After a pause, the announcer explained that this was the final scene from François Poulenc’s opera, Dialogues des Carmélites.

The music depicted a real event – the death by guillotine of 16 Carmelite nuns during the Terror in 1794. The nuns had stood at the foot of the scaffold, singing the Salve Regina and the Veni Creator Spiritus, while one by one they mounted to the top and were executed.

The announcer also said that the opera was to be performed in Toronto by the Canadian Opera Company. So, this past May, Norman and I went. The production, directed by Robert Carsen, was superb.

The story focuses on an aristocratic but timid young woman called Blanche de la Force (played by Isabel Bayrakdarian in the opera) who joins the Carmelites of Compiègne just as the French Revolution is beginning. In the convent, she befriends the dying prioress Madame de Croissy and a high-spirited novice called Constance. When Revolutionaries close the convent and expel the nuns, Blanche flees. The remaining nuns choose to face martyrdom together rather than disbanding. The nuns are condemned to death for sedition. On the day of their execution in Paris, Blanche stands in the crowd, watching. At the end, only her friend Constance is left. At the last moment, Blanche walks forward to accept the same fate as her Carmelite sisters.

I continued to think about the performance for a long time afterwards. As usual, I wanted to know what had really happened. I knew from the opera program that Blanche was a fictional character created by the novelist Gertrud von Le Fort (she even gave her heroine a French version of her own last name: von Le Fort became de la Force), but she had set her story against the backdrop of historic events. The novel, translated into English as Song at the Scaffold, was transformed into a screenplay by the Catholic writer Georges Bernanos shortly before his death in 1948 and into an opera by Poulenc in 1956. It was first performed in Italian at La Scala in 1957.

First, I went looking for the convent. It is long gone, but it stood near the river Oise in Compiègne, close to the royal chateau and park. It was built in the 1640s and destroyed in the early 1800s. Today, the Imperial Theatre stands on the site of the chapel and the Ecole d’Etat-major (a military school for officers) occupies the space that provided living quarters for the nuns.

In this picture from Google Earth, taken looking southeast, the military school occupies the foreground facing the river, and the theatre is the rectangular building with the silvery-grey roof in the middle distance. The Chateau of Compiègne lies immediately beyond, facing the formal park.

As for the place in which the sisters met their end, it was not, as you might suppose, on what is now the Place de la Concorde. In spring 1794, as the executions continued, the guillotine was moved away from the centre of the city. As Stanley Loomis explains in Paris in the Terror:

The guillotine was first moved to the poor quarter of the Place de la Bastille, where it was indignantly rejected by the residents of that vociferous neighbourhood. It was finally moved to the Place du Trône [by that time called Place du Trône Renversé or Place of the Overturned Throne], now known as the Place de la Nation, a vast unvisited public square…at the remotest end of the rue du Faubourg St. Antoine. Far from the sight of respectable property owners, yet publicly displayed for the benefit of those who enjoyed watching the executions, the guillotine could here unapologetically go about its business.

A map from about 1800 shows the site, surrounded by fields (it is at the very far right of this image). The bodies were dumped in a pit nearby, which is now part of the Cemetery of Picpus (or Piquepuce, meaning fleabite). Today, a memorial to the 16 Carmelites can be seen in the cemetery.

The tablet includes the name de Croissy. In the opera, the Prioress de Croissy dies in a harrowing scene at the end of the first act, before the Revolution encroaches on the convent. But the real Madame de Croissy died on the guillotine with her sisters. According to Carmelite tradition, a Reverend Mother serves for only a limited term, after which an election takes place for a successor. This had happened before the Revolution began, and the office of Prioress had been transferred to Madame Lidoine, who is listed as Reverend Mother on the tablet.

You can also see the name Constance of Saint Denis, the novice. She was a real person. Her name at birth was Marie-Geneviève Meunier, born at St-Denis in 1765, so she was 29 when she died. She had been unable to take her final vows, since religious orders had been suppressed during the Revolution. Although in the opera, she was the last to die, in truth she was the first (the Reverend Mother Lidoine was the last) and she pronounced her vows to her superior just before mounting the scaffold.

So what, exactly, happened? In 1790, the new Revolutionary government decided to abolish religious orders, for a number of reasons. For one thing, many religious orders had strong ties to the monarchy and tended to be royalist. For another, the Revolutionaries felt that human reason was the ultimate authority, not religion, and priests, monks, and nuns had no part in their world. And finally, there was a practical reason: the government needed money, and those churches, convents, and monasteries represented wealth they could seize – from agricultural estates to gold and silver vessels.

Orders that provided services such as nursing or teaching were not targeted at first, but the Carmelites were a contemplative order – their vocation was prayer and meditation. In 1792, all contemplative nuns and monks were expelled from their convents or monasteries, forced to wear civilian clothing, and required to swear an oath of loyalty to the state.

All across France, monks and nuns faced three options: return to secular life, go into exile and join an order in another country, or continue the religious life in hiding. The Carmelite nuns in Compiègne took a somewhat different path. They split into four groups and took lodgings in the town. Although they wore secular clothing, they continued as much as possible to live a contemplative life, attending mass at the church of St-Antoine in Compiègne. It seems they did not make much attempt to conceal what they were doing. For two years, they continued in this way.

They were arrested in June 1794 and taken to Paris for trial, accused of conspiring against the state and of religious fanaticism (one nun asked the judge who was the real fanatic). Reverend Mother Lidoine tried to take full responsibility and spare the others, but all 16 who had been arrested were condemned to death. Three other nuns who had not been in Compiègne at the time of the arrest escaped, including one who wrote a memoir about her experiences.

An interesting historical detail is that at their trial and execution, the nuns were wearing their habits, despite the prohibition against religious clothing. It turns out that when they were imprisoned in Compiègne they asked for permission to wash their clothes. In the meantime, they put on the only other things they had: their Carmelite habits. Just as their civilian clothes were soaking wet, the order came through that they were to be taken to Paris. Therefore the pictures of the nuns going to the guillotine in their habits are accurate – with one exception. They wore white caps, instead of the wimples and veils most images show. Their executioners demanded bare necks.

Why did they have to die? What difference did it make to the Revolution if this group of women in a small town 70 kilometres away from Paris continued to pray and attend mass? There are two ways of thinking about it.

From the Revolutionaries’ point of view, this form of passive resistance was unacceptable. The nuns would not submit to the authorities; they had to be punished for insubordination. Some personal motives also played a part. The mayor of Compiègne, who was anxious to curry favour with the authorities, hastened their arrest to indicate his loyalty to the Revolutionary cause.

Another view is that the nuns chose to be martyrs. They believed that by sacrificing themselves, they could help save France. Certainly, at their execution, the sight of their habits and the sound of their singing silenced (for the first time) the jeering mob in the Place de la Nation. The nuns’ serenity must have made at least some observers feel a compunction they had not felt when watching others die.

And, indeed, ten days after they died, the Terror came to an end with the execution of Robespierre. His downfall had already been set in motion when the nuns mounted the scaffold, but who is to say that the manner of their death did not help change attitudes and hasten his end?

In 1906, the Carmelites of Compiègne were beatified by the Catholic church (they have not been canonized, so they are not considered saints). To some, their story is beautiful; to others it is merely sorrowful. But thanks to the genius of Poulenc, their story will never be forgotten.

Text by Philippa Campsie. Images from Google Earth, Gallica, Wikipedia, and the Canadian Opera Company.

To hear the final scene from the opera, click here. I chose this YouTube version because it includes the full orchestral prelude to the scene and because it does not show the staging; it is intended for listening only.

Sources:

William Bush, Bernanos’ « Dialogues des Carmelites » : Fact and Fiction, Carmel de Compiègne, 1985.

Steven Payne, The Carmelite Tradition: Spirituality in History, Liturgical Press, 2011.

Peter Thomas Rohrbach, Journey to Carith: The Story of the Carmelite Order, Doubleday, 1966.

Even today, the park’s rocky waterfall seems far removed from the well-organized Paris created by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann.

