who walks alone, is likely to find places no one else has ever been.’ Albert Einstein

  Isabelle disappeared early this morning with the dogs to tend her eight horses in Versailles and I’m free to plan my weekend activities. So many choices in Paris and so little time left.

  I decide there is nothing as intoxicating as a dose of Paris architecture, so I board the red tourist bus on Raspail at 10 am to do what I wanted to do with Jane that first Monday in Paris. I get on and off the bus at whim. In a light mood of serendipity, I stop at Boulevard Saint-Germain where I spend an hour in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés cathedral. I notice in the side chapel a small group of worshippers, but I want my own quiet moment for spiritual enrichment.

  Saint-Germain-des-Prés is the oldest church in Paris, built in the year 543, and it embodies the long history of Christianity. Religious art here is priceless such as the statue of the Virgin Mary and child on the rear wall and the painting of Christ entering Jerusalem on a donkey on Palm Sunday.

  When your country is only 225 years old, it’s easy to be awestruck when peering up at the priceless rose-stained glass window in a cathedral built in the thirteenth century. The nave is even older, dating from William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, who invaded England in 1066.

  I leave and wander down Rue Bonaparte in the lackadaisical manner of the flâneur for the pleasure of it. The flâneur has no real destination and neither do I, dawdling along, window shopping. In one shop window I see books by famous French writers Diderot, La Fontaine and Victor Hugo and I read on the front cover of Hugo’s book, ‘La vie est une fleur, l’amour en est le miel.’ Life is a flower, love is the honey. It may sound corny, but I do believe my life is still in flower. I have been taking photographs of flowers in gardens and floral arrangements for five weeks now, thrilling myself. I doubt this was Hugo’s interpretation though. I stare at the book through the window stunned with the realisation that I have found what I was searching for in Paris. Right here. My life is still in flower. Thank you, Victor. Widowhood is simply a word. My actions, holidaying in France with Jane, photographing floral arrangements, keeping my travel diary, staying with French women friends and travelling solo by train, are actions of an independent woman who is regaining her sense of self. The most difficult of all? Returning to school to learn French. Life remains such an adventure.

  Apart from that revelation, Hugo’s quotation also captures the ethos of the whole of the French race: that love is the honey. In France, that means sex. Yes, there are flowers, but there is no honey in my life. But then I remember Kaye’s parting words to me. ‘You should never say never again, Nadine, because you don’t know what’s in store for you.’

  The American feminist writer Betty Friedan would say that most widows should accept that men, in later years, are a diminishing breed. There’s a huge supply and demand problem. Not only do men die earlier than women, but research has shown that 71 per cent of older men were married compared with 46 per cent of women. Add to that the fact that 38 per cent of older women are widowed compared with only 11 per cent of men. ‘Older’ for the Australian Bureau of Statistics means over the age of sixty-five. In my age bracket, 15 per cent of women are already widows and I’m one of them. We are young widows, aged under 70.

  I’ve never forgotten what she told me. Widows or older single or divorced women have four choices: celibacy, an affair with a married man, finding someone in the paucity of suitable divorced or single men on the market, or masturbation. She didn’t mention a fifth option for some women: lesbianism. That’s probably the surprising discovery of this journey—the stories of women becoming lesbians at a later stage of their lives. At every turn in my holiday there are revelations: Gertrude Stein was gay and two other French women authors I revere—de Beauvoir and Colette—were bisexual. Marie Antoinette may have taken a female lover as well as her secret love, Axel.

  There seems to be a lot more to female sexuality than the black-and-white experiences of my life thus far. I suspect French women are far more evolved in their sexual appetites than Australian women—because of their iconic role models such as the Renaissance mistresses and contemporary women writers, not forgetting the sizzling pens of twentieth-century French erotica writers Anaïs Nin and Violette Leduc. All of this has evolved into a French society where romance and sex are considered the ‘honey’ of life.

  I’m still mulling over such matters when I reach Le Bistro le Pré aux Clercs Brasserie on the corner of Rue Jacob and Rue Bonaparte. The menu propped up against a hedge of flowering plants shows nine euros for soup! Entrée is fifteen euros! I order a pork dish at eighteen euros. When it arrives, the meat is oozing blood and as raw as a pig’s hindquarter. I call the waiter and ask for it to be cooked longer.

  ‘Medium, Madame?’ asks le garcon.

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘One more minute each side,’ he says, smiling at me.

  Pork should be well done. My little stance is a reminder of how Oli would embarrass me by sending a well-done steak back to the kitchen, because it was not swimming in a sea of blood. ‘Blue means red!’ he would exclaim. So, the French cooking style hasn’t rubbed off on me!

  My last free day in Paris is carefully planned. I arrive at the Musée d’Orsay early to see an exhibition of the nude male body entitled Masculin. But I’m disappointed. The line-up winds snake-like for about 100 metres and is as bad as our first day i
n Paris waiting at the Élysée Palace. Will I queue for two hours today? No! I think I understand Jane’s reaction that first day in Paris.

  Instead, I find a crêperie behind the museum and order a seafood galette for breakfast before heading to the river. I think upon a ride on the bateau mouche, docked on the quay, but decide not to repeat anything I did with Oli, particularly the boat trip. It was such a wonderful honeymoon treat. A page has been turned in the past month and I’m seeking out experiences for myself today, rather than snatching snippets of the past.

  I stroll over the Pont de Solferino, built in the late 1990s, where countless padlocks symbolise silent love stories. There are no couples today locking in their fidelity on this bridge of romance. But I stop anyway and hang over the railing, intoxicated by the spectacle before me. The elegant Louisiana Belle paddle-steamer is floating past the majestic Musée d’Orsay. Only Paris would have a railway station whose facade is a work of art, where the iconic clock shows that it is 1.15 pm. Below me the river twinkles and en face (in front) a few bridges peep over each other, and Notre Dame and the gilded dome of Les Invalides stretch skyward. I turn away and follow the bridge into the Jardin des Tuileries.

  I have never been here before and the prospect of discovery brings a spring to my step. I read on the gate that Queen Catherine de Médicis established the garden in 1561 when Le Louvre was still a palace. The garden was later transformed by Louis XIV who commissioned his gardener André Le Nôtre to design a new park in front of the palace in 1666. He was also the genius who created the beautiful gardens of Versailles and Avenue des Champs-Élysées.

  The sky is threatening with heavy cloud as I spy an amazing statue in the very first square of lawn, loops of steel forbidding entry. Standing Woman has a voluptuous form, massive firm breasts and big nipples, curvaceous thighs, powerful, muscular legs—so magnificent a nude that the woman’s nondescript facial features fail to attract attention. Her head—out of proportion to her body—sits small and insignificant on powerful shoulders. The sculptor, Gaston Lachaise, clearly intended the focus to be the body and drew the eye away from any notion of facial beauty. She has an accentuated hourglass body with a tiny waist and markings for pubic hair. I look upon her and I admire the strength Lachaise meant to convey.