Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  Even more than the London that Dickens immortalised, later-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Paris became a city to which its inhabitants developed a visceral attachment, almost regardless of their own places of origin. The sentimental song with the refrain ‘J’ai deux amours – mon pays et Paris’ belongs to the 1920–40 era, but its huge success then was surely due to its putting into words a feeling that had been current already for two or three generations. This extraordinarily strong pull that Paris exerts has something of a literal, physical explanation, for Paris is a highly concentrated city. Even today, when there has been a large, belated suburban expansion, the population density of Paris proper, the Paris of the twenty arrondissements, is roughly twice that of London. The French concept of townscape is of something distinctively urban, consciously grand, developed and fostered over the last two hundred years. In contrast, the vague English preference for leafy suburban sprawl has created a quite different habitat.

  The geographical heart of Paris has remained in the same place for the whole seven hundred years since the building of Notre Dame cathedral on the original city-island in the Seine. The scholars, students, foreigners, wanderers and idlers, who come and go on that small section of the Left Bank that lies opposite the cathedral across a narrow strip of water, are walking in the same patterns, and often on the very same named paths that their predecessors walked before the cathedral towers were raised.

  Abelard, the young monk famous in his time for his learning and his persuasive debating skills, but more celebrated in subsequent centuries for his love affair with Héloïse, crossed from the island to deliver lectures to students sitting among hay fields before the name ‘Latin Quarter’ was current. The Rue St Jacques runs on the Roman route from the Paris island to the south: it acquired its name when the shrine of St Jacques of Compostela was established in the ninth century. The Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève follows the irregular trace of the rocky goat path that led to the top of the steep hill long before Robert de Sorbon founded his modest teaching hall there in 1257. The Clos Bruneau, an insignificant alley off the Rue des Carmes, is the last flicker of an extensive vineyard of that name, one of many that flourished on that slope. The Carmelites remembered in the Rue des Carmes arrived in the place in 1309, but they were relative newcomers in comparison with the Jews who, denied residence on the city-island itself, had a settlement on the Montagne before being expelled around 1200. Some of their bones still lie a little way off, deep under part of the Rue Hautefeuille, a very old street in its own right and one we shall visit again – but then this Left Bank territory is mined with bones, a hidden chequerboard of small cemeteries long since buried under stone, timber, piping, concrete and iron.

  Waves of itinerant masons have passed through; buildings have risen, remained for centuries, been chopped about, extended or replaced. Ancient streets have been bisected by new, wide ones; narrow rights of way have been swallowed up in boulevards, one-time central gathering places have become odd-shaped, tree-hung corners. Crowded tenements have become empty air. Yet if the psychic imprint of all that human living, hundreds of years of daily movements along personal routes within a square kilometre of space, could have left some visible trace, we would find ourselves treading directly in innumerable packed footprints. We share the same territory, both physically and psychologically, with troops of vanished others, all in their time as real and as involved in their own intricate lives as we ourselves are.

  Some fifty years after that rainswept afternoon on Ashdown Forest, I wrote a book about the French masons and their epic journeys across France in thrall to the seasons. It was only then that I discovered, almost by chance, my own ancestor’s long walk to Paris and his involvement in the very streets that I had by then made my own.

  In the early summer of 1814 Napoleon had been despatched to Elba and the Bourbons were restored to the French throne. For the first time in thirteen years the British could visit France freely, and so Arthur Jacob set out from Edinburgh. In his pocket, he had a brand new qualification as a physician from the Edinburgh School of Medicine, and not much else. He journeyed on foot from the Scottish capital to Dover but not by a direct route, for it was part of his purpose to visit all the hospitals and infirmaries he could on his trek southwards. The little memorial book that was published by his colleagues on his death at the age of eighty-three, in a world transformed by trains and telegrams, chloroform and disinfectants, says ‘it was in subsequent years a source of pride with him to be able to state that during the six weeks so occupied he traversed 960 miles.’ Given that many of the days of those six weeks must have been spent looking round wards and dispensaries and talking to other doctors, the figures suggest an average, on walking days, of well over thirty miles.

  He paused for some intensive hospital visiting in London, then set out for Dover. There he crossed to Boulogne and, still on foot, continued to Paris. His journey ended in the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine – a stone’s throw from where his grandson-in-law would live and work near the end of the century and where his great-great granddaughter, another sixty years later, would have her being. It is almost as if habitats, and even affinities for particular corners and views, persist in family DNA down the generations, unbeknown to the carriers, like a taste for poetry, a tone of voice or a turn of the head.

  Chapter II

  OUT OF IRELAND

  But the journey, in fact, did not start in Edinburgh. Arthur Jacob hailed from Ireland, a place with a different image. And he did not even come from Dublin, the elegant, miniature eighteenth-century townscape built under British hegemony, but from a remote rural place. It was the damp, soft greenness of County Wexford and Queen’s County that formed Arthur. But tempting as it is to link him therefore with the Irish scholar-monks who came to Paris to live in the Collège des Irlandais just a little to the north of the Carmelites, leaving their invisible footprints all over the streets that Arthur would come to tread, this would be false. Arthur Jacob was not authentically Irish; he was neither Celtic nor did he belong to the Old Faith, the Ireland of the beggar-child’s song, of the ‘holy londe of Irlande’. When that child was singing, some time in the fourteenth century, Arthur’s ancestors were probably Lombards – bankers and moneylenders in northern Italy. Though, by a maze of paths, some of them could have reached the same territory in Paris as the Irish, since the Collège des Irlandais in the Rue des Carmes had belonged earlier to the Lombards.

