A little mystery solved

Posted on November 24, 2013 by Parisian Fields

Curiosity, plus an interest in Paris, has led us to many surprising finds and some unusual encounters. A recent purchase at the Toronto International Antiquarian Book Fair is a case in point.

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It was a one-of-a-kind object: a handmade, illustrated, unbound book dated 1934, titled La Mode Féminine, dedicated to the School Sisters of Notre Dame by one Stewart Monaghan. Here is the description from the vendor, the Kelmscott Bookshop of Baltimore:

This unique item is a compilation of sixteen handwritten poems written in the 18th century about women, each illustrated by a pretty hand-colored original drawing of a woman in the attire of the period…. A charming item, although Mr. Monaghan’s reasons for creating and dedicating it to the School Sisters is unknown.

The handmade book was held together by boards covered in mauve cloth, edged with black lace, with pink ribbon closings. Not the sort of thing that one would expect to be dedicated to an order of nuns by a man. There had to be a story there.

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When I got home, I entered the name “Stewart Monaghan” into ancestry.com, the genealogical website. The name appeared in a record from the 1930 census of the United States. Stewart Monaghan was listed as the grandson of one Cora Stewart of Baltimore, living on Guilford Street.

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That made sense: the bookshop was in Baltimore, and the book itself was preserved in a cardboard box labelled Hutzler Brothers Co., a department store in Baltimore that was a fixture from 1858 to its closure in 1990.

The Stewart Monaghan in the 1930 census was about 12, so he would have been about 16 or so in 1934, when the book was created.

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I Googled the head of the family, Cora Stewart, on Guilford Street in Baltimore. Her name appeared in a number of articles in the Baltimore Sun written by the columnist Jacques Kelly, who was clearly a descendant of Cora’s. I sent him an e-mail.

Bingo! Jacques Kelly responded within a few hours and explained why Stewart Monaghan had created a book dedicated to an order of Catholic teaching nuns:

Let me clear up the mystery of Stewart Monaghan. Her full name, as christened, was Margery (it sometimes appeared as Marjorie) Stewart Monaghan, my mother. She hated Margery or Marjorie and NEVER used it. Stewart was her mother’s maiden name. She was an adored child and an adored adult. Her married name was Kelly and as “Stew” Kelly she was known by the cardinal-archbishop, governor and mayor.

She was born Sept. 23, 1917, and spent 16 years, first grade through college graduation in 1939, with the School Sisters of Notre Dame in Baltimore, now called Notre Dame of Maryland University. … How such a document escaped her clutches is a miracle as she saved everything, down to homework assignments of all her six children.

There is a lesson in there about the trustworthiness of census results. And about gender roles. It is hard to imagine a young man in the 1930s creating such a book and dedicating it to a group of nuns; but quite easy to imagine a teenaged girl doing the same thing.

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My next question was about the inspiration for the book. The fashion plates were stylish, and it seemed improbable that a 17-year-old girl would have the knowledge and artistic gifts to create such drawings from scratch.

In fact, they were copies or tracings. La Mode Féminine was a series of historic fashion plates, printed in Paris using the labour-intensive pochoir process (also favoured by George Barbier), and published in 1929. The creator was Henri Rouit, art director of the fashionable revue Art-Goût-Beauté.* Sets of his little books are still available on eBay and used-book websites; indeed, the complete set was sold at auction on November 12, 2013 (the starting price was 400 Euros). I, ahem, did not bid.

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I wonder how Stewart came across the French fashion plates. They had been published only five years before she created her own book; in those days that was quite a rapid transfer from France to the United States. Did her family own a set? Did the convent library contain images of women in fetching hats and décolleté gowns? Did she see only the 18th-century plates, or did she have access to the full set (which ranges from the 15th to the 20th century) and choose these images specifically? I will never know.

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The poetry ranges from courtly poems to romantic ballads to lover’s complaints. It is interesting to imagine this convent-schooled young woman choosing these 18th-century lyrics to go with her French fashion plates. The first one is an excerpt from The School for Scandal by Richard Sheridan. The one shown below, by Oliver Goldsmith, has an unexpected ending. I’m beginning to think that the School Sisters of Notre Dame were not your average teaching nuns.

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Thanks to Jacques Kelly, I know how the story turns out. Stewart went on to university, graduating with a master’s degree, became a social worker, and in 1949, married newspaper writer Joseph B. Kelly and had six children: four girls, two boys. She lived all her life in the house on Guilford Street in which she grew up. She sounds somewhat larger than life and full of energy and interests. In a 2009 column, Kelly wrote:

She was made to order for Baltimore because of her lack of pretense and her love of people, whom she cultivated by the hundreds. She was a great worker of the telephone – her calling hour began about 9:30 at night and was accompanied by clouds of Lucky Strike cigarette smoke. Using a clipboard, she was a letter and note writer and could say much in few words. She wrote quickly and kept the impressions coming. Alongside her telephone-tobacco chair was a pile of murder mysteries, many from the Pratt Library.

She sounds like someone I would have enjoyed meeting. She died in 1993, aged 75, never having visited France.

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Chances are, she forgot all about the little book she made for her teachers at the convent. It probably sat in a drawer or bookcase until someone did a clear-out and sent it, probably with other books, to the Kelmscott Bookshop, whose owners brought it to Toronto. Now it is part of my library, complete with provenance, “unknown” no more.

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Text by Philippa Campsie, illustrations by M. Stewart Monaghan after Henri Rouit.

*The journal had several names throughout its life. First (1920-21), it was called Les Succès d’Art. Goût. Bon Ton. Briefly, it was Art. Goût. Bon Ton. Finally, from 1921 to 1930, it was called Art. Goût. Beauté. Throughout these changes, the initials (AGB) matched those of the publisher – who was actually a silk merchant: Albert Godde, Bedin and Company. For more information on this publication, I recommend an article by Patricia Morris in the California State Library Foundation Bulletin.  Otherwise, not much is known about Henri Rouit. I may have to investigate.
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An artist finds life among the tombs

Posted on November 10, 2013 by Parisian Fields

When I look at Pamela Williams’s photographs of sculptures, I feel I am seeing real people.

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This photo, which she calls “Glance,” was taken in 2010 in Passy Cemetery. It is so realistic, one almost does a double-take.

The once-lustrous marble has weathered so that it looks like skin with pores. Over the years, dust and pollution have added highlights and emphasis to parts of the face such as the nose and lips. Alas, since this photo was taken, the statue has been cleaned. The last time Pamela saw it, some of the magic had departed with the dirt.

The Toronto-based photographer has spent the last few years capturing the poses, expressions, and emotions of sculptures in cemeteries in Paris, Rome, Milan, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Havana, and Buenos Aires.

Why cemetery sculpture? Years ago, a friend gave Pamela a copy of the book Permanent Parisians: An Illustrated Guide to the Cemeteries of Paris.* Pamela, who had studied fine arts at York University in Toronto, suddenly saw sculpture in a new light. Instead of being captured inside a museum under controlled light and climate, the works of art were outdoors, exposed to weather and pollution. They changed over time.

She had already been drawn to realistic sculpture. As she explains, “I am able to photograph the work from angles so that I can make it appear human.” She photographs using natural light, without reflectors or flashes and uses traditional film to create portraits of people who just happen to be in stone or bronze, rather than flesh.

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The weathered bronze she calls “Repose” is in Montmartre Cemetery and dates from about 1880. The elongated figure was hard to photograph. It was hard to find the right angle, and Pamela had to wait some time for the right light to “make it appear human.”

“Repose” graces a family tomb and is intended to be decorative rather than a portrait of either the deceased or the bereaved. It might signify beauty, grief, or the grace of a dancer at rest. Or all three.

When Pamela returned years later to see how time had altered it, the area was closed off so that the authorities could spray for weeds. Such are the hazards of pursuing outdoor sculpture.

