Many of the time-honoured small hotels of the area are still where they always were, under the same names. But their essential nature has changed. No longer are they the long-term lodgings of foreign workers, students, retired language teachers or jazz musicians: they are tourist hotels, and charge tourist rates. They are not approached up ill-lit staircases, but have front desks in tastefully furnished lobbies with brochures advertising Parisian Sights. There, callers are expected to sit and wait for residents to descend, for keys are not left in doors nor are visitors free to come and go unchallenged.
Staying at the Hôtel des Carmes occasionally over the years, Julia could chart the gradual progress of this change. The old lavatories, where tu ne mets pas ton derrière sur n’importe quoi, were replaced by the pedestal sort. At the same time, some of the labyrinthine passages and partitions were reorganised and a few bathrooms (Bain 3 francs. sur réservation) appeared. Better timed light-switches were fixed on the stairs. Nightmares were to be banished, along with cries and murmurs. Then, in the early 1970s, came a change of owner and a larger shake-up, at about the time that the remains of the Marché des Carmes were being pulled down to build the fortified police station. The hotel reclaimed its ground floor from small shops and was done up throughout. A tiny lift arrived. So did carpets in some of the rooms, and telephones.
A little later again the bigger rooms, including Julia’s old eyrie at the top, were divided into two or even three. Space was now too much of a luxury for a modest Left Bank hotel to offer, but more and more individual shower cubicles were installed. Then, in the 1990s, the whole house was done over again. The traces of its long human history were suppressed, along with old beams and stones and messages scratched in plaster, under layers of insulation, sealing, polystyrene, paint – and carpet everywhere, even on the walls of the new, larger lift. Each room had its own self-contained bathroom now, its own television, its own standard furnishings and colour scheme.
Yet something of the innumerable past lives it had sheltered still beat, a buried memory deep inside the building. And when Julia stood leaning out of one of the top windows, she could still see, looking down to the river, the illuminated towers of Notre Dame. Looking up the hill the other way she could see the Panthéon, as tenants of the house did when it was the new church of Sainte Geneviève and the market gardens and orchards began just beyond it.
At some point in the late 1980s the Hédevin family became involved in running the Hôtel des Carmes.
The hard-working, robust couple who had travelled from the Lozère to Paris to seek their fortunes in the 1920s were now dead and gone, part of the rich Parisian earth, fading from human memory. Their son Paul was a man in his fifties, content with a piecemeal life through restaurant kitchens and hotel baggage rooms, ambitious only for his daughter Véronique for whom he had ensured a ‘proper’ Parisian education. So it was that Véronique, competent, firm but welcoming, became the Carmes’s young manageress. Two or three other cheerful, reliable people joined her and, feeling comfortable, remained for many years. Even the night porter, traditionally on the Left Bank a job for transient students, was a known and trusted fixture. By and by Paul too came to frequent the now well-lit passages, tool bag in hand, whiling his retirement away attending to showers the guests had blocked or electric plugs they had mysteriously damaged. The Carmes was a true success, much appreciated by regular customers. Early in the twenty-first century it developed an enthusiastic internet following. If Julia half regretted the long-ago Carmes, with its floors of wide, splintery old wood or worn red tiles, its cooking smells and all its freedoms, she kept the fact to herself.
She has stayed briefly at the Carmes a number of times in the last few years. One visit followed an invitation from the Société Française d’Histoire de la Médecine to represent, at a conference in the Ecoles de Médecine, the English connection of ‘cette grande maison d’édition médicale française Jean-Baptiste Baillière et Fils’. Tom, very old by now, had been pleased to hear of her appearance in that role. Guiltily, he always seemed a little puzzled, if gratified, that she had turned out as she had. Once, quite spontaneously, he apologised for having neglected her so. She said that it did not matter now, for by that time it hardly did.
By a poignant coincidence that he would probably not have appreciated, she happened to be in the Hôtel des Carmes again two years later, when she received a phone call with news of his sudden death. Once again, she thought with worn affection, Tom had managed to escape her.
Another visit too was connected with a death. Julia was summoned by the remnants of the Pierre-Solanges. Her favourite Solange was dead at last at over ninety, and again she was required to ‘represent the English interest’. Solange, her great-nephews and -nieces knew, had always been fond of England. Le fair play. La marmelade. Le pudding de Noël. Agatha Christie … And there had been the haven of the Free French domain in Carlton Gardens, London, during the War. N’oublions jamais …
So it is that Julia finds herself standing up one morning in a big, old Left Bank church addressing in French a respectful congregation. A small green ribbon, bestowed on her by the French government in a fit of generosity towards those interested in obscure French history, adorns the jacket of her most sober suit. As she speaks, she feels pangs for Solange, almost her oldest friend, who will not be replaceable. But she also feels a sudden pang for the Julia who had first been welcomed by Solange, so long ago. She wishes she could tell that far-off, desperate Julia that, in spite of everything she might have seen or been told so far, life was going to be all right.
That night, in the now insulated and double-glazed security of the Hôtel des Carmes, she has another dream.
