Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  But not old Paris. Old Paris, within the ancient limits, remained the same tight-packed maze that it had always been. Even its main thoroughfares were narrow, and often there was no obvious route across town from one small district to another. And this was especially true of the Latin Quarter, known by that name ever since the time when Latin was the universal language of European learning.

  This Quarter, when Arthur Jacob took up his abode there, was still, physically, a district of monasteries, convents, learned institutions and collèges. (These last were halls of residence, sometimes religious and sometimes secular, for those who came to study or just to imbibe the atmosphere of Parisian discourse.) By 1814 many of these institutions had been emptied of their former occupants, but their structures remained, sometimes ruinous, more often put to other uses. All these walled enclaves, many with their own gardens, created a chequerboard through which lanes twisted and turned, often at right angles. The traditional Latin Quarter, then as in all the centuries before, extended from the Place Maubert at the foot of the Montagne Sainte Geneviève on the east for about a kilometre as far as the site of the wall of Philippe Auguste on the west, roughly where the Odéon Metro station is today on the Boulevard St Germain. It had one main north–south route, the Rue St Jacques, and a subsidiary one more or less parallel, the Rue de la Harpe. It had one slanting east–west route near the river, consisting of the Rue de la Bûcherie, the Rue de la Huchette (both very narrow) and the Rue St André des Arts, which ended at the westward limit of the old wall near the ancient crossroads of the Rue de Seine and the Rue de Buci. No other clear transversal routes, no direct access to the Sorbonne either from east or west. The newly named Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine (previously Rue des Cordeliers, from the monastery there of that name) snaked up from the Odéon area as it does today, but stopped at the Rue de la Harpe, which was more or less on the line of the present-day Boulevard St Michel.

  The Rue des Ecoles was not extended eastwards into the heart of the old Quarter till the mid-nineteenth century, sweeping convents and churches and graveyards away in its path. The two great Haussmann boulevards that bisect the Quarter east–west and north–south were not constructed till the 1860s and ’70s. These were to change the entire geography of the Quarter, altering the relationship between one old street and another, losing old vistas, gaining new ones and destroying many ancient landmarks. The unseen footprints of innumerable successive generations were still there, but the old routes were dislocated.

  To someone from Arthur Jacob’s generation, returning to Paris as an old man, it would seem as if the Quarter, so familiar and dear from his youth, had been broken up as in a kaleidoscope. Some street corners would have been instantly recognisable – the slant of old walls, the shape of shopfronts low under the huge beams on which the rest of the building was supported, the line of the open gutter running down the centre of the street – but effects of light and shade would be puzzlingly altered: suddenly, rounding the known corner of a lane, the walker would be out in an unrecognisable cityscape of standard blocks, shaped to fit along a space where no space should have been. Many were those who, living from one era into the other, mourned the loss of this personally internalised geography. Charles Baudelaire, born in Paris (in the Rue Hautefeuille by the medical schools a few years after Arthur Jacob’s time there), died while only in his forties, but nevertheless lived long enough to write:

  Le vieux Paris n’est plus; la forme d’une ville

  Change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur d’un mortel

  (Old Paris is no more; a town alas,

  Changes more swiftly than does the human heart.)

  I don’t know how deeply Arthur took Paris to his heart, but there is evidence that at least one acquaintance he made there, in the Rue Hautefeuille itself, stayed with him for life. I also know that he was a man very interested in places and responsive to them, and that he took the trouble to acquire foreign languages in addition to the Latin that, as a doctor, he had to be able to write. His French must have been serviceable already in 1814 for him to plan his great expedition.

  When he died, he left his books to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, of which he had twice been President, and they are there to this day: battered, leather-bound, well read, tied up with tape now and awaiting laborious further conservation. There are numerous works on medicine, as you would expect, some from the eighteenth and even the seventeenth century, a few vellum-bound, some handed down from the earlier Jacob surgeons. Many of the ones published in his own lifetime are in French, a few in German. There are also a good many on related subjects, such as chemistry and zoology; many on birds, fish, insects, fossils, and on gardening and fruit-growing. During his long professional career he lived in Ely Place, Dublin, where there were still a few walled orchards till late in the century. Maybe he owned one of them. Some books are very fine, and minutely illustrated: there is a reprinted edition of Robert Hooke’s discoveries made under the first microscope, and some works by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus. There is John Evelyn’s discourse on trees and Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne. There is Erasmus Darwin’s Laws of Organic Life – but nothing by his grandson, Charles: the seminal Origin of Species did not appear till Arthur was almost seventy. There are forty-odd volumes of a French encyclopaedia of ‘practical matters’, complete with illustrations, published in a steady series from the late eighteenth century onwards.

