He said he had “always been drawn to the panoramic format in all art forms.” Painted dioramas from the nineteenth century, decorative folding screens, the wide format photographs of Jacques Lartigue and especially the widescreen images of CinemaScope, Cinerama, Panavision, VistaVision—the wider the better. “I decided to try my hand and eye at it, so I rented a Fuji panoramic camera that takes in expansive horizons without fish-eye lens distortions,” he said. “I had only one subject in mind: the Seine, that I crossed over daily, winding its course through Paris in a beautifully broad berth, horizon to horizon. And its bridges, marrying Left Bank to Right.”
The only way to capture the power of the bridges, he discovered, was to photograph them in a long and narrow format, much as Zola had done a century before. Richard used multiple cameras and lenses, working in color and black and white. “The bridges came alive for me,” he said. “What got to me, really, was their beauty, their historic personalities, their character. They became the perfect artist’s model, still and constantly vibrant, stretched out in perfect repose across the Seine.”
Over the next several months, he walked from one end of Paris to the other, bingeing on bridge-hopping, “I photographed obsessively. Night and day.”
The photos had to feel timeless, which to him meant devoid of traffic: “I didn’t want signs of life. It had to be a hushed, sort of ideal world. I would have to wait in perpetuity not to have buses and cars, for nothing moving, for no people.”
Eventually, Richard invited me to see his bridges. He uncovered dusty gray albums and boxes of panorama transparencies as well as small photographs and slides in packages bound with gray cloth ribbon that had not been untied for years.
“You’ll get bored fast,” he said.
“No, I won’t,” I replied. I didn’t.
In the long panoramas, his “live models,” as he called the bridges, appeared naked in metal and stone. The photographs had never been published as a collection, and I wanted to linger over each one so that I could appreciate and remember, but he flipped the pages quickly. He showed me footbridges, one hidden under a highway that had since been torn down, another spanning a canal. He showed me the underbelly of the Belle Époque Pont Alexandre III, with its magnificent crisscrossing and intricate braiding of trusses and girders, photographed from a tourist boat. “I must have traveled on the bateaux-mouches fifty times, maybe more,” he said. He photographed the Pont des Arts footbridge, which joins the Institut de France to the Louvre, with pointillistic filigree in the foreground and a flowing haze behind.
Turning the pages, he stopped at an image of golden metal colonnades, a view of the viaduct for the No. 6 Métro line on the two-level Pont de Bir-Hakeim. Soon the albums were closed, the boxes tied up in ribbon again. He is certain his panoramas of the bridges will be published one day. “It was so great photographing them,” he said. “The bridges are set, like everything else in Paris that miraculously doesn’t get torn down or moved somewhere else. The bridges seduce you with the practical grace of their beauty. They don’t move. And the Seine underneath is in perpetual movement. Like time, like the weather, it is never still, totally changeable, in a total state of flux. I wanted to take pictures of the unmovable at one with the movable. The contrast splashes my eye.”
A bateau-mouche boat filled with tourists on the Seine; the Pont des Arts and the Louvre can be seen in the distance. GABRIELA SCIOLINO PLUMP.
Jacky Galloy (left), one of Paris’s bouquinistes—booksellers on the Seine—with a client on Quai des Grands-Augustins. GABRIELA SCIOLINO PLUMP.
NINETEEN
Selling Books, Selling Dreams
The Seine is the only river in
the world that runs between two
bookshelves.
— British journalist and broadcaster
KIRSTY LANG
THE BOOKSTALL along the Quai des Grands-Augustins offered no Eiffel Tower key chains, as do so many stalls, no coasters with scenes of Montmartre, no poorly printed posters of cancan dancers. There were no place mats, pocket mirrors, or padlocks to hang on bridges.
There were only books.
This was the stall of one of the traditional bouquinistes, the booksellers who have plied their trade on the banks of the Seine for hundreds of years.
“Do you have any books about the Seine?” I asked.
“None at all” came the reply.
In defiance, I rifled through the seller’s boxes.
