Many a young woman has moved to Paris with starry-eyed visions of her shiny new life. An abundance of cheese, champagne and croissants, with zero impact on the waistline. (French women don't get fat, remember, and once there, neither will she.) The seamless co-opting of that effortless French style, as if by osmosis. Throw on a Breton top, some APC jeans and ballet flats – and voilà! Instant chic.
Maybe she'll even take up smoking (it helps keep French women slim), and the single ladies will most definitely pursue a love affair, or many, with those moody, mysterious, Frenchmen.
However disconnected or lonelyI sometimes felt, Paris’s beauty was always one hell of a consolation. Credit:Stocksy
Personally, I didn't go to Paris with any delusions about what it might entail. I'd visited a few times as a tourist before I moved there in April 2017 without much of a specific goal in mind at all. It made sense at the time. I knew I wanted to return to Europe and not live anywhere I'd lived before (that ruled out London and Italy). As an arts and culture journalist, I felt that Paris would be the next-best fit, and I figured that speaking reasonable Italian would make it relatively easy for me to pick up French. Spoiler alert: it didn't.
Italian is a phonetic language. What you see is what you say, more or less, and for me it was a delight to learn. Syllables skipped over my tongue like stones skimming water. Ap-er-it-iv-o. Sta-zi-on-e. Pan-cett-a.
French I found much trickier, with its rolling Rs, nasal vowels, and so many pesky silent letters. It didn't help that in Paris, attempts by foreigners to communicate in French are often met with a raised eyebrow at best, or the sort of wincing usually reserved for the screech of nails on a blackboard.
I studied online French courses and practised my pronunciation at home. I attended a language school two nights a week where a stern teacher was more fear-inducing than encouraging. None of it helped much. My comprehension was okay and I could stammer out a few basic phrases, but I was never able to comfortably have a meaningful conversation in French that lasted more than a few minutes. I'd walk the streets and hear people talk and laugh, but their chatter passed over me in a meaningless haze. Without the capacity to join in, my often hostile inner monologue ran rampant in the only language I could understand.
I found myself wishing I'd chosen to live in Barcelona (surely Spanish would have been easier than French?) or Berlin (at least English is spoken widely there).
Culturally, I suspect these cities would have been a better fit for me, too. I visited both and found the people of Barcelona to be as warm as its weather, while liberal, gritty Berlin was the opposite of genteel and preening Paris, where, no matter what I wore, I always felt like an interloper at a fancy party.
My apartment was no sanctuary. My first year there I lived in a 17-squaremetre studio with a dire sofa bed, dirty brick wall view and five flights of stairs, a particularly grim prospect when lugging up wet clothes from the laundromat in the dead of winter. Money was tight – I ate more cereal at home in my apartment than I did anything else – and I never felt remotely close to being "almost French".
My second year was much better. I ate a big hole in my savings but it was worth it for a panoramic view (including a half-obscured Eiffel Tower) and an apartment more than four times the size of my old place.
Due to my limited French, my friends were mainly expats, most of them Aussies, which was also not what I'd envisaged, but I was bloody grateful to have them all the same. I joined Facebook groups with names like "Social Girls in Paris" and met up with other Anglophone women of varying degrees of commonality. And I dated, lots. There was no grand French romance, but I had fun whipping around the city on the back of a scooter, having weekend-long dates in Lyon and Brussels, and being whisked away on day trips to Brittany and Normandy.
I lasted 18 months in Paris before I decided it was time to move on. And, while it was often challenging, je ne regrette rien. I had incredible travel and work opportunities, met some wonderful people, took good advantage of all that fine, cheap wine, and spent a year and a half walking around the prettiest city in the world, so often bathed in an uncannily gorgeous glow (they don't call it the City of Light for nothing). However disconnected or lonely I sometimes felt, Paris's beauty was always one hell of a consolation.
In the end, Paris was just as I anticipated, really. I had a gut feeling I wouldn't feel the same affinity with it as I did with Italy and that it wouldn't be easy, and I was right. But I reflect on my time there with fondness and gratitude, and I'm looking forward to visiting soon to collect some things I left behind. Paris wasn't the place for me long-term, but for all of its frustratingly impenetrable allure, the city will always have a special place in my heart.
This article appears in Sunday Life magazine within the Sun-Herald and the Sunday Age on sale September 8.
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