BOOK OF THE DAY: ANNE HAVERTYreviews Footprints In Paris: A Few Streets, A Few LivesBy Gillian Tindall Chatto Windus 350pp, £17.99
PARIS, SO central to western culture and history, is full of well-known ghosts. Gillian Tindall, a devotee of the city since her youth, was surprised to discover that some of her own ancestral ghosts walk its streets and, history enthusiast that she is, constructs the story of the city around them.
The first was her great-great-grandfather and an Irishman, not a notable in Paris but important in Ireland. He was Arthur Jacob, a medical doctor (no relation apparently to the biscuit Jacobs!) from Portlaoise, then Maryborough, where his father founded the first county infirmary. In 1814, the young Arthur, walking all the way from Edinburgh, spent a year in Paris inspecting the practice of medicine there.
Tindall can only speculate on how he found the city, on whether it became a “place of dreams, a personal other place” for him as it would become for her. Arthur brought home no Paris diaries or wayward dreams; but he did bring a new-fangled pulse-glass (now on display in the College of Surgeons) and an interest in ophthalmology.
He became an enterprising eye surgeon in Dublin, an associate of the only other eye specialist of the time, Sir William Wilde, father of Oscar. Arthur Jacob did not approve of the “showy” and rather disreputable Sir William and his poetising wife. The Jacobs were an earnest and respectable lot.
That Paris sojourn was important, however, in another way. A book collector, Arthur got to know the publisher Baillière in Paris. Baillière, later Baillière Tindall Cox, would publish his E ssays, Anatomical, Zoological, Surgical and Miscellaneous, and would provide a Tindall husband, Bertie, for his granddaughter, Blanche Jacob.
Bertie Tindall, publisher and bookseller, was a more typical Paris denizen. A tender young man who chafed at his bourgeois existence, he kept a diary of his stay, full of romantic yearnings prefaced by scrupulous accounts of his daily expenditure on coffee and tram fares. This English branch of the family was predictably more caught up than the Irish in events in France. A brother of Bertie’s died at Passchendaele while a sister, Maud, nursed the war-wounded in Aix-les-Bains (Aches and Pains to the soldiers). Maud nurtured a lifelong but mysterious relationship with Paris on which her grand-niece can only speculate. In the post-war dearth of men, a coterie of female friends perhaps?
What is slightly disappointing about this book is that these lives that are its scaffolding remain objects of speculation. They were not expressive people – even in Bertie’s diaries you must read between his costive lines. Nor were their lives notable or tragic enough to be compensatory. For whole chapters they disappear as Tindall describes the ever-changing city ebbing and flowing around them.
She does this very well though. And it’s fascinating to those of us Irish whose locus in Paris has come to be the area around the invaluable Centre Culturel Irlandais, since the primary haunt of her ancestors and herself is the Latin Quarter.
Those familiar places, the Panthéon, the Place Maubert, the rue de la Montagne-Sainte- Geneviève, Saint Germain and the little streets around them are really her principal characters, de- and re-constructed as history shifts. Tindall has a passion for this oldest part of Paris and shows how fragile is its continuing survival.
Oddly, her most known and significant ghost is kept until last. This is her mother, Ursula, who cherished her own girlish memories of Paris and whose suicide was the instrument that sent the traumatised young Tindall there. She provides a stiffly written, painfully explosive ending; a ghost who needs a whole, and different kind of book, to herself.
Anne Haverty is a writer whose most recent novel is The Free And Easy (Vintage)