This park was primarily the work of two men: Adolphe Alphand, who oversaw the design and construction of parks under Haussmann, and Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, chief gardener for Paris.

A single-arch bridge overlooks a lake; one could be out in the country.

But consider the view below: it is quintessentially Parisian. Start with grassy space, add sunshine and soon Parisians will be lounging about enjoying themselves. It is a wonderful sight.

In the photo below, taken between 1880 and 1890, we see an island in a lake, covered with trees. At the top is a temple or belvedere, with a long approach path. On the left is the suspension bridge that connects the island to the main body of the park. The background appears to be densely populated.

Clearly, the temple is a significant monument placed for maximum visibility. But to get a proper sense of scale, one has to be there, or see images such as the one in the postcard below. Although it is labelled “Le Temple Grec,” it was actually modelled after the Roman temple of Sybil in Tivoli, Italy.

However, the most astounding feature of the park is the huge distance between before and after.

The Parc des Buttes Chaumont opened as a free public park on April 1, 1867, as part of the opening of the Paris Universal Exposition on the same day. The city was in the midst of the upheaval often called “Haussmannization” that transformed Paris from a mediaeval city of narrow, often filthy and smelly winding streets into the Paris of wide boulevards, long vistas, sculptures and monuments, imposing public and private buildings, a reliable water supply, sewer systems and clean streets.

While much has been written of the geometry of boulevards, vistas and buildings, Napoleon III also wanted parks, like those he had seen in London during his sojourn in England. Under his orders, the Bois de Boulogne was completely redesigned to fit the English model, with winding paths and varied terrain. But not all of Paris had former royal hunting grounds that could be converted so easily.

Through annexation, Napoleon III nearly doubled the size of Paris and during his reign the population of Paris also nearly doubled. Some of the newly annexed areas, particularly those in the north and northeast were sparsely populated and largely poverty-stricken. But they, too, needed parks. Parks were seen as healthy antidotes to poor living conditions as well as an aid to keeping political turbulence and restlessness in check.

Part of the annexed area included the quarries of the Buttes Chaumont. So much of the gypsum quarried in this area had been sent to the United States that the site became known as the American Quarries. Parks were supposed to be beautiful, restful, green, healthy. This was a scar on the landscape. The photo below of a part of the quarry was taken in 1877.

Here, in an 1852 photo by Henri le Secq, we see the desolate, almost lunar landscape, but also how closely it encroaches on inhabited areas.

Perhaps an even better idea of the unlikely site comes from this image from an 1863 guidebook.

Unlikely as the site was, it became the focus of Haussmann’s plans for a new park. Things happened quickly. In late 1863 the city of Paris acquired the site between La Villette and Belleville. Construction started the following year.

Some of the statistics are staggering. There were about 1,000 workers, 100 horses, 450 wagons on 39 km of temporary rails, huge amounts of dynamite. Workers excavated 800,000 cubic metres of material and brought in 200,000 cubic metres of soil ready for planting. Part of the site included a suspension bridge by a young engineer by the name of Gustave Eiffel. The bridge remains, but is less well-known and visited far less than the tower he co-designed and built for the 1889 exposition.

In this photo, taken during construction, we begin to see the key features emerging. The famous brick bridge is visible on the left and we see the large land mass above what is to be the lake.

In an 1867 guide to Paris, an engraving of the completed park shows the suspension bridge in the middle distance, the brick arch bridge on the far right, and, on top of the promontory, the temple.

Having the park ready for opening day April 1, 1867, was a staggering achievement. However, the park was not a financial success. Like many of Haussmann’s projects, it ran over budget. Moreover, it did not have the economic effect that had followed the creation of the Bois de Boulogne. That park had raised real estate values in the surrounding area, which in turn increased taxes flowing into the city coffers. Money had also come from the sale of state property whose value increased as a result of the Bois de Boulogne. This scheme of raising real estate values near parks worked in the more well-to-do western areas, but it did not work in the northeast of Paris.

Of all the late 19th and early 20th century photos of the park, the one below is perhaps my favourite. Somehow the massive landscape and the people seem to fit as they should. But what else is the photo saying?

When I look at the people in this photograph, I see that they are dressed formally, but are probably not wealthy. The women’s gowns are quite plain. They might be visiting on a special occasion, but they may not be far from their homes. Perhaps they are proud of their park. When I think of who might be in this photo, who might have come to the park, I think of something that touched me deeply when I first read it.

Baudelaire’s “Eyes of the Poor” was written in 1864 and published in 1868 in his collection of works titled Paris Spleen. It is written from the point of view of a man with the woman he loves. They are sitting in one of the glittering cafés on one of the new boulevards where things were not yet finished, but still splendid. On the street they could see those for whom the changes meant little or nothing:

A worthy man of about forty, with a tired face and greying beard, stood holding a small boy by the hand and carrying on his arm a tiny child, still too weak to walk. He had assumed the role of nurse-maid, taking the children for an evening stroll. All were in rags.

Each looked at the scene differently.

The eyes of the father said: “How beautiful it is! How beautiful it is! All the gold of the poor world is displayed on those walls!” The eyes of the little boy: “How beautiful it is! How beautiful it is! But it is a place where only people who are not like us can go.” As for the youngest child, he was too fascinated to express anything but a stupid and profound joy.*

Baudelaire might have written the same scenario about the father and children in rags looking at the rich flaunting their wealth in the Bois de Boulogne and the child saying “it is a park where only people who are not like us can go.”

The photo above was taken about 40 years after Baudelaire wrote those lines. One hopes that the people who knew that the bright cafés of the new Paris were not for people “like us” could go to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont because it was for people like them. Did the poor boy once dressed in rags come there as a man?

I appreciated the Parc des Buttes Chaumont before I knew its story, its history, and its possible meanings. It reminds me of another park I knew as a child growing up in Hamilton. When visitors came, we would take them to see the Rock Garden in the Royal Botanical Gardens on the far side of the city. It was a magical place for a little boy. Later I learned it had been built in a disused gravel quarry as a make-work project for the unemployed during the Depression of the 1930s.

Like the Buttes Chaumont, it was a place where you could feel you belonged, no matter what part of the city you lived in.

Text and original photographs by Norman Ball. Postcards from the collection of Norman Ball. Additional images from Paris en Images, Wikimedia Commons, and Gallica.

*Droit devant nous, sur la chaussée, était planté un brave homme d’une quarantaine d’années, au visage fatigué, à la barbe grisonnante, tenant d’une main un petit garçon et portant sur l’autre bras un petit être trop faible pour marcher. Il remplissait l’office de bonne et faisait prendre à ses enfants l’air du soir. Tous en guenilles…

Les yeux du père disaient: «Que c’est beau! que c’est beau! on dirait que tout l’or du pauvre monde est venu se porter sur ces murs.»—Les yeux du petit garçon: «Que c’est beau! que c’est beau! mais c’est une maison où peuvent seuls entrer les gens qui ne sont pas comme nous.»—Quant aux yeux du plus petit, ils étaient trop fascinés pour exprimer autre chose qu’une joie stupide et profonde.

Later, on a visit to the Pavillon de l’Eau, we learned that these fountains were a gift to the City of Paris from an Englishman named Wallace. How jolly decent of him, we thought. And until recently, that was all we knew about the matter.

Then I read Matthew Harrison’s history of St. George’s Church in Paris, in which he summarized the odd life of Richard Wallace (1818-90), a benefactor of the church. Intrigued by his tale, I did more research and found a very complicated story indeed.

To start with, Wallace was not his name by birth, but one that he chose for himself. He was brought up in Paris by his grandmother, but he called her Aunt. He was the illegitimate son of an English nobleman who employed him as a secretary and left him a fortune, but never acknowledged him as a son. His French wife lived for years in England, but never learned to speak English, although she was the one who left the huge bequest of mostly French art to the English nation: it is now known as the Wallace Collection and is still on view in London.

Maybe I should start at the beginning.

