Literature | Soundlandscapes' Blog

May

A Fifteenth Century Parisian Soundscape

I SPEND A GOOD PART my time recording and archiving the soundscapes of Paris. As fascinating as the contemporary soundscapes of this city are though, I am always thinking about what the city might have sounded like in the past when sounds were impossible to capture and to replay.

It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that it became possible to record sound and well into the twentieth century before attention turned towards recording urban soundscapes. Before that, our only source for what our towns and cities might have sounded like is to be found in literature – the written accounts of the sounds people heard.

The American writer, John Sanderson, for example arrived in Paris for the first time in July 1835 …

“All things of this earth seek, at one time or another, repose – all but the noise of Paris. The waves of the sea are sometimes still, but the chaos of these streets is perpetual from generation to generation; it is the noise that never dies.”

John Sanderson, Sketches of Paris: In Familiar Letters to His Friends (1838)

Clearly, John Sanderson wasn’t impressed with what he found. But contrast that with a description of a much earlier Paris.

In Chapter 2 of Book Three of his novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, also known as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo offers us a Bird’s Eye View of Paris in which he describes in fascinating detail the visual landscape of fifteenth century Paris from the top of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.

Vue de Paris depuis Notre-Dame

A Modern Day View from the Top of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.

Image via Wikipedia

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame was published in 1831 and it is clear in the novel that Victor Hugo was lamenting how the city had changed. About the Cathedral for example he says:

“The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic and sublime edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to suffer, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, or for Philip Augustus, who laid the last.”

But it is when it comes to the sounds of fifteenth century Paris that Hugo is at his most eloquent.

“And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb – on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost – climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold! – for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,—behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations.

Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germaine des Prés. Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs.

Assuredly, this is an opera, which it is worth the trouble of listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;—than this furnace of music,—than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,—than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.”

In articles for this blog I always include a sound, or sounds, of Paris that I’ve recorded, to which I add words and pictures to give the sounds an historical, social or cultural context. On this occasion, any sounds I could add would be quite superfluous to the words of Victor Hugo and the magnificent soundscape he describes.

I suggest you just relax, read Hugo’s words and, as he says, “Lend an ear, then, to this concert … this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest”.

Sep

The Sound Collector

The Sound Collector by Roger McGough:

A stranger called this morning

Dressed all in black and grey

Put every sound into a bag

And carried them away

The whistling of the kettle

The turning of the lock

The purring of the kitten

The ticking of the clock

The popping of the toaster

The crunching of the flakes

When you spread the marmalade

The scraping noise it makes

The hissing of the frying pan

The ticking of the grill

The bubbling of the bathtub

As it starts to fill

The drumming of the raindrops

On the windowpane

When you do the washing-up

The gurgle of the drain

The crying of the baby

The squeaking of the chair

The swishing of the curtain

The creaking of the stair

A stranger called this morning

He didn’t leave his name

Left us only silence

Life will never be the same

From All the Best – The Selected Poems of Roger McGough.

Mar

La Closerie des Lilas

‘THE LOST GENERATION’ was a phrase coined in the early 1920s by Gertrude Stein, the Paris based American novelist, poet and playwright, to describe the generation who came of age in World War I. ‘Lost’ in this sense didn’t mean disappeared but rather the disorientation, confusion and aimlessness among the war’s survivors in the early post-war years.

Among that lost generation was the young Ernest Hemingway who had enlisted as an ambulance driver in 1918 and was posted to the Italian Front where he was wounded shortly after he arrived. He returned to the United States in 1919 but it wasn’t long before a favourable exchange rate and the post-war spirit of daring and freedom lured him and his wife to Paris.

In the early post-war years Paris was awash with expatriate artists, writers, poverty-stricken intellectuals and political exiles with many of them congregating in Montparnasse, the heart of intellectual and artistic life in Paris during the 1920s and 30s. They became known as the Montparnos.

Paris. “The Montparnos”. Watercolour by Sem. 1928. Auteur

© Roger-Viollet Image courtesy: Paris en Images

Life for these Montparnos centred around the Montparnasse cafés and particularly Le Dôme, La Rotonde, Le Select, and La Coupole, all located in boulevard du Montparnasse.

