In 2022, our friend Patrice, a restoration architect who has contributed several ideas and themes to this blog, contacted us to ask for help in rescuing and restoring a painting in the parish church of Island in Burgundy. We told the story in a blog called “Saving Mary.” We are glad to report that the painting has now been restored and rehung in the church. Here are the before-and-after photographs.
The two saintly men with halos at the bottom of the painting have emerged as if they had been under water all these years. All in all, the restoration is a satisfying conclusion to the story.
The painting was saved, in part, thanks to a program of the Fondation La Sauvegarde de l’Art Français. The Foundation chose three artworks in each region of France and those interested were invited to vote for one of the three to receive funding from the Foundation. Friends and family rallied around to get out the vote for the painting of Mary.
Recently, Patrice got in touch to say that the Foundation was holding a similar vote this year on rural church buildings and would we consider voting for a church that means a lot to him, the Collegiate Church of Saint-Lazare (Collégiale Saint-Lazare) in Avallon?
Avallon is the main town near Island. It is a fortified city with ramparts overlooking the surrounding countryside. We visited in 2019 when we were staying with Patrice and his wife, Noëlle. We spent time at the market and exploring its narrow streets.
Patrice had this to say about the church:
For nearly nine centuries, the Collegiate Church of Saint-Lazare has watched over Avallon. A privileged witness to history and a jewel of Burgundian Romanesque art, it occupies a central place in the cultural, spiritual, and heritage life of the town. Today, water infiltration threatens the stability of the vaults, as well as the sculpted decorations for which the building is renowned. Roof repairs are essential: replacement of the old tiles, restoration of the roof frame, and complete waterproofing, all while respecting traditional materials and techniques.
The church was built on a 5th-century foundation (a crypt from that date remains), and early in the 11th century, its custodians received a relic of Saint Lazarus (the man raised from the dead by Jesus in the Bible). The relic attracted interest and attention; the church was enlarged and became a popular stopping place for pilgrims headed to Compostello.
Before the Revolution, collegiate churches were those that were served by a “college” (community) of canons (senior clergy), which distinguished them from abbeys (served by a community of monks) and cathedrals (where a bishop was based).
Like its namesake, Saint-Lazare has already survived calamities. In 1589, lightning struck the tower and it burned. A storm demolished part of the church in 1633, but it was rebuilt. Like most churches at the time, it was damaged during the Revolution. Today, the threats have more to do with lack of funding and deferred maintenance, as with so many rural churches, hence the Foundation’s efforts. Each of the churches selected in each of the region has a similar story to tell.
Clearly, a lot of work is needed, and every bit of available funding will help. The Foundation’s website shows some of the effects of the years and damp on the interior and exterior of Saint-Lazare.
Update: Voting ended on November 16. Thanks to all of you who cast a vote. Alas, Saint-Lazare was not the successful candidate in its region. It came second to another church, the interestingly named Eglise de la Décollation-de-Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Oiselay-et-Grachaux. We can only hope that the supporters of Saint-Lazare can find other funds to help pay for needed repairs and that the lovely church will continue to watch over Avallon.
Text by Philippa Campsie; photographs of Avallon’s market and streets by Philippa Campsie, images of the painting of the Assumption from Patrice Roy; images of the Collegiate Church of Saint-Lazare from Wikipedia and the website of the Fondation La Sauvegarde de l’Art Français.
Let it never be said that archival research is dull. My recent forays into the archives at the Institut national des Jeunes Aveugles uncovered a crime nearly 200 years old, and a con man who exploited a legal loophole to get rich. And thanks to the internet, I was able to follow the two malefactors to see what became of them (since neither was ever prosecuted for wrongdoing).
Let’s start with the con man or, more accurately, the snake-oil salesman. His name was Sebastien Guillié. He was born in Bordeaux in 1780 and studied to be a doctor, specializing in ophthalmology, receiving his degree in Paris in 1806. By then, he was a married man. His first job was as a military surgeon attached to Napoleon’s army in Spain.
His story gets a bit murky after that. He was imprisoned for a year in Vincennes following a failed coup d’état in 1812 by General Claude-François de Malet, who tried to seize power while Napoléon was otherwise engaged in Russia. According to some accounts, Guillié was mistaken for a General Guillet and arrested in error. He was eventually released for lack of evidence tying him to the conspiracy. (Malet was executed for treason.)
The fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy rescued Guillié’s career, and in 1814, presumably because of his medical expertise in diseases of the eyes, he was appointed director to the school for blind youth. He even seems to have been recognized by the Legion of Honour (look at his lapel pin), heaven knows why. He had not particularly distinguished himself.*
If you read my last blog, you will know that not all those associated with the school found him congenial. He moved the school into a disused seminary on the rue St-Victor – a grim, damp, building that undermined the health of many of its inhabitants. One of Guillié’s own infant daughters died there.
As associate staff, he recruited two young people from his home town of Bordeaux – Pierre-Armand Dufau, aged 20, and Zélie Cardeilhac, aged about 17, who had training in music.
Guillié knew how to put on a show. He held regular events at which the students demonstrated their abilities in front of an audience. The director who succeeded him wondered how the students learned any new skills when they spent so much time in performance. Guillié also published a volume titled Essai sur l’instruction des aveugles, ou Exposé analytique des procédés employés pour les instruire (Essay on the instruction of the blind or Analytic exposition of the procedures used to instruct them). The front page trumpets: “Printed by the blind and sold for their benefit.” Ahem. The book was actually printed by a commercial printer, J.-L. Chanson, whose name appears on the very last page. In the book, Guillié even states that the school’s printing equipment had been destroyed in 1812. (According to another source, Guillié himself sold it to raise money.) And was the book really sold for the students’ benefit? I do wonder.
The book contains illustrations of healthy-looking young people engaged in all sorts of useful toil, although, like the printing press, some of the workshops did not, in fact, exist at the school at that time. Here is basket-weaving. Apparently, this was not an option for the students at the school.
Guillié carried out painful experiments on the eyes of some of the students. I’ll spare you the details. He was also a stern disciplinarian and the children were sometimes chained up for infractions of the rules. Naturally, that sort of “procedure used to instruct them” did not make it into his book.
Guillié was asked to leave the school early in 1821. Ostensibly, the reason was his affair with Zélie Cardeilhac (she left at the same time). But that story doesn’t quite add up. If he had left in disgrace, why then was he still listed as “honorary director” of the school in the Almanach Royal for the next two years? The following entry is from 1822, after a new director had been appointed.
What did he do next? Histories of the school have nothing to say about his later life. So I thought I’d start at the end of his life and work my way back to 1821. I discovered that he had died in October 1865. I even found a photograph of him as an older man, taken earlier that year.
He died in the small town of Asnières-sur-Seine to the west of Paris. (This was good news. The birth, death, and marriage records of the City of Paris itself were destroyed in 1871, and despite heroic attempts over many decades at reconstituting those documents using information from families and church parishes, details are often sparse. But Asnières kept its records safe.) I found a complete death notice for Guillié, including his profession, address, time of death, and – here it gets interesting – witnesses.
One was Hippolyte Martin Cardeilhac, a lawyer. Aha. The link to the Cardeilhac family had apparently continued. Hippolyte Martin turned out to be Zélié’s brother. The connection offered a clue.
Gallica, the online portal of the National Library of France, has a nifty little feature in the “Advanced Search” option. You can search for two words or names occurring close together in a document, and narrow it down by date. I searched for the combination of Guillié and Cardeilhac during the period between 1821 and 1865. Bingo.
In the Annuaire-almanach du commerce, de l’industrie, de la magistrature et de l’administration (basically a city directory), from the 1840s to the 1860s, O. [sic] Guillié, ancien médecin (former doctor) and Madame [sic] Zélie Cardeilhac, former teacher at the Institut des Jeunes Aveugles, were living at 7, rue de Monsigny. During certain years, her brother the lawyer was also at the same address. The building is still there, and now functions as a hotel.
I spent a little time digging into the Cardeilhac connection, using the French genealogical website Filae. I had found only a death notice in the name of Zélie Cardeilhac, but now that I had the name of her brother, I found her family and her full name: Marie Thérèse Catherine. She was the eldest of four children, born in 1797 in Bordeaux, and the only daughter. Her father was a church musician, hence her early training in music.
Filae also supplied the interesting information that she had given birth to a daughter in 1831, named Sébastienne (!) Augustine Thérèse. The child’s father’s name is given as Jean Auguste Jaurès, a négociant (businessman). She was 33, he was 24. They were not married. She lived at 7, rue de Monsigny; he lived at 15, rue de Paradis Poissonnière (it’s a good 25-minute walk away). If he was the father, I will eat my hat. (He later went on to marry someone else, but Zélie’s child took his name.) Oh, and the birth was attended by another of Zélie’s brothers, a doctor.
All this was deeply interesting, but I needed to get back to Sebastien Guillié. What had he been doing all those years?