Let’s go back to 1798, when Richard Wallace’s grandfather, Francis, son of the Marquess of Hertford, eloped with the illegitimate daughter of an Italian dancer. There is a lot of illegitimacy in this story. Her name was Maria Emily, but everyone called her Mie-Mie. Although she had been born out of wedlock, her wealthy father (the Duke of Queensberry) made sure that she grew up in comfort. Here is a picture of her, in a miniature from the Wallace Collection.

Mie-Mie was wealthy, but because of her origins, she was not accepted into London society after her marriage. She convinced her husband to move to Paris with their two children (a girl and a boy). This was 1802, during a short truce in the war between England and France. Mie-Mie loved Paris and settled in happily, but her husband frequently went back to England without her.

Soon, relations between England and France were fraying, and so were those between Francis and Mie-Mie. Francis returned to England, but Mie-Mie stayed in Paris, now with three children (one was, ahem, not her husband’s). When her father the Duke of Queensberry died, he left her a comfortable inheritance, and she no longer needed her husband’s support.

Her first son Richard (who had been born in 1800) grew up in France and went to England after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. He joined the British army as a hussar. In 1822, his father Francis succeeded to the family title and became the third Marquess of Hertford. Mie-Mie was now a Marchioness.

Two years later, Richard turned up on his mother’s doorstep with a six-year-old boy called Richard Jackson. This was his illegitimate son, who had been given his father’s Christian name and his mother’s surname. (Well, it wasn’t really her name, it was the name she had taken after separating from her husband – I told you this was complicated – but close enough.)

Mie-Mie took the little boy in and told him to call her “Tante.” Her beloved daughter had died a few years earlier and Richard Jackson seemed to fill a hole in her life. She moved to the rue Taitbout and took an apartment directly over the Café de Paris, one of the smartest restaurants in the city. Richard Jackson grew up watching the comings and goings of le haute monde underneath his windows. He also watched the comings and goings of Mie-Mie’s younger son Henry, a founder of the Jockey Club and well-known man about town.

Meanwhile, his father Richard wandered around Europe, at one point stopping in Paris long enough to acquire a mistress and a little chateau in the Bois de Boulogne called Bagatelle. Eventually, he settled in Paris in an apartment on the rue Laffitte, installed his mistress nearby, and started to collect art.

His first purchase was a Fragonard, which he bought at a public auction. At the time, nobody was interested in 18th-century French art. It had gone out of favour  during the Revolution and in the 1840s, you could pick up Fragonards, Watteaus, and Bouchers for a song.

In 1842, Mie-Mie’s husband Francis died, and her son Richard became the fourth Marquess of Hertford. Having inherited the family fortune and estates, he could now collect art on a grand scale, and he did.

That same year, at the age of 24, Richard Jackson formally changed his name to Richard Wallace, his mother’s maiden name. By now, he had a mistress of his own, and even a son by his mistress (the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree), but he still lived with Mie-Mie, leading a bohemian life and frequently running into debt. The new Marquess decided that his son needed an occupation, so he made Richard Wallace his personal secretary. But he never acknowledged that his secretary was his own son.

The two worked together closely. Richard frequently acted as the Marquess’s agent in art purchases, and kept records of the ever-expanding collection, which contained Dutch, Italian and Spanish masters as well as French, and furniture as well as pictures.

When the Revolution of 1848 broke out, the family (minus Richard Wallace’s mistress and child) beat a hasty retreat. They spent six years in Boulogne before returning to Paris. Mie-Mie, Henry and Richard settled back into the rue Taitbout, while Richard Wallace’s mistress lived elsewhere, looking after their son, who was now in his teens.

Mie-Mie died in 1856, deeply mourned by her sons and grandson. Her younger son Henry died two years later (his will listed four children by various mothers – typical). Her remaining son, the Marquess, who never married, settled at Bagatelle and became increasingly reclusive while continuing to amass artworks.

Fast forward to 1870, when everything changed. As the French engaged in a disastrous war with the Germans, the Marquess was dying at Bagatelle. After his death and burial at Père Lachaise, the family estates passed to a cousin, who became the new Marquess, but the art collection, several properties (including Bagatelle), and a huge sum of money went to Richard Wallace.

Wallace had little time to enjoy his new wealth. Paris was in chaos. The French army was defeated, the Emperor Napoleon III was captured, and the Empress Eugénie fled to England. Wallace moved the collection from Bagatelle into his father’s old apartment on the rue Laffitte to keep it safe (he himself still lived in Mie-Mie’s former apartment). It was the right decision, as the lovely Bagatelle was later commandeered by the military.

Wallace never thought of leaving Paris, but he helped other English residents escape. He started a relief fund to help feed the poor, who were starving in the besieged city, and to help people left homeless by shelling. He also set up a medical clinic to treat the wounded. At some point, he even found time to marry his long-suffering mistress, Julie Castelnau, 30 years after the birth of their son.

Wallace also remained in Paris during the Commune that followed the war, horrified by the bloodshed it caused, but willing to help those in need. When it was over, the French made him a member of the Legion of Honour and named a street after him, and Queen Victoria made him a baronet in recognition of his services to the English in Paris.

The violence of the Commune had so shocked Wallace that he decided to move to London in 1872, taking most of the collection with him. His parting gift to the city where he had lived was the 50 fountains that Parisians call les Wallaces, designed by the sculptor Charles Auguste Lebourg. (Later, Wallace honoured the memory of his father by founding and endowing the Hertford British Hospital in Paris, which opened in 1879.)

In London, Wallace moved in the best circles, dining with the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister, but his wife Julie never learned to speak English and did not go out much. Their son, Edmond, disliked England and returned to France frequently. You won’t be surprised to learn that he had four children with a woman he did not marry. Wallace was furious and said, “Mon Dieu, est-ce que nous n’aurons jamais fini de bâtards?” (Are we never to have an end to bastards in this family?). Although Wallace became estranged from his son, he was devastated when Edmond died in 1877.

After this blow, Wallace withdrew from society, and went back to Paris to live at Bagatelle, leaving Julie in their huge London house with its enormous art collection. He died in 1890 in the same bed and in the same room as his father, attended only by a few servants, and was buried with his father at Père Lachaise.

His will left everything he owned to his wife. It was she who left it to the British nation in her will. She remained in England to the end of her life, taking a translator with her whenever she went out. She died in 1897 and was buried with her husband in Paris.

Edmond’s descendants are still living in France, the Bagatelle still stands in the Bois de Boulogne surrounded by its gardens, and the Wallace Collection remains a fixture in London. The Café de Paris, which stood at the intersection of the rue Taitbout and the boulevard des Italiens, closed in 1856, the year that Mie-Mie died (there is another restaurant there now, and a Monoprix). But the Wallace fountains continue to adorn the streets of Paris, the enduring legacy of an unconventional family.

Text by Philippa Campsie, original photographs by Norman Ball, portraits from the Wallace Collection website, picture of Cafe de Paris from Paris en Images, photograph of Bagatelle and Hertford-Wallace family tomb from Wikimedia Commons; photograph of the Hertford Hospital from Archiseek.

 Sources:

An Anglican Adventure: The History of Saint George’s Anglican Church, Paris, by Matthew Harrison, 2005, published by Saint George’s Anglican Church, Paris

The Greatest Collector: Lord Hertford and the Founding of the Wallace Collection, by Donald Mallett, 1979, Macmillan.

A hundred years ago, it was more than just passenger traffic. All kinds of products were shipped along the Seine: construction materials, farm products, fuel.

I gravitate to postcards of the working river and snap them up when I see affordable ones. Here is one of my favourites. Notice the white-shirted deckhand near the stern lowering the smokestack so that this boat can get under the Pont au Change.

Many of the postcards refer to different “ports” within the city. Each one was associated with a particular product. I was curious about the covered barges or péniches that came in to the Port de l’Hôtel de Ville shown in this postcard.

Apparently this was the place where apples were brought in from Normandy and unloaded underneath the windows of Paris’s city hall. Here’s what the interior of one of those boats looked like in 1908.

At the quai, the apples were loaded by hand into baskets or paniers and handed up to the next worker.

Once up from the hold, workers had to carry the heavy baskets across a narrow gangplank to the quai. It was tiring and potentially dangerous work, particularly in bad weather.

