Gertrude Stein also carefully calibrated levels of national maturity. She too concluded that the character of a nation had a very real effect on the lives and disposition of its citizens.
France really prefers civilisation to tumultuous adolescence, France prefers that the adolescent learns reserve and logic and civilisation and fashion as he emerges out of adolescence, France who thinks that childhood and adolescence should be felt instinctively as not an end in itself but as a progression toward the state of being civilised.
Once again, you see, there’s that link between civilization and art and being grown-up.
Here’s Edith Wharton again: No nation can have grown-up ideas till it has a ruling caste of grown-up men and women; and it is possible to have a ruling caste of grown-up men and women only in a civilization where the power of each sex is balanced by that of the other.
So now we come to a distinctly infuriating Catch 22. To get a grown-up society you need grown-up women. But you can’t mould and form grown-up women, except in a grown-up society.
Some people think it’s grown-up for women of a certain age to put sex behind them. They think that sex is a pastime of youth and immaturity. But the French don’t. They don’t equate sex with age. They equate sex with sexiness.
Sexuality is a very personal thing, of course. But I don’t see why a woman should have to declare herself sexually washed up at some arbitrary age, any more than she would declare herself intellectually completed. Sexuality is not like a small-town festival that the deputy mayor dutifully declares to be closed, or an inner light that a resentful warden suddenly switches off. Part of the trick, though, is finding in yourself a certain adult sexuality, which is, I think, a different quality from youthful sexuality. It’s more subtle, like old wine or antique jewelry.
Of course, the women of Paris offer sure evidence of the potential appeal of the older woman. Here’s a list I made up – it’s a roll-call of grown-up sexiness: Edith Wharton had her love affair with Morton Fullerton when she was forty-seven. George Sand was sixty years old when she took her last lover, Charles Marchal. He was thirty-six. She wrote: It is as if I see everything for the first time. Germaine de Staël made her second marriage at the age of forty-five. Her husband was twenty-three years old. Nancy Mitford commenced her great love affair with Gaston Palewski when she was in her early forties.
Then there was Colette, who serves as proof that being a grown-up woman doesn’t make you good, necessarily, or wise. But it sure does make you sexy. In 1920, Colette was forty-seven years old. She was a very powerful, sexual woman. But even today it still seems shocking that she began a discreet affair with her sixteen-year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenal.
It was summer and the young, handsome and earnest Bertrand was staying with his stepmother and two of her younger girlfriends at his father’s holiday house in Brittany. Colette’s novel Chéri, about the doomed love affair between an ageing courtesan and a young gigolo, was being serialized in the newspaper. No wonder, then, that Bertrand noticed Colette looking at him one day as he ran in off the beach. When she passed her arm around his waist he trembled. She kissed him goodnight – on the mouth.
Soon after that the three women decided it was time to make a man of this beautiful boy. Colette suggested to Bertrand that his sexual initiation take place with the youngest of the three women, Germaine Beaumont. But by then, Bertrand had succumbed to Colette emotionally. Bertrand told a friend that his stepmother had been demanding, voracious, expert and rewarding. Their liaison lasted, on and off, for nearly five years.
Here’s another story about wilfulness and sexiness. During World War Two Coco Chanel stayed on in the Hôtel Ritz, which had been commandeered by the German High Command. She formed a relationship with Baron Hans Gunther von Dinklage, a Nazi. He was one of those urbane German aristocrats who wangled a tour in Paris and treated the Nazi regime and the war as a rather tiresome but necessary irritant. At the end of the war Chanel was interrogated. When asked if it were true that she had consorted with a German, she reportedly replied: ‘Really, a woman of my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance of a lover.’
Of course, at fifty-seven, Coco Chanel was more beautiful than ever. And women like Josephine and Nancy Mitford took great care about their appearance into their later years. But George Sand, according to Charles Dickens, was as plain as Queen Victoria’s nurse. Edith Wharton was immaculately dressed but looked like a bad statue in a public park. And Germaine de Staël was over-weight and tastelessly dressed.
