The Fantasy, The Reality, The Aftermath – One Australian’s Obsession With Paris

Alice Grundy is Managing Editor at Giramondo Publishing. With her partner David Henley, Alice spent a year living in Paris recording their experiences on a website they named “Paris Fixe”. Together they absorbed the art, the cafes, the architecture and the Parisian lifestyle, drinking it in each day like good wine. On Tuesday 2 February 2016, Alice Grundy joined Oleh Butchatsky, co-author of Paris Tragics, to share their very different loves to be found in Paris.

THE FANTASY, THE REALITY, THE AFTERMATH – ONE AUSTRALIAN’S OBSESSION WITH PARIS

ALICE GRUNDY

The fantasy

I don’t know about you but I was a very moody, very intelligent and terrifically misunderstood teenager. No one, it seemed to me, had seen the world quite the way I saw it, nor were they as fully cognisant of the ethical dilemmas that simply existing presented. This was Canberra in the 1990s. The summers burn the grass brown and the winters freeze it. The population was homogenous – for the most part – and the culture was bordering non-existent so I thought that I was alone except when I was reading European or American classics.

It was into this quiet smallish world that my good friend introduced Sartre to me, more specifically the Roads to Freedom series that begins with The Age of Reason. Finally, I thought to myself as I sat reading in one of Canberra’s few dingy cafés, finally someone has articulated the thoughts that up until that point had been floating, cloud-like and amorphous, in my adolescent mind. Finally someone was trying to develop a system for a world without God – an aesthetics and ethics that were internally consistent, highly moral and which left the individual both accountable and in control of their will and their role in the world. And the home of this brand of philosophy that I was discovering fifty-odd years after the fact? Why France of course.

What made existentialism such a popular philosophy for my sort of person was the way that it empowered the individual and spoke of a world that was morally accountable in the absence of God. The idea of living an ethical life was very important to me. Of course, I’ve jettisoned many of those sorts of ideas now that I am 30, but at the time the childhood faith in fairness still ran strong and, particularly in dreary winters, sitting on lurid orange and blue buses, tooling around Canberra suburbs to visit my friends, the prospect of high culture and a world of artistic integrity, a world where, as one character in The Age of Reason does, might stab one’s own hand during a discussion in a café, just to prove a point, so invested, body and mind, were they in their arguments.

It seemed at the time – and in fact still seems – that many Australians cringe at the idea of culture whereas France, that far-off dreamscape, celebrated artists. It had housed some of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century. And since we were barely in the twenty-first century the plaudits of the last millennium still held significant power. To imagine a world where I could tell people that I was going to be a writer and have them respect it rather than ask, “And what will your real job be?”

So inspired was I by these books – and the Camus that I read subsequently – that I was determined to move to Paris, to become a writer and to live an authentic life. In large part, I can credit the deep rooting of my obsession to the naysayers. When people asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I said study literature and then live in Paris. Time and again people told me it would never happen. Which of course made me ever more determined to make it so.

The language has been part of my life from birth in that my mother who studied French at university and spoke it to me on occasion – only ever to caution or cajole – ne le touche pas, faites attention Alice. Like many Australian schoolchildren, I began learning French at primary school. The standard of language teaching at schools in this country is, in my experience and in what I have encountered in others, a shame. Compare the spoken English of Germans or Danes or polylingual Indians for an embarrassment of linguistic riches. Nevertheless, French and France have been part of my experience of the world for the better part of my life.

When I meet peers in China or India, or indeed in France, they are surprised to hear that as late as the 1990s, French and German were almost the only two languages available to students in Australia. In the time since I finishedschool I believe there have been some developments and it’s now possible to study Indonesian or Mandarin, amongst others, but these weren’t even options when I was at school. Japanese had just been introduced and was gaining popularity but the teachers teaching Japanese certainly weren’t Japanese, at least at my school, and I felt dubious about their ability to teach such a language.

