Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  No good. He’s off down the winding road, back view as ever, a flickering figure busy on his way to many other places. Somewhere along the road his twenty-fourth birthday has recently occurred. Paris calls.

  But first he has the excitement of London, and the negotiation there of a few formalities. Judging from his subsequent career, Arthur would have done his research thoroughly. Perhaps he had acquired a copy of a small, fat, leather-bound book which is still to be found from antiquarian dealers – A New Picture of Paris, or the Stranger’s Guide to the French Metropolis. The edition I possess is the sixth, published in 1817. It claims to have been ‘much enlarged and entirely recomposed’ in consequence of the Restoration, but it is in essence a description of the imperial Napoleonic city of the preceding decade, the city that Arthur was shortly to discover. Arthur’s earlier edition would have told him all he needed to know about procuring a passport from the Foreign Office (still a requisite that year, though, with Napoleon on Elba, it was hoped that the Wars were over), and another paper from the French ambassador at his house off Portman Square. It would also have told him how to purchase French gold and silver coins, at a rate advantageous to the traveller, from Mr Solomons, New Street, Covent Garden, or from Mr Smart, 55 Prince’s Street, Leicester Square (a district full of French émigrés since the Revolution), ‘or from Mr Thomas, 102 Cornhill, on whom the tourist may confidently rely for punctuality and integrity’. Since passports and foreign exchange all cost money, it must be assumed that whatever savings Arthur had made by his long tramp were ready waiting for him at a London banking house.

  I do not think he paused for long in London this time, though he may have taken the opportunity to introduce himself to Astley Cooper. Cooper pioneered research into blood vessels. He was soon to be appointed chief surgeon to a succession of royals, and later knighted. Abraham Colles had worked with him as a young man and must have recommended his promising pupil, Jacob, to him, for on his return from France the following year Arthur himself worked with Cooper for several months.

  If he did seek Cooper out in Guy’s Hospital, this would have fitted conveniently into his route. Guy’s, founded a hundred years earlier, stood, as it does today, just off Southwark High Street, and the road to Dover led from there. The street was lined then with galleried coaching inns and yards, of which the George today is the only survivor. Not that Arthur was about to succumb to a coach, especially after an invigorating day or two in London, but Southwark was the place anyway to start the journey. There were bakers’ shops where, for a couple of pennies, could be bought kidney pies into which gravy was poured with a spout, and in Borough Market fresh raspberries from the market gardens of Camberwell were sold wrapped in cabbage leaves.

  It puzzled me at first that Arthur set out for Dover, since, before the railways came, that was not the most obvious route to France. Many ships left from Brighton, which is not as far from London as Dover is, and arrived at Dieppe which is nearer to Paris than are Calais or Boulogne. However, the reason is not far to seek. There was a large, old infirmary to visit in Canterbury, directly on the way to Dover, but none near Brighton. In Dover, he would take one of the packets, still under sail then, which would, for a sum of about ten shillings (half a pound), deposit him in France. According to winds and tides ‘the passage is frequently completed in three hours, but it is sometimes prolonged to five or six. It will therefore be advisable to take some slight provision on board.’ (The Stranger’s Guide.)

  So, early in the morning, he leaves London again. It is high summer now. The streets soon fall away behind him, giving place to hay fields innocent of the houses that will come to cover them during the next thirty years. But the road is busy. It will take him over Blackheath and Shooters Hill, past Greenwich into the deeper countryside and on and on to Rochester thirty miles distant. In the afternoon, in some chalky rise of the North Downs where a white haze hangs in the sunlight, he sees yet another London-bound coach approaching him, and steps once again back against the hedgerow to avoid the worst of its travelling cloud of dust. The heavy vehicle, not an express coach but one that takes twelve hours from Dover to London, picking up and setting down passengers at many places on the way, lumbers noisily past him on iron-clad wheels, with its team of sweating horses and its roof crowded with hatted heads.

  The coachman on the box is a young man called Stephen Tendall or Tindall, son of a small Sussex farmer, who has seen in coach-driving the chance of a life more entertaining and modern than the drudgery of the plough and the slowly turning seasons. In his own obscure way, he is as go-ahead as Arthur Jacob.

