The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (21 page)

I could see that. In front of me was a book called
Marijuanaland
.

France has hundreds, maybe thousands, of small publishing houses; Gilberte maintains connections with many of them. “They can no longer sell to the big chains,” she said. “They do great work; we want to welcome them. We’re getting old and we have no time to lose.”

I asked her to identify the jewels in her shop. “Oh, there are so many I couldn’t possibly tell you,” she said. But then she rattled off a few:
Les impardonnables
by the Italian Cristina Campo, French translations of poems by the American Charles Olson, minor works by Henry Miller and James Joyce. Clearly, one person’s castoffs are another’s jewels.

Given all the disruptions to publishing, Gilberte has to wonder whether jewels outnumber castoffs. She survives now because her space is rent-controlled. “I will hold on, but who knows how long?” she asked. “And what will happen after I’m gone?

“I have the impression that this is a bookstore like no other. What a loss if it becomes a charcuterie.”

THE ARTISAN WITH THE GOLDEN TOUCH

. . .

I’m not an artist. I’m an artisan. I invent nothing. . . .
  If you can see the restoration, then it is a failure.

—L
AURENCE
G
ILLERY,
ARTISAN RESTORER
   

N
EAR THE HIGHEST POINT OF THE RUE DES MARTYRS,
at the foot of the steep incline toward Sacré-Coeur, sits a shop that belongs to the past. “
Dorure s/Bois
” reads the sign, painted in rich red on the wooden storefront. It loosely translates as “Gilding on Wood” and advertises a service: painting gilt on wood. The shop is always locked; you must ring to be let in. Because there are no fixed hours, you never know when the white metal shutters will be closed.

A mirror in a hand-carved gold frame hangs above the door. The large picture window displays assorted objects that have been restored, including mirrors set in gold-leaf frames adorned in waves and curves. A cherub with uplifted arms watches over Jesus on the cross. In smaller letters, painted in yellow on the pic
ture window, the shopkeeper advertises a second, more obscure service: “Putting mercury barometers in working order.”

Behind the window display, a small showroom has more mirrors framed in gold. Rows of antique barometers hang on one wall. Everything is for sale, but no prices are displayed. There is no desk; the only sign of administrative organization is a small round table with a telephone, a notebook, and a few pens. Parked next to the table is an object that seems out of place: a silver-gray motorcycle, big and flashy, with the brand name Otello. A doorway at the back of the showroom opens into what looks like a workroom. Sometimes a slim woman of indeterminate age dressed a long white smock bends over a counter, working in solitude.

During my first two years in the neighborhood, I never went in. I don’t know anything about layering gold leaf, and I wasn’t in the market for a mercury barometer. But I was curious about the woman in the smock.

Eventually I rang the bell, and she answered the door. Her skin was lined with fine wrinkles, her dark hair pinned into a bun. A small gold crucifix hung from a chain around her neck. She wore jeans and a flowered shirt. I saw flecks of gold leaf on her hands. She could have been forty—or sixty (she was actually fifty).

Her name was Laurence Gillery, and she greeted me with a musical
bonjour
and a smile so broad that it crinkled the outer edges of her cheeks and eyes. She escorted me into her workroom, where light manages to penetrate an industrial skylight dark with years of soot. Simple tools hang on the walls: screwdrivers, scissors, chisels, saws, glue, paint chips, odd-shaped pieces of bubble wrap. She keeps wine corks in a box that once
held a round of Camembert cheese. “You never know when you might need a piece of cork,” she said.

In one corner I saw a modern store-bought barometer with springs but no mercury. Why did she have it, I wanted to know.

She laughed: “It’s the only one that works!”

Gilding old frames and mirrors, she said, is the easy part of her job. She seals any cracks with glue, hand-sculpts missing pieces from odd bits of wood, and applies gold leaf. The gilding begins with ten layers of a primer coat made from rabbit-skin glue and a special white paint. After remodeling and chiseling the carved moldings, she applies an ocher-tinted glue to conceal places not covered by the gold leaf. Then come three layers of glue and rust-colored clay.

She polishes the object with a stiff brush and fine sandpaper, attaches the sheer gold leaves with a sable paintbrush, and burnishes some—but not all—of the gold with a curved agate stone. Finally, she applies a patina that blends in with the gold leaf. The goal is not perfection, since that would make the object look new.

“Gilded wood needs to be seen from a distance,” she said. “If you look at it closely, you will see stains and worn spots. That’s the point. If it’s perfect, it’s horrible.”

Although Gillery enjoys restoring gilded wood, it holds neither mystery nor challenge for her, and many other artisans do it well. Barometers are different. She proclaimed proudly that she is the only artisan in Paris who repairs mercury barometers. “I am a fossil,” she said.

