Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  In the Académie archives, which are secreted in a quiet corner of the monumental Institut de France facing the Seine, a few minutes from the old Lemoigne business in the Rue Bonaparte, the folder marked ‘Lemoigne, Maurice’ contains a random collection of papers. From these I was able to glean that he had one son who, at Maurice’s death in 1967, was his sole heir. So he was presumably a widower by then and, since he was eighty-five, it is likely that he was the last survivor of his generation. A Paris-Match photograph of him at a dinner table with others in 1961 shows a humorous, wily-looking old Parisian with a truculent bottom lip.

  Why was he figuring in such a sensational, mass-circulation magazine, hardly his usual milieu? Because he had been an expert witness in a case that shook France at that time and divided scientists one from another. A widow (Marie Besnard) had been charged with murder on the evidence that when her late husband’s body was exhumed, along with those of various other well-to-do relatives, all contained arsenic. However, the provincial cemetery in question sloped steeply downhill. Some biologists, including Maurice Lemoigne, took the view that the ground absorbed so much foul water drained from the built-up areas above it that bodies were apt to be contaminated with all sorts of substances which were not originally in them. Marie Besnard was eventually reprieved.

  Maurice Lemoigne’s obituary mentions his ‘kindliness and discretion’. His air of cheery cynicism in the photo would suggest that he, like many others, thought that Marie Besnard very probably was guilty, but as a good scientist he was not going to settle for anything but the most stringent forensic proof. Arthur Jacob, treading in the same Latin Quarter streets a century and a half before, would, I think, have approved of him.

  Chapter XVI

  FOOTPRINTS BEYOND THE QUARTER. AND NEW ONES WITHIN IT

  The Paris that Maud discovered in the years before the Great War, and where she began tracing paths for herself which she would tread from time to time for the next thirty years, had not undergone any great change since the 1890s. The last horse-tram ran in 1907, and then there was the replacement, year by year, of other horse-drawn traffic by the new motor-cars, but the only significant structural change had been the arrival of the Metro from 1900 on. One of the earliest lines, the Nord-Sud, from the Porte de Clignancourt to the Porte d’Orléans, crossed the Ile de la Cité and then the Latin Quarter but in a zigzag route, mainly to avoid disturbing academic institutions such as the Palais de l’Institut and also several of the ancient cemeteries known to be hidden beneath the narrow streets. All the lines were initially planned to end at the various Portes (‘gates’) of Paris, thus perpetuating their names for the twentieth century and beyond. Well into the 1920s, Paris proper was still corseted within the ring of the fortifs’. Not for another generation did the underground railway seem able to ignore this ancient but redundant barrier and prolong some lines into the suburbs.

  Unlike the London Underground, which was constructed in deep tunnels, the Metro was built by cutand-cover only just under the surface of the roadway, and therefore tends to follow a road’s twists and turns as if it were a submerged tram. One of the last lines to be built before 1914 was the one that traverses the Left Bank from Auteuil in the west to the Gare d’Austerlitz in the east. It provided, and provides today, a very necessary link across a whole sweep of Paris, yet as first planned the line from Auteuil was to veer north after La Motte Picquet-Grenelle and cross to the Right Bank which was already seamed with lines. It was as if the Metro company took some time to comprehend that the inhabitants of the polite seventh arrondissement might ever wish to go east into the lively student quarter centred on the Odéon crossroads, let alone into the ‘insalubrities’ of the Place Maubert and the Montagne Sainte Geneviève.

