City like an immense theatre with a never-ending series of plazas and doorways where a voice calls out of nowhere: ‘Right this way, sir!’ ‘Through here?’ ‘As you like.’ ‘Well, I might try it. But where do we sit?’ ‘Later, sir, sit later. A doorway for now –’ We stumbled through the doorway and climbed over ruins worn down by human caresses, looking and making notes all the while. We could hear people whispering on the other side of the wall. Alive or dead ? More doorways, we went through so many without ever finding our way back. -Baudelaire, Paris Spleen
A keen-eyed reader, someone who’s lived in Paris long enough to know and still quick enough to remember, knocked on my door with a correction to a recent post. ‘Big or small ?’ I asked. ‘How’d I screw up this time?’ Notes below the second Sartre article, where the full version of his the full version of his Republic of Silence appeared, talked about the Vieux Chêne political club on rue Mouffetard. It turns out the small statue of an oak tree isn’t the original but a replacement. And in Caroline Hauer’s opinion, far inferior. You can see the original in the Eugene Atget photo above.
She writes, ‘The original sign disappeared in 2008. It was replaced by a rough, heavy-handed copy, the finely sculpted wooden original still unaccounted for. It was possibly destroyed by a delivery van (on the narrow street) or damaged before being traded during one of the building’s renovations. In Atget’s photograph from 1911 you can see the elegant carved lines, the refined portrayal of branches, leaves and nuts. It’s replacement, crudely done in resin, completely omits the fine details.’
So not only do I stand corrected but reprooved for my taste in revolutionary nostalgia. (Not the first time.) I’d never seen the original. Atget’s photo – and the persistant memories of Paris old timers – leads to all sorts of speculations. Where is the old oak now ? We all know the art market has an enormous shadow running alongside, a black market in stolen and forged artworks. Last week was busy with revelations, with an early Van Gogh returned in an IKEA shopping bag to the Dutch sleuth Arthur Brand (@brand_arthur), and the return of the blood of Christ to Fécamp in Normandy, not to mention a fascinating documentary on the forger known as the Spanish Master, who specializes in the production of bronze busts that purport to be from antiquity but obviously aren’t. (That doesn’t stop young media billionaires from laying out pretty sums to own them and put them on display in their private museums, like the one in Mougins outside of Cannes.)
So where is le Vieux Chêne now ? Anybody’s guess. Maybe over the fireplace of a wealthy Communist who saved it from being destroyed. It’s a holy relic of the years leading up to 1848.
Mouffetard and the open-air market that clustered around Saint Médard were two of Eugene Atget’s favorite haunts. If you have free time on your hands, parisladouce.com is as good as it gets in its coverage of Paris theatre, monuments, the Paris Paris that goes on being a world unto itself against the latest modifications and the trampling hordes of tourists. Hats off to Caroline Hauer at Paris la douce.
This may seem a pretty small thing to spin a post out of but it’s the incessant flow of details, historic, aesthetic, that make Paris a fascinating theatre, giving lazy sots like myself reasons not to leave. No historic anecdote too small, ha ! One leads to another. The Big Ideas people are always arguing over are usually revealed to be so much hot air. Later for them.
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The old oak isn’t the only thing missing on Mouffetard. A disappearance at the top of the hill at Place Contrescarpe is worth talking about, too. It was the sign over an chocolate factory and both what it depicted and what it meant are open to wildly different interpretations. It’s hidden in a museum now because the Sensitivity Brigade didn’t want to be reminded about a piece of Paris history they find out of sync with les mœurs contemporaines.
Story for another day.