22 April 2015
The feckless fabulist who took on the Sun King: Jean de La Fontaine
For generations of governesses throughout Europe, seeking to impart to their pupils not only a knowledge of the French language but a sense of right and wrong, the fables of Jean de La Fontaine must have appeared as a godsend. Brief and entertaining, with their depiction of human foibles wittily embodied in a cast of animals and birds, they neatly pointed out the consequences of vanity, idleness and extravagance and the rewards of honesty, kindness and hard work. Had they known a little more, however, about the author, his life and some his other works, the good ladies might have thought twice about selecting him as a moral exemplar for their young charges.
Title vignette with portrait of La Fontaine from The Fables of La Fontaine translated into English verse by Walter Thornbury (London, 1873). 12305.m.1.
Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) was born in Château-Thierry on the western border of the province of Champagne, a small town surrounded by the woods and fields which provide the setting for many of his fables in a landscape traversed by the River Marne. His father and grandfather had both held a minor government post involving the supervision of waterways and forests, and after a brief flirtation with the Church the young Jean also assumed this office. His attitude to his duties was somewhat lackadaisical; although he held his position until the 1670s, he was castigated, years after his appointment, for his ignorance of basic forestry terms. While trees provided the matter for many of his fables, he had small interest in them for practical purposes.
His pliability in his choice of career extended to his marriage, in which he once more followed his father’s directives. The bride whom he took in 1647, Marie Héricart, came of a wealthy and well-connected family, and the difference in age (she was 14 years old) was not uncommon at that time. However, the marriage, which produced a single child, Charles, was not entirely successful; as his literary career developed La Fontaine spent most of his time in Paris, returning so infrequently that when he expressed a warm liking for a young man whom he met at a social gathering, he was startled to learn that this was his son. Though there was never a direct break between the couple, in 1658 Marie petitioned successfully for a séparation des biens which allowed her control of her own fortune, perhaps at the instigation of her relatives, who were concerned about La Fontaine’s improvident nature, allegations of gambling, and failure to draw a regular salary. Throughout his life, indeed, he frequently had recourse to the generosity of friends, rather more successfully than the cicada in his fable La cigale et la fourmi, who, appealing to the ant for help after spending the summer singing rather than gathering stores for the harsh times ahead, is rebuffed with the terse brush-off Eh bien! Dansez maintenant.
An early edition of the fables (Amsterdam, 1687) 12304.cc.23.
The lasting popularity of the Fables could not have been gauged from their initial reception. The publishers were initially reluctant to accept verses full of archaic vocabulary in irregular metres far removed from Louis XIV’s favourite alexandrines and later dismissed by Lamartine as ‘vers boîteux disloqués’. For La Fontaine, however, his use of old French words was not mere pedantry but the natural consequence of his love of a much earlier tradition of beast fables represented by the old French Le Roman de Renart in which animals (notably the fox hero) behave in all-too-human ways. The frequently bawdy quality of these stories appealed to La Fontaine as much as the Italian sources which he adapted for his Contes (1665), which he defended against the criticism of king and court by claiming that they could not represent a moral danger because of their gaiety. He had, however, enjoyed a classical education, and when in 1660 Nevelet’s edition of Aesop appeared, this stimulated him in a new direction.
Although not intended for children (whom La Fontaine is said to have disliked), the first volume was dedicated to the six-year-old Dauphin and won the author an invitation to court, where he was wined and dined by Louis XIV and presented with a well-filled purse which, with characteristic carelessness, he left in the cab which took him home.
The animal fable provided a useful means of expressing the poet’s views on human folly in a period which had seen the two Frondes causing devastation in France, causing him to reflect on the cruelties inflicted in the name of religion and the pursuit of power. A lion is brought low by a mosquito who in turn falls victim to a cunning spider; the death of a rabbit in the claws of an eagle leads to a train of calamities involving Jupiter himself; a mighty oak’s inflexibility literally proves his downfall while the humble reed survives by bowing to the wind. The universal quality of these fables soon won them many translators and illustrators, including Gustave Doré (1866-68; British Library 1870.a.3). They inspired numerous adaptations and imitations, including the much-loved Russian fables of Ivan Krylov (1769-1844), Ukrainian fables by Leonid Hlibov (1827-1893) and those by Antonín Jaroslav Puchmayer (1769-1820), one of the notable works of the Czech National Revival.
The Lion and the Gnat, illustration by Gustave Doré, from 12305.m.1.
The British Library holds translations of the Fables into many languages including Catalan, Esperanto, Hindi, Afrikaans and Welsh. Readers may also see an autograph manuscript of Le loup et le renard (Egerton MS 3780: 1690-1691) bearing La Fontaine’s signature, and another manuscript of five poems in the Stefan Zweig collection (Zweig MS 165: 1660). Recalling Louis XIV’s distaste for La Fontaine’s writings (not least for his criticism of the king’s love of la gloire and all things warlike), we may speculate on the pleasure that the poet who portrayed the least of his country-folk so sympathetically would have derived from seeing his writings among the treasures of a library freely available to all.
Susan Halstead, Content Specialist Research Engagement
17 April 2015
Sonia Delaunay and Tristan Tzara
The Sonia Delaunay exhibition which opened this week at Tate Modern shows her prodigious output over some seven decades. Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) worked in a variety of media – paintings, drawings, prints, fashion and fabric designs, posters, mosaics, bookbindings, and book illustrations. She is best known as the creator, with Blaise Cendrars, of one of the greatest livres d’artiste, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, for which she provided pochoir illustrations to Cendrars’ poem.
This famous book, published in 1913, has tended, however, to overshadow similar collaborations with other poets, especially the two books she produced with Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism.
Tzara moved to Paris from Zurich in 1919 and it was apparently one of his manifestos that made Sonia and Robert Delaunay, who had lived in Spain and then Portugal since 1914, aware of the renewed artistic vitality of Paris after the end of the war and determined their return to France. Tzara first met the Delaunays soon after their return to Paris in 1921. Their apartment at 19 Boulevard Malesherbes quickly became a fashionable gathering point for the literary and artistic avant garde, its walls covered with multi-coloured poems and other works of art by Philippe Soupault, Vladimir Mayakovsky, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Jean Cocteau, and René Crevel. As well as embroidering waistcoats for her friends, Sonia also decorated the interior of Au Sans Pareil, the Dadaist and Surrealist bookshop.