  There, old Paris slumbered largely undisturbed. Every so often a particularly dilapidated block would be pulled down: the venerable and notorious Château Rouge in the Rue Galande was one of these casualties, as were the houses with fine seventeenth-century doorways in the Rue de la Parcheminerie. The original medical amphitheatre near St Julien le Pauvre was marked for demolition, but was saved by antiquarian intervention. The inhabitants of most of the ancient buildings were left to carry on with life much as it had been lived in these streets since before the Revolution. Many never went far from their familiar labyrinth of courtyards and alleys. The modest version of le confort moderne that began to spread in other areas with the new century, and made more progress after the ’14–’18 War (shared flush lavatories off the stairwells, individual cold water taps in the kitchens, gaz à tous les étages), hardly touched the lanes where Dante and Maître Albert had walked. The Rue de Bièvre still followed the course of the stream that had only been covered over within living memory. When spectacular floods occurred in Paris in 1911, in that lowlying area, river and stream between them reclaimed their ancient territory. Further along the quays the lower end of the Rue Bonaparte, too, was filled with slopping water.

  An American journalist who, for many years, lived in the Rue de la Huchette, just the other side of St Julien le Pauvre and St Séverin, and who, exceptionally among his kind, spoke good French, knew his neighbours and really understood Paris wrote: ‘The people … were fairly representative of Parisians and other Frenchmen who lived in cities. The garçons, chambermaids and many vegetable and fruit sellers were peasants. They treated our street as if it were a lane in the country and were bewildered by gas-light, telephones and the traffic in the Place St Michel.’1

  But outsiders often took a rather different view of this homely district. To them, it was full of sinister nightspots and ‘Apaches’. This name, borrowed incongruously from the Wild West of America, was what the popular newspapers called the local rough youths. You would think, from the language of the Petit Journal two or three years before the War, that these young men with striped jerseys and slouch caps, who were reputed to carry knives, really were some alien immigrant group – or degenerate indigenous tribe from an impenetrable interior: ‘The Apache is the running sore of Paris. There are more than thirty thousand of these prowlers [the word employed is rôdeur, with its echo of rôngeur – rodent] as against eight thousand policemen … Too many young idlers – too many young criminals!’ Boys were even to be seen lounging on benches during the daytime. Disgraceful.

  Before the Great War, there was a chronic problem in Paris of underemployment, hence the large number of men and boys trying to sell matches, or laces, or to hold the heads of horses for coachmen who were away for a few minutes. Shabby men used to hang around the main stations and then run behind luggage-laden fiacres (horse-drawn cabs) all the way to distant parts of Paris in the hope – often disappointed – of earning a tip at the end for helping to carry boxes up several flights to flats. A number of them used to assemble on the Place Maubert because (as one explained to a sympathetic police officer who bought him a drink) fiacres came past there from both the Gare de Lyon and the Gare d’Austerlitz, heading westwards to the wealthier quarters.

  One must suppose that many of these pathetic figures, along with many of the feared ‘Apaches’ also, disappeared definitively from Paris after 1914, first into the army and then into the shattered, muddy earth of the Marne and Verdun. After the War, the problem of ‘loafers’ does not seem to have preoccupied either the police or the newspapers in the same way. The perceived problem by then was the lack of adequate numbers of Frenchmen, either to man the industries of the suburbs or to father the next generation of cannon fodder. A draconian law was passed in the summer of 1920 making it a criminal offence to advocate or provide methods of birth control, especially to women. (Condoms still remained available, ostensibly as preventatives against VD.) The birth rate, however, remained resolutely low, which had been the tradition in France for a hundred years already. The only result of the law was that amateur abortion became an entrenched feature over a wide swathe of society, known even to those leading highly respectable lives, but rarely discussed.

  As ever, peasants from remote and ston
y regions of France continued to make their way to Paris, where they provided a pool of cheap labour. Gérard the water-carrier was at last an extinct figure, but his kind was still in demand to carry wood and coal up flights of stairs, or to stand for twelve hours a day washing up in greasy water in restaurant back-kitchens. (George Orwell, who did this job himself, briefly, remarked on how these ill-paid ‘male charwomen’ took a pride in their toughness, confronting the drudgery as a masculine challenge.) The Hédevins, man and wife, came from the mountainous Lozère, France’s poorest département. They were young and strong and earned what, for them, was good money. When a little boy was born to them in 1934 Marie Hédevin did not return with him to the old country to leave him there as her own mother would have done, but paid a neighbour a few centimes a day to look after him. Playing with other children in puddles on squalid courtyards, the healthy little boy grew and flourished.

