True Pleasures

by Lucinda Holdforth

  When Benjamin writes despairingly of being in the public view as a result of his relationship with Germaine de Staël, he was not exaggerating. Here was no secluded artist. She was not at all like, say, Jane Austen, her exact contemporary, who was at that time leading a quiet life in the English provinces. Far from it. By the time she had finished writing the novel, Germaine de Staël was the premier political activist in Europe. From her base at Coppet, she was traversing the continent to confer with the Russian Tsar, British prime ministers and German philosophers. She published important political books and essays. When she was at home, her salon was the magnet for the growing European movement against Napoleon. Four years after the publication of Corinne or Italy a quip went around that there were three great powers in Europe – England, Russia and Madame de Staël. Later Napoleon would say, Her house at Coppet became a veritable arsenal against me. One went there to win one’s spurs.

  So when Germaine de Staël wrote and published Corinne or Italy, there was a lot more at stake than an artist’s idealized self-portrait. Its author knew that her work would be closely examined by kings and queens, prime ministers and generals, political allies and enemies. And perhaps even Napoleon himself.

  I’m not sure what Germaine de Staël had in mind when she wrote Corinne or Italy. She was a complex woman and this is a multi-layered work. Perhaps it is Germaine de Staël’s lament for the ideal self that she never achieved. Perhaps it is her way of revealing what she regards as the inner, the true Germaine de Staël. Or perhaps this is a very clever work of education. Corinne is intensely feminine. Unlike her extravagant and controversial creator, she is everything a woman of her times ought to have been. Yet even this paragon demands the right to be brilliant, celebrated and powerful. It’s as if Germaine de Staël is challenging her readers to envisage a new order, a world in which traditional femininity and outsize genius walk hand-in-hand.

  Here is Corinne’s magnificent and rousing moral conclusion:

  What else is happiness but the development of our abilities? … Is not killing yourself morally the same as killing yourself physically? And if mind and soul must be smothered, what is the point of going on with a wretched life that stirs me up to no purpose? … Do not people capable of great thoughts and generous feelings owe it to the world to share them? Is not every woman, as much as every man, obliged to make her way according to her own character and talents? And must we forever imitate the instinct of the bees, one swarm following another, without progress and without change?

  In modern politics – in modern life – people routinely divide themselves into separate, discrete compartments. But Germaine de Staël – politician and artist – crashed through the barriers between public and private life. She explored the boundaries of femininity even as she reached the heights of political influence. In doing so, it seems to me that she expanded the range of possibility for all women.

  Germaine de Staël still poses a challenge.

  I wonder if it matters, for example, that two hundred years later a woman like me has more or less decided to drop out? I don’t mean that I was ever going to be a party political player; that was never likely. Rather, that I might have had opportunities to succeed within some influential organizations: certainly this was the case in the Foreign Affairs and Trade Department. Large private businesses are also sites of modern power. Yet I have vacated the field.

  Believe me, as I roam around Paris, jobless, I’m conscious of the irony. I admire a woman who courageously participated in public life, even as I retreat from it.

  I can put my finger on one reason for my abdication. To succeed in the major institutions of modern life, you need to tolerate hierarchies. Our modern institutions were created by men, and the model they used for them was the most effective pre-modern organization – the military. It should not surprise us that the greatest innovator of modern organizational structures was Napoleon himself. The civil service, the European education and legal systems, chambers of commerce – all made by Napoleon, all structured along military lines, all based on hierarchy, bureaucracy and accountability. These are admirable things in their way. I just don’t think they’re me. Actually, I can’t see Germaine de Staël in a management consultant meeting either.

  I recall a rather startling conversation with a male friend. We were talking about women in large organizations, and why they don’t do as well as they should. The conversation rambled on, in the usual desultory fashion. But suddenly it changed.

  ‘Well of course,’ my friend injected, out of the blue, ‘there’s also the fact that women are bloody nightmares.’

  This rocked me. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Well, men are tribal. They endorse the hierarchy. It’s like a footy team, or Shakespeare. You have the captain or the king. He’s the boss, right? What he says, goes. No one challenges the leader’s authority. But women, they just won’t accept authority.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said dubiously. ‘But what if you disagree with the leader?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you openly disagree, you openly humiliate the leader, only if you are prepared to challenge him for the top job. You get the numbers, you mount a coup. If you succeed, then you become boss and you get to decide what happens. And if you’re no good, someone in turn topples you. It’s a sensible process. Women,’ he went on sadly, ‘they think it is right to disagree just because the boss has done something stupid.’

  Ah. Immediately about four incidents in my own career sprang to mind. Times when I had gone to my male boss and spoken up for what seemed to me basic good sense. My views were tolerated and sometimes welcomed, but I had always felt the ripple of masculine discomfort. Now I understood what this meant. I was upsetting the order. I was undermining the hierarchy. As Germaine de Staël observed, Women annoyed Napoleon as rebels …

  ‘You sheilas,’ my friend continued, ‘you’re just not tribal. You’re anarchic!’

