True Pleasures

by Lucinda Holdforth

  As the tour comes to an end, Rachel and I finally let down our guard. We are about to giggle and nudge each other, when, to our surprise, a member of the tour group approaches us.

  ‘You are the Australian student, no?’ she says, in English.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘My name is Professor Verdy. We spoke on the phone.’

  She smiles, and I suddenly see the good humor in her soft brown eyes. I realize now she’s been watching Rachel and I behave ourselves.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ we say. ‘It was wonderful, fascinating.’

  ‘When you come to Versailles next time, ring me,’ she says. ‘Come again.’

  It’s a curious thing, the charm of the French woman. The reserve, the coolness, and then the unexpected surge of warmth.

  The French language, they say, is the language of love. And the tradition persists that the French are a romantic people, the world’s greatest lovers. But that’s not entirely true, or at least, not in the way people think. After all, this is a race that has more words for ‘working girl’ than any other language I know; each one, as Janet Flanner, the NewYorker’s 1930s Paris correspondent, observed, ‘a precise professional rating’. There’s cocotte, horizontale, grisette, demimondaine, courtisane, demi-castor, dégrafée, irregulière, femme galante …

  At some stage, disconcertingly, the definitions blur, and common prostitutes at the bottom of the ladder become revered courtesans at the top. The King’s favorite courtesan was the most important, soaring to the top of the social ladder with the title of maîtresse en titre or official mistress. I must say the step-by-step progress from whore up to mistress gets you thinking about an affair with a married man in quite a different way.

  If anything, there’s a deeply pragmatic aspect to French erotic culture. This is the nation that is not fazed by the fact that President Faure died while making love with his mistress in La Pompadour’s former Paris home, the Élysée Palace, in 1898. Or that President Mitterrand was mourned at his State funeral in 1996, not only by his wife, but also by his mistress and love child. The greatest courtesans are affectionately memorialized. La Pompadour is remembered in the grandeur of the Pompadour Salon in the Hôtel Meurice in Paris. Jeanne du Barry, always second best, is recalled, carnally, in the Comtesse du Barry gourmet charcuterie and food supplier.

  Then of course, there are legions of artworks celebrating the whore. Puccini’s La Bohème was based on Henri Murger’s novel of 1830s Paris bohemia, Scènes de la vie de Bohème. Mimi, the heroine, was a consumptive grisette who gave herself for love as much as money. There was the exquisite, also consumptive, courtesan Marguerite Duplessis, immortalized by Alexandre Dumas fils as La Dame aux Camélias, and later by Verdi as La Traviata.

  Colette’s novels Chéri and Gigi are a tribute to the belle époque courtesans, like La Belle Otéro and Liane de Pougy. Colette always liked the healthy avaricious types, the survivors. Once, during Colette’s music hall days La Belle Otéro took her aside and said to her: ‘You look a bit green, my girl. Don’t forget that there is always a moment in a man’s life, even if he’s a miser, when he opens his hand wide …’ ‘The moment of passion?’ ‘No. The moment when you twist his wrist.’

  Perhaps the French attitude to sex is best summed up in Nancy Mitford’s The Blessing, when a Frenchwoman speaks to an American: ‘Well then, perhaps you can tell us,’ said Madame Rocher, ‘how in a country where there are no brothels, do the young men ever learn?’

  According to my friend Angie, whose sampling of men is truly global, there is definitely a sound basis to the Frenchman’s reputation. The best lover of all, she said, was Frédéric in Vietnam.

  ‘Tell me why.’

  ‘He was … erotic,’ she said. ‘Before then, I never liked doing it to music, but he did, and he made sex seem like a dance. And then he talked.’

  ‘Talked?’

  ‘You know, said things. During sex,’ she said, adding inconsequently, ‘Both his parents were psychoanalysts.’

  ‘He said things,’ she went on. ‘And it was …’ her voice took on a dreamy tone, ‘erotic. And then at the end he did what no man has ever done before or since …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said, “’Ave you ’ad enough?”’

