Parisian Fields

Bercy: from park to wine entrepot and back to park

Posted on August 30, 2026 by Parisian Fields

As I browsed the Paris1970 images described in my last blog, I spent a long time studying the photographs taken in the Bercy wine entrepot before its demolition. We’d visited the park that now occupies the space and it was something of a shock to see the community that had once existed there. People lived in this village within a city, as this image by an unidentified photographer attests. This was someone’s home. I don’t think I had fully appreciated that fact.

In 1970, the place was beginning to empty out, but life remained. It was no longer the bustling place of business it had once been, but there were people (including children) and vehicles and casks of wine evident, as well as laundry. This photograph is by Odette Bresard.

I wanted to know more about this vanished place. When and how did it develop? Why did its fortunes change?

I started by looking at early maps and images of the area. In the 17^th century, Bercy was a small commune outside the walls of Paris, with a chateau designed by François Le Vau (the younger brother of the more famous architect Louis le Vau) and a park with formal gardens running down to the river. The gardens were said to be the work of André Le Nôtre, who had also created the gardens at Versailles.

The chateau stood in solitary splendour for many years, but during the 18^th century, other wealthy Parisians began to buy up lots for their own “country” residences, conveniently located just outside the city walls, past the barrière or customs gate of Bercy, shown below.

The large gardens were long and narrow so that all the properties had river access. The map shown below dates from 1749. The original park is still there, but the neighbours are starting to encroach.

The merchants of wine and spirits arrived in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. By 1813, a business directory of Paris, the Almanach du commerce de Paris, lists more than a dozen wine merchants in the commune, along with vinaigriers (vinegar makers) and a sugar refiner.

Back then, wine was brought to the entrepot in large casks, where it was bottled and then distributed. Over the course of the 19^th century, the horse-drawn wagons were replaced by rail cars. I love this 1852 map by Bouquillard showing not only the rail lines, but pictures of trains in side view on them, in case you aren’t sure what the lines represent.

The Bercy site was criss-crossed with rail lines to move the wine to the premises of the particular owner. In this 1927 photo, the wine is being transported in a tanker rather than casks.

A map published the same year in a business directory shows the network of internal rail lines (the dotted lines). Notice the street names: Sauterne, Bordeaux, Margaux. Around the edges are the “octroi” or customs gates; this was a walled community, separated from the surrounding city, with its own police station (upper left) and electric power facility (lower right). Hardly surprising, given the quantity and nature of the goods stored there. This map shows about half of the site, which was cut in two by the rue de Dijon (shown here on the far right).

Wine also came by river, unloaded on the nearby quays. Like other sites close to the river, Bercy suffered during the 1910 flood. Thousands of litres of wine and spirits were contaminated.

Bercy recovered from that disaster, and from the First World War. There were big celebrations in 1933 for the end of Prohibition on the other side of the Atlantic. The entrepot escaped major damage in the Second World War, unlike the Halle aux Vins on the other side of the river, which suffered heavy bombing, and was not rebuilt (it became the Jussieu campus of the university).

But after the war, Bercy’s importance gradually started to wane, for a number of reasons. For one thing, more and more vintners were bottling their wine at the place of origin (“mis en bouteille au chateau”), removing one of the site’s functions. That was a natural evolution. But the decline was hastened by the deliberate actions of the City of Paris, which owned the land on which Bercy stood.

For years, the companies dealing in wine and spirits had leased land from the city. Starting in the 1960s, the City stopped renewing the leases, forcing the tenants to move out as their leases expired. As early as 1952, the place was becoming something of a quiet backwater, although business was still being carried on. In a book called Paris Vagabond, by Jean-Paul Clébert, written in 1952, I found a description of the area by a man accustomed to sleeping rough:

