Footprints in Paris Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Gillian Tindall

  List of Maps

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Family Trees

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Part I

  Arthur: 1814

  Chapter I Walking to Paris

  Chapter II Out of Ireland

  Chapter III Arthur’s Journey

  Chapter IV The Walled City

  Chapter V Life in the Quarter

  Chapter VI Richelieu’s Head, and Other Revolutionary Mementoes

  Chapter VII A Winter of Hospitals

  Chapter VIII Arthur in Essence

  Part II

  From Arthur to Bertie: 1815–1895

  Chapter IX Les Comptes Fantastiques de Haussmann

  Chapter X ‘A Country in the Département of the Seine’

  Part III

  The Two Albert Alfreds: 1830–1917

  Chapter XI The Self-Made Man

  Chapter XII Business in Gay Paree

  Chapter XIII Bertie Alone

  Chapter XIV Family Matters. And a World War

  Part IV

  Maud: 1902–1939

  Chapter XV Maud’s Secret Garden

  Chapter XVI Footprints Beyond the Quarter. And New Ones Within It

  Part V

  Julia: 1955–2008

  Chapter XVII The Child of the Metro

  Chapter XVIII Escapes

  Chapter XIX Another Life in Paris

  Afterwards

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Archival Sources and Acknowledgements

  Timeline

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Gillian Tindall has worked with her own memories as well as letters, diaries and documents to recreate the world of the Left Bank. She has also made vivid use of her skills as a prize-winning novelist to imagine what cannot be officially recorded.

  Footprints in Paris stands alongside this fine writer’s corpus of absorbing volumes on people and places, including The House by the Thames and her two well-loved books on France, Célestine: Voices from a French Village and The Journey of Martin Nadaud. Gillian Tindall lives in Kentish Town, London, which she has immortalised in her book, The Fields Beneath.

  Also by Gillian Tindall

  Fly Away Home

  The Intruder

  Give Them All My Love

  The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village

  The Born Exile: George Gissing

  City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay

  Countries of the Mind: The Meaning of Place to Writers

  Célestine: Voices from a French Village

  The Journey of Martin Nadaud

  The Men Who Drew London: Wenceslaus Hollar in Reality and Imagination

  The House by the Thames

  List of Maps

  The Left Bank in the eighteenth century. Based on Jaillot’s pre-Revolutionary maps

  The Left Bank in the nineteenth century. Jaillot’s map superimposed with the main arteries which cut through the medieval city

  Maubert: the centre of the old Latin Quarter

  The district of the Cordeliers

  List of Illustrations

  Plate Section One

  Arthur Jacob as a young doctor. The original portrait is in the possession of one of his great-great-grandsons

  Arthur Jacob’s half-minute glass for taking the pulse

  The Cour de Commerce St André at the beginning of the twentieth century

  Demolition for the construction of the Boulevard St Germain, late 1860s

  Sketch of the Rue Hautefeuille made at the end of the nineteenth century

  Sketch of the refectory of the Cordeliers

  Bertie Tindall as a little boy, early 1880s

  The four Tindall children, Bertie, Howard, May and Maud, late 1880s

  A studio model, drawing by George du Maurier for his novel Trilby

  ‘Life on the Boulevard’, from the Illustrated London News, c.1870

  Watercolour painted by Bertie from his window in the Rue de l’Abbaye, 1895

  The steam engine that crashed through the buffers at the Gare Montparnasse in 1895

  Plate Section Two

  Albert Alfred Tindall in old age

  The Rue des Carmes, early twentieth century

  The Rue de la Parcheminerie, c. 1900

  The Rue des Noyers, 1917

  From the diary Bertie kept during his stay in Paris, 1895

  Number 12, Rue Bonaparte, 2006

  Maud Tindall as a young woman, c.1910

  The Rue de l’Abbaye

  The Hôtel des Carmes, with the Marché des Carmes below it, 1920

  The water fountain that stood in the centre of the Marché des Carmes

  Ursula with Tom’s car, mid-1930s

  ‘Tom’ as a young soldier in 1939

  ‘Julia’ beside the Seine, c.1957

  The Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine as it is today

  The painting on the jacket by Emmanuel Lansyer is looking south towards the Place Maubert, 1860s

  The maps are by Martin Collins

  The author and publishers have made every effort to trace the holders of copyright in illustrations and text quotations. Any inadvertent mistakes or omissions may be corrected in future editions

  ‘On garde la trace de son passage au Quartier Latin toute sa vie.’