  ‘Ooh,’ I said, impressed but rather confused. ‘And so … had you?’

  She looked at me indignantly. I changed the question.

  ‘Was he marvelous?’

  ‘He was an utter bastard,’ she said vehemently. ‘Turned out he was sleeping with half of Hanoi, including an exquisite Vietnamese prostitute. But he was … erotic.’

  I’m thinking about love and romance and passion and pragmatism an hour or so later as Rachel and I present ourselves at 4 rue d’Artois, also in Versailles. Here is Nancy Mitford’s final home. The house she bought to die in. It’s very modest: a long and narrow white house, angled to let the sun in. Here’s the plaque – I’ve seen a photo of the occasion when it was unveiled, with Nancy’s sisters standing glumly around in black. Now the plaque is looking a bit faded and unkempt, as if no one is very interested in it anymore. We walk around the back. There’s a school next door where very young children are playing. In Nancy’s garden the sun shines gently on waving grass and spring blossoms and chestnut candles.

  ‘It’s all a bit sad isn’t it,’ says Rachel.

  ‘No,’ I say defensively.

  The role of the mistress is often vulnerable and painful. And lonely. But for a woman like Nancy, it would be unfair to suggest that she didn’t have a choice or say in the matter; that she didn’t, at some level, choose her relationship and its progress. As Nancy’s sister Diana wisely said: I suppose she wanted to marry him … but if she had I don’t think it would have worked out … I think she was perfect by herself.

  In 1949 Nancy Mitford wrote to a friend: He [Evelyn Waugh] has been too terrible about my book [Love in a Cold Climate] but the publishers are preparing for it to be another best seller & I confess that for me is what matters, so that I can go on living here – all I care about. Evelyn said it could have been a work of art – yes but I’m afraid it’s here & now & the Colonel I care for.

  It may sound shallow to gloat about a prospective bestseller, but Nancy was not. In those days she was still working hard for the financial freedom to create an independent life, to make it possible to enjoy ‘the here and now’ and the love affair that was so important to her. Nancy Mitford’s move to Versailles, was, I think, the ultimate statement of her classical values. That’s why she moved to the city of aristocrats, to the home of the warrior class that went to war on behalf of France and dedicated itself devotedly to pleasure the rest of the time.

  The funny thing is, Love in a Cold Climate did turn out to become a work of art. And Nancy did go on living in France, all the way to her death. And out of her accumulated ‘heres and nows’, she made a beautiful life.

  Nancy Mitford wrote about all kinds of love, but there was one love experience which eluded her. Motherhood.

  At first she fully expected to follow the usual path. In 1938 she wrote to a friend: I am in the family way isn’t it nice. But … don’t tell anybody … it may all come to nothing.

  I am awfully excited though. She subsequently suffered a miscarriage.

  In November 1941, Nancy wrote to her sister: Darling Diana, Thank you so much for the wonderful grapes, you are really an angel & grapes are so good for me. I have had a horrible time, so depressing because they had to take out both my tubes & therefore I can never now have a child. Nancy immediately minimized her grief: I can’t say I suffered great agony but quite enough discomfort – but darling when I think of you & the 18 stitches in your face [due to a car accident] it is absolutely nothing.

  Eight years later there was a curious exchange of letters between Evelyn Waugh in England and Nancy Mitford in Paris. In January 1949 she wrote joyously to her old friend: I am having a lovely life – only sad that heavenly 1948 is over … He wrote back sourly: What an
odd idea of heaven. Of course in my country we cannot enjoy the elegant clothes & meals & masquerades which fill your days … In his letter Evelyn Waugh did not refer or allude in any way to Nancy Mitford’s childlessness.

  Yet she inferred the criticism. Darling Evelyn, Don’t be so cross & don’t tease me about not having children, it was God’s idea, not mine. Do you really think it’s more wrong to live in one place than another, or wrong to go to fancy dress parties?