One of the more famous specialized port areas was Bercy, where wine was unloaded. It grew to become the major wine warehousing area – not just in France, but in the world.

Les Halles de Bercy represented the wine equivalent of the Les Halles food market. And like the food market, the area fell on hard times in the mid 20^th century. In the 1970s, when Les Halles was demolished, the Bercy area had fallen into ruins. Today, it is a redeveloped area with a park that preserves some of the old wine storage sheds or chais.

My image of Bercy shows it looking desolate during the flood of 1910. That is the customs shed underwater.

Other quais were the specialized sites for unloading bulk commodities such as plaster or coal.

Not far from Bercy, the port d’Austerlitz handled bricks. Yet all this workaday activity co-existed with passenger traffic, recreation, and other activities.In this postcard of the Quai d’Austerlitz, sent in 1906, notice the advertisements for Chocolat Menier, Benedictine and “La Mutual Life,” and the “Bain d’Hommes – 30 centimes” on the far bank. At a time when many apartments were rather rudimentary in terms of water and sanitation, low-priced public bathing places were an important part of public health measures.

In many ways, it is this kind of extraordinary detail and variety that attracts me to these images.

The postcard below shows the Port Saint-Nicolas, where a river boat from Rouen is unloading sacks (possibly containing plaster or lime). The Pont des Arts is in the background, which means that the Port Saint-Nicolas (now long gone) is right in front of the Louvre, and indeed, this area was also known as the Port du Louvre.

Notice the floating men’s swimming school beyond the piled-up sacks (Ecole de Natation du Louvre. Hommes).

In the next postcard, we see the same swimming school, but this view shows more activity on the quai and some passenger or pleasure boats in the river. But the same Rouen boat is tied up in roughly the same place. Perhaps it was a fixture in this spot.

The vantage point is identified as the Pont des Saints-Pères, today the Pont du Carrousel.

This third postcard is taken from the busy port, looking back at the bridge, as it was then. And, yes, it looks like the same Rouen boat once more.

What happened to the Pont des Saints-Pères? The website for the City of Paris tells us:

This first structure comprised a major technical innovation. It was designed by the engineer [Antoine-Rémy] Polonceau, who fought tooth and nail to have his project accepted in the face of opposition from the partisans of a suspension bridge. He even went as far as to finance the initial foundation work from his own pocket. The very lightweight structure consisted of three equal main arches, each of which itself comprised five composite wood and cast iron arches supporting a wooden deck. Although daring, this structure was nonetheless fragile, and in 1883, the bridge was closed for six months for replacement of some of the beams and cross-members. The technicians took this opportunity to suggest replacing the wooden deck with beaten [that is, wrought] iron, which was in fact done, but not before 1906. However, the structure was still extremely flexible and with the growth in the volume and weight of traffic, it shook and bounced disconcertingly.

Eventually, the bridge was replaced with the concrete structure that now crosses the river at this point.

Many people lived on houseboards and barges. The postcard below, which was mailed in 1904, depicts a rather ramshackle scene in which working and living are haphazardly mingled.

You can just see the Eiffel Tower on the right. This would have been in the river just off the 15th arrondissement and may have been taken from the Pont Mirabeau. The water level is very low, and a motley set of walkways connects the barges and houseboats to the shore.

Today Paris is famous for its ubiquitous sightseeing boats – bateaux mouches – as well as boats for dining and entertainment. The idea of floating entertainment and sightseeing is well represented in early photos and postcards. In the image below, in addition to the magnificent Pont Alexandre III, one of the enduring monuments from the Exposition of 1900, we see a typical Parisian combo: tourist passenger boats cruising the river and two permanently moored entertainment vessels, with the promise of live piano music.

The great flood of 1910 was hard on floating places of entertainment like this. In the following postcard, the forlorn little boat in the middle is either the same as the boat second from the right in the postcard above, or one very like it. This was taken farther upstream, showing the nearly drowned Passerelle Debilly, which I wrote about in an earlier blog.

These are just a few of the many postcards I have collected of the working river. Perhaps I will show some others in a future blog.

I will end with a view of the Bassin de l’Arsenal, looking towards the Colonne de Juillet in the Place de la Bastille. Note the barges full of sand and gravel.

Today, the same view shows pleasure boats and leisure. But they, too, are a form of work for their owners and caretakers.

The Seine is still a working river, even as the work changes.

Text and original photograph by Norman Ball. Historic photographs from Paris en Images.

The story behind the pavilions contains a few surprises, as Norman and I found out at an exhibit at the Musée d’Orsay called Victor Baltard: Le fer et le pinceau (Victor Baltard: Iron and paintbrush).

For one thing, the iron-and-glass pavilions were not the original plan for the markets. Baltard had designed something rather more traditional, capped by an iron roof but with stone walls. Construction was nearly complete on one of these buildings when in 1853 the Emperor Napoleon III decided to do a site visit. Apparently the Emperor was Not Pleased and work was halted. This was the building in question, photographed by Charles Marville.

One can just imagine Napoleon striding about the site, and Baltard anxiously following, watching as the Emperor’s frown deepens and darkens. Finally, the Emperor speaks. “This won’t do at all. You’ll have to take it down.” Or words to that effect.Not the sort of thing an architect wants to hear.

What did the Emperor want? According to Baron Haussmann, who worked closely with Napoleon III and was sensitive to his tastes, he wanted something more along the lines of the huge open trainshed at the Gare de l’Est, which had been completed a few years earlier. Haussmann quoted the Emperor as saying, “Ce sont de vastes parapluies qu’il me faut; rien de plus!” (It’s vast umbrellas that I want; nothing more!”)

Baltard’s competitors probably rubbed their hands in glee, hoping that they might have another crack at the plum assignment (Baltard was not the most popular choice for the job; to that point his résumé consisted mostly of church restorations). But after 10 days of furious rethinking, Baltard and his associate Félix Callet came back with three alternative designs, and the Emperor gave the nod to something that more closely resembled the vast umbrellas he had in mind.

The Emperor was right. The stone building that was demolished had narrow entries at the corners that would have become bottlenecks very quickly. Vast umbrellas of iron and glass would allow for much better circulation. Markets are all about circulation.

It was a fresh design, but not radical or unprecedented. The Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London had shown what was possible with iron and glass. Closer to home, the Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève, designed by Henri Labrouste, had further demonstrated how slender iron columns could create a space with a high ceiling and plenty of room at floor level.

Baltard just needed a push to come up with the design that now seems inevitable. But once pushed, he made the most of his ideas. One could say that Baltard wrote the book on the design of market buildings, and it would not be a metaphor. He gathered his experiences into a practical guide called Monographie des halles centrales de Paris, filled with illustrations and construction details so that others could follow his lead. And one by one, new market buildings arose around the country, indeed, all around Europe, with slender iron pillars and wood-and-glass canopies. All you had to do was follow Baltard’s careful instructions, add a few tweaks and local adjustments, and voilà.

Norman and I saw one of Baltard’s children in Sens. We had gone to visit some friends who lived nearby and on a sunny Saturday morning, we wandered into the market building in the middle of town. It was an odd six-sided shape, but it was clearly in the Baltard tradition. This is a view up into the roof.

So even though the original pavilions were demolished in 1973 (the authorities carried out the dirty deed in the summer, when many Parisians were on holiday and not on hand to protest), Baltard’s children live on in hundreds of other cities and towns.

As for Paris itself, I see Baltard’s children in the iron and glass canopies over the entrances to many Paris buildings. Known as marquises (think “marquees”), these architectural umbrellas evoke Baltard for me. He didn’t invent them, of course (the connection exists solely in my imagination), but each one seems to pay a little homage to Les Halles.

Ostensibly they are there to provide shelter, but many are too small or too high to offer much protection against the rain. They are simply architectural accessories in iron and glass, the two materials that were so fashionable in the nineteenth century.

In Baltard’s day, when Haussmann was still controlling the look of Paris streets, marquises were not permitted on the exterior façades of buildings. There were found only in interior courtyards. You can still see them framing the courtyard entrances to grand buildings such as those on the rue du Faubourg St-Honoré (can you spot the marquise in this picture?).

