The invisible woman

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Parisian Fields

As the saying goes, “Behind every great man stands a woman, rolling her eyes.” In the case of the Modernist architect Le Corbusier, that woman was probably Charlotte Perriand, his colleague and co-creator in the 1930s. Only she was probably too good-natured and well-mannered to roll her eyes. Perhaps from time to time she permitted herself a rueful smile.

On our last visit to Paris, we saw an exhibit of her furniture and photographs at le Petit Palais. It continues until September 18 and we highly recommend it.

Charlotte, who was born in 1903 in Paris, studied at the l’Ecole de l’Union centrale des Arts décoratifs, and got a job after Le Corbusier saw her chrome-tube furniture, shown at the Salon d’automne in 1927. The installation was called Bar sous le toit (bar under the roof).

Actually, she had earlier applied to Le Corbusier for a job, thinking he might have a use for her training in the decorative arts, and he had turned her down with the dismissive comment, “Nous n’avons pas de broder coussins ici.” (We don’t embroider cushions here). It was the exhibit that made him change his mind. She was apparently gracious enough to overlook his earlier boorishness.

But what is more interesting is that the ensemble was not a prototype or a commission for someone else – it was something she had created for her own studio in the place St-Sulpice. Immediately you get a sense of who she was. She didn’t say one thing and do another.

Le Corbusier was famous for saying, “A house is a machine for living in,” and for creating clean white cubes in which everything was carefully positioned at right angles and all clutter was banished. But a photograph of Le Corbu taken by Brassaï in 1931, shows him toiling at a untidy desk, with an unsteady pile-up of books and papers on the shelves behind him, and bits of bric-a-brac on the mantel shelf. The only right angles are in a picture on the wall. Machine for living in, my eye.

Charlotte understood that people have stuff. One of her comments, quoted in the exhibit, caught our attention:

Quel est l’élément primordial de l’équipement doméstique? Répondons sans hésiter: le rangement. Sans un rangement bien conçu, pas de vide possible dans l’habitat.

What is the crucial element in domestic equipment? We can answer that immediately: storage. Without well-planned storage, it is impossible to find space in one’s home.

Truer words were never spoken. Norman is building shelves in our basement as I write this. If we could, we would buy or recreate the furniture Charlotte created – elegant, multifunctional shelves and cupboards that make modern wall units look clumsy and amateurish by comparison.

Charlotte worked in Le Corbusier’s studio for about 10 years. The rest of her career was full and busy. She travelled widely, lived and worked in Japan at various times, married twice and had one child, and collaborated with other artists, architects, and designers, including Fernand Léger and Jean Prouvé.

The exhibit shows how she drew inspiration from the world around her. In a videotaped interview on the Petit Palais website, Jacques Barsac, her biographer (and, we gather, son-in-law), said that she used photography as a way of taking notes of things that interested her. The exhibit does a wonderful job of pairing photographs and objects – the slatted bench beside the picture of a fish skeleton, the roundabout beside the similarly shaped mountain refuge she designed.

She spent a lot of time outdoors – hiking, swimming, skiing. The keynote image in the exhibit is of her with her back to the camera, facing a range of mountains, raising her ski gloves in the air, wearing nothing above her waist but a string of beads (probably her signature necklace of steel ball bearings). She looks strong, healthy, and down-to-earth.

Her awareness of the world around her extended to the lot of the less fortunate. In one of the other galleries of the Petit Palais, we were impressed by a huge mural/collage on the theme of “La Grand Misère de Paris.” She had created it for a salon devoted to “arts ménagères” (domestic arts) in 1936. Not what you’d expect in such a venue, but Charlotte was aware of the dire living conditions of the poor in the city and the need for healthy housing. Modernists get a bad rap for wanting to sweep away “picturesque” slums and replace them with clean new housing, but you cannot fault their good intentions.

It’s a wonderful exhibition, but a couple of things surprised us. We saw the official document that Charlotte, with Le Corbusier and his cousin/partner Pierre Jeanneret, had received, patenting the design for a reclining chair (chaise longue basculante). Her name comes first. First. Yet in the display – in an exhibit devoted to her work – the design credits are generally listed as “Le Corbusier, Jeanneret and Perriand.” And the piece of furniture in question was for years known as a Le Corbusier design, as if she’d never existed. In most furniture shops, it is still described that way.

We were also surprised by the dearth of books about her in the gift shop. There was no catalogue, nor one of those magazine-like overviews that the French do so well. Only a fold-out brochure, one third of which was taken up with the keynote image of her, and some cards (not postcards). She deserves better.*

We could not take photographs of her work inside the museum. But in Le Bon Marché department store, there was a display devoted to her, presented by the furniture manufacturer Cassina, a company that has reissued editions of her classic designs. Her work is also in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. But again, in most cases, the designers’ names are listed with hers last. We both got quite irked by this downplaying of her role in the design.

Even the wording of the chronology of her life written on a panel at the Bon Marché exhibit seemed to efface her. The last line reads, “1999 – disparition de Charlotte Perriand à Paris.” Yes, in French you can interpret the word “disparition” to mean death as well as disappearance, but did they choose that word because her work had “disappeared” into that of others?

Charlotte, we owe you an apology. For years you were the invisible woman behind the furniture designs attributed to Le Corbu and his brother, and only belatedly – and seemingly half-heartedly – are people acknowledging your creativity and contribution. It’s time we gave you the credit that is your due.