Tzara soon became a close friend of the couple and in 1923 Robert painted his portrait in which he is wearing a scarf designed by Sonia A monocled Tzara also features in one of Robert Delaunay’s best-known paintings, Le Manège aux cochons, painted in 1922.
Robert Delaunay, Portrait of Tristan Tzara (1923). Madrid, Museo nacional centro de arte Reina Sofia (image from Wikimedia Commons)
The collaboration between Sonia Delaunay and Tzara took various forms. It included robes poèmes, dresses with texts from Tzara’s poems woven into their fabric, all made in 1922, and Sonia’s bookbinding for Tzara’s De nos oiseaux in 1923. Sonia had by then become well known for her textile designs, the main focus of her work over the next 15 years, and it was in that year that Tzara asked her to design the costumes for his play Le Cœur à gaz, a three-act absurdist provocation described by its author as “la plus grande escroquerie en trois actes” (“the biggest swindle in three acts”).
The play had already had a single, disastrous performance during a soirée dada in 1921 with a cast that included Louis Aragon, Benjamin Péret, Philippe Soupault, and Tzara himself. It gained lasting notoriety, however, by the circumstances of this 1923 revival, when it was included in Le Cœur à barbe (“The Bearded Heart”), another soirée dada organised by Tzara and Iliadz. The evening marked the culmination of the ongoing conflict between Tzara and Breton and finally split the Dadaists and led to the foundation of Surrealism by Breton and his followers. It also included first performances of new compositions by Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud, Erik Satie, and Igor Stravinsky, as well as films by Charles Sheeler and Hans Richter. The two groups came to blows during the performance of the play. Several people were injured and the actors, encased in Sonia’s heavy cardboard costumes, found themselves unable to move. A photograph showing René Crevel (Oeil) and Jacqueline Chaumont (Bouche) has survived, and their costumes can be compared to Sonia’s original designs.
Sonia Delaunay, Costume designs for Le Cœur à barbe, 1923: Left, Bouche; right, Oeil (British Library C.108 aaa.14.). A copy of the photograph can be seen here.
The text of the play had been first published in Der Sturm on 5 March 1922 but did not appear together with Sonia’s costume designs until 1977, when they were published in association with the exhibition La Rencontre: Sonia Delaunay, Tristan Tzara at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris by the art critic and publisher Jacques Damase, a close friend of Sonia who promoted her work in the last 16 years of her life. The volume includes ten lithographs, seven of which are full-page, colour reproductions of the gouaches of the 1923 costume designs; the others comprise an additional title-page and two decorations in the text. 125 copies were printed, all signed by the artist. An additional set of the full-page lithographs, individually signed by the artist, was issued with each of the first 25 copies.
Additional title page of Tristan Tzara Le Cœur à barbe (Paris, 1977) C.108.aaa.14
The friendship between Sonia Delaunay and Tzara lasted until Tzara’s death in 1963, although they grew apart in the 1930s, when Tzara joined the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and Sonia was for several years busy with the mural paintings commission for the 1937 International Exhibition. They were next brought together, with other ‘undesirables’, in Toulouse in 1944, three years after the death of Robert Delaunay. After the war Tzara once again became an habitué of Sonia’s studio, now at Rue Saint-Simon on the Left Bank.
Like Sonia, Tzara had a strong interest in illustrated books and worked with numerous artists – including Matisse, Kandinsky, Léger, Mirò, Arp, Giacometti, Villon, Klee and Ernst – on illustrated editions of his poems. There were two collaborations with Sonia: for Le Fruit permis (1956), her first book since La Prose du Transsibérien, Sonia contributed four pochoir compositions, and for Juste présent (1961), a collection of 11 poems written between 1947 and 1950, she made eight full-page colour etchings and an additional colour etching for the slipcase, printed in the right sense on the front and upside down on the back cover.
Above: Two of Sonia Delaunay’s etchings for Juste présent ([Paris], 1961). C.108.aaa.11; Below: etching for slipcase cover of Juste présent
140 copies of Juste présent were printed, all signed by the poet and the artist. The British Library’s copy is no. 124. In both publications Sonia’s colours are strong and pure, with a predominance of vermilion, indigo and black. The compositions, with their interplay between flat colour and black, hatched areas, are typical of her post-1945 output (for example, her various Rythme-couleur paintings).
Jacques Damase, who did so much to promote Sonia Delaunay’s art, did not live to see her final consecration: he was tragically killed in an accident in July 2014, just three months before the opening in Paris of this major exhibition of her work, now at Tate Modern. Perhaps the exhibition should be dedicated to his memory?
Chris Michaelides, Curator Romance collections
References
Tristan Tzara, Juste présent [Poèmes]. Eaux-fortes de Sonia Delaunay. ([Paris], 1961). C.108.aaa.11
Tristan Tzara, Le cœur à gaz; costumes de Sonia Delaunay. ([Paris], 1977). C.108 aaa.14
La Rencontre: Sonia Delaunay, Tristan Tzara. Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, avril-juin 1977 / [commissaire: Danielle Molinari]. (Paris, [1977]). YV.1987.a.344
Annabelle Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance. (Baltimore & London, 1994) YC.1994.a.3134 & 98/01171
Sonia & Robert Delaunay [the catalogue of the Delaunay donation to the Bibliothèque nationalede France]. (Paris, 1977). j/X.415/2418.
Sonia Delaunay, Nous irons jusqu’au soleil. (Paris, 1977). X.429/7809
Sherry A. Buckberrough, Susan Krane, Sonia Delaunay: a retrospective. (Buffalo, NY, 1980) f80/8227.
Sonia Delaunay [the catalogue of the exhibition at Tate Modern]. London, 2015.
Chris Michaelides, ‘Robert and Sonia Delaunay’, review of the exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, The Burlington Magazine, February 2015. P.P.1931.pcs.
Cécile Godefroy, Sonia Delaunay : sa mode, ses tableaux, ses tissus (Paris, 2014) YF.2015.a.8284.
06 March 2015
Some flights of Poe’s Raven – Mallarmé and Manet, Doré, and Rossetti
Thanks to the championing of his work by Charles Baudelaire and later by Stéphane Mallarmé who, respectively, translated his prose works and poems, the reputation of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in France has always been high, and his influence on the Symbolist generation of writers, artists and composers enormous. Though Baudelaire largely avoided translating Poe’s poetry, he did translate, in 1853, ‘The Raven’ which thus has the distinction of having been translated by two of the greatest poets of the 19th century. Mallarmé’s translation, Le Corbeau, was, moreover, published in a de luxe edition in 1875 with illustrations by Édouard Manet, a volume which is generally considered to be one of the first and greatest examples of the modern French livre d’artiste.