“What’s this?” I asked. I picked up a bottle-green leather book with the title L’été à Paris (“Summer in Paris”) printed in shiny gold ink.
It was written by Jules Janin, who had been a prominent novelist and historian, and published in 1843. The engravings inside, with yellow-brown stains of age, included one that showed eight jousting teams competing in narrow boats on the Seine before a crowd of hundreds.
A chapter entitled “The Year 2440” was an elegy to L’an 2440, the utopian fantasy novel by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, the eighteenth-century writer considered to be the first street reporter in Paris. Since Mercier was the subject of my unfinished doctoral dissertation, I thought, C’était le destin—it was fate!
“So how much do you want for this book?” I asked.
“Forty euros,” said the bouquiniste.
“Oh . . . forty euros . . .”
“Yes, forty euros. But if the book really interests you . . .”
That was the opening I needed. And he knew it.
“Would you say thirty euros? You see, it’s fate that brought us together.”
And then I told him my history with Mercier.
“Well, you’ve made your proposal, and with a big smile. I cannot refuse you. Thirty euros!”
I introduced myself, prompting him to follow suit.
“I’m Jacky Galloy,” he said.
“What’s your real name?” I asked.
“Jacky.”
“C’mon, how did you get a name like Jacky?” I asked. “Were you a roulette player? Or a bartender in a cabaret? Or maybe a Corsican gangster?”
“Ah, do you want to hear a story?” he asked.
“Bien sûr.”
“It was 1940, and Germany had declared war on France. My parents were living in the Ardennes, and the Germans were coming. My mother was pregnant. She was only nineteen. My father was called up as a soldier. She was going to be all alone, and she wept.”
Jacky stopped to catch his breath and regain his composure, then continued. “My father said, ‘Don’t worry. The war is going to last a maximum of one or two months because the Americans will come, and they will immediately push the Germans out. So we will call our son Jacky to thank the Americans.’
“My mother went south and got as far as Mâcon. The Germans occupied France. My father left for the war, and right away, he was taken prisoner by the Germans. So obviously he didn’t come back until after I was born. And my mother was angry with the Americans because they didn’t come. But she said, ‘If I don’t call my son Jacky, I am disobeying my husband.’ And she couldn’t do that.”
Jacky has three children, seven grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. A retired schoolteacher, he had dreamed of teaching literature and history but was relegated instead to instructing students—eleven to sixteen years old—in grammar and penmanship. In 2007, he and a friend filled out the paperwork to become bouquinistes. City Hall gave them a stall.
As we were talking, a middle-aged man stopped and picked up the book I had just bought but had not yet paid for.
“It’s sold,” said Jacky. “It was thirty euros, but madame insisted on paying forty for it. You see how nice she is?”
“Yes, but if you want it, I’ll sell it to you for one hundred,”
I told him. The client picked up a volume of Proust instead.
THE BOUQUINISTES are the literary gatekeepers of Paris. They have survived four centuries of censorship, economic crises, and political unrest. They endure wind, heat, frost, noise, floods, and air po
llution and tolerate idle tourists and stingy customers. They claim that their bookstalls along the quays of the Seine make up the biggest open-air bookstore in the world.
In the eighteenth century, Thomas Jefferson, an obsessive collector of artworks, furnishings, and books, searched through the bouquinistes’ boxes for books on the United States, science, and architecture; he favored the Quai des Grands-Augustins, where Jacky now has his stall. Balzac called the bookstalls “catacombs of glory [that] have devoured many hours that belonged to the poets, to the philosophers, and to the men of science of Paris!” In his 1862 history of the Pont Neuf, Édouard Fournier wrote that this “famous bridge . . . was also a huge reading room.” In the twentieth century, the American-born writer Julien Green gazed into the zinc-lined wooden cases and found “many windows through which to escape”; the novelist François Mauriac saw “a door for entering an enchanting world.” Léon-Paul Fargue, the poet and essayist, celebrated the bouquinistes as Parisian heroes, calling them “the most delightful beings who contributed with elegance and discretion to the renown of intelligence that glorified Paris.”