The wine warehouses of Bercy are a town in their own right. The gates, however, are always open and there is no trace of guards (indeed there is no sign barring access)… I have slept there several times without witnessing any kind of surveillance… But my greatest pleasure in Bercy comes from rambling about in the middle of the day, strolling down the little rustic streets paved with huge cobbles that you feel under your feet and following what seem to be tramlines until round a corner comes an exceedingly tall rail car; passing by houses that are simple farm buildings, their walls full of cracks and festooned with green creeping plants, beams with projecting hooks, gentle sloping tiled roofs, ogival double doors, short stone staircases with balustrades and square windows with solid wooden shutters; and going around great pudgy broad-trunked trees beneath which the odors of dead leaves, mown grass, damp stone, and the schoolyard hang in the air, whereas elsewhere the nose is assailed by scents of full-bodied wine, corks, new barrels and rubber hosepipes. All around the dwellings and warehouses the luckiest children in Paris play and chickens cluck and peck.*

According to a book about the area, Bercy au fils du temps, by Lionel Mouraux,** the area became known as a picturesque spot in the 1970s, attracting photographers like Robert Doisneau, as well as the amateurs from the 1970 project. One Doisneau image from that time, featuring the many cats who roamed the area, was turned into a postcard.

The book also notes that in 1970, there were still about 2,000 people employed in the entrepot. One of the Paris 1970 photographers, Andrée Naujac, captured several women at work in one of the remaining bottling plants.

But one by one the leases ran out and the businesses departed. The demolitions began in 1979. The unpopular demolition of Les Halles earlier that decade was still fresh in people’s minds, and some journalists protested in print, but Bercy was not as central nor quite as storied a site as Les Halles, and does not seem to have garnered the same kind of outcry.

Today, a park covers the land, which retains a few vestiges of the vanished village – railway lines, some bits of masonry from one of the chateaux. The paths follow the original routes of some of the former village’s roads. This photograph, which Norman took some years ago, shows the rail lines that have been retained, and in the background, a lovely waterfall on the west side of the park.

The vast park unfolds as you walk through it, with ponds and structures that hint at its past. (That’s me in the background of the photo below, by the way.)

The rue de Dijon still divides the space into two halves, but a bridge crosses the street so you do not have to leave the park to go from one area to another.

It’s a delightful space, and the city needs open areas and greenery, but one cannot help feeling a twinge of nostalgia for the vanished village. So let us take a last look.

The two images below from Paris1970 are by the same unidentified photographer, who seems to have stood on the roof of a car or truck to get a high vantage point. Note the flowers in the window of what could easily be a farmhouse in a country village.

The green growing in the rail lines in the photograph below suggests disuse. The sign on the building to the left reads Warcollier & Loury, a latecomer of a company, active only between 1957 and 1986. The blue van on the right bears the name of Raki Duze, a Turkish anise. (This is visible only when you zoom in on the original photo at Paris 1970.)

Text by Philippa Campsie. Images of the Chateau de Bercy and Barrière de Bercy: Wikimedia. Maps, photos of wine tanker and 1910 flood: Gallica; Doisneau postcard: Paris Museums collection; pictures of modern-day Bercy Park: Norman Ball. Other images from Paris1970.

* Jean-Paul Clébert, Paris Vagabond, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: New York Review Books, 1981 (first published 1952), pages 255–256.

** Lionel Mouraux, Bercy au fils du temps, Paris: Le Point, 2004.

Posted in Paris maps, Paris nostalgia, Paris parks, Paris photography, Paris quartiers | Tagged 1910 flood, André Le Nôtre, Andrée Naujac, Barrière de Bercy, Bercy park, Chateau de Bercy, François Le Vau, Halle aux Vins, Jean-Paul Clébert, Lionel Mouraux, Odette Bresard, Paris Vagabond, Raki Duze, Robert Doisneau, rue de Dijon, Warcollier & Loury | 12 Comments

The ghost of Paris past

Posted on August 2, 2026 by Parisian Fields

Two summers ago, I participated in a project to photograph our Toronto neighbourhood as it looked in 2024. I chose a stretch of our local commercial street and systematically photographed each shop façade. Then I went around to the laneways that run parallel to the main road and photographed the back of each shop. I did a bit of digital editing (straightening, brightening) before handing the photos over to our local historical society.

