Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  Galette seems to have remained in Paris, and was for some years the main contact and book-finder there for the reconstituted London firm. The formal link with the French Baillière enterprise was severed, but for many years the shop and head office in the Rue Hautefeuille remained an important source of books for England, as well as a distributor for London-produced wares – including the increasingly successful Medical Press. By 1874 Galette had been replaced by another representative, one Lemoigne, who had his own shop and book-dealing business in the Rue Bonaparte which runs down from the Place St Germain to the river. We shall hear of him again.

  Once peace was restored, the passage of ballots (small crates) of books to and fro across the Channel seems to have been extraordinarily rapid and efficient by the standards of later eras. On the occasions when it was less so, the firm in London did not hesitate to complain in intemperate terms that would hardly have been considered appropriate in later days either:

  ‘Nous avons vainement attendu depuis lundi le paquet que vous devriez nous envoyer, ce retard nous a été très désagréable et nous vous prions de bien vouloir nous en dire le motif …’ (‘Since Monday, we have been waiting in vain for the package you were supposed to send us, this delay has been most unpleasant for us and we would ask you to be so good as to tell us the reason …’)

  ‘… We are much surprised and annoyed that you have not sent the Instructions Generales Anthropologique nor any letter to explain why it is not sent, our client applies for it every day, some days twice, and we cannot give any explanation. You must know that this is very serious for us, and that we cannot do business in this manner …’

  ‘… As to the “Instructions Générales pour les recherches anthropologique”, which you report “est complètement épuisé” [completely out of print] our customer wrote to Paris and by return of post received it in the enclosed wrapper from M. Masson – you must know that such a case is calculated to do us serious mischief. Of course we do not require a copy now.’

  Such explosions punctuate for years correspondence which otherwise consists of great lists of books, increasingly medical, which were apparently received safely, but the peremptory refrain ‘Send the books by return or let us know the reason why’ is often employed. One begins to feel extremely sorry for Monsieur Lemoigne, particularly when, in 1879, a crisis point seems to have been reached. By this time the London firm had constituted itself Baillière, Tindall & Cox, and it was George Cox, he of the food-stained waistcoats and the artistic anatomy books, who wrote the following:

  ‘We have suffered inconvenience and serious losses from neglect of apparently simple matters … delay in obtaining settlement of our accounts, that we hoped you would endeavour to rectify the fault complained of – but without effect.

  ‘I enclose a postcard from MM. J-B Baillière et Fils which discloses an omission which cannot be overlooked. [Apparently this was a lost parcel.]

  ‘Under these circumstances you will not be surprised that we have decided to make an alteration. I expect to be in Paris next month and will then wind up our accounts.

  ‘I write this with great regret but if we are to retain any part of our French trade no other course is open to us …’

  As Cox wrote this in English, and there is no evidence that Lemoigne spoke or wrote anything but French, one wonders rather how their encounter in Paris progressed. Particularly as, four years later, a letter in correct French formally engaged – or re-engaged – Lemoigne as Paris representative. In the mean time, ‘our Mr Tindall’ had also been in Paris on the firm’s business, apparently on several occasions.

  It is hardly to be expected that Albert Alfred spoke much French either. His scant education would not have endowed him with any, and his son Bertie was to comment later, in the privacy of his diary, on his father’s ‘stumbling attempts to speak the language’. But in these circumstances it seems impressive that he attempted to speak it at all. Had he, perhaps, made a number of visits to France, to that Gay Paree that, by the 1860s, was taking such a distinctive shape in the English consciousness?

  Co-existent with the image of Bohemia, but a far cry from the romanticised simplicities of that country of the mind, Gay Paree is traditionally regarded as a classic Second Empire product. While the Imperial court and the newly opulent layers of le tout Paris set the pace by indulging in extravagant balls and masques, more ordinary crowds flocked to the café-concerts. Towards the end of the Empire the rules regulating these were relaxed, allowing costumed shows as well as music and songs and permitting customers to dance as well. After that, Parisian nightlife entered a new phase, and at the same period coffee shops emerged from behind four walls to become the terrace cafés now so identified with Paris.

