Parisian Fields

Monsieur Rochefort and his surprising typewriters

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Parisian Fields

When Martin, my typewriter collector friend, invited me to see “a little something from Paris,” I had never heard of the Dactyle typewriter. Nor did I realize I was about to learn the story of a French engineer/inventor who helped the blind communicate. Moreover, I encountered a mystery I need help to solve.

The typewriter that Martin took from this box at first looked familiar.

The spidery-looking keys, the cylindrical type-sleeve at the top, and the folding space bar in the middle all said “Blickensderfer 5” to me.

I have long admired the look and ingenuity of Blickensderfer typewriters. In the model 5, the cylindrical type-sleeve did not get out of alignment, and could be changed quickly, to alter the font or even the language. Moreover, with 28 keys there were 84 character possibilities. Look closely at the image below.

Here the inking wheel is making contact with the uppercase letters, which are in the middle row. The top row of letters is for lowercase and the bottom row is the symbols and numbers. To select the Upper Case, one would press the lower left key marked Maj [Majuscule] and for symbols, Chif [Chiffre].

But the keyboard is neither the English QWERTY nor the modern French AZERTY layout. Nor is it the “Scientific Keyboard” that Blickendserfer used on the typewriter he introduced at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. And the label says “Dactyle 46 Boul Haussmann Paris.”

I turned to a book called The Five-Pound Secretary: An Illustrated History of the Blickensderfer Typewriter.*

The name Dactyle appears on a significant number of Blickensderfer typewriters. The Dactyle was marketed primarily in France, although many were sold in Belgium and some in the French-speaking parts of Switzerland. The earliest known specimen has the features of the early No. 5… The Dactyle keyboard placed the most frequently used French letters in the first row and included special French characters.

This was helpful, but I wanted to know who was behind the Dactyle name and operation. My first clue came with a 1904 ad I purchased on eBay.

At last I had a name. O. Rochefort, engineer of arts and manufacturing. This ad was for a calculating machine. It didn’t mention typewriters, but the address was 46, Boulevard Haussmann. (The site is now that of the department store Galeries Lafayette. In about 1911, the company moved to 4, rue Lafayette.) With the help of a German-language website and a Dictionnaire biographique des grands commerçants et industriels available from Gallica, I put together part of the human story behind the machine.

Octave-Maximilien Rochefort, 1861–1950, was an inventor and manufacturer. He was a restless man, who travelled widely. After graduating from the École des Arts et Manufactures in 1884, he went to Algeria to work in forestry for two or three years, returned to France and soon left for Argentina in 1887. In Cordoba he was a public works engineer, involved in bridge building, and he even taught at the university. He returned to France in 1890, but left shortly thereafter for the coal mines of the United States.

Clearly, Octave-Maximilien had an eye for new opportunities. In 1896 he returned to Paris to set up a typewriter factory and sales outlet. He is best-known for the Dactyle (a rebranded Blickensderfer) and the Hall Braille-Writer (see below) and what has been described as “the Harrison machine to impress Braille characters on copper sheets for printing Braille characters.” In addition to making the Hall Braille-Writer available in France, Rochefort also sold Dactyles where the typewriter keys had raised Braille characters to assist the blind in writing inked text for the sighted to read. How did he make the transition from bridge building and coal mines to typewriters, including typewriters for the blind?

During the years of Rochefort’s stay in the United States, the most important and highly publicized technology showcase took place in Chicago in 1893: the World’s Fair Columbian Exposition. It was a stunning display of new technology from dozens of countries; the kind of event that would attract the curious and restless Rochefort.

It is more than likely Rochefort attended the Exposition. Typewriters were one of the hot technologies of the day and Blickensderfer was one of 23 typewriter manufacturers exhibiting. The award-winning Blickensderfer 5 appears to have captured the show and yet in the difficult financial year of 1893, Blickensderfer was in deep financial trouble.

It is not difficult to imagine that George C. Blickensderfer and Octave Rochefort met and talked business in Chicago before the fair ended October 29, 1893. Or perhaps a conversation that started in Chicago continued later. At some point, Rochefort acquired significant non-American rights. Rochefort was advertising the Dactyle in French as early as 1896.

And what else might Rochefort have seen at the Chicago World’s Fair? The Illinois Institution for the Education of the Blind was also an exhibitor; its star attraction was the Hall Braille-Writer, invented by superintendent Frank Haven Hall.

Hall was more interested in helping the blind than in making money. He never took out a patent on the machine, because he wanted it to be manufactured and used as widely as possible with no fees. Later in 1893, when a new state governor put Hall in another job, manufacturing of Hall’s inventions fell to the Chicago firm that had helped Hall with the development of his ideas. The company name was Harrison & Siefried, which explains why the “machine to impress Braille characters on copper sheets” is referred to as “the Harrison machine.”

Through his work in bringing the Hall machines to France, Rochefort joins the ranks of 19th-century benefactors of the blind. Rochefort was also an important inventor in his own right, but that is another story.

I am currently researching and writing about the plight of the blind in the late 19th century and the efforts to help them read and write. What started with Martin’s invitation to view the Dactyle, a typewriter for the sighted, has provided me with new research clues. That machine is now owned by a collector in England, but I am delighted to have had a chance to see it before it left Canada.

In the introduction I also mentioned a mystery. What is the meaning of this symbol which appears on the frame of the Dactyle? Could it be related to the Dreyfus affair? Rochefort’s father was strongly anti-Dreyfus. Perhaps Octave was asserting his opposition to his father’s stance. Who can provide any further ideas?

Text by Norman Ball; typewriter photographs by Martin Howard. Portrait of Rochefort from Gallica.

* Robert Blickensderfer and Paul Robert. The Five-Pound Secretary: An Illustrated History of the Blickensderfer Typewriter. Laren, the Netherlands: The Virtual Typewriter Museum, 2003.

Posted in Paris history, Paris typewriters | Tagged antique typewriters, Blickensderfer, Boulevard Haussmann, Columbian Exposition of 1893, Dactyle, Frank Haven Hall, Martin Howard, Octave-Maximilien Rochefort, typewriters | 6 Comments

The invention of the omnibus

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Parisian Fields

Take a good look at this postcard. What do you see? I tend to gravitate to postcards like this because of the rich detail in the buildings – the names of businesses, the façades of the old houses, the advertisements, the spire in the distance (it isn’t a church, it’s the mairie – city hall – of the 10th arrondissement). Most of the buildings are still there, recognizable in a modern view north along the Faubourg St-Martin.

It’s only after a while that I focus on what is in the street, not just on either side. (Norman says he is the exact opposite and looks at the vehicles first.) An omnibus pulled by three horses dominates the view, followed by two men on bicycles, with an assortment of delivery carts pulled up to the curbs on either side. Those vehicles have vanished forever, leaving only images in photos and postcards. But where did they come from?

Omnibuses were a French invention, and have a curious history, less well documented than the history of the buildings in Paris.

The story begins, not in Paris, but in Nantes, where a man called Stanislas Baudry built a steam-powered flour mill outside the city in 1823. Steam technology produces lots of hot water, and Baudry saw an opportunity to make some money on the side by opening a bathhouse. Unfortunately, the bathhouse was a very long walk from central Nantes, and there were few customers. Baudry hit on the idea of offering a shuttle service – a coach that left from the centre of town on a regular schedule. It held 16 passengers, seated eight to a bench on each side. But not all the people in the coach were necessarily going to the baths – some Nantais started to use the coach for short trips along the route.

Baudry was quick to spot another business opportunity opening up, and launched the first urban transit service in 1826. He called his coach an “omnibus,” a Latin word meaning “for all.” He expanded the business to Bordeaux the next year, and then to Lyon. His request to operate in Paris took longer to get approval, as the authorities were cautious about adding large vehicles to the already congested streets, but eventually Baudry and two partners were given permission to operate up to 100 vehicles, each of which could hold a minimum of 12 people and a maximum of 20. The authorities would set the routes.

At first, the single fare was 25 centimes (longer routes required double fares and the notion of a free transfer was not developed until 1834), collected by a conductor who was also there to help people on and off through the back door. There were no fixed stops along the route; passengers simply signalled when they wanted to get on or off. The No. 1 route and the most heavily used went between the Place de la Madeleine and the Place de la Bastille by way of the grands boulevards.