The answer emerged in an obituary. Guillié was well enough known that there were obituaries, but not well enough liked for them to be complimentary. Here is the story, told by Doctor Louis Balthazar Caffe in La France médicale:
Guillié, who had a great deal of education seasoned with a great deal of intelligence, one day became impatient with his lack of riches – a fate he shared with many of his most estimable colleagues – while he saw many idiots, ignoramuses, and rogues growing rich around him. Clients who … paid him poorly and constantly told him that they were bothered by phlegm (which is only a symptom and not an illness), inspired him … with the dastardly idea of prescribing them an anti-phlegm elixir. He had only to choose from the numerous formulas of purgative spirits available in German and other pharmacopoeias; but for commercial success, it was necessary to make people believe in a secret remedy. … The law prohibits the announcement of secret remedies (incidentally, it is worth repeating that there is no secret remedy, chemistry sees to that), so Guillié buys a dying newspaper, inserts the formula for the said anti-phlegm elixir, confiscates all the copies, and immediately puts the paper out of business after making a simple legal deposit. The law remains, from then on, satisfied and powerless. By this cruel revenge against human stupidity, Guillié realizes 80,000 francs in income.
I had seen one of the advertisements in the archives, and although I had photographed it, at the time I had no idea what it represented.
The earliest mention of Guillié’s elixir that I can find dates from 1822, so this must have been Guillié’s main source of income after leaving the school.
One mystery remains. The so-called elixir, now in pill form, was still being sold a hundred years later, in the 1920s. Who got the profits? Zélie Cardeilhac died in 1879, also in Asnières-sur-Seine; Guillié’s estranged wife had died in 1866 in Paris. Most, perhaps all, of the children of their marriage died young; if not, I cannot trace any survivors. Who’s left? The descendants of Zélie’s daughter Sébastienne. She married advantageously (a sub-prefect in Aisne), had two daughters, who also married, and survived into the 20th century. But that is pure conjecture. Perhaps an enterprising pharmacist bought the rights to the “secret” formula.
Let’s move on to our thief. It’s a shorter story.
This one started, for me, as a whodunnit. A history written in 1849 of the school mentions “un agent comptable” (accountant) who disappeared in 1831, taking with him about half a year’s worth of the school’s receivables.** The fact is also mentioned in a document handwritten by the director in 1833, but neither mentions the name of the thief.
I also found a letter written to the director in June 1831 by the head of the board of governors, Alexis de Noailles. Alexis was a born diplomat, with seldom a bad word to say about anyone, but he bursts out: “Vilain homme ! Voler des pauvres, des aveugles, compromettre une administration qui a confiance en lui !” (Dreadful man! To steal from the poor, the blind, to compromise an administration that had confidence in him!”). I had to know more.
I found the accountant’s last name in the archives; he was referred to as Le Sieur de Rubat, and he’d been hired in 1823 (one of two candidates for the job). But I needed his first name to trace him. Nineteenth-century French records are parsimonious with first names. It’s all Monsieur This and Madame That and most people seemed to sign letters with their last name only.
I found a clue in the Almanach Royal. In its list of administrators and employees at the school, it provided an initial (L.) – a bit odd, since they did not offer anyone else’s initial, and de Rubat is not such a common name that he might be confused with another accountant called de Rubat.
In any case, the initial allowed me to narrow my search and eventually I found him: Louis Prosper de Rubat, born in 1795, probably in Paris. In 1823, the same year he secured his employment at the school, he married Marie Angelique Bisson. The couple had two sons. Their first son died in infancy in the countryside, where he had been sent to be wet-nursed – a common custom in those days. Marie Angelique died in November 1830, after giving birth to a second son in March 1830.
Was her death the source of his money troubles? In any case, de Rubat declared bankruptcy (faillite) three months after her death, in February 1831.
And a few months after that, he leaves town with the Institut’s money. Where did he go?
Not that far, actually. Brussels. (Belgian and Dutch records can be found on Open Archives.) He seems to have settled down quite well with his ill-gotten gains. He remarried a woman 23 years his junior in 1836, had two more kids, a boy and a girl, and set up some kind of business (he appeared in Belgian records as a “négociant” or merchant).
I found records of the weddings of his Belgian son and daughter and wondered what had happened to the remaining son by his first wife: Alphonse Alexandre Raymond. All I could find was a record of Alphonse de Rubat, aged between two and three years old, who died in a Paris hospice in February 1833. Was that him? If so, his father abandoned him in his flight to Belgium.
Louis Prosper de Rubat died in Brussels, probably safely in his own bed and surrounded by his loving family, at the age of 83. Le vilain homme.
Text by Philippa Campsie. Photographs of Guillié from the Wellcome collection; image of the school from the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles; photograph of rue de Monsigny from Google Street View, photograph of Elixir advertisement by Philippa Campsie; lithograph by H. Walter of Brussels in 1855 from Wikimedia Commons; document excerpts and illustration from Guillié’s book from Gallica.
* I found nothing in the online database of the Légion d’Honneur and my email to the Légion archivist has not yet been answered.
**Joseph Guadet, L’Institut des Jeunes Aveugles de Paris (Paris: Thunot, 1849), page 91.
I have recently returned from a 10-day research trip to Paris for a book on Charles Barbier. Over the years, I have pegged away at this project, taking a day here, a day there for research during our visits, but the more I learned, the more I realized I needed to learn. So I went to Paris in May. Robert, the archivist at the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles (the school for the blind in Paris) was welcoming, Norman encouraged me to go on my own, and I fitted in a visit to my family in London on the way there.
All in all, I spent six days in the school archives. Once the gardien at the front gate had made a note of my presence and my passport number, I was free to come and go every day, passing the statue of Valentin Haüy as I crossed the courtyard every morning.
The archives are housed in a sunny room with windows on both sides, right underneath the music department. As I worked my way through a series of archival boxes, I listened to students practising piano or playing for their teachers. I liked the sound, even though I heard the strains of Für Elise rather a lot. Many played the way children do – rushing through the bits they know and slowing down when they hit a difficult patch. It always made me smile. Later in the day, I heard saxophone and once, drums (I left a bit early that day; listening to drummers practise can be wearing).
What I learned in six days suggested that I really need about six months to do a thorough investigation, but I brought away dozens of scans and photographs and photocopies, and I am working my way through them. I wanted to know more about the school and its workings in the early 19th century. I had read Barbier’s correspondence with the school director in the 1820s, but that told me only part of the story.
I spent almost two days studying the agendas and minutes of the Conseil d’Administration (the Board of Governors) in the 1820s and 1830s. Much of the discussions dealt with mundane matters like the price of bedsheets and the quality of the food, but this was all part of the running of a residential establishment. I discovered that the school had had the misfortune to have not one, but two unscrupulous accountants in succession, Mouquet and de Rubat (French administrative documents never give first names, which makes people hard to trace), who embezzled funds. I would have loved to dig into that story a bit more, and perhaps one day I will, but time was short and there were other stories that needed my attention.
In a box containing a variety of documents from different sources, I found a 12-page report that looked promising. I have just finished a transcription of the scans. It is one of the liveliest bits of writing I have encountered so far. Here are the first few lines.
The author is Jean-François Galliod (1777–1852), who taught and directed music at the Quinze-Vingts hospice for the blind. In 1801, the school for the blind had been merged with the Quinze-Vingts. This report, which describes life at the school from 1802 to 1815, was addressed to the school’s founder and Galliod’s former teacher, Valentin Haüy, who had left France in 1802, travelled to Russia to teach there, and returned in 1817. Galliod himself was blind and he dictated his account to his teenaged daughter, Victoire Augustine Eugenie.
The Quinze-Vingts is now a modern ophthamological hospital, but it retains its original gate (shown below from inside the enclosure) and its chapel.
Galliod’s report is like a long letter to a good friend. He even calls him “Papa Haüy” at one point. In commenting on the people around him, he’s candid and sometimes cheeky, but not spiteful. Clearly, in the early days at the Quinze-Vingts, the teaching at the school was at a low ebb. The director, Louis Bertrand, was pleasant but disengaged. When Galliod mentions the efforts of the students to avoid his lectures, one gathers that they were eye-wateringly dull. Bertrand’s second-in-command, Paul Seignette, was much more supportive and helpful.