Text by Philippa Campsie; original photographs by Philippa Campsie and Norman Ball. Colour photograph of Charlotte Perriand by Pernette Perriand-Barsac, Charlotte’s daughter. Photograph of Le Corbusier by Brassaï.

*Books about her do exist, including an autobiography. A list appears on her Wikipedia entry.

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The art of the chasse-roue

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Parisian Fields

Paris often reveals itself in the details. And as a historian of design and technology, I am drawn to the many different ways that the French seem to find for doing the same thing. In this case, protecting the sides of the wide double doorways or archways known as portes cochères from the damage by the wheels and sides of carriages or carts — now cars and trucks — going through them. Like the spikes of the anti-burglar devices I looked at in an earlier blog, they say: keep your distance. I photographed many of these devices before I even knew their name.

Let us begin our tour with a rather imposing and clearly important entryway. On either side, note the humble-looking guard stones. That is the English term, but when I took the picture, I didn’t know either the English or the French term. I enlisted the help of Adam, author of the wonderful and informative blog Invisible Paris, who has a gift for research, and he came up with the name chasse-roue (to chase the wheel) or bouteroue (to push the wheel out of the way).

For contrast, consider this image. Although it is made of cast iron and sited in humbler circumstances, it does the same job as the chasse-roue at the porte cochère of a diplomatic residence.

Before the age of cheap iron and steel, chasse-roues were traditionally made of stone. In the Passage St. Paul in the 4th the beautiful sequence of chasse-roues reads like horizontal archaeology.

Once I knew the correct name, I searched online for more images, and found a wonderful site dedicated to the heritage of the Somme region. Even if you don’t read French, click here to see a whole range of stone versions in the region to the north of Paris.

Chasse-roues are warning signs: keep back, keep your distance, don’t brush up against me. Most of the surviving chasse-roues that I have seen in Paris are from the age of economical iron or steel. And of all the cast iron chasse-roues I have seen in Paris, none give a more workmanlike message that those where the buses pound through the archways to cross the interior courtyard of the Louvre.

As with so much of the material world, we don’t know who made what we see. I have only found one chasse-roue in Paris with a name attached. Unfortunately, I don’t know who B. Dubuc was, but I assume he was the owner of the Paris iron foundry where this conical cast-iron chasse-roue was cast.

One of the beauties of cast iron — a material that I am very fond of — is that while molten, it may be poured or cast to take many forms. Once someone has made a pattern or mould of the design (the most expensive part of the process), each casting is relatively cheap. That is why we have so many inexpensive ornamental cast-iron products from the latter 19th and early 20th centuries. And because cast iron is so fluid, it can be made into elaborate shapes. Here are only a few of the many ornamental cast iron chasse-roues I have photographed in Paris.

Some of the cast-iron chasse-roues project a sense of strength and solidity. This one seems to say, “I might not be pretty, but I have a job to do and I do it well.”

Others seem to combine the image of strength with a sense of elegance. This is a beautiful but substantial casting.

Here we find a similar design executed with greater attention to detail and less encrusted in detail-obscuring paint.

Some are quite elaborate but without sacrificing the strength needed to do the job. With the holes or voids in the design, this casting would have required greater time in making the pattern or mould and greater care in cleaning the casting than for others we have seen. Nonetheless, it was still a process that allowed for production at a reasonable price.

In chasse-roues, as in gargoyles, one finds works depicting mythological or creatures from nature. And often there is a certain sly impudence. Am I imaging things or is this a cat (or lion) with attitude?

Sometimes chasse-roues work in conjunction with other protective devices as with this corner-mounted protector.

Whatever shape they come in, whatever they are made of, chasse-roues all do a similar job. The variety is part of the human technological experience and what I have seen in Paris helps reinforce my view that nothing we do is purely functional. And for that I am truly grateful.

Next time you wander about Paris, look for the chasse-roues. You will be surprised by their number and variety. Perhaps you will find my friend, which I call the “Buddha of the Marais.”

Text and photographs by Norman Ball

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The balcony scene

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Parisian Fields

The painter Gustave Caillebotte and his brother, photographer Martial Caillebotte, loved balconies. They frequently painted and photographed people standing on ornate balconies overlooking wide boulevards, gazing down at the passing scene below.* And sometimes they set up an easel or a camera on a balcony and captured what they saw from that viewpoint. One of my favourite pictures is the one that Gustave painted of the view from his balcony on the boulevard Haussmann in 1880 – a tiny view into the everyday world 130 years ago.

On our most recent visit to Paris, we rented an apartment with a balcony, and like the Caillebottes, we spent a lot of time on it, watching people come and go. However, our apartment did not overlook a wide boulevard, but a narrow, one-way street, and the first thing we saw when we looked out was not a tree and a bench, but…a Velib’ stand. Here it is, with some of Paris’s finest pedalling by.

We realized after a while that this stand served much the same function as the bench in Caillebotte’s picture. People sat on the bicycles or the docking stations just like the man pictured on the bench, but in this day and age, they were usually smoking a cigarette or making a phone call.

With the introduction of anti-smoking laws in France, outdoor smoking is common and the spot was a popular one for smoke breaks for the kitchen staff and wait staff of a local restaurant. The restaurant entrance was on the next street over (a spacious boulevard), but our balcony overlooked the staff entrance. The women’s footwear is a clue to the type of restaurant.

Another 21st century feature of the view was the green cross advertising a pharmacie – this establishment also faced onto the boulevard one block over, and the sign simply directed customers to the location of the entrance. These green crosses fascinate me. Somewhere, there is a factory churning them out for the French market, and the workers must spend their lives coming up with new patterns of green lights on a black background. It seems that no two signs have exactly the same patterns.