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“Lament” is a poignant bronze sculpture, also in Montmartre Cemetery. It expresses the grief of a mother who in 1910 lost her 20-year-old son, Robert Didsbury. Exposed to the elements, the bronze has oxidized to a variegated green and the white splotches and tracks from water add to the dramatic sense of suffering and loss. The sculptor was Robert’s mother. Her anguish is real and time has only added to it.

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With digital cameras, we see an image immediately. Traditional film photographers are often surprised when they develop the film and print their contact sheets. Pamela found this sculpture in a partially protected alcove in Père Lachaise; it ends below the shoulder and at first seemed rather ordinary. It was only when she took a closer look at the print that she found it increasingly interesting. She calls it “Cameo.”

Pamela Williams’s photos have appeared in many publications. In 1998 McClelland and Stewart reissued The Stone Angel by the late Canadian writer Margaret Laurence, first published in 1964. In search of a suitable cover illustration, the art department contacted Pamela and asked her to bring in all of her angel photos. None were used. The reason? Editorial insisted that an angel would be far too literal. In the end, the cover featured “Cameo.”

In a short essay in a collection of Pamela’s photographs called Death Divine: Photographs of Cemetery Sculpture from Paris, Milan, Rome, Randall Robertson writes, “Sensational monuments from the late nineteenth century fill Parisian cemeteries. The dead may be invisible, but their memorials definitely are not. For those with money, memorial sculpture was the most accepted, even the most expected, way to commemorate the family—to proclaim the private in a public cultural space…. Wealthy families hired the best sculptors…[and] in virtuosic depictions of hair and skin, these artists created faces and figures so lifelike that one comes to believe in their existence.”

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Although many funerary sculptures were unique pieces, there were exceptions. Some forms were used more than once by the sculptor and some were copied. The image that Pamela calls “Cherub with Broken Foot” is a marble sculpture in Père Lachaise. She has seen copies in other cemeteries, including one in bronze.

A few years ago, Pamela was contacted by a widower who wanted photos of a particularly beautiful angel. To honour his late wife, he wanted to commission a sculptor to create a copy. Pamela sold him some of her photographs. She later found out that the widower had hired a sculptor to go to the European cemetery to study the original and make a copy one and a half times the size of the original sculpture. Pamela said the original sculpture was so popular in its day that she could have directed the widower and the sculptor to good copies in American cemeteries.

Pamela returns to Paris from time to time to continue her photography of sculpture. Recently she has taken small groups of private students. Yes, they visit cemeteries, but also galleries and museums. And she has rediscovered the joys of photographing sculptures inside museums and galleries. She calls the image below simply “Paris Statue.”

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I have seen other other shots of the same statue, but in hers I could see what she had told me earlier about searching for the angle and the light to make it look human. The one shown here is bathed in light from a skylight and captured by an artist so that it looks like a real person.

One might say the same about the image below, a painted wooden sculpture in the Petit Palais.

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We own one of Pamela’s prints, called “Herald.” It shows a stone angel from a Vienna cemetery, taken at an angle that emphasizes the powerful wings and the back of the angel’s head. Although it is not from Paris, it makes us think of our strolls in Paris’s cemeteries and the amazing sculptures that continue to inspire visitors and artists like Pamela Williams.

Text by Norman Ball, photographs by Pamela Williams. Many thanks to Pamela Williams for her artistry, patience, and co-operation.

To see more photos click here. For more information on Pamela’s three books (Death Divine, Last Kiss, and In the Midst of Angels), click here.

*Judi Culbertson, Tom Randall, Permanent Parisians: An Illustrated Guide to the Cemeteries of Paris, Walker and Company, 1996.

For another view of Paris cemeteries, go to “Stained Glass Less Seen.”

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Paris in the First World War

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Parisian Fields

It’s that time of year again. The poppy-sellers are out on the streets of Toronto, and soon, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we will stop what we are doing for a minute or two and think about those who have died in wars both recent and remote.

Sufferings and betrayals in Paris under the German Occupation in the Second World War have been recorded in many memoirs, novels, and movies, but the literature on the city in the First World War is more sparse. I decided to look through our collection of postcards and books to learn more.

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I have two postcards showing Zeppelin damage. Compared with what was to come later, the destruction was fairly limited. The first postcard shows a damaged shopfront (it had sold secondhand goods) and some scattered cobblestones. On either side, children line up to get into the frame of the picture. “Crimes odieux des pirates boches,” says the caption. Clearly the point of the postcard is to stir up anti-German feeling.

The shop was on the rue Ménilmontant in the 20th arrondissement. Look at the number 91 in the top right-hand corner. Amazingly, the building exists to this day – you can still see the distinctive heart-shaped wrought-iron decorations in the windows on Google Street View.

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The second shows more damage, a house cut in half. Someone has written in a location (rue de l’Elisée), but this is wrong. A press photograph of the same site on Gallica (the website of France’s National Library) provides additional information: the raid took place on January 29, 1916, at 34, rue du Borrégo, also in the 20th (which seems to have sustained most of the Zeppelin damage). The owner, one sous-brigadier Bidault, was killed.

FirstWorldWar0002In all, the Zeppelin dropped 19 bombs that time, killing 54 people. A special funeral was held for them at Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix.

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Much greater destruction took place towards the end of the war, when Germans used huge long-range cannons to shell the city from Picardy, 120 km (75 miles) away. Although the nickname “Big Bertha” was given to these cannons, in fact, there were two types. Big Berthas were howitzers, but the enormous “Paris Gun” was much larger and heavier with a longer range. This was the gun that fired a shell that fell came through one of the windows of St-Gervais during the Good Friday service of 29 March 1918, killing 88 people.

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Even so, compared to cities in northern France, Paris emerged from the war relatively unscathed, at least in terms of its streets and buildings. Much more damage had been done in 1870-71, during the Siege and the Commune. Nor did Paris suffer under German occupation in the First World War, the fate of cities such as Lille.

Rather, citizens suffered from shortages and privations, from bereavements as sons and husbands were killed in trench warfare, from the unrelenting pressure of uncertainty as the war dragged on year after year. The city was filled with war wounded and refugees. Life went on in the cafés and shops, and the black market offered luxuries to those who could afford them, but for most people, it was a bleak period of survival and waiting. News was scarce.

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I have two postcards from the Front. The first one was not sent to or from Paris, but it is typical of army correspondence on preprinted cards at that time. H. Vincent, réserviste, writes at some length, with atrocious spelling, to say he has no news. He was serving with the C.O.A. (Commis et Ouvriers militaires d’Administration) – the administrative corps that supported the army. If I’m reading his writing correctly, he was in the 5th  Section of the COA, attached to the 55th Division de Réserve. He writes to Eugène Bailly, also in the C.O.A., 11th Section, stationed in Nantes. Nantes was a huge military centre during the war, with barracks and hospitals for both French and (later) American soldiers.

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H. Vincent ends his message with “enfin patience et courage, bien à toi.” The postmark is obscured, but I know that it reads “Tresor et Postes,” the French military mark. It is impossible to make out the year. However, by comparing my card with images of similar cards online, I believe it was sent early in the war, because the printed part resembles that of other cards sent in 1914.

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The second was sent in August 1918, as the war was finally turning in favour of the Allies. Gone are the flags and coloured printing – the card has been stripped down to the essentials. A soldier (last name Roche) informs Madame Roche (his wife? his mother?) that he was well (alive and not wounded). She lived at 8, rue Mathurin Régnier, in the 15th, in a house that is still there.

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There is nothing more on the card (nothing further was allowed), but probably to his wife or mother, that news was enough and she was glad to receive it.