Today transit is so common that it is hard to imagine just what an innovation this was. People who had never taken a coach between towns (that is, most people at the time) needed to get used to the idea of getting into a small, enclosed space with a group of complete strangers, who might be of any social class. In fact, the majority of passengers were middle class, since aristocrats had their own carriages, and the very poor found even 25 (soon raised to 30) centimes too steep. The conductor was also under orders to exclude drunks, dogs, and people with oversized packages, and had some discretion over admitting anyone who simply looked poorly dressed.

Women at first did not use the omnibuses. According to an often-repeated story (possibly an urban legend), the vivacious Duchesse de Berry was the first woman to do so, on a bet, and travelling in disguise. (This may have been a publicity stunt; it seems she had a financial interest in one of the other omnibus companies that sprang up after Baudry’s company led the way.) Eventually, more and more women used the service, although a woman travelling alone was often viewed with suspicion.

The omnibuses proved extremely popular from the start. But Baudry’s firm (Entreprise Générale des Omnibus) lost money in its first two years of operation and nearly failed. Renting facilities for stables and depots was expensive. The price of horse feed went up. The two winters were harsh and people stayed home. Some of the routes the firm was required to service were unprofitable. Competitors lured away customers. And the firm was overextended, having expanded massively in other cities while entering the Paris market.

In despair, Stanislas Baudry committed suicide in February 1830. He shot himself near the company stables on the Quai de Jemmapes, by the Canal St-Martin. It seems a strange loss of confidence in an otherwise canny entrepreneur. And if he had just stayed the course, he would have seen the company overcome its tribulations and become very lucrative indeed, particularly after a merger that brought together all the competing companies to form the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus in 1854.

He would also have seen further innovations, some successful, others…not so much. In the mid-1830s, one Marie-Toussaint-Henri, vicomte de Botherel, was so excited by the prospects of the omnibus that he decided to create omnibus-restaurants, from which cooked meals would be delivered to people’s houses. He spent vast sums from his considerable fortune building a huge central kitchen on the rue de Navarin and opening a café on the rue Neuve-Vivienne, but the logistics didn’t work and the business failed.

In 1853, the impériale was introduced, an omnibus with seating on the roof. At first, this upper deck was open to the weather, reached by a ladder, but later on some vehicles it was enclosed, and the ladder evolved into a curving staircase up the back of the omnibus.

The 1870s saw the introduction of the tram. Trams run on metal rails with less friction than wheels on a cobbled roadway, so the same number of horses can pull larger vehicles with more passengers. And the ride is much smoother. At first, the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus resisted the changeover. It had become so profitable with its existing vehicles (and with its sizable real estate holdings) that it was getting complacent and was reluctant to invest in new vehicles. The Paris authorities were getting desperate, however, as congestion increased and more and more tourists flocked to the city, attracted by the great exhibitions of 1855 and 1867. Tourists need transit. Eventually, in 1872, the city laid down tram lines (the tracks were set into the roads so that other vehicles could pass over them) and insisted that the company operate horse-drawn trams.

The next step was to get rid of the horses. The company had more than 9,000 of them at the time, and they needed feed, and stables, and veterinary care. Steam locomotion was considered too risky, but in 1880s, electric traction became an option. In this postcard, you can see a double-decker tram and a two-car tram passing the overground portion of the Metro on the Boulevard de la Chapelle near the rue d’Aubervilliers.

The double-decker trams maintained the stairway up the back of the vehicle, and from time to time, accidents occurred, like the one illustrated on the front page of Le Petit Journal, June 6, 1909.

A father holding his two-year-old was mounting the steps when the vehicle started with a jolt, sending him flying, as his horrified wife, holding their younger child, looked on. The father survived with little more than cuts and bruises, but the toddler died.

Trams were gradually overtaken by motor coaches, but horse-drawn omnibuses remained a common sight on Paris streets for many years. The very last horse-drawn impériale made its final trip between La Villette and St-Sulpice on January 11, 1913, accompanied by a crowd of well-wishers. In this image from Gallica of that historic run, it seems that it was foggy that day.

The burly percherons were put out to pasture in the countryside, the men who had cared for them looked for other work, and the streets of Paris never looked quite the same again.

Text by Philippa Campsie; images from our postcard and Petit Journal collection; engraving from Physiologie de l’omnibus by Édouard Gourdon, Gallica. Final photograph from Gallica.

Further reading: Very little is available in English on the subject of early transit in Paris, with the exception of the wonderfully detailed book by Nicholas Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris: The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit (Louisiana State University Press, 1996).

Posted in Paris civic functions, Paris postcards, Paris streets, Paris travel | Tagged Compagnie Générale des Omnibus, Duchesse de Berry, Entreprise Générale des Omnibus, Faubourg St-Martin, impériale, Le Petit Journal, Nantes, Nicholas Papayanis, omnibus, omnibus-restaurants, Stanislas Baudry, trams, tramways, Vicomte de Botherel | 19 Comments

The Paris Bridge That Never Was

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Parisian Fields

It should have been the pride of Paris; a stunning suspension bridge leaping clear across the Seine. It should have been one of the crown jewels of both Paris and the career of Claude Navier, one of 19th-century France’s most brilliant mathematicians and engineers. But things don’t always work out as they should.

This sketch by Navier shows what he planned for his 560-foot (155-metre) span across the Seine, at the site now occupied by the Pont Alexandre III. Suspension bridges were the latest thing, and Navier was the best French bridge analyst of the day. Construction started in 1824 and seemed to proceed well. In 1826 the bridge was not finished, but chain cables had joined the two shores and a roadway was suspended from the cable chains. Then the unthinkable occurred in July 1826: a crack appeared in the cable anchorages.

The anchorages were crucial to the safety and permanence of the bridge. In suspension bridges, the cables from which the roadway is suspended must carry all the weight of the bridge and traffic. At each end of the bridge, the cables pass over the bridge towers and then down into the ground where they are anchored with stone, concrete, and the earth above the abutments.

The first crack could be explained away by normal settling. What happened next could not be explained away so easily. As historian Edna Kranakis writes in Constructing a Bridge:

On the night of September 6 [1826], an accident occurred. A water main that passed close to the underground anchorage buttresses on the Champs-Elysées side of the bridge ruptured and flooded the area around the buttresses. Some of the supporting earthwork ceased to bear against the anchorages. As a result, the two fissures on the Champs-Elysées side suddenly widened … and the buttresses suffered some upturning and displacement… This movement in turn caused the towers on the Champs-Elysées side to tilt toward the river.

The bridge had not fallen down, although it was listing. And other bridges had had similar problems during construction, been repaired and then served for many decades, even centuries. At first, professional opinion stated the bridge could be rescued at a total cost of only 1 to 2% of the contract price. But in the end, the project was cancelled in spring 1827 and the Pont des Invalides (as it was known at the time) was dismantled, leaving in its place much more than an empty space.

What happened? What went wrong?

The story starts with Claude-Louis-Marie-Henri Navier (let’s just call him Claude). He was born in 1785 in Dijon. His father died when he was still quite young, but an uncle took him in and looked after his education. The uncle, Emiland Marie Gauthey, was professor of mathematics at the École des ponts et chaussées and a practising engineer.

Navier studied at the École polytechnique and then at the École des ponts et chaussées. Upon graduation in 1807 he started work for the Département de la Seine and remained there until 1822. In addition to his practical engineering work, Navier edited several engineering books and in 1821 became an associate professor of Applied Mechanics at the École des ponts et chaussées. In 1823 he published his first theoretical work on bridges and in 1830 joined the faculty of the École polytechnique. He held both posts until his death in 1836.

As historian Tom F. Peters writes in Transitions in Engineering, Navier “was not primarily a practitioner, although he had successfully built four large bridges and several canals in Italy.” However, he was thoroughly engaged in the major suspension bridge design and construction debates of the day and a leading engineering theoretician.

The French love theory. A colleague of mine once told me a story about two bureaucrats discussing a new economic project. The French one said, “Yes, we can see that it works in practice. But does it work in theory?” Navier would have understood this question.

Navier’s proposed suspension bridge was largely intended to show the importance of mathematical analysis to bridge building. Otherwise, nobody actually wanted a bridge in that location. Navier, perhaps somewhat unwisely, wrote:

There exists no urgent necessity to construct a bridge [from the Esplanade of the Hôtel des Invalides] to the Champs-Elysées; there is no obligation to build a suspension bridge in Paris. But if it is desired that one be built, let it be made into a monument; let the character of grandeur be given to this work that the style of construction admits of; let its disposition be calculated with the idea of an edifice approved by artists, agreeable to the public, honourable to the administration.