Because the street was one way with parking on both sides, and because it served as the back entrance to the buildings opposite, we would sometimes hear car horns blaring in futile frustration as the street was blocked by someone loading or unloading. The noise would reach a particular crescendo when the blockage was caused by the green recycling truck that picked up the wine bottles from the restaurant. The truck had hoists to raise up the bins full of bottles and tip them out into the pile inside. Deafening. And there were always a lot of bins to empty.

Every day, indeed every hour, there was something new to see – somebody doing a little housekeeping…

…moving in…

…or walking a dog.

But every evening, we were treated to free entertainment in the form of the valet parking guy (voiturier). Farther down the street was a Chinese restaurant that was clearly popular with the well-to-do. Between 8 and 9 p.m., the BMWs, the Jags, the SUVs, and the Bentleys would pull up and disgorge their impeccably dressed occupants. Then the parking guy would take over.

His job was to find a spot somewhere, anywhere, in the vicinity, park the car, and sprint back to his position to get the next car. He was very fit and very good at parking. We once watched him back up and round a corner at the next intersection when a spot became available on a cross street. His office was a battered Peugeot, where he kept the keys to all the cars. He had an assistant who stood around looking helpless and who was clearly not allowed to get behind the wheel of a car. I guess his job was to keep an eye on the car where the keys were kept.

If you look closely in the picture below, you will see a sort of blur in front of the Velib’ stand. That’s our guy, running flat out, to retrieve or move a car. My camera shutter speed couldn’t keep up with him.

Never a dull moment. What, I wonder, would Caillebotte have chosen to paint if he had lived on this street today?

* We saw the work of the brothers Caillebotte at the Musée Jacquemart-André. This special exhibition continues until July 11, 2011.

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

Posted in Paris art, Paris automotive, Paris civic functions, Paris streets | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Don’t go there

Posted on June 12, 2011 by Parisian Fields

On a recent trip to Paris, we arranged to meet up with a friend, a Canadian architecture-school librarian. As the three of us wandered about Montmartre, she asked us an intriguing question: “What are those spiked things for?” I replied, “They mean don’t go there.” They are more than mere barriers – they are designed to intimidate.

Some are simple, with only a single layer or row of spikes. Others, such as this fierce specimen, threaten intruders with evisceration.

All of them – and I include only a few of the many I have photographed – have one purpose: to tell you not to even think about going there and to stop you very painfully if you try. The two shown above are warnings not to climb up the drainpipe to gain entry to anything you might otherwise plan on breaking into.

Sometimes they are less obvious. On a lazy August day, we watched boys playing soccer on the wide, shady sidewalk in front of an attractive Ministere des Finances building. It was an idyllic scene.

But take a closer look. Cast your eye upwards along the grey front to the right of the group of boys. Here, let me help you with a telephoto shot.

The rings of metal thorns – even when reflected in a windowpane – are all about business, the business of saying: don’t go there.

On another building, the U-shaped light well that brightened the interior of the apartments might have provided an ideal entry point for those with evil intentions. The message of the intimidating barriers is clear: Think twice about it.

On the building below, the downspout ring of iron thorns seems lacking in enthusiasm but the bottom two levels of windows are barred. Moreover, there are three security cameras.

Now take a closer look at the barriers at the side of the building. It would be very dangerous to stand on the pillar or to try to get past it.

Even those who might gain access to the higher levels will find that many buildings have barriers to moving sideways from one building to another. Some manage to be ornamental as well as intimidating.

Others are less subtle. The closer you get the louder they seem to scream their message.

As we paused to look closer, we noticed the netting that usually indicates there is structural work to be done on whatever is underneath. Another good reason not to climb.

And the nearer you get to your imagined destination the more you know you ought to be somewhere else.

And it is not just people who get the messages. In the inner courtyard of Le Petit Palais, where we paused for lunch, we noticed a few messages directed at the pigeons: don’t even try to land or perch here. Your feet will regret it.

Best to just fly on by. There are better career opportunities elsewhere. How about acting as a “fascinator” at a regal gathering?

Text and photographs by Norman Ball.

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A palace of commerce and a 1904 rendez-vous

Posted on June 5, 2011 by Parisian Fields

“Dimanche soir – reçu lettre ce matin. Compte sur toi pour mercredi. Embrasse tous. Jean.” Sunday night – received letter this morning. [I] count on you [to come] on Wednesday. Love to all, Jean. The date on the postmark is June 13, 1904.

The message is written on the picture side of a postcard that we found in the stamp and card market in the gardens just off the Champs-Elysées. The photograph showed a huge building we didn’t recognize, with the words Dufayel on an elaborate clock tower topped with a dome which was further topped with a spire. Printed on the card are the words “Vue panoramique prise de la Butte Montmartre – P.P.C. – Paris.” (Panoramic view from the Montmartre Hill. P.P.C. might mean “picture post card.”)

Dufayel? Apparently it was a huge department store that sold furniture and housewares. When it opened in 1856, it was called Le Grand Magasin des Nouveautés. When the original owner died in 1888, an ambitious employee called Georges Dufayel bought it and gave it his own name.