  Jules Vallès (1832–1885)

  ‘… Our task is to revivify life that has passed away. We know that ghosts cannot speak until they have drunk blood; and the spirits which we evoke demand the blood of our hearts.’

  Ulrich von Wilamowitz in 1908

  Family Trees

  FOOTPRINTS IN PARIS

  A Few Streets, a Few Lives

  GILLIAN TINDALL

  Prologue

  Long ago, one afternoon late in the Second World War, a woman and a small girl are walking along a potholed gravel road that skirts the edge of Ashdown Forest, in Sussex.

  Once, Ashdown was a true forest, densely filled with oak, ash and birch. But little by little charcoal-burners, iron-smelters, gravel-diggers and herdsmen stripped most of it to a great heath, rising in tier upon tier of heather and gorse and bracken and copse to the blue hills of Colemans Hatch and Gill’s Lap. To the child, who, till recently, has known nothing but the streets of a provincial town dingy with War, and walks beside someone else’s pram, it seems like the world opening out before her.

  That afternoon there is already a hint of expectation in the air, of something stirring in dank ditches or beneath the beaten brown fronds of last year’s ferns. But it is only a hint as yet. This day that will arbitrarily lodge itself in the child’s memory must be in winter still, or in the cold early spring, for both she and the woman are wearing winter coats. The woman’s is brown, square-shouldered, with a belt, a little shabby in its fifth year. The child’s is an odd, purplish tweed, made over by the village tailor from an adult garment: it grazes her bare knees above her gumboots. New clothes are hard to come by, near the end of the War. The woman and her child are walking to see old Mr Waters, in whose carpenter’s shop down an appropriately watery side lane a kitchen table and a wardrobe are slowly being constructed. Furniture, too, is hard to come by. The furniture they used to have, which the woman remembers but the child does not, burnt brightly in a depository in the London Blitz of 1940: sizzling varnish, peeling inlay, dense upholstery smoke, the prints and photographs of stored memory reduced to a drift of black flakes.

  The child is young, not yet at school. Because her legs are short, she and the woman walk slowly. The damp air condenses into a drizzle, and then into a fine,
driving rain. The woman takes the child’s hand and they trudge on, side-stepping the puddles now forming in the potholes. The child is conscious of being good, a Big Girl not making a fuss.

  By and by the creaking and iron tread of a slow horse and cart approaches from behind, then draws level with them. The horse has huge, fur-hung hoofs that the child watches warily. The cart is empty but for a pile of sacks, and the carter has a sack over his head against the rain. He stops the horse with a throaty noise and a jangle of harness and looks down at the woman and her child.

  ‘Should you like a ride, Missus? You and the little girl?’

  – Or ‘You and the little maid’? Could he possibly have said that?

  With awkward gratitude, the woman accepts. The child, shy but delighted, is lifted up. On the rough boards there is a pleasing smell of fresh sap and old manure: everything smells of something, and so do people. She knows the cart must be going to the broomyard at the top of Waters Lane.

  For a very long time the willow and broom that grow in profusion on Ashdown Forest have been harvested each autumn and turned into household brooms. The ageing men like this carter have worked in the yard all their lives – but not for much longer. All sorts of trades and habits, including horse-drawn carting, which were declining earlier in the century, have been prolonged by the privations and shortages of War and even given a fresh lease. But by the time the child is a grown woman a whole way of rural life, including the two-thousand-year European civilisation of the horse, will finally be extinguished. She will come to marvel at the memory of that afternoon lift in the rain, knowing it is a true one yet seeing it as something that must have happened to some other girl, in some other life, or in a novel by Thomas Hardy.