The City of Paris did something similar in 1970. It divided the city into a grid of 1,755 squares and invited amateur photographers to participate in a competition to record scenes within each square. The project produced 91,655 photos of varying quality – this was long before digital photography – of which 30,225 images by almost 7,000 photographers (some of them unidentified) have been digitized. A selection is now on display at la Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris until October 2026. We missed the exhibit, which opened just as we were leaving Paris, but hundreds of photographs are now visible on line. (I love the way Paris offers so much digital content to those interested in its history.)

Here is one example, showing the roofs of Les Halles, which disappeared later that decade. Photograph by Jean-Claude Ratier.*

Now, 1970 is not all that far back. I am minded of the exchange in A Christmas Carol, when the Ghost of Christmas Past arrives and announces himself. “Long past?” asks Scrooge. “No. Your past,” the ghost replies. Well, I can remember visiting Paris in the 1970s, so I guess this is my past, in some ways.

The website, simply named paris1970.fr, offers a map showing the grid. The darker the colour of the square, the more photographs available for that area. Those shown in white have no photographs (or at least none that have been digitized to date). One can zoom in to see the underlying map with street names to find an area of interest.

This link will take you to a map of Paris as it was in 1970. Hours of entertainment for map nerds like me. I began my exploration of the photographs with areas I knew well, starting with the Place de la Bastille. The old Bastille railway station was the first thing I saw.

The photographer was not identified. Another view features a green bus and a Citroën DS. It also shows a surface car parking lot. These were once a prominent feature of the city; today, they have largely disappeared underground.

Oh, those green buses! Some had platforms on the back. Norman and I rode one of the last of them in the 1990s, before they were taken out of service. We were exhilarated by the experience. This shot was taken by Michel Legeard.

And this is what bus stops looked like. Photographer not identified.

Not all the participants had a feel for street photography. Many snapped major monuments, which looked much as they do now and have little to say about the way the city’s texture has changed, but some, such as Michel Legeard, who took the shot of the green bus, had an eye for everyday scenes. Shopfronts, advertising, cars. And people. Here is another image he contributed.

When I went looking for the current location of this Guimard Metro entrance to the Chatelet station, just off the rue de Rivoli, I got a surprise. It seems that the whole thing has been moved over, closer to the bank on the right. I didn’t know they could do that. I guess everything has been moved around at Les Halles. As for the Guimard details, I believe the current one is a replica of the original.

Another participant who seemed to understand the importance of catching the fleeting moment was Daniel Nicolas, who worked in the 11th arrondissement. I liked this one: a cinema showing that immortal spaghetti western, El Djurado, from 1966, starring the, um, unforgettable Scilla Gabel.

Finding the location was a bit tricky (the website provides only street names and general coordinates, and a few photographs I found were not in the squares I expected them to be in). But I spotted a street number, 112. According to a 1953 edition of the Ciné-Miroir magazine, there was a cinema called the Cithea at 112 rue Oberkampf. A look at Google Street view confirmed that the building with the café-bar on the corner in the background has changed relatively little; the cinema is long gone.

Daniel Nicolas also photographed a classic Vespasienne (pissoir) on the avenue de la République. The Trigano store has disappeared (although the name survives as a brand of camping gear), but I found its former building at number 78.

Here’s a less formal public convenience, captured by an unidentified photographer on the avenue Marceau where it intersects with the rue Bassano. I love the way it is tied to the tree. Perhaps attempts had been made to knock it over. The bench is still at this spot on the boulevard.

Some photographers preferred shiny, modern scenes, while others followed in the steps of Eugene Atget and Charles Marville, seeking out older, more dilapidated buildings and streets. Michel Dornet photographed the Cité Bauer in the 14th, picturesque in a rather shabby way.

Today, it has been opened up with gardens and some newer buildings. This is how that view looked in 2025.

This is not far from the apartment we stayed in last May. In exploring that area as it looked in 1970, I found the ateliers of the Belle Jardinière on the rue d’Alésia at the corner of the rue Didot, photographed by Michel Dornet. The Belle Jardinière itself, near the Pont Neuf, disappeared in the early 1970s, and it looks as if the ateliers were closing down in 1970. I cannot identify the green structures on the corner with the ladder beside them. Norman notes that the car appears to be moving at considerable speed. But nobody is using the Avertisseur de Police (the object with the vertical stripes on the bottom) to notify the authorities.

