I stretched out in the midday heat. As I extended my arms I felt a twinge in my shoulder; I must have been crouched in front of my laptop for too many days. I’d give the man with the marteau a little longer before I headed back to the studio.
After leaving Madame Curie, I zigzagged through the narrow streets of the fifth arrondissement, along the rue Tournefort where Balzac’s characters in Père Goriot lived, and along the rue du Pot de Fer where George Orwell was down and out, and into the place de la Contrescarpe where Hemingway drank in the cafés. The streets were narrow and silent and occasionally smelled of piss but I felt a delicious sense of a world shivering into place around me, a pleasure that was soothing and exciting at the same time. The streets were not just ordinary three-dimensional roadways and apartment buildings and shops, they existed as stories, as places inscribed. Here was where Orwell heard ‘the desolate cries of street-hawkers’ and where Balzac’s fictional Rastignac began his long ascent into society and where Hemingway held up the zinc bar in the Café des Amateurs. Even though I’d never seen any of these streets before, I was aware of a curious sense that they were more real to me than the streets of my hometown. I could read these streets as well as walk them. They had been imprinted in my brain already and as the written image slipped over the actual, each street and café became imaginary. It was pleasurable, as if I were seeing a landscape unfold itself out from an open page and become real. I nearly laughed aloud – the world had become a 3D fold-out book and I was living inside it.
The rue Mouffetard wound up from the place de la Contrescarpe. It was lined with cafés and there were more people about because it was lunchtime and the rue Mouffetard was a tourist street, noisy after the silent summer heat of the backstreets. A market was just beginning to pack up and vendors were crying out their best prices to get rid of the last of their raspberries and strawberries. There were lettuce and other vegetable leaves everywhere on the cobbled street, and the smells of salmon and prawns and cheeses, mouldy blues and Normandy camemberts, were overpowering. One man was selling honey and honeycomb and I stopped to look at the neat hexagonal shapes of the cells. How had creatures come up with such a precise way of making and storing their nourishment, stealing nectar so arduously from hundreds of flowers – it takes 150 flowers to fill each bee’s nectar basket – and then storing it in matching hexagonal cells until they needed it or until it was stolen by the beekeepers? It seemed a kind of alchemy, to turn flower juices into liquid gold.
I decided to head back to the studio; the hammerer no doubt would have stopped for a long lunch by now. On the way I passed the Panthéon where Rousseau and other Grands Hommes, famous men, of France are buried and then I was back in the rue St Jacques walking down by the buildings of the Sorbonne, quiet now with all the students away for the summer. Even the street was empty of traffic. It was hot and still. I suddenly felt that I was the only person out in Paris, that everyone had gone somewhere they all knew about and were laughing and talking under shady chestnuts by the water. Somewhere along the Seine out in the country. Or by a beach under sunshades. No-one knew I was here in this street. In this city of millions I didn’t know anyone at all, not even a casual acquaintance, certainly no-one who needed to tell me what they were doing or where they had gone. I’d thought I was absorbing daily life but this was all show and the real people had gone elsewhere. I was standing in a street where people had walked with donkeys and ridden in coaches for more than a thousand years, where scholars and poets and musicians, medieval François Villon and Rabelais and twentieth-century Serge Gainsbourg and Coluche had laughed and drunk wine, and where travellers from the south came to see the great capital, but now I was the only one here. I wasn’t part of this place. I was like a ghost, unseen. My imaginary world had become real and solid – I could feel the cobbles under my feet – but I had become invisible. Had I come so far to disappear?