  The Folies Bergère was founded, just north of the Grands Boulevards, unpropitiously in 1870, shortly before the Franco-Prussian War cut across the festivities. But a year later the music was playing again, and the frills, feathers and bosoms were being flourished as if nothing had happened in between. The Moulin de la Galette, a genuine mill in still semi-rural Montmartre, was transformed into a guinguette the same year. The raucous Moulin Rouge, also in Montmartre, which became notorious for its cancan dancers, did not open till the late 1880s, but the cancan itself was by then well established as a Parisian trademark. It had apparently started in disreputable working-class dance-halls as early as the 1830s, and gradually worked its way up into scandalous visibility. Jacques Offenbach, that emblematic Second Empire figure, endowed it with an immediately recognisable tune in his 1858 operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, and eight years later featured it again in his La Vie Parisienne. In the latter opera, foreigners from ‘the north’ arrive at a railway station, are taken round Parisian nightlife, through experiences of drunken debauchery, but in the end find true love: a resonant theme for many visitors to the capital.

  The same title, La Vie Parisienne, by then redolent of all things temptingly risqué, was later used for a long-running magazine which became one of France’s most famous exports. It was really a harmlessly cheery publication much given to patriotism, but its ‘saucy’ covers, which could never have been used on a British magazine at the time, ensured that it acquired an exotic reputation across the Channel.

  When Manet painted his intricate Bar at the Folies Bergère in 1881 there were beer bottles on the counter suggestive of an established British clientele. In earlier generations, English visitors to Paris had typically been rich by Parisian standards (the classic milord anglais), sometimes aristocratic and often intellectual, but now the frequent trains and steamers also brought over the middle classes. In Paris, they found on offer the kind of relaxation and stylish fun to which they would have had little access in the more socially and economically segregated society on their own side of the Channel. For it was remarked even by Parisians how extraordinarily mixed were the crowds at the Folies Bergère, not only in income but in degrees of respectability. Fathers of families took their wives there for an evening out, but at the same time the huge glassed-in jardin d’hiver at the back, full of plants and mirrors and dim lights, was regularly frequented by ‘women of small virtue’ and men on the lookout for them. In London at that date the ordinary businessman would find little to fill the gap between the frankly working-class lowlife of the music halls and the unreachably discreet, expensive pleasures enjoyed by some of high society. To such men, Paris readily became a Secret Garden to which they had discovered the key.

  It has been suggested that the whole concept of Gay Paree, as a place of liberation and fulfilment, developed as a response to Victorian repression on the other side of the Channel. But this ignores the realities underpinning French gaiety. It is true that the very name Gay Paree mimicked English pronunciation at a time when the word ‘gay’ in covert English slang (though not in French) indicated female prostitution. But, unlike England, France had developed its own repression in the form of a comprehensive system of ‘Morality Police’, with legalised brothels and girls subject to regular me
dical inspections. Perhaps this made the whole enterprise feel more respectable, and therefore more moral, to some of the English visitors.

  But if those of more romantic cast quailed at ringing a labelled bell beside frosted-glass windows and being welcomed by a smiling Madame into a plush-hung interior, there was no shortage in Paris’s now well-lit streets of other women looking to oblige. Late in the century, one survey put the number of clandestine, unlicensed prostitutes in the capital at sixty thousand, though it is difficult to see how even this conjectural figure was reached. The women in question ranged from drunken old biddies accommodating passing soldiers and vagrants on the grassy slopes of the fortifications, through under-age girls tugging at gentlemen’s sleeves in the street, all the way to relatively genteel widows or girls dressed soberly as ladies. Apparently these last, with a veiled glance, would allow a respectable-looking stranger to follow them into their home courtyard and hence to their apartment.

