Paris Journal 2011 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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It was a fairly simple apartment, even for the times. The servants’ bells in the kitchen, however, were a clear indication of middle- or upper-middle class status. The apartment of Auguste Comte, the father of Positivism, is on the second (what we would call the third) floor of an 18th-Century apartment building on the rue Monsieur le Prince. Classed as a historic monument in 1928, it was restored in the 1960s by Paulo Carneiro, a Brazilian chemist and ambassador at UNESCO. In April 1968, the apartment was opened as a museum. But it is a museum that not many people know about. It is one of those charming, old fashioned museums in which items are displayed in “vitrines,” wood tables with a glass enclosure on top. We think of Auguste Comte as the father of sociology. Born in 1798, he grew up in a France full of malaise following the Revolution. No doubt he developed his positive philosophy to counteract that malaise. He was influenced by Utopianism, and his work itself influenced Karl Marx and the British philosopher, John Stuart Mill – who seem to me to be very different from each other. His full name was Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte. With a name like that, I think I’d choose to go by “Auggie” or somesuch. Auguste came from a Catholic family that still believed in the monarchy. He believed in neither Catholicism nor the monarchy. So as a young man, after completing his formal education, he left home for Paris. Not unusual at all. He went his own way, but he struggled to earn a living. By 1826, he suffered some sort of mental breakdown and was treated by a Dr. Esquirol, known as a French “alienist.” In the 1830s, he wrote and published his main works on Positivism. He and his wife Caroline divorced in 1842, but Auguste had a longtime affair with Clotilde de Vaux, who, unfortunately, died from tuberculosis in 1846. After that, Auguste developed his philosophy into a “religion of humanity.” This he did in conjunction with John Stuart Mill, who interestingly enough also had had a nervous breakdown. The apartment’s entry is tiled in “pierre de liais,” which is a dense limestone that is not quite marble. It has one of those interesting little stoves that looks like a fancy column. The kitchen has its old hexagonal floor tiles, and the old ovens and chimney are still present. Bells high on the wall above the door indicate that there was a cook or maid to be called. A room off the kitchen was used as an office. The dining room is unchanged, and it contains period mahogany furniture that is elegant but not overly fancy. On the mantle is a scale that Auguste used to weigh his food. The salon, or living room, was interesting because of its plethora of silk-covered chairs and a settee, where Clotilde would rest when she came to visit. Portraits of Clotilde and Auguste hang on the walls. Both the dining room and living room had interesting clocks on the marble mantles. But most interesting, to us, was a phrenological head on the mantle in the living room. Nothing was mentioned about it in the flyer we received or on a plaque in the room. Phrenology must have influenced Auguste, but I don’t see any indication in what’s been written about him. Maybe there is something out there that I’m not aware of. His office for writing, called the salle de travaille, was lovely. He wrote at an elegant but not large desk, right in front of a mirror! I’d find that a bit disturbing, myself. In this room he met with his Positivist cohorts. He also kept there his personal library of 150 volumes, beautifully bound and enclosed in glass and wood bookcases. A corridor adjoins the salle de travaille with the classroom where he taught courses in Positivim. The bedroom had a nook for the bed, and curtains separating the nook from the rest of the room. The bed was mahoghany, in what I would call a sleigh style, but the French evidently call it a boat style. He spent much time there at the end of his life. He died of stomach cancer in Paris in 1857, and is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery. Throughout the apartment are vitrines holding items that belonged to Comte, and letters that he wrote or were written to him. The miniscule writing was amazing – due to the scarcity of paper, we presume. There were monocles and magnifying glasses used to read them. Pictures of Auguste and his colleagues are on the walls, and there is a beautiful bust of Auguste in the salon – it looks like stone, but is really plaster. I kept thinking how much the comedian/actor Bob Newhart looked like Auguste Comte. On to the Italian Embassy and Institute we went. This was a very grand hotel particulier that originally faced the rue de Bac, but now is accessible from the rue de Grenelle. The alley now used to enter the property was originally the road to the cemetery of Saint Sulpice (in 1672). But in the 1700s, Paris was growing. The new rich, our tour guide told us, were building their stately homes to the southwest of the city, along roads like the rue de Bac. The cemetery was relocated, and someone referred to as “le president Talon” built a house there in 1739, but his widow sold the property to the marquis Simon-Alexandre de Galliffet, president of the Parliament of Provence. As you can imagine, he had a stunningly gorgeous house built, and we got to see it yesterday. We arrived just in time for a guided visit by a young woman who seemed to be from southern Italy but who spoke clear, flawless, beautiful French. She also had beautiful, thick, long black hair. We loved this stately home, and the garden. And so we went from there to another grand old house that is now the Dutch embassy, which we’d seen before, and then on to the grandest house of the day, the Hotel de Béhague, which has been the Romanian embassy and institute since 1939. This significant property we’d spied from the avenue Bosquet and the rue de l’Exposition earlier this summer, and we were itching to see what was inside. Thanks to Heritage Days, now we know. It is fabulous – I won’t attempt to describe it. But if you ever have the chance to see it, go. In the middle of all this exploring, we stopped for a nice lunch (salads) at the Sud Café, 105 rue de Grenelle. Having done that, we didn’t really need dinner, so we stayed home after our long day of touring about. Our timing was good – in the evening, it rained. But we stayed cozy and dry. Sign
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Sunday, September 18, 2011
Phrenological head and clock in the Auguste Comte apartment.
Nook and
bed in the Auguste Comte apartment.
Stairwell
leading up to the August Comte apartment.
A
bookbinder’s sign on the rue Monsieur le Prince.
View of the
beginning of the rue Monsieur le Prince.
Back to
school supplies and cute stuffed kitties in a shop window along the rue de Vaugirard or rue Falguiere. |