My last view of First World War Paris comes from the 2001 book by Margaret Macmillan on the Paris Peace Conferences (titled Peacemakers in the U.K. and Paris 1919 in Canada and the U.S.). She describes the city as it appeared to the delegations in January 1919:

Signs of the Great War that had just ended were everywhere: the refugees from the devastated regions in the north; the captured German cannon in the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Elysées; the piles of rubble and boarded-up windows where German bombs had fallen. A gaping crater marked the Tuileries rose garden. Along the Grand Boulevards the ranks of chestnuts had gaps where trees had been cut for firewood. The great windows in the cathedral of Notre-Dame were missing their stained glass, stored for safety; in their place, pale yellow panes washed the interior with a tepid light. There were severe shortages of coal, milk, and bread. French society bore scars too. While the flags of victory fluttered from the lampposts and windows, limbless men and demobilized soldiers in worn army uniforms begged for change on street corners and almost every other woman wore mourning.

The city would not remain sad for long – the hectic gaiety of the 1920s was just around the corner – but for the exhausted populace, peace had not come too soon.

Text by Philippa Campsie.

Posted in Paris churches, Paris history, Paris postcards, Paris streets, World War I | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 21 Comments

George Barbier and the dream of Paris

Posted on October 13, 2013 by Parisian Fields

Every year, millions of people come to Paris dreaming of beauty, elegance, high fashion, personal freedom, decadent leisure, titillating knowledge, romantic affairs, sexual dalliances, and secret places. What they may not realize is that some of their dreams are built on the artistic foundations of Art Deco artist George Barbier (1882–1932) and his contemporaries.

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Years ago, Arthur Smith, librarian at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, fell under the spell of Barbier’s artworks and the technical brilliance with which many were printed. His curiosity and diligence in learning more has led to a stunning exhibition at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

Today, most overseas visitors fly to Paris crammed into crowded airplanes, arriving hot, sweaty and grubby at an unfashionable hour of the day. But Barbier lets us dream that we made the crossing first-class on a transatlantic liner, where we would lounge about, sipping cocktails with glamorous international travellers. This was the world of 1927 he created for an S.S. Île de France menu.

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And when we arrived in Paris, there would be parties at which everyone would be dressed in the height of fashion, ready to dance and flirt, as in L’Amour est aveugle (Love is blind).

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Perhaps the dance would lead to a quiet tête-à-tête with an intriguing stranger in an exquisite garden. And of course one would be the very picture of elegance.

Have those who dream of elegance today been overpowered by fads and ephemeral fashion? Who today would dare proclaim, as did the Journal des dames et des modes did in 1912, that

Elegance resides in the perfect harmony of thoughts, words, acts, gestures, attitudes and costume. It is through costume that elegance expresses itself most quickly. The elegant person should not wear anything conspicuous or extreme. He refrains from colours that are too crude, clothes of eccentric cut, perfumes that are too heavy, jewellery that is too rich, excessive gestures, vocal outbursts, and words that are too strong. The elegant person is the one who makes himself noticed by means of discretion.*

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Ah, discretion. So important. As it is for this lady garbed in an afternoon dress from the House of Paquin. Barbier’s caption, N’en dites rien (Tell no one about this) suggests a mysterious secret.

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Who was this artist who drew captivating worlds of wealth and refinement? He was part of a group of talented French artists, most of whom had graduated from the École des Beaux-arts in Paris, “nicknamed by Vogue the Chevaliers du bracelet (knights of the bracelet) for their dandyish attire, flamboyant mannerisms, dapper appearance, and common practice of sporting a bracelet.” Barbier was described as “un élégant jeune homme blond, tranquille et réservé.” He was as privileged as those he portrayed.

As Arthur Smith writes in the exhibit catalogue:

He was the son of a well-to-do Nantes businessman who left Barbier a ritzy apartment building in Paris and the means to maintain a comfortable Paris lifestyle. Barbier enjoyed a luxurious residence, a substantial income to finance his theatrical pursuits, and the resources to acquire an extensive personal library, valuable antiques, and works of art. He also possessed an automobile to facilitate his escapes into the French countryside.

Clearly the stuff of Paris dreams.

In her wonderful book The World of Department Stores, Jan Whitaker describes Paris’s contribution to  the history of the modern department store. The first ones were as far from the modern serve-yourself bargain emporium as it is possible to imagine. Well-dressed staff waited for you and waited on you, as we see in this 1913 image from the cover of an artist’s sketchbook Barbier drew for the department store À Pygmalion.

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Arthur Smith describes À Pygmalion as

an imposing multi-storey building located on rue Saint Denis. It was known as a novelties shop that marketed the latest fashions, jewellery, and fabrics to a well-to-do female clientele. This volume illustrated by Barbier featured table linens and elaborately trimmed undergarments, with vignettes of ladies engaged in such activities as playing tennis, boating, skiing, riding, golfing and dining.

When the woman had finished her shopping, she would travel to her next rendezvous by a chauffeur-driven motor car, to emerge impeccably outfitted, where she would be greeted by an improbably slender, tall, and perfectly tailored man.

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Did his lips alight upon her outstretched hand or linger close to her cheek while both thought of what the evening might bring?

The title “Envie” (Envy) suggests a slightly sinister undercurrent. Drawn for a collection illustrating the seven deadly sins, the maid holding the hat box is presumably the envious one. But such warnings rarely intrude on Barbier’s world. His world is more properly represented by the yachting costume from Costumes Parisiens.

This picture shown below was circulated with an issue of Journal des dames et des modes. Can you imagine something so extravagant as a magazine published three times a month, limited to 1,250 copies per issue? It first appeared on 1 June 1912, and 79 issues later, on 1 August 1914, it ceased publication.

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In addition to “literary articles, poems, society columns and fashion reports,” the exclusive circle of subscribers “received colourful unbound fashion plates entitled Costumes Parisiens, which were engraved on copper and coloured au pochoir. The plates were contributed by leading fashion illustrators of the day including Barbier” and a host of other luminaries. Costumes Parisiens illustrations such as Barbier’s Costume de Yacht shown above occasionally appear in antique shops and print galleries, where they are much sought after and priced accordingly.

The labour-intensive pochoir technique involved making and printing from many zinc or copper stencils to colour the print, which had first been made from an engraving or woodblock print of the original.

As fashion historian Alison Matthews David writes in her introduction to Arthur M. Smith’s exhibition catalogue ‘Chevalier du Bracelet’: George Barbier and his illustrated works,

Barbier captured the modern but rarified world of haute couture fashions, illustrating the chic hats and the changing silhouettes of the best French [fashion] houses, including Worth, Paquin and Poiret. His colourful, sophisticated tableaux commissioned by the elite fashion publications of his era show young, elegant Dianas skiing at St. Moritz or being twirled in arms of Tango dancers, but also indolent femmes fatales reclining on pillows while smoking in their Asian-inspired silk evening pyjamas.

La Paresse (idleness, indolence) is a stunning evocation of the studied indolence so inseparable from many dreams of glamorous Paris. Here we see perfectly what Albert Flament meant when he said of his friend George Barbier, “When our times are lost…some of his water-colours and drawings will be all that is necessary to resurrect the taste and spirit of the years in which we lived.”

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And sometimes an introduction to Barbier adds to our appreciation of what we already know and admire. In my case, the Cartier panther. Philippa and I spent Christmas 2012 in Paris. On more than one evening we stopped to admire this view on the Champs-Elysées.

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Only later would I learn from Arthur Smith that Barbier created the “iconic piece…the design of the panther that remains emblematic of the House of Cartier to the present day. The image of a classical figure, attired in a Poiret dress, and accessorized by the presence of a black panther, was used on an invitation card designed by Barbier for L’exposition d’une collection unique de perles et de bijoux de decadence antique hosted at La Maison Cartier from 27 May to 6 June 1914. The illustration bore the caption La femme avec une panthère noire, which was reproduced in a 1920s French magazine advertisement for Cartier.”

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Yet for all the glamour of the era, there was also a dark side.

