Caviar In Coach

On the outside, my new bosses exemplified New York’s successful business class: spa-polished skin; smooth, manicured handshakes; and two perfect children, aged nine-months and almost-two.

They arrived in Paris one month before I did, with 500 Euros in my bank account, a half-finished degree, and no idea what to do with myself. The father had just been hired as the President of a French couturier, and I couldn’t believe it when they hired me off Craigslist, for nine Euros an hour, to be the nanny to their children.

The company had rented them an apartment on one of the streets which radiates from the Arc de Triomphe, at the top of Paris’s famed Champs Elysées. Every morning the elderly Hungarian maid, who in spite of her back had scrubbed this apartment through multiple decades and owners, opened the door to greet me with a baby on her hip. The apartment was full of treasures, antiques and paintings and handbags and scarves and perfume and pearls and chains with the iconic interlocking C’s. There were books, too, about a wiry, black-haired woman with a Roman nose and an acid tongue. I read these books lying on an antique chaise in the parlour while the babies napped after lunch. It was here I learned that Coco was one of the greatest Parisians of them all.

In the afternoons, just a few blocks from where the tourists munched overpriced crêpes on the Champs, an army of nannies trundled their charges to the Parc Monceau, where we looked at the ducks and rode on the dirty slide and stood with our hands held under the water fountain for what seemed like hours. There was a carousel, too, which you could ride for two Euros to the tune of “Greensleeves” and the smell of waffles.

Because the 8th <i>arrondissement</i> was wealthy, many of the nannies in this area worked for important Parisians. One nanny bragged that she had babysat for Kristin Scott Thomas; another rode in a limousine for a day with the young heir to a fashion fortune. Yet another worked for a well known French <i>comédienne</i> whose husband owned one of the biggest supermarket chains in France. I met that woman once. We were around the same age, but she was prettier, and the small jewels in her ears were impeccable in the way that all very, very, discreetly expensive things are. After my bosses went back to America, they recommended me to her for a job, but I think she had a Romanian girl lined up, and instead I went back to Australia to finish my education.