Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  On Census night in 1926 thirty-eight people were living there, singly or in pairs or in whole households. Some stated French as their nationality, but there were also Russians, Poles, Armenians, Hungarians, an Egyptian, a Rumanian, some apparent refugees from the collapsed Hapsburg Empire who called themselves by the new term ‘Jugoslavian’, and another from the same quarter of Europe styling himself Austrian. Among the stated professions were ‘employed in a restaurant’ (Russians), a cook, a lawyer’s clerk, a ‘professeur’, a ‘docteur’, a hairdresser, a cabinet-maker, a draughtsman and an alarmingly named ‘coupeur de dames’ who was presumably in the hairdressing business too. The family groups had a number of young children between them, and there were also several students. A full house, vibrating with the footsteps, low-toned conversations behind closed doors and sudden cries: carefully maintained separate lives going in every corner of its ancient structure. Arthur Jacob would have recognised his old haunts.

  A few years earlier an Italian poet, Guiseppe Ungaretti, had lodged here for six months. A contemporary description of another hotel nearby, which had a similarly cosmopolitan population but at a lower social level, stresses an Italian presence. It mentions ‘five floors, divided and sub-divided into such small cubicles as could only have been conceived by gross avarice [on the part of the hotel owner] … Rickety tables and chests of drawers whose open drawers disgorge a jumble of colourful clothes and vegetables, especially tomatoes. In the centre of the room family and friends are crowded around a stove with no top and no chimney which is fed with charcoal for heating and cooking.’ The author is censorious, predicting that the bad smells and the lack of ‘air’ will surely be the death of some of the occupants. The book in which this description appears was published by Baillière et Fils, still a fixture in the Rue Hautefeuille.

  In the Rue Basse des Carmes – a narrow alley wrapped around the market building – a more stable and conventionally French working-class population was to be found in the 1920s, the families of bakers, metal workers, postmen, a musician, an accordion-player, hat-makers, builders, an elderly dressmaker and an ice-cream seller. In the Paris of those days, as in every era before, ordinary people could find, in the interstices of the humming city, a modest room or two in which to roost, within their means. It was a precious, taken-for-granted freedom that the prosperity of the later twentieth century, in Paris as in London and in other cities around the world, has destroyed.

  So where, in the mid-1920s, were the surviving Lemoignes living? Thirty years had elapsed since Bertie’s stay with them: it would be reasonable to assume that, by then, both of the elder Lemoignes were dead. The Census for 1926 shows no trace of the family in the Rue de l’Abbaye, though the kind of tenant does not seem to have changed. The stone-faced house sheltered, probably in the Lemoignes’ old apartment, a staff member of a magazine publishing company, his wife and two servants, and on another floor an accountant of some sort lived with two big sons. An elderly painter and his wife lived on the top floor. St Germain des Prés was still a petit quartier of modest commerce with a slight bookish, artistic and antiquarian flavour. The large café on the Place, the Deux Magots, had as yet no particular fame attached to it. Many ordinary little grocers, bakers, blanchisseries and cobblers plied their trades down the Rue Bonaparte. At no. 12 Lemoigne’s antiquarian book business was being carried on by someone from eastern France styled, in the Census, simply as ‘expert’. There was a draughtsman’s studio at the same address where his son and brother-in-law worked, and the concierge’s husband was the ‘packer for a publishing firm’.

  But St Germain des Prés, which adjoined the still exclusive Faubourg St Germain, was the polite end of the Latin Quarter. As you moved east, although the boulevards with their Haussmann apartment blocks remained respectable, grubby little drinking shops, second-hand clothes dealers and fusty working-class licensed brothels multiplied in the old side streets. The once-illustrious Café Procope was now a bouillon, literally a soup kitchen, in practice a cheap restaurant serving fixed-price meals of soup, main course, dessert and unlimited bread to a clientele of students and underpaid clerks. There was another bouillon, belonging to a chain, further along towards Maubert, and on the old Place itself the growing presence of the Mutualité made that crossroads a natural rallying point for the noisy left wing demonstrations and marches that characterised the early 1930s.