She knows she is in Paris, and in the deeply familiar territory of the Latin Quarter. Yet not far from Place Maubert, just where the land rises up the Montagne Sainte Geneviève, the terrain is not as she remembers it. The streets here give way to a great, undulating heathland with tracts of heather and bracken and broom, dotted with clumps of trees. Yet this wild landscape seems once to have been used as a graveyard, for here and there stand weathered tombstones, modest but permanent.
And somewhere over on the far side, glimmering on the horizon, is a shoreline, the edge of the land.
Her dreaming mind tries to rationalise this heath, this shore … Has a section of rural France perhaps been there all the time in the familiar street plan of the fifth arrondissement, and she has simply failed to notice it before?
Only while consuming coffee and rolls the following morning in the Carmes’ breakfast room does she suddenly understand that the heath was Ashdown Forest. It had been quite recognisable, actually.
Dreams know no chronology, perpetually attempting to conflate different periods into one. She knows that, in the dream, the tombs of different sizes and ages standing among the birch trees raised no fear. Arthur Jacob … Albert Alfred Tindall … Bertie … Maud … the Lemoignes … Yes. Those are the people whose harmless memorial stones she herself has discovered in Paris, in the landscape of time.
As for the distant seacoast, that must be the last vestige of the dream Paris, the unreachable after-the-War Paris that Julia was told about on those forest walks as a very small child. The Paris of white towers and a bright blue sea with ships and swans. Only a faint memory now, almost below the horizon. The long walk across Ashdown Forest is over.
She finishes breakfast, and goes out once again into the well-trodden morning streets of Paris to have another look.
Arthur Jacob as a young doctor
Arthur Jacob’s half-minute glass for taking the pulse
The Cour de Commerce St André at the beginning of the twentieth century
Demolition for the construction of the Boulevard St Germain in the late 1860s
Sketch of the Rue Hautefeuille made at the end of the nineteenth century. The substantial house on the far side of the arched doorway was the headquarters of the Baillière company
Sketch of the one-time refectory of the
Cordeliers, just off the present Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine
Bertie Tindall as a little boy, early 1880s
The four Tindall children, Bertie, Howard, May and Maud, late 1880s
A studio model, from George du Maurier’s novel about would-be artists in Paris. Trilby was published in 1894 but the story is set back to the 1850s
‘Life on the Boulevard’, from the Illustrated London News, c.1870
Snowscape painted by Bertie from his window high up in the Rue de l’Abbaye, 1895
The steam engine that crashed through the buffers at the Gare Montparnasse in 1895
Albert Alfred Tindall in old age
Rue des Carmes, early twentieth century, before it was widened, looking north toward the Place Maubert
Rue de la Parcheminerie, c.1900, before the demolition of the oldest houses
The Rue des Noyers, 1917, before it was absorbed into the Boulevard St Germain. Alfred de Musset’s family house still standing on the left
From the diary Bertie kept during his stay in Paris, 1895
Number 12, Rue Bonaparte, where Bertie worked.When this photograph was taken in 2006, it had just ceased to be a book dealers
Maud Tindall as a young woman, c.1910
The Rue de l’Abbaye where Bertie lodged. Number 12 is the stonefronted house with window arches
The Hôtel des Carmes, with the Marché des Carmes below it, 1920
The water fountain that stood in the centre of the Marché des Carmes, on the site of the original monastery well. Now removed to a small public garden at the foot of the Rue de Seine
Ursula with Tom’s car, mid-1930s
‘Tom’ Tindall as a young soldier in 1939
‘Julia’ beside the Seine, c.1957
A modern bus squeezes down the narrowest part of the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine
Notes
Part I
Chapter II
1 Once, when he was visiting the home of a Dublin associate, a little daughter of the house ran in and flung her arms round her father. Surprisingly, John Jacob said ‘I would give all I have for one of my children to greet me like that.’ The little girl grew up to marry one of his nephews – Arthur’s son.
2 The distant cousin who covered himself with military honour, and after whom Jacobabad is named, was of a subsequent generation.
Chapter III
1 Sir Charles Hastings, 1794–1866. Founder of the British Medical Association.
2 Statutes and Rules for the Government and Conduct of the General Infirmary for the Relief of Sick and Lame Poor at Northampton. 1813.
Chapter V
1 John Scott, the editor of The London Magazine.
2 Un Grand Homme de Province à Paris, 1839.
3 Rue des Noyers would eventually be almost annihilated by the Boulevard St Germain.
4 It disappeared when the wide streets of Monge and Jussieu were cut through the district in the 1860s, though the steeply slanting Rue des Boulangers still traces its outline.
5 Today it has been removed about a kilometre away to the small garden at the foot of the Rue Mazarine.
Chapter VI
1 Since obliterated, like so much else, by the Boulevard St Germain.
2 Various historians and commentators have claimed addresses for Marat in the part of the ancient street that is still standing, near the junction with the Rue Hautefeuille, but in reality it seems that his address, then no. 30 Rue des Cordeliers, was one of the many houses that disappeared with the construction of the Boulevard St Germain.
