The Twelve Fleas of Christmas

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Parisian Fields

A little less than twelve days before Christmas, my true love and I made a trip to the Marché aux Puces de Clignancourt. It was a chilly December Saturday morning, so the first order of business was to fortify ourselves against the cold with a café crème at a cozy inside table. Then we strolled among the shops, encountering the following items for sale.

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12 ostrich eggs on a padded swivel chair from some long-abandoned office. That will teach you to sit down without looking.

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Across from the café we found 11 globes on a shelf. They still show things like the Soviet Union, so they are for ornament only, not instruction.

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We spotted 10 pots of ivy and ferns in a florist’s shop on the rue des Rosiers (not to be confused with the street of the same name in central Paris, in the Marais; the flea market is in the commune of St-Ouen to the north of Paris).

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The 9 dolls in a box were part of a larger collection of dolls with porcelain heads. When she was a child, my mother had a doll called Felicity with a porcelain head. I wonder if Felicity might have been French.

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The 8 sparkly salamanders were in a boutique selling second-hand jewellery. A bit too glittery for me.

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When we returned home and I looked through my photographs, I thought at first that I did not have a picture that represented 7 of anything. And then I realized that there were 7 little white elephants (some might be ivory, some might be plastic) in a cabinet that was otherwise filled with pocket watches and compasses.

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Six is for 6 royal and imperial miniatures. Can you identify them?

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Five is for 5 amber bottles (cider and calvados) in the window of a shop selling all manner of bits and pieces related to food and drink.

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Four is for 4 metal cash boxes in a pile: these are modern reproductions of a traditional type of box, not antiques. Not everything in the Marche aux Puces has a lengthy provenance.

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Three is for 3 glass domes. Perfect for your stuffed owl collection.

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Two is for 2 armless half mannequins on a table. Useful for displaying hats, scarves and necklaces. Not so good for gloves or bracelets.

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Finally, one is for a toy mouse (or rat) peeking out from a pile of linen. This was in the shop with the bottles and other food-related items. The woman minding the shop told us that some months ago, there was a special event at the Puces, and each boutique was invited to add some decorations related to a specific film. Her shop (naturally) chose the theme of the movie Ratatouille, and tucked toy mice/rats into pots and pans, glasses and napkins. Apparently at least one customer shrieked when he first spotted one.

Our day at the Puces was rounded out with a visit to the wonderful Librairie de l’Avenue, where the 92-year-old Jean Bedel was signing copies of his latest book, Saut de ‘Puces’ à Saint-Ouen. Naturally, we bought a copy and had it signed. We even chatted to the publisher (Monelle Hayot) over a glass of champagne.

As he wrote an inscription in the book, Bedel asked me for the English equivalent for “chineur.” This is what the French call the type of people who haunt flea markets. I suggested “bargain-hunter,” but it is not really the same thing. Bargain hunters in Canada go to Dollaramas. Chineurs are at least one part antiquarians and they are hunting for more than simply utilitarian objects. And the word includes both buyers and sellers.

It was a wonderful day, thanks in part to advice from our friend Michael, a Parisian letterpress printer. In the spirit of Christmas we share it with you. And may you too have a visit as fine as ours.

Take the No. 85 bus, which connects with the No. 1 Metro line at Louvre-Rivoli. The bus winds its way up and down the Montmartre hill on its way north (sit back and enjoy the tour).

Do not get off at the Porte de Clignancourt (the stuff here is for bargain hunters, not chineurs). Do not get off at the stop called “Marché aux Puces” (You will be tempted, I know, but your patience will be rewarded).

Wait until the bus is inching its way up the crowded and impossibly narrow rue des Rosiers and get off at the stop called “Paul Bert.” You will be right in the middle of the action, across from the Paul Bert/La Serpette market, which is where you will find some of the more interesting and unusual boutiques.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good Paris flea market.

Photographs by Philippa Campsie; text by Philippa Campsie and Norman Ball.

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What a croque

Posted on December 9, 2012 by Parisian Fields

It all started so innocently. I was going to write a blog about a simple and unremarkable café meal, the sort of thing that warms one up on a cold December day with a glass of vin chaud, and before I knew it, I had stumbled into a culinary and historical minefield.

First, the culinary difficulties. I wanted a straightforward recipe for a Paris dish so unremarkable that it is a cliché: the croque monsieur. I consulted some of my French cookbooks; I searched the Internet. And within a few minutes, I was knee-deep in controversy. What is a croque monsieur?

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I would have said that it consists of a couple of slices of even-textured bread (not a baguette), some ham in the middle, grilled with a bit of butter, and topped with a cheesy béchamel sauce, which might include a dash of mustard.

Nearly every element in that combination appears to be contested. Let’s start with the bread. Ginette Mathiot, author of the classic French cookbook Je Sais Cuisiner, calls for pain de mie (white sandwich bread), preferably a bit stale (rassis), with the crusts cut off. But others recommend fresh pain de mie, sturdier pain de campagne, or pain complet (wholewheat/wholemeal bread). What you do with the crusts is your business.

Can we all agree on the ham? Up to a point. Ginette Mathiot allows for a “croque monsieur économique” without any ham at all. Clothide Dusoulier, in her book Chocolate and Zucchini, specifies “brine-cured ham” rather than dry-cured ham. Fine, whatever.

Cheese? Julia Child, for some reason, favoured Mozzarella. Most recipes specify Gruyère. Some mention Emmenthal. But those are Swiss cheeses, and there are some nationalists in the room. Clothilde, who is French, allows for Comté as an alternative, and Nigel Slater (author of Real Fast Food), being English, says Cheddar is an option. Fair enough. I’m Canadian: can I make it with Oka?

And what do you do with the cheese? Grate it or slice it? Put it in between the bread slices with the ham or on top? Add it to a béchamel sauce? Take your choice. You will find at least one celebrity chef who endorses your preference.

Finally, grill it, bake it, or heat it in a pan with lots of butter?  Or – as Samuel Chamberlain suggests in his book Clémentine in the Kitchen – drench it with egg and make it into a sort of pain perdu (French toast) version? I had something like that in a Canadian diner once. It was vile. Then I found this comment on a recipe website:

Some people will tell you that a croque-monsieur is dipped in an egg wash – like French toast – before being fried. Remove those people from your autodialer this instant. These same people may also tell you that you can purchase a special croque-monsieur grilling iron, with shell-shaped indentations on each side that fold together, squeezing the sandwich inside, which is then placed on a grill and turned when half done, which produces a shell-shaped sandwich. While this is technically true, it has nothing to do with the traditional croque-monsieur, and since you’ve already deleted these people from your autodialer, you needn’t be troubled by them further.

I have no idea who wrote that, but I couldn’t agree more.

As for the historical difficulties, the rumours start with the Larousse Gastronomique, which states that the first croque monsieur (in all history?) “was served in 1910 in a Parisian café on the boulevard des Capucines.” Nine out of ten recipe writers repeat that incomplete and implausible factoid. I ask you, if the date is known and the street is known, then why not the restaurant or the chef?

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Let’s start with the date. Apparently Proust had a childhood fondness for croque-monsieur, and he was born in 1871. He mentions croque-monsieur in a letter he wrote to his mother in the 1890s. So 1910 sounds a bit off the mark for the very first one.