Mallarmé first met Manet in 1873 and the two men soon became close friends. Manet’s portrait of Mallarmé in his study, now in the Musée d’Orsay, was painted in 1876, the year L'Après-midi d'un faune, their second book collaboration, appeared.
The publisher of Le Corbeau was Richard Lesclide (1825-1892) who had also published another book illustrated by Manet – Charles Cros’s Le Fleuve (1874). The commercial failure of the two books meant the abandonment of another Poe project, a similarly translated and illustrated publication of ‘The City in the Sea’.
Le Corbeau, a bilingual, illustrated, large folio edition, was published in a limited edition of 240 copies (the British Library copy (shelfmark C.70.i.1) is no. 53) signed by Manet and Mallarmé. Manet’s illustrations were transfer lithographs (i.e. brushed with transfer ink on sheets of paper then transferred to zinc plates for printing); they were printed on laid paper (as in our copy) or on China paper. There were four full-page illustrations inserted between the double pages of Poe’s English text and, on opposite pages, Mallarmé’s translation, and also a head of a raven in profile (below left), also used for the poster advertising the publication, and a flying raven for the ex-libris (below right).
When the book was published Mallarmé was still an obscure poet but Manet was already an established, albeit controversial, artist. Accordingly, the title page gives greater prominence to Manet (whose name is in larger characters and printed in red, like Poe’s) than Mallarmé. Perhaps as a friendly gesture Manet, gave the narrator/poet Mallarmé’s features.
Title-page of Edgar Allan Poe Le Corbeau = The Raven
In Poe’s narrative poem, first published 30 years earlier, the poet, tormented by the death of his beloved Lenore, is visited by a raven, a bird of ill omen, but also the poet’s alter ego. It perches on a bust of Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and its repeated answer to the poet’s questions about his dead love is a relentless ‘Nevermore’ reminding him of his irrevocable loss. Manet’s four full-page illustrations show the poet in his study (a claustrophobic, Nabi-like interior) [plate 1], opening the window shutters to let in the raven (revealing, in the process, a Parisian cityscape) [plate 2], staring up from his ‘cushioned seat’ to the raven [plate 3]. In the last illustration [plate 4] the poet has disappeared or, perhaps, been assimilated into the shadow of the raven which can be seen on the floor, from which his soul ‘shall be lifted-nevermore’.
Plate 1 of Le Corbeau, “Once upon a Midnight Dreary (Sous la lampe)”
Plate 2 of Le Corbeau, “Open here I flung the shutter (A la fenêtre)”.
Plate 3 of Le Corbeau, “Perched upon a bust of Pallas (Sur le buste)”.
Plate 4 of Le Corbeau, “That shadow that lies floating on the floor (La chaise)”
The modernity and originality of Manet’s interpretation is best appreciated when compared to the steel engravings after Gustave Doré, his exact contemporary, in his last work, published in 1883. Doré’s engravings hark back to the work of earlier illustrators of the Romantic generation as well as to his own earlier works, emphasizing the supernatural atmosphere of the poem, showing, for example, the ‘Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor’, which Manet omits, or the body of the poet in the shadow of the raven.
Gustave Doré “Till I scarcely more than muttered ‘Other friends have flown before’”
Gustave Doré “ And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted – nevermore” - the poet’s body in the raven’s shadow
Doré’s illustrations, though published eight years after Manet’s, are closer to those of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s four unpublished drawings (which were produced nearly 40 years earlier and are among his earliest works). Rossetti also shows the poet surrounded by angels and spirits, and his drawings range in style from a Faust-like unbridled Gothic composition to more ethereal depictions of angels that look forward to Pre-Raphaelitism.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Raven: Angel Footfalls” (above, ca. 1846; below, ca. 1848)
In 1881 Rossetti wrote to Jane Morris that he had been given a copy of ‘…a huge folio of lithographed sketches from the Raven, by a French idiot called Manet, who certainly must be the greatest and most conceited ass who ever lived. A copy should be bought for every hypochondriacal ward in lunatic asylums. To view it without a guffaw is impossible’. Was this extreme reaction due to Rossetti’s general dislike of the ‘new French School’ (Impressionism) or to professional jealousy?
Chris Michaelides, Curator Italian and Modern Greek
References:
Paris à l'Eau-Forte. Redacteur en chef: R. Lesclide. Directeur des Eaux-Fortes: F. Regamey. vol. 1-3. (Paris, 1873-74). P.P.1932.g.
Edgar Allan Poe, Le Corbeau. The Raven. Poëme ... Traduction française de S. Mallarmé avec illustrations par E. Manet Paris, 1875. (C.70.i.1.)
Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven. Illustrated by G. Doré, with a comment upon the poem by E. C. Stedman. (London, 1883) 1870.b.5.
Patrick F.Quinn, The French face of Edgar Poe. (Carbondale, 1957). 11874.ppp.15.
Baudelaire and Poe: an exhibition in conjunction with the inauguration of The Center for Baudelaire Studies, Furman Hall, Vanderbilt University, April Nineth to Thirtieth, 1969. ([Nashville], 1969). W17/7609.
Alastair I. Grieve, “Rossetti’s illustrations to Poe”, Apollo Magazine 97 (1973), p.142 -45. P.P.1931.uf.
Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, From Manet to Toulouse-Lautrec: French lithographs, 1860-1900: catalogue of an exhibition at the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. (London, 1978). X.421/10785.
Manet, 1832-1883 [catalogue of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York]. (New York, 1983). YA.1995.b.6128
Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Breon Mitchell, “Tales of a Raven. The Origins and Fate of Le Corbeau by Mallarmé and Manet”, Print Quarterly, VI, no 3, Sept. 1989, p.258-307. P.423/617
Le Corbeau / Edgar Poe ; traduction de Stéphane Mallarmé ; illustré par Edouard Manet ; dossier réalisé par Michaël Pakenham. (Paris,1994) YF.2013.a.5982
James H. Rubin, Manet’s silence and the poetics of bouquets. (London, 1994). YC.1994.b.5598.
