Patrick Bade
Exploring the Marais, Part 2: Musée Carnavalet

Patrick Bade | Exploring the Marais, Part 2: Musée Carnavalet

- So we’re on the second leg of our Marais tour, and once again, I’d like to start in the southeast corner. There’s the Place des Vosges, beautiful Place des Vosges. So we walk across that. And then we turn out to the Place des Vosges in the northeast corner, into the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois. And we immediately pass a very ordinary looking cafe, the Royal Turenne, but I recommend it. It does a really wonderful French onion soup, which is, of course, a bog standard to have in Paris. But it’s not guaranteed that it will be good, and this is really one of the best I’ve ever had. And then we arrive very quickly at the Musee Carnavalet, which is the museum of the history of Paris. And this is situated in two very grand, aristocratic town palaces. This is the Hotel Carnavalet, which gives its name to the museum. And it then absorbed the palace next door, which is the Hotel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau. And through these very splendid formal gardens inside the museum. And quite recently, a restaurant was set up. I think it only is a fine-weather restaurant. It’s called Fabula. And friends tell me it is, indeed, fabulous and wonderful. But I’ve never eaten there because my very favourite restaurant, La Fresque, that I’ll talk about next time, is just a bit further along the street. So we enter through the main entrance, Rue de Sevigne, and into the courtyard, 16th-century courtyard, in the middle of which there is a 17th-century statue of Louis Quatorze, Louis XIV. And we’re stopping for a minute to look up at these very beautiful 16th-century relief sculptures by the greatest French sculptor of the 16th century. This is Jean Goujon.

And these show the four seasons. You can see spring, summer, autumn, and winter. As we enter the museum, inside it. Museum, incidentally, is free for its permanent collection. They only charge for special exhibitions. And you walk down this corridor with these very quaint, interesting shop signs from 17th, 18th century. This is a time, of course, when many, many people would not have been able to read or write. So it’s useful. It was useful to have these signs to tell people what went on in the shop. You can see on the right-hand side, there’s a a keysmith. And signs, and there’s an actual shop. It’s an apothecary from about 1800. The museum closed for several years for refurbishment. It seems to be a thing in Paris. I think you may know that the Pompidou is about to close until 2030. And I was very happy when it reopened to see that it looked cleaner and better presented, but was not really greatly changed. The main change, actually, was a whole new section of the museum in the basement, going back to prehistoric times, from prehistoric times up to the 16th century. So these are Stone Age flints, as you can see. And this is extraordinary, actually. This is a canoe that may be as old as 6000 B.C. So really, really, an absolutely extraordinary thing to have survived. This section’s devoted to Roman Paris and mediaeval Paris. I’m not going to talk about those today. I’m going to save the Middle Ages for when I do the Musee de Cluny, which is the best mediaeval museum in the world. I’ll, no doubt, do that at some point early next year.

And then we return upstairs, and they have a very fine series of period rooms. Well, actually, quite a few museums in the world, some on the other side of the Atlantic, that have these kind of Parisian period rooms. This is partly down to Baron Haussmann and his redevelopment of Paris in the 1860s, when 30,000 old buildings in Paris were demolished. And quite often, these rooms were dismantled and preserved and sold on. This one dates from about 1650, and it’s the Hotel Colbert de Villacerf. And this is a ceiling from a townhouse on the Place des Vosges, painted by Le Brun, who, later on, of course, worked for Louis XIV at Versailles. And here’s a detail. This kind of complex trompe l'oeil illusionism, very typical of the Baroque. And then there are several 18th-century period rooms, this one with walls decorated by Francois Boucher. And a very elegant, this is Louis Seize, so early neoclassical. This will be from around 1780. But I’m going to take you on the tour that I regularly do when I have people in Paris, groups of people. And so we’re going to go upstairs and we’re going to start at the French Revolution. And, for me, this is actually a very moving and fascinating object. This is the Declaration of the Rights of Man. This is one of the sort of key documents, you could say, in Western history, Western civilization. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was passed by the National Assembly and it guaranteed equality under the law for all French people. And that included, well, it involved the abolition of slavery, and it included the recognition of the rights of Jews, who were equal under the law to Christians for the first time, really in Europe.