Then the place. When I Googled “croque monsieur” and “boulevard de Capucines,” I found a reference to a restaurant called “Le Trou dans le Mur” (the Hole in the Wall). Here is the story according to “Paris le Nez dans l’Air” (my translation):

It is often said that the French, and the Parisians in particular, are adept at “System D.” D for “débrouiller” [meaning coping with whatever life dishes out]. Sometimes this ability reaches the heights of ingenuity. On February 23, 1848, in the early days of the revolution that would usher in the Second Republic, a cannonball smashed into a concierge’s lodge at 23 boulevard des Capucines. But the cannon blast was not wasted. The concierge, who miraculously survived, had the bright idea of exploiting the yawning gap that exposed his lodging to the sidewalk. Thus was born the café known as “The Hole in the Wall.” It evolved from a local watering hole to a chic bar frequented by the who’s who of Paris. It is even said that in this location was born an English specialty: the croque monsieur.

It’s a great story. And I don’t believe a word of it. According to histories of 1848, there was a bloody stand-off on the boulevard des Capucines on the day in question, but it started when a group of rioters confronted a group of soldiers and a gun went off. The violence escalated and when it was over, between 30 and 50 people were dead. But in the accounts I have read, there were no cannons involved. This was not a pitched battle, planned in advance with heavy artillery in place. There were disorganized rioters and frightened soldiers with guns who overreacted. And I found no mention of any holes in walls. At least not on the day in question. Perhaps it was created some other time, during some other conflict. Or by some other means.

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Then I tried Googling “Trou dans le Mur/Hole in the Wall.” The search took me to Ernest Hemingway, who wrote:

The old Hole in the Wall bar…was a hangout for deserters and for dope peddlers during and after the first war. The Hole in the Wall was a narrow bar, almost a passageway, on the rue des Italiens with a red-painted façade, which had, at one time, a rear exit into the sewers of Paris from which you were supposed to be able to reach the catacombs.

Oh, sure. Hemingway makes it a dodgy bar, puts it on the next boulevard over (talk about a moveable feast), and adds an irrelevant and implausible detail about the catacombs (which are on the other side of the river). He doesn’t mention what he ate there. It’s just another Hemingway hangout with an improbably colourful clientele.

Finally, thanks to Gallica, I found a reference in a 1927 guidebook called Guide des plaisirs à Paris. It contains the following note: “American Bar (Au trou dans le mur), 23, boul. des Capucines – owes its name to the minuscule entryway on to the boulevard.” No mention of the specialité de la maison. There was also a Café Americain at 4, boulevard des Capucines, pictured in this photograph from Gallica. It is now the Grand Café Capucines.

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Either or neither might have been the place where socialites first ate croque monsieur.

So what is one to make of all this?

I think I will put my faith in Proust. I believe that croque-monsieur was a 19th-century dish that had a funny name because it was intended for little kids (rather like Toad in the Hole for English children). And at some point before the First World War, some chef somewhere, likely in the touristy zone around the Opera that includes the boulevard des Capucines, thought it would be fun to make this nursery food into a chic supper for his clients after a night on the town. And the rest, as they say, is history. Sort of.

Text by Philippa Campsie

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The Mystery of the Missing Suspension Bridges of Paris

Posted on November 25, 2012 by Parisian Fields

In the first half of the nineteenth century, France was a world leader in the design and construction of suspension bridges. And yet today not a single one of Paris’s nineteenth-century suspension bridges over the Seine remains. Why?

It was the image below that got me interested in this question. When a friend let me browse through his collection of early stereoviews of Paris, I found the following stereocard.

This old, faded photograph shows a very unusual bridge. Moving from right to left, we see three arched masonry spans. Above the top of the final masonry pier there is a short stubby tower that is part of a suspension bridge. This bridge continues on to the shore where a higher tower also supports the cables.

What was it? Where was it? I e-mailed the photograph to people I knew in Paris. Nobody had seen it before. One day in Paris, Philippa and I were having lunch in a crowded Parisian bistro with Adam Roberts, who writes the Invisible Paris blog, and we showed him an enlarged version of the image. He had never seen it before. The waiter and the two Parisian men at the next table also took a great interest in the photograph and an animated discussion ensued. The quest was good fun, but the mystery bridge was still a mystery.

Along the way, a retired bridge engineer friend told me about the 1839 bridge shown below, the Saint André-de-Cubzac bridge over the Dordogne River. It is one of many astounding French bridges from the early nineteenth century. The Bridgemeister website where I found this image rightly describes it as “perhaps one of the most fanciful suspension bridges ever built.” Looking at it, I wondered more and more why suspension bridges had vanished from Paris.

Then one day I found and bought the stereoview below, showing a suspension bridge. The handwriting on the back identified it as Pont Louis Philippe, Paris. It certainly wasn’t anything like the Pont Louis Philippe that stands today.

But now I had a starting point for my research. And very quickly, I made some startling discoveries. The woodcut engraving below leaves no doubt that it is the same bridge that started the whole quest. My sincere thanks to the creators of the website Art et Histoire where I found this image.

I also found this lovely pencil sketch from 1840.

Once I had a name for the bridge, a story emerged, only slightly confused by the fact that today there is a masonry bridge by the same name at almost the same spot. The current bridge crosses the River from the point at which the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe meets the embankment of the Seine to the Ile St-Louis, where it runs straight into the rue Jean du Bellay on the island.

The suspension bridge took a different route. It started at the same point, but crossed the river diagonally to the Quai aux Fleurs on the Ile de la Cité. Along the way, it touched the tip of the Ile Saint-Louis, where the support tower had been erected in the form of a triumphal arch. During 1848 Revolution the southern span was burned, but it was repaired and the bridge was given the name Pont de la Réforme. In 1852, the bridge got its old name back.

A demolition decree was issued on August 1, 1860, and the whole bridge was gone by 1862. Why? Admittedly it hadn’t been a particularly handsome bridge. Perhaps it was structurally unsound? One obscure publication in November 1850 notes that a commission of engineers examined the bridge and recommended that the suspension cables and deck be “tested to insure solidity.” But that is not what really happened.

As my interest in Paris suspension bridges grew, I came across the stereoview shown below, showing another suspension bridge in Paris, the Pont de Constantine.

Built in 1837 and named for a French military victory in Algeria that year, it was impressive for the time. It linked the Ile St-Louis and the Quai St-Bernard on the left bank. The main span of 333 feet was complemented by two smaller spans of 85 feet. With a width of just under 10 feet, it was a passerelle, or a pedestrian bridge. And in November 1850, it was reported that a commission of engineers had examined the bridge and recommended that the cables and deck be “tested to insure solidity.” Eventually, it was demolished and replaced by a fixed bridge in about 1863.

There was a pattern emerging here. Two Paris suspension bridges, built in the 1830s, reported in need of testing in 1850, and gone by the early 1860s. What are we missing?

The connection is an event that is little known and rarely mentioned: a deadly collapse of a French suspension bridge that shook the very foundations of French bridge engineering. Because of that collapse, the French halted all further construction of suspension bridges and let other countries assume the lead in suspension bridge design and construction.

The Basse-Chaine Suspension Bridge over the River Maine in Angers was completed on July 16, 1839. Its 335-foot span served pedestrians and wagons well. The bridge had been built “by two of the most experienced contractors in France who had conscientiously adhered to all the rules of the art as then known” (Tom F. Peters, Transitions in Engineering: Guillaume Henri Dufour and the Early 19th Century Cable Suspension Bridges, p. 169). Today we would call it state-of-the-art bridge engineering. France was the acknowledged world leader in suspension bridge design and construction.

Suspension bridges were known to oscillate in the wind and failures were not unknown, but on April 16, 1850, the unthinkable happened. It seems it was a stormy day and the bridge was oscillating. This would not have been regarded as unusual as 478 marching soldiers approached the bridge. But as they crossed, an anchorage tore loose and the deck disappeared beneath their feet; 226 soldiers fell to their deaths. It was the deadliest bridge collapse in history.