  The History of the Jacob Families (compiled by Arthur’s son together with a professional researcher the year Arthur died, privately printed, and now in a crumbling, disjointed state, as if beginning to fall into dust itself) admits to a probable Jewish connection but plays it down. It ignores the seventeenth-century physician Hildebrand Jacob, even though his first name was used and reused in the family. This Dr Jacob, who attended members of the Royal Family, and was known to the gossipy John Aubrey as ‘a person of great worth’, seems to have been identifiably Jewish. But the family History places emphasis, instead, on a William Jacob (1610–1688) who was a lieutenant in Cromwell’s army and was given a grant of land in County Wexford as a reward. He was, claims the book, first cousin to Sir John Jacob, 1st Baronet of Gamlingay in Cambridgeshire. He was also related to a raft of ecclesiastical persons by the name of Jacob in both Kent and Dorset. The Jacob family (never with an ‘s’ at the end) was therefore, by implication, safely Anglo-Saxon. Arthur and his forebears were members of the Protestant Ascendancy, the Anglo-Irish who – according to your perspective – either oppressed the starving native peasantry, whose land they had stolen, or made a contribution to Ireland out of all proportion to their numbers, in that it was they who created the social structures, the schools, the colleges, the hospitals, the elegant buildings and eventually most of the literature of that past-racked island.

  A hundred-odd years after William Jacob acquired his land his great-great grandson, Michael, was settled in Queen’s County – ‘a clever medical man and a pleasant companion; his compa
ny was sought often by the best in the county.’ He was to be the first in a line of Jacob surgeons which ran unbroken till 1914.

  Maryborough, the tiny chief town of Queen’s County, is today called Portlaoise and is celebrated only for the large maximum-security prison which is the main local employer. Once a pretty place built within the remains of a fortress, with a winding high street of old houses and a nineteenth-century courthouse-gaol right in the middle, it has today been rendered physically incoherent by the building of a new shopping centre just beyond the town. A similarly featureless luxury hotel (surely too grand to offer accommodation to those come to visit their relatives in the prison?) has invaded a large parcel of land near the ruined fortress tower. The old gaol has been turned into a theatre and arts centre: its complete evisceration has removed all trace of the complex history once enacted there. A plaque ‘commemorates the memory of eleven people whose remains were discovered in 1997 during the construction of this Arts Centre … May they rest in Peace.’ There might have been twelve of them, had it not been for the humane efforts of Arthur Jacob and his brothers John and Thomas. (See pages 105-7).

  I knew, more or less, what I was looking for, but had no real expectation of finding it, now after so long and so much change. In the new Public Library, somewhere beyond the shopping centre, any memories of the reachable past seemed to have been demoted to make space for coloured cut-outs of dinosaurs. However, as I drove out through the twentieth-century sprawl along the old Dublin Road, I braked at an unexpected glimpse of a blue plaque. It was on a house right by the road: a large, plain house with a classic Dublin-style doorway and porch, and walls that were probably stuccoed before they were covered in the grey porridge of pebble-dash of which Ireland today is unaccountably fond. Before the traffic came, and before a shopping centre (another) and a large modern Roman Catholic church were built opposite, the house must have had fine green views. Ruins down the lane behind it, and a steep rocky hill nearby with gravestones here and there upon it, hinted at earlier incarnations for the site.

  ‘This was for many years the home of the famous Jacob medical family. An early Dr Jacob founded the first infirmary in Maryborough (now Portlaoise) in 1756. His son, Dr John Jacob, founded the County Infirmary in 1808 and built this house c.1810. John’s son, Dr Arthur Jacob, discovered the membrane of the eye, afterwards called “Membrane Jacobi” …’ And the rest of the plaque’s inscription was about how the building became the Parochial House after 1912 and was lived in by a series of much-loved parish priests – presumably associated with the church opposite and its huge plastic pietà. The house now appeared empty.

  So I left Portlaoise with a warmer feeling for the town and its uneasy relationship with the past than I would otherwise have had. I discovered afterwards that the old stone vestiges down the lane were what remained of a very ancient building that had been reused by John Jacob, father of Arthur, as the first County Infirmary.

  The traditional system at the end of the eighteenth century, throughout the United Kingdom, was for local medical men to tender individually each year to the Poor Law Overseers for contracts to look after the sick poor. Naturally the lowest tenders were apt to be accepted, often from useless or negligent practitioners; no one was satisfied with the situation and money was wasted. Go-ahead country surgeons, like Jacob, were coming to realise that if the sick could be brought to centralised places, thus saving time and effort, good local surgeons, physicians and apothecaries could be induced to come together to pool their experience and develop standard procedures: all would benefit. Just look, said the modern-minded men, at the success of such schemes in Edinburgh and Vienna, those famed centres of progress. They could have added Paris but did not, for the moment, since Britain had hardly yet recovered from horror tales of the French Revolution and anyway was at War with France.