He must have known about the many arguments against it. It would block sightlines to the Hôtel des Invalides. The Egyptian decorative motifs were inappropriate. The beauty of the Champs-Elysées would be destroyed by building a major thoroughfare across it. It would create too much traffic.

Nevertheless, the exquisite drawings and the beauty of the mathematical calculations impressed the bureaucrats in the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées. They recommended only small changes. However, they disagreed with Navier on one point. Navier thought that something so magnificent needed to be state-financed. The bureaucrats insisted that the bridge had to be financed and built privately, and that investors should be given the right to charge tolls for 55 years.

On April 7, 1824, the project was opened to bidding. By August the successful bidders, headed by Alain Desjardins, started construction. But it was a curiously one-sided contract. The bridge had to be built according to a detailed set of specifications provided by the Corps. No change could be made without the written consent of the director of the Corps. There was no clause authorizing the contractor to suggest modifications, even though such a clause was a standard feature of this type of contract.

So if the contractor foresaw the problems, he could do nothing to prevent them. When the cracks appeared and the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées demanded that a new bridge be built at contractor expense, Desjardins argued that his company had built the bridge precisely as the contract had stipulated.

Stalemate. The ruined incomplete bridge became a symbol of what happens when theory and practice do not match.

Eventually the conflict was resolved with payouts to contractor and investors. Desjardins was given permission to build three more bridges in Paris, and could use the materials from the failed bridge. And perhaps most galling to Navier and others, Desjardins had a free hand in the bridge designs, so long as they could withstand the load tests the Corps would supervise.

Desjardins’s designs were far from elegant. At least one of his replacements was so hideous that it was described in one engineering publication in 1830 as “truly a villainous thing.”

But Navier’s career as a practising engineer was over. He bore the brunt of public criticism, was overlooked for further promotions, and died aged 51 in 1836. Posterity has been kinder, however, and his is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower, for his contributions to mathematics.

It is difficult to know what to make of Navier and his disastrous bridge. Clearly he was a brilliant theoretician. But his story contains an element of arrogance; he was departing from proven practice in the way the abutments bore the weight of the entire structure, an approach that had been arrived at without sufficient testing.

Navier was an inspiration to those who wanted to see a greater role for mathematical analysis in engineering, design and construction. But he was caught up in political manoeuvring that let an untested structure go ahead and fail spectacularly.

“Trust me, I know what I’m doing” is what people usually say just before disaster strikes. Perhaps “Trust me, the theory works perfectly,” is what Navier said before his bridge wobbled, listed, and then was demolished. A lesson to us all.

Text by Norman Ball. Illustrations from Structurae, Wikipedia, and University of Houston.

For more on the chequered history of suspension bridges in France, read: The mystery of the missing suspension bridges of Paris.

Posted in Paris bridges, Paris history | Tagged Alain Desjardins, École des ponts et chaussées, École polytechnique, bridge failure, Champs Elysees, Claude Navier, Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, Edna Kranakis, Emiland Marie Gauthey, Pont des Invalides, suspension bridges, Tom F. Peters | 4 Comments

Pierre Lelong: The search for a 20th-century Post-Impressionist painter

Posted on March 30, 2014 by Parisian Fields

“Is there a library or museum in Paris that will research a painting/artist for you? This is the painting Pop said he bought off a street artist in Paris in 1934 when he was at the Sorbonne. It’s oil on wood and 27 cm x 22 cm. I’d guess the artist’s name is Plilong or P.L. Long or P. Lilong.” This message went from the owner to his sister, then to his sister’s friend Mary Ann, who sent it to us. It was accompanied by an image of the signature. Could we help with a little research?

The picture itself showed a flat rural landscape under a dull blue sky in which three people (probably men) and two beasts (horses? donkeys? oxen?) are straining to move a heavy load of something brown and red along a dusty white road. The style is Post-Impressionist, hence the sketchiness of the details. At first the picture doesn’t look like much, but then one becomes aware that the artist has successfully conveyed the effort and strain of the men and the animals, the heat of the day, and the dreariness of the surroundings rather effectively for a mere “street artist.”

I squinted at the signature, and tried various combinations on Google. The one that worked best was “P. Lelong.” OK, the third letter may not look much like an “e” but the only references to “Lilong” were to traditional forms of Chinese housing. There was a “Pierre Lelong” (actually there are six) listed on French Wikipedia; the one identified as an artist is described in a terse note: “Pierre Lelong (1908-1984) est un peintre figuratif français, membre du comité du Salon Comparaisons.” (Pierre Lelong was a figurative French painter and member of the committee of the Comparisons Salon.) That was all. But it was a start.

I found some other paintings online, all signed “P. Lelong” (not Pierre or Pierre-Emile, his full name), so I think this is our man. The signatures differ slightly, but the others date from long after the 1930s, and signatures can change over a lifetime. So who was he?

A search of the library catalogue at the University of Toronto turned up a monograph written in 1957* that provided some details about his early life. Born in 1908 in Neuilly, just outside Paris, he lost his mother when he was six and was raised by his grandmother. At 16, he started art classes at the Atelier Julien on the rue du Dragon in Paris, but his studies were interrupted by his military service and then, it seems, by the need to earn a living. He went to work for an insurance company (la Mutualité Agricole), and abandoned all thought of being an artist.

But in 1933, he was doing well enough at his job to have the leisure to take up his brushes again. What our friend’s friend thought was a “street artist” in 1934 seems to have been an insurance agent, moonlighting. By 1935 he was able to rent a studio in Montmartre and to travel during his summer holidays to Spain. (If the date of 1934 is not exact, my friend’s friend’s painting might have depicted Spanish peasants – certainly the flat, hot landscape looks like Spain.)

In 1938, he married Marie-Rose Salvatori from Trinidad. (I wonder how they met.) He was doing well, exhibiting here and there, and travelling quite bit. Then came the war. He became a liaison officer with an English regiment, the Royal Dragoon Guards. So presumably he spoke English.

At Dunkirk, he was captured with other officers and interned at a camp near Dresden. Somehow, he was able to get painting materials. Strangely enough, this was the first time since his adolescence that he was able to concentrate full time on his art. What else was there to do? He painted what he saw – his fellow prisoners – waiting, eating, cooking, washing, waiting, playing cards, reading letters, waiting…

He was transferred to another camp near the Czechoslovakian border, where he worked in a garage and earned money selling paintings. He tried and failed to escape, tried again, and succeeded. It was February 1942.

For a while he settled in Clermont-Ferrand, in occupied France, and worked on his sketches from the camp. With the help of a another former prisoner, Henri Curtil, he produced a series called Une Vie de Camp, published in 1943. Then he and his wife sat out the rest of the war in Trinidad, where he went to work on his technique. He felt he’d never really mastered the art of painting. Methodically, he worked on still lifes, nudes, landscapes, and other genres until he felt satisfied with the result.

After the war, he went to the United States, where his only son, Jean-François, was born in 1946. He returned to Paris the following year, and found a studio at 10, boulevard des Batignolles. By this point, he was a full-time painter; not just a moonlighting insurance agent. He exhibited frequently, and kept busy doing illustrations for books, magazines, and newspapers. He was invited to paint a portrait of the composer Jacques Ibert, which was exhibited at a salon called “Peintres Témoins de leur Temps” (Painters Witnesses of their Times) in 1956. Lelong was interviewed on the radio, written up in the press, the picture of a successful painter. The future was bright.

But at that point, the 1957 account stops. What happened next? I found brief mentions of him in books about the “School of Paris” and so forth, but no indication of how or where he died (and only the year, not the day).

The next thing I found was a four-page exhibition brochure from 1978 on eBay. I bought it for a few Euros, because I liked the image of couples dancing on a sun-dappled square in front of a band, presumably on Bastille Day. It’s a light-filled, light-hearted, summery painting. Inside the brochure are three other images reproduced in black and white – boats, a beach, and a sunny interior with a nude. After the chilly gloom of the prisoner-of-war camp, Lelong seems to have focused on cheery scenes, full of warmth and colour. Perhaps his time in Trinidad was an influence there. He would have been 70 at the time of the exhibition.

But there the trail seemed to go cold. I tried a few genealogical websites. Nothing. I searched for any mentions of his son, Jean-Francois and his wife, Marie-Rose. Nothing. Until one day I found a mention of a limited-edition book about Lelong published in 1987, that is, a few years after his death.** Thanks to the wonders of interlibrary loan, I was able to borrow a copy from a library in Ottawa.