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The attractive evening dress is from Worth, generally regarded as the first French fashion house, paradoxically started by an Englishman. However, beauty notwithstanding, there is something sinister, or threatening in this image. One senses the need for caution, for this is the “Merciless beautiful lady.” Here is a woman of power, not to be treated lightly or incautiously. Undoubtedly inspired by the John Keats poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” we find there someone who “met a lady” and quite unexpectedly later found himself “Alone and palely loitering.” Too late—

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!’

Perhaps La Belle Dame sans Merci is the city of Paris itself; sometimes hard to please, but impossible to forget. Far away, one feels alone and palely loitering. Barbier captured and created a particular Paris, a Paris that haunts and holds many of us in her thrall.

Text by Norman Ball. Many thanks to Arthur Smith, Anne Dondertman, John Shoesmith, and all who brought Barbier back to life in this stunning exhibit and fine catalogue.

All Barbier images courtesy Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

*All quotations from ‘Chevalier du Bracelet’: George Barbier and His Illustrated Works, Exhibition & Catalogue by Arthur M. Smith, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, 30 September – 20 December 2013, Catalogue printed by Coach House Press. Foreword by Anne Dondertman, Introduction by Alison Matthews David. Available for $20 Canadian. Click here.

 

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The once and future Paris transport museum

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Parisian Fields

The huge Maison de la RATP on the quai de la Rapée has a sweeping view of the Seine and an impressive central atrium in which are positioned a few examples of historic trams and omnibuses. What it does not have, surprisingly, is a proper museum or even a small gift shop.

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Norman and I wandered in on a summer’s day earlier this year. We’d seen the building from across the river as we were lunching on the roof of the Cité du Design et de la Mode, and we were curious about the interior. We asked about the non-existent museum and shop at the reception desk and were directed to the tiny hard-to-find gift shop in the bowels of Les Halles (shown below; now closed). The receptionist was sympathetic. She’d seen the same disappointment in tourists’ faces before.

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We also went in search of toilettes. The building had several, but they were accessible only to those who knew the digicode. Eventually a woman at a desk in a side area where conferences and seminars were being held took pity on us and allowed us to use the ones there.

Before we left the building, we took some pictures. But the experience was unsatisfying. For a city with such a rich array of specialized museums (such as the one we mentioned in the last blog), the lack of a transport museum is distinctly odd.

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Later, in a book called Metro Insolite by Clive Lamming, I found an interesting comment in a photo caption. Below a picture of the lush foliage in the modern Gare de Lyon station, I read: “Ambiance tropicale à la station Gare de Lyon ; cet espace était destiné à accueillir un accès au musée des Transports, hélas non réalisé.” [Tropical ambiance in the Gare de Lyon station; this space was intended to house the access to the Museum of Transport, alas, never realized.] That was all. Clive had nothing further to say on the subject beyond that telling “hélas.” So I went looking for clues.

In fact, there is (or was) a museum, outside Paris, operated by the Association pour le Musée des Transports Urbains, Interurbains, et Ruraux (AMTUIR), showcasing rolling stock from cities throughout France, including Paris. It was created in 1957 at the time that most French cities were tearing out tramlines and tossing out tramcars (which are now being carefully put back in many cities, at considerable expense).

The Association, composed mainly of enthusiastic amateurs and some retired transport employees, saved what trams it could, and put them on display, first in a former tram depot in Malakoff, and then, in 1972, in an old bus depot in Saint-Mandé. Later it added omnibuses, trains, and other rolling stock from various European cities. The photo below is of the Saint-Mandé museum.

AMTUIR(You can also see some 1970 pictures of the Malakoff museum at this Flickr site. The depot sheds are still there in Malakoff, near the intersection of boulevard Gabriel Péri and avenue du 12 février 1934, but have been put to new uses.)

RATP has had a cordial relationship with the Association, offering spaces in its unused depots for the collection, and lending out old vehicles for display. But in 1998, when the new RATP headquarters was built on the quai de la Rapée, the Saint-Mandé depot was sold. The Association, with the help of the RATP, went looking for a new home. A former airplane factory in Colombes seemed suitable, the RATP bought part of the site, and the collection was moved there in 2001. Studies were done on how to fix up the place to make it into a proper museum.

Then, following a municipal election in 2002, the administration of Colombes changed. The incoming mayor and councillors declared themselves adamantly (and inexplicably) opposed to hosting the museum. Planning came to an abrupt halt. Stalemate. Several years passed.

In 2006, another suburban municipality, Chelles, expressed interest in hosting the museum and an agreement was reached. AMTUIR moved some of its vehicles there. But the space was much smaller, and could not accommodate the 170 or so trams, buses, and trains AMTUIR had collected. The remainder were put in storage in a northern Paris suburb. Since then, the project seems to have stalled, and it appears that the museum has never officially opened.

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All of which, you will have noticed, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Gare de Lyon near the Maison de la RATP. What was planned for that site? After all, the AMTUIR museum seems to have been a museum of rolling stock, but a Museum of Transport, like the ever-popular one in London’s Covent Garden, can tell a much wider story – about the stations, the routes, the design, the passengers, the people who worked for the company. Transport is not just about vehicles; it’s also about people and their stories.

The question, and the comparison with London, got me thinking. The Paris Métro and its associated buses and trams are very different from their London counterparts. The London Underground is much older (the first line opened in 1863). It has a strong visual identity, from red double-deckers to the circle-and-bar logo to the widely imitated map by Harry Beck. It has its emotional wartime history, when it provided shelter to so many people during the Blitz. It has a legacy of attractive and often witty advertising posters. Its lines have memorable names, and are consistently associated with certain colours (Bakerloo is always brown, Picadilly is always blue).

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Now think about the Paris Metro. Built in 1900, it was a relative latecomer in municipal railway-based transit compared with London and New York. Its visual identity is idiosyncratic and incoherent – from writhing Hector Guimard entrances to modern signs (a yellow M in a circle) to the current, quite lovely RATP logo to one-off signs like the one shown above. Its stations range from our favourite, the imaginative Arts-et-Metiers station that evokes Jules Verne, to old-fashioned open-air platforms (shown below) to bleakly functional underground stops to unsuccessful makeovers, like the one at Franklin Roosevelt on the No. 1 line, which reminds me of the interior of a 1980s disco.

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The buses today are unremarkable, now that the green ones with the open-air platforms at the back are gone (ah, fond memories!). There are many versions of the map, using a variety of designs and colours (the one below is from our copy of Paris Arrondissements, and the colours of the various lines do not necessarily correspond to those you will find on official maps). The Métro did provide shelter in a few stations on a few occasions during the war, but Paris did not suffer through a Blitz. It has few advertising posters and those are unmemorable.

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All of which is not to say that the RATP doesn’t deserve a museum. It may have lost control of its visual identity, but it is still an institution with a long and distinctive history. You have only to look at a book published in 2011 called Les archives inédites de la RATP, 1850–1950  [The Unpublished Archives of the RATP, 1850–1950] by François Siegel. This huge coffee-table tome is filled with never-before-seen photographs of everything from the other flood (did you know there was one in 1924 as well as the big one in 1910?) to the camps created for Les Enfants du Métro (the children of Métro employees) to the lonely plight of the poinçonneurs and poinçonneuses (the men and women who once sat in station booths to punch passengers’ tickets).

PoinconneuseA whole social history is there. Paired with some of the actual artefacts, it would make for a riveting museum. One day.

And think of the merchandising opportunities in a proper shop! Metro maps on everything from mousepads to mugs, not to mention model trains, Hector-Guimard-style trinkets, and perhaps even a series of children’s books about the further adventures of the familiar pink rabbit in yellow pyjamas – le Lapin du Métro.

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But for now, the RATP is not very welcoming. According to the RATP website, its archives are open to the public – by appointment only. You can’t just wander in.