You see, it was never about how they looked, it was about their vitality and verve and spirit. They had worked it out: how to be, as a woman, as an older woman. And they didn’t deny themselves their own sexuality.
It’s one of those bright and calm Sundays which are worthy of your Sunday best. As I walk from Rachel’s to Omar’s restaurant, I savor the slower pace of the quartier, the gentler tone. At Chez Omar I tentatively push open the heavy restaurant door. In the gloom I see several young men sitting and leaning and smoking. They seem neither surprised nor interested to see me. From the placid Parisian sidewalk I feel as though I have accidentally walked in on an out-take from a mob movie.
One of the young men walks out the back. Omar emerges, dapper and unconcerned. We step outside, and after a moment the young man pulls up in a large Mercedes. Omar takes over the driving and I am ushered gently but impersonally into the passenger seat.
Omar takes me to lunch at the Dôme restaurant, one of the famous old brasseries of Montparnasse. He tells me that when he arrived in Paris as a young migrant from North Africa he used to work here as a waiter, and later at nearby La Coupole. But now he is an important man, and the waiters treat him with elaborate and practiced deference. We take our seats and eat fine, bland sole. I have a glass of wine: Omar doesn’t drink. It’s all rather like being taken out for a treat by your great-uncle.
Omar seems, well, not particularly interested in me. He doesn’t ask me a lot of questions. He seems content merely to sit and chat intermittently, in a rather desultory fashion. I try to coax some memories of his earlier days in Paris, but I can see it’s all a bit hazy now. Or perhaps not important. I realize that this is a quiet man, a peaceful man. He has made his money, he is looking after his extended family, he is respected and admired.
Every now and then Omar surprises me with an observation.
‘At La Coupole you know,’ he says, ‘there is a dance hall downstairs.’
‘Oh?’ I say.
‘Older women would come there to dance with the young men,’ he goes on, ‘to find comfort.’
‘Really?’ I say.
But the conversation goes no further.
Our puzzling discourse unsettles me and suddenly ignites memories of my younger self. For a long time I had only the most tenuous hold on my identity. Friends and family would treat me as if I was a known personality with distinctive characteristics. But deep inside I felt unformed. I looked at the world from behind a regulation set of eyes, but inside my skin I was little more than a mass of emotions and sensations. As the French say, I didn’t feel bien dans ma peau. I simply did not know how to bring my floating attributes together into a coherent personality. And so I sometimes found it hard to connect with people, to discover the self beneath their skins. I guess I was simply a young woman, and a late developer. I guess I am still developing.
After lunch Omar seems to brighten up. ‘Now I shall show you a little bit of Paris,’ he says. ‘Shall we go to La Mosquée?’
La Mosquée is beautiful. It sits on the edge of the 5th arrondissement near the Jardin des Plantes. Under the white minaret it’s a 1920s Moorish-style complex with white colonnades, tinkling fountains and blue-green tiled courtyards. There’s the mosque itself, a library and a bath-house. And a salon de thé, elaborately decorated with banquettes and a painted ceiling and cushions and mosaics and rich colors. After we’ve had a look around, we adjourn to the little salon courtyard and eat sweets and
drink mint tea from gold-patterned colored glasses. The Sunday light filters into the space.
For the first time, Omar appears at home, and I realize that this little part of Paris, this island of Islam, means more to him than all the flashy restaurants frequented by his own clientele. Here he seems complete as an Algerian and a Parisian. This sense of cultural melding reminds me of the gorgeous African women I see on the Métro, with their licorice curls and full lips. They accessorize their brightly colored cotton turbans and kaftans with stiletto heels. They add a joyous new dimension to traditional chic.
Once I might have felt a nervous compulsion to clown and patter and tease this curious gentleman taking me out for the afternoon. But now I relax with him into a Sunday mood. I simply sit and enjoy his stories of his family. Some of it I don’t really understand – it’s a conversation directed not at me, but at some interior space in his memory, or his heart.