Mallarmé, 1842-1898: un destin d’écriture [Published on the occasion of the centenary exhibition "Stéphane Mallarmé, 1842-1898" at the Musée d'Orsay]. (Paris, 1998) LB.31. b.17750.
Lois Davis Vines (ed.) Poe abroad: influence, reputation, affinities. (Iowa City, 1999). 99/40530.
27 February 2015
Florio’s Montaigne – and Shakespeare’s?
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born on 28th February 1533, and by the time of his death 59 years later had enriched French literature with a new genre – the essay. Brought up by his father to speak Latin as his first language, he rapidly lost his mastery of it when at the age of six he was despatched to the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux so that, by the time that he left, he claimed that he knew less than when he arrived. However, throughout his life he retained a love and reverence for classical authors including Cicero, Plutarch and Seneca, which shaped not only his philosophy but his chosen form of literary expression, and ultimately made him one of the most beloved and accessible authors to readers outside his native land.
The title-page of the first edition of Montaigne’s Essais (Paris, 1580) British Library G.2344.
Witty and aphoristic, the collection of essays, first published in 1580, comprises three books divided into one hundred and seven chapters on topics ranging from coaches, cruelty and cannibalism to thumbs and smells. Their discursive nature reveals many details about their author and his milieu, drawn from his experiences as a Gascon landowner and official who rose to become mayor of Bordeaux, his travels through Italy, Germany and Switzerland, the turbulent years of the Wars of Religion, and his family life, in which we catch glimpses of his masterful mother, his wife Françoise, and his only surviving child Léonor – a household of women from which, at times, he would retreat to the peace and solitude of his tower, fitted with curving shelves to accommodate his library, to enjoy the company of his cat – another female – who has achieved immortality through his observations of her at play.
Marginal picture of a man with a cat, drawn by Pieter van Veen in his copy of Montaigne’s Essais (Paris, 1602) British Library C.28.g.7.
The Essais rapidly achieved wide popularity, and not only in France. They ran into five editions in eight years, and in 1603 an English translation appeared, the work of John Florio. Florio, born in 1533 as the son of an Italian father and an English mother, had left England as a small child when the accession of Mary Tudor to the throne had sent his family into exile, and as they wandered around Europe he acquired a knowledge of languages which equipped him to earn his living on returning to England as a teacher of French and Italian and the author of an English-Italian dictionary (London, 1578; 627.d.36).
It was at the behest of his patroness, the Countess of Bedford, that he set about translating the Essais, assisted by a multitude of collaborators who, through the Countess’s offices, tracked down quotations and publicized his work, earning fulsome dedications by doing so. His lively and spirited version contains colourful turns of phrase which sometimes expand the original, as when, in Book 1, chapter xviii, ‘des Loups-garous, des Lutins et des chimeres’ emerge as ‘Larves, Hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellowes, and other such Bug-bears and Chimeraes’ – a catalogue which, as Sarah Bakewell points out in her How to Live: a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer (Bath, 2011; LT.2011.x.3266) is ‘a piece of pure Midsummer Night’s Dream’.
Shakespeare did in fact know Florio, and Bakewell speculates that he may have been one of the first readers of the Essaies, possibly even in manuscript form. Scholars have taken pains to detect echoes of Montaigne in Hamlet, which was written before the published translation appeared, and frequently cite a passage from his last play, The Tempest, which, as Gonzalo evokes a vision of civilization in a perfect state of nature, is strikingly close to Montaigne’s account of the Tupinambá, an indigenous people from South America whom he encountered when a group of them visited Rouen.
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn or wine, or oil;
No occupation, all men idle, all.
Montaigne remarks of the Tupinambá that they have ‘no kind of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches or of povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, but common, no apparel but natural, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn or mettle’.
Such passages were eagerly seized upon in the controversy in the 18th and 19th centuries about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, and in 1901 Francis P. Gervais published his Shakespeare not Bacon: some arguments from Shakespeare’s copy of Florio’s Montaigne in the British Museum (London, 1901; 11765.i.18.). However, Edward Maunde Thompson countered with Two pretended autographs of Shakespeare (London, 1917; 11763.i.37), which argued that not only the signature ‘William Shakespere’ in an edition of the Essaies in the British Museum Library (but also that in a volume of Ovid in the Bodleian Library) was false, subjecting both to rigorous calligraphic analysis.
Alleged signature of William Shakespeare on the flyleaf of The Essayes, or Morall, Politike, and Millitarie Discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne ... Now done into English by ... John Florio. (London, 1603) C.21.e.17
Whatever the truth of the matter may be, we can make an educated guess at Montaigne’s response. An even-handed and balanced man who needed all his reserves of philosophy and Stoicism to confront the horrors of a century which saw the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and decades of conflict springing from religious extremism, he would no doubt have advocated a similar perspective on the resurgence of similar dangers in the 21st. And to those who argued about the authenticity or otherwise of these notorious signatures, he would certainly have recommended the phrase from the Greek philosopher Pyrrho which became his motto, engraved on his medallion: ‘Epekhō – I suspend judgement’.
Susan Halstead Curator Czech & Slovak
09 January 2015
European rivals in South Asia
As is fairly well known, the British Library has inherited the surviving archives of the British East India Company, and this vast resource provides researchers with a rich and unique mine of information about all aspects of Britain’s relations with South Asia in the early modern period through to 1858. What is almost certainly less well known is that the archive includes one series bringing together documentation from and about the other European powers that were the Company’s rivals in the 17th and 18th centuries.
View of the former French colony of Chandernagore (modern-day Chandannagar). Watercolour by Stanley Leighton, 1868. British Library WD 269
The ‘I’ series includes more than 200 volumes, arranged in three sub-series, of memoranda and correspondence between Europe and Asia. The first 17 of these (ref. I/1/1-17) are concerned with the Company’s relations with the French in India between 1664 and 1820, and I/2/1-32 is similar, dealing with the Dutch in India and Southeast Asia from 1596 to 1824. The subjects broached within are alas only hinted at by the frequent use in the relevant handlist of that tantalising word ‘Miscellaneous’, although there are four volumes identified as being about ‘Disputes with the French, 1773-1786’ (ref. I/1/7-10), and as a testament to the difficulties in mid-eighteenth century Anglo-Dutch relations there are no fewer than seven volumes of ‘Disputes with the Dutch’ from 1750 to 1764 (ref. I/2/14-20).
