True Pleasures (28 page)

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.

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

La Bruyère

R
ACHEL 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.