Gillian Tindall has had the ingenious and sympathetic idea of combining biography and topography in an overview of British visitors to Paris from 1814 to the present day — an enterprise of formidable research and enviable lightness of touch. Selecting various members of her own extended family, she traces their temporary residence in Paris and the reasons for their displacement. In so doing, she maps the various quartiers, along with deft reconstructions of the forces that drove these characters to seek enlightenment or advancement in the city that promised them both. Their time in Paris was instrumental in the achievement of careers that brought both wealth and satisfaction of a professional kind, and led to the widening of horizons in ways which could not have been entirely foreseen.
In 1814 Arthur Jacob walked from Edinburgh to Paris to further his medical studies, which took him to the Pitié and the Salpêtrière and eventually to Guillaume Dupuytren, who was to become his mentor and his inspiration. Even with the omni- present threat of Napoleon’s return from Elba and the resumption of war there were distinct advantages to Paris: restaurants were being established, and, then as now, the air was clearer and more beneficial than it was ever to be in London. That Arthur Jacob’s stay in Paris was a success is evidenced by his later distinguished career as an all-round medical dignitary in his native Dublin, and also by his friendship with the apprentice bookseller and later publisher Baillière.
Many years later Albert Alfred Tindall siezed the opportunities afforded by the newly established mass media to go into business with a descendant of the original Baillière who had befriended Arthur Jacob. Albert Alfred was that new phenomenon, the self-made man.
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