In search of lost department stores

When I was a child, my mother, my sister and I would make a twice-yearly pilgrimage to downtown Toronto to Eaton’s and Simpson’s department stores to buy summer or winter clothes. We dressed in nice clothes for the occasion, took the subway (my sister and I would commandeer the seat at the front or the back of the train to enjoy the view of the tunnels rushing towards us or spooling away), entered the store directly from the basement (I once got stuck in the revolving door to Eaton’s, but received nothing worse than a spectacular bruise on my arm), and returned home in the late afternoon with shopping bags and aching feet.

Eaton’s and Simpson’s (the latter eventually became known as the Hudson’s Bay Company) are long gone. A nice Montréal chain, Simon’s, has opened a branch in the Eaton Centre offering clothing and housewares, but gone are the downtown emporia selling everything from gloves to washing machines. I miss them. There is no sense of occasion to shopping in a suburban big-box store.

Paris, by comparison, has held on to many of its department stores. Galeries Lafayette, Printemps, and Bon Marché continue to attract shoppers (not all of them tourists). Our old favourite, the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, survives, but just barely. New owners (including a Canadian firm) propose new uses for the space, including a luxury hotel. We’ll see.

La Samaritaine has reopened with a glorious interior but a more limited range of goods than before. This was the store of which it was once said, “On trouve tout à la Samaritaine” (you can find everything at La Samaritaine). Not any more, but it is still very beautiful. This postcard is a modern reproduction of an old advertisement.

These five stores are the remainders of a host of glittering retail palaces from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

My favourite is Dufayel in Montmartre, which disappeared in the 1920s. Its founder, Georges Dufayel, pioneered purchases on credit and had a vast advertising business that put his name on walls throughout the city. The store included a cinema that showed films by Georges Méliès. I discovered the existence of the store because of a flea-market postcard I bought in 2011, and since then, I have snapped up every postcard I find with the name Dufayel on it. I bought the most recent one this past May, showing the entrance from a slightly different perspective compared with my original postcard. The tower above the entrance had a beacon that lit up the night.

Recently, in a blog about photographs from the 1970s, I found an image of the workshops of La Belle Jardinière. The store itself once graced a building on the Seine near the Pont-Neuf, as shown in this early flea-market find.

I bought a new postcard in May showing the interior and a display focused on automobile travel. The clothing and the Renault motor car place it in the early 20th century. La Belle Jardinière closed in the late 1970s.

Also at the market, I found an interior of the Grands Magasins du Louvre from the same period. This huge department store was located between the Palais Royal and the Louvre (hence the name). The postcard is a reproduction in halftone of an older image, which itself seems a little unreal: posed and stilted, and possibly altered to add more people. Not all the people pictured seem to be in the right scale and the man in the centre foreground seems to be hovering in midair.

The Grands Magasins was badly damaged by a fire caused by a plane crash during the Second World War. The walls of the building held up but the interior was destroyed. Nevertheless it continued in some form until the 1970s, when it became Le Louvre des Antiquaires, an antiques market. Today it is the home of the Cartier Foundation. A strange coffin-shaped annex for carpets and rugs, which I discovered when looking at satellite photos, remains hidden behind a neighbouring building, squeezed up against a church. It is now occupied by a fashion design company.

A more obscure store that emerged from my postcard collection was the Grand Bazar de la Rue de Rennes, which opened in 1906. The postcard depicts the opening.

In the 1920s, the store became part of the Magasins Réunis, a chain based in Nancy, in the east of France. In the 1970s, the building was modernized beyond all recognition and is now a Fnac (a media store).

Another part of the Magasins Réunis chain, a big store on the Avenue des Ternes with a lovely dome, has also become a Fnac store, but at least the exterior of the original building has been retained.

Another bazaar was the Bazar Bonne Nouvelle, which closed in 1930 after a fire. This charming hand-coloured engraving shows it and the surrounding buildings in about 1846. The image is just part of a massive panorama 5 metres long showing the grand boulevards from La Madeleine to La Bastille.

Among the changes I’ve seen myself over the years is the disappearance of a small department store, Franck & Fils in Passy, which is now a branch of the Bon Marché’s Grande Epicerie de Paris. I still have a dress I bought there years ago. I took this photo in the sunny tearoom on the top floor, where I had a splendid lunch in 2011 while doing research for a walking tour in the area.

Aux Trois Quartiers in the Place de la Madeleine disappeared at the end of the 1980s. This photograph from the 1970s captures it on the corner of boulevard de la Madeleine and rue Duphot, shot from the top of the steps of the Madeleine church. At that point, it was an Art Deco building from the 1930s, although the store was originally founded in the 19th century.

More obscure department stores include Au Gagne-Petit on the avenue de l’Opéra. The name seems odd, since the term “gagne-petit” means a low-income person, and this was a grand address in what is now a high-income neighbourhood. It started life, as so many department stores did, as a seller of fabrics, about the time the Avenue de l’Opéra was pushed through the neighbourhood in the 1840s. In the 1860s, the owner created a grand entrance, and over the door is a bas-relief of a knife-grinder. This is the gagne-petit after whom the store was named (rather as La Samaritaine was named for a fountain with a sculpture of the Samaritan woman who gave Jesus a drink of water in the Biblical story). The grand entrance façade and the bas-relief of Au Gagne-Petit remain today, but in behind is a Monoprix.

The building of A Réaumur also survives on the street of the same name, complete with dome and an ornate clock bearing the store name. Domes seem to be de rigueur for department stores of a certain era. It closed in the 1960s and is now a block of offices.

The department store was a Parisian invention, starting with the Bon Marché (the subject of Zola’s novel, Au Bonheur des Dames, 1883), which changed the face of retailing. In their day, the stores employed thousands upon thousands of people, not just as salespersons, but also behind the scenes, managing inventory and billing, making deliveries, feeding the staff in huge dining halls, keeping the place clean, creating eye-catching displays. The stores advertised in magazines and newspapers, which was good for journalism, and published catalogues, which brought city goods to country subscribers. They offered cafés and sitting rooms for women, who could spend a day there with friends without imposing on anyone else’s hospitality and without causing a scandal by being away from their own homes. That was important in the 19th century.

In the 21st century, the remaining department stores are still free museums showcasing modern life, with their displays of the latest fashions and furniture, their restaurants and viewing terraces, their well-informed staff, and their sometimes-over-the-top seasonal decorations. The exhibits change all the time, and we love to go for a wander, even if there is nothing we need to buy (we usually find something, though).

The topic is vast, and if you want to know more, I highly recommend The World of Department Stores by Jan Whitaker, a fellow blogger, published in 2011, an international survey of department stores’ innovations and social importance. And if you’re in Paris, you might enjoy the walking tour I created for VoiceMap, “Revolutionaries of Retail: Paris and the Invention of Shopping,” which includes not only department stores, but everything from arcades to bouquinistes to the technology behind window shopping (hint: it’s all about the plate glass).

Text by Philippa Campsie; photo taken in Franck & Fils by Philippa Campsie; images of Fnac (Ternes), Bazar Bonne Nouvelle, Au Gagne-Petit, and A Réaumur from Wikimedia; Fnac (Rennes) from Google Street View; image of Aux Trois Quartiers from Paris1970; all other images from the Campsie-Ball postcard collection.

Bercy: from park to wine entrepot and back to park

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 17th 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 18th 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 18th and early 19th 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 19th 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.

The ghost of Paris past

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.

The domestic front

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.

A month of Sundays

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.