  I do not think that any of the younger generation of Lemoignes moved in that direction. I see them, rather, after about 1910, when Monsieur Lemoigne was retired, migrating away from the shabby, ‘airless’ old streets of the Latin Quarter, up the hill a little towards Montparnasse (conveniently near the Institut Pasteur). This was where the artistic life of Paris now had its epicentre, in the Dôme and the Rotonde cafés at the junction of the Boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail. I don’t imagine that the Lemoignes had any direct contact with such figures of Montparnasse’s heyday as Modigliani or Picasso, or that they joined the ‘shrieking hordes of poseurs’ on the café terraces that Orwell noted there in the late 1920s. But the pleasant, respectable streets between the Luxembourg Gardens and the big Montparnasse Cemetery had, in a more general sense, become Paris’s Hampstead or Greenwich Village, and people like Matilde Lemoigne (and Maud) felt at home there. Simone de Beauvoir was growing up there in those years. Not till the German invaders of 1940 made the central crossroads of Montparnasse their playground for the next four years did the currents of literary and artistic Paris flow down the hill again and recolonise St Germain des Prés.

  Or should I locate the surviving, unmarried Lemoignes, rather, in the little house at Châtillon? No Metro ran out in that direction till the end of the 1930s, but the electrification of the trams had made the journey in and out of town quick and easy. Châtillon had become a suburb, but still a pretty one because of its hilltop situation. On the Avenue de Paris gabled houses faced in heavy, mock-rustic stone alternated with provincial-style stores and the remains of much older cottages and stables. There were market gardens, and in side lanes with names like ‘Impasse des Champs Fleuris’ two-storeyed modern villas, set in shady gardens with the remnants of old orchards, still made possible the rural dream.

  The young couple mentioned earlier, both from eastern Europe, who had met in Paris during the First World War, married soon after the Armistice. Leaving their ageing parents to their respectable but essentially Slav and immigrant world near the Gare de l’Est (the point of arrival in the city), the couple migrated to the fresh air and petit bourgeois French innocence of Châtillon. From there, the husband could readily travel in and out to the editorial work he had now secured in a series of magazines: fashion, art, the new cinema … Three children were born to them within six years. When they grew older, they might travel in to Parisian lycées if, as seemed likely, their own tastes too proved literary and artistic. The couple had achieved what they had left their homelands to seek: they were happy. The youngest son – let us call him Serge – recalled till the end of his own life jolly family evenings with the violin and Russian songs, but wrote:

  ‘As regards social life, my parents’ friends were by now almost all French. I only heard Yiddish or Russian spoken when we visited my grandparents. My parents, I think, had taken a deliberate decision to live à la française and to turn away from what they had earlier suffered. Yes, a page was turned, as if history had been forgotten. But that was in the end revealed to have been a fundamental mistake …’

  Long after that, too, was over, and the War and its consequences had scattered the three children to different parts of the world and made them almost strangers to one another, Serge described unearthing a photo of these pretty, dark-eyed children grouped together with their parents in a flowery garden. He, a man who had never much liked his brother once they were past infancy, had neither wanted nor had any children of his own, and to whom his far-off nephews and nieces were little more than names, found, to his embarrassment, that the photo made him want to cry.

  * * *
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  One odd, persistent memory of my own inclines me to the notion that the ‘ramshackle old place’ in Châtillon, where Bertie gardened furiously, did remain in the possession of some of the Lemoignes between the Wars. Though they may well have sold off most of the garden to a developer as the value of their savings declined.

  One weekend in the mid-1950s a teenage girl – whom I can see clearly but as if she were someone else from a distant era – was wandering round the flea market just inside the Porte de Vanves. Unknown Châtillon was on its hill above. A slum of corrugated-iron shanties occupied part of the site of the fortifications, where the Périphérique motorway would later be built. But the girl who was me focused only on the foreground, where a feast of stalls and ground-sheets displayed china, glass, old clothes, shoes, horned wind-up gramophones, antique cooking stoves, abused dolls, washstand sets, dressmaker’s and shop-window dummies, crude oil paintings, bolsters, flaccid and stained red eiderdowns, books, used prams, sepia photographs of places now unrecognisable and embossed albums containing forgotten people.