Before and during his presidency, François Mitterrand enjoyed strolling along the quays in search of literary treasures in the bouquinistes’ stalls. Mitterrand wrote about his visits to the bouquinistes in letters to Anne Pingeot, the other woman in his life and with whom he had a daughter. In one letter, he described the joy of finding a rare, “deliciously rebound” book by the nineteenth-century poet and writer Gérard de Nerval; in another, he proposed a leisurely stroll, writing, “If the sun smiles on us while we walk, we will go to visit some good bouquinistes.”
In my early days in Paris, alone in a strange city, I spent long stretches of time strolling among the bouquinistes. I did not need to speak; the booksellers didn’t have to know that I lacked the imperfect subjunctive in French. I lost myself in old books, prints, newspapers, and magazines.
One day I got up the nerve to begin a conversation in French with a bouquiniste. His wooden boxes overflowed with hundreds of exquisite leather-bound books with gold lettering, elaborate cover designs and engravings, and satin ribbon page markers. “Do you have a reprint of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris?” I asked in French.
“Mademoiselle,” he replied, “why would you want a reprint when you can have the original?”
The twelve volumes had been published in the 1780s. Where would I find an original?
He pulled out a business card and wrote the name and address of a book dealer on the back of it, instructing me to mention his name and ask the dealer the same question.
I headed over that same day. The bookstore was in Saint-Germaindes-Prés, on the Left Bank. It was one of those places that looked too important for amateurs. A man in his sixties greeted me with a gaze that was neither warm nor cold. I asked about Mercier’s Tableau.
He disappeared into a room hidden behind a curtain of moss-green velvet. Several minutes later, he emerged with a high stack of brown leather books: both Tableau and a later work of Mercier’s, Le nouveau Paris. The pages had been rebound into nine volumes sometime in the late nineteenth century, but these first editions dated from between 1783 and 1793. When I opened the books, they smelled of old paper and dust. He asked for 1,750 francs—about $350. I said yes. He didn’t take credit cards. I came back with cash the next day. I was too intimidated to bargain.
I went back to the bouquiniste to tell him what I had done. “Pas mal,” he said.
The volumes sit front and center on a desk in the foyer of my apartment for all to see. They are among my most prized possessions.
THE WORD BOUQUINISTE first appeared in print in a dictionary in 1752. It is derived from the word bouquin, which dates to 1459 and means “old book of little interest.” The verb bouquiner means to read up and study and also to trawl the quays looking for books. The bouquinistes were born of religious censorship. In 1562, during the Protestant Reformation against Catholicism, the Catholic Church’s Council of Trent created a list of banned books. France was gripped by the civil war between Huguenots and Catholics, and booksellers trafficked in Protestant pamphlets and libelles, or “little books”—illegal “libelous” pamphlets that slandered public officials.
To keep control over what the French were reading, in 1577 the king issued a royal decree that ordered booksellers to sell their merchandise from designated locations. When the Pont Neuf was built, booksellers set themselves up on the broad quays nearby, only to be shut down in 1628, reauthorized in 1640, then banned again in 1649. Books continued to be sold there unofficially until 1721, when Louis XV forbade bookselling on public walkways. Booksellers returned to the Pont Neuf under his grandson Louis XVI. During and shortly after the French Revolution, the bouquinistes salvaged books pillaged from the estates of the nobility, flooding the open market with rare first editions. During an ambitious renovation of the Pont Neuf, the booksellers began to be expelled in 1851; by 1854 they were gone.
Then the city of Paris began to regulate the bouquinistes. A decree in 1859 issued the first permits officially authorizing booksellers to sell their books along the quays. In 1891, they received permission to leave their books in place overnight; their boxes were enlarged and permanently fixed to the quays.