The rest of the teachers were a mixed lot. I laughed aloud at the story of M. Gèneresse (the spelling of people’s names tended to be rather creative in those days, so I have no idea if that’s what it really was). Here is Galliod’s description (my translation):
M. Gèneresse taught only grammar, one lecture [a week], and the composition of letters. M. Gèneresse came from the colonies specifically to teach French grammar, which he learned I don’t know where… He used a book. Whenever one said something that didn’t appear in his book, he would say, “My friend, you know nothing.” He once asked a student to give an example of a proper name. The student responded, “Bordeaux.” [Gèneresse replied] “You don’t know what you are talking about. Paris, the Seine, those are proper names.” From this we knew that at least he could read. He knew a bit of music, which was of no use to us. He left in 1815…
At first, Galliod taught music to individual students. His role as music master for the school, and the creation of a choir and orchestra had informal beginnings:
In 1802, my friends expressed the desire to sing in the chapel of the Quinze-Vingts. I brought together all your old students… I showed them with some difficulty the bass part of the mass we used to sing. That wasn’t all; many of my old schoolfellows were not at the Quinze-Vingts, so I had to go and rehearse with them at their homes. They lived on the rue St. Denis or thereabouts. Mornings I worked at the Quinze-Vingts; in the afternoon, I took one of my sighted music students and gave him my arm to get to the quartier St. Denis, where I taught each person his or her part. From there I went to the Café des Aveugles. Our major rehearsals took place at the Quinze-Vingts. We performed the mass on Easter Day, and later at the Blancs Manteaux. We continued to perform it several times at the Quinze-Vingts.
The chapel is one of the few survivors of the old Quinze-Vingts. This is a picture of the interior.
At the Café des Aveugles in the Palais Royal, blind musicians entertained the patrons, so Galliod probably had some friends there.
And Notre-Dame des Blancs-Manteaux was a church in the Marais, not far from the Quinze-Vingts. This drawing is from 1877; I gather it was rebuilt in the mid 19th century and would have looked rather different in Galliod’s day.
In 1804, the group learned a mass setting for four voices by the composer Jean-Baptiste Métoyen. The composer expressed doubts about the choir’s ability to learn it. But with the help of a sighted music student to interpret the score (this is long before the days of braille musical notation), the choir learned it in time for All Saints’ Day in November.
The choir even performed for a visit by the pope. At the time, Pope Pius VII was living in exile in France, so this is not quite as impressive as it sounds, but he came with a clutch of cardinals. The choir sang in Italian, Latin and French and the pope distributed rosaries to the participants.
In 1806, M. Seignette, the second-in-command, asked Galliod to become the official music instructor for the school students. Galliod accepted. Three of the older students, who played violin, bass, and clarinet, pitched in, and Galliod figured out the rest, learning to play other instruments alongside his pupils. Seignette helped him obtain more instruments, to give the students some choice in what they learned to play. And so an orchestra was formed, with violins, cellos, basses, flutes, oboes, clarinets and horns. Later they added bassoons.
Galliod composed an overture for the orchestra that allowed each of the best players to do a small solo. It must have taken some time, teaching each group its part individually, and then putting it all together. One student, Noël-Jean Ismann, could see a little and was able to read musical scores. (Ismann went on to become a music teacher at the school himself.) By 1808, the orchestra was playing Haydn symphonies.
In 1811, Galliod formed what he calls a “harmonie,” meaning a band made up of wind instruments and percussion. It included serpents (shown below) and a bass drum. When some of his star players left the school, he rounded up a couple of violinists and gave them oboes. Within a few months, they were part of the band.
In 1814, Seignette asked Galliod if the choir and orchestra could perform Vivat in Aeternum by Nicolas Roze. This was a big piece performed at the coronation of Napoleon. You can hear it on YouTube and it’s pretty impressive. Galliod went to see Roze, taking his daughter and Ismann with him and a letter of introduction asking for copies of the music for a motet and the Vivat.
He [Roze] asked me, why do you want them? I said, to sing at the chapel in the Quinze-Vingts. He asked, by whom? I said, by blind people. He asked, how are you going to do that? I explained as best I could and he gave me the score with considerable hesitation, telling me that we were not to perform it until he had conducted a rehearsal. He asked, when could he come to hear it? I told him M. Seignette would write to him. We learned the motet that precedes the Vivat and the Vivat in a week. We informed M. Roze. He came right away and found us assembled. He was very surprised to hear the motet and Vivat he had given us performed by blind people…he had expected it would take us a month to learn.
On the feast day of St. Louis in August 1814, the group successfully performed a concert of this work. Galliod next planned a Te Deum for double choir in December.
And then he injured his leg. He couldn’t get to the Palais Royal where his musical friends were gathered, so he stayed at the Quinze-Vingts and taught the musicians there, sitting down, with his foot on a stool. When the leg got so bad he couldn’t walk, he called a friend, gave him a broom handle, and asked him to make a crutch. The rehearsals continued, but the musicians were struggling, so he sent for M. Roze, who was happy to continue working with the group. The two of them, working from nine in the morning to one in the afternoon each day, rehearsed the music. Galliod got his daughter to help the women singers learn their parts. On December 29, they performed the Te Deum and a mass in front of the Grand Aûmonier (the senior priest in charge of the Quinze-Vingts) to the satisfaction of the administrators.
By this time, Nicolas Roze had become one of the group’s most enthusiastic supporters, and he took over rehearsals while Galliod recovered.
Galliod persisted, staging concert after concert, despite losing some of his best players to an orchestra that entertained people in the gardens of Versailles. Then came the big blow. M. Bertrand died in March 1814 and was replaced by a doctor named Sebastien Guillié. Galliod remarks, dryly, that “[the death of ] Bertrand was regretted by some of his students; it was regretted even more when they came to know Monsieur Guillié.”
No kidding. At a concert for the archbishop in January 1815, Guillié asked Galliod what salary he wanted to remain as music director for the school. Galliod replied, 800 francs. Galliod says Guillié haggled as if he were buying apples and eventually offered 500 francs. When Galliod refused, Guillié demanded the keys to the music cupboard. Before handing them over, Galliod asked to remove instruments and tools in the cupboard that were his personal property. Guillié and Mouquet (remember Mouquet? one of the two dishonest accountants?) grabbed the rest of the instruments, threw them pêle-mêle (pell-mell) into a sack, and took them away. The school moved to separate quarters in February 1815.
Galliod continued to conduct the choir and orchestra at the Quinze-Vingts, and after Guillié was fired from the school in 1821, Galliod came and helped out with the music program there from time to time. He knew Charles Barbier and helped publish a couple of books using Barbier’s raised-point writing method, which was popular at the Quinze-Vingts. I was saddened to find out that Galliod’s loyal and helpful daughter died in 1824 (when she was about 26). Galliod composed music that seems to have been lost, but inspired generations of musicians, who went on to become teachers and performers, not just at the school, but in many other places. He deserves to be better known.
Text by Philippa Campsie, images of Café des Aveugles, chapel interior, serpent, and Roze from Wikimedia; drawing of Notre-Dame-des-Blancs-Manteaux from the Musée Carnavalet; photographs of INJA and the gate of the Quinze-Vingts by Philippa Campsie. Many thanks to Robert Pradère, archivist at INJA, and to Mireille Duhen of the Association Valentin Haüy, who helped me with my research and answered my questions.
On a blustery January day, two friends and I set out to walk the route of the Bièvre river across the Left Bank. Jill, who lives in Paris, had done most of the walk before and suggested the route. Elizabeth, a friend from California, and I were up for the expedition, which took a full afternoon. Norman stayed home with a sore leg that needed some rest.
The Bièvre river, a remnant of Paris’s industrial past, was buried in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, having become polluted from the many tanneries and dyeworks along its route. Tanneries used substances such as dog poop (known, oddly enough, as pure) to soften leather, while dyeworks in the 19th century were using more and more chemical colourings. (I should know. My great-great-grandfather, who trained as a chemist in Switzerland, ran a dyeworks in Lancashire in the 1860s that poisoned the river Irwell near Bacup. Environmentalism was not a thing back then.) This 1862 photograph by Charles Marville makes it all look rather tranquil. Note the rudimentary bridge.
The three of us met in front of the Jardin des Plantes. The garden was closed because of high winds and the danger of falling branches. We noticed several people approaching the gates, reading the sign, and rolling their eyes. One of them muttered “Typical…any excuse to close” before stomping away.
Jill had brought a book about the buried river that had a not-terribly-detailed map of the route with very small type. Actually, not having a precise guide added to our enjoyment, as we had to keep our eyes open for the medallions in the pavement that mark the route.
We got off-track sometimes, but the triumph of spotting a medallion indicating the correct route was very satisfying. Every so often, we would also find square plaques on the ground indicating other features of the river.
Our initial exploration went well until the road dead-ended. The route disappeared underneath the buildings of the natural history museum, a green campus that looked interesting, but was closed to the public. We did ask at the gate, but the guard suggested we keep walking.
I took a picture of the pathway, wondering if the leaf litter concealed any medallions.
Eventually, we spotted medallions on the rue Saint-Hilaire. The gap between the buildings suggests the route.
On the other side of the road, however, was a solid wall of buildings. We picked up the trail again near the church of St. Medard at the bottom of the rue Mouffetard. At this point, we stopped for a snack in a pastry shop while a rain shower passed overhead. I had a “lingot,” which is similar to a “financier” but a slightly different shape. Highly recommended.