Dufayel (1855 -1916) was quite an operator. He either invented or popularized the notion of buying goods on the installment plan and buying from a catalogue. He also sold coupons that could be used in other stores, and took a cut of each transaction.*

Les Grands Magasins Dufayel expanded over the years until the store occupied most of a city block to the east of the hill of Montmartre – about a hectare in all. The inside was palatial, with chandeliers and mirrors, and contained a winter garden and a theatre that seated 3,000. On top of the dome was a revolving searchlight of 10 million candlepower – roughly similar to the light that currently revolves on top of the Eiffel Tower. The statues on either side of the entrance represent “Credit” and “Publicity” and over the door is “Progress” riding in a chariot. (For pictures of the interior, click here or here.)

The building is only one of the points of interest in the photo. There is a tall chimney on the right, and a sort of crane on the left. In front is a lively street scene, with people coming and going to and from small, awning-shaded shops. The area is not fully developed, since “Terrain à Vendre” (land for sale) is painted on one of the walls in the foreground.

Curious to see what was there now, we set off with a friend on a fine May morning to find out. We located the building shortly after leaving the Barbès-Rochechouart Metro station. We approached its southern front first, which was also impressive, before we found the west-facing façade shown on the postcard. The building is now occupied by the BNP Paribas bank.

Alas, what was once the front entrance is now the back of the building and is obscured by an ugly fence. The squared-off dome was gone, and so is the huge clock face, but the stonework with its relief sculpture of Progress riding in a chariot is still there.

We wondered if the view from the Butte Montmartre would still show the street in front (rue André del Sarte). We climbed the steps at the end of the street and headed into the Louise Michel park to take a look.

At first we took the lower path, where thick trees and bushes prevented us from getting a clear sight of the building.

But when we took a closer look at the postcard, we realized that since the lower path was visible at the bottom left, the picture had been taken from much higher up.

Eventually, on one of the upper paths, we found a bridge over what must have been a small creek or gully that gave the same view as the postcard, although trees still obscured part of the view.

The land that was for sale at the turn of the century had been sold. The chimney and the crane were gone. But the street still contained small shops and cafés, and people were still coming and going.

What about the other side of the postcard? Who was Jean expecting on Wednesday? The card arrived on the same day it was sent (the Monday). Who needed e-mail in those days of same-day mail service?

The postcard was addressed to “Mademoiselle Lucienne Ricard, 18 rue Nicolas-Simon, Tours, Indre-et-Loire.” Rue Nicolas Simon does not appear on Google maps, but I found it on an image of an old Baedeker map of Tours. When I compared it to the current map, I realized that the street had been renamed rue Jules Simon. No. 18 is still there, visible in Street View.

Jean must have known Lucienne well, because he used the intimate “tu” form of address. I wonder if they were brother and sister. And, if Jean’s last name was Ricard, whether he was the novelist of that name who published several books in the 1920s and 1930s.

I hope Lucienne made the rendez-vous in Paris with Jean. Perhaps they shopped at Dufayel, entering the palace of commerce by the grand doors under the clock tower.

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

*Dufayel also bought a house at 76, avenue des Champs-Elysées, which had once belonged to a duchess, tore it down, and had the architect who had designed his store (Gustave Rives) create an even more elaborate mansion (now demolished). He installed himself there in 1905 or so with his art collection. His name is also associated with Sainte-Adresse in Haute-Normandie, where there is another large building bearing his name. He created a resort area in the town known as “Nice – Havrais” (the Nice of the area of Le Havre). Busy guy.

Posted in Paris history, Paris postcards, Paris quartiers, Paris shops, Paris streets | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 32 Comments

Rattled in Raspail (adventures in banking)

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Parisian Fields

In 1910, Stephen Leacock wrote a short story called, “My Financial Career,” which began with the words, “When I go into a bank I get rattled. The clerks rattle me; the wickets rattle me; the sight of the money rattles me; everything rattles me.” Leacock expressed this reaction to a bank in a small Canadian town. What would he have made of the grand and intimidating Banque de France on the Boulevard Raspail?

Perhaps we should explain. We had received a 500-euro note from our bank in Canada. They didn’t have much in the way of choice, and we needed some cash for our trip, so we took it.

When the time came to change it, we entered an ordinary bank near our apartment. The teller was aghast. Surely we did not expect change for this note? No, no. Banks do not change money. What a preposterous idea!

We asked politely where we could change this troublesome note. The Banque de France and only the Banque de France was the answer.

The next day, we found ourselves on the Place de la Bastille, where there is a branch of the Banque de France. We entered. This itself is a process. Press a button. Wait. Enter a little airlock between two sets of doors. Perhaps decontamination occurs at this point. Push another button. Wait. Enter the bank.

We approached the teller and repeated our request. Ah non! Not this branch of the Banque de France! How could we have thought such a thing! No, no. We must go to the bank on the Boulevard Raspail. That is the one and only place in Paris to change a 500-euro note.

OK, fine. Whatever. It is close to the Bon Marché and we are always happy to visit the Grand Epicerie there. So we head to the Boulevard Raspail.

Now, it is important to time one’s arrival. The bank isn’t open just any old time to passersby. It opens at 8:45 a.m. and remains open until noon. At that point, the bankers need their lunch. It reopens at 1:30 p.m. and remains open until 5 p.m. But if you need the services of a teller, you must get there before 3:30 p.m., when the guichets (tellers’ wickets) close.

So far, so good. We arrive just before 3 p.m. We go through the airlock ritual and enter the bank. It is all heavy marble and dark wood and gloomy shadows. We see a desk labelled “Accueil” (welcome), but no one is there to welcome us. Somehow, we cannot imagine feeling welcomed to this oppressive spot.