An inquiry was launched immediately. Its initial findings were disturbing. The bridge had been designed according to the best and most well-proven theories of the day, constructed to the highest standards, and there had been no visible signs of weakness before the collapse. This final finding led to an immediate halt to the construction of further French suspension bridges.

Cables carrying the weight of a suspension bridge must be anchored firmly. At the time, there were two methods for building suspension bridges. The British used massive eyebar chains made of heavy plate-iron links. Each bridge was held firm by these giant iron links, which went deep underground into anchorages.

By contrast, the French and Swiss pioneered a method of supporting suspension bridges with wire strands or cables, based on the work of engineer Louis Joseph Vicat. The wire cables were split into strands beneath the ground and grouted in place in the anchorages with hydraulic lime mortar. In theory, the mortar would protect the strands from water, rust (oxidation), and any subsequent loss of strength. Since 1831, this had been the approved and near-universal method of building suspension bridges in France.

No one seemed concerned by the fact that there was no way to inspect the anchored ends of the cables. It turned out that the hidden mortar did not always cling to the cable, and water leakage was a problem. The cables were rusting and the mortar was failing, weakening the entire structure.

The bridge that collapsed had been built according to this widely accepted practice. There had been no negligence, no shoddy workmanship. In the words of the Commission of Inquiry, the “oxidation did not originate in a structural error particular only to the Basse Chaine Bridge, but rather to a structural fault in the system itself, so that it is to be feared that the same result will occur wherever it has been applied” (quoted in Peters, p. 171).

Since 1831, hundreds of suspension bridges had been built using a system now shown to be dangerously faulty. Immediately all suspension bridges were suspect. The findings “struck…like a bombshell” and “all bridges built in the previous quarter century, that is, all those with inaccessible anchorage shafts, had to be immediately inspected” (Peters, p. 171). Hence those inspections of the Paris suspension bridges in November 1850.

During the next 20 years, there was an official moratorium on suspension bridge construction, and many existing bridges were demolished, like those in Paris. The moratorium was finally lifted in May 1870, by a French government decree. By this time, the French lead in iron cable suspension bridges had passed to North America, primarily through the work of a German immigrant, John A. Roebling, and the American-born engineer Charles Ellet Jr., who had studied at the École des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris.

In Paris, even the Bercy Bridge, shown below, was replaced, although it had been built using the British system of eyebar chains. Perhaps it fell victim to the need for bridges to carry more traffic, but likely it was the fear brought on by the deadliest bridge collapse in history.

Paris today has little visible heritage of one of the great epochs of French civil engineering. It was only with the work of Gustave Eiffel and Company that the French regained prominence in bridge engineering. But no further major suspension bridges were created in Paris, other than a very small Gustave Eiffel suspension footbridge in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.

Text by Norman Ball. With special thanks to Roger Dorton, Bob Wilson, Gregor Dallas, and Adam Roberts.

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A French family in wartime

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Parisian Fields

Today, November 11, is the anniversary of the end of the First World War. In France the Jour de L’Armistice or le Jour du Souvenir is a day of military parades and ceremonies. But there is more to remembrance than marchpasts and bugles.

A few months ago, I bought six First World War postcards at an open-air antiques sale near the Bastille. The cards, dated 1914 to 1916, showed patriotic or sentimental images specifically created for wartime correspondence. The patriotic ones showed soldiers expressing devotion to France’s flag; the sentimental ones were of wounded men being treated by angelic (and slightly improbable-looking) nurses.

What caught my attention was that all six had been sent to the same address in Montreal: 1759 Park Avenue. Clearly, the postcards had formed part of a long-ago collection. I wish I had taken the time to search for others from the same source. However, the six I did buy provide brief glimpses of a family in wartime. I decided to find out what I could about the people who had sent and received these cards.

It took me some time to track down the address. You won’t find 1759 Park Avenue on Google Maps, because the street numbering has changed since 1915. But thanks to the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, I was able to look at street maps of Montreal dating from before the First World War. I found that 1759 Park Avenue corresponds to what is today 4859 avenue du Parc. The building still stands – a typical Montreal walk-up brick row house with lots of stairs in front.

The surname that appears on the cards is unusual – Bernigaud. Of the six cards, one had been sent to Louise Bernigaud and the rest to Jeanne or J. Bernigaud. Having two names instead of just one made it much easier to trace the family.

Louise and Jeanne were sisters and I found the whole Bernigaud family on a genealogical website. There were seven children: Louise was the eldest, followed by Henri, Philippe, Jeanne, Jean, Marie, and Paul. Their parents were Joseph and Marie. They came from Charolles, in the department of Saone-et-Loire, part of the Burgundy region. The family had left France in 1907 to come to North America (via the United States), and by late 1914 they were living in Montreal.

I spent some time deciphering the handwriting and peering at postmarks.

The first postcard (chronologically) was sent at Christmastime in 1914, from one Yvonne Michaud to Louise Bernigaud. It was posted in Montreal and contains the brief message “Joyeux Noël et Bon Souvenir.” There were several Yvonne Michauds in Montreal at the time. So no clues there.

The second was posted in Lyon Terreaux (one of the Lyon post offices) in July 1915 by someone called Jeannine, and was addressed to Jeanne. The sender, Jeannine, seems to have been working in a French hospital in Lyon (perhaps the Hôpital Desgenettes, a military establishment).  She thanks Jeanne for taking an interest in “her soldiers.” She mentions that her uncle is suffering from tuberculosis brought on the previous winter by the severe cold. (So many people died of tuberculosis in those days; it was one of the leading causes of death.) Her cousin Albert has been evacuated from a hospital in Perpignan. Alas, since I do not know her last name, I cannot find out any more about Jeannine.

The third postcard is also addressed to Jeanne Bernigaud from Lyon, sent in December 1915, but this time, the sender was one C. Vignal. The writer alludes to a loss in the family.

I hope 1916 brings you the happiness you wish for. I hope we see each other soon, at the end of this terrible war. I think how we were all together a year ago and that your dear departed had just received his papers. How happy he was! He had his reward and his sufferings were brief. He is watching over you and protecting you. I often think of him and of you.

Que 1916 vous apporte tout le bonheur que je vous souhaite. Que nous voyons bientôt, la fin de cette terrible guerre. Je pense que l’année dernière nous étions ensemble et que votre cher disparu avait reçu sa feuille. Comme il était heureux ! Il a eu sa récompense et ses souffrances été abrégés. Il veille sur vous et vous protège. Je pense souvent à lui et à vous.

At first I wondered if Jeanne Bernigaud had lost a fiancé, but as I continued my research, a different story emerged. All but one of the members of the Bernigaud family were mentioned in postwar records of various sorts. Philippe was missing.

At the French Defence Ministry website I found the record. Philippe Jean Marie Bernigaud had died at Souchez, near Vimy Ridge, on June 12, 1915, as the result of enemy action. He was 20 years old.

Canadians will immediately recognize the name “Vimy Ridge.” So many Canadians died during a later battle there (1917) that the Canadian government erected a monument to Canadian soldiers. I have visited the memorial, and was moved by its stark shapes and extraordinary vista towards the east. It has recently been meticulously restored.

Who was the author of this message, C. Vignal? There is a clue on the card. “We were all together a year ago.” I doubt that the entire Bernigaud family had returned to France. More likely C. Vignal had been in Canada. I found a Catherine Vignal who had come to Canada before the war with her husband Henri and had been counted in the census of 1911 there. She had been born in the early 1860s, which would make her in her early 50s at this point. A possibility, but I’m really only guessing.