Old barometers are hard to find but are valued by collectors and interior decorators as objects for display. Some come to Gillery from antiques dealers; others from clients who inherit them, sometimes reluctantly, as they have no idea what to do with them.
None of the dozens displayed on the walls functions properly. Restoring a barometer to working condition requires such a large investment of time that Gillery doesn’t begin until she has a buyer.

An eighteenth-century barometer with a wooden face nearly three feet wide rested on the counter. It looked unfixable to me, but a Swiss businessman had bought it recently for about 5,000 euros.

“Now I’m going to show you how to make it work,” she said.

AN ITALIAN, EVANGELISTA TORRICELLI,
invented the mercury barometer in 1643. It has a glass tube with a stopper at the top and a mercury-filled reservoir at the base. The weight of the mercury creates a vacuum in the upper length of the tube. When atmospheric pressure rises, forecasting sunny, dry weather, the mercury rises. Falling mercury and pressure precede bad weather.

Mercury is toxic and especially damaging to the nervous system. Hatmakers used it in the nineteenth century, with results that gave rise to the saying “mad as a hatter.” Many U.S. states ban devices containing mercury, even classic glass thermometers. The European Union restricts its sale but allows trade in “antique mercury-containing measuring devices,” such as barometers, if they are more than fifty years old. Gillery assured me that mercury contained safely in a barometer poses no risk.

Gillery learned the craft from her father, but before he accepted her as his partner, he gave her a warning: “You come into this world as you would into a religious vocation. Be careful before you settle here. Work somewhere else for a while.”

She apprenticed at various workshops and was so talented that at age twenty, she landed a job restoring furniture at Ver
sailles. It was a secure government post—a job for life, with an extra month of pay as an annual bonus, a five-week paid vacation every year, and a generous pension at the end of her career. She could have been a colleague of the finest artisans in the most glorious showpiece of France.

She hated it.

She hated working with bits and pieces, assembly-line style, with no chance of following a project from beginning to end. She hated taking orders from bureaucrats. She hated the chatter and small talk of her colleagues, all of them women restricted to the finishing stages of restoration.

“I learned from my father to work on an object from start to finish,” she said. “I learned to work alone. Ateliers, even the best ones, like at Versailles, are assembly lines. You do one process and then pass the object to someone else. It’s depressing.”

Gillery quit after a year and joined her father on the rue des Martyrs. When he retired, in 1984, she bought him out.

A purple velvet curtain hides a staircase leading to the small apartment above the shop where she lives with her husband, a professor of French literature, and their two daughters, both musicians. Once upon a time, just about all of the merchants along the rue des Martyrs lived above their shops. She is one of the last. The apartment is so small that her showroom doubles as a dining room for special events, like the party she threw when her husband became a full professor. In 2014, she celebrated thirty years here.

Wearing her rough linen smock that fell almost to the floor, Gillery stood at a counter bolted to the wall. She was restoring a hand-carved barometer in gilded lime wood, accented in pale green. It weighed ten pounds and was set in a frame of carved flow
ers, birds, and arrows. One needle pointed to the weather (“tempest,” “strong rain,” “good weather,” “very dry”), while the other indicated atmospheric pressure. In the center was a thermometer that Gillery said was a Réaumur, with a temperature scale invented by the French scientist René Réaumur and used in France until the Celsius scale took over, in 1790. It sets the freezing point of water at zero degrees and boiling at eighty. She didn’t know when the barometer had been made but called it “Louis XVI style.”

“I always put myself into the era of the object,” she said. “Then I speak to it. I study it. It gives me pleasure. I become part of it.”

She turned the barometer over and, with a pair of pliers and a flourish, pulled out the rusty nails holding it together.

“Are you a carpenter?” I asked, surprised.

“I’m doing what’s needed to get it going.”

The doorbell rang, and she sighed. She assumed the role of a boutique owner. A woman with a timid air carried, as if it were a baby, an object wrapped in brown burlap and tied with rope. The woman was in her fifties and dressed in elegant blue. She unwrapped a mirror set in a silver-toned frame with so many curves, angles, and mosaic pieces that I wondered where it ever could have hung.

“This mirror is of the Régence era, beginning of the eighteenth century,” Gillery said. “Between Louis XIV and Louis XV.”

The woman looked pleased. She clearly wanted to sell it but was too embarrassed to start the conversation by talking business. So she told the story of the mirror: it belonged to her grandmother, it had once hung in her apartment, she had redecorated with contemporary furniture and the mirror no longer belonged.

“I’ll give you fifty euros for it,” said Gillery.

The low figure shocked the lady in blue. She said the mirror had been in her family for a hundred years.

“It’s damaged,” said Gillery. Her voice was flat as she explained that the wooden frame had to be repaired, the mirror cleaned and refurbished. Even fully restored, she said, it would be worth only a few hundred euros.

“Well, it’s not worth it for me to sell,” said the lady in blue. She picked up the mirror, the burlap, and the rope.
“Bonjour,”
she said coldly.