So it’s very important for a number of reasons. And then we walk into the area of the French Revolution and we can meet up with some of the most famous or notorious revolutionaries. That’s Mirabeau on the left-hand side, who had suffered from smallpox. And you can still see the pockmarked face. And on the right is the death mask of Marat. I’m sure you’re all very familiar with the painting by Jacques-Louis David of “The Death of Marat.” And the pained face in the painting. Of course, it’s based on that death mask, although somewhat idealised. This is a model of the Bastille. And the taking of the Bastille, the storming of the Bastille, on 14th of July, 1789, is a kind of symbolic, key date, a symbolic date for the start of the French Revolution. And next to that model, in that room, we have a painting of a gentleman called Henri Masers de Latude. And he was a rather dubious character, actually. He was a real con man and a blackmailer and God knows what. And he is actually principally famous for having escaped from the Bastille, which was like the Tower of London. It was the most notorious prison. And you weren’t supposed to be able to, it’s supposed to be impregnable. You weren’t supposed to be able to either escape from it or to break into it. But as we see, as we saw, as we know, both things happened. He escaped from it twice. And what I think is rather wonderful is that in the museum, underneath his portrait, we actually have the very rope ladder that he used to escape the second time from the Bastille. Here is a contemporary painting of the storming of the Bastille. It has such a sort of symbolic importance.

And when they broke into it, there were hardly any prisoners in it. There were about half a dozen, seven or eight, I think, very elderly gentlemen who’d been in prison there for a very long time. And they were actually fairly happy where they were, and rather annoyed to be disturbed. Now, one of the things I really love about the Carnavalet is the way objects tell stories. And, in fact, when I was putting this lecture together, it did occur to me, you could make a wonderful small exhibition or put together a lecture purely looking at, say, 12 objects, pieces of furniture or other objects that tell the story of French history. Here is an armoire, a big cupboard. Was an essential piece of furniture in any French household, up until the early 20th century. And this one is decorated with what on the left is the taking of the Bastille. On the right is a scene of one of these great public celebrations of the supreme being that were meant to take the place of the Christian faith after the French Revolution, at least for a short time. The French have a very destructive element. I hope that’s, it sounds like a dreadful, even racist generalisation, but I think, you know, Parisians, shall we say, rather than, well, maybe French altogether. I experience it again and again living in Paris and just off the Rue La Fayette.

And every weekend, there are demonstrations passing, and they can often turn violent. And there is this urge to, when you have historical change, to destroy the buildings associated with the previous period. This has happened again and again. There are so many buildings in Paris that have been destroyed for political reasons. In London, of course, we’ve destroyed, many wonderful historical buildings, but usually for economic reasons rather than political reasons. In Paris, later on, there was the destruction of the Tuileries. Actually, when they had the gilets jaunes a year or so ago, a mob went to the historic restaurant La Rotonde and tried to burn it down. Shocking, really, simply because it’s a favourite restaurant of Monsieur Macron. Anyway, this shows the Bastille had become such a hated symbol of the ancien regime. And this shows the demolition of the Bastille. Another very key event, of course, was the oath of the tennis court. Just to give you a little bit of background history to this, the French monarchy, theoretically, had a relationship with a parliament similar to the English parliament, ‘cause we had our struggle between monarchy and parliament in the 17th century, with our civil war. And eventually, a balance was created between despotic royal power and parliament, which is meant to represent the people. Well, in France, after 1614, the parliament, well, the estates, as they called it in France, was never called again until 1789, the summer of 1889.

Louis XIV, in particular, ruled as a total despot. But the French government, the French monarchy, had got into very, very severe economic difficulties in the 1780s, partly as a result of subsidising the American Revolution. And they desperately needed to raise taxes. And they really couldn’t do this without recalling the Estates General. Three estates, there’s the church, there’s the aristocracy, and there’s the people. So they called these. This happened at Versailles. And when the people came, particularly the Third Estate, they said, “Yes, yes, we’ll give you the money you want, but we want some kind of rights in return. We want some kind of constitution.” And so Louis XVI and his advisors, they panicked and they tried to shut down the Estates General. And the Third Estate said, “Oh, no, you know, we’re not having this.” They found themselves locked out of the hall in Versailles where they were supposed to meet. So a certain Dr. Guillotin, more of him later, suggested, well, let’s go to meet in the tennis court. And they met, the Third Estate, in the tennis court and they swore an oath that they would not disperse until they had achieved a constitution. And so it was a very historic moment and wonderfully, almost like a Hollywood movie, just as they were swearing this oath, a summer storm broke out. And you can see that top left. You can see-

• Sorry. I’m so sorry to interrupt. There’s been some annotation done on the screen, I think, by accident. Is it possible for you to unshare your screen and reshare it? 'Cause I think people.

• Right, where do I do this? I can see stop share. Yeah.

• Stop share, yeah. And then redo it, and hopefully it will go.

• Share sound. Right, right, yeah. Share. Yeah, it’s gone. Thank you.

• [Host] Sorry about that.