View of Batavia (modern-day Jakarta), the capital of the Dutch East Indies. Aquatint by JohnWells, 1800. P494
These are dwarfed, however, by the size of the third sub-series, which consists in all of 165 volumes. Its existence is due entirely to Frederick Charles Danvers (1833-1906). A man of wide-ranging interests, Danvers joined the East India Company as a writer in 1853, and five years later transferred to the India Office after the Company’s abolition. After spells in the Revenue, Statistics & Commerce and Public Works Departments, he was appointed Registrar and Superintendent of the India Office Records in 1884, a post he held until 1898. In what must rank as a major feat of international archival co-operation, between 1891 and 1895 he oversaw the transcription of volumes of documents from repositories in Lisbon, Evora and The Hague; besides this, he enhanced their long-term value to scholars and researchers by supervising the translation of 35 of these volumes into English. The Dutch records cover the whole of the 17th century, whereas those from Portugal date from as early as 1475 and extend into the early 19th century. The series thus contains a range of primary sources on many aspects of the European engagement with South and Southeast Asia both before and during the colonial era.
Map of the City of Goa in Portuguese India, from Denis L. Cottineau de Kloguen, An historical sketch of Goa, the metropolis of the Portuguese settlements in India ...( Madras, 1831.) 1434.e.2
All these volumes are located at St. Pancras, and can be delivered to the third floor Asian & African Studies Reading Room for consultation within seventy minutes of ordering.
Hedley Sutton, Asian & African Studies Reference Team Leader
References:
F.C. Danvers Report to the Secretary of State for India in Council on the Portuguese records relating to the East Indies contained in the Archivo da Torre do Tombo, and the public libraries in Lisbon and Evora (1892), OIR354.54
F.C. Danvers, Report on the records relating to the East in the state archives in The Hague (1945), OIB325.349.
17 December 2014
A dish fit for the gods: 150 years of Offenbach’s ‘La belle Hélène’
When in the 1690s the Académie Française was rocked by the so-called Querelle des anciens et des modernes between two factions headed by Nicolas Boileau and Charles Perrault respectively, history might have regarded it as a short-lived conflict unlikely to have much lasting influence on the development of French culture. However, in a society with a long tradition of respect for classical learning and its place within the educational system, it was never completely extinguished, and continued to flare up in the most unlikely places – such as the Paris comic opera stage.
By 1858, when the restriction limiting the number of performers in such productions to three was finally lifted, Jacques Offenbach (1819-1860) had already achieved considerable success in the small theatre which he had leased at his own expense, the Salle Choiseul, to accommodate his troupe, the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, when unable to make a breakthrough at the Opéra-Comique. His tastes, though, ran towards the lavish, and once free of the previous limitations he set about engaging a cast of 20 principals and making plans to stage his latest work, Orphée aux Enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld).
An early photograph of Offenbach, from ‘Argus’ Jacques Offenbach (Paris, 1872). 10602.e.4.
It success exceeded all his dreams, but not, perhaps, for the reasons which he had anticipated. Most unlike Monteverdi’s Orfeo or Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, it presents the hero not as a noble tragic figure descending to the realm of Hades to rescue his beloved wife but as a lackadaisical violin teacher whose wife is driven distracted by his trills and arpeggios, so that her abduction by the sinister king of the underworld, disguised as a shepherd, comes as a relief to both. Indeed, it was so far removed from the marmoreal world of classical antiquity that it provoked a furious outcry in the pages of the Journal des débats and Le Figaro. No voice was louder than that of the critic Jules Janin, who accused Offenbach of making a mockery of the austere values of Roman mythology so revered by the great figures of the Revolution. Behind this, though, lay a more contemporary target for satire – no less than the figure of the Emperor Napoleon III and his court in the guise of Jupiter (familiarly tagged as ‘Jupin’, i.e. Joops) and his entourage. The notoriety, as much as the sparkling music and witty libretto by Hector Crémieux, did wonders for the box-office takings, and in April 1860 the emperor himself ordered a command performance – and presumably was not disappointed, as that year he made a personal grant of French citizenship to the Cologne-born Offenbach, followed in 1861 by the Légion d’honneur.
Inspired by this success, Offenbach proceeded to tackle another classical subject, the story of Helen of Troy, in La belle Hélène. The librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy showed no more respect for their theme than their predecessor Crémieux, and fell foul of the censor for their portrayal of the Grand Augur, Calchas, which was viewed as an attack on the clergy. Pompous and hypocritical, Calchas cheats outrageously while gambling, and was at one point intended to fall into the water until the censor insisted that this was taking irreverence too far. Nor do Agamemnon, Menelaus and the other heroes fare any better; they appear as a gang of ridiculous blockheads who are easily trounced by the debonair ‘shepherd’ Paris (‘l’homme à la pomme’) in a series of word-games designed to sharpen the dull wits of the Greeks.
The chorus which accompanies Orestes’ entrance, from Jacques Offenbach, La belle Hélène, autograph score, 1864. Zweig MS 72
Most startlingly of all, perhaps, Orestes makes his entrance as a precocious playboy, flanked by two good-time girls, Parthénis and Léoena, dancing in to the refrain ‘Tsing-la-la! Tsing-la-la! Oyé Kephalé, Kephalé oh-la-la!’ and intent on emptying his father’s coffers in the pursuit of pleasure. The role is sung by a soprano, and its creator, the all-too-aptly-named Léa Silly, proved a major headache to Offenbach. In a situation reminiscent of Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario), a skit involving a hapless director and his two warring prima donnas which Offenbach had staged some years earlier, she antagonized the diva Hortense Schneider, a long-term star of the company who was cast as Helen, by upstaging and mimicking her, dancing a cancan behind her back as she sang a major aria, and so enraging Schneider that she threatened to quit not only the production but Paris altogether.
Hortense Schneider as Helen in La belle Hélène, from Louis Schneider, Offenbach (Paris, 1923) 7896.t.20.
Yet despite these trials the first night went ahead on 17th December 1864 at the Théâtre des Variétés, delighting critics and public so much that it launched a run of 700 performances. Among its admirers was the famous chef Auguste Escoffier, who created a special dish in its honour – Poire Belle Hélène, a luscious confection of poached pears and vanilla ice-cream topped with chocolate sauce and crystallized violets. Like the opera itself, it is a treat for the connoisseur – and certainly fit for an Emperor.