  This man’s ideas struck a chord with me. They certainly explained some of the perplexing interactions in my own working life. And in a funny way they clarified the strange impotence of the women politicians, the ones who used to bustle in to see the Deputy Prime Minister. Perhaps they seemed de-sexed because they were de-sexed. They were playing a man’s game, trapped inside the hierarchy.

  As I was musing on the implications of all this, my friend suddenly changed tack once again. He was clearly on a favorite topic.

  ‘You know, of course, it’s all about to change.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The Internet is changing everything; it’s creating a more free and open world. The big organizations used to control things, but not much longer. Now it’s a networked era. People can be independent; they can come together if they have common goals. They don’t have to put up with the old tribal hierarchy, the old bureaucratic models. This will suit women much better.

  ‘God forbid,’ he concluded ruefully, ‘you’ll probably all take over.’

  I didn’t quite know what to make of this conversation at the time, but now it’s beginning to make sense. Germaine de Staël tried to navigate the perilous straits between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perhaps today we are in another period of transition, navigating our own straits of change.

  As I sit here, an idea is coming to me, an image. It feels as if it has been floating around in the back of my head for some time, but is just coming into focus. My apartment has a small second bedroom. It’s the place where I write and think, where all my books are shoved in messy piles on old bookcases. I have vaguely been thinking about working from this room, writing things for hire. And I’ve been faintly ignoring this idea because it seemed so, well, banal and inconsequential.

  But perhaps it won’t be so bad. I will be networked into the world and able to participate in it. Better still, I won’t have to play some prescribed role any more: I will be answerable to no one. Maybe this will be my chance to integrate my private and public selves; to pull all the disparate parts together into one compl
ete whole. And if I want to create a new self altogether, well, I can do that too.

  Suddenly a notion arises that makes me smile, at my own ridiculous stream of consciousness as much as anything else. For the first time ever, my bedroom won’t be a long, long way from the office: it will be the office. Where, perhaps, I’ll have more power than I’ve ever had before.

  I realize that I am sitting in the all-male café with a broad and goofy grin across my face, and the fat copy of Corinne or Italy facedown on my lap. The cigarette vendor behind the counter looks faintly surprised.

  It’s 1816. Napoleon, defeated and disgraced, suffers in lonely exile on the remote island of St Helena. His faithful Josephine is dead, passing away sweetly in 1814. The woman he married in her place, Marie Louise of Austria, has abandoned him and taken their son to Vienna.

  On an impulse the former dictator picks up Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne or Italy. A novel he had tried to suppress. Perhaps he thinks the voice will have died down. Perhaps he thinks it will no longer hold its old infuriating power.

  He turns the pages and the voice rings true and pure. The message is unmistakeable – a call to society, to women, to each woman, demanding that each and every one fulfil her gifts, that she make her way according to her character and her talents.

  And it still drives him crazy. I can see her, I can hear her, I can sense her, I want to run away, I throw down the book, Napoleon rants. But he turns another page. And another. And still the voice continues, compelling, shimmering, vibrant. A siren song to liberty and love and art. He finds he can’t stop reading.

  However, I shall persist, Napoleon says, perhaps not realizing that he is admitting his own defeat. I want to see how it ends, for I still think that it is an interesting work.

  14

  A Good Death

  I’ve always felt the great importance of getting into the right set at once on arrival in Heaven. The thing is, one must be careful in a new place not to get into uncongenial company.

  Nancy Mitford

  I’VE BEEN THINKING a lot about death. Oh, not in a negative way, quite the contrary. I’ve been thinking about death as the final act of the human narration, the ending that explains the beginning and the middle, the resolution that sorts it all out. It’s a natural outcome, I guess, of thinking about women’s lives, their whole lives, from beginning to end. In life, as in all good detective stories, it seems to me that a good ending can make sense of a messy plot, weaving all those loose threads and strange knots into a very satisfying whole.

  Death is an honorable business in Paris. There are at least three cemeteries within the périphérique. Père Lachaise is a major tourism destination, where little girls still put flowers on Marcel Proust’s grave and young men make the pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s tomb. Parisians go there too. They like a good death – it suits the logical and pessimistic side of their nature.

  And I too take a great interest in the topic. I realize that it’s impossible to plan the way you die. But I do have some clear preferences. I would very much prefer not to die by animal. This applies particularly to shark or crocodile attack, which seems to me a most humiliating way to go. Humanity has spent an awfully long time overcoming nature, and I feel I would be letting the team down were I to slide down the evolutionary pole to the bottom of the food chain, being munched alongside plankton and seaweed. Rachel reckons she doesn’t mind how she dies as long as it’s not of lung cancer. Her reasoning is that if she tells her family and friends she has lung cancer they will secretly think it serves her right (or, more specifically, serves her right stupid bitch!) for smoking. This would be more than she could bear. On her death bed Rachel wants people to be nice to her – and mean it.

  Some people prefer a quick death. My present preference is for a slow one, with time for tender goodbyes and little speeches and farewell parties, and, well, last words, and final says on the matter. Whatever the matter might be.

