True Pleasures

by Lucinda Holdforth

  But, on the way to her death, the sunny, racy past must have seemed an eternity away to Madame du Barry. It was a freezing December afternoon. Snow was falling and the light was dim. Most of the crowd had given up and gone home. But the bloodthirsty and the curious stayed to gawk at the famous beauty who had captivated the former King. What they saw was a plump, frightened fifty-one-year-old woman. Even this hardy crew was shocked and disturbed by her frantic moans and sobs. An anxious murmur started up.

  Right up until the very last moment, Madame du Barry couldn’t believe this could happen to her. She had loved life, and life had been rich and full of glories undreamt of for a little Parisian girl. She couldn’t believe it would end like this, why should it? Was she not simply one of the people? Until the last moment, she begged and bribed and pleaded. ‘I’ll show you where my jewels are, there’s more to tell, wait,’ she said. The night before her execution she ate an enormous meal, as if she couldn’t get her fill of life’s sustenance. The next day when they came to get her she was amazed. ‘This can’t be happening, it’s a mistake, wait, please.’ As they placed her in the tumbrel she stumbled and wept. She was a woman who loved life and wanted to keep on living, no matter how briefly. As they rumbled over the cobblestones she moaned and begged. As they pulled her onto the platform she struggled and pleaded and wriggled. As they lay her down, positioning her head in the crevice of the guillotine, she said – and these were her last words: ‘Wait, Monsieur, I beg you … just a minute more!’

  I don’t take a moral view about how a life should be lived or ended. If anything, I take an aesthetic view. I realize it’s impossible to control the circumstances of death. But a good death surely lends poetry to a life. Marie Antoinette’s death was moving because she was a woman who transcended herself at the end. Madame du Barry’s death was touching because she didn’t.

  I turn and stroll back down the rue de Rivoli. At the Galignani bookshop I stop and idly turn to a table of French-language paperbacks on sale. A title catches my eye: Amoureuses du Grand Siècle (Gallant Women of the Great [17th] Century). Mmm, interesting. I turn to the table of contents. Here is Ninon de Lanclos. Here is Madame de Lafayette. And here is the woman whose ultimate fate has eluded me, Hortense Mancini, la duchesse Mazarin.

  I flip to the relevant chapter, and then straight to the last page. It says: He [her husband] deposited her coffin next to that of her uncle Mazarin in the funeral monument in the College of Four Nations founded by the Cardinal, today our Institut [de France]. This is nothing new. I knew this. But I went to see, and the body’s just not there.

  I read on: One would like to imagine the ghost of the joyous Hortense presiding over the debates of our Académiciens. Yes, that’s right, I think. One would have liked to imagine the ghost of Hortense at the Institut. But she wasn’t there.

  And then, with leaping heart: But in 1793 her remains were thrown into the Seine by the sans-culottes [revolutionaries].

  I am transfixed, rooted to the spot, electrified by this bulletin. So that’s what happened to Hortense. I can hardly breathe.

  It happened in the exact same year that Marie Antoinette and Madame du Barry died. At the height of the Terror. Just over the river the rabble must have somehow stormed the Institut and extracted the – the what? coffin or bones? – from the tomb and thrown them into the Seine. (I wonder why they didn’t do the same to the remains of Cardinal Mazarin?) And then the bones must have just flowed down through the city like so much debris. Perhaps the remains of Hortense mingled with the blood of those who died on the guillotine. Strange to think that Hortense Mancini played a part in French history – nearly one hundred years after her death.

  I look around, wishing there were someone here to tell. All of a sudden I feel very emotional. I feel as if I too am part of this flow, this river of life and death, this beauty and this futility, these women.

  If history were an emotion, perhaps this would be the feeling.

  Père Lachaise is not what I expected. I imagined it would be quiet and peaceful. But it certainly doesn’t feel dead. In fact, it’s alarmingly alive. Everywhere I look the head-stones have cracked and the rubble is piled up and green growing shoots poke through the dirt. It’s as if a slow-moving earthquake were underway. In fact, it’s rather as if the dead themselves were restless, shifting and squirming under the earth, gradually easing their way to the surface. A few staff members stand around with shovels. They have a helpless expression, as if overwhelmed by the struggle to keep the buried in their rightful place.

