Paris 12 Ancien - Quartier Saint-Jacques

Off the beaten track today: in search for Agnes Goodsir, then dinner with friends at their temporary home near the Eiffel Tower.

Breakfast at 8:15 - decadently late, but it is Paris and we both slept in. It was extremely good, suffering only from being in a windowless room. Then we set off around 9am to touch base with Great-Great-Aunt Aggie.

My grandmother was a Lorimer, and her mother was a Goodsir. Agnes Noyes Goodsir was her aunt. Agnes was born in rural Victoria in 1864 and was a painter. She studied art at the Bendigo School of Mines and Industries from 1898 to 1899, and in 1899 some of her work was raffled in Bendigo to partly finance her trip to study in Paris. (Sounds odd, but turn of the century exchange rates made it possible). She studied art in Paris and lived there from 1900 until she died there in 1939, although there was a break from 1914-1921 when she was in London because of WW1. Quite a bit is known about those London years because her three nephews - all farmers from Victoria - were in France with the AIF, and one of them wrote many long, eloquent and detailed letters about visiting his aunt Aggie in London (where he and his brothers met Cherry and her then husband) when he was on leave from the front. All three made it back home. When I was little I knew the letter-writer well: he was my father's Uncle Pat, a farmer well south of Nyngan.

Agnes painted light and bright still lifes, mostly beautiful flowers in vases, but was most famous for her portraits. Her subjects included Bertrand Russell, Banjo Patterson, Mussolini and Tolstoy, but most were of her partner, Rachel (Cherry) Dunn, One of the best of those was hanging for 45 years in the harbourside apartment of my aunt and uncle, Mickey and Rob, and is now on Rob's wall a little north of Sydney.

Agnes and Cherry lived at 18 Rue de l'Odeon, which was a 10 minute walk from our hotel. It was Paris at it's best: lovely temperature, cool breeze, empty streets except for a few people out shopping, bright blue sky. Even better, we found what we wanted straight away. No. 18 Rue de l'Odeon was still there, and the same (I am sure) from the outside as it was 100 years ago. It was the 1920s artistic heartland. A few doors up from their building, Ulysses was first published (at No. 22). It is just down the road from a theatre, the short street is home to several known writers and has plaques for people every second or third building, there is a typical French cafe on the corner ( as there was a century ago), and the street still has the odd bookshop.

One of the residents of No. 18 let us see the foyer, but we did not know which apartment she lived in, so there was no point going further. Anne had found a 1922 photo looking down the street from the Odeon Theatre… and it is still almost exactly the same, except that the roundabout outside the theatre has been replaced by a plaza, the restaurant is on the other side and the large metal sculpture in the roundabout in the 1922 photo was removed in 1942 and melted down to make German guns.

We strolled around the nearby streets and were probably the only tourists, even though it seemed like quintessential Paris. We then walked south on a very shady boulevard all the way out of the city proper to the Parisian Cemetery of Bagneux, where Agnes (died 11 August 1939) and Cherry (died April 1950) are buried. The walk took maybe 1.5 hrs, and was beautiful until the very last and more-modern section. The cemetery admin people had emailed Anne that Agnes was in Section 37, Row 13, Tomb 2. The cemetery was perhaps a square km, with 83,000 graves, but we found their rather darkened, simple cement tombstone very easily.

From Bagneux we caught a metro to Sacre Couer, looked down on the city and around at the teeming tourist crowd, then walked down the hill, past a strange hardware store where I bought a sisal and copper-wire brush to clean the mud off our boots, through the Palais Royal gardens, where Anne, Fiona, Alistair and Nicolas had breakfast each morning 22 years ago, then through the Louvre and back to the hotel. Very important to be showered and changed into our trekking best, as were were going to dinner at 7pm with friends at the Australian Embassy. More specifically, with the Ambassador and a few diplomat/academic guests.

Dinner was good. We had a truly unique view of the Eiffel Tower from the third or fourth floor of a rather austere Seidler building. Grosvenor Place in miniature. My university friend (the ambassador), her columnist and omniscient husband, a former academic/journalist, a former ambassador to China and his partner, and us. Some stereotypes, perhaps, but made up for by the columnist's amazing knowledge and ability to link the world together, and the journalist's amusing frankness about his French-government sponsored junket. It went quite late, so we were back at our hotel at 12:15. We took the Metro. Others headed for taxis, but the streets were jam-packed with people (a Taylor Swift concert as well in Paris tonight) so the queues looked long. It was not as if we were at risk: the stations were far busier than at 6:30 pm, and the Metro trains ran every 5 minutes. I am sure we were back faster than if we had caught a taxi straight away...and all those extra steps!

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