  So it was here, in the newly opened County Infirmary, and in the farms round about that Arthur, who was born in 1790, became a teenage apprentice to his father. He saw the handsome new house begin to go up nearby when he was sent to study medicine in Dublin. It was to this house that he eventually returned from his Paris adventure. He was in practice himself in Dublin, and already making his mark in research, by the time a brand new Infirmary was built further along the Dublin Road, with money badgered by Dr John Jacob out of the local great and good.

  So, as it turned out, it was Arthur’s much younger brother, another John, who took on the Infirmary and the extensive country practice at the father’s death. This son ‘was alike to rich and poor, to the peasant and the peer … honest, straightforward and outspoken almost to a fault’. (Obituary, 1864.) Family lore has it that he had an obsession, possibly well founded, with tuberculosis and the need to combat this with fresh air, and used to bang his stick through the windows of wretched little houses if the occupants were unwilling to open them. His local name was Old Danger, from the speed at which he drove the buggy that was kept ready to visit patients day and night, but the same energy and eagerness made him loved. His own children, sadly, were afraid of him.1 He followed his father in keeping a diary on all the families he treated, of every class – a record which, passed down in the family and progressively augmented with succeeding generations of patients, became a medicosocial account of nineteenth-century rural society.

  The bust of John now in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland shows mutton-chop whiskers, a high stock and a determined look. The companion bust of brother Arthur – clean-shaven, neck bare above Roman drapery – creates a more spiritual impression, perhaps more fitting to a distinguished pioneer in diseases of the eye. He wears no glasses, though other likenesses throughout his life always show him with these. Perhaps it was in the need to wear spectacles from boyhood that the origins of his particular interest lay. Did the father understand in good time that his youngest son and namesake was the one more suited than Arthur to driving out to patients over the hills and bogs of Queen’s County?

  Or perhaps there were family arguments about this. There must have been good reason why the father’s nickname went down the generations in family lore as Old Squaretoes. There were other sons, older than John, who might equally have been expected to step into their father’s professional place but apparently did not. The eldest of all, Michael, mysteriously disappeared to Australia, which was not yet a place of respectable emigration. Was he discarded as a ne’er-do-well? Two others went to India and succumbed there to the infections that claimed many European lives.2 John was in fact the youngest of the twelve children, almost all of whom survived into adulthood. Fifteen years younger than Arthur, he was still in baby petticoats when the Infirmary was founded. When Dr Jacob died in 1827, leaving the newer and purpose-built Infirmary behind as a memorial, John was a just-qualified practitioner not yet twenty-two. He took over, and flourished. But surely this was not what Dr Jacob had originally planned when he sent Arthur, who had by then stepped into Michael’s place as eldest son, to study in Dublin with a celebrated surgeon, a chance that he himself had never had?

  By custom, surgeons had till then existed on a lower plane than physicians and their training tended to be more modest and pragmatic. No previous Jacob had had a formal diploma in surgery from a medical college in Dublin nor had gone on to take a separate course as a physician in Edinburgh. But times were changing and there was a scent of progress in the air. ‘Dr’ Jacob, with his Infirmary on the model of others that were opening or shortly to open up and down the British Isles, prided himself on being part of the change. His son was to have the joint qualification and MD after his name.

  There had long been a tradition of young doctors completing their studies in Edinburgh, which was both cheaper and better organised for the purpose than Dublin. An MD from Edinburgh, where the likes of James Gregory, John Bell and James Hamilton the obstetrician were already making their mark, was much prized. There medicine itself, for so long sunk in an unprestigious trough of bleeding, leeching and cupping, was beginning to quicken to a few glimmering ide
as to do with careful observation, precision and hygiene, and these would become more focused as the century went on. In any case there were many historic links between the Scots and the Anglo-Irish community to which almost all Dublin doctors belonged. Although the Penal Laws keeping Roman Catholics out of the professions had been largely revoked by Arthur Jacob’s day, the medical establishment were still mainly ‘of the Protestant persuasion’. Abraham Colles, the renowned surgeon and anatomist under whom Arthur worked in Dublin, had taken his degree in Edinburgh and no doubt recommended it to his pupil. So to Edinburgh in 1813, for a final year of study, Arthur went.

  While he probably did not subsist, like the traditional hard-up Scottish student, on a barrel of oatmeal a term and another of salted herrings, a young man with ten brothers and sisters at home could not expect to live extravagantly. Quite as hard-working and determined as Colles, Arthur may have stayed with the same landlady, a Mrs Smellie in the old town, who used to interrupt her student lodger late at night ‘to prevent him from reading himself into a coffin’. Food was not expensive; ‘a piece of good cod’ for tenpence would provide dinner for several days for two men sharing, and sixpence a head would buy a Sunday feast in an inn by the Firth of ‘good kele broth, bacon and eggs, oaten bread and butter’. Butcher’s meat, though, was a rare treat.