  The girl must have picked up one of the albums, for the next memory is its board-thick pages. The cloud of youthful self-absorption that enveloped her was momentarily pierced by a faint shaft of imaginative interest, the feeble first stirrings of an empathy with the past: low waists, drooping stockinette, strapped granny shoes, cloche hats, hair screwed up in buns or cutely shingled à la garçonne, young faces mismatched above what now seemed aged styles as in a children’s joke book … She felt sorry for them, disinherited as they were. Someone, once, had known them well enough to keep their pictures, to write names under them, and it had (she thought, not understanding that time carries everything away) all been in vain.

  A page or two of faces in old-fashioned nurses’ uniforms, caps well down on brows …

  A youngish man in a high-collared military tunic and medals. A tiny spray of very ancient, yellowed box leaves pressed onto this page, leaving its ghostly imprint …

  ‘A Châtillon … Chez Madame Vaurin … Avec nos amis Leclair au Petit Robinson … Avec nos amis russes …

  ‘Avec Maud, notre amie anglaise.’

  But, knowing nothing of Maud, the girl idly went on turning over the pages. Then the stallholder was approaching her. Blackened teeth in a cavernous mouth and an ingratiating smile. Reek of old sweat, Gauloises and garlic. She put the book down. In her small, scuffed shoes and cotton skirt with rattling nylon petticoats underneath it, she retreated to pore over a stall selling cheap North African jewellery.

  Of course Maud was a common name then. Might have been anyone.

  But still, recalling this remote fragment of retrieved time, trying in vain to bring it into clearer focus, I have a small ache of frustration, a regret.

  I do not think that Maud was still visiting Paris in the 1950s. At the start of the Second World War in 1939 she would have been too old, at sixty, to resume her nursing activities with any Red Cross, either French or English. I have the impression that her long involvement with France died out during that War and in the years following it, when no foreign travel was possible for ordinary British subjects.

  In any case, after that ten-year gap, it may have been that her particular friends were dead, and the house in Châtillon – or the flat off the Boulevard Raspail or the Rue de Rennes – given up.

  Perhaps the cross-Channel relationship subtly changed with time, wearing thin like an old garment. In the War, when France was occupied, no boat services ran and no letters could pass to and fro. The long British relationship with Paris itself hung in suspension, just as it had during the Napoleonic Wars of a hundred and thirty years earlier, though, for many, Paris still remained a lodestar. ‘Lost love, lost youth, lost Paris – remorse and folly. Aie!’ wrote Cyril Connolly in wartime London. ‘Tout mon mal vient de Paris. There befell the original sin and the original ecstasy; there were the holy places …’3 In 1942, when the outcome of the War still hung in the balance, far away in New York the American journalist Elliot Paul, who had lived for many years in the Rue de la Huchette, getting to know it intimately – ‘the beds, stoves, meals and draperies; the soaps and olive oil; the wine, the bread, the piety and wit; the crimes and sacrifices; the knowledge, ignorance, love and hate’ – wrote in anguished nostalgia: ‘If only that tiny thoroughfare, a few hundred yards in length, could be resurrected, there would be enough of France alive today to stir a spark of hope in the hearts of men.’

  As we know, in the end Paris was given back un-destroyed to the Parisians and to the world at large. But for some Parisians and for some visitors things had changed. Betrayals had occurred. Ageing people, who remembered the useless sacrifices and losses of the previous War, were more likely to have pinned their hopes, during the Occupation, on Pétain’s Vichy government than on the clandestine and faction-ridden Resistance movement. And there was the Mers el Kebir business, when the British navy scuttled the French fleet … Some French citizens never felt the same about the British after that. In mutual reticence, disapproval, embarrassment and eventual silence, a number of long-term friendships ended in the years after 1945. And some British felt quietly but profoundly shocked when it eventually became apparent that Parisian Jews at every social level had been deported wholesale to their deaths with very few hands or voices raised to save them. The endemic anti-Semitism of Catholic France, which had manifested itself so strikingly in the Dreyfus case at the end of the previous century, combined by 1940 with the vague resentments fostered by decades of unrestrained immigration. The effect was lethal. Many of the Jews who had believed, half a lifetime ago, that the Gare de l’Est was their gateway to freedom and security found they had another journey to make – to the Gare d’Austerlitz.