Today, there is an apartment complex set in landscaped grounds on this site. The clock is still on the street at that intersection, though.

I also explored an area we had stayed in many times, just off the boulevard du Port Royal. On the rue du Faubourg St-Jacques, Brigitte Mouly captured a tiny shoe repair shop wedged into a corner outside the Port Royal Maternity Hospital.

That corner today looks as if you could barely find room for a chair, let alone a shop.

Paris in 1970 was greyer and grittier. The facade-scrubbing program had started, but many grimy buildings remained. Here is a photo of the rue du Faubourg St-Denis, by Jacques Leblic, the most prolific of all the photographers (at least according to what is online), who took 221 photos in the 10th arrodissement, interiors as well as exteriors, streetscapes and small details, arcades. There is much to see here: the dented car, the cart for selling flowers, the golden horses heads (indicating a horse butcher), the varying hues of the buildings.

Paris was still an industrial city in 1970. The vast Citroën factory in the 15th arrondissement continued to produce cars until its closure in 1975. In this photo by Roger Havart, we see the facade, which faced the river. Behind it, the factory stretched over an enormous expanse. The site is now the Parc André Citroën.

On the other side of the city, in the 12th arrondissement, was Bercy, a working site that was also turned into a vast park, but in the 1970s it was still filled with wine warehouses. They were demolished in the early 1990s. The unidentified photographer of the photograph below had the sense to include street signs (rue du Médoc, avenue du Petit Chateau) as well as commercial signs: Celliers Mondain Rosé (or CMR) on the right and Caves de la Roseraie in the far background. This is documentary photography at its most useful.

Not all the photographs are this good. Some are crooked, some are out of focus, some are overexposed. As photographs taken by amateurs used to be. The shot shown below, taken by J.C. Clavier on the Champs-Elysées, suggests the technology in use at the time. I love the way the photographer is holding her umbrella while taking the shot. I wonder what had caught her attention on the ground in front of her. I wonder if she was part of the project.

Text by Philippa Campsie, 1970 photographs from paris1970 (I have not cropped or changed them in any way), contemporary images from Google Street View.

*The photographers were amateurs, and I could not find information about individual names. If anyone can provide information about any of these dedicated volunteers, do get in touch.

Posted in Paris automotive, Paris nostalgia, Paris parks, Paris shops, Paris streets | Tagged Bastille train station, Belle Jardinière, Bercy, Brigitte Mouly, Cinema Cithea, Citroën, Daniel Nicolas, J.C. Clavier, Jean-Claude Ratier, Les Halles de Bercy, Louis Emou, Michel Dornet, Michel Legeard, Paris buses, Paris1970, Roger Havart, Scilla Gabel, Trigano, Vespasienne | 9 Comments

The domestic front

Posted on July 5, 2026 by Parisian Fields

I was having lunch with my friend Mireille in a pleasant bistro when I became aware of a commotion at the next table. A man with three small children – two girls and a boy. The man was focused on his mobile phone and the kids were acting up, presumably trying to get his attention. Failing that, they got ours. In fact, when I looked towards one of the girls, she started to direct her performance towards me, the only nearby adult paying attention to her. I smiled at her sympathetically, but turned back to my conversation with Mireille.

I remember the occasion, because it is relatively rare to see misbehaviour by French children in a bistro. Normally, they remain in their seats, eating and talking to the people around them. They may squirm, giggle, or squeal, but for the most part, they are learning how to behave in public. Pierre Bonnard painted this well-behaved baby at table in 1893.