Card No. 4. The message is addressed to Jeanne, written in pencil, and signed “Michaud.” There is a loop through the word that might make it “C. Michaud.” A relative of Yvonne Michaud? Or just another person with a fairly common last name? There is no stamp or postmark. It is dated 14 January 1916. The sender apologizes for not having written earlier, and sends good wishes for the New Year for Jeanne and her family, with the hope that the entire family would soon be reunited under one roof.

Card No. 5 is also from C. Michaud, also in pencil, and dated about a month later. Michaud has received good news of Henri (Jeanne’s older brother, who would have been about 23 then).

Neither of Michaud’s cards has a postmark. They might have been sent in a packet with other letters. Perhaps C. Michaud enclosed the card in a letter to a relative (Yvonne?) in Montreal, who delivered it by hand.

Despite the lack of a postmark, I believe they were sent from France. There is a record of Henri sailing from France to New York at the end of 1916, so I assume that he was in France when C. Michaud wrote the card and therefore that both Michaud’s cards were written from France. Was Henri also a soldier on active service? The ship’s manifest lists him as a “clerk.” Perhaps he was a clerk in the military? I wonder why he was returning to Canada.

The tone of both messages is very formal and respectful, so I’m guessing that Michaud is a young man, and a soldier, like the ones shown in the pictures on the cards. The use of pencil suggests he may have been writing from the field. I wonder what happened to him. On the French Defence Ministry site I found records of 26 people with the last name Michaud and the initial C who had died in the Great War. Many others with the same initial and last name may have survived the war and are not counted among the records of the fallen.

The last of the six postcards is from Jeannine again. It is stamped, but the postmark is too faint to read. The message is dated May 1916. Jeannine says she is now in a small town of 6,000 souls, but hastens to reassure Jeanne that it has its own post office. She mentions that the spring weather is good and speaks of her interest in gardening and stamp collecting. Part of the message is cryptic.

I found your “marriage proposal” very funny; the ceremony is not complicated. Sell the necklaces which you can.

Votre « demande en mariage » m’a bien amusée, la cérémonie n’est pas compliquée. Vendez les colliers ce que vous pourrez.

What was that all about? Jeanne might have sent her friend an amusing story about a proposal, or she might have received a proposal herself that she described in an amusing way. And selling necklaces? A mystery.

That is all. Thanks to ancestry.com, I was able to follow the Bernigaud family for a few years after the war. Jeanne returned to France, and in 1922 is living in Autun, not far from her birthplace. Her older sister Louise visited her there, but returned to Canada with their brother Henri on the S.S. Melita. Henri went into business of some sort. Jean trained as a pilot. Paul was a mechanic. Marie became a secretary and worked for the wife of an eccentric New York millionaire. Their mother, who may have been widowed by the 1920s, was living in Charenton outside Paris in 1931. But there the trail goes cold.

There is something extraordinarily compelling about these bits of paper that are still fresh and readable almost a hundred years after they were mailed. They were saved as a group, eventually they were sold, and they made their way into the hands of a dealer. They travelled from France to Canada, then they went back to France, and now I have returned them to Canada. Fragile, easily destroyed, yet somehow persisting into the 21st century, they continue to bear witness to the story of one French family in wartime.

Text by Philippa Campsie

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The Other Great Nineteenth-Century Tower of Paris

Posted on October 28, 2012 by Parisian Fields

The story begins in a photograph shop in the Village St-Paul. I was browsing among the stereograph cards, when I came across something that looked like this. It captivated me.

I say “looked like,” because this is not the same stereograph. For some reason, I did not buy the card I saw in the Paris shop, and I later regretted my hesitation. But I kept my eyes open, and a year or so later found the one above in a bargain pile at a photo show in Toronto. Sometimes I get lucky.

What was it? Where was it? The shop owner in the Village St-Paul had told me it was an artesian well that once stood on the Left Bank. That was all he knew. Later, I found a postcard that gave additional clues to its location.

The postcard was mailed in 1901. Look at the right side of the image. You can see the Great Wheel built for the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. Clearly, the tower was not far from the Champ de Mars, where the Exposition was held.

More and more intrigued, I went on eBay and ordered an illustration that had appeared in a magazine in 1888. Later I discovered it was based on an 1841 engraving.

Not your average artesian well. The iron tower rose to a height of about 13 storeys; the narrow base accentuated the sense of height. At certain times, visitors could climb the cast-iron circular stairs that wound up the middle of the column, stop on any one of the three circular balconies, and gaze out over the city and countryside. At other times, the tower was shrouded in diaphanous films of water that tumbled outwards and downwards from each of the balconies.

The tower was completed in 1841. But the story begins even earlier, in the days of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Throughout its history, Paris has made a clear distinction between what is inside the walls and what is outside, even though the location of the walls has changed over time. In the early 19th century, Paris had many slaughterhouses inside the walled city. Imagine the congestion, sounds, and odours as thousands of animals were walked along city streets to the slaughterhouses, where things got even noisier and smellier.

Napoleon Bonaparte considered this state of affairs unacceptable for his capital city. On February 9, 1810, he decreed that all the slaughterhouses in Paris were to be closed and replaced by five large new abattoirs outside the walls as they stood at the time. This was in the days before environmental assessments and impact studies, so work started about six weeks later. The abattoirs were finished in 1818, and as of September 15, 1818, it became illegal to bring animals for slaughter into the city. Alas for the exiled Napoleon, he was no longer in Paris to see the achievement of his decree.

One of the five abattoirs was called Grenelle; it was also known as the Abattoirs des Invalides or Abattoirs de Vaugirard. It was a massive complex with 16 buildings covering about eight acres, with its own water pipes feeding 174 taps. Abattoirs need lots of water, particularly one with 48 échaudoirs of scalding water.

Paris is geologically well-situated for tapping underground water supplies through artesian wells, a technology in which France had been a leader for centuries (the word artesian comes from the French province of Artois). In an artesian well, the underground water source is under such pressure that when the rock above is drilled through, water flows upwards of its own accord, with no pumping required. The greater the pressure, the higher it flows above ground level.

Some artesian wells tap water very close to the surface. Not the one at Grenelle. Drilling started in the abattoir courtyard. It was a risky business, demanding both faith and technical competence. The political driver was the mayor of Paris: at the time, one François Arago, now remembered more as a famous physicist. The engineering was entrusted to Louis-Georges Mulot, who had successfully drilled other artesian wells in France.

Drilling started in December 1833 and continued for years. In 1837, more than 200 feet of drilling rods broke loose and fell to the bottom of the bore hole, then at a depth of over 1,250 feet. It took 15 months to recover the equipment and resume drilling. Finally, at a depth of almost 1,800 feet, the boring-rod broke through the rocky arch above the subterranean aquifer, dropped about 14 feet and water gushed up through the pipes in the well and flooded the wooden tower housing the drilling equipment. Mulot sent a terse message to the Mayor on the afternoon of February 26, 1841:

Monsieur Arago, Nous avons l’eau. Mulot.

The next day 100,000 visitors came to see the gusher (not a bad turnout in the days before Twitter). Beautifully clear water was coming out of the ground in the middle of an abattoir. The water was under such pressure that it rose up more than 100 feet.

The water needed to be contained and piped to a reservoir from which it could be distributed to other parts of Paris. Such a system required a pipe that rose high above the ground near the well to let the water continue flowing at an even pressure.

Now at other times and in other cities, this would have been simply a matter of creating a functional piece of equipment to do the job on the spot. But this was a time of great pride in engineering, and besides, this was Paris. Anything that high had to be carefully situated and aesthetically pleasing. It was decided to erect the tower several hundred metres away from the abattoir in the centre of Place de Breteuil. And the design of the column was given to Constant Delaperche, an accomplished painter and sculptor who had been born in Paris in 1790.