Along with an extended list of his many successes, including a retrospective exhibition in Nice of 150 works, I found the end of the story. Apparently, Lelong continued to paint as long as he could, working from an atelier at 74, rue des Plantes in the 14th. He vigorously defended the art of figurative paintings against the dominant abstract artists of the day. But his health started to fail in 1981, when he was 73, and he spent more and more time in hospital (it is not clear what the illness was). He died in Paris on 29 June 1984. And about six months later, his son, who was working in Morocco, died in a car accident there. I wonder what happened to his wife, Marie-Rose. Did she stay in Paris? Did she ever go back to Trinidad?

Lelong’s paintings turn up now and then in sales and on eBay, and so do copies of Une Vie de Camp. He painted mid-20th-century life in the style of the Impressionists – with cars instead of carriages, young women in short skirts instead of long gowns, motorboats instead of rowboats, electric lights instead of gaslight. Some images are reduced to geometrical shapes, but never completely abstracted. I like them. He came a long way from that initial 1930s painting, and as the research unfolded, I felt I had travelled at least part of the route with him. Our friend Mary Ann had sent us on an intriguing journey. Now to find an original we can afford…

Text by Philippa Campsie. Images by Pierre-Emile Lelong.

* Ivan Bettex, Pierre-Emile Lelong, Geneva: Les cahiers d’art-documents, no. 53, 1957.

** Bertrand Duplessis, Pierre Lelong, ou la recontre d’un homme avec l’univers, Paris: Editions SMPMD, 1987.

Posted in Paris art | Tagged Atelier Julien, Bertrand Duplessis, Henri Curtil, Ivan Bettex, Jacques Ibert, Jean Minet, Jean-François Lelong, Marie Rose Salvatori, Mutualité Agricole, Peintres Témoins de leur Temps, Perre Lelong, Pierre-Emile Lelong, Post-Impressionism, Salon Comparaisons, Une Vie de Camp | 26 Comments

Paris Bridges: Mirrors of History

Posted on March 9, 2014 by Parisian Fields

More than beautiful ornaments and a way to cross the Seine, Paris bridges are mirrors of history. They reflect impermanence, bad weather, political turbulence, and much more.

The Pont au Change that exists today was built in 1858-1860. As the link between the Place du Châtelet on the right bank and the boulevard du Palais on the Île de la Cité, it is an important part of the north-south transportation network. In the image above, we see it as it looked in 1831. But this is just the tail end of the story. Paris and Its Environs Displayed in a Series of Two Hundred Views (1831), from which this image by Augustus Charles Pugin is taken, tells us that the Pont au Change “has existed in one shape or other, from time immemorial.” The phrase “one shape or other” is important.

Cécile Renaudin, in Les Grandes Catastrophes à Paris, traces the bridge at the Pont au Change to 872 when it was a stone bridge. We are not sure how long the bridge that was there in 872 lasted, but according to Sophie-Marguerite and Serge Montens in Paris de Pont en Pont (Paris from Bridge to Bridge), there was a wooden bridge at this site called Pont du Roy (King’s Bridge) during the Middle Ages. It was destroyed in 1280. And again in 1296. And again in 1373. And in 1408, 1510, 1616, 1621 and 1651. After that, it was replaced by a stone bridge.

The flood of 1296 was particularly brutal. All of what was then Paris was under water. The rapid flow and volume of the flood destroyed two stone bridges, their mills and the houses which had been build on them. The mills were driven by undershot waterwheels suspended from the underside of the bridge and turned by the water flowing by.

The effect of ice could be even more disastrous than floods of water alone. For example, in 1408 when only three Parisian bridges spanned the Seine, severe cold, which froze the river, was followed by a rapid thaw, setting adrift loose masses of ice that destroyed all three bridges.

It may surprise some to learn that the Seine froze every so often. Modern Paris winters can be quite mild, but in 1514, it was so cold that wine froze and had to be cut by axes and sold by the livre (pound). In the winter of 1607-08, the communion wine in the chalice at the church of Saint-André-des-Arts froze and the priests had to use a stove to thaw it out.

When the great flood of 1616 took out the Pont au Change yet again, it was replaced quite quickly, but five years later fire destroyed the new bridge. Reconstruction did not start until 18 years later in 1639 and it was not finished until 1647. And four years later in 1651, it was gone again.

The engraving above by Felix Thorigny shows two views of the Pont au Change, 1660 (below) and 1680 (above). The bridge of 1660 is covered with three-storey houses. For many centuries, this was quite common in Paris and other cities such as London. Bridges were places of business and residence. Once known as the Grand Pont, it became the Pont au Change in 1141 after Louis VII, who reigned from 1137 to 1180, granted money changers the right to set up their stalls there. (Louis VII was also known as “Louis the Young,” although he lived to be 60; his father, Louis VI, was called “Louis the Fat”). One thing led to another and gambling stalls were eventually set up on the bridge during Carnival. However, this practice was abolished in 1604.

Paris and Its Environs notes that when the Pont au Change was “again carried away by a great flood in 1616, with all the houses that were upon it, some of the furniture…was washed as far as the town of St. Denis.” The bridge was rebuilt and the houses reappeared, not to be removed until 1788, by the order of Louis XVI.

Bridges blog002

The story of successive bridges at the same site is a common one. The Pont Royal today connects l’avenue du Général-Lemonnier on the right bank with rue du Bac on the left. This was the former site of Pont Rouge, built in 1632, reconstructed a number of times, and finally carried away by ice in 1684. The following year, Louis XIV financed the construction of the replacement, le Pont Royal, completed in 1688 and still standing as one of the oldest bridges in Paris.

The changing names of some Parisian bridges reflect France’s often turbulent history. Consider what is now Pont de la Concorde and was Pont Louis XVI at the time the image above was created. The bridge links the place de la Concorde, formerly Place Louis XV, on the right bank with Quai d’Orsay et Quai Anatole-France. The French Revolution led to the renaming of Pont Louis XVI and the beheading of the man for whom it was named.

Paris and Its Environs notes that first it became “Pont de la Revolution [1792]; then it became the bridge of the Legislative Body, then of Concorde [1795], then again of Louis XVI.” And that wasn’t the end. Although with the Restoration, the name had reverted to Pont Louis XVI, in an attempt to appease pressure from anti-monarchical republicans, Louis-Philippe changed the name back to Pont de la Concorde in 1830. By this time, Place Louis XV had become Place de la Concorde and so it all seemed to fit together very well. Perhaps too well. Consider the long gestation period and the source of some of the stone for the bridge.

Some bridges took a long time to get built. “In 1722 the city of Paris had been authorized by Lettres patentes to raise a sum of money for the erection of a bridge opposite the Place Louis XV.” Time passed. Nothing happened. In 1786 Louis XIV issued an edict to allow “a loan of 30,000,000 livres to be employed in embellishing Paris, out of which 1,200,000 livres were assigned towards defraying the expense of erecting this bridge.” By that time, France was in dire financial straits and tension was rising. Construction started in 1787 and finished at the end of 1790, but events had overtaken the bridge. A year earlier, on 14 July 1789, the storming and subsequent destruction of the Bastille freed up more stone for the building of the bridge originally intended to honour Louis XVI.

There is one other change we should mention. In the engraving above titled Pont Louis XVI, we see 12 large statues on the bridge. In 1810, Napoleon had the bridge adorned with the statues of eight generals who had died in action during the Napoleonic wars. During the Restoration, they were replaced by 12 monumental marble statues of four great ministers, four soldiers, and four sailors. But sometimes too much is simply too much. These colossal statues were too heavy for the bridge, were removed and taken to Versailles.

The existence of the much-renamed Pont de la Concorde reflects another important aspect of Paris history—its growth by increased suburbanization. The bridge was built to connect “the suburbs of St. Honoré and St. Germain, which, previously had no other direct mode of communication except a ferry established near the Hotel des Invalides”—unless one went as far as Pont Royal.

Bridges blog003

In addition to providing crossings and merchandising space, the bridges of Paris offered wonderful views of the river, its banks and the buildings of Paris. The image above is taken from the Pont Neuf looking towards the Pont des Arts. Paris and Its Environs described the view as “one of the most noble and striking in Paris.” It clearly shows the delicate iron work of the Pont des Arts, built in 1802-04, a bridge described as having “an elegant appearance but wants solidity and is only used for foot passengers.”