This is what Pamela Druckerman found when she wrote Bringing Up Bébé (Penguin, 2012). Using her journalistic skills of observation and research, and her circle of French and non-French friends with children in Paris, she documented everything from the way French parents get their babies to sleep through the night (the chapter should be required reading for all new parents) to the way in which the weekly and monthly menus for Paris crèches are set by a central committee. Her opening chapter was titled “French children don’t throw food,” and she describes watching French families enjoying peaceful meals in public while her infant daughter had a meltdown. As a mix of memoir and anthropology, it makes an enjoyable and informative read, even for someone, like me, who is not a parent. The image below is by Georges Rival, mid-20th century.

Pamela and her husband, Simon Kuper, went on to have twin boys, and presumably the three children were brought up with a combination of the French parental wisdom described in the book and their parents’ American/Dutch/English habits and instincts. Simon has recently written that the boys have reached the baccalauréat stage, and I imagine that their elder sister is either at university or starting a career.

When the book was published in 2012, smartphones were not as ubiquitous as they are now. The episode in the bistro was cautionary, and I wonder what else might have changed since 2012 as a result of distracted parenting. (The newspapers focus on the harmful effects of social media on children; we should not overlook the effects on parents.) Maybe there is no difference. The first word in Pamela’s glossary of French parenting terms is “Attend” (Wait). But now the child has to wait while Mum posts on Instagram or Dad finishes watching a TikTok video.

If any of our readers have thoughts on the subject, we’d be interested to hear them.

***

The other domestic matter I’d like to mention is ironing. Strange as it may seem, ironing and Paris are connected in my mind. (And it’s not just the paintings of Edgar Degas, as shown below.) Bear with me.

When I was a teenager, the music teacher at my school organized a three-week choir trip to England. At the end of the trip there would be an optional weekend at a youth hostel in Paris, for an additional cost. My parents were willing to fund my participation in the tour of England, but insisted that if I wanted to go to Paris, I would have to raise the extra money myself.

By that time, I was earning money as a babysitter in the neighbourhood, but that was mainly on weekends. I needed to earn more to pay for the Paris visit. So my mother agreed to pay me a hourly rate for ironing. I started off with pillow slips and my father’s handkerchiefs and graduated to shirts, blouses, and dresses. After several months, I had what I needed for the weekend in Paris.

Fast forward to the year I spent in France. As an au pair in Paris, ironing was one of my duties. When I set up the board on the dining room table, my employer looked at me oddly. “I thought you were right-handed,” she said. “I am,” I replied. What I had not realized is that for years, I had ironed on the board set up by my left-handed mother, with the point facing to the right. (Although I turned the board around, I still iron certain things, such as shirt sleeves, as my mother taught me, occasionally using my left hand. Old habits die hard.) Once again, ironing skills helped me to stay in Paris. (The image below is also by Degas, 1869.)

Over the years, I have ironed only when it is absolutely necessary. When I was working flat out as a freelancer and university teacher, we had a cleaning lady who ironed beautifully and actually enjoyed doing so. (She could also fold fitted sheets impeccably; our linen closet was a wonder to behold.) Alas, she retired shortly before I did. Two other cleaners came and went, but they did cleaning only, not ironing, and I was thrown back on my own skills.

I still have my mother’s old, clanky, metal ironing board and I would set it up near the washing machine in the basement, hardly an inspiring environment. I iron only when I can get decent classical music on the radio (in Toronto, that means CBC Music between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays, and a few hours on the weekends).

Friends tell me I should just buy no-iron clothes and be done with it. But Norman looks his best in a crisply ironed shirt (he likes to buy them at Alain Figaret in Paris), and in summer I wilt in anything other than pure cotton or linen clothes. That means ironing.

This past May, Norman and I were out shopping for some gifts when we happened upon an elegant droguerie on the rue Vaugirard. Drogueries are uniquely French institutions. The name leads one to expect a drugstore, but in fact they sell household products and hardware. Norman calls them “drudgery stores,” and some of the more mundane versions, selling mops and buckets and cleaning liquids, do make one equate housework with drudgery. Not this one. In a light, airy space, we found attractive products of wood, bamboo, metal, and natural fibres, mainly from Europe and Japan.

As we browsed, I was inspired with the utterly illogical idea that owning such lovely things would make our house clean, tidy, and calm forever. (And it would smell heavenly, thanks to the laundry and dishwashing liquids sold at Kerzon, another favourite shop.) A lovely dream.