  Like the nightlife, in Paris the oldest profession was more socially mixed and inclusive than its equivalent in London. The image of the irrevocably Fallen Woman was not part of the French construct. Many girls who profited commercially from youth and freedom disappeared into more or less respectable marriage once they had saved up a dowry. This was particularly true of the Left Bank, where de facto prostitution was recognised as being a fresher, younger, more innocent trade than on the money-centred Right Bank. Grisette-style girls were still keeping students company, and there were also several renowned Brasseries de Femmes in the Rue Monsieur le Prince and the Boulevard St Michel. In these big cafés, pretty local girls were given free meals if they talked to customers and encouraged them to buy more drinks. What other arrangements they made with the customers was their own affair.

  It is hard to believe that the dynamic Albert Alfred, who worked in the Strand-Covent Garden area which was then the epicentre of London prostitution, passed through his visits to Paris with total disregard for the more attractive and classless opportunities it offered.

  Long afterwards, when he was an old man, and the business venture he had founded with George Cox of the artistic anatomy had become a widely respected firm of medical publishers, Albert Alfred embarrassed his grandchildren terribly on the memorable day out in Brighton – ‘Granpa had an eye for a pretty woman of the Rubensesque type and commented in the loud voice of the chronically deaf on the charms of our fellow promenaders, especially their legs. In despair, Tom and I expressed a passionate desire to visit the aquarium, where few of the pretty ladies went and their beauty was hidden in semi-darkness …’1

  In his second marriage, by which time he was in a position to follow his own tastes rather than monetary considerations, he chose a woman of some beauty and generous proportions. She was the daughter of a baronet, though illegitimate because she was one of a brood of children born of a bigamous second marriage. Not till many years later did a landmark court case award any legal inheritance to her. On marriage, Albert Alfred apparently confided in his son Bertie, then aged fifteen, ‘I’ll give her one child, to keep her happy.’ He did just that: one further daughter was born in the Lewisham house and no more. His remark gives one pause for thought on two counts. It clearly indicates (as do the birth rates of the time) that by the 1890s some form of contraception was widely practised among the more aware sections of the population. It also suggests that his relationship with his elder son was not quite as oppressive as some younger members of the family later suggested, though what the shy and certainly virginal Bertie made of his father’s man-to-man confidence it is hard to imagine.

  By the late nineteenth century to have been at public school was the hallmark of an English gentleman, an essential rite of passage for Albert Alfred’s sons. Bertie was duly sent to boarding prep school and then to Charterhouse, the long-established City school which had fairly recently moved into grandiose new buildings outside London to accommodate the rising demand for places. He was not, however, to continue on to Oxford or Cambridge as he might reasonably have expected to do and as his studious tastes would have warranted. The official reason was that Albert Alfred could not afford to spend any more on his eldest son. Albert Alfred, however, lived in an increasingly affluent style in the years that followed, presently moving to a substantial house in Kent, near Maidstone. Here, in true country-gentleman style, he cultivated a fine garden, before moving on again to a still larger and brand-new house in Sussex with a billiard room, conservatories and stables. Some of his wife’s grand if irregularly born family lived in the area. Contrary to what one might imagine, he seems to have taken active interest and pleasure in his herbaceous borders, lawns, fruit trees and vegetable gardens, becoming a pillar of local flower shows. Evidently the genes of his lost rural ancestors were still alive within him.

  When the time came, the much younger Howard was allowed to read History at Cambridge. The real reason for Albert Alfred’s parsimony over university for Bertie was probably that he did not want his eldest, the heir to the family business, cultivating academic interests that might carry him in a different direction. Signs from Bertie’s later life suggest that he might have chosen, rather, a career in architecture or museum-curating. It may also have been that Albert Alfred felt obscurely jealous of his children, whose upbringing he must have perceived as luxurious compared with his own.

  But, in fairness, he did his best to equip his eldest well for a role in the international book trade, sending him first to stay with a contact in Germany for six months, and then to Paris for almost the whole of 1895. And Bertie was grateful, partly, no doubt, because he was told he should be and, as a Victorian son, it did not yet occur to him to think otherwise, and partly because his affectionate nature inclined him to love those around him. ‘Dear old Father,’ he wrote in his diary in Paris when he had just seen the Old Man off at the Gare du Nord, ‘he has been good to me, not many fellows can boast of such an education as I have had.’