But as the architectural controls weakened during the late nineteenth century and buildings became more flamboyant, the marquises began to venture out of courtyards and take their places on the boulevards and avenues.

There is a tiny one on the Grand Hotel des Balcons, the hotel where Norman and I stayed on our first trip to Paris together, near the Place d’Orléans. Many happy memories and associations there.

There is another on a little hotel close to the apartment where we stay these days.

Indeed, marquises seem to be de rigueur for hotels, large and small. And hotels, like markets, are all about circulation.

Many theatres have them.

But some decorate otherwise anonymous doorways.

This parasol-like version in blue is on a grand and wildly decorated building on the Avenue Marceau. This may be the entrance to the concierge’s loge.

I notice marquises wherever I go in Paris, and I’ve collected quite a few photographs of them.

I think of them as little shards of Les Halles that have scattered throughout the city to remind us of the lost mother ship.

Text and original photographs by Philippa Campsie and Norman Ball. Historical photographs from Paris en images.

The upbeat article begins with the declaration that “Paris, which is today considered one of the most beautiful cities in the world, is still striving to become more beautiful” (p. 47). In pursuit of that aim, “the city has been authorized to borrow the immense sum of nearly $200,000,000.” Part of this amount was to go to “the creation of new boulevards and highways” including the projected letter-“X”  bridge shown in the rendering below.

Much of the image is familiar. The Louvre is visible to the left, on the right bank. In the upper right, one sees the Ile de la Cité crossed by the oldest bridge in Paris, le Pont Neuf. In the very top right corner, Notre Dame Cathedral sits at the upstream end of the island. In the lower right we can see the dome of the Institut de France. And dominating the image is the “X” Bridge with “one branch connecting the rue de Rennes with the rue de Louvre, and the other forming a junction between the wharf of the Louvre and the wharf Conti.”

Something seems to be missing. Where is the pedestrian bridge Pont des Arts with its graceful arches springing across the river? The “X” bridge seems to have been designed to replace this historic river crossing, shown below in a photograph dating from 1900.

The Pont des Arts, which opened in 1804, came to represent the dreams of an ideal artistic path. One studied art on the left bank at l’École des Beaux Arts and as one’s career blossomed, one crossed to the right bank where one’s work would be hung and exhibited in the Louvre.

The Pont des Arts was one of many contributions to the city by Napoleon, to beautify Paris and glorify his reign. As First Consul, he ordered the construction of this, Paris’s first metal bridge, a nine-arch pedestrian bridge or passerelle. It took its name from the Palais des Arts (Arts Palace), as the Palais du Louvre (Louvre Palace) was known during the First Empire.

With abutments for nine arches, however, the Pont des Arts represented quite a obstruction for ships and barges, which hit it frequently. This photo shows an engraving by Jules Després of the Frigorifique which ran aground against the bridge piles in 1879.

One can understand the logical appeal of the X-bridge: with only one pier in the centre of the river, it would be a less likely target for passing vessels than the Pont des Arts.

Nonetheless, the Pont des Arts survived the unrealized “X” bridge proposal. Popular Mechanics (July 1910, p. 47) made no mention of the impracticality of having horse-drawn traffic negotiate the mid-river intersection (the illustration, like so many renderings of proposed structures, shows enough life to make the bridge seem useful, but not so much that it reveals the potential bottleneck the bridge might represent). Nor does the article mention what would be torn down and lost to make its construction possible. The only hint of disbelief is found in the words “If erected” rather than “When erected.”

The Pont des Arts suffered bombardment during the First and Second World Wars, but it survived and was eventually replaced by a similar-looking structure of seven steel arches that opened in 1985. The new Pont des Arts is still a lovely pedestrian crossing, somewhat marred by the heavy incrustation of padlocks left by visiting “lovers.” The bridge is a space free from vehicles in a busy area. Places for moments of quietness are one of the great riches of Paris.

Having seen many renderings, visions and proposals from various times advocating a “new and improved” Paris, I am not particularly surprised by the “X” Bridge proposal. I am only grateful it did not go ahead.

But there is more to the story. I read about this in the July 1910 issue of Popular Mechanics, not in a fashion or tourist magazine. Popular Mechanics was then the kind of magazine aimed largely, but not exclusively, at young men with “grease under their fingernails.” In the early 1970s I interviewed a then-retired mechanical engineering professor who was in his eighties. He told me that in each freshmen class of the 1920s, it was easy to spot the students who would become good engineers: “they were the ones with grease under their fingernails; they tinkered with motorcycles and engines.” They also read magazines such as Popular Mechanics.

So here in a magazine for people with grease under their fingernails we find a bridge proposal for Paris. We also find Paris being praised as one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Perhaps it is a measure of just how much Paris was part of consciousness of the western world that it turned up in Popular Mechanics. And in that one issue, the X-bridge was not the only bit of Paris.

Among other features, an article titled “The Busiest Underground Corner in Paris” appeared in the same issue.

The author appears to have been awe-struck, as I often am when using the Paris Metro. It starts: “Of all the wonderful engineering work done by the Metropolitan underground railways of Paris, the most complicated is that under the Place de l’Opera, where three great tubes cross each other, all of which must have station facilities in the crossing’s tangle.  The three tubes, the platform, stairways, and elevators constitute a veritable Chinese puzzle, and the wonder is that the congested underground and overhead traffic has not been even more disturbed during the work” (p. 48).

The image clearly shows “the three subway tubes, the platforms, stairways, elevators, and two of the openings leading from the boulevard.” Today, escalators move people far faster than elevators. The station is still a marvel and what the magazine failed to mention is that all this hidden “tangle” lies beneath the beautiful space in front of the Opera Garnier. It is all part of what makes Paris the world’s most-visited tourist destination and the second densest metro system; the Metro takes a bit of practice to get the hang of it, but soon one appreciates how easy it is to get around.

I wonder if the July 1910 issue of Popular Mechanics helped spark someone’s love affair with Paris; the love of someone with grease under his fingernails, perhaps. Each of us has a story about how we came to love the city. Mine started with the woman I love and with whom I write this blog. Those who hunted for gold in the Klondike and elsewhere used to say “gold is where you find it.” These pictures in a long-ago magazine for tinkerers and future engineers suggest that “Paris is where you find it.”

Text by Norman Ball

Photograph and illustration of the Pont des Arts from Paris en images.

A few months ago, I received a comment about a blog post I had written on Queen Philippa. The writer was a professor of medieval history who wanted to use one of my photographs in a lecture. Turns out she taught at the University of Toronto, where I am an adjunct professor myself. We arranged to meet for coffee.

Chatting in her light-filled office with a view over one of the prettier parts of the campus, we found we had many common interests. She was originally from France, but had spent much of her life in Québec. When I mentioned the enjoyment we get from researching stories behind old postcards, she went over to a shelf and took down an album:

She had inherited it from a relative who had collected postcards, particularly those in series, and offered to lend it to me.

That night, Norman and I went through the pages, turning them carefully as some were a bit crumbly. About halfway through the album, I saw a familiar face: the Nurse with the Pearls, who had made an appearance in a previous blog.

The picture above is the postcard in my own collection. In my friend’s album, the postcard was part of a series, and the card had some interesting differences. I realized that I had made some erroneous assumptions about the card when I had seen it before.

The first thing that struck me was the postmark: 1909. This was not, as I had supposed, a First World War card. The “Ange de Dévouement” had been pressed into service as a wartime card in 1914, but its origins went farther back. But before I go on, let me show you the series of five, with captions translated rather literally, so you can follow the story.

“Go, my dear daughter, where duty calls you. Of all missions, yours is the most beautiful.”

“On the battlefield, she brings hope to the wounded with her attentive care.”

“The angel of devotion, she calls to her aid the balm of love, that sovereign remedy.”

“Healing is nearly complete, which brings a deep anxiety, [since] the nurse and the wounded man realize that they love each other.”

“When one has been in peril, one can be happy: to charm my old age, unite your two hearts.”