When the rain stopped, we pressed on, leaving the 5th arrondissement and crossing into the 13th. The rue Berbier du Mets was studded with medallions, as we wound our way past the back of the Gobelins tapestry factory and the chateau of the white queen (chateau de la Reine Blanche).
Actually, there were two white queens. Marguerite de Provence, widow of Louis IX (also known as Saint Louis), built a castle here in the 13th century when her husband died. Royalty wore white as a symbol of mourning. Her widowed daughter, who was actually called Blanche, lived with her. The current building is not the original 13th-century construction, but dates from the 15th to 17th centuries.
As we walked along the rue Berbier du Mets, Jill showed us a page of her book: an old painting of a tower at the back of the Gobelins tapestry factory rising up from the riverbed. Sure enough, the tower was still there. Comparing the picture with real life gave us an indication of how high the ground had risen over the buried river.
The route skirted the Square René Le Gall, a pretty sunken park that seemed very green in January (at least to Canadian eyes). We followed the medallions along the rue Croulebarbe to the boulevard Auguste Blanqui, crossed, and immediately lost the trail.
At that point, we discovered another problem with the map that we hadn’t spotted at first. There are two branches of the river, the bras vif (living arm) and the bras mort (dead arm) – the dead arm being part of the river that had stopped flowing before it was buried. We’d hoped to follow the brasvif, but we kept finding medallions for the bras mort. Then we noticed that whoever had designed the map had indicated the bras mort with a lively blue, and the bras vif with a dull mauve. That seemed counter-intuitive. We’d been following the bright blue line by instinct, and by mistake.
We picked up the trail again on the rue Wurtz and followed the river’s oxbow route, stopping to explore the Cité Florale. This urban village is a collection of small houses on narrow streets named for flowers.
Shortly after passing the place de Rungis we spotted a sign with the name Bièvre (it seemed to be a space for children’s art), which encouraged us, as we could not see any medallions nearby.
Jill and Elizabeth were starting to notice my tendency to wander into any courtyard with an open or unlocked gate. I cannot help myself. Many are open because there are businesses in the buildings that need to be accessible to clients and customers. And some are simply open because nobody has locked the gate. You never know until you walk in. The worst that can happen is an abrupt invitation to walk out, but nobody paid any attention to us.
We found one courtyard dominated by a huge tree, with Christmas decorations on it and on the greenery around the courtyard.
Approaching the circular Place de l’Abbé Henocque, we got a little lost. Looking at Jill’s map again, we saw a line in orange. The legend said that it represented a “dérivation à ciel ouvert.” Really? Open to the sky? We had to investigate.
What we found was another urban village of small houses on three pedestrian streets arranged in the form of a triangle, called the Square de Peupliers. I guess a triangle can be a square in Paris. We saw a man clipping a tree in his front garden. He waited for us to pass, and I asked him if he knew where the route of the Bièvre was. He looked mystified.
A few minutes later, we found several medallions in the area, but no sign of an open waterway. I wanted to find the man and show him, but he had disappeared.
The route then turned south and headed for the edge of the city. The streets in the area, many of them named for doctors, were very different from those in central Paris. One, with houses set back behind small front gardens, reminded me of London.
We noticed a lovely rainbow as the sky began to clear.
We lost the trail of medallions around the time that we crossed the Petite Ceinture.
But when we entered the Parc Kellerman, it didn’t matter. The spacious park is attractive, despite the constant noise from the Periphérique on its far side, and we were treated to a splendid sunset.
As it was getting dark, we made our way back to the Porte d’Italie for a glass of mulled wine and some snacks. Jill calculated that we had walked about 10 km.
If you are in Paris, I can recommend the walk. No need to do it all, you can do a section and still enjoy the hunt for medallions. I love the way it took us through some unfamiliar areas we might never otherwise have seen, and the scavenger-hunt feeling of searching for clues along the way. Jill says she’s already planning a new walk for our next visit.
Parts of the Bievre river outside Paris are being uncovered (a process called daylighting), and there are plans to open up more of the river.
Text and most photographs by Philippa Campsie; photograph of Gobelins by Elizabeth Symington; watercolour of Gobelins from Wikimedia; Marville photograph from the Met.
Further reading: Renaud Gagneux, Jean Anckaert, and Gerard Conte, Sur les traces de La Bièvre Parisienne, Parigramme, 2002.
It’s January 19. Do you know where your New Year’s resolutions are?
This year, I decided to go minimalist and easy: look up. You can interpret those words any way you want. Chin up, perhaps, if you’re feeling blue. Or, put your device away if it is starting to dominate your life. Or notice your surroundings carefully, if you feel a call to mindfulness. Stand up straight, if your posture is slumped. Or all of the above.
It started when I was in Paris and developed an interest in dormer windows (lucarnes). Our friend Mireille had sent us an article that provided a whole vocabulary to use for these features of Paris roofs. I was determined to become an expert lucarne-spotter. That called for a lot of looking up. But I became fascinated by what I saw above me. This building on the corner of the rue Neuve Saint-Pierre and the rue de l’Hôtel Saint-Paul has a fairly ornate dormer facing the intersection.
Now, you need to be careful when you look up in Paris. Not watching one’s feet can have unintended consequences, from twisting an ankle on uneven pavement to stepping in something undesirable (actually, the one time I did get something on my shoe, it turned out to be a piece of rotten fruit). The best place to study lucarnes is from a bus window, and we took a fair number of buses. Not ideal for photography, but good for practising identification techniques.
So here is a small guide to the dormers of Paris.
First of all, properly speaking, a dormer window is a window with a vertical glass surface that is set into a roof, rather than a skylight, which lies flush with the slope of the roof.* My Larousse (and Google Translate) offers the term lucarne for both dormers and skylights; but people may also call a skylight a tabatière (literally: snuffbox) or vasistas (also used for a transom window, and yes, the term comes from the German for “What is that?”). Some people simply use the popular brand name Velux. This photo that I took from the roof of the Galeries Lafayette shows buildings on the rue Scribe, with skylights on the left and dormers on the right.
Dormers can be further characterized by whether the dormer sits on the roof, detached from the rest of the façade, or whether it rises up from the façade through the roof, in which case it might be called une lucarne pendante (hanging), engagée (engaged), meunière (miller), or gerbière (a tall wheat sheaf that sticks up above its surroundings in a field). The following example on the rue Boissy d’Anglas shows dormers that are continuations of the façade.
Most of the other terms for dormers are related to the shape of the roof immediately on top of the window and its surroundings. Probably the most common type is la lucarne jacobine, or la lucarne en batière (boatman), which has a peaked or gable roof. Here is a tiny one on the roof of one of the oldest houses in Paris, on the rue François Miron.
Another common sight is la lucarne capucine, or la lucarne à croupe (in English, a hipped dormer). The roof of the dormer is three-sided, with a triangle over the window, as shown below on the rue de la Perle.
Interesting that these two types have names relating to religious orders. Jacobin is the name for the Dominican order in France; Capuchin is a type of Franciscan friar. The names allude to the hoods worn by monks. Jacobin hoods presumably formed a peak over the face, while the Capuchin version flopped down over the forehead.
Another common dormer in Paris is la lucarne rentrante, which is set back into the roof and offers a tiny bit of space in front of the window. I was able to get a good shot of these ones on the rue de Saintonge from the window of a friend’s apartment.
There are often windowboxes and a bit of greenery associated with these versions, and a few residents are even able to wedge a small chair into the space for soaking up rays in summer.
The one shown below, on the boulevard Henri IV, is particularly spacious. Notice the mosaics below the balconies.
Some grand buildings have dormers with a pediment or ornate decoration over the window. These are known as lucarnes àfronton. In this picture, taken in in the Cité Martignac off the rue de Grenelle, various kinds of dormers are visible, but the dormers on the right, just below the top-floor lucarnes rentrantes, have attractive pediments.
If the decoration extends out to either side, the dormer is said to have ailerons (fins). These lucarnes are on the rue François 1er.
Another group of dormers features rounded tops or rounded windows. These are known as lucarnes bombées (curved dormers) or lucarnes cintrées (arched dormers). The window may be squarish, but the roof over the window is rounded. These gentle curves are on the rue de la Perle.
The curves may be more pronounced, as seen on the rue de Sully, shown below. Here the tops of the dormer windows are also rounded.
If the window itself is round or oval, it is called la lucarne à l’oeil-de-boeuf (ox eye). Once again, this is the rue François 1er.
The Hôtel d’Aumont, containing the Tribunal of Paris, viewed from the rue des Nonnains d’Hyères, has lovely oeil-de-boeuf windows with stone frames.
Finally, there are the dogs. No, really. La lucarne rampante or chien couché (sleeping dog) has a roof that slopes down like the roof, but at a slightly different angle. On the rue de la Petite Pierre, shown below, the sleeping dogs on the uppermost level alternate with lucarnes bombées. Alas, these are the only ones I spotted, and the photograph is not as clear as it could be.