*
When Jean-Jacques Rousseau first saw these streets on his way into Paris from the south, he didn’t like them at all: ‘I saw nothing but dirty, stinking little streets, ugly black houses, a general air of squalor and poverty, beggars, carters, menders of clothes, sellers of herb-drinks and old hats.’ That was nearly 300 years ago, and most of the buildings were still medieval, crooked and falling down, with no sanitation, and it was a much poorer area than it is now, but Rousseau wasn’t keen on towns anyway. He was more of a hippie really – the original hopeless romantic. He was happiest when he lived with Madame de Warens in the country near Chambéry in the Alps, wandering through the woods and wildflower meadows, gardening, making honey, taking care of chooks and pigeons and cows: ‘I strolled through the woods and over the hills, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I lazed, I worked on the garden, I picked the fruit, I helped in the household and happiness followed me everywhere.’
In Paris, like me, he was an outsider. He came from Switzerland and he was a Protestant – although he converted to Catholicism for a while – and it was difficult to find his way in. He recognised that ‘nothing is achieved in Paris except by the help of ladies’ and was regularly received at their homes, but he was often slow in conversation, and, unfortunately for him, the essence of French society for a long time had been quick and witty conversation. Madame de Sévigné, a hundred years before Rousseau, was a mistress of the art and mixed in all the highest circles, but Rousseau was afraid of quick wit and ‘women who prided themselves on their brains’, especially those who employed the ‘trick’ of asking lots of questions without giving anything away of themselves. I don’t think Rousseau would have liked de Sévigné’s famous account of an investiture at Versailles where two courtiers got their ribbons and swords and lace so tangled up with each other, ‘they had to be torn apart by force and the stronger man won’, and, even less, her brutally amused tone as she tells the story of Vatel, the chef at Chantilly who killed himself because the fish he had ordered for the king’s banquet had not arrived.
But Rousseau did love France: ‘My continuous reading, always confined to French authors, nurtured my affection for France and finally transformed it into so blind a passion that nothing has been able to conquer it.’ It’s disarming the way he just comes out and admits it. There’s nothing to defend in a blind passion, it simply is.
And he liked the French: ‘They are naturally obliging, kindly and benevolent, and whatever may be said, really more sincere than those of any other nation. But they are fickle and flighty. The feelings they profess for you are genuine, but those feelings go as they come.’
That may have had more to do with him than the French – he was hypersensitive and never really fitted in – but he did change France from the inside out. He literally made a revolution – many revolutions in fact – in politics, education, literature, in ordinary attitudes and way of life. For him, feelings, passion, nature and imaginary life overruled rationality and the practical world every day: ‘Never mind how great the distance between my position and the nearest castle in Spain, I had no difficulty in taking up residence there.’
I had no difficulty either. I was fifteen and lying on my bed reading one of Guy de Maupassant’s nineteenth-century stories, Clair de Lune. A severe priest, fearful of sensuality and tenderness, is won over by the beauty of a moonlit night in his village. On the farm it was a hot January afternoon, the day flattened by the tedium of Mass that morning and by the sun heating the corrugated-iron roof until the rooms underneath were ovens. The day was still, curtains unmoving, the lilac painted bedroom walls and three china half-cups hanging on nails unchanging. Even my brothers and sisters were quiet, stunned by the heat. But I could hear distant nightingales as they ‘shook out their scattered notes – their light, vibrant music that sets one dreaming, without thinking, a music made for kisses, for the seduction of moonlight’. It was cool in that world and the full moon silvered a fine mist around a line of poplars.
I could easily take up residence in any imaginary village or town.
&nb
sp; I don’t suppose that people were only practical and rational before Rousseau, but he was the one who turned the life of imagination and creativity into a kind of cult. In fact, even though I didn’t read him when I was young, and even though I don’t think I’d like him if I met him now, it was almost certainly because of his strange stormy mind that I ended up in Paris, standing invisible in the rue St Jacques several centuries later.
I should really introduce him.
