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Wednesday, 20 February 2008 |
Metrostop Paris -
History from the City’s Heart
By Gregor Dallas
John Murray Feb 2008 240 p. paperback
Village Voice €18, Your French News Price €16
The British-born, US-educated historian
Gregor Dallas has taken a break from
writing about how nations at war manage the
difficult transition to peace – the subject of his
earlier ‘War and Peace Trilogy’ – and gives
free rein to his fondness for recounting littleknown
anecdotes or well-known stories
viewed from a fresh and startling perspective.
He chooses twelve episodes rooted in the
history and scenery of Paris and connects
them with as many stops on the metro. The
connections seem far-fetched at times, but no
matter – the stories are good and Dallas brings
them and their setting alive. He’s the kind of
storyteller who keeps darting off on what
seem to be tangents but eventually turn out to
be threads in a pattern that makes sense when
viewed as a whole.
From the catacombs and execution
grounds below the Barrière d’Enfer – Hell’s
Gate – at metro Denfert-Rochereau to the
Villette, the site of the city abattoirs in the
19th century and the cauldron from which one
of the weirdest political movements in French
history sprang – the anti-Semitic union of
butchers in purple shirts and ten-gallon hats
led by the “cowboy” Marquis de Morès –
Dallas takes the reader on a dizzying tour of
Paris from the fifth century to the 1950s. On
the way we meet a bizarre assortment of
characters, from a Norman soldier named
Montgomery who killed King Charles IX in a
jousting accident to Saint-Vincent de Paul,
Oscar Wilde, Claude Debussy, Jean-Paul
Sartre, the psychoanalyst Otto Rank – even,
for a brief appearance, Adolf Hitler. Some of
the episodes are lurid, like the account of
Anais Nin’s abortion in her sixth month of
pregnancy in 1934, or the statistics about
abandoned babies and the booming wet-nurse
industry of the early 1800s. Others seem a
little strained: few art historians would go
along with labelling the sculptor Antoine
Bourdelle (1861–1929) the “inventor of
Modernism”, and the connection between
Nin’s affair with Rank and Hitler’s visit to the
Trocadero in June 1940 seems tenuous, to say
the least.
But Dallas enjoys short-circuiting history
to produce such sparks.
His inspired tinkering leaves the reader
with a sense of what it must have felt like to
live in the times and places he describes. As
you walk down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-
Denis in his company you catch a whiff of the
“effluvia and foetish gases” that indisposed
the Reverent Norgate when he trod these same
cobblestones (now covered with asphalt) in
1815. This is history you can smell.
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