Then Norman found the ironing board. It was Italian, on a wooden frame, with a shorter, wider board and a place for the iron. A thing of beauty. We debated the merits of taking it home as oversized baggage, or having it shipped, but eventually came to our senses. However, we did write down the name of the manufacturer and took some measurements.

We left the shop with a small draining board and a shower mat (the floor of the shower in our rented apartment was lethally slippery). Back at the apartment, I used the ironing board there, which was more conventional, but still smaller and nicer than the wonky behemoth at home in Toronto.

I still think about the wooden ironing board. It was compact enough to live upstairs, and I would be able to iron in a nicer environment. We wrote to the manufacturers in Italy, but they told me they did not sell their products in Canada. I have searched in vain here for a sturdy, folding wooden board. There was one on etsy, but the seller could not ship it to Canada.

Perhaps on our next trip I will actually buy the one I saw and bring it home with me. My life would not change. The house would not instantly become calm and uncluttered. But adding a soupçon of elegance to a mundane chore might improve my mood on ironing days.

Text and photo of droguerie by Philippa Campsie. Bonnard painting from Wikiart; Rival painting from Mutual Art; Degas paintings from Wikimedia; ironing board from Foppapedretti.

Posted in Paris books, Paris shops | Tagged Bringing Up Bébé, Edgar Degas, French children, Georges Rival, ironing, Pamela Druckerman, parenting skills, Pierre Bonnard, Simon Kuper | 10 Comments

A month of Sundays

Posted on June 7, 2026 by Parisian Fields

May is holiday time in France. This year, there were four long weekends in a row (May Day, Victory in Europe (VE) Day, Ascension Day, and Pentecost/Whitsunday), followed by the weekend of the soccer match between Paris St. Germain and Arsenal. When PSG won, some of the merrymakers needed time off to recover.

We had rented an apartment for the month in the 14th arrondissement, near the rue d’Alésia, a comfortable neighbourhood with lots of families, good everyday shops, and pleasant restaurants. The light-filled apartment on the fifth floor had a narrow terrace filled with greenery overlooking a quiet street. On the far side of the street was a private garden with a Tree of Heaven where birds nested.

We had time to get to know some of the shopkeepers and to get familiar with the weekly rhythm of openings and closings and which places stayed open on the holidays.

It had been more than a year since our last visit, and we noticed some changes. More trees and pedestrianized streets, more bicycles, more dazzlingly clean buildings that brighten up the spaces around them.

Not all changes were welcome. We were heart-broken at the state of the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville (BHV), where vast acres of floorspace were completely empty. When we went to buy something in the kitchenware department, we had the undivided attention of four employees, who told us that there had been no deliveries of new merchandise since November 2025.

And we were not impressed by the installation at the Pont Neuf by the artist known as JR, not just because we thought it rather ugly and unnecessary, but it messed up the bus routes. We use buses more and more as time goes by (fewer stairs to climb and more opportunities to see the city).

Buses provide interesting insights into Parisian social behaviour. There is more camaraderie with fellow passengers than you find in the Metro. Indeed, a whole etiquette is visible. For example, it is customary to greet the driver with “Bonjour” when getting on the bus. Clearly this habit is impressed on children. On one bus, a mother and her little boy got on through one of the rear entrances; the boy marched up to the front of the bus, cheerfully greeted the driver, and then returned to sit with his mother.

Paper tickets are gone (along with the confetti of dropped tickets around Metro stations), and Navigo cards are used to pay. Most people carry them in a purse or wallet and tap the whole thing against the machine that validates them. Passengers often help each other in crowded buses, and it is common to see someone who cannot reach the machine hand a card to someone else who can. Once an elderly gentleman who had entered at the back entrance found that the machine there was out of order. He handed his entire wallet to a fellow nearby, who got the attention of a woman sitting in a seat closer to the front, who took it and handed it on to a young man, who gave it to another woman, who tapped it against the machine. The wallet then made the reverse journey back to its owner.