The cards, unlike others in series, are not numbered, so there might have been others. I wonder if there was some further complication before the happy resolution. But I love the fact that her pearls are firmly in place in the three middle images.

If you look closely, you will see that the backgrounds are not real. The figures have been photographed in a studio, and their images cut out and superimposed on painted backgrounds. Perhaps the least convincing is the one inside the hut; the two empty bunks are at the wrong angle, although the view through the tent flap is more realistic.

And look at the man’s uniform in the last two, especially the fez and the baggy trousers. He is no ordinary French soldier; he is a Zouave. In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, these regiments were made up of French settlers in Algeria and Tunisia conscripted into the French army. The background of the fourth postcard also suggests north Africa, with its palm trees and keyhole-shaped archways.

And what was the battlefield? Was it one of the battles by which the French extended their control over north Africa, or one of the skirmishes with British soldiers, as Britain was also trying to assert itself in that part of the world? We’ll never know. I think the postcard was left deliberately vague so that buyers could imagine what they wanted.

One purpose of the series might have been a bit of propaganda for the Red Cross. Would young women be more inclined to join the ranks of the nursing sisters if there was a possibility they would meet handsome young soldiers they could marry? Perhaps.

The mark “AN Paris” indicates that the series was the work of Armand Noyer, a prolific creator of postcards, stereocards, and cartes de fantaisie, many of them featuring shapely women in various states of déshabille (the risqué ones date mostly from the 1920s and 1930s; his prewar production was more straitlaced). He numbered each series: this one is 745.

The postcards were sent from someone called Madeleine, who lived in Angers, to Monsieur and Madame Emile Marsais, who lived at Les Grandes Barres, St-Aubin-de-Luigné, about 25 km southwest of Angers. Today there is a vineyard there.

The first four were sent between July and September 1909. Madeleine asks when Mrs Marsais will be visiting Angers, inquires about the couple’s trip to Lourdes, notifies them that she will be on the 1:57 train but not to worry about meeting her, and lets them know that she and her father will be driving out to “see the vines on Sunday.” Ah, so there was a vineyard then, too.

The fifth does not have a clear postmark, but seems to have been sent later than the others. Madeleine notes that the water has finally retreated from her father’s cellar, and none too soon, since at its height it came up to the highest step on the stairs. From that detail, we can determine the date: there was a flood in Angers in March 1910, two months after the devastating Paris floods.

Madeleine sent other series of cards to Mr and Mrs Marsais, although in most cases, she just scrawled “Bonjour” or “Amitiés” for a message. In the cards with a more detailed message, Madeleine’s spelling is a bit erratic; perhaps she was still just a teenager, or perhaps she had not had much of an education. Or perhaps she just was not very good at spelling.

Her last name might have been Gouadon. On one of the cards from another series, she invites Mr and Mrs Marsais to lunch and concludes, “Amitiés à tous et à 11 heures Maison Gouadon.” This unusual surname is associated with that area.*

The album contains dozens of these series, many of them with winsome children in place of adult protagonists. These ones may seem impossibly sentimental, but in an age in which cat videos go viral, we in the 21st century cannot claim that the early 20th century had a monopoly on cutesiness.

I’ll leave you with some images from one of the children’s series, also sent by Madeleine [Gouadon?] to Mr and Mrs Marsais. All were mailed in April 1909.Since they are all rather similar, I will show only the first one in detail. The words underneath are about the joys of being brother and sister. I’ll spare you the translation.

Note that in the few months between the time these were sent, and the time Madeleine sent the series about the nurse, the price of postage has doubled, from 5 centimes to 10!

Text by Philippa Campsie

*The French have a wonderful website that that allows you to see where certain surnames are most concentrated. Type in a family name and the map will indicate where people with that name were born during four periods: 1891-1915; 1916-1940; 1941-1965; 1966-1990. For example, only 5 people with the name Gouadon were born in all of France between 1891 and 1915, two of them in the Maine-et-Loire department, where Angers is located. Perhaps Madeleine was one of them.

Philippa and I had just left the Palais de Tokyo. Outside it was a grey rainy day. I slipped on the stairs going down to the river, but it was Paris, and I didn’t mind so much.

Soon I was photographing others who seemed to take the rain in stride. I liked the bridge, but I was concentrating on the people and their umbrellas.

We encountered the bridge on other occasions, but I never had a chance to look at it more closely. Then, last December, I found myself near the bridge with time on my hands on a sunny day.

As I drew closer, the bridge seemed to grow ever more exuberant.

I was captivated. It was as if structural steel had captured the path of a skipping stone thrown from the bank of the Seine across the river.

I always want to see the underside of bridges. Beneath the bridge, just above water level, I could appreciate the geometry of structural steel. The river was high that day, and fast-flowing muddy water bent gracefully around the piers. No vehicles rumbled overhead; I could hear the water.

I was intrigued by the gracefulness of the two structural members that transfer the load to the bearings that support the bridge and allow slight movement as the bridge expands and contracts with changes in temperature.

I also paid attention to the signs with no words. One sees variants of this warning all over Paris. The sharp points contrasted with the smooth regularity of the rivet heads.

Soon I discovered that there was more to this bridge than seductively shaped ironwork and gracefully weathered wood. I began to notice more and more unusual details.

Clearly someone had been given the freedom to make something very special.

The columns were most unusual, the work of an artist capturing the waves on the Seine, an artist reminding us that Paris is an important port.

On that afternoon I was looking at a rare beauty that clearly needed help. And it appears to be getting it. Restoration is under way.

One can only hope that the inevitable signs of age can be restored and that the passerelle will one day be returned to its former glory.

Perhaps a sensitive restoration will leave some evidence of former ways and former days. I am rather fond of this evidence of an older way of putting in electric wires. Surely anyone who has worked on rehabilitating an older house will recognize the porcelain insulators. I like them. I hope the remnants will stay as a tiny bit of history in-situ.

After a couple of hours, I wandered away from the bridge and a few minutes later my cell phone rang. It was Philippa; she was on the right bank near the pont de l’Alma, which I could see quite clearly as I talked on the phone. My path to our meeting place inadvertently turned out to include a construction site I had to exit from carefully. But I did get an unusual view of a very different, and very modern bridge.

Back at home in Toronto I started to find out more about the passerelle Debilly.

Structures made for International Expositions often have a short intended lifespan and most do not survive. The Eiffel Tower built for the 1889 International Exposition was expected—at least by some—to be torn down soon afterwards and it nearly met that fate. Three of my favourite Parisian sites, the Petit Palais, the Grand Palais, and the Alexander III bridge, were built for the Universal Exposition of 1900 and they too have survived. The modest passerelle Debilly was also a survivor from 1900.

It was originally known as the “passerelle de l’exposition militaire” and then the “passerelle de Magdebourg,” before it took the more dignified name of Passerelle Debilly in 1906 to honour the First Empire Army General Jean Louis Debilly, who died in the battle of Iéna (Jelna) in 1806. The Exposition included buildings on both sides of the river and the bridge was designed to link the Army and Navy Hall on one side with the “Old Paris” series of buildings on the other bank. These buildings have long since disappeared, but the bridge still crosses the Seine with pont de l’Alma upstream and the pont d’Iéna downstream.

The image below, taken from a stereograph view, shows the bridge, on the upper left, entering the Army and Navy Hall, a magnificent structure. The Eiffel Tower is out of sight to the right of the photograph.

Here’s a closer view of the Army and Navy Building as seen from the passerelle.

The bridge survived in part because it was useful and well-built. The City of Paris acquired it in 1902. Originally built to align with Avenue Albert de Mun, the city in 1906 moved it “quelques dizaines de mètres en amont” (several dozen metres upstream, actually more than 200 metres) towards Pont de l’Alma to a position opposite rue de la Manutention. Here it was further away from the pont d’Iéna, a name of no happy memories to Debilly.

Not everyone approved of the bridge. In 1941 one architect argued for its destruction because it was no more than an “accessoire oublié d’une fête passée” (a prop or accessory from a faded or past festival). Cooler heads or perhaps simply inertia prevailed and the bridge was left as is. In 1966 it was added to the supplementary registry of historical monuments. It was repainted in 1991 and the deck redone in 1997.