Bridges blog005

In the nineteenth century, Paris and London were vying to be the greatest city on earth. After praising the Austerlitz Bridge shown above, Pugin asserted that “the quiet river scenery of this plate will remind our English readers of some views of the Thames in the neighbourhood of the British metropolis, and particularly one just above Vauxhall. There is indeed a striking similarity in the light and elegant character of the Pont d’Austerlitz and that of the Vauxhall Bridge. Both are also models of that great modern improvement in aquatic architecture, the cast iron bridge.” It was also a place to appreciate “the placid flow and unpretending character of the Seine [that] always appears to us to form an agreeable contrast with the magnificent works of art on its shore.”

The bridges of Paris gave then, as they do today, a view from above the river. In an earlier era they also allowed one to get above the smells of the river.

This was true of both the Seine and the Thames, and Pugin mentions it, along with a useful tip for tourists. “The water [of the Seine] like that of the Thames, requires to be well filtered; and strangers find it needful to qualify the laxative qualities with wine or brandy.”

Text by Norman Ball. Images (except for one from Paris en Images) and all direct quotations from Paris and its Environs Displayed in a Series of Picturesque Views, The drawings made under the direction of Mr. [Augustus Charles] Pugin, and engraved under the superintendence of Mr. C. [Charles] Heath, with topographical and historical descriptions, 1831.

Posted in Paris bridges, Paris history | Tagged Augustus Charles Pugin, Cécile Renaudin, Felix Thorigny, Les Grandes Catastrophes à Paris, Paris and its Environs, Paris de Pont en Pont, Pont au Change, Pont d'Austerlitz, Pont de la Concorde, Pont des Arts, Pont Louis XVI, Pont Neuf, Pont Royal, Saint-André-des-Arts, Serge Montens, Sophie-Marguerite | 7 Comments

The first time I saw Paris

Posted on February 16, 2014 by Parisian Fields

This blog is dedicated to the memory of my father, John Campsie, 9 April 1921 – 8 February 2014. He passed his love of travel on to me and encouraged me to learn French.

The first time I saw Paris, it was a mistake. We were actually supposed to be in Greece, not Paris. And it was all my fault.

I was eight years old. At the time, my family was living in North Berwick, Scotland, because my father had taken a year-long sabbatical from his publishing job in Toronto to write a book. During the Easter holidays that year, he planned to take us first to Malta, his birthplace, and then to Greece.

At first, our holiday went pretty much according to plan. We flew to Malta, and spent one night in a hotel that my father remembered from his childhood in Valletta in the 1920s. Time had not been kind to the hotel – everything seemed mouldy and damp and the waiters in the dining room were elderly and hard of hearing. The next day we moved to a modern hotel.

On Sunday, we went to a service at St. Andrew’s Scots Church in Valletta. In the 1920s, my grandfather had been the minister at this church, as well as a chaplain to the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet stationed in Malta. That is how my father had come to be born there – in the manse beside the church on Old Bakery Street.

The photo shows my mother, my sister Alison, and me dressed in our Sunday best outside the church. The house just beyond the stone church, with the knobs on the top, is the one where my father was born.

During the service, I started to feel queasy, and then very sick indeed. My mother took me outside and we wandered about in the sunshine for a while, until the service was over. I spent the rest of the day in bed. The following day, I was still very sick, and my parents got a doctor, who discovered that I had a perforated eardrum. He prescribed antibiotics and told us, “She cannot fly in an aeroplane for at least three months.”

So we had to scrap the plan to go to Greece. Instead, my father had to figure out a way of getting from Malta back to Scotland by land and sea. This must have been enormously stressful for him, but I didn’t know that at the time. When you are eight years old, you assume your parents will solve all problems. And he did.

I recovered enough to see something of the island – I have my father’s 35 mm slides showing trips here and there in a rented Morris Minor convertible. But I had to wear one of my mother’s scarves to keep the wind out of my ear.

Eventually, we set out on our epic journey home. First, we had to take a djasa (one of the colourful local rowboats) out to a steamer that would take us to Sicily. This is the photograph my father took while we were crossing Valletta harbour with our luggage.

The crossing was choppy. We landed in Syracuse, where we spent the night. Octopus was on the menu of the restaurant where we ate, something none of us had ever tried before. I understand that there is a way to prepare octopus that makes the experience of eating it less like chewing boiled rubber bands, but the chef in Syracuse did not use that technique.

The next day, we took a train to Messina, ferry to Reggio, and another train to Rome, where we stopped for a couple of days. My father’s pictures show us in the Forum and the Boboli Gardens and touring the Vatican. Here Alison and I are standing on the entrance gate to the Palatine Hill, with the Colosseum in the background.

Looking back, I am astonished that we found a hotel room, because it was Holy Week and people were pouring into Rome. But my father seems to have solved that problem somehow. The name “Hotel Lux” sticks in my mind. The hotel is still there, near the train station. It may well have been where we stayed.

Here is a rare picture of my father in Rome. Rare, because he was usually behind the camera, not in front.

We left Rome on Easter Day itself, on an almost-empty train to Turin. That in itself is remarkable. Who do you know leaves Rome on Easter Day?

From Turin, we went to Torre Pellice for a few days. This was another place my father had known as a child: in the 1920s, he and his family had spent several annual vacations in a nearby village called Angrogna.

I gather his family holidays consisted largely of taking long walks and admiring mountain scenery. So that is what we did, too. I have pictures of us hiking along mountain trails and eating picnics beside streams. Here we are in the Italian Alps; I am looking enviously at my sister’s camera. My father seems very formally dressed – perhaps it was a Sunday.

I don’t know what Angrogna is like now, but back then, it didn’t seem to have changed much since the 1920s. My father happily recognized his family’s old haunts. Indeed, the photo below, which he took on that trip, resembles a watercolour my grandmother painted several decades earlier, with the addition of a few cars. And the three of us. (What do you suppose had caught our attention on the left?)

After a few days of mountain walking, we set off again, by train from Turin to Paris. I suppose we would have arrived at the Gare de Lyon. That must have been my first view of the city.

Where did we stay? My memory is that the hotel was not very big, on a narrow street opening into the Place de la Madeleine. The only street that fits that description is the Passage de la Madeleine, on which is located the Hotel Lido at number 4. It was well-established at the time and apparently quite cheap. So that might have been the place. Or not; memory does play tricks.

What did we do? Here my memories are overladen by those from subsequent trips and, alas, my father took only a couple of photographs. But there is one of us walking by the Seine and another of Alison and me pushing around a toy sailboat on the pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg. I do remember that.

After a few days, we moved on. Train to Calais, ferry to Dover, train to London, train to Edinburgh, train to North Berwick, journey’s end.

So that is how I first saw Paris. We went back as a family when I was a teenager, and there were two memorable school trips before I returned to study at the Sorbonne. In 1983, my father and I found ourselves in Paris – once again by mistake. We were supposed to be in Russia. This time, it wasn’t my fault. But that is another story altogether.

Text by Philippa Campsie; photographs by John Campsie.

Posted in Family history, Paris hotels, Paris nostalgia, Paris travel | Tagged Angrogna, Gare de Lyon, Hotel Lido, Jardin du Luxembourg, John Campsie, Malta, Passage de la Madeleine, Place de la Madeleine, Rome, St. Andrew's Scots Church Valletta, Torre Pellice, Valletta | 48 Comments

Walls within walls

Posted on February 2, 2014 by Parisian Fields

According to an old proverb, “Good fences make good neighbours.” It may or may not be true. But do good walls make good cities? Or, more simply, do walls help make cities? It seems that a wall built during the reign of Philippe II, known as Philippe Auguste, may have helped Paris become the city it is now. Or maybe that process started earlier, with a wall that archaeologists are just beginning to discover.

I knew of Philippe Auguste’s wall, because we had seen the part that is still visible in the Marais. A few years ago, we rented an apartment nearby and we used to pass the wall and the sports ground in front of it on our way to and from Monoprix and the Village St-Paul.

More recently, I found a map dating from the 1820s showing Paris under the reign of Philippe Auguste that was published in Histoire physique, civile et morale de Paris depuis les premiers temps historiques jusqu’à nos jours, by Jacques Antoine Dulaure.

I realized I knew nothing of the king who had a name like mine. So I went looking for him.

Philippe II succeeded to the throne of France (at that time a much smaller entity than today’s republic) in 1180. He was considered a pretty good king as kings go, but his track record as a husband is dismal. His first marriage was contracted when he was 15 and the bride, Isabelle of Hainault, was 10 years old. He didn’t take to her, and was on the point of seeking a divorce from her until somebody gently reminded him that if he did that, he would have to give back her dowry (it consisted of rather a lot of land). This argument made an impression, and Isabelle stayed. She bore him a son and died in 1190.