The website also notes: “Since 1992, RATP has embarked upon a vast process of restoring its historic rolling stock. When a series of rolling stock is discontinued, one example is taken away to be preserved for future generations. A number of vehicles and objects from this collection are exhibited permanently in the reception hall of the Maison de la RATP (RATP’s headquarters near Gare de Lyon). The others are preserved and stored, with a view to being exhibited at the new Musée national des transports urbains.”

One day. One day.

P1120500Text by Philippa Campsie; original photographs by Philippa Campsie and Norman Ball. Image of poinçonneuse from Paris en Images. Image of museum at Saint-Mandé from Direction générale des patrimoines de France.

Posted in Paris metro, Paris museums | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Le Musée Valentin Haüy: A different vision of history

Posted on September 15, 2013 by Parisian Fields

This is no ordinary terrestrial globe. And you’ll find it in a museum that is anything but ordinary.

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When we move in closer, we find that it is labelled in Braille.

Copy of P1120079And the map shown below is not your average stuff-it-in-the-bag tourist map of Paris. But, for the blind, it gave a good introduction to the layout of Paris. Take a good look. I am sure you can locate the Seine and the Ile de la Cité. It was designed to be read by the blind who read by touch.

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Welcome to the Museum Valentin Haüy (his unusual last name is pronounced Ah-oo-ee), which honours the founder of Europe’s first school for the blind. More than that, it is an excellent guide to how life has changed for the blind.

Before the 18th century, the traditional lot of the blind included poverty, ridicule, little or no formal training or education, and life at the margins of society. At a street fair for Saint Ovide in 1771, a café owner put together an “orchestra” composed of people from a nearby residence for the blind. The crowd was there to laugh at the blind:

Tricked out in long red robes, and wearing pointed dunce caps and opaque glasses, the ensemble played horribly discordant “music.” Seated on a peacock throne, the “conductor,” wearing wooden clogs and a hat with ass’s ears, tried unsuccessfully to keep time. The crowd laughed uproariously at this bizarre performance, which was a great money maker for the owner of the café where it was staged.*

Not everyone was amused. The 26-year old Valentin Haüy, a well-educated interpreter, was so moved by the humiliation suffered by the blind that he dedicated his life to making life better for them. He decided to start with one of their strengths, namely their ability to distinguish shapes through touch. Through that they could learn to read. His belief that the blind were competent and capable was unheard of in his day.

Valentin was not rich, but he was committed to his cause, persuasive, and somewhat well-connected. He tried to make the writing system used by sighted people visible to the blind by creating raised, embossed letters that the blind could read by touch.

P1120078(For more examples of embossed type, see this online exhibit from Birkbeck University.)

Haüy had to make a living, but he found time and money to support a young blind beggar whom he taught to read his system. Then in 1786, Haüy rented space at 18 rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires for l’Institution des Enfants Aveugles (Institution for Blind Children), the first educational institution of its kind in Europe.

The school did not have it easy; there was always the need for money despite the efforts of a Philanthropic Society. When Haüy’s students impressed Louis XVI, the word Royal was added to the school name, which became the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles (Royal Institution for Blind Youth), but the new name brought no extra funding and later Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette were executed during the Revolution.

The school was nationalized by the revolutionaries in 1791. In the end neither they nor their successors proved any more supportive and understanding. Eventually Haüy was forced to retire in February 1807. His pension was less than half his former salary. Nonetheless, Haüy had shown that the blind could be taught to read by touch. Others built on this breakthrough.

One such pioneer was a retired French military officer, Nicholas Charles Barbier de la Serre (1767-1841). At a time when teaching the blind to read and write was based on imitating the standard forms of letters, he had a different approach.

Contrary to popular myth, Barbier did not develop his ideas on the suggestion of Napoleon, who wanted a way for soldiers to communicate messages in the dark. I confess to making this error in an earlier blog.

After his military career was over, Barbier dedicated his life to languages and communications. He wanted to create a written language that would be easy to learn. He felt that people had been “déshérités de l’instruction” (disinherited from, or robbed of, instruction) by the difficulties of writing.

His new system was phonetic, and did not require its users to know how to spell. All they had to do was to record the sounds of words. The French language consists of 36 distinct sounds. The 36 sounds can be listed in a table of six columns, each of six lines. In Barbier’s system, each sound was represented according to its coordinates on the table: one number for the column and one for the line. These coordinates were recorded by a system of raised or embossed dots.

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One must credit Barbier with freeing the blind from the need to decipher stylized versions of the written alphabet, which were confusing (how to distinguish a cursive a from an o from a c?). And he was the first to propose that blind people use a stylus to make the indentations on the paper that, when turned over, became raised points the blind could read.

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Unfortunately, the system was still too complicated, with 2 columns of 6 dots.

P1120106When the ten-year-old Louis Braille arrived at the school for the blind in February 1819, he was taught the method introduced by Haüy. Two years later,  Barbier introduced his system to the students at the school. Braille realized that if Barbier’s system could be simplified, it would be even better. He modified the system to a total of 6 dots in 2 parallel columns of 3. Moreover, because there were so many ways to pronounce words (depending on regional accents), he returned to representing letters instead of phonetic sounds.

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His fellow blind students recognized the brilliance of Braille’s system far faster than their sighted educators and administrators. Alas, educational systems seem to be inherently conservative. It took a very long time for the Braille system to be accepted.

The standard Braille system of raised dots allowed the blind to write for the blind. But what about writing for the sighted who did not know Braille? Louis thought of that too. He realized that the roman alphabet could also be reduced to a system of points which he called decapoint. Here is a sample from the Louis Braille Museum in Coupvray.

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It was, as one might imagine, very laborious to write such a letter. So Braille worked with another blind man, Pierre Foucault, to produce a mechanical system to write decapoint.

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One simply pressed the appropriate plunger depending on which of ten possible positions one wanted.

A considerable number of the blind were also deaf, or deaf and mute. The museum also shows equipment developed to meet their needs. In the image below we have a device to communicate with someone both blind and deaf. The sender pressed the keys and the receiver could feel the appropriate pins rising and falling, spelling words in Braille.

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And for a two-way conversation one could use this device.

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The stories of devices, systems, ingenuity and perseverance that the Valentin Haüy Museum tells are astounding. We first visited the museum at the suggestion of a friend in Paris, Farouk, who shares my interest in the history of typewriters (the museum has an excellent collection of typewriters for the blind).

Since visiting the museum, where curator Madame Noëlle Roy graciously welcomed us and patiently answered our questions, I have changed my research interests. There is so much to learn about devices for the blind that I will leave the research on devices for the sighted to others.

The Valentin Haüy Museum is a unique resource filled with extraordinary objects. I can hardly wait to get back. I want to spend more time looking at this machine to write both Braille and inked writing at the same time on two separate sheets of paper.

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And as a Canadian I would like to know the story behind this item. Does anyone have any suggestions?

P1120143Text by Norman Ball, photographs by Philippa Campsie. Thanks to Farouk Derdour, Madame Noëlle Roy, and Stéphane Mary for their kind assistance.

* C. Michael Mellor, Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius (Boston: National Braille Press, 2006), p. 30.

Posted in Paris history, Paris museums, Paris typewriters | Tagged , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Going, going, gone

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Parisian Fields

34495-7In the 1850s, as the old Paris of narrow streets and ramshackle houses gave way to the broad boulevards and uniform apartment blocks planned by Napoleon III and carried out by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Charles Baudelaire wrote an epitaph for the city he remembered:

Old Paris is no more (the form of a city / Changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart)
Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville / Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel)

Baudelaire was right at the time, and indeed, you could say the same thing of Paris today. It never stops changing. Just as you cannot step into the same river twice, you cannot set foot in the same city twice. Ask any visitor who has gone on a futile quest to find “that wonderful little restaurant / hotel / shop / patisserie we discovered on our honeymoon / student year abroad / first visit / previous visit.” We’ve all done it, and we’ve usually ended up looking sadly at the space it once occupied, now a laudromat / modern high-rise / government office / vacant lot.