  The fact was, though there were more manufacturing jobs in and around Paris between the Wars than there had been before, people were poor. George Orwell did not deliberately seek out bug-infested hotel rooms and tiny brick-floored cafés stinking of old red wine to represent the nadir of being ‘down and out’. These conditions were there as a normal part of Parisian lower-class life, and although some of the inhabitants of his street (the Rue Mouffetard, up the hill from the old Latin Quarter, behind the Panthéon) were disreputable, many of them were ‘the usual respectable French shop keepers, bakers and laundresses and the like’. True, these same inter-War years saw the beginning of workers’ insurance schemes. The largest of these, la Mutualité, actually established its headquarters on the Place Maubert and eventually managed to add its name to the Metro station there – ‘Maubert Mutualité’. But these efforts of trades unionism and welfare were all the more necessary because France was economically at a low ebb.

  Huge sums of money had been spent on the War; the Government had issued paper money to cover the deficit and so inflation had got going. By 1918 the franc had lost well over half of its pre-War value and continued to sink. Because, for the whole of the preceding hundred years, the presumed value of gold against the franc had been unaltered, the notion that it was a fixed and natural measure like the litre or the metre had become part of French consciousness. People were ready to believe governmental promises that an eventual return to the gold standard would put everything right again. But in 1924 France abandoned the gold standard, with a substantial devaluation. It was also promised that ‘German reparations’ for the War would fill the national coffers again, but, with Germany’s own more acute financial crisis, this did not happen, even though the French made an ill-judged expedition to try to claim the money. The value of savings, pensions and annuities – the kind of prudently hoarded income on which members of families like the Lemoignes depended – declined and declined.

  Many rents had been frozen in 1914, as a protection for tenants whose breadwinners were absent, damaged or dead, and after the War this legislation was never wholly repealed. The measure helped the poor to maintain their precarious existence but did nothing to encourage them to climb out of it. At the same time it created a class of semi-bankrupt small landlords, who ceased to repair properties from which they received almost no income and whose notional value they had no way of realising. The world slump of 1929 made things worse, and France was inefficiently governed: throughout the 1930s French government after French government fell.

  For all the continuing elegance of her beaux quartiers, the worldwide importance of her fashion industry, the buoyancy of the artistic and bohemian Paris (which had largely moved up the hill from the Latin Quarter to Montparnasse) and Paris’s durable international reputation for fun and gaiety, her infrastructure became increasingly ramshackle. By 1940, when, for the third time in seventy years, German troops marched onto French soil, the capital had declined from being Haussmann’s resplendent New Babylon into a battered, old-fashioned townscape, where no shutters were ever painted, nothing ever seemed to be renewed, roofs and pipes leaked, the telephone service was a bad joke, and where British and American visitors marvelled at the cheapness of food and lodging as if in some Third World state.

  The once-feared ‘Apache cellars’ of the Montagne Sainte Geneviève became tourist attractions. A long-established dance-hall there became a cosmopolitan homosexual meeting point. By the late 1920s there were unofficially estimated to be forty thousand Americans living for the time being in Paris, although the numbers declined again after 1930 with the United States’ own financial crisis. It is from this era that one can date the curious phenomenon, still observable on the Left Bank today, of an almost hermetically sealed anglophone world with its own cultural preoccupations, its own bookshop (Shakespeare & Co.), its own parties and dramas. It also has its own folk memory of former figures, from Gertrude Stein and Hemingway to the more recent Allen Ginsberg and William Styron, which hardly interacts with the French inhabitants’ perceptions of the Left Bank in anything but the most superficial way. The Paris ‘to which all good Americans go when they die’ has always been, like the earlier ‘Gay Paree’, a different place from the one the local inhabitants know.

  One may be fairly sure that Maud Tindall’s Secret Garden did not include either the ‘American bar’, which was opportunistically added to the long-standing Montparnasse guinguette La Closerie des Lilas, or the Bal de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève, nor yet the innumerable small hotels described by George Orwell and Henry Miller.