Shortly thereafter, Philippe went on the Third Crusade with Richard the Lionheart of England (when Richard was imprisoned and Philippe did not come to his aid, the former allies became deadly enemies – but that’s another story). On his return from the Holy Land, Philippe married Ingeburg of Denmark. Nobody knows what happened on the wedding night in 1193, but the very next morning, he sent her away. He took another wife (or concubine) called Agnes de Méranie, who went on to bear him two children.

The pope was furious and ordered the closing of all churches in France to force Philippe to renounce Agnes and take back Ingeburg. Philippe refused and it was only the death of Agnes in 1201 that ended the standoff. Philippe eventually recalled Ingeburg as queen (although he still didn’t want her as his wife – you do wonder what on earth happened on their wedding night). Ingeburg put a brave face on it, reigned as queen, and managed to outlive Philippe when he died in 1223.

All of which has nothing to do with the wall. Unless Philippe built it to protect himself from irate in-laws.

Colin Jones, in Paris: Biography of a City, notes that the wall was never used defensively, since the city was never besieged while it was in place, but it was an important symbol and helped consolidate the city. As he puts it:

This was power architecture. It made Paris the most heavily – and the most conspicuously – defended military stronghold in western Europe… The choice of Paris as royal capital meant that the cronies and clients of the monarch became eager to establish themselves in the city… high courtiers built permanent residences.

Before this time, courtiers had tended to camp out – grandly, with servants and cloth-of-gold tents, but camping nonetheless. Now they were putting down roots.

Jones adds: “Building the wall was a way of inhibiting external expansion and stimulating the consolidation of undeveloped land within the walls.” Today this is known as growth management or urban intensification and is intended to combat suburban sprawl. Philippe was way ahead of the curve on that one.

The map shows plenty of undeveloped land to build on, as the wall enclosed vineyards (“vignes”) and farms (“terres en culture”). Note the route of the Bièvre – a canal has been built from its original route that empties near the Ile de la Cité. Apparently you can still see the archway under the wall that allowed the passage of the canal. Today it lies underneath a post office at 30 bis, rue Cardinal Lemoine.

There are a dozen or so gates (portes) and posterns (poternes), and four towers where the wall met the river – Tour de Nesle, Tour qui fait le coin, Porte Barbelle sur l’Eau (elsewhere called Barbeau), Tournelle. All gone now, although the name Tournelle persists in the name of a bridge.

This modern picture shows what the Tour de Nesle might have looked like.*

But Philippe was not the only wall builder. If you look closely at the map, you can see something called the “Seconde Enceinte” (Second Wall) faintly traced in yellow on both sides of the river. One section is labelled “Accroissem^t de l’Enceinte” (Enlargement of the Wall).

Dulaure dates this wall to the early 12^th century; other historians had suggested that it was built much earlier, at the end of the Roman period. To support his argument, Dulaure cites a poem containing a detailed account of the Viking raids on Paris in the 9^th century and insists that if there had been a wall around Paris at the time, the poet would have said so. It makes sense.

Colin Jones mentions a wall defending some of the churches on the Right Bank, but considers it a late Roman addition. My historical atlases do not mention or show this earlier wall. However, in 2009, the Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives (INRAP) found traces of a medieval wall at the intersection of the rue de l’Arbre Sec and the rue de Rivoli in the 1st arrondissement.

INRAP calls it the “second wall” and dates it from the 10^th or 11^th century. There is a short video on the INRAP website showing the excavation. Here’s the Google satellite view. That’s the rue de Rivoli at the bottom.

The archaeologist interviewed on the video notes that there is no documentation for the wall; nonetheless, starting in the 18^th century, historians began to suspect the existence of a wall inside that of Philippe Auguste and had theories about its location and gates. Dulaure was one. And his instincts were right about the date.

Dulaure’s map also shows a second wall on the Left Bank as well as the Right. He has some evidence from documents about its location, which at its easternmost extent, is shown running alongside the canal de Bièvre. INRAP hasn’t confirmed this part yet, but my money’s on Dulaure. I’m sure it’s there.

Maybe, just maybe, this was the wall that helped start Paris on what Colin Jones calls “the greatest quantum leap in the history of Paris, before or since. Not much more than a dot on the map even in 1100, by the end of the twelfth century it was the largest city in Christendom and a pre-eminent cultural and intellectual centre.” Perhaps this medieval enclosure played a role far larger than anyone imagines.

Text by Philippa Campsie; photograph taken in the Marais by Norman Ball. Map images from Gallica, satellite view from Google Earth, painting of the Tour de Nesle from Wikipedia.

This website has a complete list of the remaining pieces of the Philippe Auguste wall that are still visible.

*The name of the Tour de Nesle was immortalized in another royal scandal 100 years after Philippe Auguste’s reign, as the site of adulterous assignations between the daughters-in-law of the king (Philip IV) and their lovers. When these liaisons came to light, the men were tortured and executed and the women were imprisoned. In the 19^th century, Alexandre Dumas turned this event into a play called La Tour de Nesle.

Sources: John W. Baldwin, Paris, 1200, Stanford University Press, 2010; Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City, Penguin, 2004.

Posted in Paris history | Tagged Agnes de Méranie, Alexandre Dumas, canal de Bièvre, Colin Jones, Ingeburg of Denmark, INRAP, Isabelle of Hainault, Jacques Antoine Dulaure, John W. Baldwin, nstitut national de recherches archéologiques préventives, Philippe Auguste, Philippe II, Pope Innocent III, Porte Barbelle sur l’Eau, Tour de Nesle, Tour qui fait le coin, Tournelle | 3 Comments

Pugin’s Picturesque Paris

Posted on January 19, 2014 by Parisian Fields

For us, no trip to Paris is complete without time browsing through racks, boxes or bins of old engravings of Paris. We find them at antique fairs, flea markets, galleries, book stores and many other places. Quite a few were originally published as part of books long since disassembled.

This is one of a half-dozen prints we bought one afternoon at an antiques fair outside the Saint-Sulpice church in June 2013. Initially attracted by the view of the Tour St. Jacques, it was the lesser details on the river that caught our attention. The floating bathhouse for women (Bains des Dames) spoke of an important part of Paris life. And what is the story behind the sinking vessel in the foreground?

This view of the Canal de l’Ourcq also attracted me with its exaggerated perspective and height. I did not hesitate to put in the purchase pile.

Both engravings bore the inscription “A. Pugin Dirext.” immediately below the image. It meant that Pugin was not the artist, but the one who had supervised the work. The Paris-born Augustus Charles Pugin (1762–1832) was a renowned artist, writer on mediaeval architecture, and draftsman.

Philippa used some of these images in a blog on the old customs houses of Paris. But we wanted to know more about the source of the illustrations.

Then, in early November, we attended the Toronto International Antiquarian Book Fair, where we enjoyed looking at the books on display and meeting old friends. Gordon Russell of Alexander Books in Ancaster, Ontario, told us he had a book that “might be of interest.”

The object of interest had clearly not had a happy life. There was water damage, the binding was fragile with one hinge broken, and the other was ready to go. But it was already an old friend, nonetheless, and it seemed our duty to rescue it. This is how we became the owners of Paris and its Environs Displayed in a Series of Picturesque Views. The drawings made under the direction of Mr. Pugin, and engraved under the superintendence of Mr. C. [Charles] Heath, with topographical and historical descriptions.

Volume I had been published in London in 1830 by Robert Jennings (62 Cheapside) and Volume II the following year by the renamed Jennings and Chaplin at the same address. Each volume contained 100 engravings plus accompanying text in French and English.

We were thrilled to own the book, but concerned about its fragility. Fortunately, Toronto bookbinder Kate Murdoch of Taylor-Murdoch-Beatty bookbinders turned it into a sturdy volume that will easily last another century or more.

Now we can browse the book with no worries that it will fall apart. It allows us to enter the Paris of the 1820s. Some of the scenes have disappeared completely, some have been changed dramatically; but every image is intriguing. So come browse a few images with me.

The title page above is one of the most damaged pages in the book. It also leads to an intriguing story about the statue(s) of Henry IV which it portrays.

The Pont Neuf was started in the reign of Henry III and finished in the reign of Henry IV. Composed of two parts of unequal length that meet on the Ile de la Cité, it is here that a famous statue of Henry IV was erected. But the story of the statue is more complicated than most people realize.