Susan Halstead, Curator Czech and Slovak
01 December 2014
The Two Sieges of Paris: more caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune
In an earlier earlier blog post I wrote about Napoleon III’s defeat at the hands of the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 as illustrated in our last collection of caricatures (Cup. 648.b.8) to be conserved to ensure that it is fit for use. Following the Emperor’s abdication, a provisional Government of National Defence was proclaimed on 4 September 1870, with General Trochu, the military governor of Paris, at its head.
Le plan de Trochu: seule histoire vraie du siège de Paris. Paris: Publication du Journal Le Grelot (Supplément). [27 August 1871].
This satirical print, Trochu’s plan: the only true story of the Siege of Paris, pokes fun at the General’s plan for defending the city from the besieging German troops. The main image shows Trochu clutching his plan and standing on a dish with scuttling rats: as the lyrics in the accompanying song put it, Parisians were reduced to eating ‘rats, mares and mules, and dogs in place of bread’. The smaller image on the left refers to the unsuccessful sorties (the French word means ‘exit’ as well as ‘military sorties’ or breakouts) that Trochu made under pressure of public opinion. The caricature on the right alludes, in an untranslatable pun (‘repasser’ means both to ‘to iron’ and ‘to go back across’), to the sortie of 30 November-2 December when Trochu’s troops crossed the Marne to meet the Prussians, but then had to retreat back across the river. The lyrics, composed cumulatively over time starting with the first verse in early autumn through to the following spring by a group of ‘well-known journalists’, sarcastically attribute every disaster – military defeats, starvation, bombardments and the eventual capitulation of Paris on 28 January 1871 – to deliberate manifestations of Trochu’s plan to be welcomed.
Trochu resigned on 22 January 1871. The new government, elected on 8 February and led by Adolphe Thiers, who had been a minister under King Louis Philippe, now tried to seize the guns that had been used to defend Paris in an attempt to disarm the city. Parisians fought off the government troops and kept their artillery, but this bungled attempt provoked the very rebellion it had been designed to forestall. A Commune (municipal council) to run the city was elected on 28 March, with the red flag as its symbol. The government retreated to Versailles. Its army, defeated by the Prussians, now turned its guns on its own people and encircled Paris. Government troops entered the city in the last week of May in what became known as the ‘semaine sanglante’ (‘bloody week’).
This pro-Commune lithograph shows Parisians fighting on the barricades led by a woman dressed in red (the colour of the Commune), in a pose reminiscent of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.
Règne de la Terreur. Guerre civile. Insurrection de Paris, du 18 mars 1871 au 28 mai. Ruines de Paris. Les décrets et derniers documents de la Commune. Paris: Imprimerie Beillet, [1871]
By contrast, this anti-Commune print depicts the defeated Commune as a dying ‘pétroleuse’, a scandalously bare-breasted dishevelled harpy, carrying a container of petroleum and brandishing a burning firebrand, with a petrol bomb tucked into the skimpy folds of her dress. She is contrasted with the upstanding female personification of the victorious army. The small vignettes all around the print show burnt-out landmark buildings set alight in the face of the advancing government troops. The incendiaries were alleged to be female revolutionaries dubbed ‘pétroleuses’. The two smaller images show respectively the Commune’s shooting of Generals Lecomte and Thomas, and the execution of the archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Darboy, depicted raising his arms in a pose recalling the central figure in Goya’s Third of May, in the prison of La Roquette. The archbishop, who was courageous and dignified in the face of the execution squad, became an instant and enduring martyr for the Catholic right. The government’s repression of the Commune was pitiless: an estimated 25,000 communards were killed, a further 12,500 tried and over 4,000 were deported to New Caledonia in the Pacific. Others fled into exile including the caricaturists Faustin and Pilotell, represented in our collection, who forged new careers for themselves in Britain.
The republican government’s bloody repression of the Commune made plain that the Republic did not represent the people as a whole and turned the Commune into an enduring Socialist myth. By the same token it proved to the propertied classes that a republican government was not synonymous with Revolution.
Calliste, L’Irascible…Le Statu Quo! (Bruxelles: Ch. Sacré-Duquesne, [1870-1871])
This satirical lithograph shows President Thiers as a monarchical republican crushing the Commune, symbolised by its red flag, while the moderate Orleanist monarchists, represented by the sons and grandsons of King Louis Philippe, trample on the flag while doing obeisance to him. The legitimist Comte de Chambord, grandson of the Bourbon Charles X, hovers above flying the white flag of the Bourbon monarchy: his rejection of the tricolour as the new national flag scuppered his chances of becoming king and restoring the monarchy.
Teresa Vernon, Lead Curator French Studies
References/Further Reading
Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune, 1871. (London, 1999). YC.1999.a.3641
Gay L. Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune. (Ithaca, 1996). YC.1997.a.1077
Help us raise funds to conserve this collection of caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. By making a contribution, you support our conservators’ efforts to clean, repair, and reback these precious volumes, making them accessible to users both now and in the future. Please make a donation at http://support.bl.uk/page/care-for-collections today; every amount makes a difference .
27 October 2014
Félicien Rops, Baudelaire and skeleton passions
Félicien Rops (1833-1898), painter, printmaker, and illustrator, was active in both his native Belgium and in France, where he moved in 1874; his vast and varied output included landscapes, portraits, and, above all, representations of modern life, often caustic and disconcertingly frank. A leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde, he is perhaps best known for his etchings and book illustrations of the 1870s and 1880s which, with their heady mixture of of erotic (or frankly pornographic) and macabre imagery, make him one of the great figures of the late 19th-century Decadent Movement, and an artist whose work often reflects the themes investigated in the British Library’s current exhibition ‘Terror and Wonder: the Gothic Imagination’.
His friendship with Baudelaire during the two unhappy years (1864-66) the poet spent in Belgium had a profound and lasting influence on Rops, and determined much of his later imagery. Baudelaire went to Belgium in April 1864 to give a series of lectures and to evade his creditors. Already seriously ill, plagued by money worries and a broken man, his despair there manifested itself in ferocious misanthropic attacks on Belgium and the Belgians. Rops was well-known by then as a caricaturist, his lithographs of social and political satires in the style of Daumier and Gavarni published in various Belgian newspapers and magazines, and also for realist subjects inspired by Courbet. Rops was introduced to Baudelaire in May 1864 by Auguste Poulet-Malassis, the poet’s publisher and friend and, like him, in self-imposed exile in Belgium evading his creditors. Rops and Poulet-Malassis were the only persons whose company, in the words of the poet, “lightened [his] sadness in Belgium”.
