Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  Already, when Bertie arrived in Paris, tramlines were carrying Parisians well beyond the Zone to these future suburbs, then still charming villages. From the tram terminus on the Place St Germain almost outside their door, the Lemoignes could get all the way to Châtillon where they had a country retreat. They could also get westwards to the Bois de Boulogne and eastwards to the Bois de Vincennes. Both these originally private and royal hunting grounds had been given to the municipality of Paris by the Emperor Napoleon III. During his earlier enforced exile in England while kings were back on the French throne, he had been impressed by the London parks. Both wild woods had been landscaped and prettified. In the Bois de Boulogne, where George du Maurier nostalgically recalled duck-shooting in boyhood on a remote mere, two lakes and an artificial waterfall were made.

  But Paris was not yet punctuated by Metro stations, those Art Nouveau erections of wrought-iron tulips and lilies that have come to epitomise for us the fin de siècle. A protracted debate about whether the trains should run underground, as in London, or on iron structures overhead, as in New York, was only just being settled in favour of digging down. The work had yet to begin, and it would be 1900 before the first line was opened between the Etoile and the site of the Bastille. Nor, in 1895, had the wrought-iron pissoirs, that were destined for the next two generations to be such a ubiquitous feature of the Paris streets, quite made their appearance. The 1890s did, however, see a rush of statues onto the streets: two Joans of Arc on the Right Bank, Danton at the junction of the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine and the Boulevard St Germain, Louis Blanc and Voltaire on the far side of the Latin Quarter in the Rue Monge, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in front of the Panthéon, a lion up the hill on the site of the old Porte Denfert growling eastwards towards the lands that had been lost to the Prussians in 1870. Henry Murger would get a bust in the Luxembourg Gardens in 1895.

  Later in the decade more would be erected, including one commemorating Etienne Dolet at Place Maubert, his place of execution. This statue was generally despised by the artistic taste of the Left Bank as being of poor quality3 and damaging further the proportions of what was left of the Maub’. While the Parisian municipality were at it, they demolished yet a few more ancient houses there and in the Rue Galande, and added one of the new pissoirs to the Place for further embellishment.

  But this, in 1895, lay a few years in the future. The Place Maubert that Bertie passed through as he strode off to inspect St Julien le Pauvre, St Séverin or St Etienne du Mont was essentially still the battered remnant of what had been there for centuries. The Rue des Noyers, with de Musset’s family home, still stood on the far side of the Boulevard, so did the Marché des Carmes, so did all the top-heavy old houses in the narrow, steep Rue des Carmes, which would not be widened till the 1920s. Indeed, across most of the Latin Quarter, the works of Haussmann had laid only a light veil over a townscape that still had much of its dense, original texture. The buildings still looked like fortresses; narrow doors and passageways still led to labyrinthian hidden courtyards. Off the Rue des Carmes, up a flight of darkly enticing steps, the twelfth-century Clos Bruneau survived as a cul-de-sac. In the early mornings, which were scented with fresh coffee and stale tobacco, street sweepers manipulated rolls of sacking in the gutters to direct the copious streams of water in sluicing away the detritus of the horse-drawn city, just as their predecessors had done for generations with the open central ditches.

  Today the horses have all gone. But entrenched Parisian habits die hard. Water still gushes in profusion at the pavement edges. Medieval houses still loom over cobbled byways. Beggars still accost one. Tramps have never been entirely banished from the streets. Waiters still wear black waistcoats and long white aprons. If Bertie could return today to the Paris he first discovered over a hundred years ago, trams or no trams, he would find much of it entirely recognisable.

  Chapter XIII

  BERTIE ALONE

  Two things emerge clearly from the daily record Bertie kept for much of his Parisian year. One is that, whatever dutiful gratitude he might feel, he would really rather have been in Lewisham with his sisters. There was a little sister now too, baby Doris, the one child of ‘Mothery’, the second Mrs Tindall, and there was young Howard also in the holidays from prep school. Then there was his prized bike: one of the modern chain-driven models that had replaced the hazardous penny-farthings. Through bicycling, the young of both sexes were discovering a freedom of movement unknown to earlier generations.

  There was also someone called Adela, who was staying with the family in mid-January when Bertie took his leave. He recorded:

  ‘I was down and so was Adela a good time before eight and when everything was finished we sat chatting together until the others came down. I think I said goodbye to that dear little girl with more reluctance than [to] anybody except May as she has done so much to make me feel at home and comfortable during her short stay.’

  It seems an odd phrase to use, since the Lewisham home was Bertie’s own, but a clue to what his experience of childhood had been is provided by an entry in Paris two weeks later, on 5 February: ‘It was my birthday … It is now the ninth birthday I have spent away from home.’

  Since he was then turning nineteen, he had evidently been at boarding school since the age of ten: that is, since then he had been away for three-quarters of each year. He would have been alone at school when he was told the news of his mother’s death, and also, several years later, that of the new baby’s birth. This exile was the standard practice for English boys of Bertie’s class, then and for another half-century; some, no doubt, were less affected by it than others.

  ‘… I did not get anything or hear a word from anybody the whole day long … Father had left with M. Lemoigne a beautiful diamond tie pin to be given to me on the 5th and also from Mothery 3 shirt studs, and that was the only recognition of its being my birthday and that did not come direct from home.’

  As if to console himself that day, he bought ten centimes’ worth of hot chestnuts from a street-seller, a ‘Japanese ashtray’ for fifty centimes (the cost of two stamps for England) and ‘two saucers for plants’. On the following day – ‘Directly after dejeuner I went out to the Louvre and spent some two hours and a half there, among the sketches and designs, Phoenician and Assyrian halls and Middle Age pottery. Then I went into the chief room of pictures …’ Not much real consolation there, one would think, but – ‘On arriving home at 4.30 the Concierge’s wife handed me a packet from home, at last, a day and three-quarters late. There was a long letter from May and a BBB silver mounted pipe, a letter and tie from Adela and a tie from Maud and Howard, and lastly a note from Mother and Father and three tins of cocoa. On the strength of that I sat down to my letters with a pipe and a cup of cocoa and did not budge until dinner time.’ Pipes and cocoa were not then the accoutrements of middle age, but of grown-up bachelor life; in the same way that words such as ‘most enjoyable’ and ‘exceedingly’, which would now be used only by the very old, were then fresh and vigorous.

  The other theme that emerges strongly from the diary was that he was determined to see as much of the treasures of Paris as he could in the time that was accorded to him to improve his French before starting full-time work in the Rue Bonaparte. But this was far more than the earnest resolve of someone consciously imbibing ‘culture’. It is clear that Bertie derived sensory satisfaction and interest from art and architecture to a level unusual in a nineteen-year-old boy in that or any other era. On the very day after his father left ‘I went off to start my study of the Louvre’ and repeat visits there pepper the diary: ‘the pictures … always appear fresh to me.’ By the weekend he was in Notre Dame for the first time, and had found his way past Maubert to St Etienne on the Montagne Sainte Geneviève – ‘a very beautiful old church’. (He was to revisit it later, and found it ‘even more beautiful than I thought at first’.) The following day he went to morning service at the British Embassy church, then ‘walked the length of the Bois, then home to de
jeuner which I had to have alone’. The day after, he went with Madame Lemoigne and her two elder boys, Paul and Emile, ‘to hear the closing service of une adoration perpetuelle. I have never seen or heard such a gorgeous ceremony.’ Clearly, the Victorian Anglican aversion to all things Papist was not current in the Tindall household.

  Except when accompanied by one of the Lemoignes, Bertie seems to have gone everywhere on foot. Admittedly he had only six francs per week to spend, and frequent tram-rides at between fifteen and thirty-five centimes a time would soon have consumed this, but it was rather as if it did not occur to him, in his youth and health, to do anything but walk. He set his legs in motion as naturally as Arthur Jacob had eighty years before, adding his footprints to the dense palimpsest of others throughout the Latin Quarter, discovering ‘all the old narrow streets of old Paris. I went for an hour to the Cluny in the afternoon … It is a strange feeling, knowing that you are walking on the same pavement under the same roof as the Romans.’ By and by he penetrated behind the boulevard, wandered north of the Place Maubert by St Séverin, into the Rue de la Huchette (‘very poor people’) and back to the St Germain territory via the Rue St André des Arts and the Rue Hautefeuille – ‘narrow streets dotted here and there with some lovely old hotel of the XV or XVI’. Not till much later, exploring up the hill southwards, towards Montparnasse, did he come upon the Roman arena of Lutetia, then only partially excavated and hemmed in by houses. He was delighted to find there for himself a section of the medieval Paris wall of Philippe Auguste.

  He trekked much further afield too, all over the Right Bank, discovering the secretive Ile St Louis, quartering Paris from one church or museum to another. A ‘voyage of exploration’ up the Boulevard Sébastopol led him to four of them. So few people then visited Paris in this way that the Sainte Chapelle on the Ile de la Cité, now a world tourist attraction, was rarely open. When, at his fifth attempt, he managed to get into it he was enchanted – ‘a magnificent piece of pure Gothic work … the windows are lovely though the whole place is darkened by the surrounding buildings.’ The as yet unfinished Sacré Cœur, however, on the heights of Montmartre, he diagnosed as ‘very hideous and dark’, a view widely shared since.

  He went to the furthest ends of Paris as well. Hardly had he settled in when fresh snow fell in what turned out to be one of the coldest winters ever recorded.

  ‘As I thought there might be some chance of skating, I walked directly I had had my café [breakfast coffee] and dressed to the Bois de Boulogne, getting there in ¾ of an hour, but I had to return very disappointed. I returned as I came by foot and I suppose I must have walked quite 8 miles before twelve and I did not get up till 9 o’clock. I spent an hour at the Louvre in the afternoon, and froze for the rest [of the day] as my stove positively refused to light although I laid it four different times.’

  A few days later, however, he was teaching the Lemoigne boys and their teenage sister to skate in the Bois de Vincennes, and by mid-February reported, ‘My pupils are getting on very well. Matilde skates quite respectably now though always too afraid to go alone.’

  Others besides Bertie were keeping diaries that winter in the Latin Quarter. At the end of the first week in February, an elderly lawyer, a lecturer at the Sorbonne, whose family flat was high above the Boulevard St Germain overlooking the Place Maubert, wrote of having seen from his balcony ‘a huge number of wild ducks passing overhead, also cormorants and other sea birds, escaping south’. Three days later, the temperature was minus fifteen centigrade. Gas meters froze, blocking the supply to the lighting on which bourgeois homes then ran. (Gaz à tous les étages, as it is still announced by old enamel plaques on walls.) At lower social levels people died of cold. The painter Gauguin broke a leg during that freezing winter, slipping on ice on a Left Bank quay, and swore that when it was mended he would disappear to Tahiti and never return. (He kept his vow.) Such heavy snow fell on one day that the horses could not move about the streets, bringing the traffic to a standstill. But Bertie sounds cheerful enough, writing that the Seine itself was ‘frozen over hard, a thing which very rarely occurs. It is a grand sight to stand on one of the bridges and look either way … as far as one can see, nothing but ice.’ Presumably he had by then mastered his stove.

  It must also have been that week or soon after, though he does not mention it in this diary, that he painted a little watercolour with almost professional skill and great exactitude, showing the ‘nice look out on chimneys’ from his attic room ‘for I can’t see the ground in any direction’. Snow lies thick and unmelting on every roof, on distant skylights and even on the tops of brick chimney stacks where normally heat would melt it. This Latin Quarter roofscape seems a classic view from an attic in the country of Bohemia. But there is no indication in the extensive book list in his diary for 1895 (eighty books) that Bertie had read Murger, or that he saw the Puccini opera about La Vie de Bohème which was playing at the Odéon theatre later, in the summer. Nor, apparently, did he read du Maurier’s Trilby, which only came out that year. His Paris was rooted in the more distant past.