The story starts far away from Paris. Ferdinand, Grand Duke of Tuscany, planned a magnificent equestrian statue of himself. He began by arranging to have a colossal bronze horse cast, but his own death prevented the casting of his own statue to ride the horse. The riderless horse eventually ended up in the hands of Marie de Medici, regent of France, who had it shipped to France.

The ship carrying it was wrecked on the coast of Normandy. The horse “was, however, by immense efforts, dragged from its watery grave, and finally conducted in triumph to Paris.” Still riderless, it was set upon the Pont Neuf and eventually became known simply as the Cheval de Bronze, until a statue of Henry IV was added.

The statue suffered indignities during the Revolution and “in 1792, when the revolutionists were short of cannon, the horse and rider disappeared,” presumably melted down for cannon. Henri and his horse returned after the Bourbon restoration, when another statue was erected on the same spot. This is the statue we see today.

The Canal de l’Ourcq shown above has the intriguing subtitle, “Sous la fontaine de l’éléphant” (under the elephant fountain). What elephant would that be?

The image is described as “the model in wood of the celebrated bronze Elephant which Napoleon designed to erect in the Place de la Bastille.” Had the decree of February 9, 1810, been carried out, it would have been quite something. The elephant and its proposed castle or tower would have risen to a height of 24 metres (72 feet). The legs were two metres in diameter and one would have had a winding staircase for visitors to climb. The whole thing was to be cast in bronze from the “cannon taken from the ‘Spanish insurgents.’ ” The foundation masonry was constructed, but that was as far as it went. “The ‘Spanish insurgents’ were destined to overthrow this amongst other colossal schemes of Napoleon.” (For the full story of the elephant, read this post on the excellent blog Culture & Stuff.)

However, Napoleon did succeed in another venture made of melted-down cannons, with the Colonne de la Place Vendôme. The square now known as the Place Vendôme was created in 1699. Until the Revolution, it had been dominated by an equestrian statue of Louis XIV. This, like the Henri IV statue, eventually fell victim to the Revolutionaries.

Later, Napoleon decided this would be the perfect location to celebrate his recent victories. Inspired by the Roman column of Trajan, Napoleon’s column, completed in 1810, rose to a height of 44.3 metres. Built of stone, it is clad in bas-reliefs cast in bronze. And the source of the bronze? Melting down “twelve hundred pieces of cannon, taken from the Russian and Austrian armies.”

Pugin’s book is full of stories like these, written at a time when the Revolution and Napoleon were still part of living memory.

For example, the Tour St. Jacques is all that remains of a church demolished by the Revolutionaries in 1793. However, their zeal was somewhat tempered, as the church was sold so the stone could be re-used for building materials on the condition that the tower would be preserved. There appears to have been no restrictions put on the use of the tower. As the text of Paris and its Environs notes, “The tower, passing into the hands of private persons, has been converted into a patent shot manufactory.”

This sounds like a curious use, but one well suited to the tower’s height of about 50 metres. Lead shot consists of spheres of lead of varying sizes used in firearms, particularly shotguns. It can be made by pouring molten lead through a sieve into water, but in 1782 William Watts of Bristol, England, patented an improved method that put the sieve high above the ground. The molten lead was poured through a sieve and cooled as it fell; the surface tension of the liquid lead formed spheres which fell into water, where they cooled. The height of the Tour St. Jacques proved ideal for this purpose. Later the City of Paris purchased the tower and square.

I find this sort of detail fascinating. More images and stories from Paris and its Environs will find their way into subsequent blogs. However, I should like to close with a few words about this work, drawn from an excellent article, “Paris and its environs: Augustus Charles Pugin’s view of the city” by Andrea Quinlan from the British Art Journal.

The Paris-born Pugin (1762–1832) was a prolific artist who spent most of his life in England. But beginning in 1819, he made frequent trips to France with art students and his son, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, an architect whose reputation eventually overshadowed that of his father. The many watercolours the group painted formed the basis of subsequent engravings for this book.

The text was by L.T. Ventouillac. Born in Calais in 1798, Ventouillac came to England in 1816, and became a professor of French literature and language at the Royal College of London in 1830. Ventouillac had “published a number of books on French language and culture” before writing the text for these images.

Paris and its Environs was Pugin’s way of recovering from a financial trough after losing a lawsuit. The book was intended for a middle-class audience and was an early type of travel guide. Not everyone enjoyed such books. One contemporary writer grouped it in with other travel guides as “the damdest, lying, ill got up, money-getting clap-trap possible” while another praised it, noting “the name of Mr. Pugin was a guarantee for the excellence of the drawings…and the superintendence of Mr. Heath was an assurance that the pencil would be done justice to by the burin.”

Who cares if Pugin’s motives were mainly to make money? I have been paid for books and articles I write. Nearly 200 years later, I am grateful to him for capturing a Paris that has largely disappeared. The book preserves the city as it looked after the Revolution and before the changes instigated by Napoleon III and Haussmann, a view seldom seen these days.

Text by Norman Ball

Posted in Paris art, Paris history | Tagged Alexander Books, Andrea Quinlan, Augustus Charles Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, Canal de l’Ourcq, Charles Heath, Fontaine de l’éléphant, Gordon Russell, Henry IV, Jennings and Chaplin, Kate Murdoch, L.T. Ventouillac, Lead shot, Marie de Medici, Napoleon Bonaparte, Paris and its Environs, Place Vendôme, Pont Neuf, Robert Jennings, Taylor-Murdoch-Beatty bookbinders, Toronto International Antiquarian Book Fair, Tour St. Jacques, William Watts | 11 Comments

Lutetia, viewed by a 19th-century historian

Posted on January 5, 2014 by Parisian Fields

I have a weakness – no, a fondness – no, a passion for old maps of Paris. On a visit a year or so ago, I bought three old maps from an antiquarian bookseller. During our annual New Year’s tidy-up, I came across those maps again and realized I had never taken the time to study them closely.

They had been published in Histoire physique, civile et morale de Paris depuis les premiers temps historiques jusqu’à nos jours, by Jacques Antoine Dulaure in about 1825. The maps were created by Jacques-Marie Hacq using information provided by Dulaure.

This one, from the first volume in this multi-volume work, is called “Paris under Roman domination” and includes elements of the Roman city that had been discovered by archaeologists up to that point. Much more is known now, but Dulaure did his best with the available information and with some creative theorizing. So what you see here is not a map of Roman-era Paris, it is a map of what an early 19^th-century historian knew and conjectured about Roman-era Paris. Which in some ways is even more interesting.

Note the number of islands in the middle of the river – five. Only the Ile de la Cité is identified (as Lutetia Cité); the others are left blank. If the Romans used these islands, they left no traces that had been found as of the 1820s. Other maps show different numbers and configurations of islands, but historians agree that there were once several in the Seine here. Only two remain. (The third-largest and the furthest upstream, once known as the Ile Louviers, is now part of the Right Bank.)

The areas on both left and right banks are labelled as “Faubourgs” (suburbs) and many tombs are marked (tombs survive when traces of the living have been erased). To the east are marshes (marais) and plains (prairies), to the north west are forests, marshes and sandy areas (sables), and only the southwest part of the area is (Dulaure presumes) devoted to agriculture.

The map also shows roads leading out of the city in all directions, two dead-straight aqueducts (an overground one from Chaillot and an underground one from Arcueil), and the Bièvre River (with some small islands of its own), before it was channelled and redirected to empty into the Seine farther downstream.

Lutetia Cité, hand–painted a faint pink, contains a fortress, a prison (Prison de Glaucin et Tour de Marquefas* – Hacq renders this as Tour de Margnefas), an altar to Jupiter, a marketplace (Place du Commerce), a “cippe antique” (funerary monument), and something vaguely marked “Antiquités” roughly where Notre Dame Cathedral is today.

Dulaure describes each of these elements and explains why he has placed them where he has, using evidence from older texts, archaeological discoveries, etymology, and oral traditions. For example, he says he knows that there was a prison on the island, because it is mentioned in the writings of Gregory of Tours in the 6^th century. He placed it where the flower market is now because there were earlier churches here with names that indicated their proximity to a prison. As theories go, it’s not bad.

On the Left Bank is a huge “Palais des Thermes,” with spacious gardens, bordered to the west by a short canal. The size and orientation of the palace are approximate, but the Roman baths now incorporated into the Cluny Museum would have been part of this complex. (This not-very-good photo shows some of the Roman brickwork in the frigidarium at Cluny.)