  In the long future, when both these coming men are dead and gone, the grandson of one will marry the granddaughter of the other. But this improbable wedding will be a dynastic one, engineered by both families, for by then a link will have been formed between them which is traceable back to Arthur Jacob’s stay in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the months before the Battle of Waterloo.

  Chapter IV

  THE WALLED CITY

  A great many other people besides Arthur Jacob were visiting France that summer. Seat of the bloody Revolution of 1789–94 that had sent tremors of fear round Europe, then at War with Britain for much of the intervening time, France was a focus of fascinated curiosity, particularly for those who also regarded her as the main source of the Enlightenment. By 1814 travellers could again easily visit Paris, for the first time since the short-lived Peace of Amiens in 1802. Both British and Americans took advantage of this, and a few of them have left diaries to tell us what it was like. Morris Birkbeck, a leading exponent of new agricultural ideas and owner of much land, set out from Dieppe by the huge, swaying French diligence, so much slower than the stagecoach of England. He was already in middle age, although his energy and enthusiasm were yet to carry him on a few years later to found a Utopian settlement on the other side of the Atlantic, that obsession of visionary spirits. Although the French roads were much quieter than those in southern England, he found the countryside and the towns between the coast and Paris more cheerful and prosperous than he had expected:

  ‘Since I entered the country I have been looking in all directions for the ruins of France; for the horrible effects of the revolution of which so much is said on our side of the water: but instead of ruined country, I see fields highly cultivated and towns full of inhabitants … Everyone assures me that agriculture has been improving rapidly for the last twenty-five years … and that vast improvement has taken place in the condition and character of the common people … I ask for the wretched peasantry of whom I have heard and read so much; but I am always referred to the revolution: it seems they vanished then.’

  Later on his long journey round France, he commented on ‘the general politeness of all classes and the lack of heavy drinking in spite of the relative cheapness of wine’. He did, however, also remark that ‘our English eyes look in vain for respectable homes [i.e. the comfortable though unpretentious country house which had by then become such a feature of the British landscape, like the Jacob house outside Maryborough] … Remote from large towns and manufacturies, there seem to be no habitations but those of small farmers and cottagers.’

  It depended, of course, on what your expectation was. The Stranger’s Guide that Arthur Jacob may have had in his pocket describes Calais as having ‘a mean and dirty appearance’ surrounded by ‘a dreary expanse of country … infinitely inferior to that which [the traveller] has so lately admired at Dover’. Boulogne, which is where Arthur landed, finds rather greater favour as being more ‘picturesque’: Boulogne had a long tradition of trade with England, both licit and illicit (‘Brandy for the parson, ’baccy for the clerk, laces for a lady, letters for a spy …’) and was now poised to develop a more genteel British community. However, Montreuil, on a hilltop, the next place of any size on the hundred-and-sixty-mile road to Paris, is stigmatised in the Guide as forming ‘a miserable contrast with the beauty of the situation. The streets are narrow and dirty, and an appearance of poverty
pervades the place.’ The writer also remarks, as did all travellers at this period, on the inconvenient fact that French towns were still walled with gates that were shut at night, a practice long abandoned in England. And he has a further complaint:

  ‘The poor laws are unknown in France. No public provision is made for age, sickness or misfortune; it is not, therefore, surprising that the number of mendicants should be great. The natural frivolity of the French character contributes to increase this evil. The common people live merely for the passing day; they lay up no provision for the future; and when age or misfortune overtakes them, they have no resource but the charity of individuals.’