Images of skeletons are evoked in Baudelaire’s poetry and described in his art criticism (for example Alfred Rethel’s series of engravings Auch ein Todtentanz). They evidently influenced Rops who confided to Poulet-Malassis that he shared the poet’s “…love for the primary crystallographic form: the passion for the skeleton”. He was accordingly commissioned to execute the frontispiece of Les Épaves, a collection of incidental verse by Baudelaire which would include the six censored poems from the 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Les Épaves was finally published in 1866 with the Rops frontispiece illustrating the complex iconographic programme elaborated by Baudelaire. It depicts a skeleton, symbolising the tree of good and evil, in whose feet grow flowers representing the seven deadly sins. Angels and cherubs are flying high above around a medallion of the poet carried away by a chimera.
Frontispiece by Rops from Baudelaire’s Les Épaves (Paris, 1866). British Library 011483.c.19
This was the first of a series of skeletons that would feature regularly in Rops’ work over the next three decades, most of them direct or indirect evocations of Baudelairian themes, showing the lasting effect of the poet’s work. They include La Mort qui danse (‘Death Dancing’, ca 1865), and the painting La Mort au Bal (‘Death at the Ball’, 1865-75), both of which show a skeleton dressed as a woman and evoke Baudelaire’s poem ‘Danse macabre’. Mors Syphilitica (1875) shows the grim reaper masquerading as a prostitute in a doorway whereas La parodie humaine (1878) shows death hiding behind the elegant appearance of a young fashionable woman (another syphilis warning).
Félicien Rops, La Mort au bal. (1865-75) (Otterlo, Kröller-Müller Museum)
Félicien Rops, La parodie humaine (1878) (Namur, Musée provincial Félicien Rops)
Satan is also sometimes depicted as a skeleton, as in the two versions of Satan semant l’ivraie (‘Satan sowing seeds among the wheat’), one pastoral and one urban. The earlier of these images (1867, below left) shows Satan dressed as a peasant sowing the seeds of discord, in the later print (1882, below right), a gigantic Satan is crossing Paris, his right foot resting on the towers of Notre-Dame; in this case the seeds of discord, sown with his right hand, are women (a typically misogynistic image of woman as the instrument of the devil).
The two versions of Satan semant l’ivraie (Musée provincial Félicien Rops, Namur)
Finally, skeletons appear in various guises in Rops illustrations to literary works by, among others, Joséphin Péladan’s Le Vice suprême (1884). Curiously, Rops never illustrated a work by Edgar Allan Poe, whose prose works would have been known to him through Baudelaire’s translations.
‘Le vice suprême’ from Josephin Aimé Péladan, Études passionnelles de décadence. Le vice suprême (Paris, 1884) Tab.603.a.29.
Postscript: It was while visiting the baroque Jesuit church of Saint-Loup in Namur on 15 March 1866, in the company of Rops and Poulet-Malassis, that Baudelaire had a seizure which led ultimately to aphasia, paralysis and, the following year, his death. His collapse occurred as he was praising the elaborate confessionals of the church the interior of which he had earlier described as a “terrible and delightful catafalque” and as a “catafalque embroidered in black, pink and silver”. Four years earlier Baudelaire had an ominous warning, which he described in his diaries in apocalyptic terms – “I constantly suffer from from vertigo, and today… I felt pass over me the wind of the wing of imbecility”; he must have now realised that the end was imminent.
The Church, a masterpiece of Belgian architecture, has recently been deconsecrated and is currently being restored. A stone’s throw away, the Musée provincial Félicien Rops, houses a rich collection of the artist’s work. Its façade is adorned with a street sign showing Pornokratès, Rops’s most famous work, its rather curious putti bearing a distinct resemblance to those of his frontispiece of Baudelaire’s Les Épaves, an appropriate reminder of the poet in this neighbourhood redolent with baudelairian associations.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Italian and Modern Greek
Félicien Rops, Pornokratès (Museum Félicien Rops, Namur)
References:
Charles Baudelaire, Les Épaves: Pièces condamnées – galanteries – épigraphes – pièces diverses – bouffonneries. (Brussels, 1866). 011483.c.19.
Félicien Rops, 1833-1898, lithographies, gravures, dessins, peintures. (Namur, [198?]). YA.2000.a.15029
Michel Draguet, Rops. (Paris, 1998). LB.31.b.17754
Bernadette Bonnier, André Guyaux, Hélène Védrine, Autour des Épaves de Charles Baudelaire (Antwerp, 1999) YA.2001.b.1454
Bernadette Bonnier, Véronique Carpiaux, Museum Félicien Rops (Oostkamp, 2003) YF.2006.a.5513.
Bernadette Bonnier (ed.), Le Musée provincial Félicien Rops, Namur (Brussels, 2005). LF.31.b.2064
17 October 2014
One book, many faces: the Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano
When the French novelist Patrick Modiano (b.1945) was announced as the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature, many readers in the English-speaking world reacted with incomprehension. Even allowing for the notoriously low percentage of publications each year represented by foreign literature in translation, this might be understandable, as none of his books has aroused the international curiosity or controversy as those of Michel Houellebecq or Michel Tournier. Revisiting the same themes and employing similar stylistic devices, he has instead provoked certain critics to see this as recourse to a tried and tested formula or lack of imagination. At the very outset of his career, in 1975, Modiano himself remarked in an interview that he did indeed have the feeling that he had been repeatedly writing the same novel from the beginning.
There is no excuse for those with a limited knowledge of French to neglect his novels, as several have been translated, including Le quartier perdu as A trace of malice (1988; Nov. 1988/2400) and Voyage de noces (Honeymoon, 1992; YK.1993.a.1120). The more one reads, the more apparent it becomes that instead of rehashing old material for want of new ideas, Modiano is probing more profoundly into subjects of timeless significance and constantly honing and refining the tools which he employs.
Interestingly, for an author whose use of language is so subtle and polished, Modiano’s first tongue was not French but Flemish, in which he was raised by his maternal grandparents who cared for him during the frequent absences of his mother, the actress Louisa Colpijn, and father Albert Modiano who, despite his Sephardic Jewish origins, had evaded deportation during the Second World War, trading on the black market and actively associating with the Paris Gestapo. This clouded background influences many of Modiano’s writings, including the one for which he may be best known outside France: the screenplay for Louis Malle’s film Lacombe, Lucien (1973; screenplay published Paris, 1974: X.909/29206), which explores the protagonist’s involvement with the French Gestapo when he is rejected by the French Resistance. Modiano’s very first novel, La place de l’Etoile (Paris, 1968; X.908/17202), is the initial statement of a theme which so enraged his father that he attempted to buy up the entire print-run, experiencing this wartime story of a Jewish collaborator as a personal attack.