Dulaure adds the garden to the west (he notes that other historians do not mention a garden) with the explanation that Roman baths and major buildings were usually associated with gardens and that 6^th-century accounts refer to a garden here. He notes that it was later called “Clos de Lias.” Clos means vineyard, and he traces the origin of Lias as a version of the French article Le plus a modified version of “Arx,” meaning palace or citadel.

The canal marked as “La Petite Seine” to the west of the gardens of the Palais des Thermes lies roughly where the rue Bonaparte is now. There was a stream emptying into the Seine at about this point (now buried), but it is not clear when it was turned into a canal. Some historians had suggested that it was built much later, connected to the moat of the fortified Abbaye St-Germain (the Abbey and its fortifications came long after the Romans had departed). Dulaure disagrees. He insists that the canal was useless as a defence against invaders, and notes the discovery in 1806 of some large foundation stones and gold medals dating from the 3^rd century in this spot. He concludes it was an ancient construction, possibly built to enhance the Roman gardens.

On the Right Bank is the Place Tudella – spelled Tndella on the map (Hacq was clearly a bit sloppy with spelling). Dulaure says that Tudella was a common name in ancient France that designates a fortification. Another French antiquarian, however, writing in 1753, had suggested that the name comes from the Latin word for mallet (tudes), and that this was a place on which a game was played with mallets (the jeu de mail, which was rather like croquet). Not sure I can visualize the ancient Romans playing croquet, so I’d give Dulaure the benefit of the doubt on that one.

The Arena now known as the Arènes de Lutèce is shown on the map, but its location would have been mere conjecture in the 1820s. Apparently it had long been known that an arena had existed on the Left Bank, but its remains were not discovered until excavations for a tramway in the 1860s. On this map it appears on the side of a hill labelled “Mont Locutitius.” This is where Mont St-Genevieve is now. Today part of the arena has been excavated and is open to the skies.

Here and there Dulaure has noted a few archaeological discoveries, such as the “Tête de Cybèle trouvée à l’extremité orientale de la Rue Coquillière” (Head of Cybèle found at the eastern end of rue Coquillière). Cybèle was a mother goddess and a bronze head depicting her (she wears a castle on her head like a crown) was found in 1657 near the church of St-Eustache. The head, the authenticity and provenance of which have been questioned, is now in the collection of the Musée des monnaies, médailles et antiques of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Another site is marked as “Autel à Bacchus depuis S. Benoit et S. Bacchus.” The altar would have been dedicated to the Roman god of wine and festivity, but St Bacchus (no relation) was a 4^th-century Christian martyr from Syria. A church built here called St-Benoit-le-Bétourné celebrated St Bacchus and his fellow martyr, St-Serge. (“Bétourné” refers to the fact that the church was the wrong way around – normally churches are oriented with the altar to the east, but this one had its altar to the west.)

About 150 years after Dulaure wrote his book, a group of historians recreated what they knew about the city in Roman times, in a map created for an exhibit in the Carnavalet Museum in 1984 and republished in Atlas de Paris. There are differences from Dulaure’s map, but on the whole Dulaure holds up pretty well.

In future blogs, we’ll look at the maps of 13^th-century and 16^th-century Paris from Dulaure’s book.

Text by Philippa Campsie; original photograph of the Arènes de Lutèce by Norman Ball; original photograph of the Cluny Museum by Philippa Campsie. Final map by Jean-Pierre Adam and Philippe Velay, from Atlas de Paris, Parigramme, 1999. The image of the map itself is the Gallica version, because mine is too large for my scanner. Other images are from the Google Books version of Dulaure.

For more information about Roman-era Paris, we highly recommend the website Paris, A Roman City.

* The Tour de Marquefas was later called the Tour-Roland and Victor Hugo uses that name in Notre Dame de Paris, 1831, published a few years after Dulaure’s history. Hugo’s book also refers to the Prison de Glaucin. It is possible that Hugo had a copy of Dulaure and referred to it in recreating medieval Paris.

Posted in Paris history, Paris maps | Tagged Abbaye St-Germain, aqueducts, Arènes de Lutèce, Bièvre River, Bibliothèque Nationale, Carnavalet Museum, cippe antique, Clos de Lias, Cluny Museum, Cybèle, Gregory of Tours, Histoire physique civile et morale de Paris depuis les premiers temps historiques jusqu'à nos jours, Ile de la Cité, Ile Louviers, Jacques Antoine Dulaure, Jacques-Marie Hacq, Jean-Pierre Adam, jeu de mail, La Petite Seine, Lutèce, Lutetia, Mont Locutitius, Musée des monnaies médailles et antiques, Notre Dame Cathedral, Palais des Thermes, Philippe Velay, Place Tudella, Prison de Glaucin, Roman-era Paris, St Bacchus, St-Benoit-le-Bétourné, Tour de Marquefas, Victor Hugo | 13 Comments

Hark the Herald

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Parisian Fields

In casting about for a Christmassy theme for this week’s blog, I thought about angels. Angels have prominent roles in the Christmas story, and I had photographed lots of them in Paris, hadn’t I? Or had I?

Well, yes and no. There are winged creatures aplenty in Paris, but not all are angels. The golden figure on top of the Colonne de Juillet is the Spirit of Liberty. The Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre is pre-Christian. The Pont Alexandre III is graced with winged horses. And the winged being in the statue that greets those entering the Petit Palais is the Gloria Victis – the spirit of fame carrying a dying soldier.*

But angels, hm.

Then I remembered a funny little shop in Montmartre we had seen during a visit in December 2010.

La Boutique des Anges sold angel-themed items, but pictures of its front window showed that most featured what I’d call putti – chubby babies with wings, found in both religious and secular art, and sometimes depicted in the role of Cupid (who was, after all, a Greek god).

Putti are everywhere, I found as I looked through my photos. There is a stout pair in the 16^th arrondissement on rue Raynouard that Norman calls the “sumo cherubs,” because they appear to be wrestling.

There are quite a few on facades – here are two in need of a good cleaning.

Putti also appear on the front of the mairie of the 7th arrondissement.

And a putto hugs an unimpressed-looking lion in front of the Palais de la Découverte. The lion appears to absent-mindedly chewing on the putto‘s garland of flowers.

Putti are everywhere in Paris. This image from the Raphael Sistine Madonna, glued to the front of a Vespa, seems to sum up a certain Parisian attitude to art.

But I wanted to find a herald angel, like Gabriel in paintings of the Annunciation.

That made me think of the rue de l’Annonciation in Passy. Sure enough, just over the door to the church of Notre Dame de Grace de Passy on that street, there is an image of Gabriel making the announcement to Mary.

And I thought of the photographs of Pamela Williams and went looking in my images of Père Lachaise. I found another angel.

The Val-de-Grâce, about which we have written before, is filled with angels. They are in the ceiling…

…playing musical instruments on the doors of confession boxes…

…and guarding secret doors to who knows what.

The Cluny Museum has angels with trumpets.

We even found one on the façade of the Hotel Roblin near the Place de la Madeleine.

Angels grace the blackened fragment of the façade of the Tuileries that has come to rest behind the Hotel Carnavalet.

But what pleased me particularly was to find one on the roofline of a building just off the Avenue de la Grande Armée, because the building had been designed by Gustave Rives, about whom I have written in more than one previous blog.

I’d inventoried the buildings designed by Rives for a Wikipedia entry and photographed many of them in Paris, but it was only when I went through my photos that I spotted the angels, high up where few might see them, gazing over the rooftops.

But these are just the stone angels that anyone can see. We have met many real angels in Paris. They are the people who help us find places to stay, who recommend places to visit, who help us in our our research quests, who invite us into their homes. Our Paris is full of living, breathing angels.

We are not in Paris this Christmas,but we think of the many angels who have helped us during previous visits there. We have been blessed many times over by angels who make our visits memorable.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good visit to Paris, whenever you are there. May you also find Paris angels who contribute to your visit and help you understand more about this extraordinary city.

Text by Philippa Campsie. photographs by Philippa Campsie and Norman Ball.

* This bronze by Antonin Mercié was a memorial to those who lost their lives in the France-Prussian War.

Rosemary Flannery has filled a book with images of angels in Paris, which sounds like a delightful project and an interesting way to learn about the city’s history.

Posted in Paris architecture, Paris churches, Paris streets | Tagged Antonin Mercié, Avenue de la Grande Armée, Cluny Museum, Gustave Rives, Hotel Carnavalet, Hotel Roblin, Paris angels, Petit Palais, Rosemary Flannery, rue de l'Annonciation, Tuileries Palace, Val de Grace | 6 Comments

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