  So here I am standing at Place de la Concorde. As usual I have the best intentions of strolling around and looking at the gorgeous, gilded sculptures and flowing fountains. As usual I find myself paralyzed at the thought of moving anywhere off this bit of footpath for fear of the traffic that swirls in a chaotic frenzy. So I shall just swivel and gaze and think.

  Even with the traffic, this is still one of the most beautiful and famous locations in Paris. Place de la Concorde means harmony and amity and peace. Ceremonial festivities are still held here. But this is also the killing field of Paris; this place is stained with blood.

  During the Revolutionary Terror, from 1793 to July 1794, no less than 1, 119 people were executed here. But you wouldn’t know it. There are plaques everywhere in Paris commemorating all kinds of people and events. But there is no plaque here to remind us of the shaved heads and tied hands, the ugly open tumbrel, the jeering crowds, the smell of stale blood, the sweat and fear on the platform. Perhaps it was just too horrible.

  In those dark days, it was fashionable to laugh at the guillotine. People were careful with their final words. On approaching her death, Manon Roland, one of the republican salonnières, cried out magnificently: ‘Sweet Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!’ In a different style, the revolutionary Danton quipped roguishly to the executioner: ‘Show my head to the people! – it is worth the trouble.’

  But not everyone was like that.

  On 15 October 1793, Queen Marie Antoinette was brought here to die. She had spent her final days in solitary confinement in the Conciergerie prison on the Ile de la Cité. If you have been to the Conciergerie you’ll know just how surprisingly awful it is. It makes you shiver. It makes the hair stand up on your neck. And it’s not just the cold. Even after two hundred years, the pale stones reek of horror.

  Just after 11 am the executioner arrived at the Queen’s little cell. He tied her hands behind her back and hacked off her hair. She climbed awkwardly into the open tumbrel. The wooden benches were hard beneath her thin white gown. The cart rumbled over rough cobblestones down the length of rue Saint-Honoré. At rue Royale it turned left to reach the open Place. The revolutionary artist Jacques-Louis David was living in rue Saint-Honoré and saw the Queen pass by. He quickly sketched what he saw: an ugly, shrunken and devastated woman.

  After she died, the Queen’s surviving friends were haunted by thoughts of the long, lonely hour she endured in the cart. What was she thinking as she confronted the taunts and stares of her former subjects? As she was carted like cattle to her death?

  Along the route the Queen glimpsed reminders of other days. She passed the rue Royale apartment she had kept for her private visits to Paris. Maybe she remembered the fun of those jaunts to masked balls and the opera, the company of friends, the thrill of escaping court duties.

  As she turned into this Place, she may have recalled her very first public event in Paris after she married the heir to the throne and became Dauphine. It took place in May 1770 when this was known as Place Louis XV. Nearly 300,000 had turned out to greet the newlyweds, but the event was badly managed and 132 people died in the crush. Marie Antoinette’s second visit to Paris was more successful. The crowd cheered the young couple and the Duc de Brissac told the young Dauphine that all of Paris had fallen in love with her. Marie Antoinette wrote about the event to her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, remarking complacently how little seemed required of her in order to please the crowd. Her mother wrote back and sharply told her daughter not to take anything for granted. Mother, it turned out, knew best.

  But perhaps Marie Antoinette had other, more somber recollections in mind. After all, she had changed a lot over the past few years. From a spoiled, haughty creature she had transformed into a strong and loyal woman. She stood by her husband, refusing to leave the country without him. She had comforted him and cared for their children with a steadfastness that few who knew her thought possible. But her husband, the King, was now dead, guillotined in January. She had been humiliated during a show trial when she had been accu
sed of all kinds of crimes, including incest with her own son. The little boy had been removed from her care. She had heard him swear and curse as the guards had taught him, and sing revolutionary songs in the courtyard.

  Whatever her private thoughts, Marie Antoinette retained her aristocratic hauteur to the end. She held her head high. As she crossed to the guillotine she inadvertently stepped on her executioner’s foot. ‘Pardon, Monsieur,’ she said, with Hapsburg precision, ‘I did not do it on purpose.’ It may have been a statement about her whole foolish, tragic life.

  Of course, the death of a queen lends itself to drama. And I have a literary turn of mind. I am all too inclined to elevate small incidents into grand gestures, to read Shakespearean significance into events which are no more than the sheer bump and accident of life.

  Which brings me to a very different death. Two months after the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette, Louis XV’s mistress, Jeanne du Barry, followed the same route from the Conciergerie to this Place. She too had begun her career here. She was a pretty twenty-year-old mingling in the crowd on the day they unveiled Louis XV’s statue in 1763. It was, by coincidence, the day that Madame de Pompadour made her last public appearance. The beautiful blonde successor to Madame de Pompadour was spotted by Jean du Barry, cardsharp, impresario, dealer and pimp. He would marry Jeanne, introduce her to the top men in Paris, and eventually take her to Versailles to captivate Louis XV himself.