Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  The later family story was that Madame Baillière sold all the assets of the firm in 1870 to Tindall and Cox, who had clubbed together, and that they thereafter ran it as the soon to be renowned medical publishers under the name Baillière, Tindall & Cox. Several early letter-copy books, however, which happen to have survived against time and chance when all other material has gone, and have come to rest in a university archive,4 suggest a rather different story. Baillière’s was as much a book-dealer as it was a publisher, obtaining and despatching books all over the world. The bulk of the London trade involved deliveries of books from Paris. Although these were not all medical books, works in French did then still predominate in medical literature. By gravitating towards doctors, Albert Alfred was now encountering a foreign culture and a language in which he could have had no previous grounding. Paris was beckoning him. But he was not yet quite up to confronting it.

  The letter books suggest that in the early 1870s two men of French origin continued to run the day-to-day business. The firm went on trading as ‘Baillière and Co.’ (or Baillière et Cie, according to which language a letter was written in) for another half-dozen years, before all formal connection with the original firm was severed. No doubt Albert Alfred, striding about the Strand district making useful contacts, thinking up his Aid series and perfecting his air of a successful businessman, gave the impression that he owned the reborn firm, as eventually he did. But letters of that time still refer to him not as ‘the Chief’ but as ‘our Mr Tindall’.

  Business was rapidly building and his bright ideas continued. In March 1874 he wrote a letter in his own clear hand – everything was handwritten: the typewriter, like the telephone, would not make a general appearance in offices for another thirty years – to the private secretary of the Princess Royal. This was Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, born the same year as Albert Alfred himself. She had married Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia at seventeen and by 1874 had eight children. Albert Alfred was asking if the firm might dedicate to her the translation of a book to be called in English The Young Mother’s Guide – ‘the author is one of the most accomplished French physicians, director General of Nurses and Crèches … The work has done an incalculable amount of good in France and will, we are convinced, be the means in this country of rescuing many little lives from a premature grave …’ The compliment was graciously accepted.

  Behind this canny idea was some personal emotion. For Albert Alfred himself was soon to become a father for the first time: his daughter May was born in the month of that name. Aged thirty-three, he had married Sophia Simson the summer before. For a man from nowhere it was a remarkably good match. My guess is that Albert Alfred had already been living in Lewisham, and that they met at their local church, St John’s. Sophia had been teaching Sunday school there and was involved in other classic good works of Victorian womanhood such as the Dorcas Society (bedlinen for poor mothers). A young man met under the auspices of the Church of England in a fashionable parish was bound to have an aura of reassuring respectability about him, however nebulous his family. Charm and general conviviality no doubt helped, and there was Albert’s fine baritone voice: he joined the Church choir and was one of the founders of a local choral society. By this time he could afford to dress with the elegance that shows in later photographs of him. He would also by then have shed the remains of whatever rural accent he had carried from his Kent childhood. His grandson recalled, many years after his death, that ‘he sounded as you would expect: like a Victorian gentleman.’

  Sophia was slim, dark, rather good-looking by the standards of today but not pretty by those of her own time, which favoured a plumper face and a ‘rosebud mouth’. She is said to have been gentle and retiring: in the few surviving photos she looks nervous. A faint echo from voices now long dead categorises her as ‘over-educated’: in secret, she wrote poetry. She does not sound to have been well suited to the animal vitality of Albert Alfred but, given her financially and socially solid background, she was clearly a prize he was not going to miss. No doubt she brought a marriage settlement with her. She was already twenty-nine. Whatever reservations the Simsons may have had, it was time that dear Sophie fulfilled a woman’s destiny in a home of her own … After all, Albert Alfred was doing so well. And in these changing, modern days …

  Further rumours from the past suggest that after marriage Albert took to jeering at Sophia’s cultural tastes and complained that she did not darn his socks as he wanted. Perhaps he was jealous of her superior education, or merely wished to assure himself and everyone else that education was not everything. And perhaps too, in his concept of how the married should treat one another alone at home, which was not something you could learn by observation or from an etiquette book, he had reverted to the manners of his own parents. Years later, for his second wife, he chose a well-born but easy-going woman who quite liked darning, had no intellectual pretensions and knew better than to argue with him.

  He is also alleged to have found Sophia’s diary and read it aloud, with comments. But then everything remembered about Sophia is tinted by the fact that she died before her time. To such a one, the role of blameless victim is readily awarded.

  Bertie was born early in 1876, less than two years after May. Another girl, Maud, followed in 1879. Then there was a longer pause until the birth of a second son, Howard, in 1884.