  In Paris in those years there were many other foreigners who, from necessity, integrated themselves into French society and finally merged with it, the memory of their foreignness only surviving today in family surnames. Even before 1914, when European frontiers were remarkably open, many migrants from southern and eastern Europe had made their way to France. France, unlike Great Britain, had not passed an Aliens Act in those years, and did not do so after the War, because of the perceived need for the country’s economy of more labour to replace the dead. The most obvious foreign group in the 1920s were the White Russians – refugees from the Revolution of 1917 and the establishment of the Soviet Union. Laying claim, sometimes truthfully, to title and wealth in the homeland they had had to forsake, they were to be found in large numbers driving fiacres, or later taxis, or attempting to set up restaurants. The Ballet Russe was fashionable, so was Slav music, and these new arrivals with their heavily accented French, their ceremonial manners and their ‘charm’ became favourites among the more sophisticated Parisians. With the dislocations of post-War Europe they were joined by others: Hungarians, Poles, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese and, of course, eastern European Jews escaping persecution. The French capital was, for all its internal problems, seen as a mecca of freedom and civilisation.

  A man who will reappear in this story, and whose parents arrived as separate hopeful youngsters before 1914, wrote to me in old age:

  ‘My mother came from Warsaw, from a family of petite bourgeoisie who nevertheless appreciated art and literature. My father had also developed these tastes. With his parents, five brothers and a sister, he had left a small town in Lithuania to settle in Odessa, a prosperous centre, where, it was said, one might hope to make a good life. One has to say, however, that they were ill-informed: pogroms led by the Czar’s Cossacks and their accomplices were an everyday fact of life. Again, they had to leave, taking little with them (no family jewels in my background). In the luggage they could carry were clothes, a samovar, a violin, and some books they particularly valued – a Bible, of course, and Pushkin’s stories (which, much later, my father used to translate for me when I was lying in bed) and a resplendent History of Art. The family effectively split into two. Those who left for the United States (God knows how they managed it) were keen to get on materially in life, while for the others Paris, the reputed city of art and culture, was the supreme destination.’

  The classic Russian-Jewish family, even to the samovar and the violin. I wonder if that was literally true or whether, over the decades, thes
e talismanic objects had come to represent so much else intangible that had been both brought to Paris and left behind?

  He went on to describe the success with which his father, having learnt good French in Odessa, managed to acquire a job in a publishing firm and married the girl from Warsaw, and how the family gradually prospered, becoming naturalised, virtually abandoning their Slav roots and also the faith of their fathers. But he added at the end: ‘My parents, whose personal pasts were full of humiliations and persecutions, and who had come to France to live in peace, in the end, in this country they had chosen, had to face new horrors …’ He, his brother and sister and their parents all survived the Second World War, thanks to a strategic change of name on their identity cards and a hasty retreat to Lyons. There were, however, uncles and aunts who, in spite of their cultural aspirations and their successes in journalism and architecture, did not survive to see the Liberation of Paris in 1944.

  The Census records for Paris 1926, the earliest that are available for the capital,2 tell their own tale about the influx of foreigners into Paris during those years, and especially in the Latin Quarter. An old house, numbered 5 Rue des Carmes, between the Marché des Carmes and the corner of the Rue des Ecoles, was now a lodging-house hotel. Many old houses, whose rooms till then had been rented unfurnished to ordinary families, had by the 1920s turned themselves into hôtels meublés, probably as a landlord’s device for getting round the freeze on rents. Long ago, this house and its neighbour, no. 3, had reared high above the Carmelite cloister whose square shape was still expressed in the market. They seem to have belonged to the Carmelites but, facing onto the street, they would have housed stabling on the ground floor, perhaps store rooms and servants’ quarters above. Cellars, ancient stone walls and beams survived, but were heavily camouflaged by nineteenth-century conversion. An iron-railed spiral staircase ran up through the centre of the building, and there were odd, blind passages, dark even at midday, like corridors in bad dreams.