  But what is striking is the very large number of books on foreign places, some old but many published during Arthur’s lifetime, ranging from travellers’ tales, through memoirs of the ‘Twenty Years in North Africa’ variety, to historical and philosophical studies of other cultures. Among the countries covered are Sweden, Finland, Lapland, Iceland, Greenland – Arthur seems to have had a particular taste for these northern fastnesses – Labrador, Newfoundland and North America in general. The American continent was opening up progressively throughout his life, and evidence of this appears in journeys of exploration into ‘the West’, the Rockies and ‘New Spain’. South America interested him also – Brazil, Peru, Paraguay and Chile figure. Sub-Saharan Africa is also there but to a lesser extent (Dahomey, Sierra Leone, the Cape …). The interior of Africa was hardly explored for much of the nineteenth century. But Australia figures, and the islands of the Pacific, including Tonga, also China, Tibet, India, ‘Bootan’, Ceylon, Mauritius, Persia, Turkey, Syria, Algeria, Morocco, Cyprus, Greece and Italy. Nothing, however, on ‘the Holy Land’, that staple of Victorian popular geography. The main bulk of Europe does not seem to have appealed to his imagination either, perhaps because, once he had worked in France, it was accessible and known. He was stirred, rather, by the amount of new information now becoming available on exotic and far-flung parts of the earth, including the polar seas.

  I do not think he ever voyaged to these parts himself. To do so would have been immensely expensive and time-consuming, and his busy professional life overtook him. But he voyaged extensively in his mind. Other books, such as the Letters of Madame de Sévigné, translations from the Portuguese of the poems of Camões, and various philosophical treatises, suggest further realms of mental voyaging.

  Chapter V

  LIFE IN THE QUARTER

  When Arthur arrived in Paris the enduring ecclesiastical character of the Latin Quarter was already a thing of the past, but there was no hint of the changes to its contours that the century would later bring. Old Paris was as it had long been, and all foreign travellers described it in much the same way: high, ancient, fortress-like houses rising six or seven floors above narrow, shadowed and dirty streets. These were almost all without pavements and were chaotically crowded with both pedestrians and wheeled traffic, which regularly broke axles lurching over old pavings as huge as stone pillows. Gas lighting would not begin to arrive for another ten years or so. At night oil lamps were lit, suspended on rope from the houses on each side. These illuminated the centre of the street for those with carriages rather than the hazardous edge
s for those without, and were not lit at all in the short nights of summer. Mounds of refuse and stable sweepings stood at street corners each morning, even beside grand private mansions. Much of this was never fully carted away, and was ground down by feet and wheels into a stinking black mud. In the daytime tradesmen used the street as a work-place; tinsmiths mended pots and pans with soldering irons dangerously close to passers-by, mattress-cleaners spread out flock to dry. It took an unusually perceptive foreign visitor to remark that Paris, in spite of all this, was ‘a magnificent place … character is indicated by almost every surface … In the English capital, your ideas and feelings are less frequently and forcibly excited than in the French.’1

  It was also noted with some surprise by British and American visitors that Paris houses were most often socially layered, with commerce and workshops or stabling at street level, often extending round an inner courtyard. On the spacious first floor there would be a tenant of some social standing – ‘He perhaps pays 300l. [£300] per annum for the rent of his share of the edifice. Above him are tenants possessed of different gradations of fashion or opulence, to the sixth or seventh floor, which are inhabited by the milkman, the cobbler or the scavenger, and who only pay a rent of ten pounds.’ Thus states the author of Picture of Paris, the Stranger’s Guide – who also notes disapprovingly that it seemed to be no one’s job to clean the shared staircase and that the richer tenants did not appear to care about this. Evidently, the time when the gabled and timbered houses of old London were socially mixed in the same way had passed from British memory, as the town had spread into new quarters, purpose-built for the gentry, leaving the older areas to exclusively working-class occupation. In fact, in many parts of Paris the pattern of social mix survived till recent times, for the mid-nineteenth-century building prospectors who made fortunes under Haussmann continued the tradition of building blocks to house different kinds of tenant on different floors. Only in the last decades of the twentieth century has the rise of property values deprived the working class of their old eyries on top of bourgeois blocks in central Paris and driven them off to distant outskirts on the Anglo-Saxon model.

  Where did Arthur stay in Paris? Somewhere within five or ten minutes’ walk of the Ecoles de Médecine, one may be sure. Another young British doctor, also newly qualified from Edinburgh, arriving in Paris four years later, easily found lodgings for himself and an American friend with a Madame Rousseau: three rooms between them for sixty francs a month plus five for the concierge. (The franc was then reckoned at twenty-four to the pound.) This house was in the Rue de la Vieille Estrapade, which was to the north-east of the medical schools, on the high ground just above the Sorbonne and the Panthéon, almost on the line of the old walls near the Porte St Jacques. It seems to have been a respectable establishment, and indeed the streets round there were particularly favoured by the six hundred-odd students attending the Ecoles de Médecine at that period, because they were thought to be slightly healthier than the district near the river. But I have a sense that Arthur, no longer a student and independent by nature, may have sought somewhere cheaper than Madame Rousseau’s rooms, knowing that in any case he would be spending little time at home. To him, after Dublin and Edinburgh, living in the midst of working-class Parisians would not have been a novelty, as it classically was for a boy from provincial France; but in any case he seems to have been robust enough in temperament and dedicated enough to his profession not to mind much where he lodged. The notoriously corrupting nature of Paris, which was generally recognised long before Balzac made it one of his principal themes, was hardly likely to affect a man who had voluntarily walked over a thousand miles to get there.