• Yeah, thank you. Thanks a lot. So this is actually, David was there, Jacques David, the great painter, and we know he was there 'cause there’s a sketchbook including, actually, a little sketch of, can you see the umbrella right up at the top that’s been there? Because of the gust, sudden gust of wind, that umbrella has turned inside out. And he obviously saw this and he noted it in his notebook, and he included it in this picture. Ooh, I seem to have. Oh, that’s it. So Jacques-Louis David became a kind of key figure in the French Revolution, kind of minister for arts and minister for propaganda, we would say today. In a way, he had the role that Goebbels had in the Nazi regime. And like Goebbels, he organised these great rallies. And this is the 1792 equivalent of the rally, trying to raise popular enthusiasm. As I said, trying to replace the Catholic Church as the official religion of the regime. We move on to a section that deals with the fate of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and their children. They were forcibly taken from Versailles, back to Paris, and they were in the Tuileries Palace, but that was attacked by a mob. And they attempted to flee from France, but they were recaptured. And from then onwards, really, I suppose, their fate was sealed. So what we see on the left here is a painting of Louis XVI being taken away and saying goodbye to Marie Antoinette and his children.

And on the right, I find this a very poignant painting, actually, it’s of his oldest son, who would have become Louis XVII. So some of you may have wondered why it is that there is a Louis XVI and there’s a Louis XVIII, and no Louis XVII. Well, he was the Louis XVII. So he was taken away, and he was appallingly treated, horribly abused. I mean, it was a dreadful, dreadful fate. And he died as a child. I think he was about 10 years old when he was a child. So that is Louis XVII. This, as I said, if you’re going to consider French history in, say, shall we say, 20 objects, this might be one of them. This is a shoe worn by Marie Antoinette on the day that the Tuileries Palace was taken by a mob. And she lost her shoe. And it was actually found by, it was rescued, you could say, by a royalist supporter and carefully preserved as a relic. So there is a shoe of Marie Antoinette. So after this failed escape attempt, they were now imprisoned in the Temple. This was a kind of fortress-like complex, originally built by the Knights Templar, so mediaeval, in the Marais, actually just a few streets away from the Carnavalet museum. Very close to where the Jewish museum is that I’m going to be talking about next week. And there’s a section. Oh, why have I got him coming up now? Nevermind.

This is Dr. Guillotin, looking very much a man, actually, of the ancien regime, with his powdered wig and his lace cravat, and that slightly smoky smile that I talked about before. And his immortality is that he invented this machine for chopping off heads. And you may react to that with horror, but, actually, it was a humanitarian invention because previously, chopping off heads was a very messy, nasty business. According to legend, the Duke of Monmouth, he was an illegitimate son of Charles II who led a rebellion against James II. And they say that his beheading took five blows of the axe, and then he had to be finished off with a pen knife. So, you know, if you’ve got to go, it’s better to go in one blow, one blow, isn’t it? So he invented this machine. And on the right-hand side, close to his portrait in the museum, you can see these guillotine earrings. And I think the museum has actually kind of missed a trick 'cause you can’t buy replica guillotine earrings in the shop. They have a very good shop at the museum. But I checked, and if anybody is really desperate to make a statement, and where you would make quite an impression, I think, entering a dinner party wearing these earrings, you can actually find them and buy them on the internet. Ah, yes, back to the Temple. And this is a reconstruction, more or less, of the apartment where the royal family were kept in the Temple. At least all the furniture here was furniture that was in that apartment.

And you can see it’s not super, super luxurious and splendid, like Versailles or the Tuileries, but they weren’t living in discomfort. They had many comforts, like this billiard table. This is Louis XVI’s shaving bowl. So they lived quite comfortably up until the very end. Of course, Marie Antoinette then was taken to the Conciergerie and then she really was imprisoned in a small, uncomfortable cell before her death. So the French Revolution, on the whole, I think it, you know, really is something to be celebrated. And I would say, especially for Jews, it’s really something to be celebrated. It’s their liberation. It’s basically the end of ghettos, and the opening up of possibility for Jews, and not just Jews, any non-Christians, to be assimilated into modern society. But it was something that unleashed enormous destructive energy. And so there are things to be regretted and lamented, particularly if you’re a medievalist. If you love mediaeval architecture, if you like church architecture, it was a complete disaster. We’d had a similar thing in England, of course, with the dissolution of the monasteries, and the Reformation, led to huge destruction of what the French would call the . You know, we lost so much mediaeval architecture and art because of all of that. But the French did it much more thoroughly. There was really massive destruction. Some people were aware of this. And so many of the monuments and the artworks in churches were rescued. And a museum was set up in Paris with these works of art from destroyed churches.