  In time to come Albert Alfred’s grandchildren rather liked the Old Man, as he was known in the family. He was fun. He entered into their world, conspired with them to break rules about sweets and bedtime, and even once egged on his granddaughter to pick some daffodils from a private property as a present for her mother – a gift that was not well received, and indeed gives one further pause for thought about the Old Man’s probity. Once, rather too late in their childhood, he took them for a blustery trip on a Brighton pleasure steamer and a meal of fish and chips in a cheap café. He relished the outing more than they did, since by then their tastes were reflecting their more refined upbringing. Perhaps he had missed out on such things in his own unmentioned youth. With his own children, relations were not always easy. May grew up large, handsome and as assertive as he was, and was able to stand up to him, but the younger children are said to have taken after their mother and ‘he scolded and abused them and pried into their private lives so that they became shy and secretive.’5 Bertie’s diary, however, that he kept during his own year in Paris, gives a more complex picture.

  Bertie was thirteen when he lost his mother. Afterwards, he became a great keeper of photographs, programmes, newspaper cuttings and Christmas cards. The first items in the album into which he pasted his collection are the local-paper reports of Sophia’s funeral and of the stained-glass window that was erected a few months later to commemorate her. There is also a folded sheet of cream writing paper, on which are carefully noted down the various illnesses of the three eldest children. In January 1878, for instance, May had had chicken pox, and by February Bertie, just two, had caught it. By the end of the following year, rising four, he had had scarlet fever and passed it on to May. By 1882 Maud had joined the family and all three children had had measles. Oddly, Maud was thought to have had measles again, in 1887. She was evidently considered a delicate child, for she had some other illness, unnoted, in the spring of 1889, which started a fatal train of events. There seems a peculiar poignancy in the fact that this anxious little aide-mémoire on nursery ailments is the one piece of his mother’s handwriting that Bertie managed to preserve.

  Some mild contact with the family in Kent had evidently been maintained. The old fly-driver and his wife eventually retired to Brede, a village some seven miles from Hastings. They were surely dead by the 1880s, but in adult life Bertie had a vague memory of a ‘holiday on a farm’ when he had been quite small, and of references to ‘the Brede people’. Presumably these were some younger Tindall relatives who had remained conveniently on the land. Farm holidays were one of those things, like flannel next to the skin and regular ‘doses
’, that were thought to be good for children, especially London ones, and any social mismatch might be tactfully put down to the difference between urban and rural ways.

  Spells at the seaside, breathing ‘ozone’, were also held to be highly restorative for children who were sickly, and given the soot-laden air of the whole of London by the late nineteenth century this was no doubt valid. Hastings was now a well-established seaside resort, a hilly, healthy place, and so it was to some relatives in Hastings, living in the picturesque Old Town, that little Maud, aged nine and a half, was despatched. Old enough to manage as a guest on her own, but too young, it was no doubt thought, to be fussy … And there may have been other children on hand to play with.

  In Hastings, however, Maud contracted typhoid fever, which is a severe and potentially fatal form of gastroenteritis. In previous eras it had been endemic in Britain, and indeed it was probably the cause of Prince Albert’s untimely death in 1861, which does not say a great deal for the water supply at Windsor. But nearly thirty years later, with the huge drainage works that had been carried out in London and in most other towns, it was very much in retreat. Middle-class families living in suburban comfort did not expect to encounter typhoid. It had become a working-class ailment, associated with primitive plumbing and unhygienic habits.

  Telegrams went back and forth. Sophia went down to Hastings to nurse her daughter, who gradually recovered. It was Sophia who died. She was forty-four. The death was registered by one of the St Leonards relatives, though it took place, for reasons one can imagine, in rented lodgings facing Hastings’ sea-front. The cause of death was testified by the doctor in attendance as ‘Double pneumonia, fifteen days’ with an extra (and surely irrelevant) mention of arthritis. But typhoid is what she was always said, in the family, to have contracted, tending Maud.

  After this tragedy there seems, for reasons one can understand too well, to have been very little further contact with Hastings. Much later in life Bertie, according to his own son, gave the impression of knowing nothing at all about his father’s side of the family. Left an emotional waif by the sudden loss of the mother who understood his reticences and sympathised with his developing artistic interests, he now had only his overbearing father as an adult in the forefront of his life. The words of the Bastable children, also of Lewisham, echo in the mind: ‘Our Mother is dead, and if you think we don’t care because I don’t tell you much about her you only show that you do not understand people at all … Most of our things are black or grey since Mother died.’

  Unlike the fictional Bastables, the Tindall children were too disparate in sex and age to form a cohesive front to keep grief at bay. May mounted something of a campaign against the new stepmother, when she appeared, and induced the five-years-younger Maud to follow her, but Bertie was a boy on his own, as was Howard, who was separated from Bertie by being eight years younger. Now, more than ever, Albert Alfred Tindall must have seemed like a force of nature, blotting out everyone else around him.

  Chapter XII

  BUSINESS IN GAY PAREE

  Just as Albert Alfred Tindall entered the Baillière orbit, Paris was plunged into the unexpectedly disastrous Franco-Prussian War and the abrupt end of the Second Empire.