One gets used to the changes, typical of any modern city. Every time we leave Toronto to visit Paris, we return to find that in our neighbourhood, one business has closed, a new one has opened, and a sign on a third proclaims that a developer is seeking to turn a row of older shops into “a 52-unit condominium with retail at grade and underground parking.”

On this past summer’s visit to Paris, however, we noticed a pattern to the disappearances. It started on the first day, when we passed the Livre Sterling on the avenue Franklin Roosevelt, an idiosyncratic bookshop we have written about in a previous blog.

P1040631This time, the tables outside advertised books on sale and the shelves inside were almost empty. It was going out of business. Perhaps it wasn’t an ideal location for a bookshop, but it was the only one in the area, and now it has gone.

We already knew about the demise of our favourite English-language bookshop – the Red Wheelbarrow on the rue St-Paul in the Marais. Here it is as we remember it.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe owner had had to move away for personal reasons, and had been unable to find a buyer to take over the business. So the books were sold and the place closed. The sign remained for a long time after the shop went dark.

What threw us completely was the disappearance of another Marais book and paper store – the Librairie Charlemagne on the rue St-Antoine, which had closed a year earlier. How had we missed that? We’d bought books, maps, gifts, stationery in that store countless times over the years. It had vanished so completely that I had to ask in a nearby store if I had got the address wrong. No, a young woman told me, it had closed and been replaced by a clothes shop.

By a curious quirk of Google Street View, the view of the bookshop is split between 2008 and 2012. I have spliced the two together here with a red line to show the overlap: on the right is the bookshop when it was still a going concern. On the left is the same entrance again and the rest of the facade with signs advertising the going-out-of-business sale. I wonder if the little statue still graces the corner of the rue St-Antoine and the rue de Sévigné.

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We wandered over to Mona Lisait nearby (a chain that sells secondhand and remaindered books). The branch in the Marais occupies an odd, interim space that seems to have been a cobbled lane at one point.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERANorman then suggested we have a look for the Archives de la Presse, a place selling old magazines and advertisements, where we had often rummaged for materials related to our research. Of course, we couldn’t exactly remember the name, but we described what we wanted to the man behind the counter at Mona Lisait, and he gave us some generalized directions. We set off and after a few wrong turns, arrived in front of the shop.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAs we watched, burly guys carried out boxes of books and magazines and put them in a truck. The shop was closing, although it will continue selling old magazines and newspapers online and maintaining a small stand in the Bon Marché. They even have a Facebook page. Score one for the Internet.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERATea and Tattered Pages in Montparnasse closed earlier this year when its proprietor died. Her daughters are searching for someone to carry on the business, which even at best seemed like the triumph of hope over experience. We can remember eating a modest lunch with a friend in the back room, surrounded by books, and the proprietor at one point asked us to keep an eye on things while she popped out to get a carton of milk for our tea.

Oh, there are still plenty of bookshops in town. There are still bouquinistes, and we even saw a display of prototypes of modernized bouquiniste stands on display near the Hotel de Ville last December.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERABut the form of the city is changing, and its independent bookshops are dwindling, despite efforts by the government to prop them up.

I can’t help thinking of that scene in Victor Hugo’s book Notre Dame de Paris, in which the archdeacon gazes at the huge pile of stone that is the cathedral and then points to a book, open on the table, saying with a sigh “This will kill that.” The printed book will kill the cathedral.*

Well, the cathedral is still standing, but it is filled mainly with tourists and their colourful guidebooks rather than worshippers taking spiritual nourishment from its carvings and stained glass windows. Those who do look for guidance may seek it in solitude from a book, and not from a huge religious building and the community associated with it. I suppose that is what the archdeacon meant.

Now the book is changing and the city is changing with it. It’s not that people aren’t reading. The big libraries are full of scholars, although they are often staring at laptops and tablet computers rather than actual books.

P1070559Parisians wander obliviously past the bouquinistes, absorbed in the latest news from their handheld devices. And in some places, physical books are considered décor, not the vehicle for enlightenment or spiritual nourishment. You can even get virtual books, like this wallpaper that indicates the presence of a real bookshop inside Artcurial. Note the door handle in the middle. (Ceci n’est pas une collection de livres.)

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Books are objects, like typewriters, that once performed a function. And for many people, the function can be performed in other ways, through other media. But bookshops have a function too. They were never just about selling books. They hosted readings and launches, and they were places to go for conversation and news. At the Red Wheelbarrow, the people behind the desk recommended not just books, but the best boulangerie in the area. The staff weighed in on the merits of local cafés, and introduced us to other browsers crowding into the tiny space. You can’t get that on an e-book.

In Paris, where sometimes it can be hard to find one’s feet and where much is unfamiliar, a space like the Red Wheelbarrow allowed us to feel on solid ground. Lost bookshops are lost friends. When a place like that disappears, it is not just the end of a business, it is the end of a friendship.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAText by Philippa Campsie, photographs by Norman Ball. Photograph of the rue Pontoise by Charles Marville from Paris en Images.

*L’archidiacre considéra quelque temps en silence le gigantesque édifice, puis étendant avec un soupir sa main droite vers le livre imprimé qui était ouvert sur sa table et sa main gauche vers Notre-Dame, et promenant un triste regard du livre à l’église : Hélas ! dit-il, ceci tuera cela.

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The colours of the Batignolles

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Parisian Fields

The Batignolles does not attract many tourists. That, in itself, is part of its charm. But there are many reasons to venture there. Food. Gardens. Places for children to play. And colour, because that is what struck us both – this is an area filled with colour.

The restaurants are colourful.

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The grocery stores are colourful.

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The corner stores are colourful.

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The antique shops are colourful (we found some nice antique postcards in this one).

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The library is colourful.

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The street machinery is colourful.

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Even the residents are colourful (this lady has coordinated her pink outfit wonderfully).

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The residents also seem to have a sense of humour, if this bilingual pun is anything to go by.

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After a morning ramble, we had lunch under the trees at le Tout Petit, which seemed appropriate for a quartier filled with children. The couple on the left, who lived in the area, said it was very child-friendly.

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We later saw the couple from the café with their children in the playground that is part of Square des Batignolles. We can thank Adophe Alphand (again) for the design of this miniature wonderland. You enter down a winding little path, lined with Norman’s favourite concrete-made-to-look-like-wood.

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And there you will find more colourful residents of Batignolles: the ducks and waterfowl. Take a look at this little fellow’s beak. You’d never get away with something that gaudy in the Tuileries.

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Of course, there is the ever-popular black-and-white look.

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And the classic mallard colouring is never out of fashion.

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Across the rue Cardinet from the Square des Batignolles is a park so new that it is not quite finished. Parc Martin Luther King is just part of  the huge new Clichy-Batignolles development. Its long straight paths, its reconstruction of a wetland, and its skateboard facilities make for a contrast with the much older park. All very 21st century. Parc Martin Luther King seems popular with children and teenagers, and it’s nice to have both spaces in the quartier. Something for everyone.

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With so much colour, the area attracted its share of artists back in the day. Manet lived at 34, boulevard des Batignolles, which I failed to photograph when I was there, but Google Street View has captured its lovely blue door.

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The Café Guerbois on what is now the avenue de Clichy, was a noted hangout for Edouard Manet and his friends at no. 9 (it’s now a menswear shop). At no. 11, we spotted this façade.

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This was once the establishment of G. Hennequin, a merchant in “Couleurs Fines, Toiles et Pinceaux” (fine colours, canvases and brushes). Some Impressionist canvases still bear a paper sticker with the name of the shop on it. It functioned as an art supply store until 2010. You can see what it used to look like here.