At university, I continued to study the French, the thinkers not the language – Descartes in philosophy for instance – but I also discovered more about the influence, the draw that France has had on my favourite writers and thinkers. Ernest Hemingway. Vladimir Nabokov. Gertrude Stein. The Paris of the early twentieth century was particularly vivid in my mind. In a Modernism subject, the lecturer waxed lyrical about Sylvia Beach of the left bank bookshop Shakespeare and Co who was the first publisher of Ulysses. That Americans smuggled copies of the blue dust-jacketed hardback in their suitcases, bringing this radical new work to the States where it had been banned, cemented Paris in my mind as the cultural centre of the world at the time. Shakespeare and Co, although no longer in its original location (or either of the two locations where Sylvia Beach had the store) is still open and the internet told me that it was possible not only to visit but that creative writing classes in English took place in its upper wood-paneled rooms. An intoxicating thought indeed.

The last element in solidifying the fantasy was the knowledge of the Schengen Visa. For one year, if you have $10 000 in your bank account and a return ticket to your country of origin, and no police record, an Australian aged under 30 can receive a one-year working holiday visa to European countries that are signatories of the Schengen Agreement. If it hadn’t been for the money, I would have left directly after university. In order to save up, I worked in think tanks, even The Sydney Institute had me back for a while after putting up with me all through university, and for the public service in a job where I had to log all incoming mail by hand in a department with a terrifically long name that, for cultural reasons, could not be abbreviated. At the end, I had RSI and enough money for my visa.

So a year later, with my police check and my visa and my plane tickets, a place to stay – oh, and my boyfriend who had decided to come – and one small suitcase, I hopped on a plane for Paris in February 2008.

The reality

Being a Gen Y, of course I started a blog about my trip. Reading back over that blog now, in preparation for this talk, aside from cringing at the terrible writing and string of bad haircuts, I can see that much of the early days in Paris were spent walking.

Paris is such a kind city to pedestrians. Although we arrived at the tail end of winter and the days were cold (and of course coming from Sydney I didn’t have a decent coat), there was always a café or a bar or a boulangerie where I could sate one craving or another and emerge, restored, into the fresh air. I had learnt the term “flaneur’” and was keen to embody it, taking a notebook everywhere with me, pausing to write down my thoughts and to work on my book (of course I was writing a book at the time).

Although finding a job should have been the first priority, what really came first was joining the writers’ group at Shakespeare and Co and trundling along with a direly underdeveloped first draft of a first chapter of a novella. There I met a young English woman who, kind to strangers having been a newcomer to Paris less than a year before, took me in hand and got me a job at the Rose Bakery, an organic (or bio) café run by a French man and his English wife, serving trendy English organic food and appealing to actresses and models and wealthy locals of the ninth arrondissement (the middle part, south of Pigalle for those who know it).

You’d remember my referencing the paucity of language teaching in Australia? Part of my poor French was my own fault since I stopped taking the subject in Year 11. Nevertheless, I thought that I had enough French to work in a café – especially an English one.

For the vegetarians who were accidentally served meat, those who spoke too quickly for me to follow and the ageing French movie stars I failed to recognise, I am sorry.

Language was not just a hindrance at work but also in social scenarios. One evening I was invited to a party at a friend of a friend’s place whose father had a vineyard in Champagne. I wore my blackest ensemble and sipped on champagne, growing more confident with each glass. A few hours in, I met the host and was delighted to thank him for his hospitality, especially since it was my first party in Paris. Except that I used the word boum instead of soiree and he burst out laughing. He called his friends over and asked me to repeat my comment a half-dozen times. They all cackled. I had to beg for an explanation. Another problem with finishing French studies so early was this: a boum is the party twelve-year-olds have in their parents – garages with cheezels and balloons. Adults go to soirées. A mistake I would never make again.

I’d like to believe that these sort of mistakes are small and everyone trying to speak French must make the same all the time, but for those who haven’t experienced a linguistic glitch like this, it can be quite embarrassing. While my peers in Australia will try to follow someone speaking with an accent and can often make a good guess as to what they’re saying even without understanding all the words, there’s a stubborn intransigence to the French ear. They have difficulty understanding anyone who makes even slight changes (inadvertent or otherwise) to their language. A minor mispronunciation will often lead to a total communication breakdown, even if the context of the sentence and the words that they can understand should give them enough information to illuminate the one word I was butchering. Things like quartier and Cartier, fois and froid or the eternal bane of my waitressing life, myrtille (blueberry). It calls to mind Hermia’s importuning Demetrius in Midsummer Night’s Dream:

The more you beat me, I will fawn on you: 


Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me, 


Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,

Unworthy as I am, to follow you.