  I’ve thought a lot about this exchange. Evelyn Waugh was criticizing Nancy Mitford for being happy. That much is clear. How dare you be happy! is his unmistakeable implication. Her defense was simply that she couldn’t have children, and so it was necessary to find other joys and pleasures in life. Pleasures that might appear entirely frivolous to the eyes of a devout Catholic father of a large brood. But it wasn’t fair to blame her for flourishing despite the absence of children in her life.

  I think a lot of women today, perhaps unconsciously, share Evelyn Waugh’s view that a woman is not complete unless she has children – or, to put it another way, that a woman without children is not a true woman, but floating, anchorless and without purpose.

  Many of the women I admire never had children. Nancy Mitford. Edith Wharton. Madame du Deffand. Coco Chanel. Others did but children played only a minor role in their lives. Hortense Mancini abandoned her four young children when she fled from her husband. Madame de Pompadour had a daughter with whom she spent very little time after she began her liaison with a King. Colette had a daughter with her second husband – but sent her away to be raised, only spending time with her during summer holidays. Napoleon’s Josephine, by contrast, was a devoted mother of two: she died in the loving arms of her son. Yet none of these women defined themselves by their status as mothers. Nor did they expect that the experience of motherhood would completely fulfil them.

  People talk a lot nowadays about having it all. Having the husband, having the career, having the children. And there’s a cruel implication that missing out on any of these experiences is necessarily a permanent blight on life itself. Like most of us, however, Nancy Mitford didn’t have it all. She graciously accepted that it just didn’t work out like that. She merely had whatever was hers to have. And she made the most of it.

  10

  Dressed by Dior

  There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life. And so when hats in Paris are lovely and french and everywhere then France is alright.

  Gertrude Stein

  I DON’T QUITE KNOW how to say this. I’d like a French manicure please? But do the French call it a French manicure? What if it’s like condoms: the English called them French letters and the French call them capotes anglaises?

  I’m in the Guerlain manicure room on the ChampsÉlysées. One minute I was on the hot wide street, the next I was climbing the creaky wooden staircase to a different century, up, up and my nose twitching as I inhaled the distinctive dusty smell. Now I’m perched awkwardly on a high faded settee among stuffed chairs. Dowdy women in gilt frames are looking down their considerable noses at me. A collection of vintage Guerlain perfume bottles in a glass case adds to the historic micro-climate. Even the sunlight seems old and musty as it filters through the high windows.

  Into the room walks a brusque little woman who wheels over a trolley and sets herself up in front of me. She takes her time. Only when she is quite ready does she look up and say calmly, ‘Bonjour, Madame.’

  Clearly, this is no fancy Sydney salon where they wrap you in blankets and burn calming oils and play new-age music, as if you are a particularly dangerous inmate in a progressive asylum. Here in Paris, beauty isn’t therapy, it’s business.

  French polish, it’s called. It takes a long time. First there’s the undercoat to cover the whole nail in pink-tinged clear varnish. Then another coat, the same. Wait for it to dry. Then there’s a fiddly bit where a hard white varnish is applied just to the crescent tip of the nail. My manicurist is clearly an expert though; she attacks the task with complete confidence. Wait while this dries. Then clear varnish the whole nail several times until it sets completely hard. So the crescent tips of your nails are whiter than white, and your cuticles are pink and healthy. The effect is one of heightened reality: everything looks natural, only much better, natural in a way that poor old nature could never hope to achieve.

  Somehow this seems to me very French, and sets me wondering whether I am wise to be sporting this very hard red lipstick, a color which bears absolutely no relationship to nature.

  My manicurist is coming to the end of her task. My hands are soft and smooth; my nails are shining. ‘Now you are soignée,’ she says, breathing a sigh of aesthetic relief. Les petits soins the French call it, the little attentions. In Paris, the little things matter a lot.

  Possibly my favorite Hollywood film about Paris is the fifties musical Funny Face, which it’s only fair to warn you, fails as a film largely because of the miscasting of the million-year-old Fred Astaire as the love interest to the radiant Audrey Hepburn.

