Special train to...

To... Senlis!

I found the destination of our special train from La Bibliothèque Nationale de France's Gallica document retrieval system.
To extract anything from the major French newspapers of the WWI era has required a wrestling match with Gallica. I found this to be a slow business compared with, say, the New York Times's smoothly cross-referenced site, but I got a lot better at it as the weeks went on.

The Gallica beta test site Galicalabs gives much more flexible access to BNF's resources. The searches are easier to formulate, and it pays to know that separating words with full stops is the way to search for a particular phrase. Like "train.special".

There are four occurrences of this phrase linked with the name Bourgeois in Gallicalabs. You can find a sample query here


None of these pages is from the publication that supplied our scrap of newsprint, because the surrounding items are different. One (Le Journal of April 3) is identically worded. Le Gaulois of April 4 is the same except "toutes classes" is omitted.. The other two (Le Petit Parisien and La Croix, both of April 4) are clearly the same train, but Bourgeois' address is given as 1, Rue de Helder, 1. La Croix has an extra line "La Glorieuse Mutilée" - the Glorious Maimed. 

The full text of the La Croix ad reads:

TRAIN SPÉCIAL POUR SENLIS

LA GLORIEUSE MUTILÉE

Départ Lundi 5 avril, midi 55 Retour 19. h 25

Toutes classes.– Billets et Programme.

Chez G. LE BOURGEOIS, 1, rue du Helder, 1.

La Croix 4 avril 1915

Le Journal 3 avril 1915

Le Petit Parisien 4 avril 1915

Le Gaulois 4 Avril 1915

Why Senlis? This old town in the Oise département of northern France was swept up in the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. A full description of the battle can be found in the 1917 Michelin Illustrated Guide to the Battlefields 1914 : Battle of the Marne  here in book form or here in scanned text. The Germans, having smashed two armies through Belgium into northern France, were aiming for Paris. The capital was expected to fall "like a plum" into German hands, and the citizens began to flee southwards. But the Germans met unexpected resistance, not just from the French, but the Belgians, a British Expeditionary Force, and a Moroccan brigade. The Germans were driven back to the Somme and the Belgian border towns whose names resonate today: Ieper, Passchendaele ...

The battlefields became a place to visit, the Michelin guide in its description of its itinerary explains why:

" This tour, of which a plan is given below, covers the ground on which the fate of Paris was decided in September 1914.

" In the course of the journey the traveller will live over again the anxious moment when the Germans, having arrived within gunshot of the capital, had to decide whether to continue their irresistible march on Paris or attempt just to put the allied army out of action: he will then reconstruct the tragic struggle which for five days confronted Gallieni, Maunoury and von Kluck.

" The country traversed has the varied scenery of the Ile-de-France ; from the vast forests of Valois, the tourist will come to the fertile up-lands of Brie, intersected by lovely valleys. He will become acquainted with Chantilly, the great Conde's town, afterwards Marshal Joflre's Headquarters; Senlis, a jewel of ancient France, which narrowly escaped the fate of Louvain; Meaux, with its cathedral, its old mills, and the ruins left by the war in the surrounding villages.

" This is the war pilgrimage which should be made by all Parisians and all tourists passing through Paris who have a day or two to spare."

A little piece of newsprint

It was just a torn-off piece of newspaper, buried in a hole in the fireplace beneath a couple of layers of plaster. Un bout de papier. But we would never throw something like that away. It was a little piece of the history of the house, somebody had a reason for putting it there.
So we unrolled it.

"Page two" - the two detached pieces are facing the wrong way...

.... although I didn't realise until I had begun the transcription. The transcripts below are corrected.

A word caught my eye: tsar. Then a name: Venizelos. I knew that name, Elevtherios Venizelos, prime minister of Greece at the outbreak of World War I. He is still a hero on the island of Crete and I have visited his grave in Mournies, in the foothills of the White Mountains, overlooking the north coast of the island, a place of tranquility shaded by pine trees.

The scrap of paper was rapidly scanned and tucked away in a jiffy bag. Transcription took a lot longer, but the end result was most satisfactory.

The news of the day, 4th April 1915

The more we picked out of the piece of newsprint, the more convinced we were about a wartime date. The news items were dated 2nd and 3rd April, a short advertisement for a day trip by special train to an unknown destination was dated 5th April, that was our terminus ad quem.  The news indicated the year: 1915. The date of the edition: almost certainly 4th April 1915. Easter Sunday. Possibly the 3rd or the 5th. Le Matin of 4th April 1915 carries some of the same stories, including the Havas agency report of Venizelos' proposition heavily rewritten, but the paper was not torn from Le Matin.

... and on the reverse, one of those interminable sentimental serials. Transcription can await another day.

So what was the paper? The present local paper, La Nouvelle Republique, was not published at that date. And it had to be a national newspaper. The travel agent for the special train trip, le Bourgeois, gave only a street address - where? Why, in Paris, of course, no need to spell it out, everyone knows old Bourgeois, let's save on the price of the advert!

The tantalising words Gazette de F ... at the beginning of the item about German schoolboy conscripts (écoliers allemands) gives a huge clue. There are plenty of local Gazettes in France but only the one national existed: la Gazette de France.

Is the Gazette de France on line? No it isn't.With some trepidation I ordered a photocopy from the Bibliotheque National de Paris. This great library has an on-line ordering system for copies of its paper files, and the order form fortunately gave enough space to explain what I was looking for, and why. Only one title is present in full, so I had to quote that one: Menées Allemandes in Italie (German Machinations in Italy). I have a feeling that it's the back page. I should get a quote for a photocopy of the full page to be sent as an e-mail attachment, at the price of however long it takes a librarian to do it. Fingers crossed.

And I've always wondered if the message for A.-G Corbes was some kind of code....

A change of focus... a change of name...

Touraine Flint has changed its name and header...
it is now...

Following Others' Footsteps.

The change came about when we realised that there is so much history to this area...
and, for us particularly, that of La Forge itself and its environs...
that Touraine Flint was a "bloggers handicap"...
especially that Flint word.

When we arrived here, one of the first things we found....
carefully preserved in a tin box...
probably a biscuit tin...
were the last milking records....

Sad reading to watch the production tail off...

Whilst cleaning up the old fireplace in the longère, we found a strip of paper...from 1915... a strip of newspaper...
that had been rolled up and used as a Rawlplug...
Pauline has spent hours deciphering the wording....

One side of the clipping. When we did the scan we got the two smaller pieces back to front.

Second part of the clipping

We have been looking at the old cadastral maps....
and made interesting discoveries about the buildings that are here now....
and the ones that aren't...
the ones on the other side of the bief...
and the layout of the bocage field system in the pré...

Cadastre Napoléonien 1812  - extract, Moulin de la Forge and Bezuard

The millstream - le bief - existed in its present form in 1812. So...
when did the forge come into use?
When did it stop? And why?
What was made here?
When did it become a farm?

All that remains of the forge is some piles of slag (scorie or laitier) like this

And there are things yet to discover about the longère...
we know that it was a set of three buildings...
possibly four...
some very old...
and they and the barn were no longer in use when the forge was running in 1812...
judging by some of the older timbers in the longère, there was no roof.

The loft - le grenier - above the Long Room has a rendered wall, which is weathered just like the barn.

Possible building sequence from C11th...
click on picture to decipher!
Thanks to remnants found during re-tiling,
we know that the "magenta" building
had a pyramidal roof.

And, whilst we find used bits of flint...
almost every day we work on the land...
that Flint word was blocking our brains....
and any posts...
decent pictures of flint are hard to take.

We get fossils, too...
like the little cluster found only yesterday...
a fossil that links straight to the present day...
because the species still exists!

All things that need somewhere to be written about...
that didn't quite fit under the original header!

La Réunion "Cailloux"... and some Stone Age "bling"!

The AMGP [Amis du Musée de Préhistoire du Grand-Pressigny]
hold a Réunion "Cailloux" two or three times a year.

The first of this year was on Saturday 11th January in the recently opened HQ...
last year, it was held immediately after the AGM [or CAG!]  and, I feel, better attended.

At these events we can get the finds from the garden....
for us, mainly from the potager...
identified as to whether or not it's just a "cailloux"...
or actual worked stone.

We must be getting better at spotting the real items...
or...
was it because we were working on our hands and knees so much this year...
or are we filtering better...
but we had a much better proportion of positives...
a small scraper [grattoir] that also resembled a lion's head,
a couple of drills [perçoirs],
a flake off a polished flint that had then been reworked as a small sickle blade.

Two perçoirs... probably of different periods...
the one on the left is like my hole enlarging drill... stepped.
The one on the right looks to have had a flake taken off the central ridge...
probably to afford extra grip.

Also a pair of bi-face flint tools...
a chisel...
an almost microscopic flake that was the leftover from working a tool by 'pression'...
that is, working the edge by pressing hard against it with a bone or wood point...
done on opposite faces, alternately, it leaves a slightly wavy, but extremely sharp, edge.

Two different biface axes or choppers...
again, age is unknown...
but these tend to be Mesolithic or older.

But more about these in later posts...
there were two wonderful things brought along...
a vitually intact polished stone axe that was so little used...
that the three stages of polishing were clearly visible...
fairly coarse at the point for mounting it into the wooden or antler shaft...
highly polished with sand or flint dust for most of it, giving the classic shape [but showing striations]...
and, finally, 'sur polir' [super polished] at the blade tip...
polished using a mix of very fine sand / flint powder and grease in a groove on the "polisoir"...
this gave a non-striated, glossy tip to the piece....
it looked wonderful, but vanished back into the owner's pocket before I had a chance to take any pictures!!

I didn't make that mistake with the second item...
a collection of what can only be described as Stone Age "bling".

M. Geslin, the chairman, was given a collection of stone "tools"...
crafted in jasper...
when on the society's field trip to Brittany this year.
The word "tools" is in inverted commas here because these items were for show only...
perfectly formed, they are far too fragile to be used...
they are full of fracture lines...
and other faults caused by inclusions...
they would have blown apart if used for real.
But, to look at, they were wonderful...

These two shots are of the opposite sides of the biggest biface "axe"...
the axe is on the right... a piece of raw jasper is on the left.
If you look at the upper picture (by clicking on it)  you will see the fracture lines
mentioned above.

The full collection looked like this....

The axe above is in the top right corner with the raw jasper beneath...
the steel ruler gives scale.

These were for trade, ceremonial and political use, funerals, etc.
For trade, they could be exchanged for goods with somone who wanted a bit of "bling"...
politically, they could be given as gifts...
to ease passage, calm a situation...
ceremonially, they could be "framed" and worn...
or laid out in a certain form to show rank...
for funerary use, and buried with the corpse, they would have shown status...
both rank or wealth!

This is the reverse side of the small biface axe at the bottom right of the collection above.
The script in Indian ink shows where it came from.
The purple veins in this jasper are rather wonderful, I think.

Whatever the use of these, they would have been highly prized.

_______________________________________________________

The pictures could probably be better... but I am still perfecting technique!

Les Palets de Gargantua

Apologies for the lack of previous entries over the past months!

The weekend of 14th-15th September was the opportunity for organisations large and small all over France to display the nation's lesser-known heritage under the Journées Européennes du Patrimoine scheme. This is no thanks to the dreadful national website, or the Centre region booklet which contrived to omit everything in the canton of Ligueil! Having friends who live in Charnizay own up to never having visited their local dolmen (you know who you are), the excellent leaflet for Touraine du Sud brought this megalithic monument to our attention. There was to be a visite commentée - a guided tour.

Accompanied by our friend Joan, we followed the signs from Charnizay along the road to Obterre and were finally guided to an enclosure along a stretch of track where we could see other cars parked. In the midst of a rolling lawn surrounded by trees there is a massive assembly of stone, believed to date from the early Neolithic period about 5000 years ago. It is the work of people who had no iron tools, no tractor-driven diggers, just flint and antler picks. The capstone is 6 metres by 4.2 metres and weighs 50 tonnes, an almost incredible feat of the human spirit..

The guided visit under way

A dolmen is a funerary monument - a stone tomb - and there are several more in the vicinity,  and across Europe as far away as Britain. They may be a family or tribal tomb as there is often one principal burial and several lesser ones. Les Palets de Gargantua consists of three huge pieces of stone, and there is much speculation as to whether it was never finished, or if there were once more stones that were later removed for reuse. There has never been any real excavation to find out, although Time Team fans will immediately think of non-invasive methods of finding out what lies under the ground.

The Palets de Gargantua

Our guide, from the Association "Charnizay, son passé et la Nouvelle-France", described the way the stone would have been cut in a local quarry, and three possible theories as to how it was transported to the chosen spot  - on rollers, on mud, or on frozen ground. Her own house a few metres away was constructed from the same rock, which is pudding stone, known to French geologists as poudingue. It is a rather handsome stone made up of lumps of reddish flint in a grey-blue matrix, and very hard. Our Neolithic ancestors built to last!

The interpretative board... the information can be read if you click on the picture...

The name originates with the giant Gargantua, who is a character from the works of Rabelais. A palet is a quoit, a throwing toy. One legend is that Gargantua's wife carried the quoits in her apron to the Champ de l'Ormeau (ou de l'Humeau) where Les Palets de Gargantua now stands. Alternatively, Gargantua himself threw the quoits, from Charnizay or from Bossay-sur-Claise. Gargantua amused himself by hurling the quoits at his target which was the menhir (standing stone) at Draché according to some, or the dolmen at Civray-sur-Esvres according to others.

The site is beautifully presented, with a brand new interpretive board and for the day a display of the publications of the Association under a neat awning. It would make a good picnic spot - there are picnic tables for that purpose! The sheer size of the dolmen was overwhelming, but there is a sense of great peace.