Before we depart the conversation drifts to the tragic death in Paris of the English Princess Diana. Omar suddenly looks very serious.
‘You know that Diana was killed because of her relationship with a Muslim man.’
I look startled.
‘Sure, of course,’ he says bitterly. ‘She was free here. But the British, they couldn’t let her be.’
We walk back to the car and Omar tentatively passes an arm around my waist. I gently drift out of his embrace. We smile cautiously.
As Omar drops me off he says to me, ‘Come and see me next time you are in Paris.’ And, ‘Will you write about me and my restaurant?’
I walk through the door to see Rachel lying on her chaise longue reading Vanity Fair.
‘How was that?’ she asks.
‘Odd,’ I say. ‘But good.’
Edith Wharton’s death was a major public event. She was a great and famous author, very rich and well respected. And she had planned her death well. Her letters and papers were in order. She had even marked some documents clearly, For my biographer. She was well aware that history would judge her and that her letters and documents would eventually form part of a fuller picture of Mrs Wharton.
But no one was prepared for this. In her desk was a fragment of a novella and it was pornography. Superbly written and realized, but clearly, pornography. It reveals its author to be a woman with a detailed knowledge of sex and sensuality. A woman who has, as the French might say, been well and thoroughly fucked.
Here’s just a little of what Mrs Wharton wrote:
As his hand stole higher she felt the secret bud of her body swelling, yearning, quivering hotly to burst into bloom. Ah, here was his subtle forefinger pressing it, forcing its tight petals softly apart, and laying on their sensitive edges a circular touch so soft and yet so fiery that already lightnings of heat shot from that palpitating center all over her surrendered body, to the tips of her fingers, and the ends of her loosened hair. The sensation was so exquisite that she could have asked to have it indefinitely prolonged; but suddenly his head bent lower, and with a deeper thrill she felt his lips pressed upon that quivering invisible bud, and then the delicate firm thrust of his tongue, so full and yet so infinitely subtle, pressing apart the close petals and forcing itself in deeper and deeper through the passage that glowed and seemed to become illuminated at its approach …
To add to the taboo-breaking frisson of this passage, I should tell you that it describes the first formal act of incest between a father and his adult daughter.
And it was written in 1935 when Edith Wharton was seventy-three years old.
13
But Women Are Politics…
What else is happiness but the development of our abilities…?
Germaine de Staël
WHEN I WORKED in Canberra, I came across quite a few women in politics. Labor women, mostly. They were nearly all graduates of seventies’ feminism, and many had found their way to national politics via the trade union movement. They had fought hard for the sister-hood and were enjoying the spoils of victory. All padded flesh and hefty heartiness, they would bustle in to see the Deputy Prime Minister, as loud as their big-shouldered suits. They would lecture him with finger-wagging vigor on child-care and maternity leave. The Deputy Prime Minister would laugh vaguely and wave them away, promising, perhaps, to do something, sometime.
Yet despite the big hair and bright makeup, despite the correctly feminist issues and domineering maternal banter, I was always struck, in the end, by how similar these women politicians were to their male counterparts. Like the men, these women had somehow de-sexed themselves. That’s not to say that politicians didn’t have sex lives, far from it: Canberra is a notoriously lusty city. Rather, that all those men and women in public life had consciously put their intimate selves and their professional selves into separate compartments. The bedroom was kept a long, long way from the office.
As I stroll past the Palais Bourbon, home to the French Parliament, and into the creamy heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, every now and then I pass an exquisite shop displaying finely embroidered bed linen or filmy hand-stitched silk nightgowns. The French are completely at home in the bedroom: in fact, for centuries bedrooms played an important role in French public life. The Bourbon Kings conducted a formal lever and coucher, often held in a large, grand room away from their actual sleeping quarters. It was a great privilege for a courtier to attend the King’s rising and retiring ceremonies. Moreover, whenever the King presided over parliamentary sessions, he did so on a canopied bed, the lit de justice. This was a curious but apparently potent symbol of the King’s divine, supreme power. Some think that Louis XVI sealed his fate when he fell asleep on his lit de justice, snoring his way through a critical parliamentary debate in the early stages of the Revolution.