  And looking at the list of inhabitants here, I can see why. These were larger-than-life figures – larger than death too. Here’s the taboo-breaking Colette lying under a short square slab, with fresh flowers on her grave. Here’s Edith Piaf, the heartbreaking and heartbroken singer. Maria Callas, who died of sorrow when Ari Onassis married the widow Kennedy. The great actresses Simone Signoret and Sarah Bernhardt. Cléo de Mérode, the nineteenth-century cocotte who befriended the young Colette. Gloria in excelsis Cléo! her lovers would sing appreciatively. Marie Laurencin the painter: Coco Chanel once commissioned and then rejected a portrait by Laurencin; the artist portrayed Chanel as soft, sweet and dreamy – quite unlike the woman herself. Marie d’Agoult who ran off with Franz Liszt. Dancing Isadora Duncan who died of a scarf. All these women are buried here. Even so, they don’t seem quite dead yet.

  Père Lachaise is also the final home of some of the important men in these grand women’s lives. As I approach Chopin’s grave I see a small group of people kneeling and crossing themselves as they reverently place flowers and a Polish flag. They look so upset, you’d think Chopin died yesterday.

  I seek out the grave of Germaine de Staël’s lover Benjamin Constant. In Arduis Constans is carved on the tombstone. Constance in adversity. No doubt the motto is intended to signify a whole life, but I bet everyone who knew him thought it was an apt description of Constant’s love affair with Germaine de Staël.

  I am glad Benjamin Constant has a telling phrase on his tombstone. Most of the gravestones are very dull, offering merely a date of birth and death. I rather like the idea of something witty on my tombstone, something to make people laugh, or think. In my deepest secret fantasy I imagine it also says something like: Here lies Lucinda Hold-forth – diplomat, author, showgirl. I have no idea how I am going to justify showgirl.

  But if Père Lachaise is short on witty words, it does have some good visual jokes. Here’s President Felix Faure, who died in 1898 while making love to his mistress. He’s on his back, a life-sized statue reclining on his tomb. And he’s got a very pleased look on his face – it’s almost post-coital. Marshal Suchet was one of the bravest of Napoleon’s marshals. Above his grave is a busty angel caressing an erect cannon.

  A well-dressed man minces his way down a path. He leads me unerringly to the defiled tomb of Oscar Wilde; gentle, brilliant, persecuted Oscar Wilde. Oscar loved Paris. The city revealed to him the flipside of beauty, the price to be paid for pleasure, and the exquisite moment when pleasure flirts with danger. The Parisian aesthetes inspired The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of my favorite books. Paris in the late 1900s was completely unlike triumphal, brutal, imperial London. Having been defeated by the Germans in 1870, Paris was a city at home with frailty. It had a vocabulary for failure. Delicate and painful emotions like tristesse, ennui, regret and even disgust could be explored in this city without shame. No wonder it was where Oscar Wilde retreated to die.

  Rachel has an interesting view of Parisian decadence. She thinks Paris hides her dark side, her twentieth-century failures, the stain of Nazi occupation and collaboration. Official, glorious, gilded Paris, she thinks, obscures the darker truths. In her blacker moments Rachel calls Paris the museum theme park or, even more cruelly, the real Euro Disney. She says these things with a scornful turn of her curved lips.

  There are lots of people who think it’s unhealthy to dwell on death or dying or even the past. They reckon that the thing to do is to live for today
and to look steadfastly into the future. And I’ve learned my own lesson about living in the past.

  When my boyfriend left me after the 1996 election, I didn’t believe it. I was absolutely convinced that he had suffered some kind of brainstorm from which he would, eventually, recover. And when he recovered, I thought, he would hurry back to me and we would get married and live happily ever after. This belief was so strong that it was only slightly shaken when he went off on his diplomatic posting to Jakarta. Four months later I was still calling and e-mailing him, waiting with anxious but unquenched faith for the inevitable moment of his return.