3 Although the Terror tends to be seen by history as a largely Parisian phenomenon, another 1400 overall were guillotined in provincial France.
4 Much of it is there today, though embedded within the more extensive buildings of the late nineteenth century.
5 Quoted in The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and Its Medical School 1784–1984, by J.D.H. Widdess.
6 Mémoires d’un Bourgeois de Paris, by L. Véron, 1856. Louis-Désiré Véron studied medicine under Guillaume Dupuytren, but later made a fortune out of a patent remedy and took to journalism and politics.
Chapter VII
1 Today the two ancient foundations form one hospital in large, modern buildings near the Gare d’Austerlitz, not far from the original sites of both.
2 The manuscript pages are today in the Wellcome Library.
3 Not to be confused with the later Hôtel Voltaire by the Seine.
Chapter VIII
1 Quoted by J.D.H. Widdess. Op. cit.
2 Manuscript memoir of Arthur’s granddaughter, Blanche Jacob.
3 Unfortunately no letters between them survive from the famine period two or three years later, though there must have been some.
4 Information from Patrick F. Meehan, writing in The Laois Yearbook in 1983.
Part II
Chapter IX
1 Etudes sur la Transformation du XII Arrondissement, 1855.
2 Henri Meding, Paris Médical, 1852.
3 Coins de Paris, 1905.
4 Lawyer, newly elected member of the Corps Législatif, and later and most famously Minister of Education under the Third Republic.
Chapter X
1 Pierre Mazerolles, La Misère de Paris, les Mauvais Gîtes.
2 A character in the popular songs of Pierre-Jean Béranger.
3 Daphne du Maurier, The du Mauriers, 1937.
4 Also known as Fiesta.
Part III
Chapter XI
1 All the Tindalls in the area, however they spelt themselves, appear to have been descended from a John Tindall/Tendall who owned a small amount of land in Ticehurst in the mid-eighteenth century. ‘Tindalls Cottage’, which stood there till the 1970s when it was demolished for the contruction of a reservoir, survives as a heap of numbered bricks and timbers in the storehouse of the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum at Singleton, West Sussex. At the time of writing, its re-erection is planned ‘soon’.
2 In the UK, the full Census records may not be consulted till one hundred years have passed.
3 I am indebted for this insight to Kathryn Hughes, in The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton, 2005.
4 The University of Reading.
5 Manuscript memoir of his granddaughter, Monica Campbell née Tindall.
Chapter XII
1 Manuscript memoir of Monica Campbell.
2 Since the 1970s, the Boulevard Périphérique has occupied the ring round Paris traced by the old fortifications. This urban motorway preserves, in its signs, the memory of the old gateways in and out of Paris that used to punctuate the customs wall.
3 This contemporary view of the statue is now hard to evaluate, since it disappeared, along with many others, in the early 1940s, melted down by the occupying Germans.
Chapter XIII
1 H. Dabot, Calendrier d’un Bourgeois du Quartier Latin, vol. 2, 1905.
2 Quoted by Marguerite Perrot, Le Mode de Vie des Familles Bourgeoises 1873–1953, thesis 1961.
Chapter XIV
1 Quoted in A Short History of Baillière Tindall by D.H. Tindall.
2 He did, however, love her very much. Letters abandoned in a barn, which only came to light as this book was being printed, show that for their entire married life, whenever they were apart, he wrote her a loving and chatty letter every single evening.
3 In 1920 a nephew from the Jacob side, who had also been in the trenches in Flanders but survived, was taken into the family firm to fill Howard’s empty place. He fortunately proved very able.
Chapter XV
1 Manuscript memoir of Monica Campbell.
Part IV
Chapter XVI
1 Elliot Paul, The Narrow Street, 1942.
2 In virtually every provincial département of France, as in Great Britain, Census records from about 1840 onwards are available for consultation, and in France these may be consulted for up to thirty years before the present date. The records of the twenty arrondissements that make up Paris seem, however, to have bee
n largely lost. Various excuses are offered by local archivists – that the reorganisation of Paris proper circa 1860 led to a loss or misplacement of documents, that records disappeared wholesale in the burning of the Hôtel de Ville in 1871 – but none of these theories explains the absence of material for the later 1870s to the 1920s. One is forced to conclude that the doctrinaire left-wing nature of most Parisian Councils over many decades has led to the unthinking destruction, in the name of progress, of paper testimony to past lives that should have been kept.
3 The Unquiet Grave, 1944.
4 ‘From the Paris railway station of Austerlitz there were sent to the camps of Pithviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, and from there deported and murdered in Auschwitz, 3700 Jews, all male, on 14th May 1941. From 19th to 22nd July 1942 a further 7800 Jews were transported, four thousand of them children seized in the Vélodrome d’Hiver raid, arrested within Paris on the order of the occupying German forces by the police accredited by the authority then in charge. This was done in the name of the “Government of the French State”. ‘Let us never forget!’
Footprints in Paris Page 29