The pieces of Delaperche’s design were cast in the foundry at Fourchambault and then brought to the site, where all 100,000 kilograms were assembled into a glorious iron confection that defies categorization. The top reminds me of a Wallace Fountain and the column seems pagoda-like, but in a rather straitlaced fashion.

Of course, some people complained about it, just as they did with Eiffel’s much taller tower. But the two are very different. Eiffel’s had been conceived as an exposition decoration and it eventually became the home of important scientific work; it is still an important communications tower. The Grenelle tower was also a major tourist attraction, but it had been built as a workhorse.

Mulot continued to drill other wells and won many awards for his work. He died in Paris on April 11, 1872, at his home on Rue de Rochechouart, aged 80. At the time his most famous well was still serving Paris; it was the tourist tower of the day. Eiffel’s came later.

But for all of its seeming timelessness, Paris changes. And seemingly endless supplies of water dwindle. In 1903 the Place de Breteuil lost its magnificent tower. It was replaced by a statue of Louis Pasteur.

The abattoir was also demolished and the area is now a residential district, but in 1906, the site of the drilling was honoured by the erection of a magnificent fountain, La Fontaine du Puits de Grenelle (the fountain of the Grenelle artesian well), in an intersection now known as the place Georges-Mulot, 15th arrondissement. Four medallions adorn the four-sided fountain, celebrating local worthies. In addition to Louis-Georges Mulot, we find Valentin Haüy facing rue Valentin-Haüy, Rosa Bonheur facing rue Rosa-Bonheur and Eugène Bouchot facing …well, you know the drill by now.

And once again, I am reminded that if our vision of a past era concentrates on the “one big thing,” we miss many equally exciting but different achievements.

Text by Norman Ball. Photograph of the abattoir courtesy of Paris en Images.

For more information on the artesian well, I recommend this site: Centenaire 1911-2011 des rues Lapparent-Vaudoyer-Heredia

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A virtual walk through old Paris

Posted on October 14, 2012 by Parisian Fields

In the novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, Emma Bovary does something that may sound as familiar to some of you as it does to me. She lives in the countryside, but she wants to be in Paris. So what does she do?

She bought a plan of Paris, and with the tip of her finger on the map she walked about the capital. She went up the boulevards, stopping at every turning, between the lines of the streets, in front of the white squares that represented the houses.

Madame Bovary was written in the 1850s, and the plan Flaubert had in mind was probably much like this reprint that Norman and I found in the bookstore in the Hotel de Sully (an excellent source of books on Paris).

With this book, I can trace Emma Bovary’s imaginary steps with my own finger. This is Paris in the early days of its Haussmann transformation, a city with 12 arrondissements, halfway between the medieval and the modern. It is a conventional map in book form, the precursor to today’s version of Paris par arrondissement. It shows public buildings and churches, palaces and schools. But the blocks containing the houses are just “white squares.”

(Note that the 4th arrondissement in the 1850s does not correspond to the 4th arrondissement of today.)

Emma’s longing for Paris might have been all the more inflamed if she’d bought a bird’s-eye view map. The best known is the immense Turgot map of 1739. This past April, at the Salon international du livre ancien in the Grand Palais, one of the booksellers had a huge coloured version of this map mounted on the back wall of his booth. I was so entranced by the map, I could hardly tear myself away. Here, for example, is the Palais Royal.

Unlike today’s maps, north is towards the bottom left, not at the top.

The detail is extraordinary. There are wonderful little touches that you notice only when you have your nose right up against a full-sized version. Look at the space between the western end of the Tuileries Gardens (at the top) and the eastern end of the Champs Elysées (at the bottom).

The Place de la Concorde has not yet been created, and the space is just an extension of the Gardens, separated from them by a “Pont Tournante” over a little moat. Where the grand buildings of the Crillon Hotel, Automobile Club, and Hôtel de la Marine stand today, there seems to be a lumberyard. Look at the riverside. There are boats and what appears to be a row of lanterns. A grand gate marks the entry to the Cours la Reine – a riverside promenade. It was still there in Emma Bovary’s day.

Turgot’s is the most famous, and probably the most beautiful of the bird’s-eye view maps of Paris, but by no means the first. The Bibliothèque nationale de France has published a compendium of Paris maps dating back to the 16th century,* and the very first one reproduced in the book is a bird’s-eye view, dating from 1553. The one shown on the cover here dates from 1572.

Bird’s-eye view maps let you get up close and personal with the historical city. In one sense, they seem like a straightforward approach to early mapmaking: they represented the oblique view of a city from a high church steeple or tower that an artist could presumably draw from life. But in another sense, they are utterly amazing. The mapmaker had to extrapolate that view from a tower to places where there were no high buildings, present everything from a uniform angle, and show buildings realistically while ensuring that streets were visible and labelled.

How did they do it? How did they get it more or less to scale? The amount of work involved must have been staggering. One insight comes from a paper about 19th-century artists who created bird’s-eye views of American towns in the traditional manner:

[The mapmakers] did not go up in hot air balloons or strap miniature cameras to pigeons or kites to gather information for their panoramas. Instead, they stayed firmly on the ground drafting a street map in perspective based on a grid. Next, they walked through the town sketching the facades of buildings that would appear from the viewing direction that they had chosen. Finally, they drafted the final panorama, filling in detail from the building sketches they made in the field.**

I assume that is how the Parisian mapmakers proceeded: plan, sketch, assemble. But Paris is huge. The enormous Turgot map took two years to create.

Michel-Étienne Turgot didn’t do it himself, but it was his idea. He was the Prévôt des Marchands (Provost of the Merchants, which I assume is like the head of the city’s Board of Trade) and he wanted the map as publicity for the city. This was an early exercise in city “branding.”

Oddly enough, in the 1730s, when Turgot had his idea for a huge map, bird’s-eye views were rather out of date. This was the era of flat, two-dimensional maps that look surprisingly like satellite views, thanks to improvements in surveying techniques. But Turgot wanted something beautiful, something that showed the details. He bypassed professional mapmakers in favour of Louis Bretez, a member of the Academy known for his architectural drawings and paintings.

It was quite a commission. The map is oriented towards the southeast, so most monuments are shown at an angle, not straight on. Although Bretez taught perspective at the Academy, he was instructed to depict all buildings at the same scale, wherever they were located. So there is no vanishing point on this map, no horizon. The scale was 1/1400 and Bretez was given carte blanche to enter buildings so he could sketch the courtyards and interior facades. It sounds like a dream assignment.

Bretez toiled from 1734 to 1736. He probably relied on existing surveys and maps for most of the underlying plan and focused on the architectural details. When he was finished, it took another three years for the engravers to make the plates (the map is in 20 sections) and print them. Then Turgot distributed the map to everyone who was anyone in European trade.

Turgot thought big. When the 20 sections were assembled, the final version was about 10½ feet wide and 8 feet high. The one at the book fair was the original size and looking at it, I felt I could almost climb inside Paris of the 1730s. The best indication of the map’s size is shown in this fashion shot from Harper’s Bazaar in 1951. The model is holding the portfolio that would contain the 20 sheets.

Emma Bovary would have loved it. Eat your heart out, Google Street View.

Text and original photographs by Philippa Campsie.
* Pierre Pinon, Les Plans de Paris: Histoire d’une capitale, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2004.
** Tom Patterson, “Looking Closer: A Guide to Making Bird’s-eye Views of National Park Service Cultural and Historical Sites,” Cartographic Perspectives 52, Fall 2005.