  It had all been going so well – well, that is, if you were in a position to enjoy the extravagantly consumerist society that Napoleon III had fostered, and admired the new Paris evolving in a golden web from Baron Haussmann’s fingers. As well as the evisceration of many old districts and the destruction of thousands of solid old houses, whole new quarters had been built. Huge new department stores, gas-lit, with plate-glass windows and grandiose wrought-iron staircases, were replacing the old shops of individual drapers, hatters and glovers in covered passages such as the Cour de Commerce St André. Charles Garnier’s new and very ornate Opera House, with its own avenue leading to it, was being built in Paris’s new, western heart. A couple of kilometres further out, what had been the isolated rural village of Monceau at the Restoration, a place of wet nurses and milkmaids, was now bordered by a park lined with the enormous houses of those to whom speculation in property had brought unprecedented wealth. The whole ring of suburban villages – Grenelle, Vaugirard, Ivry, Montmartre, Belleville and the rest – that had been included within the customs wall of the 1840s were, from 1860, incorporated into the new, enlarged Paris of twenty arrondissements.

  Plenty of people deplored what Paris had become, from exiled French nationals plotting in the back rooms of restaurants in London’s Soho, to the young Emile Zola who was then working in Paris’s most successful bookshop. He had just completed his schema for a huge novel sequence set in Paris and elsewhere under the Second Empire, when the Empire itself collapsed with spectacular suddenness. No one, including Zola, had foreseen this in the first half of 1870, least of all the Emperor Napoleon III himself. He had made some recent liberalising gestures. Surely that should keep everyone content, even the muttering republicans? He had sought war with the Prussians under the impression that victory would follow and that this would further extend France’s landmass and her world status. Yet by the early autumn those of the French regular army who had not already been killed were trapped in the fortress of Metz, the Emperor himself was a prisoner of War and the Prussian forces were marching on Paris. The thirty-three-kilometre customs wall round Paris was hastily strengthened and fortified. Behind this barrier, the capital would spend the winter of 1870–71 under siege – more literally, a blockade – a strangely medieval experience for a huge modern city. Cold and hunger increased as the winter went by, and so did civil unrest, as different factions of nationalists and republicans each strove to drag the events their way and to save France’s bedraggled ‘honour’ according to their own ideology.

  Across the Channel (where Napoleon III was eventually allowed to seek refuge, as repeated waves of French exiles had before him) only qualified sympathy was expressed. The French, it was felt, were always revolting against their leaders: it was a stupid Gallic habit. And why had they made War on the Prussians anyway? In Britain, at that date, the German provinces still figured as a benign source of learning and culture – and, indeed, as the source of the Royal Family, given Victoria’s Hanoverian origin and the late Prince Albert’s more obviously Germanic one. Although France had been an ally in the unsatisfactory Crimean War, she still figured in the popular British mind as the traditional, centuries-old enemy, and there was a vague, general feeling that she had got her comeuppance. Besides, the urban French ate horseflesh, something to which the horsey British had never knowingly stooped. At tea tables in Kensington and Lewisham, where ‘French novels’ denoted something exciting but essentially indecent, there were jokes about how the Parisians were now eating rats – ‘A change from frogs, doncha know?’

  In fact they were reduced, before the Siege was over, to eating nearly all the animals in the Jardin des Plantes, including the beloved elephant and giraffe. Not quite all, however. The monkeys were spared. Darwin’s Origin of Species had been published ten years previously, and a general notion of its ideas had entered the European thought stream. Might eating monkeys, particularly the larger apes, be all too near to eating one’s own distant relations? Evidently even the most fervently Catholic French, whose piety had been encouraged again under the Second Empire, had been made uneasy by the thought.

  How Arthur Jacob, close observer of the animal world, friend to bear and monkey, one-time Paris inhabitant and almost certainly an unbeliever, viewed all this from his retirement in Cumbria, I can only guess. His capacity for wintry amusement, no doubt, did not desert him.

  Intimations of the troubles in France crop up in the earliest surviving letter books of what was still Baillière, London, as a series of tiresome but minor impediments to the real business of life, which was the book trade:

  8th October 1870, to someone in the Cambridge University Library: ‘We are much obliged for your note and will pursue the livraison of [illegible] as soon as ever communication with France is
restored …’ This, with its rogue French term for ‘delivery’, was signed by a W. Galette who, however, seems to have made his way to Paris before the Siege closed in completely, since by 7th February a colleague was writing to him there, in French, with a grateful mention of his zèle et exactitude. Evidently some mail was getting through, probably couriered by English nationals with passports that allowed them to come and go, but, as the Siege was overtaken by the brief and disastrous uprising known as the Commune, trade through Paris became increasingly difficult. There is a reference at one point to a whole package of books having been detained by a commissaire-priseur (a customs valuer) and, in May, at the peak of the Commune, to two previous letters having been stolen by ‘a thief’. By later in the summer, however, the Commune and its brutal suppression were but another bloody French memory and a series of burnt-out buildings (including the Paris Town Hall and all its stored records). It also left, among the bourgeoisie, a fear of insurrection, and, on the Left, a bitterness, that were collectively to haunt French society for generations to come.