  There speaks the archetypal English voice, certain of his own superiority, a voice that was to boom louder as the century went on and Britain’s wealth and world influence increased, while France seemed to progress only by means of repeated uprisings and regime changes. But if the landscape and towns of Picardy and upper Normandy did not make the same unfavourable impression on the well-informed Birkbeck, they are still less likely to have disconcerted Arthur Jacob. Growing up in rural Ireland, visiting his father’s poorer patients in tiny turf-roofed cabins, he would have encountered a way of life considerably more primitive than that of post-revolutionary northern French peasantry. Nor would he have been a stranger to beggars: the beggars of old Dublin were notorious. He would also have been unsurprised by various other inconveniences listed on the debit side by the scrupulously fair Birkbeck, including ‘the habit of spitting’; ‘the Cabinets d’aisance, and, in some places, the utter want of them’; unpaved streets, smelly towns, dirty water thrown from windows, ‘increasing numbers of priests’, over-loquacious ceremonial greetings, and (in contrast) the casual way servants would enter a room at any and every moment.

  It was true what the Guide said about the French beggars. Dickens, at a slightly later time, remarked that ‘every cripple at the post-houses, not blind, who shoved his little battered box in at the carriage windows [asked for] “charity in the name of Heaven”.’ Many of these would have been ex-soldiers from Napoleon’s Grande Armée, or their dependants. The numbers of deaths and injuries among young conscripted Frenchmen during the Wars were comparable, in proportion to the population, with those suffered just over one hundred years later in the First World War. But the Napoleonic Wars were, like the Revolution that had preceded them, consigned quickly to the receding past: no one, from 1814 onwards, wanted to think about the disastrous retreat from Moscow two years earlier. The damaged survivors of this and other battles had little attention paid to them, outside Paris’s military hospitals of Les Invalides and the Val de Grâce.

  However, the Guide was wrong about France having no provision for the sick and old poor. On the contrary, almost every town of any size had an ancient religious foundation that served this purpose, and though the Revolution had battered many of them, it had not – unlike the Reformation in England two hundred and fifty years before – destroyed them. There was one in Montreuil, one in Abbeville, both on Arthur’s direct route, and the large town of Amiens had two. There was an Hôtel Dieu, the ‘Lodging of God’, the traditional name for the last refuge of the poor: this one had been founded in 1100. There was also the large Hôpital St Charles, which was partly funded by a lottery. It had two hundred beds for the old, two hundred for needy children, and accommodation for some fifty to sixty newborn babies, most of them foundlings. This establishment must certainly have been in Arthur’s list to visit, en route to the very large number of such institutions – many more than in London – that were to be found in Paris.

  In Amiens, and in many places in Paris, the sick were cared for by the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul, a nursing order founded in the seventeenth century. It had clearly been much too useful to be disbanded at the Revolution as the older, grander convents and monasteries had been. Another young British doctor, following in Arthur’s footsteps several years later, remarked apropos of the Hospital for Incurable Women on Paris’s Left Bank that the inmates ‘are waited on with great tenderness by the Sisters, instead of being obliged to drag out a miserable existence in filthy lodgings or an ill-managed workhouse’.

  It was to be another forty years before Florence Nightingale, in the Crimea, commented that the wounded French had devoted Sisters to care for them and that something of the kind should be done for ‘our own poor fellows’. Such was the paradox of France at the end of Napoleon’s rule: though, by many measures, it was far less prosperous than Britain, old-fashioned in many ways and politically highly unstable, the forces that had made it the intellectual centre of Europe in the previous century were still at work. People who could now visit Paris again did so partly because it was a source of exotic fashions and ways of living and was a great deal cheaper than England for daily expenses. It was already, as it was to become far more emphatically in the future, an escape route, a place of dreams, a personal Other Place. But people also went, as Arthur did, in search of practical new ideas, and customs old and new that they could admire and emulate; and they were not, overall, disappointed.

  The Paris in which Arthur finally arrived in the late summer of 1814 had a population approaching three-quarters of a million. London, at a million-plus, had overtaken it and would, in the following decades, become bigger and bigger, leaving Paris and every other world capital behind. But Paris, in its own way, was growing too.