The 3-span bridge has a total span of 120 metres, but the large central span of 75 metres allows the piers to be quite close to the banks. This gives a wider navigation channel than would be the case with arches of equal length. The 22.5-metre side arches are actually half arches.

The passerelle Debilly was designed by engineers Jean Résal, Amédée Alby and André-Louis Lion. Résal was a professor at the famed École Polytechnique and he and Alby were the design engineers for the much more famous Pont Alexandre III, which also opened in 1900. Lion was the official engineer for Ponts et Chausées (Roads and Bridges).

The stunning ceramic tiles were made by the French company of Gentil et Bourdet.

Well-known as a rendezvous for lovers, Paris has also been the meeting place for spies from various nations. During the Cold War, the passerelle Debilly was apparently a favoured meeting place for spies and assorted “diplomats” who needed to exchange messages, currency, or other things. It was also the bridge on which, several days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an agent of the Democratic Republic of German was found dead.

Who knows what other stories the bridge could tell? What happened when Martine and Anna had their “vacances” in Paris?

Perhaps next time I will arrange a top-secret meeting on the bridge to exchange, um, stereocards?

Text and photographs by Norman Ball. Photograph of the Army and Navy building from Paris en Images.

We went there last December to see an exhibit of prints and drawings by Mary Cassatt (I wrote an article about it for Girls’ Guide to Paris). The exhibition was interesting, but I was captivated by the house. The lunchroom offered a view of an enclosed garden, and a large poster on the wall provided the beginnings of an answer to the question in my mind: “Mona Who?”

The short answer would be: a fabulously wealthy American society hostess (1897–1983), once nominated the “Best-Dressed Woman in the World,” and benefactress of the institution that occupies her former Paris residence.

There was a second exhibit on the upper floor, and I climbed the oval staircase to look around. A large room contained a grand piano, a gilded mirror, some candle sconces, and a few pictures. I spotted a small corridor leading to a powder room.

One seldom has the opportunity to wash one’s hands and comb one’s hair in such elegant surroundings, and for a few minutes, I made myself at home.

There were three black and white portraits of Mona on a ledge, so I photographed them (badly). However, I later found clearer versions of the same images online. Here is one of them.

Back home in Toronto, I decided to find out more about the woman whose house I had visited. There is remarkably little written about Mona Bismarck. And after reading what there was, I think I know why. Here is the story.

Mona (or Frances) Strader was the daughter of a Kentucky horse breeder and trainer, Robert Strader. Her childhood was sad and chaotic. Her parents divorced when she was four or five years old. She lived first with her maternal grandmother, then with her paternal grandmother. The former was later declared insane and sent to an asylum. An uncle suffered the same fate. Another uncle shot a prostitute and then turned the gun on himself. A third uncle died in a hunting accident. Only her father seemed to be a steady influence in Mona’s life, and he was not always around.

The only way out of this nightmare was marriage. Mona’s starter husband was Henry James Schlesinger, son of the richest man in Wisconsin. She’d met him through her father’s racing contacts. She was 19; he was 39. The marriage was not a success. In 1920, Mona sought a divorce after three years of marriage, and left her young (and only) son in her husband’s custody in Milwaukee.

At this point, she had already met husband No. 2, a wealthy banker called James Irving Bush, said to be the “handsomest man in America.” The two married in New York in 1921; she was 24; he was 38. Fairly soon, Mona discovered that her new husband behaved appallingly when he was drunk, and he was often drunk. This time she went to Paris to obtain a divorce (note to self: find out more about Paris as the “divorce destination” in the 1920s and 1930s).

Back in New York, Mona started up a fashion venture with a friend called Laura Curtis, who was engaged to be married to Harrison Williams, one of the richest men in the United States (a big step up from the richest family in Wisconsin). Rumours abounded that Mona “stole” Harrison’s affections while her friend was out of town. In fact, Laura Curtis jilted Harrison Williams, leaving him free to marry Mona. But the rumours won and it took Mona some time to live them down.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to do so while living in New York. Harrison Williams took her on a honeymoon cruise around the world in his enormous yacht, Warrior. She was 29; he was 53. It was 1926.

Three years later, the stock market crash reduced her husband’s fortune of $680 million to a paltry $5 million. The Harrison Williamses apparently failed to notice their change in fortunes. They had a Long Island mansion at Oak Point; a New York town house on Fifth Avenue; an all-white house decorated by Syrie Maugham in Palm Beach; a Paris apartment on the rue Pouquet; and a villa with a large garden on the Island of Capri in the Bay of Naples called Il Fortino.

Meanwhile, Mona had become the darling of the fashion mavens. Cecil Beaton never tired of photographing or drawing her, although he said he could never fully capture the beauty of her huge acquamarine eyes and extraordinary silver hair.

Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar published endless stories about her exquisite life and clothes. And in 1933, the Paris couturiers Molyneux, Lanvin, Vionnet, Chanel and Lelong voted her the world’s “best-dressed woman.” Okay, the nomination was a little self-serving, since she wore their creations, but they were not alone in praising her sense of style. And in the end, it was Balenciaga who was her favourite couturier; he opened his fashion house in Paris in the late 1930s.

Perhaps the best way to sum up Mona’s life at this point was the phrase used in 2007 by Emily M. Banis in the title of her master’s thesis for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York: “Mona: Portrait of a Female Dandy.”

Mona was a “dandy” in the sense that her greatest creation, her work of art, was her own appearance and her lifestyle. That was what she did. That was all she did. Nobody ever saw her reading a book. Nobody ever credited her with a witty remark. If she wrote letters, they were unquotable. She never learned French or Italian, despite years spent in those countries.

What Mona created was herself. After her chaotic and unhappy childhood, her achievement was to control every aspect of her life. Her houses were perfect. Her clothes were perfect. Her dinners were perfect. Her flowers were perfect (she loved gardening and grew her favourite flowers from Kentucky and England in the gardens in Capri, even though every drop of fresh water had to be brought from the mainland). Nothing less than perfection was acceptable.

In 1943, Dali painted her in an extraordinary portrait. In the first version, he painted her naked, but she objected, so he painted her wearing rags (but with her ever-present pearls), surrounding by objects from antiquity that evoke a certain menace. Apparently Mona loved it and it graced her Paris house on the avenue New York until a few weeks ago.

Harrison Williams died in 1953. His obituary in the New York Times noted: “The only reason the Harrison Williamses don’t live like princes…is that princes can’t afford to live like the Harrison Williamses.”

The following year, Mona acquired the final feature her life had lacked: an aristocratic title. She married Count Edward von Bismarck, the grandson of the German chancellor of that name. Eddie was thought to be gay, but he had been Mona’s long-time friend and confidant. He apparently believed that he was dying of stomach cancer, and she may have married him assuming it would be a very short marriage and a long widowhood. Eddie lived for another 16 years.

By this time, Mona had lost her trademark silver hair. In the 1950s, according to most sources, she started to dye her hair brown, and her friends were astonished that she would give up her most recognizable feature. Maybe, in middle age, she no longer wanted to be so recognizable.

Mona was devastated by the closing of the house of Balenciaga in 1968. The story goes that when she heard the news, she did not leave her room for three days. After this period of mourning, she switched to Givenchy.

Eddie died in 1970. Mona then married his doctor, Umberto de Martini, 14 years her junior. Big mistake. She thought he would look after her as she aged, as he had looked after Eddie; he thought she would fund his extracurricular activities, which included a mistress in England. When in 1979, he accidentally drove his Alfa Romeo off a bridge near Naples (her friends made the inevitable joke about “Martini on the rocks”), she was delivered from a burdensome marriage. She went back to using Bismarck as her surname.

She lived for four more years, dying in 1983 at her house on the avenue New York, aged 86. The terms of her will would have created an arts foundation that encompassed her Paris house and the artworks in her villa at Capri. But she had forgotten her son by her first marriage, who contested the will and demanded an inheritance larger than the measly million or so she had assigned him. The Capri villa and its contents had to be sold, along with other parts of her collection.