Now, my next object, if we’re having our little exhibition of objects that tell a story, this is very splendid, isn’t it? This is the all the things you need for comfortable travelling, that belonged to Napoleon. So it must weigh a tonne, I would think. And it’s got different layers and, you know, it’s a very complex little piece of furniture, really. And presumably he had some burly soldiers who could carry it around for him. But this went with Napoleon everywhere on his military campaigns. Oh, here it is. You can see it with all the bits coming out. And so moving on to, well, actually this still, this is still . Napoleon, of course, declares himself emperor of the French in 1804. And we have two of the most colourful, glamorous characters of the period in these portraits. On the right by Prud'Hon is a portrait of the great diplomat Talleyrand. He was perhaps the most brilliant and celebrated diplomat in not just French history, in European history. So he comes from the aristocracy. So before the revolution, he’s very much part of the ancien regime. He then serves Napoleon very brilliantly. So he was obviously somebody with no very fixed political or moral ideas. He was pretty flexible. And then, actually, his greatest triumph, what he’s most famous for, is his representation of France at the Congress of Vienna in 1813. So he was representing the defeated country in the war.

But he was so brilliant at playing one country against another, at manoeuvring, manipulating, and so on, that France actually came out of that treaty remarkable unscathed. And then he was rewarded, of course, he was very much in favour, then, with the restored Bourbon regime, with Louis XVIII. And he ended his career as French ambassador to Britain. Very brilliant, very witty man. I think you get a sense of his wily intelligence from Prud'Hon’s portrait. And on the left is the most famous salonniere of the Napoleonic period and afterwards. This is Madam Recamier. She was a celebrated beauty, although she claimed not to be interested in sex and never to do it, which was possibly as well, 'cause she was married to a much older man, a wealthy banker, who was rumoured to be her biological father. And there are two very famous portraits of Madam Recamier. The other one, by David, is in the Louvre, this one in the Carnavalet. And in both of them, she is displaying her most desirable and famous feature. Apparently she had the most delicious toes. And so in both portraits, she has herself painted barefoot. So we move on to the Romantic period. Romanticism, with a capital R, is a cultural movement, shall we say? It’s not really a style. It’s a whole set of ideas and beliefs. Romanticism starts, the two countries who really get it going are Germany and Britain. And it only arrives in France, really, I would say, belatedly, after the fall of Napoleon. But it has a particularly intense form in France, I think partly coloured by the immediate historical background. This huge drama of the revolution and the Napoleonic Wars in France, conquering most of Europe, from the Atlantic through to, well, at one point, through to Moscow.

And so, as I said, the revolution and Napoleon had generated these vast energies. And then France sort of collapses in on itself. And there is this powerful sense of pessimism and that very French thing, ennui, ennui, which is very difficult to translate precisely. 'Cause if you look it up in the dictionary, it will say boredom, and it’s not boredom. It’s a sense of exhaustion, disillusion, that, as I said, is very strong in French. This section of museum is devoted, really, to the cultural life of France during the Romantic period. Romanticism, and I’m sure you’ve heard me say this before, big male hair. You know, we’ve got rid of our powdered wigs now. It’s natural hair, and the more, the better. And it has to look like there’s a permanent storm going through your hair. So here are two caricatures of the time, of Berlioz and Franz Liszt, two of the great figures of Romantic music, with very abundant and very unruly hair. And here, again, two of the most glamorous figures of Romanticism. On the right is Maria Malibran. She was the greatest singer of the period. A beautiful woman, a very talented woman, a great singing actress. Remember, I said, when I talked about Maria Callas, that she was by no means the first great singing actress. You know, if you’re going to talk about a prototype, it’s really Maria Malibran. Died very young, at the age of 26. Died in Manchester, of all places. She was up touring England. Manchester, of course, very powerful, you know, the workshop of the world, with Birmingham incredibly rich at the time, so I’m sure she was going to be paid very well.

And her rival appeared in town. And she was pregnant and she’d had an accident and she was in frail health. And the doctor said to her, you know, “Madame, you must not sing tonight.” And she was determined to out-sing her rival, and she said, “Well, I’m going to sing that bitch out town if it kills me,” and it did, I’m afraid. She died in Manchester. But dying young is all part of the Romantic legend, really. Think how many, I think there’s an interesting, I’m sure you’ve heard me say this before, there’s an interesting relationship between different cultural movements and longevity. The Impressionists all lived to a ripe old age, I think because, well, they were living a healthy life out of doors. And their whole attitude to life was probably a healthy one. Romantics, I think, probably don’t have such a, Romantics are like rock stars. They have to live dangerously, they have to burn out, and they have to die young. And if they don’t, of course, it’s, in a way, undignified. I think, you know, Wordsworth, Franz Liszt, Mick Jagger, you think, hmm, they might have left a better legend if they’d left while they were still young and beautiful. Well, of course, when he was young, Franz Liszt was very beautiful. This is Franz Liszt on the left-hand side. And when I take people around, I often ask this rhetorical question, I’ll probably get into trouble one of these days for doing it, but I ask the women in the group, “Would you go out with this man on a Saturday night?” And usually, most of them say, “Oh, yes, yes,” they would. You could see, well, he was very young, very sexy when he was at the start of his career. My next object that tells a story, this is a desk that belonged to Louis Philippe. Louis Philippe was king of France from 1830 to 1848.