  The grown-ups say the War will come to an end by and by, but this means little to the child who has known nothing else and so regards war as being in the natural order of things. She has also been told that ‘after the War we shall be able to have as much butter and sugar and meat – and sweets! – as we like,’ but this seems so improbable she thinks the grown-ups must be lying about it, as she has noticed they do about Father Christmas and fairies. Then there’s that other story about how ‘when the War is over Daddy will come home.’ Daddy is a very young man in a leather photograph frame in Mummy’s bedroom. His coming home sounds interesting, exciting even, but largely mythic. Like the prospect, confided to her when they were sharing the house of another family in Reading, that ‘when we have a home of our own again we’ll have it all decorated as we like.’ Now they do have a home of their own, but the walls are mostly white and the curtains mostly blackout stuff. The beds come from Granny or from Auntie Someone in the village, and there is disappointingly little sign as yet of the hoarded tinsel, paperchains or holly that the word ‘decorated’ meant to the child when she heard it.

  It’s all just a story really, like the seaside and Paris, both places that Mummy is going to take her to when the War is over. The child has in fact been to Brighton, to go to the dentist and buy shoes, but does not associate the word ‘seaside’ with that. The shore at Brighton has mines and is covered in rolls of barbed wire, and the two piers are shut and derelict with a big, heaving hole of sea in the middle of each. This, to the child, is in the natural order of things, just as it is natural that the red iron chocolate machines on stations are always empty. She does not connect Brighton’s forbidden and forbidding beach with the seaside pictures in children’s books: boys and girls jumping about on yellow sand, with a beautifully made castle and a red bucket, and perhaps a small white dog jumping too.

  So the after-the-War seaside and the after-the-War Paris, of which her mother speaks so longingly, have got themselves into the same story in the child’s mind. Paris is a white city with towers and gold bits on them, like the magic castles in the big fairy-story book in Granny’s house. There are knights in armour and unicorns and a forest behind. Paris also has a seashore, with very blue sea and ships with white sails. And magic swans, who sing. She can’t quite square this with her mother’s wistful remarks about having ‘so many friends in Paris’, but then Mummy talks a lot about other times – what has been or what will be.

  The mother does not seem to notice the folds of Ashdown Forest, to which the child’s eyes are continually drawn from her new vantage point up in the jolting cart, but this is probably because the mother is severely short-sighted and has never accepted her need to wear glasses. This physical myopia will, in the passage of years, evolve into a mental myopia also, a self-inflicted prison.

  She retreats into literature, poetry mainly. She does her earnest best to share this with the child, talking and reading to her as if she were a small adult. So, by the time school will intervene, and each child in the class is asked to choose a poem to learn by heart, the child rejects the suggested ditties about primroses and fairies and brings to the school the Lyke Wake Dirge, banged out by her mother on an upright Remington with a worn ribbon. The headmistress is not pleased, which puzzles the child rather. It can’t be Mummy’s fault, so it must be her that Miss Spencer is cross with. Perhaps it is because she hasn’t actually learnt to read the letters yet? But this does not matter (she thinks dismissively) as the words are in her head already. She does not understand quite all of them, but the graphic picture is there: a scary journey across the heather and bracken of Ashdown Forest in the winter, almost in the dark, probably in the rain, and only a flicker of candlelight to find the way.

  On Whinny Moor when thou hast passed,

  This aye night and all,

  To Bridge o’ Dread thou com’st at last

  And Christ receive thy soul –

  The traveller has no shoes on, she thinks, and maybe nothing else either, not even a nightdress. There is some abyss there that she senses with dread, though knowing it is beyond her comprehension.

  If hosen and shoon thou ne’er gavest nane,

  This aye night and all,

  The winnies shall prick thee to the bare bane

  And Christ receive thy soul –

  ... To Purgatory fire thou com’st at last –

  With a shudder of fear that, in the daylight and in company, is half-pleasurable, the child looks over the end of the cart to the great rain-blown expanses that lie ahead for her to cross when she is grown up. And it’s all right, because some lovely house – in Paris, or Purgatory or somewhere, with gold and silver decorations on it – will be waiting at the end of the road.

