Between 2009 and 2011, I was engaged in research into the background of a large set of books, dating from the 1870s, buried away in the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne. The Library was unaware that the books constituted a set, even though there were roughly 170 volumes, and many of these volumes are very large indeed. The reason for the mystery was that the books covered a diverse range of topics and had therefore been scattered around the collection. The common factors were that all books related, in some way, to Paris, all had a similar binding and, on scrutiny, all had the imprint of the Imperial, and subsequently National publisher.
Although not always clear, the books seemed to come under the series title of l’Histoire générale de Paris and had been gifted to the collection by the French mission who attended the 1880 International Exhibition in Melbourne. Beyond that, further information was simply not available, presumably due to the loss of Melbourne’s archives in a major fire in the 1950s.
So, with my dismal French language skills, I travelled twice to Paris in an attempt to discover more detail. Spent many weeks in the Archives Nationales, the Bibliothèque National de France and the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, as well as numerous smaller libraries and archives. And while I was able to find much more about how the books arrived in Australia, I could find nothing about what the books actually were and what they represented for France.
It was a few days before I was due to leave Paris for the second time, having nearly given up hope, that I received a message from the office of the Director of the Musée Carnavalet, Jean-Marc Léri. The message was simple. It said ‘The Director knows what the books are and would like to speak to you.‘
Jean-Marc Léri
photo: Scanpix / Margus Ansu / Postimees
And so, two days later, I found myself in the Director’s office in the attic of this most extraordinary museum in the centre of Paris, in the Marais. The conversation is not just about the books, but about the fragility of memory and the determined historiography of one of the world’s most culturally rich cities.
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Detail of one of the maps from the Atlas des ancient plans de Paris which was published in 1880.
It’s a reproduction of the Plan de Vassilieu de Nicolay, originally created in 1609.