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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. This was of a different order of magnitude to Arthur Jacob’s 100-mile walk to further his studies. Nor was Paris the same walled city that it had once been. Haussmann had intervened and the emphasis now was on the Right Bank, the rue de Rivoli being the emblematic straight street according to civic principles. Albert Alfred Tindall is a less endearing character than Arthur Jacob but he amassed a small fortune and saw the firm of Baillière, Tindall and Cox established in both Paris and London as reputable publishers of medical books and journals.
He was thus able to send his son Bertie to Paris in order to study the French end of the business. Bertie was to lodge in the rue de l’Abbaye, and to stay for a year, recording his expenses in a Lett’s pocket diary, frequenting the Louvre, and walking everywhere to visit churches and notable sites. Whether or not these peregrinations were inspired by the loneliness and discomfort of his attic room, he seems to have cheered up once out in the street and in time matured into the sort of visitor ideally situated to appreciate what Paris had to offer a timid 19-year-old from Lewisham. The firm of Baillière, Tindall and Cox, which Bertie was trained to join, was eventually established in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. Both Bertie and his father lived into their nineties and worked to within a few days of their deaths.
It is interesting to note how modern maladies increase incrementally with the passing of time. Neither Arthur Jacob nor Bertie Tindall seems ever to have been indisposed. Bertie’s spinster sister, Maud, who nursed in France during the first world war, went to Paris repeatedly to shake off an alleged delicacy and in so doing became rather more robust than she would have been at home. She too, inspite of dire predictions, lived into her nineties. Rather more at risk was a latter-day ‘Julia’, who seems to have had a tricky mother from whom she was obliged to escape from time to time. The mother, ‘Ursula’, suffered from depression, which became progressively worse, and ended fatally. ‘Julia’ settled for a time in Paris, and presumably wrote this agreeable book, a tribute to past lives and to the city where it is still possible to negotiate ones future.
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