Some of Modiano’s books in the typical livery of his French publisher Gallimard
Throughout his career Modiano returns to the themes of, memory and loss, the fallibility of recollection, the fragile nature of identity and the many ambivalent elements of which it is composed. He sometimes draws on factual material, as in Dora Bruder (Paris, 1997; YA.1999.a.11146. English translation Berkeley, Calif., 1999; m00/17481), inspired by an item in a 1941 number of Paris Soir which set him on a search for a 15-year-old Jewish girl who escaped from the convent which had sheltered her, only to end up on a transport to Auschwitz. His characters struggle with amnesia or with troublingly persistent memories; they search for the families, loves and past which they have lost or remember only in fragments. Yet amid this atmosphere of rootlessness and displacement Modiano also displays a startlingly detailed sense of place, most evident in his vivid evocation of the landscape of Paris. Appropriately, he received the telephone call from his daughter announcing his award, the crown of a career in which he had also won the Prix Goncourt, Austrian State Prize for European literature and Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, as he was walking near the Jardin du Luxembourg.
It was a meeting with the writer and critic Raymond Queneau which launched Modiano’s career by bringing him into contact with the Parisian publishing house Editions Gallimard. His style, however, has little in common with that of the author of Exercises du style and Zazie dans le métro; indeed, he has been described as the Marcel Proust of his time. Outside French literature, though, one might compare him to another European writer whose work is tinged and haunted by the same feeling of loss and hallucinatory quality of wandering through a landscape which is now bewilderingly strange, now painfully familiar – W. G. Sebald. Both share an ability to act as the remembrancers and consciences of an age threatened by the consequences of an amnesia which is all too deliberate.
Susan Halstead Curator Czech & Slovak
10 September 2014
Before the ‘Miracle of the Marne’ – what if the Germans had reached Paris in September 1914
In August 1914 the German army broke through Belgium into France and advanced towards the French capital. French troops under General Joffre, backed by the British Expeditionary Force, met the German army on the river Marne (6-12 September 1914) and successfully halted the German advance: Paris was saved! Popular memory in France now recalls how General Galliéni, the military commander of Paris, requisitioned a fleet of Paris taxis, the so-called ‘taxis of the Marne’, to ferry reinforcements to the front.
The widespread belief and fear that Paris would be taken and that the city would be destroyed has been forgotten. On 2 September, the French government had relocated to Bordeaux in South West France. The US Ambassador, Myron T. Herrick (1854-1929), however, decided that ‘as the representative of the greatest neutral power I should remain in Paris and exercise all my power to save the art treasures of Paris from the fate of Louvain’. On 3 September, he had a ‘large number’ of posters printed in both French and German that he intended to be pasted on the houses of American citizens to safeguard their property. He then had a notice posted ‘in the Herald’ [presumably the New York Herald (European edition)] requesting American citizens to come to the Embassy between 4 and 7 September to collect them.
Sauvegarde. Avis est donné par l’ambassadeur des Etats-Unis d’Amérique que le local situé a Paris… (Paris, Imprimerie Herbert Clarke, [1914]). 63 x 40.5cm. British Library WW1.P/3 (1-22).
Schutzbrief. Die Botschaft der Vereinigten Staaten Von Nord-Amerika macht bekannt dass die in Paris… (Paris, Druckerei Herbert Clarke, [1914]) 63 x 40.5cm. WW1.P/3 (1-22).
SAFEGUARD The United States Ambassador gives notice that the building in Paris situated at – is occupied by Mr. – an American citizen and hence is UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. The Ambassador therefore asks that the Americans living in said building be not molested and that its contents be respected. Myron T. Herrick. Ambassador. (Translation by Myron T. Herrick).
The British Library’s copies of these two posters come from a collection of posters, postcards and ephemera formed by Mrs Albinia Wherry (1857-1929) when she worked at the Women’s Emergency Canteen for Soldiers (‘Cantine Anglaise’) below the Gare du Nord in Paris from 1915-1918. Staffed predominantly by British women, it provided food, hot drinks, cigarettes, washing facilities and later sleeping accommodation for Allied troops. The collection was donated by Albinia Wherry’s daughter in 1962 and is kept the Library’s French and Philatelic collections. A photograph of Albinia Wherry and a postcard of the Canteen are now on display in our current exhibition in the Folio Society Gallery ‘Enduring War: Grief, Grit and Humour’.
The collection of posters and ephemera at BL shelfmark WW1.P/1 (1-51) to WW1.P/5 (1-15) in French Collections has recently been beautifully and expertly conserved by the British Library’s Conservation team. Bernard Wilkin, our collaborative British Library/Sheffield University PhD student, spotted these two posters and their significance when working on a project describing this collection in 2013.
A pencil inscription on the French poster, ‘Given me by the publisher. Never published’ indicates that Albinia Wherry obtained these posters directly from the printer, Herbert Clarke. Herbert Clarke was an English printer and publisher based in the rue Saint Honoré, and a long-standing member of the British colony in Paris, so this is probably how Mrs Wherry got to know him. The pencil inscription on the German-language poster adds ‘printed in 1914 for use if [the] Germans entered Paris’ (below).
The Hoover Institution also holds copies of these posters which they date ‘1940-1944?’ It would be interesting to find out whether any other copies are held elsewhere. Of course the posters were never actually used since the Germans did not reach the capital, but they provide vivid testimony to the widespread belief at the time that the Germans would occupy Paris.
Teresa Vernon, Lead Curator French Studies
References:
Lindsay Krasnoff . The Lives of Diplomats: Americans in Paris, 1914 http://blogs.state.gov/stories/2014/02/10/lives-diplomats-americans-paris-1914
Thomas Bentley Mott, Myron T. Herrick, Friend of France. An autobiographical biography. (Garden City, N.Y, 1929). 10885.cc.8.
Réception de M. Myron T. Herrick… à l’Hôtel de Ville de Paris le 26 juillet 1920. (Paris, 1920) 10170.l.16.
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