*
Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712 and died in 1778, ten years before the English came to settle in Australia. His mother died when he was born; his father read to him all night long when he was a child, which gave him ‘the strangest and most romantic notions about human life, which neither experience nor reflection has ever succeeded in curing me of’; he became passionately and often hopelessly attached to various women in his life; he liked to be spanked, a pleasure mostly unfulfilled; he believed that ‘Man was born free and is everywhere in chains’; he wrote Of the Social Contract which revolutionaries carried in their pockets, and Émile, a sensitive and natural approach to bringing up children; he had five children, every one of whom he forced his mistress, Thérèse, to put in a foundling home where they probably died; he was neurotic and became paranoid (‘After long being maddish, he is plainly mad,’ said the philosopher Hume when he met him in England); he was the father of Romanticism; and he wrote The Confessions, in which he claims to examine his mind and heart with complete honesty: ‘I have bared my secret soul as Thou thyself hast seen it, Eternal Being’, but there’s something about him that I don’t believe.
It’s to do with a certain dissembling in myself, I know that much. I recognise something in him that I’ve struggled against for years without being able to name it. I’ve sensed it, rather, as a type of sticky coating on my mind and spirit. Rousseau said he struggled between weakness and courage, self-indulgence and virtue, but I think it was a struggle between self-deception and the desire for truth. At least that’s what I’ve come to see in myself, a leaning towards self-deception. I suspect it comes from a desire to be thought well of, from caring too much about what other people think. Read the signs carefully, don’t let anyone catch a glimpse into the narrow chamber of the soul.
It’s the opposite of my reaction to Montaigne, whom I’m happy to admit I adore. When Montaigne argued that we couldn’t change our essential natures, we could only try to cover them over and hide them, I felt myself breathe out at last. It wasn’t an excuse, just a truthful observation. But I owe Rousseau, because it wasn’t until I started examining my reaction to him – he’s a revolutionary hero and a defender of the imaginary life, I should be bowled over by him, so why was I disliking him? – that I started to see what it was. Perhaps it was Montaigne’s looking-glass I needed to gaze into.
For coffee with Rousseau I selected Les Chant des Voyelles in the rue Lombard because I thought the name, The Song of Vowels, a poem by Rimbaud, would appeal to him. He orders a tisane, a herbal tea. His hair is slightly longer than the fashion and he wears a cream shirt and a violet velvet coat like the one he once bought in Lausanne when he started work for the Archimandrite of Jerusalem. He doesn’t look much different from the way he did in the eighteenth century, a bit retro late-1960s, a cravat and waistcoat, gentle features, soft brown eyes. In London or Melbourne he’d hardly be noticed, but here in the dark chic of Paris he looks as if he is trying to draw attention to himself. True Parisians don’t do that; it’s gauche to so obviously signal who you think you are.
‘Tell me about living in England,’ I begin, thinking we could share our experiences of being in a different culture. But he darts me a suspicious look and I remember that when he was in exile there he often believed people were attacking him. I change approach.
‘But I should tell you about myself first. I come from Australia. As a lover of nature, you might be interested to know there are many plant species in my country that don’t exist here – banksia, eucalypt, bottlebrush.’ I know he has made a study of botany.
He relaxes and tells me all about living near Annecy with Madame de Warens and how he loved to walk across the hills and observe nature. He says that living in the natural world and a natural upbringing is best for children, who are all ‘born free’. I’m tempted to ask him about putting each one of his five babies on the stone at the foundling home, but it would be pointless. I’d have no patience with his justification that he was saving them from a poor upbringing in his mistress’s family. Instead, I ask if he would discuss Of the Social Contract, which expands his theories on the relationship between the natural man and the State, and he becomes passionate. This is his Big Idea. I tell him there’s a street not far away named after him, rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and he tries to hide how pleased he is. Although he is trying to be humble, I feel a surge of irritation – he’s driven by ego just like the rest of us. It makes me feel less tolerant of even his brilliant ideas. We part with no arrangement to meet again. I suspect we don’t like each other that much, our mirrors too self-reflective.