  One day a mutual acquaintance came to see me. He brought up the subject of my boyfriend. ‘Well of course it’s so lonely for him up there,’ I said. ‘It can be awful you know.’

  ‘That’s not what I heard,’ he replied, looking at me from under his eyelashes. Then he glanced down and added, ‘Of course, they’re still keeping it pretty quiet.’

  I rushed around to visit two dear friends, a couple, on whose old blue couch I collapsed as great shiny tears spouted from my eyes. I couldn’t believe it. This man was my destiny! Joanne hugged and consoled me. But her husband took a different approach. ‘So let me get this straight,’ said James, leaning forward, pushing his glasses back on his nose. ‘You say that you and this guy were meant to be together. But you say he’s not only left you. He’s left the country. He’s got another job. And now you are telling me he’s even got another girlfriend.’ James looked straight at me, with an incredulous look on his face as if he couldn’t quite believe he was about to state something so obvious. ‘I mean, face it: it’s over.’

  Once I stopped crying I felt a lot better. And I started to recover almost immediately.

  But if personal history can be unhelpful, History with a capital H is entirely meaningful to me. I suspect it has replaced literature as a way for me to learn what it means to be human. Today we lead formless lives. We live with limitless freedom in a world without contours. History, and her sister, tradition, offer us the shape and style of human experience. It’s the standard against which we can choose to measure ourselves, or rebel.

  There’s another reason. It’s only when you understand history that you can appreciate how culturally determined we all are. Things which we tell ourselves are ‘natural’ are often nothing more than behavioral fads. For example, I am, historically speaking, a late Romantic, that’s my historical fate. But it doesn’t mean I have to confine myself to the limits shaped by my age.

  I once made the mistake of telling my boyfriend that I didn’t want a small, meager life but dreamed of a big one. At that time I really didn’t know what I meant myself. If I could have expressed it I would have said it wasn’t about a grand style of living, or travelling widely, or even about doing adventurous things. In fact, it wasn’t about external things at all. It was about a desire for an enlarged sense of life, an internal spaciousness, a capacity for fullness of experience and response.

  My boyfriend simply scoffed at me, he thought I suffered from a bit too much self-esteem. He came from an upright Protestant family which prized financial security and modesty and solid achievement. He thought I was a grandiose Irish Catholic with jumped-up views and romantic delusions. Perhaps he was right.

  Wandering and dreaming, losing myself in the alleys and corners of Père Lachaise, today I sense a deep connection to the women of Paris. I am grateful to the city that nurtured them and welcomes me.

  This Paris, the Paris I love, feels handmade to me, delicately stitched together through time. It’s like a lovely collaborative work of art, initiated by the seventeenth-century salon hostesses, enriched by their eighteenth-century successors and embellished in turn by their nineteenth- and twentieth-century descendants. Each generation of women adding to the legacy before handing it on. Like a beautiful tapestry woven by dozens of hands over hundreds of years.

  I stand here suffused with memories not my own, and yet it seems that they belong to me as well.

  At the end of my long walk around Père Lachaise, I come to the top of the hill. Here is Gertrude Stein’s grave. It is massive, plain and strong, like the woman herself. GERTRUDE STEIN spell the big gold letters. After a moment I walk around the back. There, in much smaller letters, is the other name. Alice B. Toklas.

  I’d heard about this grave, and, no doubt like most people, I thought how appalling it was that Alice was relegated to afterthought status. But in fact, the inscription was at her express request. Which suggests a kind of pride in modesty. It’s as if Alice is saying to us: Behind every great woman, there’s … another great woman.

  15

  Au Revoir

  It seems that our mind, our temper, passions, taste and feelings are influenced by the places where we dwell.

  La Bruyère

  RACHEL AND I are drinking champagne. I love champagne. I really love it. The ‘thwop!’ as the cork pops. The burble of the pale liquid as it rises up the long delicate flûte. The tingling ‘chink’ of the clinking glasses. The first sweet heady rush as the liquid aerates the blood. I never get bored with the little rituals. And I love the legends of champagne, so many of which are associated with women.

  The most famous of the champagne dames was Lily Bollinger. She’s the one who said of champagne: I drink it when I’m happy and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it when I’m not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it – unless I’m thirsty.