  Discovered by famous fashion photographer Fred as she works, mouse-like, in a dark and cavernous bookshop, Audrey is whisked to Paris for a fashion shoot. At one stage she repudiates the shallow world of fashion and sneaks off to a smoky basement where a Sartrean guru holds court. She is adorably earnest in her intellectual black stovepipe pants, skivvy and ballet shoes. But we all know it won’t last. Because what she really wants to do is put on a Dior frock and twirl deliriously under the Eiffel Tower, releasing a bunch of celebratory balloons. That’s what tends to happen to bookish girls in Paris: you arrive an intellectual, you depart a fashion victim.

  I head down the stairs, holding my hands carefully in front of me. They look lovely.

  I was very disappointed the first time I walked down Avenue Montaigne. I thought it was too big. It’s still too big. It’s a big walk and the price tags are even bigger. This is couture row, and the signs say Christian Dior, Chanel, Emanuel Ungaro, Nina Ricci, Valentino …

  Clothes are a funny business. No matter what we wear, we are saying something about ourselves to other people. If we are in fashion or out of it, expensively dressed or simply dressed, soberly or loudly or eccentrically attired – what we wear is a public message. And because we can choose what we wear in a way that we can’t choose our eye color or height, our clothes go beyond being a simple reflection of self to an active invention of public identity. As little girls we play dress-up, practicing being women. As women we still play dress-up, practicing being the women we want to be – or at least, be taken for.

  The French understand this very well: in fact, clothes once played an important political role. At the court of Louis XIV, the nobles were classified by what they wore. The old nobility were known as the noblesse d’épée, the nobility of the sword. The new class of nobility was based on their juridical and administrative functions on behalf of the crown, and they were known as the noblesse de la robe. More generally, clothes were an all-purpose symbol of social status. The parties and balls of the court of Versailles were open to people of any rank, as long as they were dressed appropriately.

  I always laugh when I read a women’s magazine declaring that some starlet or other has an ‘individual’ or ‘unique’ style, when all she wears is a minute variation on prevailing fashions. In fact, all of us wear a modern uniform. And really, this is no bad thing. It’s a way in which we all say that we consent to live with each other; that we accept the terms of modernity. I’m like you, our clothes say to each other, I’m with you. In many respects it’s not all that different from the days of Louis XIV.

  But there’s one wonderful difference. Whereas in Louis XIV’s day only the very rich could afford to wear the appropriate clothes, today mass production means most of us can afford some gesture towards the latest fashion, if we choose. Coco Chanel was the first designer to understand the democratization of fashion. She not only accepted this,
she actively embraced it. She thought it was wonderful that her clothes were widely copied, that a shop girl could achieve the same look as a countess. A fashion that does not reach the streets is not a fashion, was Chanel’s view, and her supreme fashion insight.

  When I read the various biographies of Coco Chanel, however, I learned a few things about haute couture. I discovered that it is special because it combines the art of design with the craft of tailoring. Coco Chanel would fit her clothes directly on her models so that they flowed and curved with the line of their bodies. In particular, she was obsessed with the cut of the sleeve. She would cut her dresses and jackets very high under the armpit. The effect was to give a woman a lean, long torso and slender arms. At the same time she carefully shaped the sleeve so that the woman would have maximum shoulder rotation and movement. The fit was perfect both for beauty and wearability.

  After reading this I looked carefully at the photos of Chanel couture, and then at my own suit jackets. Hmm. My clothes looked like sacks by comparison. More importantly, I looked sack-ish in them. Chanel was also remarkable because she made her clothes to last. She was still wearing the same little suits thirty years after she first made them, and they still looked beautiful. She turned fashion into anti-fashion, by making it timeless. She turned fashion into style.

  Looking in the windows of these elegant stores I can still see something of the fine tailoring and detailed work that makes haute couture special. And insanely expensive.

  Edith Wharton only wore the finest clothes. She thought that beautiful clothes were an art form. One of the things she loved most about living in Paris was that the French agreed with her. She wrote: