Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  But in any case they strike one as rather a dull family. Monsieur Lemoigne may have had a top dressing of Left Bank culture derived from the book trade (he dealt in antiquarian books as well as recent ones), but there is no hint of interesting reading being done in their home or of a social life of any dynamism. The parents’ silver wedding anniversary came round that year. Bertie noted, ‘We could not do better than fête it, though they did not do anything to help us.’ As well as the children and Bertie, only one friend was present at dinner. To Bertie’s surprise, it was this elderly female who provided the dessert. It appears too that the Lemoignes had not thought of going skating till Bertie did. They seem to conform to what a contemporary commentator called ‘a social class living on its savings as well as its earnings, characterised by a stiffly conventional sitting room, one long-serving maid, lycée for the boys however stupid … The key to their psychology is that their life is constantly organised according to careful accounting, which is taken very seriously.’2 A certain amount was spent on food in such households, but almost nothing on furniture or linen, as that would have been provided once and for all by a dowry on marriage. Girls were not expected to pass exams. Travel, except within a very restricted family circuit, was unknown. Bertie remarked that once, when Matilde returned from a visit to an aunt, ‘she was welcomed as if absent a whole year, by these people who have practically never left home.’ In mid-March her birthday occurred:

  ‘Bouquet of violets for Matilde – 1 franc … Just on sitting down to déjeuner she was kissed all round, not by me of course but by the family, and wished many happy returns of her birthday according apparently to French custom, though I don’t think much of it, and nothing more was heard of her birthday until at dinner a small pastrycook cake was introduced as her birthday cake.’

  That afternoon he went to the Arts et Métiers museum with Emile, the middle son, but Matilde did not accompany them. Towards the end of the month she went away again to stay at Compiègne, north of Paris.

  ‘I suppose the house will be horribly dull now, she is the only lively figure in it except little Maurice. [Maurice, at eleven, was the same age as Bertie’s brother Howard.] Paul, moody old moony philosopher, has not a word to say to anyone except “enfin, tu m’ennuies” [“You’re boring me/irritating me”], although he may be clever as I don’t doubt it, he keeps it all to himself and has not the slightest idea of forming part in a conversation or to make himself pleasant in the least way.’

  Paul, perhaps, had been reading too much Schopenhauer, then rather fashionable, and a student boorishness was (and is) a common Left Bank affectation. The following day, however, Bertie succeeded in taking him to see the Ile St Louis, perhaps twenty minutes’ walk away. ‘He had never been there before.’ Later, over Easter, Bertie had to make a planned outing with only Emile and young Maurice ‘as Paul would not come and Matilde could not stir out of the house with me even accompanied by her two brothers without her eldest or her parents’.

  This was the obverse side to Gay Paree, with its nightlife, its rowdy popular fêtes and its formal, many-course dinner parties where even respectable people indulged in risqué conversation (Bertie did attend just one of these, and was rather stunned by what he heard). Girls like Matilde, des jeunes filles de bonnes familles, were in reaction to these excesses kept in a state of nunnery-like segregation that would by then have been out of the question for Bertie’s sisters, in the 1890s world of the New Woman across the Channel.

  Towards mid-March Bertie recorded:

  ‘I was out for 2½ [hours] in a pouring rain on an errand for M. Lemoigne or rather for Baillière, Tindall & Cox. It is the first thing of the sort I have ever done and that in French with only the smatter I have at present. But still I got through very well con sidering. I had to go to two publishing houses and enquire about an agent in London who had disappeared with money for some advertisements without their appearing. My attempts were however fruitless.’

  Not till late April did he start working full time at the Lemoigne office, his own decision apparently:

  ‘The hours are rather long … From 8.30 to 7.0 or as it sometimes is 8, with only an interval at 12 for dejeuner … My last free days are over and from now on I shall be at everybody’s beck and call, until I work my way high enough to beck and call in my place. Anyhow I have the consolation of having made the best of my unusually long lease of freedom thanks to Father’s bounty.’

  As, not long before, he had recorded, ‘I went for a very long walk in the afternoon all by myself as usual,’ freedom had evidently had its bleak side.

  However, in one respect life chez Lemoigne had looked up. In mid-March he had written:

  ‘Immediately after déjeuner I went with Madame and Matilde by tram to their much talked about garden and house at Châtillon, about two miles the other side of the fortifications. The house is a very ramshackle old place and the garden is not up to much but I dare say is very nice in summer. They found a little room in the attic of a house close by which I could have from Saturday to Monday always.’

  Such was to be the pattern as the days lengthened. The tramlines, which had been installed less than twenty years before, had had a transforming effect on the lives of Parisian families such as the Lemoignes, who do not ever seem to have taken fiacres (cabs) and would never have hired a carriage for a longer ride. The two lines that ran from the Place St Germain, out beyond the Porte de Vanves all the way to Fontenay-aux-Roses and Clamart, were still horse-drawn in 1895, though many of the trams that traversed Paris more centrally had been modernised in the previous three years, either with steam traction or with electricity. (The latter, having primitive accumulators under the wooden bench seats that gave off acid vapours, were not particularly popular.) The violet-and-yellow horse-drawn tram that deposited the Lemoignes at Châtillon therefore went slowly, at about eight to nine kilometres an hour, but it was much appreciated. Châtillon represented the unspoilt country and fresh air, an escape with a touch of magic to it, just as the country house in Normandy or on the Loire does to Parisians today. It was a way of keeping symbolic faith with the rural roots which, for most nineteenth-century Parisian families, were only a generation or two behind them.

  Spring, however, was very late that year, with ‘not a bud to be seen’ in early April. In the Lemoigne boys’ Easter holidays, shortly before Bertie was to start full-time work, he and the family spent a whole week in Châtillon. Bertie sketched, gardened and made the outing with the younger boys on which Matilde was not allowed to accompany them. There were further weekends there in May, although on the 16th: ‘During the day it had the audacity to snow, at this time of year. I have never known it snow so late.’

  However, at the beginning of June he wrote: ‘I gardened the whole day long as hard as I could, putting all my strength and zeal into the work. There is so much to be done and so many improvements and renovations to be made.’ The following day, Whit Monday: ‘I worked even harder all the day than the day before and it was 4.30 before I sat down to rest abit. How I enjoy working like that. I feel a different being entirely there to what I do at Paris. How I long all the week for Saturday to come.’

  The gardening gene that he seems to have inherited from the Kentish Tindalls was to blossom in adulthood. The creation of a beautiful and tree-hung garden from an empty meadow in Hertfordshire was to be the joy and pride of his adult life.

  The ancient village of Châtillon occupied the site of a prehistoric hill-fort on the highest hill to the south of Paris. When Arthur Jacob was in the Latin Quarter it was a distant place, but even after the wall of the 1840s had extended the boundary of Paris over much of the countryside Châtillon still had a fine view over the meadows and windmills of Issy and Vanves. The population was then about fifteen hundred; fifty years later, at the beginning of the 1890s, it was still only a thousand more. A large number of them, according to the Census, were retired people living off property and savings. So, a genteel place of retreat. There were 339 houses, j
ust one small workshop employing ten people, some old stone quarries, and farms nearby.

  But Châtillon’s country days were coming to an end. The simple charm that drew families like the Lemoignes to it would eventually be destroyed by their very presence, as the village bit by bit became a suburb. Gas street lighting had come, along with the tram, and in 1893 the local Council decided to give street numbers to the houses along the main road from Paris. For the time being, however, the grassy fortifications and the rural semi-slum at their foot still provided a barrier to Paris’s slow, relentless expansion. Les fortifs’ were demolished after the First World War, but even then the peculiar, separate identity of the Zone persisted for another generation. Other families, living in modest comfort as the Lemoignes had, still discovered in Châtillon their archetypal dream of a little house near apple blossom and birdsong within a tram-ride of the great city. We shall meet one of them.

