A Corner in the Marais: Memoir of a Paris Neighborhood Book

The author notes in the Foreword that "what has always interested me most in history is not the lives of great men or the analysis of the social, political, and economic forces that determined the great events, but rather the attempt to recreate a sense of what it was like to be an ordinary person living in a given era." Wow. A sentiment and a view of the past that is exactly after my own heart.

The author first saw Paris in the summer of 1949, as a Columbia undergraduate, and was immediately smitten. He felt he was "coming home" and for the next thirty-odd years he spent as much time there as possible. His second wife was Parisian herself and in the early 1980s, when they decided to relocate to France full-time, to a place in the country, they also decided to find a pied à terre in the city. What they came up with was a very small but recently renovated sixth-floor walk-up in a very old building in the quarter known as the Marais -- "the marsh" -- which was a run-down neighborhood at that time full of mostly-Jewish immigrants, but which had once been a middle-class district just inside the city wall (and which now has been rediscovered and includes some of the highest-priced residential property in Paris).

In Boston or Philadelphia, a home that dates from even 1700 is regarded with awe and is probably under the care of the local historical society. In most cases, it wouldn't even be a private residence any longer but would have been turned into a museum. Karmel's building, however, dates from at least the 1390s -- more than six centuries ago, during the Hundred Years War, and a century even before Columbus's first voyage. When he finally discovered just how old it was, he began researching the history of the building, the block it was located on, and the Marais generally, and he presents his findings here in a very readable and entirely fascinating way. Most of the building's history, of course, is anonymous, especially since most early records regarding fiefs and property rights were systematically destroyed during the Revolution -- but enough documents survived to cast light here and there. This is a especially true of what appears to be an auction of the property for debt in the mid-17th century, which was carefully stage-managed by those concerned in order to establish solid title to the property. He explains, too, the legal convolutions necessary in France at that time, and what sort of records were created as a result, all of which should be of considerable use to anyone with an interest in European history of that period -- and his somewhat bemused attempts to untangle all the layers of familial relationships involved will interest genealogists. It isn't a big book, less than 150 pages, but it's easy to lose an afternoon in the story Karmel tells.