For a few days, Norman had a sore leg and used a cane. On most buses, younger people would leap to their feet to offer him a seat. Only a couple of times did we see oblivious young women (it always seemed to be young women), who were so furiously focused on their mobile phones that they failed to respond appropriately. I assumed they were tourists who hadn’t been trained in Parisian bus manners. Another older gentleman and I exchanged raised eyebrows and rolled eyes at their lack of consideration.

Buses inspire conversations. We chatted to a retired doctor who was writing a paper on the participation of medical professionals in the slave trade; she also pointed out sights on our way through the 20th arrondissement. A retired Vietnamese masseur showed us pressure points on our hands that we could massage when we had a headache. We discussed the different meanings of écharpe and foulard (two different types of scarf) with a French-speaking Spanish woman.

I was interested by the way in which no two buses seemed to have identical configurations of seats inside. There are buses with two entrances, and some with three (an extra one at the very back). Articulated buses usually have four. Some buses have groupings of four seats arranged to allow for conversation; in others most of the seats face forward. There are different arrangements of pull-down seats, and seats over the wheel wells that require one to climb up to sit down. Some have special places for luggage. Most have spaces for wheelchairs and baby buggies.

On one trip, a woman parked her baby’s pushchair in the space and sat down nearby. When the driver had to accelerate quickly at one point, the buggy fell over and the baby started to cry. The whole bus became concerned. When the driver was able to stop, he came to check, and was assured that the baby was unharmed. The entire bus expressed opinions on the event and kept asking the mother for an update on the child’s condition.

There are signs in the buses to indicate upcoming stops and the time to the bus’s final destination. They are helpful when they work, but they do not always work. The indicators at the bus stops that show the time of the next bus are also a bit hit-or-miss. However, the vagaries of the schedule are another excuse for conversations. And when it rains, squashing together to get under the bus shelter roof adds to the general sense of we’re-all-in-this-together. You just don’t get that feeling on the Metro.

The weather was so variable that we experienced all four seasons in the course of a month. It was cold and rainy when we arrived, then mild and rainy, then warm and sunny, and finally boiling hot (all of Europe experienced a heatwave towards the end of the month). On one of the hottest days, we went with a friend to the Picasso Museum. It was cool and uncrowded and we emerged feeling less frazzled.

In the entrance way, I laughed at a sculpture of a goat that looked like one of the marionettes in The Sound of Music. Yodel ay hee ho.

On another hot day, we went to lunch with a different friend at the Collège de Bernardins, which we can highly recommend as a good café in a calm, welcoming space on a hot day.

We explored non-French culture in various ways. We ate more than once at a newish restaurant near our apartment that served Creole food and, towards the end of our stay, dined at a Portuguese restaurant with tables set out on a pedestrianized street that was clearly popular with the locals; it was always full. We attended a concert of New Zealand music and another of East Indian music. A friend and I strolled through the Japanese garden created by Albert Kahn.

We went to the Saturday flea market at the Porte de Vanves, more than once. Norman bought a model dirigible (as one does); I bought several good-quality tea towels of durable linen. (I noticed that the owner of our flat had also stocked up on these items.) My niece, who was in Paris for a weekend, found a wineglass to replace one of hers that had broken and an antique mustard pot in a lovely green that she uses as a flower vase. We enjoyed looking at the variety of silver tableware and asking the stallholders about the original use of some very specialized items, from oyster forks to asparagus servers. Every visit is an education in 19th-century arts de la table.

The trite phrase “live like a local” is trotted out by short-term rental agencies to encourage visitors to avoid hotels and rent an apartment. We discovered that it is possible to do so, but there are conditions. 1. Stay at least a month. 2. Take the bus. 3. Spend time in the neighbourhood and get to know the local shops and shopkeepers. 4. Visit interesting places more than once. 5. Explore a few of the other cultures found throughout the city. 6. Strike up conversations (you’ll need to learn some French to make this feasible).

We are both retired now, and are rediscovering Paris at a slower pace, with a deeper appreciation for the way it allows us to take our time. Years ago, Norman found a photograph, which hangs in our bedroom as an inspiration. That will be us, as long as we are able to get there.