La lucarne retroussée or chien assis (sitting dog), in which the roof over the dormer is at a sharp angle to the slop of the roof, is also relatively rare, but I did see one at the corner of the rue Charlot and the rue Pastourelle and took a hasty and not very good photograph. Can you spot it?
The odd thing is that many French people use the term chien assis for all dormers. I have no idea why, when so many other wonderful terms are available.
Certain dormer shapes are found elsewhere in France but rarely in Paris, such as the lucarne guitarde, which has a roof with a rounded front. Then there are Parisian one-offs, like this double-decker version on the rue Madame de Sévigné. No idea what it would be called.
A dormer at the corner of the rue de l’Hôtel de Ville and the rue du Brosse has a steeple on top, complete with weathervane.
Sometimes, as I gazed skyward, I couldn’t really tell what I was looking at. This building on the rue de Grenelle has all kinds of interesting details at the roof level, but all I could really see were the undersides of the dormer eaves.
I could not find a special name for a dormer with a flat roof, although I saw quite a few. The pictures of flat-roofed lucarnes that I found online seem to be on modern houses, so there does not seem to be a historic or colourful name available, but if anyone knows of a name other than lucarne à toit plat, please let me know.
On our last night in Paris, still looking up, I photographed the elaborate dormers in the Hôtel de Sully against a clear night sky.
Once you learn the names, it’s fun to go on a lucarne hunt anywhere. So go outside, look up, and tell me what kinds of dormers are in your neighbourhood, wherever you are.
*Also not to be confused with a gable (pignon), the triangle-shaped upper part of a wall between the two slopes of a pitched roof, as in Anne de la Maison aux Pignons Verts.
When our friend Mireille in Paris asked me to research the descendants of Valentin Haüy, the man who pioneered education for blind children, my first reaction was, “Wait – he had children?” I knew about Haüy’s work with blind students. But I’d somehow missed the fact that he had children of his own.
I pass his statue every time I visit the archives in the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles. But the young man at his feet is his first student, François Le Sueur.
Historians have lots to say about Haüy’s relationship with Le Sueur, and with other, later students. Information about his family is sparse. The Wikipedia article makes no mention of wife or children, and notes that he spent the last years of his life living with his brother, René-Just, a noted mineralogist. They sound like two old bachelors bunking in together.
René-Just was a priest, and so, yes, a bachelor. But Valentin was a husband and a father. In his biography of Haüy, historian Pierre Henri relegates details about Haüy’s two wives and his progeny to an appendix I’d never bothered to examine. It was a start.
Haüy was 29 when he married for the first time in 1774 at St-Germain l’Auxerrois in Paris. His wife, Elisabeth Victoire Vaillard, was about 21. The record on Filae (the French genealogical website) transcribes her name as Taillard, which is reasonable, if you look at the records. Variant spellings, creative handwriting, and inaccurate transcriptions make genealogical research in this era a challenge.
The couple had a daughter in 1775, and named her Catherine Madeleine Victoire Justine.
By that time, Haüy had had the experience that inspired him to educate blind people, but he had not begun to act on that ambition. In 1771, he visited the Fair of St-Ovide, held in what is now the Place de la Concorde. There, he saw a group of blind men dressed in long gowns and pointed hats, pretending to make music on instruments they could not play, performing in a café for the amusement of the customers. This appalling display was the subject of an engraving.
As the story goes, Haüy was angered by the way in which the blind were being mocked and resolved to do what he could to ensure that blind people could find more dignified ways to earn a living. After all, deaf children were already being taught at a dedicated school founded in Paris in 1760. Why not blind children?
But first, Haüy needed to establish himself in society and earn some money. He was a linguist and translator (reportedly he spoke 10 languages), and became interpreter at the court of King Louis XVI in 1783.
The following year, he persuaded the Philanthropic Society to sponsor his plan for a school to teach blind children to read and write. Although most accounts suggest that Haüy met a young blind beggar, François Le Sueur, and selected him to be his first student, the respected historian Zina Weygand states that the teenaged Le Sueur got word of the scheme and sought out Haüy himself.
However the two actually met, the resulting relationship was fruitful. Le Sueur made rapid progress learning to read books with raised lettering, in a form invented by Haüy. The picture of a smartly dressed Le Sueur reading a book by touch adorns the cover of the English translation of Weygand’s book, The Blind in French Society.
Haüy opened a day school for boys and girls in his own house on the rue Coquillière. We can now imagine Haüy’s wife there, too, along with his 10-year-old daughter.
The students gave demonstrations of the skills they had acquired in reading and music, and their presentation in Versailles led to royal endorsement of the school in 1786. That year, the school moved to rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires.
Just as things were going so well, Haüy’s wife died in 1788, at the age of 35, leaving him with a 13-year-old daughter. That must have affected him. Did he send the daughter to live with relatives, or did she remain with him?
Meanwhile, he had to contend with the political upheavals of the Revolution. Since royal endorsements no longer had value, the school needed a new form of state support. In 1791, the government proposed the merger of the schools for the deaf and the blind. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
That same year, Haüy married again, to Louise Marguerite Allain. I found a record of her baptism in Rambouillet in 1772.* She would have been 19 to Hauy’s 46 years. How do you suppose Haüy’s 16-year-old daughter felt about her new stepmother?
The couple had a son the following year, Philodème Just Haüy, born during the Reign of Terror (his first name means “lover of the people” – politically correct in Revolutionary times). The stress on Haüy at this time can only be imagined. He was trying to keep control of the school he had founded in the face of authorities who were determined to regulate the establishment with a heavy hand, and he had a young wife, a baby, and a teenaged daughter to protect. He was even imprisoned briefly, and although he was eventually freed and his name cleared, he lost his day job as a translator in the Maison des Postes.
His daughter, Catherine Madeleine Justine Victoire (I don’t know which name she used regularly) left home in 1795, when she was 20, by marrying the son of a bailiff.
Meanwhile, the merger with the school for the deaf proved a failure and the school for the blind was moved to a convent that had once served as a shelter for women. The school was now known as l’Institut des Aveugles Travailleurs (the Institute of Blind Workers, emphasizing the youngsters’ roles as labourers and minimizing their role as students).
In 1798, Valentin’s wife gave birth to a stillborn girl.
Eventually, the school was forced to merge with the Quinze-Vingts, the hospice for adult blind people, shown below. Haüy wrote letters of protest, but the plan went ahead in 1800, and the students were subject to harsh discipline in the new situation. Haüy tried to provide them with some measure of education, thereby taking them away from their labours. The authorities viewed this as insubordination.
In 1801, Haüy’s wife had another son, Adel Theodore Vincent de Paul Haüy, who died in infancy. (Note the inclusion of a saint’s name. St. Vincent de Paul was the patron saint of Haüy’s school. It was a brave choice at a very secular time.)
Finally, in 1802, Haüy’s school job was abolished, and he was offered a small pension. He was 57, responsible for a wife (who had recently lost two children) and a 10-year-old son.
He opened what was first called a Lyceum for the Blind and later, oddly, a Museum for the Blind and School for Languages in the Hotel de Mesmes, shown below, on the rue St-Avoye (now part of the rue du Temple). To make ends meet, he took in only paying students from well-off families. It wasn’t a success.
In 1806, at the invitation of the tsar, he left for Russia with his wife and 14-year-old son and a former student, Alexandre Fournier, hoping to found a new school there. On the way, he stopped in Berlin and his discussions there contributed to the foundation of a German-language school for the blind.
Russian was not one of the 10 languages Haüy knew (although most educated Russians spoke French), and he attracted few students. Nevertheless, he stayed until 1817, perhaps because he disapproved of the Emperor Napoleon’s reign in France, perhaps because there was no work in France for him.
Haüy’s son, Philodème Just, however, flourished in Russia, where he was known as Just Valentinovich Haüy. He became an engineer, and in 1820, aged 28, he married Caroline Horson de Forville, 24, whom Pierre Henri describes as a marquise. I regarded that information with great suspicion until I found a document for the marriage of their son which used the term “Marquis Herson de Forville.”
Just Haüy is held in great regard in Odessa. He designed at least one bridge, contributed to the supply of clean water, and conducted research on the prevention of landslides. He was also something of an artist and the sketch shown below is attributed to him. He and his wife had two children, a girl and a boy, and they carried on the family name. I was able to trace their descendants to the present day.**
But back to our beleaguered Valentin. He returned to France in 1817, with his former student Fournier, but without his son, and presumably without his wife. He went to live with his brother René-Just.***
The principal of the re-established school for the blind, Sebastien Guillié (Zina Weygand calls him a “despot”), refused to let Haüy visit the premises. But Guillié was fired in 1821 for having an affair with a female teacher (he was not missed), and his successor Alexandre-René Pignier, did his best to repair the relationship with the founder.
On July 19, 1821, the feast day of St. Vincent de Paul, Haüy was invited to visit the school, then located on the rue St-Victor (Haüy did not live to see the building that his statue now graces). He returned a month later for a special concert in his honour. He was overcome with emotion as he listened to the children singing.