As Australia is yet to recover from cultural cringe, the very disdain that some French have for our attempts at their language, at their style, their food, makes us only love them the more for it.

Over three months waitressing my biceps grew, as did my vocabulary and I only gave a half-dozen people the wrong order. The long days, lettuce washing and toilet-cleaning weren’t exactly what I had imagined for my Paris sojourn so when I saw a sign in a dress shop down the street from my apartment asking for applications I was quick to go inside and talk to them.

At the dress shop they accepted my application – once I had attached a passport photo – because in France you have to always supply a photo with an application, and sometimes a handwriting sample – I had a new job within the week. This was significantly better for my language acquisition since my fellow shop-girls were studying French literature at university and enjoyed teaching me the quirks of grammar. And even better, idioms. There’s a French equivalent to spoonerisms called contre-petrie. For those interested, I can share an example afterwards although it’s not appropriate for speaking into a microphone or printing The Sydney Papers.

Around this time, I began to understand some of the politics around weight and gender and to decode some of the things that people were saying to me. For instance, when my colleagues said, “Oh, it’s so great that you eat that.’ (referring to a felafel from one of the best joints in the world that was just down the street) what they were really saying was “I can’t believe that you would eat that, no wonder you weigh more than me.” They would leave their diet pills in the shop bathroom so that their boyfriends wouldn’t accidentally stumble on them at home. It wasn’t limited to supplements though. During the day, they would eat next to nothing, the standard black coffee and cigarettes, so that in the evenings they could eat normally in front of men and appear nonchalant about food. My sample is, admittedly’ limited but these were intelligent university students in the twenty-first century and still they masked their eating habits from their boyfriends.

The conservatism came up regularly at the shop. The designer was from Corsica and her clothes featured bright colours and vivid patterns. Customers, on hearing my accent, would ask where I was from and then conclude aloud, so the designer is Australian. When I assured them she was French, they were incredulous, often contradicting me. As if it was impossible that a true French person would hire a foreigner.

Another serendipitous arrangement arose, just at the end of the summer, when an internship at a literary agency came up. I was eager to try another world as three months had passed in the dress shop and the wind down of tourist season would mean fewer shifts at the shop and, having always been a bookish person, its appeal was significant. In the dress shop, my boss was looking through applications for my replacement and never looked past the photo. Any applicant who wasn’t white immediately went into the no pile. Hijab, no. Algerian, no. Even blonds were less quickly accepted. He seemed to be a fan of brunettes and I came to understand how I had been given the job, since I knew by now how terrible my French had been in the interview.

My last job was altogether different – interning at a literary agency, Susanna Lea Associates, the eponymous company of an English agent and her French husband. Unutterably glamorous, I remember her breaking in some YSL platform shoes the week before Frankfurt as she zipped off to meetings with authors and publishers, dinner with Bono and what not.

These last few months – although still bringing on waves of disgust at the inadequacy of my French – I learnt about the literary world. As well as the cycles of the publishing houses and how France’s protectionism had resulted in an industry that flourishes in some senses but is utterly stifled in others.

The aftermath

I never wanted to leave, even though many French people I met, particularly those around my own age, were incredulous that I wanted to live in France. They saw it as limited, a has-been country, too narrow and colonial-minded. To them, Australia was a land of possibility and, above all, sunshine. Where I saw culture, they saw baggage.

I was desperate to stay. I hatched more than a few plans of passport swapping and my boyfriend, with his English passport, proposed to me so that we might remain in our Paris bubble. He proposed on a bridge over the Seine, in the rain, with a ring whose glass bauble was filled with purple liquid, representing my preference for writing with a fountain pen using purple ink…It was a very Paris moment. But in the end, we had to come back.