And it was a prosperous, successful period for France. But his regime was swept away by the 1848 revolution. I should say revolutions 'cause there were really two revolutions. There was one in February, and there was another one in the summer of 1848. And once again, the mob stormed the Tuileries Palace. I don’t how many times that palace has been stormed. I think the first time was actually in the childhood of Louis XIV, under . And they broke into his office, and they suspected there would be valuable things in this desk. So you can still see the damage. Can we see it in this thing? The broken locks and the damage where they tried to break into this. Oh, yeah, there you can see it. You can see the damage above the keyhole to break into the desk. And, again, more damage to lever open the roll top. So we move on to the Second Empire, after the 1848 revolution. Second Empire is Louis-Napoleon. He is legitimately elected as president of France in 1849. He promised to be, really, a strong man. And, you know, people are very gullible, aren’t they? They will vote for somebody they think is strong, even if they disapprove of that person’s morals. And then he declares himself, again, emperor of the French in 1852. So, officially, the Second Empire is 1852 to 1870. And it looked like a return to a Napoleonic regime that would continue because he had a son with his beautiful Spanish wife, Eugenie. They, in fact, only had one child 'cause she really, she was another woman who really didn’t like sex. And she was actually quite relieved that Napoleon satisfied himself with a series of mistresses, as long as the mistresses behaved themselves, which they didn’t always. So they had this one son, prince imperial, and all the hopes of France were invested in him. This is a bust of him on the right-hand side.

And on the left, another object in my series of objects telling the story of France, is this incredibly splendid cradle that was commissioned by the city of Paris as a gift for the emperor. And it’s worth pausing in front of it and looking at it in some detail. It was an interesting combination of historicism, you know, with its classical imagery and so on, the swags and eagle, with modernity because it’s one of the first objects that uses, the silvery parts are not silver. They’re actually aluminium, which had only really just been discovered and developed. Here are two more pictures of this very, very splendid object. And you could see incredible richness with this Limoges enamel panels. This is the Tuileries Palace, which, of course, doesn’t exist anymore 'cause it was burnt down in the Paris Commune in 1871. But it was a 16th-century palace. But this was probably its most glittering and brilliant moment in its history under Louis-Napoleon. Napoleon and Eugenie put on incredibly splendid, gorgeous festivities. And as we’ve seen from the Olympics, the French are really, really good at that kind of thing. This is Baron Haussmann. And in case anybody is going to put a question about him, this is a question I’m often asked, was he an architect? No, he wasn’t an architect. We talk about Haussmann in Paris. We talk Haussmann architecture. He’s responsible for the modernization and redevelopment of Paris, cutting through the old city with these straight boulevards that are such a feature of Paris. He didn’t actually design anything at all. He just supervised the whole thing. And this is a painting showing, it was vast. And, again, thinking of the difference between France and England. Here we are, near neighbours.

On Monday, I’ll go back to Paris. It will take me two hours and 15 minutes, and I arrive in a different world. And these kind of huge works are just something that I think the British are disinclined to do. They don’t have the, well, there’s never been a government strong enough or authoritarian enough to push through things like this. But, I mean, Paris was radically changed. Not only were, you know, tens of thousands of buildings demolished, they were requisitioned, they were demolished, these streets driven through the old city. But the whole landscape of Paris was changed. And this, it shows there was a hill that was flattened and taken away, where the Trocadero is. That’s in the west of central Paris, where the great exhibitions took place in the 19th century. And we can see a whole mountain or hill being systematically flattened and taken away. And this is a painting of the vast demolitions in the centre of the city. Many people regretted it. There was, of course, a loss of beautiful architecture. But on the other hand, there’s, I think, one feeling you have when you walk around Paris, that this is the centre of the world, sense of grandeur, the sense of space. This is very much down to Haussmann. Well, another object that could go in our little display of objects telling stories, this is the walking stick of the great French Romantic poet Charles Baudelaire, who lived into the 1860s. Very, very influential. Thinker, well, wonderful poet, of course. And there are many beautiful songs that are settings of his poems. And famous also for his highly influential essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” which was really a kind of manifesto for artists like Manet and Degas.

And throughout the essay, he’s talking, actually, about an artist, and he only gives his initials, G, for Guys, the name of the Guys. So many people think “The Painter of Modern Life” is about Manet. No, it’s not. It’s about this artist, Constantin Guys. He was actually, basically, an illustrator who worked for the new illustrated, But he drew, what Baudelaire was saying was stop painting gods and goddesses and nymphs and shepherds and all that kind of thing. Look around you, just see how amazing Paris is and depict what you see. And that’s what Guys did. And this is a lady of the night. She is a prostitute. It was very shocking that she’s raising her skirts to show her legs. So 1871, 1870, there’s the Franco-Prussian War, where Louis-Napoleon, I mean, he falls into a trap set for him by Bismarck. So, Bismarck, the trouble was that Louis-Napoleon all bombast, trying to pretend he’s a strong man, but actually an idiot, who, as I said, he’s manoeuvred, he’s manipulated by Bismarck into this disastrous war. France is defeated, his regime goes under, and a revolution breaks out in Paris. And what you can see, the Communards, who actually pretty well tried to systematically burn down the whole city. And in the middle of this image, you can see the Tuileries Palace on fire. And then we come through to one of my absolute favourite parts of the museum, which is the period 1870 to 1914. This is the period of the Belle Epoque.

Well, usually more strictly, Belle Epoque is sort of circa 1890 to 1914. And people sometimes say to me, “What period in history and where would you have liked to live if you could choose?” Well, I think if you had lots of money and you weren’t too constrained by religious inhibitions, living in Paris between 1870 and 1914 would’ve been as close to heaven as you could get. This wall shows paintings with different aspects of life in Paris in this period. This painting by Henri Gervex, this is towards the end of the period. You can tell by the women’s fashions. This is just before the First World War. And this shows a luxury restaurant in the, it’s called “Pre-catelan.” It’s in the Bois de Boulogne. Do I have a detail? Yes, here’s a detail. It’s telling a lot of stories, this picture. And you can see beautiful, of course, highly corseted, expensively dressed young woman. The one on the left, she’s looking very, very bored. So these are, well, these are kept women, basically. These are . Very, very wealthy courtesans. You can see the one, she’s with a rather grossly fat, not very appealing, man on the right-hand side. So it’s a period. The Belle Epoque, of course, it’s very notorious for its pleasure-seeking, I suppose you could say, its lack of morality. This is one of the most famous male characters of the Belle Epoque. This is a man called Boni De Castellane. He was actually a very handsome man. I suppose you can see that. He was a prince and he came from a very ancient family. And basically, he sold himself, his good looks, his ancestry. And he married an American railway heiress, one of the richest women on the planet. There she is.

Sadly, rather plain, not looking very happy, understandably. She’s called Anna Gould. And I’m sure you know all about this period, where usually it was the other way around, like if you think of the Duchess of Marlborough. It would be beautiful, young American girls who are very wealthy, who would be, more or less, sold off to European aristocrats like the Duke of Marlborough. There were a great many of them. In this case, it was other way around. And he made his contempt, although they did actually have four children, he made his contempt for her very, very public, really. And he got through $10 million of her money before she finally lost her patience and divorced him. So it’s a period of seduction. And the painting on the left-hand side, this dates from earlier in the period I’m talking about. So this is 1870s. You can see she’s wearing a bustle. And this shows, again, an expensive courtesan. And on the right-hand side, a painting, literally, of a seduction at an elegant soiree. These are both on that wall I just showed you. And many delightful paintings showing aspects of life under the ancien regime. This is by Jean Beraud. Very exciting. Bicycling was a new thing, and particularly exciting to men because, women, obviously, you can’t wear skirts, voluminous skirts, and ride a bicycle. So it forced women to wear clothes that revealed that they had legs. And that, in itself, was, you know. And that was incredibly exciting. This is the period of the creation of the Paris Metro. Opened in 1900. It was not the first underground system in the world.

The first, of course, was in London, going right back to the 1860s. And the first in continental Europe, beating Paris very narrowly, was in Budapest. But the Paris system, very different from the London one, as you can see from this painting. The Paris Metro is in shallow tunnels, by and large, that run underneath. They could do it because the whole city is crisscrossed by these wide, straight Haussmann boulevards. So all you had to do was dig them up and you could have the tunnel under the boulevards. And the tunnels of the Metro follow the streets around Paris. So, for me, it’s less claustrophobic, of course, than the London system. But for people of our age and over, it’s difficult because there are relatively few escalators, hardly any lifts. And there are enormous numbers of steps up and down, and the intersections at places like Chatelet and Montparnasse-Bienvenue. You can walk for a mile in a kind of warren of tunnels. Theatre has to be mentioned. Of course, this is the Belle Epoque in Paris is the golden age of theatre. Not so much of writing for the theatre. A lot of the plays performed, his is Sarah Bernhardt, were very meretricious plays. They were really just designed to show off her histrionic talents. But she, and I’ve talked about her before, she became the most famous woman in the world. She was the most travelled woman in the world, up to that point. And she was the queen of Paris theatre. This is one of her partners and one of her lovers, actually. He was the nearest male equivalent. This is an actor called Mounet-Sully. They were the stars of the Comedie-Francaise in the 1870s, relatively early in her career. And he was thought to be the most beautiful and the sexiest man in France. And this little painting in the museum shows him freeing himself in his dressing room. So Belle Epoque. Art Nouveau.

Art Nouveau is a style that originates in Brussels, but it spreads to Paris by the late 1890s. And for a decade, it’s the style in Paris. And the greatest one, no, one of the two greatest Art Nouveau jewellers is Georges Fouquet. And this is his shop. Luckily, the whole shop, the exterior of the shop and the interior, has been preserved and reassembled in the Musee Carnavalet. So this shop was originally exactly opposite Maxim’s restaurant and bar. And so what happened was that, you know, the very wealthy men went to Maxim’s, and beautiful women flocked there. And the beautiful women would pick up the wealthy men at the bar, and a deal was struck between them. And the price for the woman’s body would be a lovely piece of jewellery by Fouquet, very conveniently. So you could pay, the wages of sin were, in fact, beautiful Art Nouveau jewellery. Here, again, is the exterior. And this absolutely breath-taking interior of Fouquet’s jewellery shop done by Alphonse Mucha. As I said, it’s a marvellous thing that this survives. So few things like this do survive. Here, again, is the interior of Fouquet’s jewellery shop. This is another very characteristic space of the Belle Epoque. This comes from a magnificent restaurant. And this is what’s called a So this is all, really, Paris was, I suppose, the sex capital of the world, particularly for Anglo-Saxon men. It’s where you went to behave badly. And if you had plenty of money, again, you could.

This is all part of the same complex, really. You pick up the beautiful girl at the bar. The actual business is done in a . You know, oysters and Champagne and lobster would be served in here. And you’ve got a banquette there for bonking, you could say. And then, of course, you can nip out and buy the bracelet later to pay the bill. Very moving, I think, is this collection of furniture from the bedroom of Marcel Proust, one of the greatest French writers, who, of course, chronicles the Belle Epoque in his book “A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu.” So the last part of his, he lived the life of the Belle Epoque in the early part of his adulthood, and then later, he retired to his bedroom, where he wrote this enormous epic novel. And it was largely written in this bed that you can see here. And he was very sensitive to sound, so the room was lined with cork. And there is actually a piece of cork on display, I put it in the insert here, that came from his room. And so he was living, more or less, as a hermit, but he was a passionate lover of music. And by this time, well, he was always a very wealthy man, and he hired the Capet Quartet, they were the leading string quartet in France, to come to his bedroom. And for a whole night long, they would play quartets to him, Faure, Cesar Franck, Debussy and so on, his favourite music. And as dawn broke, he got his famous housekeeper, Celestine is her name, I think, she would fry up potatoes.

They were served fried potatoes for breakfast, and he threw gold coins at them. So to evoke this, I’m going to play you a little bit of a recording made in the 1920s. Proust died in 1922. This recording was made in 1928, so six years later. And this is the Capet Quartet, the very quartet that went to Proust’s bedroom to play for him. And we also have furniture from another very famous workplace. This is the office of Gertrude Stein. You know, photograph on the right, you can see how it looked in her apartment in Montparnasse. And you can see Alice B. Toklas coming through the door. So the famous works of Gertrude Stein, such, well, most famous being “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” would’ve be written on this desk. Another room that I really love and can’t possibly miss out from this talk is this ballroom. This is actually post-First World War. It’s painted in the 1920s, but still has a very Belle Epoque feeling to it. And it’s by the Catalan artist Josep Maria Sert Splendid, gorgeous, sumptuous, kind of neo-Baroque as another detail from this. And we move into a whole section which is devoted to women. And Paris was, well, you needed the money, I suppose, but it was very open to women. Women could be much freer there than they could in any other city in the world, particularly lesbian women, women who were in same-sex relationships. So the two portraits here, these are by the American artist Romaine Brooks. And she was part of this very elitist lesbian circle, again, based on the Left Bank in, actually, it’s Saint-Germain rather than Montparnasse. And on the left, we have the American Natalie Barney.

And you can see the little bronze statue of a horse. And this is a reference, she was a great horsewoman. And it’s also a punning reference, really, because her nickname was l'Amazon. Amazon is a French word for a woman who rides horses, but it’s also a kind of a term for a lesbian, particularly one of a rather masculine kind. And on the right-hand side is one of her lovers, the Duchess de Gramont, also by Romaine Brooks. And so you could be very out as a lesbian in Paris in the 1920s. So, well, there was relatively, certainly in more elite circles, there was very little prejudice. It was something that was very accepted. And there were lesbian nightclubs and restaurants. And it was quite okay for women to dance together or to show signs of physical affection in public, as you can see from this painting. This is Suzy Solidor. She was, I suppose, the most out, the most stylish lesbian in Paris between the wars. And she had her own club, but it wasn’t, I mean, men could go to it, men did go to it, but it was principally a club where women could feel comfortable together. And I’d like to play you a little bit of, she was a chanteuse as well. She had this wonderfully deep voice. And her most famous song is called “Oeuvre,” which means open. And she starts off open your eyes, wake up. And then it moves on to , open the window. And then open up your silk corsage. And then on to , to open your blouse, your linen blouse, so that I can touch. And it goes, I won’t go any further than that, but it gets quite graphic towards the end of the song, about things being opened up.

• I want to finish with another very stylish Parisian woman. And this is Juliette Greco. We’ve moved on, really, in terms of time as well. Her great period was the post-war period. The period of Saint‑Germain, the heroic period. It’s the period of Simone de Beauvoir and existentialism and all that kind of thing. And she was really the muse of all the intellectuals and the poets of that period in Paris, before moving on to become a film star in Hollywood. This portrait is the last thing we’ll look at, but I want to play, finish with her voice. And this Saint-Germain, this is Saint-Germain-des-Pres, which was her stomping ground in the 1940s. You can see how beautiful she was. And let’s finish with her voice. And as we’re now well into autumn, we’ll have her singing “Autumn Leaves.”

• Now, I can’t see any chat. It’s disappeared. How can I? Share, pause. No, I still can’t see any of the chat. So I’m sure there must be some comments and questions. Can you-

• See it now? It should be at the bottom, in red, with a number next to it.

• Oh, I can see. Yes, yes, it is, yeah. Ooh, yeah, so lots .

Q&A and Comments:

“One of the shop signs appears to be a star of David, which…” I don’t know what that would’ve been, what that particular shop sign would’ve been advertising, so I can’t really help you with that one.

Yes. Red lines. Carnavalet. You should get a list. It’s sent out with every lecture, which has got all the names on it. So this is all about the red line. Sorry about that.

So, oh, let me see if I can get through this. “Gruesome earrings.” Yes, I know. As I said, it will be quite a… Yeah, oof, Karen, you are so right. Yes, well, I think, Karen, you have to say that his motivation was a good one. You know, faced with the prospect of an axe or the guillotine, I know which one I would.

“World-weary.” Yes, very good, thank you. Wonderful translation for ennui, world-weary. Jaded, too. Michael’s saying he agrees that Talleyrand was brilliant. Yes, well, there are so many ways, I think, you know, that World War II could have been avoided. Thank you, Judy.

“Comeback of royalty in the next century after all the.” Well, I think, you know, it was partly imposed on France at the. I don’t know if, in fact, if they’d ever had a vote, whether the French would’ve wanted the Bourbons back in 1815. I think it was the rest of Europe. that forced the Bourbons. And the returned Bourbons, of course, were never very popular and the French got rid of them quite soon.

“Militant, destructive. I know.” Well, look at other nations. People think of the Germans. Of course, the Germans are just, I never think they’re more wicked than anybody. They’re just more efficient and they do things more thoroughly. If you look at the British Empire over many centuries, it’s also been incredibly, I think the Brits are also very destructive, but in a different kind of a way. Oh, that’s an interesting idea because they don’t deal with ennui. Thank you, Karen.

This is, yeah, Belle Epoque I think it would be a popular period to go back to. “Gigi.” Yes. Colette, of course, writes all about this. “Gigi” is, that’s a very good book for getting the whole flavour of the Belle Epoque. There were method, there were abortion, which was not legal, but there were backstreet abortions that were very dangerous. And there were forms of contraception as well. Actually, going right back to the 18th century, there were methods of contraception.

Q: And this is Margarita. “Who likes the Metros?”

A: I do, on the whole.

Yes, I’m just trying to, there is stuff about the, not a lot, actually, really, about the Dreyfus affair. And, actually, it’s interesting, Cecilia, I think it is, there’s not overtly political, the display in the museum. Oysters, Champagne, purple velvet works for you, Karen. I think it would work for me as well. It’s funny, oysters, and not that I particularly like them, but there’s something about them. I know it, they’re forbidden. Maybe that’s part of the reason, the attraction for them. But there’s something festive about them as well.

Thank you, Nikki and Margarita. Yes, you have to go back to the museum now it’s reopened.

Thank you very much, Judy. Onion soup. Yeah, but funny enough, I had an onion soup early this year in a really famous, smart restaurant, the Vaudeville, and it tasted of nothing. So, as I said, an onion soup is quite a test for a restaurant. Thank you for all kind, very nice remarks. It’s very heartening.

Thank you all. And next week, I’m going to do the Museum of the Art and History of Judaism. But, again, I’m going to put it into its context and finish off with a walk out of the Marais and past my favourite restaurant, into the area of the . So thank you. See you again next week. Bye-Bye.