Valentin Haüy died on March 19, 1822, at the lodgings in the Jardin du Roi that he shared with his brother. He was 76 and had been unwell for some time. His brother died two and a half months later. They are buried together in Père Lachaise.
The tomb includes the names Vuillemot and Rougeron. Vuillemot was Valentin’s daughter’s married name; Rougeron was his granddaughter’s married name (she married in 1821 and may well have included her grandfather in the celebration). It seems that both families contributed to the creation of the grave, and I hope this means that the daughter and granddaughter maintained their relationship to the end of Haüy’s life.
Does it make a difference to our understanding of Haüy’s work when we include his family members? I think it does. He had family obligations, experienced widowerhood and a second (probably unhappy) marriage, and would have taken pride in his son’s accomplishments and his granddaughter’s marriage. Nobody writing a biography today would exclude the family context. But Haüy is usually viewed as if his only relationships were professional or political ones, and all the highs and lows of his life related to his work. It’s time to restore him to the family circle.
P.S. While we’re at it, what about the other fellow in the statue, François Le Sueur? Well, in 1793, aged 27, he married Marie Louise Thérèse Mesnard. She was seven years older than he was and also blind. She came from Rambouillet (like Haüy’s second wife). He died in 1810, aged 44, while Haüy was in Russia. She died in the Quinze-Vingts in 1841, aged 82.
The two main sources of information are Pierre Henri, La Vie et l’Oeuvre de Valentin Haüy (Presses Universitaires de France, 1984), available only in French and Zina Weygand, The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille (Stanford University Press, 2009), a translation of Vivre sans Voir (Créaphis, 2003). The story about Le Sueur appears on page 94 of the English version. Weygand mentions, but does not name, Haüy’s wives and children in her account of his life and work.
*The record gives the father’s name as “Allais” instead of “Allain” and the mother’s as “Giraud” (elsewhere spelled Girault). The original document is not available for view on Filae, only a transcription, but it appears to be the correct record.
**Although Haüy’s daughter married and had a daughter of her own who married, all of the children of that marriage died in childhood. So his present-day descendants are related to his son, Just Haüy.
***Haüy’s widow, Louise Marguerite Allain Haüy Menié, died in 1856, aged 84. She had remarried in Marseille three years after Haüy’s death.
The other night I couldn’t sleep, and to pass the time I got out Norman’s collection of Paris stereocards and looked at the images. After a while, I realized that one thing was missing from nearly every image: the Eiffel Tower. That’s because most of the images were too old to include it; that is, they were taken before 1889. Many date from the 1860s and 1870s and in those days, the popular monuments were the then-new Opéra, the old Hotel de Ville, and the now-vanished Tuileries Palace. Views of the latter two predate their destruction in 1871.
I was impressed at the age of the images, because stereoscopic photographs arrived on the scene remarkably quickly after the invention of photography itself. Commercial photography really began in Paris in the 1840s with Louis Daguerre, and stereoscopic photographs started to appear in the 1850s. Early experiments were conducted in Great Britain, but a French photographer and instrument maker called Jules Deboscq helped commercialize the technology.
Stereoscopic photographs are taken with a special camera with two lenses that are roughly the same distance apart as the pupils of the eyes in a human face. The stereo viewer also has two lenses that allow people to look at the two images separately with each eye. The card is inserted into a holder and can be moved closer to or farther away from the lenses to bring the image into focus. The human brain recombines the images in a way that creates a 3D effect. Here is a photo of Norman holding one of the viewers we own, patented in 1895 and created with aluminum, at that time a very new material.
Alas, given the way my eyes work, I am unable to experience the 3D effect, but the images are fascinating nonetheless. And the double image, one slightly at an angle to the other, makes for interesting comparisons. I’ve always loved those games in which two pictures are similar but not identical and you have to spot the differences. Try that with this image of the Tour St-Jacques. We are looking east and the top of the old Hotel de Ville is just visible to the left of the tower.
Look to the far left and you will see the name of the department store Pygmalion; it stood kitty-corners to the tower on the rue de Rivoli, between the boulevard Sebastopol and the rue St-Denis. But if you look at the right-hand image, you can see how much is cut off from the store name, while more buildings are visible to the right.
The stereocard is labelled “Photographie H.J. à Paris,” which identifies it as the work of photographer Hippolyte Jouvin (1825–89). We have quite a few of his images.
I also like this image, because I prefer photographs of streets to photographs of monuments.
There is no information printed on the stereocard, and someone has helpfully written in pencil on the back: “Street in Paris.” However, the Pantheon is clearly visible on the horizon, along with the tower of St-Etienne-du-Mont (faintly, to the left of it) The dark mass of trees at the end of the street would be the Jardin du Luxembourg, so it appears to be the rue de Fleurus, looking east, at the corner of the rue d’Assas. The building on the left has survived, but the one on the right has not.
Zooming in, I can see that the gates to the garden seem to close off the end of the street, which suggests that the photograph was taken before the rue Guynemer was built in 1866, running along the west side of the garden.
Here is a wonderfully busy street scene. The label on the back reads: “Place du Chateau d’Eau & Caserne du Prince Eugene.” Today this is the Place de la République.
I love the movement and bustle, the range of conveyances, some horse-powered, some human-powered, and the fountain in the middle with eight lions keeping watch. Since 1883, the monument to the republic has towered over the fountain, so this image is probably from the 1870s. The photographer is not identified, but the card backing is marked “Paris Instantané.” Several different stereocard publishers used that name. After all, to capture all those people in motion, you need a very fast exposure.
Here’s a vanished building, which I did not recognize.
Peering at it through a magnifying glass, I could see the street names: Cours la Reine and the rue Bayard. There is also some writing on the glass around the street lamp: Rue Bayard des Champs Elysées. I got out my 1850 Paris map and spotted “Maison Francois 1er” at that intersection. That checked out. But the connection to Francois 1er was tenuous. In the 1820s, a military officer called Alfred Brack bought the façade, which he found in a small town near Fontainebleau, had it brought to this spot stone by stone and sculpture by sculpture and reassembled facing the Seine. Then he had a house created behind it. People used to do that sort of thing. You can see that the back of the house is much less ornate relative to the façade. Brack spotted some salamanders in the carvings, the symbol of Francois 1er of France and gave it that name, but there is no evidence that the king had anything to do with it. It was demolished in the 1950s to make way for an office building.
The stereocard not only gives the photographer’s name, Henri Guérard (1846–97), but also his address on the rue de Rivoli. Quite a few photographers had establishments on that street. He was a publisher as well as a photographer, and sold books from that address. I can place him there in the 1870s, definitely. In 1879, the address is associated with another name.
Another card that identifies the photographer (or at least the publisher, Debitte & Hervé) but not the location is this one:
It is the Grand Hotel on the Boulevard des Capucines. The corner is occupied by the Café de la Paix, which opened in 1862. To the right, beyond the frame, would be the Opéra. The building still stands, along with the café on the corner (I once had breakfast there), and the hotel is now called InterContinental Paris le Grand.
The year of the Commune of Paris, 1871, was a watershed. We have several images, most of them badly faded, of the destruction caused by fires. I tweaked the contrast on this one of the Hotel de Ville after the fire to make it clearer.
This series called “Désastres de la Guerre” was published by someone with the initials “J.A.” Thanks to a comprehensive online resource on stereo photographers, I was able to identify this as Jean Andrieu (1816–c1895).
Here’s what the old building looked like before the 1871 fire, viewed from directly in front, as you approach from the rue Victoria.
There is nothing on this card to identify the photographer. But if you are still playing the game, you will spot a bench visible on the left that is not visible on the right.
Clearly there was a market for disaster photography. Two entrepreneurs, identified only as “E.C.” and “A.T” produced a series simply called “Paris–1871.” This image of the Place Vendôme shows the base of the column that was toppled that year.
But here is something odd. This is the south side of the column, looking north, the side with the inscription – which also has been hacked off – and the door to the interior. But the image is reversed, because in every other picture of the monument, the bas-relief wheel (you will need to zoom in) is on the left side of the door.
Some of the publishers of stereocards used fancy techniques to add interest to their images. In this view of the former Tuileries Palace by the photographer Ernest Lamy (1828–1900), the images have been printed on thin tissue held by a special cardboard mount.
The back of the paper is coloured so that if you hold it up to the light, you can see the effect of lighted windows and even a moon, at least on one side.
It’s rather magical. Thanks to Norman for holding it still while I photographed it in front of my desk lamp.
I could go on and on, and lull you to sleep, as I was eventually lulled myself. I will leave you with the one image we do have of the Eiffel Tower, published by the Keystone View Company, one of many U.S. enterprises that published stereocards. This dates from the 1930s, showing that the popularity of these images lasted well into the 20th century.