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The Technology of Compassion

Posted on September 30, 2012 by Parisian Fields

I had just finished typing when typewriter collector Martin Howard took the photo below. If you read Braille, you will see that it says “parisian fields.”

The Pantheon is the final resting place of France’s heroes: Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola. In 1952 the remains of Louis Braille were placed there—well, most of him. They left one of his hands in his home town of Coupvray, where he was born on 4 January 1809. He died in 1852, having spent most of his life in Paris. (The picture shows the memorial in Coupvray.)

Louis was born sighted, but when he was three, he accidentally poked one eye with an awl in his father’s harness-making shop. It became infected and in that pre-antibiotic era, the painful infection spread to the other eye. At five, he was completely blind. In an age when the blind usually suffered a life of neglect and ridicule, Louis was fortunate. His parents, along with the local priest and schoolteacher, felt he should go to the local school and learn by listening.

He did well and by 1819, aged ten, he was in Paris as a scholarship student at the National Institute for Blind Youth (L’Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles). The Institute had been founded in 1784 by Valentin Haüy, a philanthropist and linguist who spoke ten languages. When Louis arrived, Haüy was no longer director, but his ideas were still respected.

In 1859 Haüy’s works were commemorated by a moving statue in the Institute’s courtyard, carved by sculptor Jacques Joseph Emile Badiou de la Tronchère.

Valentin Haüy was sighted, but the experience of seeing blind people being mocked during a religious street festival at the Place de la Concorde had reshaped his life. He wanted to open the world of the written word to the blind. In 1784 he developed a much-praised method of imprinting or embossing raised letters on heavy paper which the blind could be taught to read by touching the raised outline of the letters. Unfortunately, it was a cumbersome and expensive method of communicating.

Louis Braille learned Haüy’s method of recognizing the shapes of letters standing out from the page by touching them. But he was frustrated by the limited amount of material produced by this method. And how could he write to others, such as his family, without having others do it for him? Louis’s father made him a set of leather letters he could trace, but he wanted a better system.

Help came from an unusual direction. Years before, the Emperor Napoleon had demanded that his soldiers be able to compose and read messages at night without making a sound or using a light. One of his officers, Charles Barbier de la Serre, came up with a system of 12 raised dots for writing and reading messages.

This sonograph “night writing” was a limited system. For one thing, it was based on 36 different sounds, rather than normal spelling. Given regional accents and variations in pronunciation for any given word, the system could easily lead to confusion. For another, it was technically difficult to produce and read, because each “cell” representing a phonetic sound was composed of 12 positions to accommodate dots. Still, the system embodied two important principles. First, it was tactile. Second, the letters were represented by the position of the dots rather than the actual shape of each letter.

Braille learned the “night writing” system. But he still felt that the system needed to be simplified.

By the time he was 15, Louis had come up with a system based on actual spelling and a simplified 6-dot system. Each cell consisted of two vertical rows of three dots each. He even adapted the system to music notation. At the age of 20, in 1829, he was the published author of The Method of Writing Words, Music and Plain Song by Means of Dots, for the Use by the Blind and Arranged by Them.

When he had finished his studies, the talented Louis was hired as a teaching assistant and made a professor at the school in 1833. He taught history, geometry, and algebra.

Now you’d think that the world would recognize the value of his breakthrough system and beat a path to his door. Alas, educational institutions tend to be conservative. Although at first his system of writing was popular with students and supported by successive directors, in 1840, a new director at the school banned the system and even had books burned as part of his campaign to adopt an inferior American system that was later abandoned. And when a history professor at the school had the nerve to have a book translated into braille, he was fired.

Students continued to push for change, but Louis had been dead for two years when the school finally adopted the Braille system in 1854.*

One problem remained. Writing in Braille still had to be done by hand with an awl and a tablet. How could one quickly create Braille letters on paper? In an era when so many things had been mechanized, why not find a mechanical means for the blind to create their Braille cells?

The typewriter is one of those devices that has been invented over and over again. The history of early typewriters is confusing and littered with dubious claims and counterclaims. However, I accept that the oldest surviving example of typewritten text comes from Italy in 1808 (it is shown below). It was typed by the blind Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano on a machine made for her by an Italian nobleman Pelligrino Turri. Turri was fond of the vivacious and charming young Countess and devastated when she lost her sight. The grief-stricken admirer vowed to create a machine to let her write to friends. And he did just that. His typewriter allowed the Countess to say what she wanted in private and do it in a way that could be easily understood by the intended sighted reader, one of whom was the inventor and, it seems, her lover.

More typewriters would follow, many driven by concern for the blind. Several, including one made by Foucauld in Paris, tried to satisfy both sighted and blind by simultaneously printing letters and embossing Braille dots. It was not a success. The effective mechanical production of Braille text by the blind was finally made possible by Frank H. Hall in Jacksonville, Illinois.

On 1 July 1890, following 25 years’ experience in the public schools of Illinois, Mr. Hall was appointed Superintendent of the Illinois Institution for the Education of the Blind. He set to work to create a better way for blind individuals to write in Braille. He completed his first machine in May 1892 (according to the school’s publication) and by 1893, there were 25 in use at his school and about 75 had been sold to other institutions and individuals. It was an astounding machine in terms of mechanical simplicity and its impact on the life of the blind.

This beautiful unrestored machine shows evidence of long use: six keys with beautiful wear patterns. How nice to see antiques which have not had evidence of their years torn away by overly enthusiastic restoration.

Each of the six keys activates a rod, which moves up to emboss a dot on the paper. To understand how this works, note the piece of metal rising gracefully from the metal above the keys and then arching gracefully towards the back of the machine. It looks to me like an elephant’s trunk.

At the back, we see six jointed vertical pieces of flat metal. Philippa thinks they look like insect’s legs. At one end, each is joined to a rod coming from one of the six black piano-like keys. When the key is depressed, one end of the horizontal piece to which it is attached will also fall and the other end will rise. Although they are of differing lengths, each of the rising ends of the horizontally pivoting arms has a stout piece of wire attached to it. This wire strikes the flattened portion of the elephant’s trunk, which is properly known as the “anvil.” Each wire hits the anvil at a slightly different place. Each wire has its own hole in the anvil which limits how far it travels. And if we have put a piece of paper around the cylinder (platen) so it comes between the bottom of the anvil and the pieces of wire, we will produce the raised embossed dot pattern of the Louis Braille system.

To my mind, the Hall Braille Writer is one of the most exciting and significant of the many nineteenth-century typewriters. It is a delight to use, with a nice touch, and whether the keys are struck singly or in chords, the system is impossible to jam. In the Hall Braille Writer, each wire hits a distinct point, whereas with conventional typewriters, each key hits at the same point, hence a propensity to jam. Hall’s machine successfully linked two important lines of history: the quest to find a mechanical means to allow the blind to write for the sighted, and the quest to allow the blind to write using a system that other blind people could read. Hall supplied the machine and Braille the system of writing.

Helen Keller used this machine, and extolled its virtues relative to a competing method called the New York Point System, which used eight dots instead of six. As she wrote, “in the great world of the blind New York Point is a provincialism. The machines for it are made only in New York, and write only New York Point. On the other hand, machines for Braille are made in Germany, France, England and America. I have owned American and German Braille writers which place me in communication with people all over the world.”

It was only in 1916 that schools for the blind in the United States officially adopted braille. Another 16 years passed before a universal English braille code was adopted. Let Helen Keller have the last word: “We the blind are as indebted to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg…Without a dot system, what a chaotic, inadequate affair our education would be.”