Mona created herself. And when she died, her greatest achievement in life disappeared. Beauty and a glamorous lifestyle do not survive when the individual who brings them to life has gone. And exotic gardens may not survive the death of a gardener. This, I think, is why so few people have written about her, and why there is no full-length biography.

I didn’t know any of this as I washed my hands and snapped a couple of pictures of Mona’s first-floor powder room. She was a remote presence, a name on an oil painting in the front hall. But clearly many people have benefited from her legacy. The Mona Bismarck American Center may not be as well funded as Mona wanted it to be, but it nonetheless sponsors concerts and exhibitions that Paris residents and visitors enjoy, and the exhibit I saw was beautifully presented. The Center’s recent sale of the Dali portrait will contribute to its work. On February 5, 2013, the painting fetched a price of 2.6 million Euros at Sotheby’s in London.

Poor Mona. She had beauty, wealth, and an exalted social position. But in the photographs and portraits, she does not look happy. Be careful what you wish for. She wished for riches and control; she had riches during her life, but she could not quite control her legacy.

Text and original photographs by Philippa Campsie

Sources: Emily M. Banis, Mona: Portrait of a Dandy, New York: Fashion Institute of Technology, master’s thesis, 2007; James D. Birchfield, Kentucky Countess: Mona Bismarck in Art and Fashion, Lexington: University of Kentucky Art Museum, 1997; Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins, The Power of Style, New York: Crown Publishers, 1994.

I found this image of one of the most celebrated of all bals in a collection of stereocards. The Jardin Mabille disappeared more than a century ago, but its influence persists.

The original Jardin Mabille was founded by one of Paris’s innumerable dance teachers, who in 1831 opened an outdoor dancing space reserved for his students. Monsieur Mabille (sometimes called Père Mabille, or Father Mabille), leased or owned land on the rue Montaigne (once known as the Allée des Veuves), just off the Champs-Elysées.

In the early 1800s, the Champs-Elysées was not yet the grand avenue laid out by Baron Haussmann. It was a fashionably countrified promenade, a straight, tree-lined drive outside the dense central urban area, leading towards Paris’s suburbs and countryside.

Père Mabille started a small venture, but his sons envisaged something grander. In 1844, they transformed the modest private dancing area into a major public attraction. Over the next few decades, the Jardin Mabille rose to prominence, then declined, and eventually disappeared.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) visited the Jardin Mabille in the early 1850s, after Père Mabille’s sons had introduced 3,000 gas lights, as well as landscaping with trees, flowerbeds, walkways, scenic paintings and mirrors. Entranced, she wrote of the

flower-beds laid out in every conceivable form, with diminutive jets of gas so distributed as to imitate flowers of the softest tints and most perfect shape… In the centre there is a circle of pillars, on the top of each of which is a pot of flowers with gas jets, and between them an arch of gas jets. In the midst of this is another circle, forming a pavilion for musicians, also brilliantly illuminated, and containing a large cotillion band of the most finished performers. Around this you will find thousands of gentlemen and ladies strolling, singly, in pairs or in groups. While the musicians repose they loiter, sauntering round, or recline on seats.

When the musicians broke into “a lively waltz” she was transported:

In an instant twenty or thirty couples are whirling along, floating like thistles in the wind… Their feet scarce touch the smooth-trodden earth. Round and round, in a vortex of life, beauty and brilliancy they go, a whirlwind of delight, eyes sparkling, cheeks flushing, and gauzy draperies floating by… It is a scene perfectly unearthly, or rather perfectly Parisian, and just as earthly as possible.

She was not alone in her enthusiasm. More than a decade later, another observer wrote about the Jardin Mabille in its heyday. G. A. (George Augustus) Sala was among the many journalists who covered the Paris Exhibition of 1867, one of more than nine million people who attended the Exhibition. In a book published in 1868 he evoked “a merry age, a dancing age, a jovial, lighthearted devil-may-care age. Vive la Joie! Vive la bagatelle! Long live the Café Riche and the Jardin Mabille and the Closerie des Lilas and the Thirteenth Arrondissement!”

Curiously, in his 1868 account of the Exposition year, there is no description of dancing at the Jardin Mabille. But he notes that after a song, “Everybody applauds, everybody drinks, everybody is happy.” Going to the Jardin Mabille was about seeing and being seen.

Ten years later, in a 1878 letter to the London Telegraph, reprinted in the New York Times, Sala talks of revisiting the Jardin Mabille. He calls the Paris of 1867 a “sparkling, profligate city” and says that the Mabille had been populated by “the most sumptuous costumes that Worth could furnish, the costliest bonnets that Lucy Hocquet could build.” (Worth was Charles Frédéric Worth, the Englishman who emigrated to Paris and became couturier to Empress Éugenie. Today he is considered the father of French haute couture. La Maison Lucy Hocquet was the hat boutique where only the most well-off could afford to buy bonnets.)

In his 1878 letter, Sala reeled off the names of “the grandest dandies from the clubs, millionaires from Brazil, from Mexico and from California; English peers and members of Parliament, Senators, Deputies, diplomatists, bankers, notaries, adventurers” who had patronized the Bal Mabille in the 1860s. But ten years later, something is amiss. Sala no longer sees the gorgeous women he remembered from his earlier visit. “It is only the poor relations…I seem to see at Mabille this Thursday night.” The “velvets and satins, the cashmeres and lace shawls, the brocades and the jewels, the feathers and the flowers of price” were no more.

Above all, the Bal Mabille was no longer a place where people came to dance. Sala notes:

The dancing is a mere hollow imposture… But to keep up the delusion that Mabille is the favorite home of Terpsichore [goddess of dance] the administration hire a few couples of semi-professional dancers.

These dancers he dismissed as “posture masters and mistresses [who] fling their limbs about to the music of a tolerable band at stated intervals during the evening.” What bothered Sala the most was the presence of what he called the gobemouche (literally, fly-swallower): the horde of gaping, naïve bumpkins. Gone was the sense of exclusivity that had thrilled him in 1867. Gone were the moneyed patrons, or at least those who had the appearance of money.

About the same time, John Russell Young accompanied then ex-President of the United States, General Ulysses S. Grant, on a world tour in the 1870s. Young went to the Jardin Mabille and saw the paid dancers who “mingle around in the crowd as though they had paid to come in.” Then “when the music commences (generally the music of the harmonious Offenbach), these young men and women rush upon the boarded floor and dance peculiar dances—the ‘Can-can,’ among others—not much worse than I have seen it on the New York stage.”

Young did not like the Jardin Mabille. But he had one explanation of its popularity amongst his fellow countrymen.

Mabille is said to be a very bad place, and [our American friends] attend expecting that something outrageous will certainly happen. I do not imagine that it occurs to one out of ten of our observing countrymen that Mabille is simply an institution kept by a Frenchman for English and Americans to visit.

The same comment is echoed in the writings of David Ross Locke, a.k.a. Petroleum V. Nasby, stage performer and writer, friend of Mark Twain, who set off in 1881 to visit Europe. To defray some of his expenses, he wrote about his travels for the Toledo Blade. Locke/Nasby described professionals at the Jardin Mabille doing their version of a “style of dancing [that] was always in favour in Paris among the people.”

Locke/Nasby had caught on to an important distinction. France had a long tradition of popular dances, that is, dances invented by poor people for whom exuberant movement was a welcome relief in lives filled with stress and hardship. But as tourism became a more important economic force, something happened to the lively dances at the Jardin Mabille. What had once been an individualistic expression of life’s ups and downs in dance, the can-can, a French working-class dance that had originated in the 1830s, was refashioned in the music halls of Britain and the musical stages of America as a public entertainment. Then it was reimported to Paris as an amusement for tourists, endlessly reproduced at the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère.

And so it continues. The tourists are titillated by a dance that seems risqué and the locals earn money from their performance. What does it matter if the dance is not “authentic”? It has been evolving constantly since the 1830s. Culture is never static.

Text by Norman Ball. Historic illustrations from Paris en Images.