I don’t remember how many years ago I bought this book, but it sat on the shelf long enough to have escaped my notice until I took it down to kill a few minutes while waiting for my wife to get ready to go out. One of the downsides to reading and writing about books all the time is that one loses touch of that magical experience of opening a book and commencing to read without any prior knowledge to cloud one’s judgment.
If I ever knew much about I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, I’d forgotten it long ago. I suspect it was nothing more than the loveliness of the title that made me buy it in the first place. So I was naively putting myself in Madeleine Masson’s hands, knowing that I would be setting it down in a few minutes, perhaps not to pick it up again for a matter of years, if ever.
“It was a beautiful day in June 1940” opens the first chapter, “Paris — June 1940.” Of course, we know enough history to realize that a beautiful day in Paris in June 1940 is not going to end beautifully. Masson’s lover arrives to persuade her to leave for Switzerland with him. As a Jew, she understands the risks she faces. “They say that the Germans will be entering Paris at any moment,” her anti-Semitic landlady announces with undisguised delight. Masson chooses not to go to Switzerland but carries on packing up, prepared to join the flood of refugees leaving the city for … well, any place else.
We understand by the end of Chapter One that Masson’s title is a lie, which gives everything that follows a certain poignancy, rather like that one feels in watching the silly bourgeosie in Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La règle du jeu. And Masson herself could easily have been one of the characters in Renoir’s film. Raised in South Africa by a French father and Austrian mother, she came to Paris in 1934 with her mother, who was hoping to establish her own salon and effectively separate from her dull diamond broker husband (if not from his money).
For Masson, however, Paris is a different kind of escape — from her mother, in fact. She quickly finds herself a job as secretary to a wealthy American dowager and a room of her own in a pension, and begins to assimilate into a peculiar cross-section of Parisian society. At the high end, she meets the idle rich and idle not-so-rich (the latter often of noble descent) through her enployer and mother. At the low end, she meets people like Madame Tricon, the patronne of her pension:
She told me that she was one of the first women in Paris to have eyelashes made from the hairs of her current lover’s legs. “Imagine, ma petite,” she said, batting two black centipedes at me, “Imagine to yourself the voluptuousness of giving him Japanese kisses with his own hairs.
At one of employer’s soirees, Masson meets Baron Renaud Marie de la Minaudière, who plies her with food and drink and by the end of the evening declares himself desperately in love. She takes quick stock of his character: “lazy, amoral, deeply religious, sentimental, and selfish.” Nonetheless, when he proposes, she accepts.
Then she discovers that she is the third player in a duet. The Baron is in thrall with the Marquise de Rastignac, a fifty-ish noblewoman his mother enlisted to introduce her son into the mysteries of sex. Some twenty years later, the two are still carrying on their affair, aided in part by the fact that the Marquise is footing much of the bill for the Baron’s playboy lifestyle. Masson’s account of the Baron and the Marquise is just one of the nuggets of la vie Parisienne pluperfect that are studded throughout this book:
The Marquise’s finest hour, L’heure bleue, was her hour of triumph. From 5 to 7 p.m. was visiting time for French lovers; and in love nests all over the country, and in Paris particularly, men were taking down their trousers and heading for the Louis XVI style bed where lay la petite amie in a frilly négligée. Tearing off this garment was part of the ploy. I could never visualise the Baron’s Laure frivolling naked on what the Baron called with some respect the battlefield. For this lady, who to me resembled a Roman matron, had amisleading air of impenetrable virtue. Her clothes appeard welded to her massive frame, and her large handbags and tiny feet were as much a legend in Paris as was her vanished beauty.
Not long after Masson and the Baron are married, the Marquise pays a visit and informs the new bride that “Renaud is my life and I don’t propose giving him up.” Masson’s job is to produce an heir and interfere as little as possible in the status quo ante matrimonium.
This is also the view of the Baron’s family, who don’t bother to hide the contempt they feel towards a pretender with three strikes against her: a Jewess, a foreigner, and a commoner. They refuse to even acknowledge her existence. The shock of her rejection on all fronts causes Masson, now pregnant with the Baron’s child, to miscarry. And this, ironically, then enables Masson to get the marriage annulled through some intricate maneuvers through the Byzantine processes of the French bureaucracy and the Catholic Church.
For proper Parisians, there is no difference between an annulée and a divorcée. Official recognition as a wanton woman, however, frees Masson to explore less-sanctioned aspects of Parisian society. She takes a series of lovers, some who fall for her, others whom she falls for, none of them remotely suitable. Early on, she is aided and abetted by Lucy de Polnay (sister of the author Peter de Polnay, whom Neglected Books fans may recall). Lucy instructs her in the fine art of judging a lover, dismissing one for having what she called “the postman’s knock method”: “three sharp rat-a-tats, put it in the letter box, and away.”
Masson also comes to know — intimately or briefly — many of the celebrities of Paris of the 1930s: Colette, Nathalie Barney, Anaïs Nin, Suzy Solidor, Marie Laurencin. So, if you’re not satisfied with savoring Masson’s delicious tales, you can also feast upon pages rich with vintage Parisian gossip, including their “curious sexual appetites and habits.” (Masson could never share Count Serge Cheremeteff’s “passion for the whip and the rod,” for example.)
And, as we know from the start, there is the tragic goodbye to all that, as Masson tries to find a way out of France with thousands of other refugees. The streets of cities like Tours and Bourdeaux “black with people, like flies on a wound.” Just what happens to her in the end, however, is unclear. In the book, she writes that she managed to book a passage to South Africa from Marseilles. Her Wikipedia page, on the other hand, suggests that she stayed and became involved with the Resistance. After the war, however, it’s clear that she married again (a Royal Navy captain), had a son, to whom the book is dedicated, settled in England, and became a biographer and playwright. She died in 2007 at the age of 95.
I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye is as insubstantial as an éclair — and every bit as irresistible.