We have just returned from a week’s holiday in Paris and Versailles. Before setting off I read the second most exhilarating book I have encountered since last Christmas: Rooftoppers,1 a novel about Sophie, a twelve-year-old girl in Paris searching for her mother. Almost everyone else in the story believes her mother to have drowned in a tragedy in the English Channel; Sophie herself had only been rescued by chance after being found floating in a cello case. It’s a book by the award-winning children’s author, Katherine Rundell. (I should explain here that the most exhilarating book of all I’ve read this year is a new biography of the metaphysical poet John Donne.2 The author is an Oxford don, a fellow of All Souls, the same Katherine Rundell.)
We stayed at a hotel in rue de Richelieu in the 2eme Arrondisement, close (as it happened) to the magnificently long building that formerly housed the Bibliothèque Nationale until President Mitterand modestly decreed that a new national library, the Bibliothèque Francois-Mitterand, be built next to the Seine. Across the road was the École Nationale des Chartes: ‘Grand établissement d’enseignement supérieur au service de l’histoire, de l’histoire de l’art, de la philologie, de l’archéologie et des métiers de la conservation du patrimonie et des bibliothèques’. This lofty description, spelt out on the wall of an actually rather modest building, was also translated into English and – though possibly not for the benefit of any passer-by who could read neither French nor English – into Latin. I’m struggling to think of anywhere comparable in England, somewhere that at least embodies heritage, even if it does not teach patrimonie; All Souls,Oxford, perhaps– or not?
It was sometimes unbearably hot in Paris – and when I saw water being sluiced along the gutters, I recalled my first visit to the city, in August 1969; then, I had deliberately walked in the gutters to keep my feet cool. It did rain once last week, however: a biblical downpour while we were having supper in the Brasserie Vaudeville, opposite the Bourse. This restaurant originally opened in 1918, just as the Great War was grinding uncertainly towards its end – surely a bold time to start a business? – and it’s somewhere I shall always cherish, for three reasons. First, the food is terrific. Second, it retains all its original and very stylish decoration: Art Deco avant la lettre (the term – but not the style – originating with the 1925 Paris World Fair, the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes). Third, since 2004 the restaurant has sponsored a distinguished literary prize, the Prix littéraire le Vaudeville, and photographs of previous winners hang on its walls. Food, style and literature united: ‘They order,’ as Laurence Sterne so rightly said, ‘this matter better in France.’3
In Rooftoppers Sophie criss-crosses Paris, looking for her mother, at rooftop rather than at street level. Taught by Matteo, a boy who lives among the skylights and chimney pots of the city, she learns how to climb, run and jump safely, how to navigate her way from one street – even from one arrondisement – to another; he even teaches her tightrope walking. These are skills that Katherine Rundell herself has acquired. In the Introduction to the novel, she says, ‘I’ve always loved being up high; I love aeroplanes, and mountains, and flying on the flying trapeze. I’ve always been shy, and I love the idea of seeing the world when it can’t see you. When I was younger, I taught myself to walk on a tightrope – I find the feeling of focus and balance and height it brings a miraculous thing.’
The rooftops of Paris are astonishing in their variety, especially in the ingenuity with which extra space is found for rooms in the roof space. Part of the secret, of course, lies in the ubiquitous mansard attic roof, a style well illustrated in Versailles – on a grand scale at the 17th century Chateau and, later, on a domestic scale seen on a series of small shops in the rue Royale. Though the lower section of such a roof has a very steep pitch, the pitch of the higher section is gentler: easier to walk or run across. When Sophie is just beginning to learn, she asks Matteo what is the worst type of roof surface – copper, because it is slippery? ‘Non,’ he replies, ‘Stone tiles, the old ones, from the old days.’ He explains that they are too easy to dislodge, and the noise they would make crashing down might give away the presence of someone on the roof. He prefers slate or copper, and tells her flat roofs are best.
I’m surprised Matteo makes no reference to zinc. Rooftoppers is mostly set in pre-First World War Paris, when zinc was already a regular choice of roofing material: it had been introduced by Baron Haussmann in the 1840s and apparently now covers 80% of all roofs in the capital. In 2014 an application was made for the zinc rooftops of Paris to be recognised as a world-heritage site, but more recently it is the professional skill of the zinguers, the welders of zinc roofs who have the knowledge and expertise to create these practical as well as aesthetic features of the Parisian roofscape, which has been listed in the inventory of France’s ‘invisible’ cultural patrimonie. I will admit, though, that welded zinc isn’t necessary to the plot of this astonishing novel. In the end, Sophie almost flies across the rooftops to be reunited with the mother no-one but she believed she’d ever meet again. We see them, finally, spinning ‘round and round until they looked less like two strangers and more like one single laughing body’.
On our last full day in Paris we took a nostalgic train journey to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, passing the University of Nanterre, which proclaims itself L’Université des Possibles. I wonder whether Katherine Rundell has seen this slogan; if she has, I think she’d approve: ‘Never ignore a possible!’ runs like a mantra through Rooftoppers.
© Adrian Barlow
Notes:
1. Katherine Rundell, Rooftoppers (London: Faber & Faber, 2013)
2. Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne (London: Faber & Faber 2022)
3. The opening sentence of Laurence Sterne’s 1768 novel without a plot, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.
Illustrations:
Fig. 1 A rooftop view of Paris looking towards the Eiffel Tower and the dome of Les Invalides. This photograph first accompanied my 2013 post, Paris, as I see it
Fig.2 Rooftops seen from ground level (rue de Richelieu)
Both photographs (c) the author