The French bedroom had an important social function as well. The seventeenth-century salon hostesses often received friends in their bedrooms. Many had little couches known as ruelles (little streets) built between their beds and the walls for their friends to lie upon while visiting. Bedrooms are still a source of uncomplicated fascination in France. I’ve been to see Marcel Proust’s bedroom reconstructed in the Musée Carnavelet and Madame de Récamier’s bedroom in the Louvre. The beds always seem remarkably small, as if an earlier France was populated by exquisite diminutives.
But right now there is only one French bedroom that really interests me. It belongs to a political activist who not only refused to be de-sexed by public life, but who openly smashed through the conventional demarcation lines between public life and private passion. She lived between the tumultuous years of 1766 and 1817 and her name was Germaine de Staël. She was, Lord Byron thought, the first female writer of this, perhaps of any age.
Germaine de Staël’s bedroom was Europe’s headquarters for liberal politics and progressive ideas. A succession of lovers – soldiers and statesmen, diplomats and scholars – owed their careers to her influence and inspiration. In between amorous exchanges she obtained their appointments and sinecures, she edited speeches and essays, she advised on tactics and policies, she clarified lines of thinking and corrected logical errors. None of which interfered in the least with her own enormous workload: writing essays and novels, hosting the most important salon in Europe and, finally, emerging as the leading dissident against Napoleon. All achieved without any official political appointment.
In the course of reading about the women of Paris, Germaine de Staël came as a major discovery to me. I felt quite shocked that I had never heard of her. I wanted to say, well, I knew a bit about Napoleon and Wellington and Talleyrand. So why wasn’t I told about Germaine de Staël? Hey?
In truth, Germaine de Staël’s life story moves and disturbs me. There could be many reasons for this. One may be that her life raises the distinctly unsettling question of women and power.
I’m at number 52 rue de Varenne and standing in front of a plaque (again). There must be thousands of these plaques pasted around Paris, like postcards from history. But this is my favorite. Translated, it says:
Hôtel de Galliffet: Cultural Institute of Italy
Talleyrand made this the center of political life under the
Directory as Minister for Foreign Affairs. It was here that
Madame de Staël was presented to Napoleon Bonaparte on
3 January 1798, and the beginning of their mutual hostility.
Imagine a cold and beautiful winter’s evening. The biggest party since the ancien régime is underway. Stepping from their carriages, five hundred guests stroll through this courtyard where rows of classical white columns are emblazoned with martial images: the vivid tents and banners recall Napoleon’s recent heroics in Italy. Inside the lovely house the scent of amber lingers in the air, intensified by thousands of candles hung on low, glittering chandeliers. Flowers line the staircases. For the first time in France, the waltz is being played, and the thin dresses balloon gently as the women sway and turn. Dazzled by their own glamor, it gradually dawns upon the guests that they are being elected into a new French political elite.
And this is just what their host Talleyrand is trying to achieve, because tonight he inaugurates a new kind of aristocracy. With a new kind of king.
From her home around the corner in the rue du Bac, Germaine de Staël arrives at the ball, a colorful figure with her bright turban and dark curls. She sweeps through the courtyard, impervious to the glitzy atmosphere. She’s seen this kind of thing before. Her Swiss father was a banker, one of the richest men in France. He served for a time as Louis XVI’s finance minister. Her host, Talleyrand, was her first lover, and he owes his appointment as foreign minister to her political influence. She knows only too well the strengths and weaknesses of this new breed of politician. After all, most of them attend her salon. As far as Germaine de Staël is concerned, this phase of the Revolution has merely put the villains-for-the-love-of-profit in the place of the villains-for-the-love-of-crime.
True Pleasures Page 16