  I knew this quote for many years, and developed a completely idiosyncratic mental image of its originator. In my mind’s eye Madame Bollinger was a French version of Morticia Addams – slender and willowy, possibly sporting a long cigarette holder. Then I saw a photo of the real thing. Here was a stout working woman with thick ankles and bushy hair, riding a bicycle through her vineyards.

  After a moment’s mental readjustment, I liked the reality even better than my imaginings – an old lady cheerfully popping a bottle at afternoon tea-time. There were other champagne women too – and it may or may not be pertinent to note that they were all widows. It’s hard to believe they weren’t merry. There was most famously the veuve (widow) Cliquot as well as Mesdames Pol Roger, Pommery, Perrier and Roederer.

  Hortense Mancini’s best friend in London, St Evremond, is credited with introducing the British to champagne: he did so in Hortense Mancini’s salon. Madame de Pompadour didn’t drink much, but she made an exception for champagne. She thought, Champagne is the only wine that leaves a woman beautiful after drinking it.

  For the past few days we’ve been at play. Rachel has barred me from old museums and historic buildings. Instead we have preened in the Café Beaubourg and posed at the China Club. Rachel bought chunky shoes at Freelance and groovy knits at Joseph, and I bought a pair of sunglasses at Karl Lagerfeld’s gallery shop and a pair of red skin-tight gloves from a century-old gantier. We explored the glorious nooks and crannies of the Marais district. We took a long afternoon tea at Mariages Frères.

  But now this is my last night in Paris and Rachel and I are drinking in the bar of the Brasserie Alcazar. We’re talking about the future. She’s decided she’s had enough – she’s had a job offer and she’s going to move to London. ‘Look, there are a lot of things about this place that get to me,’ she says, ‘but the main thing is: I need to live in English!’

  Actually, I know what she means. I’ve got language troubles of my own. For years now I have been writing in the voice of men and in the language of men. Speeches for men like the Deputy Prime Minister, papers for management consultants. To earn a living in my second bedroom I shall probably have to continue speaking in the voice of men. But somehow I want to find a way to express myself in my own voice. Discover what a modern woman’s voice is like. Discover what this woman’s voice is like.

  It’s the following morning and slightly hungover, dark glasses in place, Rachel and I set out for our last long sunlit walk through Paris
. We walk down the rue Vieille du Temple, across Pont Louis-Philippe, across Pont Saint-Louis, behind Notre-Dame, and then over the Pont de l’Archevêché to the Left Bank. It’s Rachel’s favorite walk in Paris and I can see why. Every step is beautiful. As we cross the bridges the Seine flows beside and under and around us.

  And so – it seems inevitably – we wind up at Shakespeare and Company bookshop where the wordy young Americans squat on benches, boxes and chairs; where the dust rises and falls on thousands of unsold books; and where once, on my first visit to Paris, an ex-lover from Australia recognized me by the sound of my voice.

  I head straight over to the bookshelf full of old Paris guidebooks. One of them has a red hardback cover and gold print. It’s called, simply, Paris. It is by André George and was published in 1952. I flick through it, admiring the plentiful black and white photos of the great buildings and cityscapes, the gloved women and snub-nosed Citroëns. Then I come to this: Of great moment in the history of France is the Rue de la Victoire, named to commemorate Bonaparte’s victorious campaign in Italy. He used to live at No. 60, in the hôtel of the young and unattached widow Josephine de Beauharnais … Oops. I had taken Evangeline Bruce’s word as gospel and looked for signs of Josephine’s house at number 6. That’s where I took Rachel on that dreadful rainy day when she was bored stiff. Now it appears that all along we were at the wrong end of the street. As Rachel approaches I snap the book shut. ‘Anything interesting?’ she asks. I shake my head casually. ‘Not really,’ I say. I quietly buy the book and stuff it discreetly into my bag.

  Finally we head back down to the Seine. The clouds have come over and a greenish tinge has returned to the sky and the water. The trees shake and roll in the wind. I look along the great panorama of bridges and buildings and monuments.