We felt that if Manet or his friends could see the Batignolles today, they would still find places they recognized. In time, they would even find a new watering hole to replace the Café Guerbois. I wonder which of the many local cafés they would choose…

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

Posted in Paris gardens, Paris parks, Paris quartiers | Tagged , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Mushrooms, manure, and the secret of French food

Posted on August 4, 2013 by Parisian Fields

Recently, at The Astrolabe Gallery, a print and map store on Sparks Street in Ottawa, I chanced upon a page from the London Illustrated News, Dec. 4, 1869. Two woodcuts depicted “Mushroom Culture in France.”

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The “entrance to a mushroom cave at Montrouge, near Paris” intrigued me. The central figure is a young man handing over a basket that he appears to have brought up from below ground. Three women take the baskets away. A man sits astride a pony harnessed by a whiffle tree to a cable that runs over a pulley to below ground. Another man is emptying a larger wicker basket and the contents run down a rough chute. A fourth man leans on a shovel. In the background there are three heavier lifting wheels and in the distance a large fortified building (Philippa wonders if it might be the Montrouge fort, one of 16 built around Paris in the 1840s).

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The next cut portrays the “interior of the mushroom cave.” It is lit by candles and was probably much darker than the artist portrays. On the far right, a man appears to be picking mushrooms and another is loading them into baskets, which he will then pick up using a shoulder harness similar to that used by the man climbing the pole to take the mushrooms above ground. A man leans against a shovel next to a large wicker basket on the ground and another similar basket is either ascending or descending. The man with the wheelbarrow looks to have been working hard and on the left are more mushroom beds. The walls appear to have been hewn out of stone.

For the rest of the story, I needed to “see page 567” from the Illustrated London News. Thank goodness for online historic newspapers available through the library. The short text described the way in which mushrooms were cultivated on horse manure in caves and the abandoned mines or quarries that underlie much of the Paris region. The text noted, “Some account of this curious subject will be found in Mr. Robinson’s book, ‘The Parks, Promenades, and Gardens of Paris,’ just published by Mr. Murray, which is a volume full of pleasant and instructive matter.”

Nothing I enjoy more than pleasant and instructive matter. Mr. Robinson turned out to be William Robinson, an Irish gardener and journalist who promoted “wild gardens” of perennials, rather than the formal gardens of annual bedding plants that were common in his day. (He would probably approve of our chaotic Toronto garden of perennials, herbs, and vines, shaded by a maple tree.)

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The full title of his book was The Parks, Promenades & Gardens of Paris Described and considered in Relation to the Wants of our Cities and of Public and Private Gardens (Victorians didn’t believe in short, snappy titles). He wrote it when he was the Times correspondent for the Horticultural Department of the Great Paris Exhibition. The book describes French horticulture, market gardening, and food and compares them with their English equivalents. The English versions are usually found wanting.

Robinson was impressed by the great care French growers took with their crops. He contrasted it with less careful and less productive practices in England. In writing about lettuce, for example, he exclaimed, “The culture of salads for the Paris market is not merely good—it is perfection.”

He devotes an entire chapter to Mushroom Culture, and begins by stating enthusiastically, “Mushroom growing as carried on around, or rather beneath Paris and its environs, is the most extraordinary example of culture that I have ever seen either above or below ground, under glass or in the open air.”

Like any good journalist, Robinson had connections, so he was able to find a normally wary champignonniste (mushroom grower) to escort him into “one of the great ‘Mushroom caves’ at Montrouge, just outside the fortifications of Paris, on the southern side” on July 6, 1868.

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Robinson took pains to help his British readers gain a clear picture. “The surface of the ground is mostly cropped with Wheat; but here and there lie, ready to be transported to Paris, blocks of white stone, which have recently been brought to the surface of the ground through coalpit-like openings. There is nothing like a ‘quarry,’ as we understand it, to be seen about; but the stone is extracted as we extract coal, and with no interference with the surface of the ground.”

This underground quarrying had led to the hundreds of kilometres of galleries, caverns, tunnels, and open spaces that still lie beneath many parts of Paris. Occasional subsidence had led to collapses, such as that of a row of houses on the rue d’Enfer (now the rue Denfert-Rochereau) in 1774. Napoleon later prohibited all further quarrying and mining under the city. However, Montrouge was outside the walls. There, conventional farming continued above, while below, limestone or gypsum were quarried and mushroom farming took place in underground caverns.

The depth of these mushroom farms ranged from 20 to 160 feet below ground. Robinson described the entrance as “a circular opening like the mouth of an old well, but from it protrudes the head of a thick pole with sticks thrust through it.” After descending this precarious contraption, the champignonniste entered a network in which one cave and its many passageways held six or seven miles of mushroom beds.

This was an area of year-round production at a constant temperature, so as one wandered about one saw beds in varying stages of growth and maturity. It was also an area of intensive cultivation in which beds were crowded together with little or no spare room, “every available inch of the cave being occupied.” Moreover, it was kept extremely clean at all times so that everything looked in “perfect condition.”

The harvest went on every day, growers “occasionally sending more than 400 lb. weight per day, the average being about 300 lb.” The white button mushrooms produced for the Paris market were Agaricus bisporus. The beds were of two basic shapes, both of which we see in this image.

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The key was good manure; it is the same with cooking, you have to start with good ingredients. Champignonnistes wanted “ordinary stable manure, not droppings [from the street].” There is manure and manure, and the stuff in the street could easily be contaminated with other things. The manure “is thrown into heaps four or five feet high, and perhaps thirty feet wide. The men were employed turning this over, the mass being afterwards stamped down with their feet, a water-cart and pots being used to thoroughly water the manure where it is dry and white.” After five or six weeks it would be ready for mushroom cultivation.

Then into the underground caves, where the half-decomposed manure would be mixed again, formed and compacted into shape. It was planted with what Robinson calls “mushroom spawn,” including the naturally occurring version that grows in manure, which Robinson said ensured the best mushrooms. The beds would be covered with about an inch of soil. This soil was “simply sifted from the rubbish of the stone-cutters above, giving the recently made bed the appearance of being covered with putty.”

Harvesting was labour-intensive. It was not just a matter of pulling the mushrooms out and moving on. Instead, when the mushrooms were removed, “the very spot in which they grew is scraped out, so as to get rid of every trace of the old bunch, and the space covered with a little earth from the bottom of the heap. It is the habit to do this in every case, and when the gatherer leaves a small hole from which he has pulled even a solitary Mushroom, he fills it with some of the white earth from the base.” It is this extraordinary capacity for taking pains, for looking after the details, that I believe is the secret of French food.

The indefatigable Robinson also visited another mushroom farm owned by a Monsieur Renaudot on September 29, 1868, in Frépillon, Méry-sur-Oise.* He took the train, alighting at Auvers. Again, he found “vast quarries in the neighbourhood, both for building-stone and the plaster so largely used in Paris.”

Frepillon

The entry point to this farm was in the side of a hill “so that the interior looks like a vast gloomy cathedral.” The method of careful cultivation and “perfect cleanliness” was similar to that at Montrouge. However, there was a significant difference: “The chief advantage the cultivator here has is the facility of taking his manure of anything else in or out in carts, as easily as if the beds were made in the open air. Near Paris, on the contrary, everything has to be sent up and down through shafts like those of old wells, and the men have to creep up and down a rough pole like mice.”

Renaudot“All the manure employed is brought from Paris by rail. … so much per horse per month is paid in Paris for the manure; then it has to be carted to the railway station and loaded in the wagons; next it is brought to the station of Auvers, and afterwards carted a couple of miles to the quarries, paying a toll for a bridge over the Oise on the way. That surely is difficulty enough for a cultivator to begin with! Then it is placed in great flat heaps…and here it is prepared, turned over and well mixed three times, and as a rule watered twice. About five or six weeks are occupied in the preparation.” And this went on constantly, day in and day out.