  The essential physical difference between London and Paris, which is as clear today as it was two hundred years ago and more, derives from the different histories of England and France – the one, an island realm which has never been successfully invaded since 1066, the other a Continental kingdom constantly vulnerable to the incursions of other powers. In the early Middle Ages both London and Paris were compact walled cities designed to keep enemies at bay. Paris consisted of the original settlement on the Ile de la Cité, which had gradually become the heart of a semi-circular swathe of development on the right bank of the Seine reaching about a kilometre from the river at its furthest, and another of roughly the same extent on the left bank. Centred now on the newly constructed Notre Dame, Paris went on accreting round her cathedral like a coral reef round a great rock. A fortified wall was built right round this city about the year 1200, under the reign of Philippe Auguste. In the next century and a half Right Bank Paris expanded a little more, and so new sections of the wall were built further out under Louis XIII and Charles V. However, the wall round the Left Bank remained where it was, a fixed urban contour. Even today, when it has disappeared, streets follow its lines, and buried fragments of the massive structure are still to be found – in the Rue Clovis behind the Panthéon, and in an underground car park near the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine.

  It is this small, contained city, north and south of the river, with its great old gates – Porte Montmartre, Porte St Denis, Porte St Martin, Porte St Antoine, Porte St Jacques, Porte St Germain, the Porte de Buci and the others – that formed old Paris, an intricate mass of streets and buildings, which did not change its essential lineaments for hundreds of years. In England, the gates of the City of London fell into disrepair, the walls were pillaged for building materials, the town began to expand north over Moorgate Fields and Finsbury and to stretch out robust tentacles along the Strand and Holborn towards that other city at Westminster. By the late seventeenth century London and Westminster were merging into one large built-up area, with a new western quarter burgeoning round St James’s, and the medieval walled City was a distant memory; but then time ran differently in England … Paris still clung to her walls, and her centre was still the island in the river as in the days of Abelard.

  Outside the walls Paris had, by the eighteenth century, begun to spread, but only in a tentative, suburban way interspersed with gardens, vineyards, tanneries on the south side along the Bièvre river, and other small works. The smell of the tanneries mingled with that of hawthorn and lilac and washing laid out to dry. Montparnasse was still countryside, and so was Montmartre in the north, wit
h its windmills. However, by the reign of the ill-fated Louis XVI this spread had become important enough financially for a new wall to be built encircling Paris much further out. This so-called wall of the Fermiers Généraux measured twenty-four kilometres round. It was a relatively light fortification intended as a tax barrier, with customs posts at intervals for goods entering Paris. It was not popular – ‘le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant’ – and by and by the murmurs swelled and joined the cacophony of the Revolution.

  But meanwhile the first tentatively grand road plans, based on circular meeting points of the sort we associate with Paris to this day, began to be laid out, between old Paris and the new wall, on the high ground above the Latin Quarter. On the Right Bank the remains of the old walls of Louis XIII and Charles V were converted into grassed walks for bowling games – the origin of the word ‘boulevard’ – then, later, gravelled and planted with elms. (The ghosts of these pleasant walks are today drowned in relentless modern traffic and high commercial buildings: Boulevard Haussmann, Boulevard Poissonnière, Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle …) Other more central improvements were suggested, some of them prefiguring the huge road-piercing campaign that actually got going under Préfet Haussmann some seventy years later. These did not get built at the time, since the Revolution overtook such rational plans along with many of its own initial ideals.

  However, when Napoleon came to power, he continued the grand avenue schemes, mainly to the west, where the Champs Elysées and the Arc de Triomphe would eventually appear, ousting fields of cows. He set about a massive rebuilding of the old fortress of the Louvre, and made a beginning on the arcaded Rue de Rivoli to run along its northern side from the Tuileries palace and provide an eventual cross route for the capital. He had four new bridges constructed, an aqueduct, and a canal to bring water to the city. He built three kilometres of new quays, a big wholesale wine depot on the river east of the Latin Quarter, and several covered markets. He had the slaughterhouses and the cemeteries moved to the edges of Paris. He built the Bourse – the Stock Exchange – and continued the building, which had already been planned before the Revolution, of fine new medical schools on the western edge of the Latin Quarter – the Ecoles de Médecine. Paris overall was beginning to assume some of the shape and logic that are still part of its structure today.