Keystone and another company called Underwood and Underwood (which Keystone eventually bought out), published a vast range of views of many countries, with detailed captions on the back, and accompanying books that you could use to travel to distant lands in your armchair with your stereoscopic viewer providing an immersive experience. Great fun.
Sleep well, and may you dream of Paris.
Text and original photographs by Philippa Campsie; all other images from the stereocard collection of Norman Ball.
Beating the August heat is a challenge in Paris and in Toronto. Sometimes the only solution is to divert oneself with a good book. Preferably in a cool bath.
The windows of our neighbourhood bookshop almost always feature a book with three words in the title: The Paris [something]. Network. Secret. Apartment. Bookseller. Affair. Library. Diversion. Sister. Whatever. Nearly all have similar cover art – a young woman, seen from behind or in a way that hides her face, with the Eiffel Tower visible in the background. I can’t keep all these books straight. Some are earnest and well-researched, some are ill-informed and filled with clichés, some are just girl-meets-boy with croissants. Many are set in wartime. One made me laugh out loud as the heroine tucked into a typical Paris breakfast of fresh eggs, yes, eggs, in – I kid you not – the occupied city of the Second World War with its food shortages. I forget which one that was. The Paris Egg, perhaps.
That is not the kind of book I have in mind.
For the perfect summer escape, go to Brittany. I have just finished a mystery by Jean-Luc Bannelec, set in Concarneau. One can almost feel the brisk Breton breezes blowing off the page. Be prepared to experience an intense craving for seafood – like Simenon’s Maigret, the detective doesn’t like to work on an empty stomach. The author (the name above is a pseudonym) divides his time between Germany and Brittany, and writes in German. I am, of course, reading an English translation. A friend told me about the books a year or so ago, and each summer since then, I spend another few pleasurable hours with Commissaire Dupin. I’m getting quite used to the craving for fish.
For those who seek to understand more about modern Paris, read Impossible City: Paris in the 21st Century, by journalist Simon Kuper. Norman and I have long enjoyed his columns in the Financial Times and this is a distillation of his views as an “accidental Parisian” for more than 20 years. Kuper is clear-eyed, curious, well-informed, and thoughtful, and his book is an excellent guide to the city as it is and as it might one day become.
We will always feel gratitude towards Kuper and his wife Pamela Druckerman, who helped us remain sane in the months of lockdown with a weekly Zoom broadcast called Pandemonium U. Every week, Kuper or Druckerman would interview a writer or academic on his or her area of expertise, from cuisine to politics to art to history. Those informative interviews directed us to some terrific reads. They are still available online, so you can listen to them any time.
I even once spent an hour tracking down the location of a photograph of Simon Kuper on his bicycle that was featured in the Financial Times about a year ago. (It’s the kind of thing I do on a dull day when I need to spend virtual time in Paris.) And, as luck would have it, last December, our niece Alex treated us to a superb lunch on that very street, in the restaurant just visible on the right. I recognized the surroundings immediately.
Kuper’s insightful book ends on a positive note, describing the government’s ambitions for “Grand Paris,” a plan to join the banlieues to the central city by building 68 new Metro stations in places that previously had poor transportation connections. “By the time it’s completed around 2030, it could end up being a bigger urban transformation than Haussmann’s,”* Kuper suggests.
There is even a proposal to turn the Périphérique highway – that source of noise, pollution, and social alienation – into an urban boulevard, complete with trees and sidewalks, as shown in a conceptual rendering below. The French are not afraid to think big. I finished the book feeling heartened.
And for enjoyment and edification at the same time, you cannot do better than A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment by Stéphane Hénault and Jeni Mitchell. Hénault is an experienced fromager (cheesemaker) and Mitchell is an academic specializing in the study of war. Each short chapter links a food or drink to events in history – Crusades and plums, Huguenots and chestnuts, the Renaissance and oranges, Napoléon and crêpes… It’s a fascinating way to tell history and fully appropriate for the subject.
Just to give you a sense of the “I-didn’t-know-that” appeal of the stories, here are two examples from the 20th century.
During the First World War, Camembert, often viewed as the quintessential French cheese, went from being a regional product little known outside Normandy and Paris to a cheese appreciated throughout France and abroad. French soldiers (poilus) received cheese with their rations, and at first the French government offered them mainly hard cheeses that had a long shelf life, such as Gruyère or Cantal. But thanks to an aggressive campaign by Normandy Camembert producers, who decorated their round boxes with French flags, assiduously lobbied the French government, and worked to keep prices low, Camembert “became the daily cheese of the French soldier, most of whom had never encountered it before. By 1918, the army was requesting 1 million Camemberts each month.”** The soldiers retained their taste for Camembert after the war.
Alas, the government did not restrict the use of the word “Camembert” to cheeses made in Normandy, except for the specific name “Camembert de Normandie.” French and foreign competitors began to manufacture versions of the cheese. I once tried something called Camembert that came from one of the Scandinavian countries, a version so bland that it left a faint aftertaste of wallpaper.
I was equally interested to learn that the baguette – that staple of French life, without which a meal is considered incomplete – has held this status for only about 100 years. A law passed in 1919 restricted working hours in French bakeries to between 5 a.m. and 10 p.m. As the authors put it, “It is commonly believed that this law is responsible for the rise of the baguette, which could be produced more quickly than traditional breads, thus allowing bakers to comply with the law but still offer fresh bread in the morning.”*** They acknowledge that other factors were at work, but there is nonetheless a connection between the progressive reforms of the interwar years and the baguette.
That’s a Canadian baguette, by the way, on our kitchen counter in Toronto. Not a bad one, but not quite the French version, made by someone who started work at 5 a.m. precisely.
If you would like to suggest your favourite French-themed books for summer reading, I would love to get your recommendations. As long as the first two words aren’t The Paris…
Now I think it’s time for another cool bath.
Text and baguette photograph by Philippa Campsie. Photograph of Concarneau from Wikimedia Commons. Picture of Simon Kuper from the Financial Times. Conceptual rendering of the Périphérique in 2030 from Challenges. Camembert from Saveur Lointaine.
*Simon Kuper, Impossible City (New York: Public Affairs, 2024), page 228.
**Stéphane Hénault and Jeni Mitchell, A Bite-Sized History of France (New York: The New Press, 2018), page 242.
Opinion is divided as to whether Napoleon Bonaparte was a tyrant or a genius, or both. But perhaps we can all agree that he left something to be desired as a husband. His divorce from his beloved Josephine de Beauharnais when she could not give him an heir proved that establishing a dynasty was more important to him than she was. Josephine was shattered when he broke the news.
Further evidence of his insensitivity can be found in the fact that after the divorce in 1809–10, he decided to give Josephine a present and commissioned a porcelain tea set from the Sèvres factory. The theme was famous women, painted by a noted woman porcelain artist, Marie-Victoire Jaquotot. Completed in 1812, it was known as the Cabaret of Women – “cabaret” in this sense means a tea or coffee set with cups, saucers, and serving pieces.
Josephine took one look, packed it up, and sent it back to the factory. I don’t blame her. In order not to lose his investment, Napoleon re-gifted the set to his new wife, Marie-Thérèse. Almost immediately, she gave it to a friend, the Comtesse de Ségur. I don’t blame her, either.
We saw the porcelain in question recently at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
It was part of an exhibit called “Making Her Mark,” which focused on the work of European women artists from 1400 to 1800. The creation of the Cabaret des Femmes Célèbres falls after the latter date, but it fits within a tradition of fine work by professional women artists who are not often recognized today.
I was curious about the choice of women portrayed.* Queens of various nations, aristocratic ladies from France and elsewhere, plus some one-offs, like Joan of Arc, pictured on a jug, looking remarkably unmilitary, unlike most images of her.
Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I share a sugar bowl, which seems a bit cheeky. Mary looks as if she suspects who is on the other side.
This cup, one of eight with fluted bases, depicts Anna Scott, the “Duchesse de Montmouth [sic].” Scottish. Fabulously wealthy and titled. Husband executed for treason (the Monmouth Rebellion). Interesting choice.
And this is not at all what I thought Madame de Sevigné, the famous letter writer, would look like. I had a completely different mental image of her.
But even more than the faces on the porcelain, the woman who painted them interested me. One of the many things I learned from the exhibition was that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, women not only excelled as porcelain painters, but also oversaw this work in some factories. At Sèvres, the most highly respected artist was Marie-Victoire Jaquotot (1772–1855), who created several cabarets featuring portraits of famous people. This was just one example of her work.
We’d visited the Sèvres porcelain museum a few years ago, and I highly recommend it. It is filled with brilliant colours and beautiful shapes.
I wish my mother could have been with us. She loved porcelain and had a small collection of pieces that interested her. Once I asked what it was that attracted her, and she said that porcelain never lost its colour. Textiles fade, paintings darken, metals corrode, but porcelain remains bright as the day it is made.
