Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (28 page)

If you stroll up this café-lined street from Rue de Rivoli you’ll see immediately on your right the three-star Hôtel Caron de Beaumarchais. It liberally derives its name and theme décor—a 1792 Erard pianoforte in the lobby and cozily faux–Ancien Régime–style rooms—from the proximity of Beaumarchais’s residence, two blocks north. Hidden among the bookshops and the fashion accessory and specialty food boutiques, the mansion stands at number forty-seven. Its exterior is grimy, its heavy carriage doors elaborately carved with writhing Medusa heads.

Rebuilt in the 1650s atop medieval foundations, and repeatedly remodeled by the time Beaumarchais rented it in 1776, the townhouse was more than merely the budding playwright’s dream residence. It was here, in the gilded, frescoed salons frequented by emissaries and artists, that Beaumarchais headquartered Rodrigue, Hortalez et Cie, a cover worthy of a modern spy novel. The company was at the heart of an intricate clandestine operation to supply American revolutionaries with ships, arms, and gunpowder. With one adroit hand Beaumarchais brought Figaro to life in this townhouse, while with the other he spent more than six million
livres
of French and Spanish gold to help the Insurgents beat the British. Without Beaumarchais, historians say, the decisive Battle of Saratoga could not have been won and America might never have gained its independence. Without Figaro, add others, the Bastille might never have fallen.

It shouldn’t detract from his achievements that Beaumarchais undertook both his arms dealing and playwriting to turn a profit—his motto ran, roughly, “Do the public good while lining your own pockets.” He was prototypically modern, with eyes firmly on the bottom line. That explains why, in the salons of this mansion in the heat of July 1777, he also created the Société des Auteurs Dramatiques, paving the way for the first laws on intellectual property and royalty payments. It was here too that Beaumarchais became publisher of Voltaire’s collected works. This ruinous venture heightened suspicions among hereditary divine-right Ancien Régime aristocrats and plutocrats terrified by Beaumarchais’s subversive atheism and beliefs in meritocracy. “You made the effort to be born,” says Figaro to Count Almaviva, “but nothing more than that.”

Ring the bell marked “Concierge” on the right of the carriage door and push past the carved medusas into the mansion’s outer courtyard. The custodian will intercept you; this is still private property. By a series of flukes the building has changed little since Beaumarchais’s day. Even the low-relief sculptures surrounding the court have survived (they show Romulus and Remus nursed by the She-wolf; and allegories of Strength, Truth, Peace, and War; plus the goddesses Ceres and Flora). You can only peer through the vaulted passageway at the tantalizing main courtyard, freshly restored, with more sculptures, masks, and garlands. If you’re lucky, you might glimpse through parted drapes the dazzling ceilings the playwright-spy knew so well.

Imagine Beaumarchais’s gold-encrusted carriage rattling down Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, past the sumptuous Hôtel Carnavalet, now the History of Paris Museum, across Place des Vosges, to the wide boulevard that today bears his name. For several hundred yards along the boulevard’s east side stretch the landscaped grounds of the estate Beaumarchais and his third wife have been building since the late 1780s for the phenomenal sum of 1.6 million
livres
. Inheritances and settlements, plus real estate speculation and a controlling interest in Paris’ first-ever water utility, have made Beaumarchais fabulously rich. Known as the “Mansion of the Two Hundred Windows,” Beaumarchais’s estate is a parvenu’s paradise, with a semicircular colonnade, temples to Bacchus and Voltaire, a Chinese humpback bridge, and a waterfall. The Bastille rises to the south, its towers and bastions an ominous theatrical backdrop. The main house is not yet finished when, in April 1789, Beaumarchais and a party of aristocratic friends, including the future King Louis-Philippe, watch with horror as rioters ransack a nearby mansion then assault royal guards, with a loss of some two hundred lives. Have Figaro’s spiritual heirs gone mad? Beaumarchais can’t help wondering. A few months later, on July fourteenth, Beaumarchais again watches from his terrace as rioters from the blue-collar Faubourg Saint-Antoine neighborhood storm the Bastille. And the rest is history.

“If we were to allow that play to be performed,” remarked the otherwise unperceptive Louis XVI in 1784 about
The Marriage of Figaro
, “we would have to demolish the Bastille.” Fittingly, when the demolition began on July 15, 1789, Beaumarchais, as president of the Marais’s Blancs-Manteaux district, was sent with other dignitaries to supervise. With his typical pragmatism and aplomb he bought—or requisitioned—some of the Bastille’s stones and sent them trundling to the worksite of his personal theater under construction at 11 Rue de Sévigné, between Saint-Paul and the Carnavalet—the heart of the Marais.

Demolished in the mid-1800s, there’s nothing left but the façade of the Théâtre Beaumarchais (sometimes referred to as the Théâtre du Marais). In 1791–92 the chameleon citizen-playwright staged here the third of his Figaro series, the little-known
La Mère Coupable
. More recently, starting in about 1960, for forty years a Hungarian delicatessen ensconced in what was the theater’s foyer sold some of the best salami in Paris. An elegant, could-be-anywhere boutique has now replaced it. Like dozens of unglamorous shoe repair, grocery, and hardware shops, the deli was one of those Marais touchstones from the blue-collar age that have given way to gentrification. When I look up at the former theater’s pilasters, my mind’s eye sees a slice of the Marais layer-cake. First there was a swamp, then came Philippe-Auguste’s medieval city wall, followed by part of La Force prison, then a theater built with the stones of the Bastille, next a Hungarian deli, and now a trendy boutique.