  ‘Awfully bumpy, wasn’t it?’ says the woman brightly when the cart, going out of its way, has deposited them right beside Waters’ place and disappeared back up the deep churned mud of the lower lane. She takes out a small packet of Players Weights and lights one, firmly regaining the modernity by which she sets store. She is, for a moment again, a clever young woman with a degree from Oxford and friends in Paris, who are just waiting for the War to end to invite her there again. Only, by some unfair quirk of fate, it would seem, has she found herself here in the depths of Sussex, in the depths of a War she has not tried to understand and takes as a personal setback, under a sodden sky.

  Part I

  ARTHUR: 1814

  Chapter I

  WALKING TO PARIS

  The child grew up, and went away from Sussex for ever, but Ashdown Forest remained lodged in her mind. It was that landscape that rose before her in memory when she heard the Lyke Wake Dirge again, or encountered the 23rd Psalm with its still waters, green pastures and valley of death, or John Bunyan’s lifetime pilgrimage.

  ‘As I walked through the wilderness of the world …’ Bunyan’s archetypal book begins. For him, this was matter-of-course. Long ago, everyone who wanted to move from one place to another, except the rich or unusually fortunate, simply turned their legs on to walk. Carts were for transporting heavy loads over short distances; over longer ones, when packhorses were used, they went at foot-pace, their masters walking alongside, on immemorial paths of a width not for wheels but for feet. It was on foot that armies moved to War until t
he twentieth century, and on foot that Dick Whittington and all the other unnamed Whittingtons over time came to big cities to seek their fortunes, or simply their daily bread. For many centuries itinerant labourers, harvesters, hedgers and ditchers, sheep-shearers, tinkers, pedlars, drovers, ballad-singers and preachers measured out their lives in footprints up, down and around the high roads, the byways, the sunken lanes and the downland paths of Britain. Some even ventured abroad.

  What the child (whom I will call Julia) was not told, and what I did not discover for many years, was that a great-great grandfather had once made an epic journey on foot all the way to Paris, for his own work’s sake. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, all young like him at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and with more talent than means, he automatically walked as the logical way of covering any substantial distance. His name was Arthur Jacob, and when he set out to cross the length of England and northern France in the summer of 1814, his lifetime’s career was just opening out before him. Paris was to be a determining factor of that life. So it was also to be, for different reasons, for his great-great granddaughter some hundred and forty years later.

  Arthur arrived in a Paris which had an enduring tradition of young men travelling to the great city on foot, to take it on as an apprenticeship or a challenge. In some trades, particularly stone-cutting, building and roofing, men from the mountain villages of central France would leave home and family each spring once the snows receded and take the long road to Paris, Lyons or Marseilles. There, they spent the summer months on building sites, living sparingly, saving the bulk of their wages to carry home, still on foot, as the autumn chill set in. These great forays, out of the unlettered fastnesses of the rural world and into the evolving world of the cities, were known to the men themselves as ‘campaigns’.

  Except for a mere handful of surviving known names, those of individuals unusual enough to move from the building site into social and political prominence, nearly all these labouring men who trudged across France and through the generations are now forgotten. They have, in the biblical phrase, no name in the street. But it was they who built the streets and the impressive buildings of Paris. In doing so, they were a key part of an evolution that was eventually to transform the human relationship with landscape. For hills, moors, hidden paths and streams were substituted buildings, paving stones, avenues, alleys and quays. When a city is small enough to be walked out of in an hour or so, as Paris and London still were in the early nineteenth century, then the surrounding fields continue to provide a context: identification with the urban structure is not complete. But once a great city has become a world in itself, then the allegiance of earlier generations to the land, the emotional importance with which they have invested standing stones, crags or tall trees, is transferred to urban landmarks. An urban peasantry is born.