On the desk we find forms that must be completed in order to carry out a cash exchange. Norman gets out a pen. (The bank does not supply one.) Date, name, first name, address, amount, origin of the funds, phone number, profession, signature. Proof of identity is required.

At the bottom of the form is written, “The lack of compulsory information will make the operation impossible.” (This is the bank’s translation, not ours.)

To one side are three guichets, enclosed in glass. Probably bullet-proof. Only two are staffed. A woman teller is occupied with a young man who has what appear to be large pouches of money. He has been there some time, we can tell, and he has the air of someone who expects to be there for even longer. He tries to make a cellphone call and the teller raps angrily on the glass. He is to desist, immediately. He promptly ends his call.

The other teller, a man, is engaged in a transaction with another customer. Across from the tellers are some benches with people sitting on them. They are formal and rigid, and when you sit on them, you feel like someone waiting for the outcome of a judgement in a courtroom. The benches imply that you are guilty.

After a while, we notice a little contraption that dispenses paper tickets with numbers on them. We tear off a numbered ticket and sit down again. Nothing happens for quite a while. Godot was here some time ago, but he left in despair.

Eventually, the male teller finishes with his customer, and a man from the bench steps forward eagerly. The teller motions for him to stay where he is. He freezes. After a while, it becomes clear that the teller is having computer difficulties. Time stands still.

Eventually, a woman member of staff approaches the benches of the accused. She says that the ordinateurs (computers) are hors de service (out of order). They might be working again in five minutes, or in an hour, or not for some time. She has no idea. Teller service is hereby suspended. She does not apologize for the inconvenience.

One might wonder why a computer is needed to change one cash note for a series of smaller notes. Presumably one’s passport must be scanned to determine whether one is wanted by Interpol. It is clear that someone with a 500-euro note is up to no good.

Norman says he will wait until 3:30 since we are here anyway. Philippa goes across the road to the Bon Marché to use the facilities. When she returns, there is a notice on the door.

No exchange today. We go home.

Norman goes back the following day on his own, and approaches a teller with a working computer. The man delivers something of a lecture on the inadvisability of travelling with such a monstrously large note. Norman replies with some feeling that he was not given a choice by his bank in Canada, and that Paris did not give him any choice in where to cash it. Standoff. Security is not summoned. This time.

Years ago, on our first visit, we used American Express travellers’ cheques, which we exchanged at the Amex office opposite the Opera. This was once a grand place to see and be seen, where people used to come to fetch their “post restante” mail and book tickets to exotic places. It gradually withered to a small hole-in-the-wall office, but it was still bright and cheery and the staff members were pleasant. Those were the days.

Well, our time at the Banque de France was, as they say, a learning experience. If you are reading this and planning a vacation in Paris, heed our advice: do not let your bank fob you off with cash in large denominations. Get nothing larger than a 50-euro note.

Text and photographs by Philippa Campsie and Norman Ball

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Traces of tragedy on a quiet street

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Parisian Fields

Not many people walk the length of the rue Jean Goujon in the 8th arrondissement. Either they are strolling along the river, or gazing at the likes of the Christian Dior boutique on avenue Montaigne (fashion central), the next street over. The rue Jean Goujon runs between the river and avenue Montaigne, and it is as quiet as the tomb. I use this simile advisedly.

We chose it by chance, and by chance we stopped to admire a handsome church facade and dome topped with a golden statue reflected in the windows of the office building opposite. The double glazing made a double image.

A small sign by the church caught our attention. Something to do with a “Bazar de la Charité.” We crossed the road for a closer look. No, it wasn’t about an upcoming rummage sale. It was the raison d’être for the whole structure.

The church is called Notre Dame de la Consolation, and the consolation is that of the bereaved whose wives, husbands, children and parents perished in the fire of May 4, 1897, that occurred here.

The Bazar de la Charité was an annual fundraiser for the poor, and like all successful fundraisers, the organizers had secured the participation of some celebrities — in those days, that meant people with titles. The Duchesse d’Alençon was the highest ranking of those in attendance.

The bazaar wasn’t just your average church craft and white elephant sale. The organizers had created something that looked like a medieval street in a large wooden building on this site, made of painted cloth, cardboard and papier-mâché. There was food and drink on offer, and trinkets to buy in little boutiques staffed by society ladies, but most of all there was entertainment. And so, to be as up-to-the-minute as possible (this was 1897), the organizers arranged for moving pictures.

Alas, the equipment didn’t work as it should have. In the end, nobody was really sure what happened. Some said the assistant did something wrong. Others said it was a malfunctioning projector that started the fire that immediately spread to the rest of the building. Many of those in attendance escaped, but about 130 people perished, most of them women.

The chapel was later built on the site to commemorate the dead of the Bazar de la Charité. It is not a large church, as it might seem from the façade, but a rotunda under a dome that can accommodate about 75 or so people. We also glimpsed a cloister open to the sky, with tombs on one side, opening off to the rear of the chapel.

Feeling thoughtful, we continued our walk. And a few steps further, we found another memorial of another kind, this one to people who died far away, in another country.

The Apostolic Armenian Cathedral in Paris, St-Jean Baptiste, is a completely different style of church, although it was built only a few years later, in the early years of the 20th century.

A small poster indicated a display of front pages from international newspapers and magazines relating to the massacre of the Armenians during the First World War. The exhibit was in a space behind the church, reached by a narrow passage that opened out into a courtyard.