  On that station today a plaque reads:4

  De la Gare de Paris-Austerlitz

  Furent dirigés sur les camps

  de Pithviers et de Beaune-la-Rolande,

  avant d’être déportés et assassinés à Auschwitz:

  3700 juifs, tous les hommes, le 14 mai 1941,

  et du 19 au 22 juillet 1942

  7800 juifs, dont les 4000 enfants de

  La rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver,

  arrêtés dans l’agglomération parisienne

  à la demande de l’occupant allemand

  par la police de l’autorité de fait

  dite ‘Gouvernement de l’Etat Français’

  N’oublions jamais!

  *

  Arthur Giles had died before the Second World War. He was ten years older than his wife. Through the War and afterwards, till May’s own death in the 1950s, the two sisters lived together in a small house in Sussex on the borders of Ashdown Forest.

  May, though balked of a daughter, as usual got her own way. She had the younger Maud to look after her till the end.

  Maud, who had been supposed to be ‘delicate’, lived on a great many more years. My one image of her – I do not think I had ever met her before – dates from about 1970. She was having tea with her brother Bertie, two very old, tall, thin, beaky-faced survivors in a world that seemed to them changed out of all recognition. Bertie had had a stroke and had given up talking much, since he tended to forget what he wanted to say, but they seemed nevertheless to be complicitly enjoying themselves over fruit cake and Earl Grey. A year or so later, Bertie had gone, but still in 1973 Maud, who must then have been rising ninety-four, could write a good, cogent letter to her nephew in a clear hand. She regretted, she said, that she knew so little about her father’s side. She mentioned a family crest, and the possibility of the Tindalls having been descended, eight centuries back, ‘from the widow of King Stephen – this I gleaned from my old friend of the Lake District before she died. She too was a Tindall.’ As to Albert Alfred’s father’s occupation, she agreed that there had been a persistent family tradition that he had at one time driven the Dover coach, but after that – ‘I always understood that he had his own livery stables.’5

  This incidental letter, and a few plang
ent poems by Maud, mainly about nature, have through time and chance survived. Streams ripple, dew drops glisten and meadows have a tendency to be flower-bedecked, but her own sense of beauty and wonder comes through; so it does in a fairy story she wrote for children appealingly called ‘When Everything was White’. There is also a manuscript ghost story (with a phantom coach) whose narrator is a busy London surgeon with a motor-car; and a third story, set in Canada, which she actually wrote in fluent, if not totally correct, French. This has been corrected for her in pencil in a different, classically French hand. There is also a notebook into which she evidently transcribed for her own use a wide vocabulary of idiomatic French words and phrases, such as one might acquire from daily contact with native speakers.

  Along with these few survivals is a copy, in Maud’s handwriting, of Swinburne’s passionate poem ‘At Parting’. Also a finely executed pen and ink drawing of an Italianate building, signed by Howard and dated 1903 when he must have been about eighteen. Apart from photographs of the brothers and sisters in childhood, nothing else remains.

  Maud died, apparently without fuss, the year after the letter to her nephew was written.

  Her long but obscure life, that led nowhere and left so little lasting trace, was full of integrity, decency, private emotion and secret effort. Like innumerable others of her kind, she passed over personal disappointments and frustrations in silence, and made a life for herself with what was available to her. Childless, in old age she gave financial help to the daughter of her half-sister Doris, when the young woman’s husband left her on her own with three children. An emblematic British spinster aunt, she nevertheless found another country of the mind across the Channel. The alchemy of Paris turned her from a stock joke into ‘a charming woman of the world’ and of her own secret world also.