  Soon after the fourteenth of July, that watershed date which, even today, makes Parisians feel, as their great-grandparents did, that they ought to be leaving town for a summer of harvesting with country relations, Bertie left the Lemoignes for a while. He went first to the Normandy seacoast, to look at Caen, Trouville, Honfleur and Villerville, and then on the overnight boat from Le Havre to Southampton. The expedition – his first as an adult – was full of architectural delights and unusual expenses such as ‘candied apple for Howard’ and eight francs for a hotel room, breakfast and dinner (‘splendid cooking’). At dawn, from the deck of the ship, he observed some of the British naval fleet with true-born English pride. ‘Then, on landing at Southampton, train to Waterloo, then home to Lewisham.’

  Home life at once reclaimed him: tennis parties, walks over the fields round Catford, much cleaning, mending and tinkering with his bicycle and the installation of ‘new pneumatic tyres’. In August, the whole family took off for one of those very English nineteenth-century holidays in lodgings in what was apparently a chilly East Coast resort. Much rain fell, but ‘splendid bathing trips’ are nevertheless reported. The beloved bike came too: Bertie rode it from Lewisham to Liverpool Street where it accompanied him on the train. Just before departure he recorded, ‘What a shame Adela isn’t going to stay with us as she did two years ago. I shall miss her tremendously.’ However, Adela seems to have been staying nearby, as there are frequent references to her on bathing and picnic parties. Father, meanwhile, was not a constant presence. At times the London office claimed him, and over one weekend he went off alone to the Yarmouth horse races.

  By September the family were home. Bertie spent odd days at the office (now expanded into an eighteenth-century house in Covent Garden) ‘helping with foreign correspondence’. Late in the month he went back to Paris. He found the Lemoignes at Châtillon in a heatwave which, in that climatically dislocated year, lasted till October. Temperatures rose to thirty-five degrees centigrade – Indian levels of heat. Days were spent indoors, avoiding the sun, and all the evening in the garden in the warm dark. ‘It is really very remarkable, and will probably never happen again in my lifetime,’ Bertie noted. (He lived to be ninety-six, but his prediction was correct.) ‘I wrote a long letter to Adela after déjeuner, how I do love writing such letters and being able to give vent to one’s feelings.’

  In the first days of October, Paris reclaimed the household. Bertie’s comment ‘We all left Châtillon, which I shall probably never see again’ seems a little sad after his selfless gardening there in the summer. ‘And now I have begun again my monotonous routine of business life, coming and going to and fro and copying out the same letters, going to the same place, buying the same books … We are just approaching the busiest time.’ In fact, for the long period in Paris when he was working in the Rue Bonaparte the days are mostly left blank, except for Saturday evenings and Sundays, his only day off. On Saturday 5th October he ‘escaped from business for half an hour’ to watch Pasteur’s funeral cortège pass through the Place St Michel on its way to Notre Dame. On the Sunday it poured with rain as he was returning via the Grand Boulevards from Mass in a distant church – ‘It was tremendously full. The music and singing were very fine indeed, still sounding in my head.’ Later in the afternoon guests arrived, frustrating his attempt to give Matilde a lesson in poker-work. For Monday he wrote: ‘… We had a very fine day and abit warmer too, how I longed to be on my bicycle and away to Fontainebleau or Versailles or St Germain [en Laye] instead of being glued to my desk … The rain seems to have brought out the chestnuts and other trees on the Boulevards, some are in full flower again, some with flowers and no leaves.’

  On the following Sunday he visited the Jardin des Plantes, then, as if tracing the pathway of Arthur Jacob long ago, found his way to Dupuytren’s museum in the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine and was rather overcome by the deformed babies in glass jars – ‘To think that the human race can produce such dreadful things out of its loins is very dreadful, to think of it makes me shudder and feel quite sick.’ Loins. Emotions less spiritual than his tenderness for Adela clearly stirred in Bertie’s repressed heart.