Text by Norman R. Ball, with typewriter photographs courtesy of Martin Howard. Other photographs from Wikimedia Commons. Norman and Martin are collaborating on a book on nineteenth-century typewriters.

* For more on the chequered history of the early years of the Braille system at the Institution, click here.

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On reaching 100 – blogs, that is

Posted on September 16, 2012 by Parisian Fields

When we posted our first blog on July 27, 2010, called “The Sounds of Paris,” we had fairly simple objectives. We wanted to use our photographs of Paris, our shelf of books on the city, and our small collection of antique postcards. We wanted to share some of the things we had found (or found out) during our visits. And, finally, we wanted to answer some of the questions that nagged us. How does the Paris street cleaning system work? What is that long-lost building in a turn-of-the-century postcard? What is the human story behind this artwork or that memorial?

In the past 100 posts, we’ve covered everything from a clumsily executed murder to bouquinistes by the Seine to chimneypots and the finer points of parking. We sometimes set out to write about one thing and end up writing about another – rather like our wanders in Paris. We set out to see something and then one of us says, “I wonder what is down that street?” and one thing leads to another and our original destination is left for another day – or another trip.

Not much has changed after 100 blog posts, although we have more photographs than ever, more books, and a lot more antique postcards.

We both take photographs, although Norman has a better eye and a better camera. Here he is, aiming for the perfect shot, whatever it takes.

We both do research, although Philippa is more obsessive and is more comfortable reading French. Here is a photograph she took (a bit hurriedly) on her visit to the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris in spring 2012.

And we have friends, too many to acknowledge individually, who provide inspiration and support and hospitality. Here, for example, is Norman walking in Tours with Paul Davenport, an economic historian and former university president who teaches about Impressionist Art – we’ve signed up for his next course, which starts this coming week, at the University of Toronto.

And here is some art by Richard Ewen, our man in Texas, which formed the basis of a particularly popular blog post.

And we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the support of two fellow bloggers: Adam Roberts of Invisible Paris, who never fails to inspire us with his on-the-ground knowledge and research skills, and Doni Belau of Girls’ Guide to Paris, who encouraged Philippa to create two walking tours as well as several articles for her site.

Of course, we are leaving out so many others who have cheered us on the way, from family members to complete strangers, who take the time to comment and to encourage our efforts. Please know that we read every word and appreciate every suggestion.

WordPress provides statistics on our progress. We know that the all-time most-visited posting on Parisian Fields is our “Guide for Visitors to Paris,” in which we offer the advice that we always give to friends who are about to visit the city. The next on the list is “Finding Paris in old postcards” followed by “Finding the world in Paris postcards.” Clearly we are on to something with antique postcards. People want to buy them, study them, learn about them, find new stories in them. Postcards are rich sources of information and stories.

We dramatically expanded our postcard collection on our last trip (April–May 2012) with a visit to the Old Paper Market at Saint-Mandé, just outside the Périphérique on the west side of the city. It was raining (it rained a lot that trip), but the stalls were covered and there were riches to be found.

While Philippa carefully searched for items on her wish list (she’ll buy anything showing the Dufayel Department Store or ads created by Dufayel), Norman wandered along the row of dealers. He was amazed to see a large box containing hundreds of assorted Paris postcards listed for 59 euros (the lot). He spoke to the man. Whatever he said was magic. The price came down to 50 euros. He bought it on the spot.

When we came home, it took many evenings to sort out the contents of that box, but we found some treasures. Some are earmarked for future stories, but here are two that caught our attention.

Postcards of Paris monuments are a dime a dozen, but postcards of ordinary Paris streets are more unusual and interesting. Here is one of the rue du Ranelagh in the 16th arrondissement. This was the street that Philippa lived on when she was a student and au pair to a French family. This shot shows the intersection with rue Davioud (someone has helpfully written it in), a few blocks west from the building she lived in (No. 28).

We particularly like the fact that this postcard has been used (pristine, unused postcards are less interesting). The text on the picture side, in childish handwriting, says, “Thank you for the pretty ring. It suits me. I send a big kiss to Grandfather and Grandmother. Anaïs.” It was posted in August 1905 in Auxon, in the department of Aube.

The address on the other side is written in a more adult hand. There is a name, but no street address, and it was going to Kemplich in Lorraine, a region that at the time was part of the German Empire, having been taken over in 1871 at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. The card had to go through Kedingen in Germany to reach its destination, and there is an extra postmark that indicates this step in the voyage. Little Anaïs’s family was divided by a border.

The St-Mandé box also yielded a postcard of one of Norman’s favourite haunts – the Hotel de Sens, home of the Bibliothèque Forney in the Marais, where he has spent many happy hours browsing collections related to the decorative arts, and their postcard files, which include cards written by French people visiting Niagara Falls in Canada.

Note that in this picture, this extraordinary 15th-century building is being used as a commercial premises – a glassworks (Verrerie Haroux).  It dates from about the same time as the Anaïs postcard. We know that, because in 1899 Eugene Atget photographed it looking as it does here. Back then, the Marais was the haunt of artisans and fabricators of all kinds. The trendy boutiques and respectfully restored historic houses came later.

Alas, nobody has used this postcard, so there is no story to tell about the sender or recipient.

There is something about holding a postcard that has been sent from one person to another more than 100 years ago that makes you feel close to history. Did Anaïs survive the First World War? Did her family? Were they around to celebrate the return of Lorraine to France? Or had they perished in those four ghastly years?

In the course of researching, writing, and choosing images for 100 blogs, we have stumbled across countless stories of long-vanished people and their friends and families. Traces of their lives and passions survive in these scraps of pasteboard. Will anyone ever trace us through our e-mails and text messages, or have we vanished more permanently than Anaïs and her grandparents in 1905?

Vive la carte postale! You who are reading this, if you crave immortality, send a postcard to a friend or family member this minute. Years from now, a blogger may find it and start an inquiry into your life and times. The descendants of Anaïs may be looking for her right now…

Send your postcard from a favourite place, a place where you like who you are when you are there. That is why we keep going to Paris as often as possible and why we write about what we find  in this magical city. We hope you enjoy our blogs, 100 of them and counting, as much as we enjoy putting them together.

Text and photographs by Norman Ball and Philippa Campsie

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Lost (and found) in translation

Posted on September 2, 2012 by Parisian Fields

Among the pitfalls in learning French are what is known as “faux amis” (false friends) – that is, words that sound as if they ought to mean the same thing in English and French, but don’t. Like librairie, which is a bookstore, not a library. Or photographe, which is a photographer, not the camera image. Assister doesn’t mean to assist but to attend. Confection is garment making, not a bonbon. And so on.

However, if you have a sense of humour of a certain type, it is possible to exploit English-French confusions for a peculiar type of Franglais pun.

We found out about this when our friend Kim, a graphic designer and artist, snapped up a box of cocktail napkins at the Toronto Junction flea market (yes, we have flea markets in Toronto, too), labelled “Fractured French.” Each one shows a Franglais cartoon with a caption by Fred Pearson 2nd and an illustration by Richard Taylor.

The French captions sometimes require you to mispronounce the French words the way an English speaker might (so, for example, “S’il vous plaît” comes out like “silver plate”). Sometimes, you need a pronunciation somewhere between English and French (“Marseillaise” becomes “My mother says yes”). Sometimes the pun is not Franglais at all, but a joke involving two similarly pronounced French words and a certain amount of 1940s stereotyping (“Mal de mer” becomes a terrifying mother-in-law).