This quality is partly what ensured Marie-Victoire Jaquotot a secure and very profitable career. A recent article** about her work describes the early 19th-century fashion for creating reproductions of famous paintings on porcelain as a way of preserving them for posterity. She called her work “inalterable painting.” And it was – if you didn’t drop it. Her output was prodigious and some of her reproductions fetched more than the original paintings had.
She created several self-portraits, but this one made me laugh.
Somehow I can’t imagine anyone painting porcelain while dressed in the latest fashions and entertaining a small child with a dog.
She seems to have set out to become a professional from an early age. She studied with the painter Etienne-Charles Le Guay, who had a habit of marrying his students (and he had many women students). She was the second of three wives. It was 1794, she was 22, and he was 10 years older than her.
The marriage lasted seven years. She went on to have two children by Jean Comairas, an architect 10 years her junior (the son became a painter, the daughter died in infancy), and finally married a Jean Pinet, whom she outlived.
She was close to the royal family and for a few years in the late 1820s had an apartment and studio in the Louvre. She was designated the First Porcelain Painter to the King (was there a second?), had students of her own, and received an annual stipend of 1,000 francs. Although she used the facilities at Sèvres for creating the porcelain, she negotiated commissions directly with patrons, which annoyed the director of the porcelain factory no end. In this self-portrait, she looks demure, but she was a shrewd entrepreneur.
One of those women who defy stereotypes and upend our notions of women’s roles in the past. Her images endure, as “inalterable” as she had hoped. I hope the Comtesse de Ségur made good use of the tea set. It would be a shame to waste it.
The Art Gallery of Ontario exhibit (which was created in cooperation with the Baltimore Museum of Art) closes at the end of June, but if you want to see the Cabaret of Women, it is owned by the Clark Art Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The Clark bought the set in 2021 through an auction arranged by Drouot and held in Fontainebleau, which offered a large range of items associated with Napoleon, from furniture to clothing to household items.
Text by Philippa Campsie. Photographs of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Sèvres Museum by Philippa Campsie. Portraits of Marie-Victoire Jaquotot and engraving of Napoleon and the Empress Josephine from Wikimedia.
*The full list of women depicted in the Cabaret of Women, along with brief biographies and the sources of the images can be found here. It is a meticulous piece of documentation.
**Daniel Harkett, “Medium as Museum: Marie-Victoire Jaquotot’s Porcelain Painting and Post-Revolutionary Fantasies of Preservation,” Chapter 7 in Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France, Iris Moon and Richard Taws, editors (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
The church of Sainte Jeanne de Chantal at the Porte de Saint-Cloud in the 16th arrondissement is a striking example of mid 20th-century architecture. With its dome and tower, it almost looks like a mosque with a minaret.
You enter a large, austere sanctuary. Up near the front are two small arched doorways.
When you walk through one of the doorways, you find a jewel of a chapel surrounded by beautiful modern stained glass windows.
We spent a long time examining the windows and reading the panels beside displays about the life of Sainte Jeanne de Chantal – she sounds like my kind of saint, down to earth and independent-minded – and about the building of the church.
What caught my attention was the fact that the church had been bombed during the Second World War, when it was still unfinished (construction had started in the 1930s). Parts of it had to be rebuilt in the 1950s and it was completed only in 1962.
We sometimes prefer to overlook the fact that Paris was bombed in the Second World War, perhaps because it is embarrassing to remember that (unlike the First World War), it was the Allies doing the bombing, in their efforts to weaken the German occupiers. Some histories of the German occupation of Paris in the Second World War barely mention air raids and bomb damage. After all, the big story was the saving of the city by the German commander, Dietrich von Choltitz, who disobeyed Hitler’s orders to destroy Paris.
Other accounts suggest that most of the bombing happened in the poorer districts to the north and east of the city, rather than the prosperous 16th to the west. But the church at Porte de St-Cloud was close to the Renault factory on the Ile Séguin in the Seine and other industrial sites, which were strategic targets for the bombers, and the 16th came in for some collateral damage. Here are the sites mentioned in this blog, and they are spread across the city.
Only much later was I able to find out exactly when the church had been bombed. A wartime newspaper that I found on Gallica mentioned the church as one of several damaged or destroyed sites in the 7th, 15th, and 16th arrondissements after heavy bombing by the United States Air Force on September 15, 1943.
Most of the bombing occurred during 1943 and 1944. Before that there were only two major air raids over Paris: one on a factory in Chatou (a western suburb, not shown on the map) in June 1940 and the other on the Renault plant in March 1942. But in the following two years, the city was bombed repeatedly. In one case, an Avro Lancaster was hit by anti-aircraft fire from the German occupiers and crashed on to the roof of the Grands Magasins du Louvre on September 23, 1943. All seven crew members, four of them Canadian, were killed, and the building was extensively damaged.
The very last day of bombing was August 26, 1944, and that one time, it was the Germans bombing the allies and members of the Resistance who had secured the city as the occupiers were fleeing. That raid killed about 190 people and demolished more than 400 buildings, including the Halle aux Vins, which burned to the ground. Perhaps since it was a one-off, it is mentioned only briefly in passing in a couple of books I have about the occupation and liberation of Paris.*
A week or so after our visit to the church, I wandered into the Paris Historique building on the rue François Miron in the Marais. I was immediately drawn to a book called Abris souterrains de Paris : Refuges oubliés de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Underground shelters in Paris: Forgotten refuges from the Second World War) by Gilles Thomas with photographs by Diane Dufraisy-Couraud.**
I opened the book at random, and was fascinated to find this photograph of people sheltering in the Metro, just as Londoners had sheltered in the Underground during the Blitz.
It made sense. Some of the stations are deep underground. The book also noted that different stations were designated for the French and for the German occupiers. That, too, made sense.
As in London, Métro stations were only one type of shelter. Certainly, there was no shortage of underground spaces available – Paris has a vast network of tunnels, sewers, catacombs, and quarries underneath the city. The Germans used some of these spaces for storage and other purposes, and the Resistance fighters used them for escape routes and clandestine operations of all kinds.
One big concern in wartime was poison gas, and provisions were made to seal off the underground shelters if need be. The book shows all kinds of arrangements for making spaces air-tight, and mentions that as in England, residents were expected to carry gas masks.
Despite these provisions, known collectively as “Défense passive,” many Parisians died in air raids, and many buildings were destroyed. The raid that damaged the church of Sainte-Jeanne de Chantal killed about 300 people.
The following image of the rue Richomme in the Goutte-d’Or district, showing Sacré-Coeur and the Dufayel building in the background, was taken after a particularly destructive raid by the Allies on April 21, 1944.
An aerial photograph from December 31, 1943, shows damage to the suburb of Courbevoie. Those dark objects at the top of the photograph are falling bombs.
The book about the shelters includes comments from people who remembered the war. Here is an example (this and the following quotations are my translations):
At the end of the Occupation, I was living a few hundred metres from the Gare du Nord. During the night of April 21 to 22, 1944, the Allies’ air forces bombed the marshalling yards at La Chapelle. I took refuge in the basement of my building. But the din of the explosions was so bad that to this day I cannot abide the sound of fireworks. (Philippe Bouvard, quoted in the Figaro magazine, July 22, 2016.)
Others were less troubled:
In offices and above all in schools, the siren constituted a break or even a welcome recreation. The schoolchildren, conducted by their teachers, hurried to the shelters reserved for them, in a joyous brouhaha; they left in the hope that classes would not resume. (Pierre Audiat, Paris pendant la guerre, Hachette, 1946.)
In some cases, it depended where you lived:
Each quartier had its own approach: in the 5th, which was rarely touched by bombs, nobody considered going down to the basement during an alert. By contrast, in the Batignolles or Montmartre, ever since the terrible bombing of [April] 21, [1944], all the inhabitants, at the first sound of the siren, hastened to the depths of the Métro, clutching small suitcases containing their most precious belongings. (Jean Galtier-Boissière, Mon journal pendant l’Occupation, La Jeune Parque, 1944.)
To this day, sirens across France sound on the first Wednesday of each month. That is just to test that the alert system works. The sirens would sound in earnest in the case of a major disaster, from a dam break to a release of toxic gas. But in 1943 and 1944, they heralded bombing raids. Although Paris did not suffer nearly as much as London did during the Blitz, it was not spared entirely. Residents of both cities knew what it was to wait underground while the bombs came down, wondering what they would find when they emerged.
* In one, this event is described in a single paragraph beginning, “The sense of victory was disturbed Saturday evening when the Germans attacked Paris from the air.”* If I’d been a tenant of one of those buildings, I would have been more than just “disturbed.” Jean Edward Smith, The Liberation of Paris: How Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and von Choltitz saved the City of Light (Simon & Shuster, 2019), page 191. In Ronald C. Rosbottom, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light under German Occupation 1940–1944 (Little Brown, 2014), the event rates a footnote only (page 336).
**Parigramme, 2017. The quotations are from pages 32, 48, and 94.
Parisian Fields 