Although the exhibit was officially closed (it was after 5 p.m.), a woman motioned for us and another visitor to enter through the glass doors, and descend the staircase to the underground exhibition hall.

We spent some time examining the display, but we didn’t want to linger too long and incommode the church staff. What we saw was sufficiently sobering. When we came up the stairs, the lady in charge asked if we would like to see the church. She ushered us through the side entrance.

The church was a little larger than the chapel of Notre Dame de la Consolation, but it was still an intimate space, with an organ in a loft over the entrance, and an impressive painting on the curved apse behind the altar. The space was full of colour, with rich carpets on the floor, and glittering chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.

We emerged into the sunny street thinking about two different stories of tragedy and loss — one local and immediate, one distant and unimaginably vast. Paris is a space of memories, held within its stones and its communities. There is still an association devoted to the memories of those who died in the fire of 1897, just as there are associations that perpetuate the memory of the victims of the Armenian genocide.

Behind almost any facade on any street in any city there are stories to be told. If we were to pick a Paris street at random and an address at random, and somehow talk to the oldest inhabitant of that address, what stories would we hear?

Text by Philippa Campsie; photographs by Norman Ball.

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Signs of Paris

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Parisian Fields

On the first day of our first shared trip to Paris, signs such as this made me realize we were walking through history. We had bought the makings of a picnic lunch, which we ate on a park bench. We wandered about Montmartre and one of us spotted a now-familiar blue-and-white sign.

Cities and progress often go hand-in-hand. Paris is filled with majestic signs of progress. Think of the Eiffel Tower, the Wallace fountains, the Louvre, the historic grand department stores such as Le Bon Marché and arcades that showed the world how to shop, or the many bridges that have turned the river into an art gallery of civil engineering and construction.

But for people who lived in the flats of Paris, this sign indicates a more immediate kind of progress. “Gas on all floors.” Gas for cooking and lighting, perhaps even heating. If you hadn’t had such a luxury before, this was important.

We have since seen many variants of this type of sign, the most common touting both “Eau et gaz à tous les étages.” Gas and running water.

But we have only seen one sign such as this. Perhaps one of our readers could help us find another where less of the writing has disappeared. The sign proudly proclaims this is a Healthy House (Maison Salubre). The next line tells us why it is so healthy. “Tout à l’égout.” All the floors are hooked up to the sewers. Indoor plumbing had arrived; no need for chamber pots; the so-called night soil disappeared instantly. This, along with water and gas, announced real progress.

Indeed, simply having standard signs of any kinds was at one time an important innovation. Street numbering was introduced during last years of the 18th century, when France still used the Revolutionary calendar. Not everybody was in favour of the idea. Some people thought it was a precursor to new forms of taxation. Others objected to the fact that everyone had a number. Liberté, égalité, and fraternité was all very well, but the wealthy objected to having the same type of identifier as poor households. The numbers were put up at night in order to attract as little attention as possible, but this led to all kinds of errors. The blue-and-white enamel versions for streets and numbers were introduced in the 1840s.

Street signs represent layers of history. The name of Charlemagne conjures up powerful images of history long gone. But even before it was rue Charlemagne, it was rue des Prestres. As the language evolved, the letter “s” sometimes disappeared to be replaced by a circumflex accent and Prestres became Prêtres or priests. At some point, Charlemagne’s name displaced that of priests. Perhaps it occurred during a period of anti-clericalism. But then, why change rue Percée, a street named to mark an opening in a wall, to Prévôt (Provost), which can stand for a clerical office? There is a story there, but I don’t (yet) know what it is.

Official statements of name changes are relatively common. Unofficial reminders of what went before are less common. Is this a real name, or a personal comment about a former inhabitant of the street?

And some signs suggest that another name would be more appropriate, or that more thought should be given to the rights of children. Did this sign appear only here or was it put up more widely?

Other signs speak to us of different slices of Paris history. It was a chilly November day when Philippa drew my attention to a small but important sign and explained it marked the water level of the great flood of January 1910. At that time, I had not even heard about the flood. Since then, I have learned a great deal more and read whole books on the subject.

Many modern signs announce other kinds of social standards. Cities succeed only because people cooperate voluntarily in upholding certain norms. But sometimes we need reminders of how to behave in areas we share with many others. It is a nice dog but….

And we know your dog loves children, but sometimes children want to be alone, even when the dog is on a leash.

Sometimes signs confirm other impressions. On an April day, it was more than the warm sun that reminded us of a trip we had both made to Malta to speak at a conference. Some of the enclosed balconies on the street reminded us of those in the streets of Valetta and as we talked about Malta (where Philippa’s father was born), this is what we stumbled upon.

A little corner of the Mediterranean on the streets of Paris. Perhaps there is another story there, too.

Signs help us peer into the past, glimpse the daily life of others, and anchor our thoughts and experiences. They are documents I study.

Text and photographs by Norman Ball.

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Cheap eats

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Parisian Fields

The very first time we went to Paris as a couple, we took along a book called Cheap Eats in Paris by Sandra Gustafson. This was in the days before the Internet and iPhones made restaurant recommendations easy to find, and we used the book to find inexpensive cafés and restaurants (we had used the companion volume, Cheap Sleeps in Paris, to find our hotel).

Years before, when I was a student in Paris, cheap eats meant the student cafeterias dotted around the city, run by an organization called CROUS (Centre Régional des Oeuvres Universitaires et Scolaires) de Paris. I had a meal ticket that entitled me to a lunch at any one of several cafeterias, and from time to time I would investigate a different campus to see if the student engineers or doctors got better food than the foreign students (not really, I concluded).