The illustrations are evocative of an upper-class postwar period. Dowagers in floral dresses and pearls; young women in strapless cocktail gowns. Men in tweeds or dinner jackets. Night clubs. Country houses. Seaside hotels. The Canadian-born Richard Taylor (1902–70) created many cartoons for the New Yorker, so the style and some of the characters may look familiar.

According to an article written in 1950,* Fred Pearson 2nd (1912–60) caught the French pun bug in the late 1930s. Soon he became known for his collection of puns and his friends started to volunteer their own ideas or jokes they had heard. In the late 1940s, Pearson and Taylor published a book of the illustrated jokes called Fractured French. It was so popular that they produced a sequel, called Compound Fractured French. Eventually, the collaboration expanded into merchandising. To this day on eBay you can find plates and ashtrays as well as cocktail napkins featuring the cartoons.

The original box of napkins that Kim found would have once had 36 different cartoons, but contained only 17 when she gave it to us. Mind you, that’s not bad for a set of throwaway items from the 1950s. I wonder how they survived all those years.

We have included a few of our favourites from this collection as illustrations.

“Ruban bleu/Mamoulian scrammed” gave us pause, until we discovered that Rouben Mamoulian was a noted film director at the time.

Pearson died in 1960 and Taylor in 1970. The torch passed to a new generation of pun artists who enjoyed making French sound like English.

In 1967, a Hollywood actor called Luis d’Antin Van Rooten published Mots D’heures: Gousses, Rames. This was a different approach to transatlantic humour. If you say the French words aloud, they resolve themselves into familiar English expressions that sound like someone with a heavy French accent. The title eventually becomes “Mother Goose Rhymes” if you say it often enough.

Van Rooten’s forty French verses make a strange kind of sense (the title translates as “Words of the Hours: Pods, Oars”), helped along with creative punctuation and notes in the form of scholarly annotations. The book even comes with a complete (and bogus) provenance: Rooten claims it was found among the effects of an elderly relative – who had been a schoolteacher in Aix-en-Provence – and dates from the 18th century or earlier.

Any academic who sometimes finds traditional annotations and footnotes a little too precious at times will appreciate Rooten’s pseudo-scholarly comments on poems such as Un petit, d’un petit.

Say it ten times over. Eventually, it resolves itself into “Humpty Dumpty.” Rooten’s comment on the French text? “The inevitable result of a child marriage.”

Now try this: Lit-elle messe, moffette, Satan ne te fête…**

Van Rooten died in 1973, without producing a sequel. That task seems to have fallen to a writer called Ormonde de Kay, who had previously made a serious translation into French of Mother Goose verses. In 1980, he published a collection called N’Heures Souris Rames which is dedicated to Van Rooten. De Kay claims that these poems were given to him by a mysterious Hungarian and are of 16th-century origin.

Further, he asserts that the fact that the French verses sound like English rhymes when they are pronounced aloud can be traced to the likelihood that French Huguenot émigrés who fled the Wars of Religion would have sung them during their exile in England (at a time before nursery rhymes were common); the English enjoyed them without knowing their meaning, and turned them into English verses instead.

So, for example, when they heard the émigrés singing Hâte, carrosse bonzes, they heard “hot cross buns,” and the rest is history. Or history imagined by the fertile brain of Ormonde de Kay. Some of his contributions to this highly specialized genre include:

Heroïque Garonne de moule-bourrée bouche***

and

Tuie-nickel, tuie-nickel, le tel se tare****

Norman says he finds it rather like deciphering certain vanity licence plates. Keep saying it until it makes sense.

The technique is called homophonic translation. It takes a certain kind of mind and linguistic facility to pull this sort of thing off and a certain sense of humour to appreciate the results. You may not improve your conversational French with Un petit, d’un petit and the like, but you can impress non-French speakers with your accent. Of course, any real French person hearing you would think you had gone completely mad.

Text by Philippa Campsie; illustrations from Fractured French by Fred Pearson 2nd and Richard Taylor, © 1950.

*Pearson’s Windfall, by Geoffrey T. Hellman, New Yorker, December 30, 1950
**Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet
***Here we go round the mulberry bush
****Twinkle, twinkle little star

Posted in Paris popular culture | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Everyday Hats of Paris

Posted on August 19, 2012 by Parisian Fields

While there is a Paris of high fashion, there is also the Paris of everyday life. And what could be more everyday (quotidien) than dry cleaning or having a dress or pair of pants altered?

This little bellhop with his pillbox hat shows you where you can get your clothes dry cleaned (le pressing) or altered (la couture). It might not be haute couture, but it helps us meet our daily needs.

School is part of everyday life. So are crossing guards. We have them in Toronto, but they don’t at all measure up to this one in the Marais. The hat. The hat. You are supposed to be looking at the hat. Yes, nice stockings too. I wonder if the other side of the “Stop Ecole” sign says “Arrêt School”?

French children seem to have lots of time out of school and Paris is richly endowed with playgrounds and parks for them. This little guy and his friends were having a marvellous time. They climbed on colourful equipment, pushed empty strollers around, waddled about in warm clothes (including hats such as this), and above all embodied the magic of childhood.

On a late November day, I emerged from the subdued interior of the Centre Pompidou. Outside, the movement, the crowds, and the colours were dazzling. A flash of light caught my eye. For the next few minutes, the concrete slabs were a stage for the quiet, studied movements of a young scooter rider in a world all of his or hers alone. And yes there was a hat. It was a bicycle helmet (casque). I understand the Brits call them “crash hats” and I have also heard the term “skid lids.”

Perhaps in a few years the youngster will have a bigger two-wheeler and a more avant-garde safety helmet such as the one below. Did you notice the belt drive on this bicycle? It is a folding bike. I wonder who made it.

Maybe I could get a bicycle like that for Christmas. But all I really want for Christmas is to be in Paris and not in Toronto. There is so much less non-stop, force-fed, clichéd jolliness in Paris. It is less in-your-face, more meaningful and done so much more imaginatively. Look at the Galeries Lafayette window below.

I so much like this photo because it conveys the confusing magic I associate with Paris. I am also impressed by the red railing in the lower right.

As I look at this photo and those below, I think the world has much to learn from a country where a department store creates a special walk-up elevated viewing area for the children. It gives them their own front-row view of magic and possibility.

It is not just the children who adore the Christmas window displays. I keep coming back to the joyful animation in this Bon Marché Christmas window. And the lady beneath the hat? She is the one who introduced me to Paris. We both bought hats from the same hat maker at a craft market on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet.

And here is the one I bought for myself, taken at the hat stall in the market. I was just starting to grow a beard at the time, hence the stubble.

Pick up a travel or tourist article about Paris, and chances are you will find exhortations to visit the flea markets. They are worth going to. I met the lady shown below at the Porte de Vanves flea market at the very edge of the city. Cross over the Périphérique and you are in the suburban commune of Malakoff, not in Paris.

As with much that one finds in the Porte de Vanves flea market, the lady, her hat, and her pearls have a certain faded and dated elegance.

Back in the heart of the city, the hatted lady below stood out as if alone amongst the many, her eyes almost looked through me and her lips seemed alive. I waited for them to move.

One very rarely sees berets in Paris. It is not like in the old movies, where happy accordionists and stevedores all sport berets and smoke cigarettes that seem glued to their lower lips. This accordionist was very happy. Yes, as everyone should, we paid him for his joyful music. Bringing us joy is his job and he does it very well. And somehow the baseball cap seemed right. Paris has a rich historical heritage to which one returns and re-explores, but it is also a city of the present, a city that offers surprises. I want Paris to keep surprising me. A beret wouldn’t do the job.

Text and photographs by Norman Ball.

Posted in Paris flea markets, Paris popular culture, Paris streets | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments