Paris Journal 2013 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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Noon! It was time to “go to church,” which meant
simply going to hear the “audition” of organ music that follows mass for
about a half hour. I arrived in
time for the very end of mass, so I joined the worshipers in prayer, then
listened to the priest give all the announcements for the parish’s next week
of happenings. I still think that
making the announcements at the end is anticlimatic. Much better to leave everyone with a
rousing or inspiring benediction, I believe. But this is the
way it’s done at the church of Saint Sulpice.
After the half hour of glorious organ music I left by the back door
and hurried over to the marché,
which was in its last hour of operation for the day. For once, there
wasn’t a line of waiting customers at the Belle Viander butcher. So I cheerfully greeted the butcher and
asked for a thick slice of country terrine, 300 grams of country ham (trancher pas trop fine, s’il vous plait),
and two links of boudin blanc
(white sausage). After buying a
couple bottles of wine at the quaint wine shop that opens both into the marché and onto the street, I made my
way over to my favorite produce vendor, hoping the line had dissipated. It had. I was in luck;
there was a romanesco. So I bought it,
a “rougette” head of colorful lettuce, and a couple of bananas for Tom. So when I
returned to the apartment, I was loaded with goodies, and Tom was
pleased. He dug into the terrine right
away. I told him that
we’d have to finish working at the computers and leave the apartment by about
2:30PM in order to accomplish our Journées
du Patrimoine goal for the day: a
guided tour of the famous/infamous Hôpital
Salpêtrière (often called La
Pitié-Salpêtrière). The afternoon
was warmer and even a little sunny now and then, unlike Saturday when the
rain was almost nonstop. When we left,
we made our way to the boulevard Saint Germain via the ancient rue Gregoire
de Tours. We walked briskly down to
the east end of the boulevard, and then past the Arab Institute, the
Sorbonne’s sciences complex, the Jardin des Plantes, and the Gare
d’Austerlitz. Then we saw the
pretty Square Marie Curie, a public park that was once part of the
Salpêtrière grounds. We walked through
it, and at the exit on the other side, we could easily see the imposing
entrance archway of the old hospital.
The front gardens of the hospital are meticulously maintained, formal
gardens, but the rest of the huge complex is not very beautiful, as you might
expect from a big old institution like this. We already knew
much about Salpêtrière’s history. Tom
knew much about it from the research he did for his book, The
Ivory Leg in the Ebony Cabinet:
Madness, Race, and Gender in Victorian America. I learned a bit by helping Tom with that
book, but I was so curious that I read more on the subject. Now was the
time to see this storied place. Tom
had forgotten how it got its name. I
reminded him that “salpêtre”
(potatssium nitrate) was a main ingredient of gunpowder, and that the place
was originally a gunpowder factory. It was Louis
XIV who had a hospital built on the grounds of the factory, in 1656. It wasn’t so much a hospital as it was a
place to put “undesirables” such as prostitutes, the mentally disturbed,
epileptics, and even just plain old poor people, to keep them conveniently
away and out of sight. It was expanded
and expanded until it could hold 10,300 patients/inmates. Those thought
to be insane were kept in chains. In
answering one man’s question, our guide said that it was especially the women
who were thought to be insane. That
reminded me of something that George Carlin once said: the reason women are crazy is that men are
stupid. Tom agrees. I’m glad he’s so smart. There were so
many prostitutes at the “hospital” that at one point, as the Revolution was
about to begin, many of them were shipped to Canada and Louisiana, where they
had to marry ex-convicts in order to populate “New France.” For some reason
I still do not understand, a mob of poor people that stormed Salpêtrière in
1792, for the purpose of freeing the prostitutes, actually ended up murdering
many of them. In the 19th
Century, some of the reforms in the treatment of the mentally ill began to
happen. In France, the leader of this
movement was Philippe Pinel at Salpêtrière.
The chains were removed from the patients. The Hôpital de la
Pitié was an older institution, established in 1612, that was moved next to
Salpêtrière in 1911. Now the two
hospitals are one. No longer just for
treatment of the mentally ill, the facility has departments for just about
every medical specialty. Many famous
people have been treated there, including Prince Rainier of Monaco, Josephine
Baker, Gerard Depardieu, Jacques Chirac, and Princess Diana. In fact, Princess Diana died at
Salpêtrière, following the car crash in the Alma tunnel. The hospital’s
chapel is one of its main tourist attractions, because it is an architectural
wonder by the same architect who designed Les Invalides: Libéral Bruant. It is austere, old (1675), and constructed
in the shape of a Greek cross. It is
also deceptively large; its four chapels can hold a congregation of 1,000. Our guide
pointed out the dark etching called “Souls in Purgatory” that some of the
inmates had created in one corner of the chapel. It was chilling. After the tour,
Tom and I stayed to chat with our guide.
She was perfectly fluent in French and English (of the British
variety). Her French, while it was
good, was rapidfire, so we did miss some of what she said during the tour. She told us that she’d been nervous about
giving the tour. We talked about
Charcot and his groundbreaking beliefs about hysteria and post-traumatic
stress. There were a few female
patients of Charcot’s at Salpêtrière who became medical celebrities as
Charcot made presentations using them as examples. This story was written up by Asti Hustvedt,
and was published as a book titled Medical Muses:
Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Our guide
pulled a copy of the book out of her knapsack to show us. “It is a Norton book,” Tom noted. I explained to the guide that W. W. Norton
is Tom’s publisher. She said, “Oh,
you’re a writer?” I’m hoping that
Norton will send us this book. Perhaps
there is something in it we can use for Back
to the Lake’s third edition. Our guide told
us that she works at Paris Historique on Saturdays. That reminded me that we intended to go
back there, because when we discovered it a month ago, the place was closed
for the Feast of the Assumption. So perhaps we
will see her again. We decided to
walk home through the middle of the Jardin des Plantes, then down the rue
Jussieu and the rue des Écoles. All
told, we were on our feet, walking, for about four hours. I noticed, too,
that for the Heritage Days tours we took on Sunday, and especially on
Saturday, there was much stair-climbing involved, and the pace between stops
was brisk. This did not bother us at
all, but I did note that these tours are not for the infirm. You must be in fairly decent shape to keep
up. We had enough
time back at the apartment for showering, dressing, and checking up on
messages, and then it was time to walk up to the boulevard for our lovely
Sunday dinner at beautiful Vagenende:
lobster salad, leg of lamb, and profiteroles! We were not
disappointed. We were a little
concerned about the two Americans at the table next to ours. She ordered the sea bass, which was no
problem. He ordered the sole meunière. Something went terribly wrong as the server
or someone was deboning the sole for him, and the manager came back to
explain that the chef would have to start over and make a new one. Oh dear. That took a long time. Meanwhile, the American talked about
Kierkegaard. Later, on the way home, I
asked Tom if he thought the long wait for the sole would have greatly
disturbed a Kierkegaardian. Tom said
if he really was a Kierkegaardian, it wouldn’t bother the man at all. As Soren
Kierkegaard said, “Patience is
necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.” He also said, “Most men pursue pleasure
with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.” Some things are
worth the wait. |
Monday, September 16, 2013
Sitting
in the Saint Sulpice church during the organ “audition” after mass.
Approaching
the entrance to the Hopital de la Salpetriere from the Square Marie Curie (above), and
walking through the hospital’s front garden (below).
Passing
by the garden of the Cluny, the City of Paris medieval museum, on our way
home along the rue des Écoles.
The
Sunday special is leg of lamb at Vagenende, on the
boulevard Saint Germain.
Statue of Dante on the rue des Écoles. |