In his novel, Les Montparnos, published in 1924, Michel Georges-Michel says:

“What seduced them [the Montparnos] was the café life and the café-sitting, a free and open style of living that they didn’t know either in London or anywhere in Puritanical America; it was an international bazaar, a county fair, a round-robin dance of the Rotonde, the Dôme, the Parnasse where all hours of the day a person could indiscriminately work, drink, play the piano (on Sunday, no less) – even with women one didn’t know, who freely offered to make one’s acquaintance simply for the fun of seeing an American artist close up, or, if they weren’t quite so spontaneously free, then some milk for their hunger, a couple of shots of liquor for their boredom …”

Ernest and Hadley Hemingway arrived in Paris in December 1921 and, after a couple of false starts, they moved to an apartment in rue Notre-Dame des Champs in early 1924. Hemingway worked as a journalist but after their move to rue Notre-Dame des Champs there were some particularly hungry months when he gave up journalism and tried his hand at writing short stories.

While most of the literary crowd were to be found at Le Dôme, La Rotonde, Le Select, or La Coupole, when he wanted to work undisturbed Hemingway preferred a café further along boulevard du Montparnasse closer to his lodgings – La Closerie des Lilas.

Originally a stop on the main coach route out of Paris, La Closerie des Lilas was opened in 1847 on the corner of boulevard du Montparnasse and boulevard St. Michel, next to rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and l’avenue de l’Observatoire. In the late 19th-century, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Émile Zola, Paul Cezanne and Théophile Gautier were frequent visitors and, at the turn of the 20^th century, it became a favoured literary salon for the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire.

In A Moveable Feast, a memoir about his years as a struggling, young, expatriate journalist and writer in Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway says:

“The Closerie des Lilas was the nearest good café when we lived in the flat over the sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and it was one of the first best cafés in Paris. It was warm inside in the winter and in the spring and fall it was very fine outside with the tables under the shade of the trees on the side where the statue of Marshal Ney was, and the square, regular tables under the big awnings along the boulevard.”

A Moveable Feast, p. 81

It was at one of the tables under the shade of the trees that F. Scott Fitzgerald read the manuscript of The Great Gatsby to Hemingway.

I called into La Closerie des Lilas at around three o’clock in the afternoon as the last of the lunch guests were leaving and before the evening diners arrived. I opted for a seat in the corner under the glass roof of the brasserie. When Hemingway was here, he would sit at a table to the right of the bar in the mornings while in the late afternoon he chose a corner table with the low light from the west coming in over his shoulder. He would most likely have ordered his customary café crème as he worked on the first draft of his novel, The Sun Also Rises, a draft he completed here.

Inside La Closerie des Lilas:

Sitting in my corner seat amidst the gentle hum of La Closerie des Lilas I couldn’t help thinking about Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation. Hemingway thought about it too; he used the phrase as one of two contrasting epigraphs for The Sun Also Rises:

“You are all a lost generation”

– Gertrude Stein in Conversation

“What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.”

– Ecclesiastes

Oct

The Last Time I Saw Paris – Elliot Paul

ELLIOT PAUL, AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST, first walked into the rue de la Huchette in the summer of 1923. “There,” he wrote, “I found Paris”.

The rue de la Huchette looking to the east

The Last Time I Saw Paris is a memoir by Elliot Paul of his time in Paris between the First and Second World Wars. For most of that time, he worked as a journalist for the Paris Herald (now the International Herald Tribune) and he lived in the rue de la Huchette.

In the book, Paul paints an absorbing picture of daily life in the rue de la Huchette bringing together a cast of characters, from the stately Monsieur de Malancourt to l’Hibou, the tramp, from the culturally precocious Hyacinth to a flock of prostitutes. He weaves their friendships and enmities, culture and way of life into a rich and compelling tapestry.

The rue de la Huchette looking to the west

Today, the rue de la Huchette is a street with more gift shops than you could shake a stick at, more restaurants per square metre than anywhere else in Paris, most of them Greek, it’s a street constantly awash with tourists and it has perhaps the best jazz club in town.

Having read the book, I thought it would be interesting to follow in Elliot Paul’s footsteps and explore the rue de la Huchette.

Early afternoon sounds of the rue de la Huchette:

Rue de la Huchette by Eugène Atget

“The rue de la Huchette, in time and space, had a beginning, a middle and an ending. Centuries ago, when Paris was a walled city on the Île de la Cité and cows were pastured in what is now the place St. Germain, some of the first Parisians to quit the fortified island area settled along the left bank of the Seine. The rue de la Huchette runs parallel to the river, just a few yards south of the quai. No one seems to be clear about the meaning of its name, least of all the modern inhabitants.”