  The Balzac family moved from the Touraine to live in Paris that same autumn; Honoré de Balzac was then in his teens. In a later literary work he placed his young provincial character in a little room near the Hôtel de Cluny – the fifteenth-century abbot’s palace between the Rue St Jacques and the Rue de la Harpe that concealed then-unexcavated Roman baths. The young man pays fifteen francs a month for a room on the fourth floor: he complains in a letter to his sister that it is ‘one of the poorest and darkest little streets of Paris, squeezed between three churches and the old Sorbonne buildings’.2 But then this particular young man soon gets tempted from his studies by ill-fated money-making schemes. Not, you note, by the seductions of the vie de bohème. Although Balzac did use that phrase just once, in 1830, in his great Parisian novel cycle, it was not till 1845 that Henry Murger applied it to his world of the passionately feckless young and, in doing so, transformed the concept into a romantic idyll that would be copied and played out again and again in the Latin Quarter down the generations to come.

  I am inclined, though, to see Arthur Jacob, too, for practical reasons, in the very heart of the Quartier Latin. Perhaps he found a room in one of the cross-streets between Harpe and St Jacques – Rue de la Parcheminerie, for instance. Laid out about 1270 beside the cemetery of St Séverin, it was known then as the Writers’ Street because it was largely populated by public letter-writers and copiers. It later became the main centre of the parchment sellers. Houses were rebuilt several times on the same foundations and at some periods they were quite grand. Photos taken in the early 1900s, just before some substantial municipal demolitions in the name of hygiene, show fine doorways and windows ornamented with stone carvings in the style of the early eighteenth century. By Arthur’s time the houses were all hotels where people lodged long term, thus preserving the old meaning of the word ‘hotel’ as a fixed residence, and they were more respectable than they would later become: Hôtel des Pères Tranquilles, Hôtel St Séverin, Hôtel de la Paix, Hôtel Garantie, Hôtel du Centre ‘founded in 1806’ … Writing materials were still sold in the Rue de la Parcheminerie; there were many book-dealers round the church of St Séverin, and others already established, as today, on the riverside quay. In 1812 an antiquarian book-dealer set up shop in the capacious, derelict grandeur of the Hôtel de Cluny, which had been emptied of its ecclesiastical inhabitants at the Revolution. Just the area for a book-loving young man.

  Immediately to the east, the other side of the Rue St Jacques, lay the section that had been the medical quarter for centuries, before the building of the new medical schools shifted this focus a few hundred yards to the west. The first medical schools had existed across the water, on the island by Notre Dame, in the early fourteenth century, next to where Paris’s Hôtel Dieu stood right on the river. The Hôtel Dieu remained there till the mid-nineteenth century, when it was rebuilt on the other side of Notre Dame where it stands to this day, but the medical schools shifted over time. For a while they were in a church near the Hôtel de Cluny ceded to them by the Mathurins, an order of monks who specialised in buying back Christians who had been imprisoned during the crusades. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the aspirant doctors moved again, to the Rue de la Bûcherie, running parallel to the Seine and very near it, where much of the firewood that Paris consumed was landed and chopped up. Here, at the corner of the Rue de la Bûcherie and the Rue des Rats (later more elegantly renamed Rue de l’Hôtel Colbert), a fine domed amphitheatre was built in 1744. It served as a lecture hall, a theatre for such operations as were performed, and then as a dissecting room till at least 1810. It may still have been in use for dissection when Arthur arrived in the Latin Quarter, for dead bodies were a passion with French doctors at that time. No doubt the presence very near to hand of the church of St Julien le Pauvre had long been convenient for the amphitheatre, for this ancient little place of worship was the mortuary chapel for the Hôtel Dieu, just across the water by a covered wooden bridge. Many of those who died penniless and friendless in that last refuge must have been swiftly transferred from the chapel to the domed building on the next corner.

  By the mid-nineteenth century the amphitheatre was recorded as being used variously as a lavoir for local washer-women, the warehouse of a wine merchant, and as a discreet brothel. Against all the odds, it stands to this day,
a monument to the past of that particular knot of streets, which is the oldest kernel of the Latin Quarter.

  In fact, you could say that the tradition of science here antedates even the arrival of the medical school. It was here, some hundred years after Abelard taught philosophy among the cornfields and the vineyards, that Maître Albert, a great Dominican philosopher, chemist, naturalist and polymath, gave public lectures that drew a large audience, including the young Thomas Aquinas. Albert the Great was perhaps the first person to define the principles of observation, experiment and logical conclusion that form the basis of medical science. His presence is often invoked in the area, but the crooked thirteenth-century street now called after him was, till the nineteenth century, called the Rue Perdue, the Lost Street. I suspect that this poignant name was a deformation of some quite other word, just as the Rue des Rats was originally the more benign Rue d’Arras – Tapestry Street. In Maître Albert’s day lectures were still given in the open air, with the speaker standing on a bench or table and listeners sitting round respectfully on the ground or on bales of straw. A wisp of remembered straw survives in the name Rue du Fouarre, ‘fouarre’ being an old word for animal forage.