The meals were basic, but typically French, and although there was considerable variety from day to day, seldom did one have much choice on any given day. The servers behind the counter simply added things to one’s tray as one moved through the line, and at the end, one would assess the whole and make the best of it.

Most meals began with some sort of starter (which the French call an entrée) – usually something like crudités (raw vegetables such as grated carrots or sliced cucumbers prepared with a bit of vinaigrette). Then a main course, which included some protein and a certain amount of bulk (lentils were often featured in large quantities). Then a small green salad. Finally, a choice of cheese or dessert. Copious amounts of bread were available to eat alongside the meal.

A few dishes were unappetizing. I remember the day tripe was served. I didn’t really get a good look at it until I was sitting down at one of the long tables, and when I did, it seemed to be looking back at me. This was not tripe à la mode de Caen, slowly braised in Calvados; it had been boiled, and it was pale and flabby. I took another plate and covered up the dish so that I could eat the rest of my lunch without having to see it.

Mind you, I don’t suppose it would have been much worse than some of the cafeteria food I ate during my Canadian university years – things that we called mystery meat or Syncrude pie, or that perennial feature, fried bologna.

These days, we rent an apartment when we go to Paris, and we save money on food largely by shopping at markets and cooking for ourselves. Yet we still love discovering cheap eats in the form of little cafés when we are out and about. If you want to find them yourself, there is really only one guideline: get away from the tourist areas. No, there may not be much English spoken, but if you can read enough of a French menu to point at your choices, you’ll be fine. And be prepared for places to look unprepossessing from the outside. Money saved on decor can be money spent on food, and that is a good thing. Spot the cheap eats in the following photograph.

The menu may be written up on a board rather than printed on paper, and you may have a limited range of choices. But chances are all the food is simple but flavourful, and it will probably be a prix fixe arrangement that offers several courses. Even with wine and coffee added on, it will come in at a fraction of the price of a fashionable café. Usually with excellent people-watching opportunities thrown in, and often conversation with the waiter or diners at nearby tables.

One that we recently enjoyed was just outside the city, in the suburb of Malakoff. We found it after strolling through the flea market at the Porte de Vanves. It was decidedly no-frills – formica tables, bare floor – but a few euros bought us each a generous lunch. Most of the other diners were regulars or market stallholders. At one table, a group of men compared ornate knives. People came and went for a quick coffee or glass of wine, consumed standing up at the bar. In the following picture, its orange awning is just visible on the right.

Another time we found a little place near the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. It had the traditional zinc counter and the tables were crowded together very tightly, but the food was splendid. There was also a tiny place in the 14th, now closed, that offered only three choices at lunchtime, prepared on a little stove in the back, and featured the work of local artists on the walls. We chatted with the waiter, who introduced us to one of these local artists. We ended up buying an ink sketch, which he signed for us. I can see it on the wall as I write this.

I was telling a friend about these discoveries, and we found ourselves talking about the days of workingmen’s cafés and Chinese noodle houses and those London chophouses that feature in the novels of Charles Dickens. All part of a range of cheap eats that were once available to single people living in rooms without kitchens, when masses of people lived in lodgings where cooking was impossible.

These eateries often had large common tables and benches rather than small tables and chairs, just like the university cafeterias. There wasn’t much choice, but you could get a reasonably nutritious and often very flavourful meal of several courses for a nominal sum. They were cheap because of the economies of scale possible by feeding lots of people at the same time with a set menu offering limited choice.

Today, food has become individualized and people equate “cheap eats” with fast food, which isn’t, in fact, cheap relative to its quality, and – as Morgan Spurlock showed in Super Size Me – is not healthy for day-in-day-out eating. Say what you will about university cafeterias, but students can eat there every day, three meals a day, without developing liver damage.

The university cafeterias are still dotted around Paris – when we stayed in the hospital district, there was one down the road – but the equivalent of the workingmen’s café or the cheap neighbourhood joint serving a few simple dishes at limited hours is an endangered species in the central city.

That’s too bad, and I don’t just mean for tourists like us. Students, artists, shop assistants and a whole range of people of slender means once relied on these places as a way of surviving in an expensive city. The very people who made Paris the place it is were nourished in cheap eateries. In these cafés they met their friends, argued about politics, fell in and out of love, and planned their futures. And not just in Paris, but in many other cities.

What will it take to bring back the cheap lunch at a long table in a crowded room where the choices are few but the food is plentiful and conversation is free?

Text by Philippa Campsie; original photographs by Norman Ball and Philippa Campsie. Thanks to Wayne Roberts for the inspiration: visit his website for more inspiration on local food and sustainable food practices.

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The photograph I didn’t take

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Parisian Fields

It was winter and we were walking back to our rented apartment in the 14th arrondissement from Monoprix, with a borrowed buggy filled with basics – toilet paper, dried pasta, yogurt. We traipsed down a road called rue Campagne Première. Norman stopped to take a photograph of some ceramic tiles that had caught his attention. I dawdled along, and found myself looking at this plaque on the wall.

Hey, I thought, here are some names I recognize. Erik Satie who wrote those Gymnopédies for the piano (I can sort of play some of them). Louis Aragon, who wrote Paris Peasant (which I can sort of read in the original French). Marcel Duchamp who made toilets into art (which I have seen in a retrospective). And Man Ray, that surrealist photographer from the United States.