Over time, the manure lost its nutritional value and had to be removed. It was then used in gardens for mulch. Nothing was wasted.

In a good year, the underground caves at Méry-sur-Oise produced 3,000 pounds a day. It was all astounding for a method developed only in the early nineteenth century, by a Monsieur Chambry. But perhaps not surprising in a country that takes growing food as seriously as preparing and eating it.

311-11

Text by Norman Ball. Additional images from the Google Book edition of The Parks, Promenades & Gardens of Paris by William Robinson and Gallica maps. Picture of mushroom sellers at Les Halles from Paris en Images.

For insight into the modern cultivation of mushrooms in caves (in the Loire Valley), click here.

* Méry-sur-Oise was the location of Baron Haussmann’s unrealized plan to build a giant cemetery outside the city and send the bodies there by train. He chose it because the area had sandy soil that would aid decomposition.

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Death and taxes

Posted on July 21, 2013 by Parisian Fields

Whenever I buy postcards or other pictures of Paris, I gravitate to anything unfamiliar. So when I was leafing through some inexpensive engravings at an antiques fair on the Place St-Sulpice in June, I was immediately drawn to this one.

Cunette1831

Barrière de la Cunette? “Where was that?” I asked the young woman who was in charge of the stall. She consulted Wikipedia on her iPhone and said vaguely that it had been on the Left Bank, over to the west. Of course I bought the engraving, along with one of the Barrière de Passy. Both dated from 1831.

Passy1831

Time for some research. I knew a bit about the “barrières” (customs houses) that had once encircled Paris, because four of them are still there. The Rotonde de la Villette is one, and others can be seen in the Parc Monceau, the Place Denfert-Rochereau, and the Place de la Nation. However, I hadn’t realized how many there were originally (more than 50) nor did I know much about their creation.

But first, I wanted to pin down the location of the Barrière de la Cunette. I consulted my reproduction 1850 map of Paris, which shows the city as it was before the 1860 expansion that reconfigured the city and its arrondissements. There it was, on the river’s edge near the Champ de Mars, opposite the narrow island known as the Allée des Cygnes, slightly downstream of today’s Pont de Bir-Hakeim. As it happens, the corresponding barrière on the Right Bank was that of Passy (also known as the Barrière des Bonhommes or Barrière de la Conférence). This map from Gallica dates from 1800.

Gallica Map

And just what, exactly, is a “cunette”? It’s a military ditch usually associated with fortifications; when filled with water, it becomes a moat (une douve). There appears to have been a ditch or canal emptying into the Seine at this point.

Next question: when was it built? The vaguely Classical look seems to hark back to the First Empire of Napoleon, when Classical architecture was all the rage. In fact, it was designed and built in the dying days of the ancien régime, in the 1780s, along with 54 other barrières and the wall that encircled Paris.

This was not a defensive wall; it was all about customs and excise. It was built at the behest of a group called the Fermiers Généraux (General Farmers), which sounds very rural and agricultural, but it was nothing of the kind. These were tax farmers, well-to-do financiers who collected money for the king and had a fair bit of leeway in how they approached their task.

In the 1780s the Fermiers realized how easy it was to evade paying the duties required on goods entering Paris. Anyone could saunter in unobserved and smuggling was common. So they did what a typical financial concern would do these days: they commissioned a study by one of their number, Antoine Lavoisier (yes, that Lavoisier, the famous scientist known as the “father of modern chemistry”).

Lavoisier estimated the tax loss at 6 million livres a year and proposed a wall 3.3 metres (10 feet) high surrounding Paris that would require those bringing in goods to pass through gates at which the tax could be levied. He also sketched the route of the wall, which instantly tripled the size of the city, earning him the undying hatred of the tavern keepers on the former edge of town who had once profited from selling tax-free wine and now had to collect and remit the required taxes. (They didn’t forget about this. A decade later, Lavoisier was guillotined during the Terror, along with the other Fermiers Généraux.)

Lavoisier’s plan was adopted in 1784 and the wall went up. It is long gone now, but a portion remains on rue Bruant on the grounds of the Salpetrière Hospital. Here is an image from Google Street View.

Rue Bruant

The architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux was assigned the job of designing the buildings that would be positioned wherever the wall crossed a major road (or the river). It was quite a commission. The barrières on major routes included offices for the tax collectors, sentry boxes and observation posts for the guards, living quarters for the staff, customs sheds, warehouses for impounded goods, and stables. Those on minor roads were less extensive.

The Barrière de la Cunette and the Barrière de Passy, being on the river, had an additional feature: a boat called a patache that monitored river traffic and collected taxes on waterborne goods. Here is a model of one of the pataches that Ledoux designed for the riverfront barriers, from the collection of the Musée Ledoux in Arc-et-Senans. I don’t know if this over-the-top vessel was ever actually constructed. There is no sign of it in the engravings.

patache

Ledoux called his barriers Propylées (or Propylaea, a Greek term for a monumental gateway), and ensured that no two were the same. The architectural historian Anthony Vidler notes that Ledoux had a “propensity for architectural overstatement and hyperbole, for elevating modest subjects by their architectural treatment.”* Indeed. Compare the Barrière de la Cunette with the last customs post you passed in your travels.

Vidler also describes how Ledoux went about the task of designing so many buildings: “all were invested with a similar architectural character, fabricated as it were out of a versatile kit of parts, abstracted by Ledoux out of Renaissance and antique prototypes, with apparently infinite properties for combination and re-combination.”** In other words, a classical Lego kit, but made up of columns, porticos, and domes.

Ledoux enjoyed the work, but his employers (not surprisingly) complained of cost overruns and removed him from the project. Meanwhile, his fellow architects accused him of bad taste. And Parisians hated anything and everything to do with the wall. They did not attack Ledoux personally (he survived the Revolution), but a Parisian mob looted and burned the barrières, even before attacking the Bastille. The destruction started on July 10, 1789, and continued for several days. Forty-six barrières were badly damaged. One academic has argued that this attack was every bit as momentous as that on the Bastille on July 14, but has not received the same attention from historians.

Here is a picture of the attack on the Barrière de Passy.

Passy burning 2

These events did not, however, put the Ferme out of business, at least not immediately. The Fermiers appointed another architect to supervise repairs and the customs gates were back in business in 1790. As the Revolution proceeded, however, the Ferme lost power. The tax was suspended in May 1791, an occasion for boisterous celebrations by the populace.

But nothing is as certain as death and taxes. The Terror may have killed the Fermiers, but the country still needed money, and in 1798, the tax on goods entering the city (known as octroi) was reinstated by the Directory. Octroi was collected in Paris until 1943.

By the time the architectural draughtsman Augustus Charles Pugin (father of the celebrated architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin) decided to include these two barrières in his 1831 collection of 200 engravings called Paris and its Environs, the buildings were considered picturesque. Mind you, the English version of the book notes drily that the barrières were “by no means favorably regarded by the people” of Paris.

The wall and most of the barrières were demolished in the 1850s and 1860s, as part of the expansion of Paris under Napoleon III and Haussmann. They no longer represented the outskirts of town and had no further purpose.

The Barrière de la Cunette seems to have been forgotten until 1896, when the archway that once stood under the now-demolished customs building was rediscovered during excavations for a railway running along the Left Bank eastwards to the Invalides station.

In this drawing by Jules-Adolphe Chauvet, the background looks bleak, compared to that in Pugin’s 1831 version.

Cunette 1890s

Ledoux probably thought his monumental Propylées would endure forever. He could not have imagined that 100 years later, the relics would be considered archaeological curiosities.

Text by Philippa Campsie, map and additional images from Gallica.

*Anthony Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Utopia in the Era of the French Revolution, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006, p. 106.

**Vidler, p. 108.

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