*
The day after the hammering was Patrick’s nineteenth birthday. He was born on a cold August day in the Blue Mountains and every year it had been a rugged-up celebration: rosy cheeks, fires burning, mittens, wild children running through the bush, swarming in like birds to be fed and flying out again. It felt strange to wish him a happy birthday on a hot midsummer’s day from the other side of the world. Strange not to see his face. I remembered the first time I had seen him lying on my belly, coated in vernix, the purity and sweetness of his being.
I woke before dawn in the rue des Trois Frères with the pang of missing both Matt and Patrick deep under my ribs, an aching pang. I lay in the dark on the mattress under the low ceiling and wondered what I was doing on the other side of the world so far from them. What if a crack opened up in the earth and they were on the other side of it and I could never get across? The planet may as well hurtle off its orbit because nothing else would matter anywhere in the world. The before-dawn thoughts settled as the greyish light came in from the courtyard; they were young men now and they were going their own way as they were meant to. And they might come my way again. Patrick had applied to study at university in Amsterdam because his course in international politics required a year’s study overseas, and Matt wanted to come and visit, but he had no money.
When I woke again I felt unformed, like a runny sea-creature without a shell. I got up and wrote until lunch but in the afternoon I cried. It wasn’t sadness or distress, but almost as if I had become liquid. My sons had grown and my body was losing its capacity to ever make children again. I didn’t want any more babies – babies and children were relentless hard work – but a fundamental ability was leaving my body and would never come back.
That evening I went to Mozart’s Requiem at La Madeleine, the Greek temple church with its Corinthian columns and tympanum, built by Napoleon III. Apostles and saints circled the base of the dome, and below it, at the back of the altar, a marble Mother of God was supported by two gloriously winged angels. It was a monument to Church and State power, a long way from the tin church in a paddock I’d knelt in as a child. The glorious music poured through me, the sound of earth and heaven, the soaring voices and the heartbeat of violins, and again I felt as if I’d become liquid, as if I could be poured into a mould and remade as anything at all. I breathed in and out, conscious my breath was in rhythm with the music. I had not realised before that having babies had kept me solid. For them, I was the origin of being, cells, blood, breath. If I’d come to learn the difference between real and imaginary, then right now everything else was imaginary.
Still, the weather was always real. It’s what we’ve all had to share from the beginning: sun, rain, wind, storm. August was humid and there were storms often in the afternoon. Paris is in the basin of the Île-de-France region, and in summer the hot air is held in it like a bowl of soup. The heat rises and the air
molecules become electrically charged as they rub past one another and then late-afternoon thunderstorms crash around the stone buildings. Because I’d not heard thunder echoing and re-echoing off stone buildings before, storms were much louder than I was used to. I loved watching from the safety of shelter, high up in a building like a bird in a cliff cave, but one day on a busy Friday afternoon in town, I was caught outside. Anthony had had a meeting in another quartier and when he finished he’d sent me a text to join him.
‘Rendezvous place Colette 4 pm near Académie Française.’
I finished writing for the day. It was inching forward into detailing how life continued after Dina’s death as it does after everyone’s death. The ordinary, even the banal, keeps on happening. Annie Ernaux wrote of her mother’s death and was stunned to see how the ordinary phrases suddenly had power: ‘the first springtime she will never see, sensing now the force of ordinary phrases, even of clichés’. Theo had often gone to sleep on my lap, had nosebleeds, played soccer with Patrick, been sad and bewildered. Each morning in the dim under the mezzanine I breathed in another time on the other side of the world – and often the rest of the day seemed a review of the morning as fragments of times, weather and places floated through me.
Map-book in hand, I caught the Metro to Concorde and walked down alongside the Tuileries and crossed over the street in front of the Louvre. I waited on the edge of place Colette, standing in the shade by the colonnade. Beyond the Louvre the south-western sky had darkened. The heat had become moist and even while I stood still my skin was damp, clinging in the way I loved when I was naked in Anthony’s arms. Sexual weather.
Ransacking Paris Page 5