  How was this education going to be pursued? Why, of course – by work experience at the premises of Monsieur Lemoigne, the vital Parisian contact whose past relations with Baillière, Tindall & Cox had been so chequered. Bertie does not appear to have known that, and probably did not suspect that his presence at Lemoigne’s was not merely for his own benefit but was designed to bind Lemoigne more firmly to the London interest. For good measure, he was also to be a paying guest at the Lemoigne home, not far from the shop in 12 Rue Bonaparte. He was to have two attic rooms, with a breakfast of coffee and rolls brought up to him every morning, and to share the Lemoignes’ table at lunch and dinner. Monsieur and Madame Lemoigne had teenage sons themselves. It must have seemed an ideal arrangement.

  The Lemoigne apartment was in a handsome, stone-fronted house in the Rue de l’Abbaye, immediately behind the surviving church of the Abbey St Germain and overlooking its northern wall. The street had been laid out in 1800, after the Revolution and the saltpetre-store explosion had reduced many of the Abbey buildings to ruins. Beneath the cobbles of the Rue de l’Abbaye and its single row of houses lay (and lie today) the foundations of the once-beautiful Chapel of the Virgin and the monks’ library and cloister. The skeleton of a perpendicular-Gothic window is still to be seen in a hallway on the wall that divides one house from the next. Immediately behind the street the tiny Place Furstemberg, with its central ornate lamp standard, preserves the footprint of the one-time Abbey stable yard.

  Bertie, in spite of an already passionate interest in old stones, does not seem to have known that he was occupying such hallowed ground. A pity, since, had he realised, he might have been just a little happier. In other respects, the area that was to become so celebrated in the twentieth century as St Germain des Prés was at that period an unassuming district. As to the accommodation offered to him, Bertie’s initial reaction was that of generations of English visitors used to the more spacious and comfortable homes of England:

  ‘We drove straight to Lemoigne’s place [from the Gare du Nord] and he showed me my rooms, which are
as pokey as his own flat, consisting of a room with a small cupboard and stand to work in and a sitting room with a bedstead with a nice look out on chimneys, with a horrible bed, a rickety table, two chairs and a washboard-stand and nothing more, they are very small and uncomfortable. We had dinner with Lemoigne’s whole family of four and a wife and left them for the night at 10, Father having found lodgings in a small hotel about a few minutes’ walk away.’

  Bertie wrote this, and all the other entries recounting his Paris year, in a Letts one-page-a-day pocket diary designed, rather, to record daily expenses. He did record these faithfully, like many of his generation – and was to do so for the rest of his long life – but as he also used the book to describe what he had done on most days, and often what he had felt too, he sometimes had to resort to minute writing to cram everything in. As well as this, he had the habit, common among nineteenth-century letter-writers, of using every bit of remaining space once he had reached the bottom of the page by doubling back and writing between the lines. Only once I had realised this did some of his more apparently incoherent entries make sense, though I feel there are some, including the above, where Bertie himself got slightly lost in the verbal maze he had created.

  The Paris that Bertie discovered in 1895 was super ficially very different from that of earlier generations. Arthur Jacob would only have recognised disjointed bits of it submerged in the greater mass. The population was now about two and a half million. Close-built urban landscape extended right up to the fortifications – les fortifs’ in Paris slang.2 Although the land on the far side of these grassy ramparts was supposed to be kept clear as a zone of fire, with a network of forts along it, in practice, since the customs gates themselves had been abolished, it had filled up with illicitly constructed shanties and summer houses, vegetable patches, grazing donkeys, gipsy caravans, the yards of small industries, rag-pickers’ dumps and impromptu summertime cafés under awnings. Big flea markets were held every week, one just outside the northern exit from Paris, the Porte de Clignancourt, and another in the south-west just inside the Porte de Vanves. Part rural idyll for the poor escaping from the streets of inner Paris, part slum for the marginal members of society, the Zone, as it came to be universally called, persisted into the second half of the twentieth century, long after the spread of Paris had leapfrogged over it and created new and more permanent suburbs much further out.