  He seems to have tried hard. He had enjoyed himself in Germany, learnt German quite easily and made friends. It was reasonable to hope the same might happen in Paris. An entry in mid-February, however, indicates how things were, at any rate with the Lemoignes’ eldest son Paul, the nearest to him in age: ‘After dinner one of Paul’s friends came in and stopped until 11.30, he was very amusing, more so than Paul himself, who has scarcely a word to say at any time.’

  It was not that the Lemoignes made no effort at all for their guest. There were trips to see classical plays at the Odéon theatre nearby and, later in the year when Bertie was working, to the opera. There was even an expedition with Paul to what seems to have been a grand public ball at the Hôtel de Ville, by then entirely reconstructed with lavish gilding after being burnt out during the Commune in 1871. ‘I suppose there were about 20,000 people there … the building itself is most extravagant in its magnificence of carving and decoration. We stayed to the end at 5.30. Even then there were too many people to be able to dance properly … Omnibus to Hotel de Ville 30 cmes. Refreshments H d V 1.50. Punch and roll on way home 40 cmes.’ Presumably the luxury of a bus there – buses had always been relatively expensive in Paris – was because the two young men were in evening dress. Two days before there is an item of four francs fifteen centimes noted for ‘Gloves and tie for ball’. So, a relatively expensive outing.

  Except at such rare events, or when the occasional and much welcomed friend from Germany visited Paris, it never seems to have occurred to Bertie in the course of his long tramps to call at a café for a reviving beer or a cup of coffee. So much for Gay Paree in the mind of this particular young Englishman, after years in the austerity of a single-sex public school, in a country where, as yet, cafés hardly existed and pubs were for the working classes. His budget, admittedly, would not readily have run to a drink in one of the now celebrated Montmartre nightspots, but he seems in any case to have had not the faintest yearning in that direction. During the year he read, among many classic French works, Zola’s L’Assommoir, a novel whose translation had been banned in England where censorship by the biggest lending libraries still had a firm grip on what could be put down in print. But then the frightening and essentially moral L’Assommoir would hardly encourage one to try the absinthe for which Paris was then renowned.

  In Bertie’s expenses hot chestnuts often figure, as do cigarettes and tobacco, stamps, second-hand books from the quays, church collections, black ink (for sketches), hot baths (1.25 at the Bain Douches which were in the nearby Rue de Seine) and small sums to beggars. Once he had to spend a whole four francs (two-thirds of his weekly budget) on getting his much-used boots soled and heeled. Bootlaces figure too. I was surprised at the number of these he seemed to get through, but as they were then sold on the streets of Paris by small, poor boys trying to earn a few sous, it may be that Bertie, seeing in them his own young brother, regularly took pi
ty on them.

  If he ever had an encounter of a more equivocal nature, or realised he was being solicited for something other than money – unlikely in the Latin Quarter but highly likely in some of the Right Bank districts where he walked – his diary is silent on the matter. Letters arrived at intervals from Adela, each one carefully noted.

  I suspect that a basic problem for Bertie in the Lemoigne household was one of slight but persistent social mismatch. France had not enjoyed Britain’s huge industrial and imperial prosperity. In general the French middle classes lived more modestly than their British equivalents – a fact which remained true till after the middle of the twentieth century. One notes that the Lemoignes’ flat, like most in Paris then and for decades after, had no bathroom. Paris’s monolithic nineteenth-century apartment blocks, with their street entrances designed to look like carriageways and their ostentatious front balconies, actually enclose a maze of ill-lit passages and cramped bedrooms overlooking communal courtyards. There was then, and there is still today in these blocks, a necessary culture of suppression, of carefully guarded privacy, of not disturbing the ever-present neighbours or allowing them to disturb you. The elderly lawyer living on the Boulevard St Germain remarked in his own diary that year, in a footnote to a birth and a death that had taken place in the flat above unknown to most in the building: ‘What an odd thing is this living together without being together, all under one roof, in these Paris dwellings.’1 No doubt the Lemoignes, bred to this self-sufficiency, were adept at it.