THERE WAS A TIME, on Sunday afternoons especially, when the bouquinistes facilitated romance. Searching for a rare or unusual book became part of the ritual of seduction. And “I think I’ll visit the bouquinistes” was sometimes the cover husbands offered their wives when they went to visit their mistresses on Sunday afternoons. Fargue wrote about certain men who stopped there: “Elderly Parisians of no particular importance, dressed to the nines, gray trousers and spats, sideburns carefully combed, impeccable top hat, walking stick under the arm, imposing collar, flashy or delicate necktie under a well-proportioned collar, a flower in the buttonhole, a smile always in place on happy lips. They were well-cared-for, spoiled old gentlemen with private incomes; and while waiting to go off to their rendezvous gallants they would move in a trance of pleasure among astronomical maps, postage stamps, erotic prints, and first editions.”
One of my favorite paintings of the bouquinistes hangs in the Musée Carnavalet: Bouquiniste sur le Quai des Grands-Augustins by Bernard Boutet de Monvel. A painter, sculptor, engraver, fashion illustrator, and interior decorator, Boutet de Monvel stayed in Paris during World War II, apparently oblivious to the Occupation. He devoted himself to painting the booksellers along the Seine’s banks and continued to paint them after the war.
Boutet de Monvel’s painting, completed in 1949, shows two men in topcoats who appear to be customers. One, a bearded, bespectacled figure wearing a hat, stands in profile as his companion bends over to look at something of interest. Already, at that time, more than books were for sale, as several groupings of prints hang from clips. The painting was one of Boutet de Monvel’s last works; he died in a plane crash in the Azores the same year.
Each bouquiniste is allowed one stall with four boxes painted dark green (the same shade, “wagon green,” as old railroad cars and park benches). Officially, three of the boxes must contain only books; the fourth can be devoted to other items, including prints, postcards, maps, posters, and stamps. The selling of “trinkets and other tourist objects” is supposed to be banned and result in the revocation of a license, but that doesn’t happen.
There was a time when bouquiniste boxes were reserved for the war-wounded and fathers with large families. These days, the rules are different. Would-be bouquinistes must have experience with books and no criminal record. When a stall becomes vacant, a committee composed of representatives from the city government, the business world, and the book industry decides who should take it.
A bouquiniste pays no rent or taxes. Bookstore owners are banned from becoming bouquinistes. Subletting is forbidden. Bouquinistes should be present at least three days every week; on other days, employees can work the boxes. Bouquinistes can take no more than six weeks of consecutive vac
ation. The stalls, which must conform to rigid size standards, are limited to one per family.
These days, there are about 240 bouquinistes, and they operate stalls holding 300,000 books, spread along nearly two miles of riverfront. Some still specialize: in crime novels, or military history, or music, or antique maps that cost several hundred euros each that must be locked up or taken away for safekeeping at the end of the day. Cities such as Ottawa, Beijing, and Tokyo have copied Paris’s open-air bookselling, but nowhere else do booksellers enjoy the magic and mystique of the Seine.
Yet the bouquinistes are suffering. A long, slow, inevitable decline began decades ago. The afternoon stroll along the Seine, when Frenchmen would come out to savor Paris and search for literary treasures, has gone out of fashion. People buy fewer books, and the books they do buy are cheaper and easier to find on the Internet. Now the customer of the Seine bouquiniste is more likely to be a souvenir-shopping foreign tourist who doesn’t speak French.
In Paris, his classic book from 1975, the British-American art critic John Russell was already lamenting the decline. “The quays have lost much of their character in recent years,” he wrote. “Many bouquinistes have given in to the mass market and now offer only prints, maps, and trumpery reproductions.”
Still, Russell loved outdoor booksellers. He noted that in Paris they worked in “surroundings of extreme beauty” and offered “a public service in preserving an asylum of idleness in the very middle of the restless city.”
The late Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld would have agreed. For his 2018–19 haute couture show under the dome of the Grand Palais museum, he paid homage to the bouquinistes, building an elaborate runway that featured miniature versions of the booksellers’ wagongreen boxes linked to an imaginary quay of the Seine. He filled them with Chanel-related books, publicity materials, and magazines. He completed his set with streetlamps and park benches, installing a fifty-foot-tall image of the Institut de France as the centerpiece.
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