Rewind to Beaumarchais’s speeding carriage—by now a nondescript vehicle sans glittering gold, in keeping with Revolutionary etiquette. Who knows how many times it rumbled from the theater to the Mansion of Two Hundred Windows, racing past carts loaded with prisoners on the way to the guillotine? Ironically, the Committee of Public Safety together with Robespierre almost managed to execute the subversive author of Figaro. True to character, he had reinvented himself as gunrunner for France’s new revolutionary despots. Only by luck, chance, and intrigue did Beaumarchais, declared a “counterrevolutionary” and exiled, keep his head on his shoulders. During his absence, troops stormed his Marais estate expecting to uncover weapons. All they found were thousands of unsold volumes of Voltaire’s collected works.

There’s nothing left of the Mansion of Two Hundred Windows and its grounds, where Citizen Beaumarchais spent the final years of his life, still rich and full of fire but no longer a hero. He died in the last year of the eighteenth century, on the cusp of the modern age, and was buried in his garden near Voltaire’s temple, on the edge of the Marais. The final irony, a postscript to this extraordinary life, is that, before the estate was demolished to make way for the Canal Saint-Martin and Boulevard Richard Lenoir, King Louis XVIII’s men dug up the freethinking playwright’s bones, in 1822, and moved them to Père-Lachaise, a cemetery named for a Jesuit priest. Even in death the itinerant iconoclast knew no rest. Over the rumble of traffic on his boulevard I sometimes hear Beaumarchais chuckling, reminding me that if you don’t laugh you’re destined to cry.

Madame X’s Seduction School

Frenchmen aren’t seducers the way they were …

—M
ADAME
X

small black sheepdog darts over the lawns of Paris’s fashionable Bois de Boulogne parklands, among coiffed pooches and Catherine Deneuve lookalikes. The middle-aged man at the other end of the retractable leash eases over to a chic Parisienne with a poodle. “Ah, you must be Madame Fifi,” he splutters, taking cues from another woman standing nearby. “Perhaps you could advise me on how to help my dog adapt to Paris life—I’ve just moved here you see and …”

Cut to the outdoor terrace of a crowded Paris café. Another man, this one a frump in his mid-thirties, has been eyeing the young woman at the next table but hasn’t screwed up the courage to talk to her. On cue from a half-hidden figure seated at the table behind him, the man clears his throat, leans toward the object of his desire, and smiles winningly. “
Pardonez-moi
, I know this is going to sound strange, and I don’t usually do such things, but I have to say there’s something really interesting on the back page of your newspaper. Could I take a look at it?”

At an upscale boutique in Rue Saint-Honoré, a cute saleswoman shows a pair of expensive shoes to a fortyish man dressed like someone from Federico Fellini’s
La Dolce Vita
. The man is exquisitely polite and charming, though he’s obviously shy, and after paying for his shoes returns a few minutes later with a single white rose. “Your eyes are so beautiful I just wanted to thank you,” he says. The saleswoman—used to dealing with gruff or blasé types—is speechless. He hands her his card. “Next time I’m in Paris may I take you to lunch?”

“But my boyfriend …” the woman begins to object.

“It’s just lunch, I assure you, your boyfriend has nothing to fear, but there’s something about you, your eyes …”

What do these corny pickup scenes have in common?

A shadowy puppeteer I’ll call Madame X, the feisty founder of Paris’s first École de Séduction—a school where you learn the fine art of seduction. Madame X and her crack team of Latin Lover “seduction coaches” accompany advanced students into the field for hands-on sessions. Dogs in parks, newspapers in cafés, and roses in boutiques are just a few of the tricks Madame X uses to push her tongue-tied French males to take the plunge, to make the move and try to pick up the femme fatale of their dreams.

A seduction school in Paris—land of adultery and philandering, the fountainhead of De Sade and Casanova? Yes indeed. The operation got started in the mid-1990s and was such an immediate success that other Seduction Schools popped up (and disappeared overnight). One may be coming soon to a town near you, possibly even in what the French still regard as puritanical middle America. Madame X featured heavily in the French press for a time—she made more than three hundred TV appearances and was written up in about a hundred articles. Then several American TV stations interviewed her, and she was set for stardom. Over a decade and a half later, she’s still at it, and still a regular feature on French talk shows. Why?

The answer is straightforward: it’s difficult for anyone to believe that Parisian men need to be taught how to pick up women. What has happened to the Jean-Paul Belmondos, the Jean Gabins, the Alain Delons of the country? Most people consider France to be a paradise of the senses—fabulous food, an excess of culture, and sex a-go-go.

“Frenchmen aren’t seducers the way they were up to the mid-1980s,” Madame X told me in rapid-fire French, flinging her arms around for emphasis. “The relationship between men and women began to go downhill starting then. The reason is fifty years of feminist revolution. At a certain point it had to backfire for women. We’ve become victims of the war we’ve waged.”

A tall, muscular forty- or perhaps fifty-something, Madame X is an ex–Club Med staff member, a former sales team manager and business consultant, matchmaking agency director, and dancer. She has the imposing presence of a permanently bronzed Alpha Female, with large mobile features, big brown eyes, serious hair, lavish gestures, and canon-shot exclamations. Her body language shouts out conflicting words—randy, bossy, tough, pushy, single-minded, saucy, outspoken, physical. To hear her speak of French women as “victims” of feminism struck me as comical.

In my three decades in Paris I have encountered French women like her, though none wearing, as she was, a loose white shift paired with red basketball shoes, her hair crowned by a pair of sunglasses (despite the fact that we were inside an office building). Most of the Parisian Alpha Females I have known sport smart Chanel suits and flirt dangerously with the executives come to cut deals with them.