I photographed the plaque (alas, it isn’t a very good shot). And because Norman was still busy, I photographed the building it was attached to, the Hotel Istria, with its line of lamps hanging from the wall. That made a better shot.

Dang. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have photographed the building next door – 31 bis rue Campagne Première. The one with the interesting ceramics. Because that is where Lee Miller met Man Ray for the first time in 1929. It was an important meeting for both of them, and for the history of photography. I won’t miss my chance next time.

I had become interested in Lee Miller years ago after seeing a photograph of her by Man Ray in a book called The Women We Wanted to Look Like (St. Martin’s Press, 1977). The text said that she had gone from being a model to being Man Ray’s student/muse/companion, and later a war photographer, and that after the age of 53, she had not taken a single photograph, because, as she said, “You can’t be an amateur when you have been a professional.”

And here was the building where it all began – well, some accounts say they met here, others that they first saw each other in a nearby bar – but this was where they worked and collaborated and where Lee learned to be a professional photographer.

Only recently did I read a biography that filled in the details that earlier book had hinted at.

Elizabeth (Lee) Miller was born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was the indulged daughter of a wealthy businessman whose hobby was photography. Over the years, he got into the habit of photographing his daughter in the nude (her biographer, Carolyn Burke, does not speculate on his motives, and neither will I).

He continued this hobby even after the day that his seven-year-old daughter, who had been briefly left in the care of a friend of the family, was sexually abused. And, if that were not bad enough, she contracted gonorrhoea from this single episode, which required ongoing and painful treatment for years thereafter. One cannot even begin to imagine how she felt.

Elizabeth Miller grew up something of a troublemaker and was expelled from nearly every school she attended. In 1925, aged 18, she was sent with a chaperone to a finishing school in Nice, in the south of France, but she never got there. After a few days in Paris at the beginning of the trip, she decided this city was where she belonged. The chaperone went on to Nice without her.

Elizabeth enrolled in a school for stage designers, lived in a chambre de bonne (a maid’s room on the upper floor of a typical Parisian apartment building) – I did the same when I was a student – and spent a blissful few months steeped in bohemian Paris culture. But when her course was finished, her family decided that enough was enough and her mother firmly escorted her home.

Back in the United States, Elizabeth did some theatre work, and became a model for Vogue. Did I mention that she was amazingly photogenic, with a graceful figure, an impossibly long neck, and deep-set blue eyes?

It took a few more years for Mr and Mrs Miller’s daughter to leave the nest for good. She changed her name from the prosaic Elizabeth to the androgynous Lee and went back to Paris in 1929. She made her way to 31 bis rue Campagne Première, found Man Ray, and announced that she was going to be his new student/apprentice. He said he didn’t take on students and was about to leave town anyway. She said she would accompany him, and she did. They spent the next three years together.

It probably wasn’t quite that simple, but that is the story Lee told people later, and stranger things happened in the 1920s. In 1930, she moved to her own studio on rue Victor Schoelcher, opposite the Montparnasse Cemetery, but she remained Man Ray’s muse and lover – at least for a while. She broke Man Ray’s heart, in the end. But during the three years they were together, she absorbed enough knowledge to become a reputable photographer.

Man Ray had two sides to his career. He photographed the rich and fashionable (anyone who was anyone in Paris in the 1930s had a portrait taken by Man Ray). And he was part of the surrealist group, pushing at the boundaries of representation and artistic convention.

Lee Miller had more than two sides to her career. She modelled for French Vogue (known as Frogue). She took portrait photographs, and she photographed street scenes and landscapes that were not exactly surrealist, but were not realistic either. She does not fit neatly into any category.

She earned surrealist credentials, however, playing the part of a statue that comes to life in the Jean Cocteau film Le Sang d’un Poète (The Blood of a Poet). Cocteau painted eyes on her eyelids and told her to walk with closed eyes across the set, wearing a sort of armour that made her look armless and was applied to her body with butter and flour, which cooked itself under the intense lights. On top of all that, the old mattresses that were being used as soundproofing rained down bedbugs on the cast and crew. Nobody ever said it was easy being a surrealist. Still, the film became something of a cult classic. (If you have ever taken a film history course, you will probably have seen it.)

Lee went back and forth between Paris and New York in the 1930s, married an Egyptian in 1934, and lived briefly in Cairo, but it took a world war for her to find something really meaningful to do. She became a war photographer, photographing everything from London during the Blitz to the opening of the death camps in Germany after the war. (Amazingly, Vogue published her realistic photo journalism – not the sort of thing one can imagine in today’s version of the magazine.) There is a famous photograph of her in Hitler’s bathtub in Munich in 1945: the house had been commandeered by the American army, and she was invited to stay for a few days.

She was one of those people whose wartime experience was so intense that everything afterwards seemed inconsequential. After the war she divorced, remarried, and went to live in England. She did some work for British Vogue (aka Brogue), produced a few pieces of photojournalism, and achieved renown as a gourmet cook, but nothing ever lived up to her wartime experience. Nothing ever could. I have encountered other Second World War veterans like that. They used up all their emotion and adrenalin in the war and postwar life never came close to that feeling of immediacy and importance. In 1960 Lee Miller gave up photography, and in 1977, aged 70, she died of cancer.

And it all began, really, on the rue Campagne Première, a few blocks away from our rented apartment, in a building that I didn’t think to photograph, beside the Hotel Istria.

Further reading: Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life, New York: Knopf, 2005.

Text and original photographs by Philippa Campsie; additional photograph by Norman Ball.

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