Text and photographs by Philippa Campsie.

Posted in Paris gardens, Paris streets, Paris transportation | Tagged Albert Kahn, Musee Picasso, Paris buses, Pont Neuf, Porte de Vanves flea market, RATP, rue d’Alésia | 20 Comments

Helping Lazarus rise again

Posted on November 9, 2025 by Parisian Fields

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.

Posted in Burgundy | Tagged Avallon, Camino de Santiago, Collégiale Saint-Lazare, Fondation La Sauvegarde de l’Art Français | 8 Comments

Cold cases: The snake-oil salesman and the thief

Posted on July 27, 2025 by Parisian Fields

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 20^th 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.

Posted in History of the blind, Paris crime, Paris history | Tagged Alexis de Noailles, Alphonse Alexandre Raymond de Rubat, Asnières-sur-Seine, General Claude-François de Malet, Hippolyte Martin Cardeilhac, Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles, Jean Auguste Jaurès, Louis Balthazar Caffe, Louis Prosper de Rubat, Marie Angelique Bisson, Sebastien Guillié, Wellcome Collection, Zélie Cardeilhac | 11 Comments

The music master

Posted on June 1, 2025 by Parisian Fields

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.

Posted in History of the blind, Paris history, Paris music | Tagged Café des Aveugles, Charles Barbier, Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, Jean-Baptiste Métoyen, Jean-François Galliod, Louis Bertrand, Nicolas Roze, Noël-Jean Ismann, Notre-Dame des Blancs-Manteaux, Paul Seignette, Quinze-Vingts, Sebastien Guillié, Valentin Haüy, Victoire Augustine Eugenie Galliod | 7 Comments

Hidden rivers, white queens, and squaring the triangle

Posted on March 2, 2025 by Parisian Fields

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 bras vif, 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.

Posted in Paris history, Paris quartiers, Paris streets | Tagged Bièvre River, Chateau de la Reine Blanche, Cité Florale, Gobelins, Jardin des Plantes, Lingot, Louis IX, Marguerite de Provence, Parc Kellerman, Petite Ceinture, Square de Peupliers, St Medard | 12 Comments

Look up

Posted on January 19, 2025 by Parisian Fields

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 à fronton. 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.

Posted in Paris architecture, Paris streets | Tagged chien assis, chien couché, dormer, lucarne, lucarne à croupe, lucarne à fronton, lucarne à l’oeil-de-boeuf, lucarne bombée, lucarne capucine, lucarne cintrée, lucarne en batière, lucarne engagée, lucarne gerbière, lucarne jacobine, lucarne meunière, lucarne pendante, lucarne rampante, lucarne rentrante, lucarne retroussée, skylight, tabatière, vasistas, Velux | 16 Comments

The private life of a public man

Posted on November 10, 2024 by Parisian Fields

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.

Text by Philippa Campsie; image of Hotel de Mesmes from https://histoire-bibliophilie.blogspot.com/2019/07/; sketch by Just Haüy from https://www.persee.fr/doc/casla_1283-3878_2016_num_14_1_1136 (page 56); all other images from Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Posted in History of the blind, Paris cemeteries, Paris history | Tagged Alexandre Fournier, Alexandre-René Pignier, Caroline Horson de Forville, Catherine Madeleine Victoire Justine Haüy, Foire St-Ovide, François le Sueur, Hotel de Mesmes, Institut des Aveugles Travailleurs, Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, Just Haüy, Louise Marguerite Allain, Philodème Just Haüy, Pierre Henri, Quinze-Vingts, René-Just Haüy, Sebastien Guillié, St. Vincent de Paul, Valentin Haüy, Zina Weygand | 7 Comments

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Parisian Fields

Bercy: from park to wine entrepot and back to park

The ghost of Paris past

The domestic front

A month of Sundays

Helping Lazarus rise again

Cold cases: The snake-oil salesman and the thief

The music master

Hidden rivers, white queens, and squaring the triangle

Look up

The private life of a public man

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