  Monsieur Lemoigne made a brief work trip to London and, in the circumstances, stayed as a guest at Lewisham. The campaign to ensure his loyalty was evidently proceeding. Shortly after he came back, Bertie made another brief escape during office hours. He raced from the Place St Germain about three-quarters of a mile up the Rue de Rennes to witness a spectacle which subsequently became enshrined in Paris iconography:

  ‘At about four o’clock there was a terrible accident at the Gare Montparnasse, the break [sic] of a train refused to act and it dashed into the station at full speed, carried the buffers before it and broke its way right through the station which is high above the road, and the engine fell over into the Place de Rennes and is now hanging over the balustrade with the tender attached. The buffers saved the passengers from the telescoping of the front … Now the engine is in a ludicrous position upside down with crowds of sight seers around it … The driver and stoker jumped off.’

  There had been a rumour running through the Latin Quarter that a hundred people were dead. In fact, as the carriages had just missed toppling over after the engine, most of the passengers had not even realised what had happened. Bertie knew by the evening that only one person had been killed: he thought it was the newspaper seller who had had the misfortune to be standing on the pavement exactly under the trajectory of the runaway engine. In fact it was the paper seller’s wife who was crushed by it. The following day the press reported: ‘Madame Héguillard, mother of two young children, had abandoned for just a few minutes her work as a seamstress to take her husband’s place at the newspaper stand while he went to get the evening editions.’ The irony of her becoming the main news herself in the next day’s editions was much commented on. And indeed the whole combination of circumstances – the lethally powerful steam train, the newspapers, the hustling modern world with its ready photography, the wife taking the man’s place as so many women would have to twenty years later in the large-scale disaster of the First World War – was to make the event emblematic of 1890s Paris for subsequent generations.

  ‘Sunday, 27th October. I spent a most enjoyable day with the Lemoignes under the hospitable roof of M. and Mme. Ferbin[?] at Asnières. They had given me a special invitation although I had never met them before, and they received me most kindly. I am sure that if I were asked about abit more into the society of other people instead of being continually confined to the narrow circle I am in here, it would do no end of good to my French which I almost despair of ever improving. This is the very first time I have ever been invited out to a meal in France and I do hope it will not be the last …’

  At the beginning of November his father and stepmother arrived for a visit. He had booked them a room at the Hôtel Voltaire on the quay near the Pont des Arts (the family hotel in which George Moore had lived in comfort while working on his Left Bank novel of love and poverty). Bertie met them at the Gare du Nord and brought them back for an informal m
eal at the Lemoignes’ – ‘their Pot au Feu, which is always nice’. Hearing his parents’ ‘stumbling attempts to speak the language’ made him realise temporarily how much progress he himself had made. Catharine Tindall (‘Mothery’) seemed to have forgotten the language which she must surely, Bertie thought, have once known? Due to her aristocratic father’s bigamy and therefore the family’s anomalous social situation, she had spent much of her childhood in Brittany.

  Albert Alfred had probably been wise to ensure a more intellectual mother for his elder children before indulging himself with Catharine, although there may have been rather more in her head than readily appeared. More than thirty-five years later, when he was dead, she at last revealed a fervent support for the Rights of Women. She had apparently been incubating this through the years in Albert Alfred’s company, head bent over her darning, but had prudently kept it to herself.

  Sunday was spent ‘hurrying my people’ round his own favourite sights of Paris, including Cluny – ‘Mothery was perfectly charmed by it.’ Albert Alfred escaped to ‘see his agent in Montmartre’. The next day brought torrential rain, and they went to Manon at the Opéra Comique in the evening. ‘A terrific heat, as there always seems to be in all the theatres here. Myself scarcely felt it, what with the spell of all the lovely music and splendid acting, although we had much trouble to pursuade Father not to go out in the middle, he was thinking so much of the microbes.’ An odd sidelight on the preoccupations of that otherwise proverbially robust man. The result of too much haphazard contact with medical literature, perhaps. Or were the microbes a pretext because he felt hemmed in and wished to escape again? – to stroll, smoking a cigar, down the lighted boulevard, open to any chance encounter, stopping off perhaps for a drink in a café-bar glittering with cut glass, as he had done in Paris twenty-five years before when he was young and unencumbered.