Desperately Seeking Charcot (1)

I love a good mystery, especially one that sends me inwards and outwards on twisting paths of discovery. This one started last November when I wrote about a house on the Rue de la Tour des Dames that I found interesting and attractive, but for which I had little information. One reader suggested that it had belonged to Dr Charcot, a famous name which immediately caught my attention, but which I found impossible to confirm. Later, I was contacted by the Head of the CLEISS agency, currently housed in the building, who invited me to take a tour around the inside of the structure. Would a visit to the house clear up the mystery?

What is the history of this house and did a Charcot live here? From this point on, the story becomes a tale of two Charcots, both called Jean and both Doctors. Jean-Martin, the father, is arguably better known today than his son, Jean-Baptiste, certainly in the field of medicine. Was this his house? The information I had confirmed a home in Neuilly and a residence on the Boulevard Saint Germain, but no mention of a dwelling in the Rue de la Tour des Dames. However, a quick check of the bible of Paris history, Hillairet’s 'Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris' confirms that this house ‘fut habité après son marriage par le docteur Charcot’ (was lived in after his marriage by the Doctor Charcot). But which Doctor Charcot?

Jean-Yves Hocquet met me at the entrance to the house one lunchtime and very kindly gave me a tour around the property. The portes cochères lead through to a garden and stables, today converted into a car park and additional offices, with the rear of the house featuring an attractive veranda. The Flemish theme seen in the brick and gables of the exterior is continued inside, with dark, mahogony wood prevailing on staircases and window frames. All the original rooms are today used as offices, but the original features, marble fireplaces and painted ceilings, are still visible behind the desks, computers and photocopiers. It's an interesting 19th century dwelling, but with little exceptional on display.

Mr Hocquet also confirmed a Charcot connection at the property, but could not give me any dates, and there was no traces of the Charcot name anywhere to be seen inside the house. It was fascinating to see inside a private building when many of my observations are necessarily limited to the exterior only, but sometimes the guts tell us little more than the skeleton has already revealed, and that was the case here. It was time to find another way to solve the mystery.

The Archives de Paris, Boulevard Sérurier, 75019

With books and websites there is always a concern about the reliability of the information. Are the writers merely passing on erroneous details from other writers? The only place that could truly offer an answer to my question was the Archives de Paris, a building which stores two centuries of documents on individuals, buildings and taxation. It is also a fascinating place to spend an afternoon, pouring over and touching heavy, official documents from previous centuries, trying to make sense of the often tiny, dense text inscribed on the pages.

I first find a trace of the building in a taxation document from the 1850s. It was seemingly built and owned by the Comte Leblanc de Chateauvillard, who himself lived at 60, Rue St Lazare which bordered the property to the rear. Apparently it was not always a salubrious building. A note in the document reads "Cette maison construite en 1833 est très mal tenue. Il n’y a point de concierge et les locataires demanagent la plupart du temps sans payer leur loyer" (This building built in 1833 is in a very poor state. There is no housekeeper and the tenants move out most of the time without paying their rent). By the 1876 survey though the situation was more stable. It was now in the hands of the Cléry family who lived in the house themselves, and a housekeeper is listed in the document. A much later document though, this time from the mid-twentieth century, gives me the answer I was looking for. One of the Cléry offspring, Marguerite, who would later inherit the house, changed her name to Charcot. But which Charcot had she married?

See also: Desperately Seeking Charcot (2)

Great Dames...(Part 1)

(Rue de la Tour des Dames, 75009)

At the eastern end of the Rue de la Tour des Dames near the Trinité church stand a group of elegant Parisian ladies. These are not the ‘dames’ mentioned in the street name, but a collection of townhouses built when this area was the most fashionable part of Paris. Known as ‘la Nouvelle Athènes’ or new Athens, the streets in this district were home to a community of artists, writers, actors and composers, who used their restoration wealth to construct neo-classical follies.

The Tour des Dames mentioned is in fact a throwback to pre-revolutionary times. The Tour (tower) was a windmill found in this area which belonged to the ladies of the Montmartre Abbey, situated further up the hill from this spot. This place of religion and aristocratic privilege sheltered generations of ‘Abbesses’ (another street name in this part of Paris) and nuns until revolution came at the end of the eighteenth century. The last sister was named Louise de Montmorency-Laval, and neither her position nor her age, nor even the fact that she was blind, deaf and handicapped prevented her from joining thousands of other female representatives of the previous order at the guillotine. Worse, she was condemned for having ‘plotted silently and blindly against the Republic’.

The Abbey was destroyed and the windmill removed, but the area retained a rural feel. Less than thirty years later, after the failure of the first Republic and the restoration of the monarchy, a new kind of female resident began to arrive and construction began again. These were actresses at the Comédie Française, the wives of painters or, slightly later, writers such as Georges Sand. Given the power to design and create, they built a small community of elegant, curved, sometimes brightly coloured properties, and enjoyed the limelight of Paris for most of the nineteenth century.

Today these streets are quiet, although some properties such as the Musée de la Vie Romantique and the Musée Gustave Moreau retain their original decoration and character. The other ladies have retired from artistic life and have been converted to the more staid worlds of law, finance and insurance. In the Rue de la Tour des Dames, these ladies look forlornly at each other, perhaps discussing past times when they were young, beautiful and fashionable before they were upstaged by younger rivals in other parts of the city.

These houses are still in many ways the epitome of the Parisian lady. Gently crafted, elegant and perfectly formed, they nevertheless today present a face of cold indifference to the world. Some hide away their charms behind fences, whilst others have disguised their interior behind softly painted facades. As I walk along the street and admire them, they do not even acknowledge my existence.

I know why this is though. It is because I am brick. I was born in brick, brought up in brick, went to school in brick, and brick is in my DNA. It is part of me, and sometimes in Paris I miss having it around.

(To be continued…)