tenlittlebullets:tenlittlebullets:Old houses in the Rue Mondétour - Adolphe Martial Pot&e
tenlittlebullets: tenlittlebullets: Old houses in the Rue Mondétour - Adolphe Martial Potémont Another album of Paris images I just dumped on Photobucket: A.M. Potémont’s engravings of old Paris. He did a lot of them; if you do an image search for Potémont on gallica.bnf.fr you’ll get hundreds of results. I cherry-picked a couple dozen of them for being relevant (however fleetingly) to Les Mis fandom’s interests, but if you like them and want to see more of what old Paris looked like, go check out more of them on Gallica! (Note: Gallica leaves huge amounts of whitespace around the images, which can make them look tiiiiiny, but as the above cropped version demonstrates, once you download them they’re high-res enough to zoom in on details.) Bonus tidbit: the first factoid Hugo mentions about Corinthe and its vicinity in Les Mis is a basket-maker’s shop advertising itself with a giant wicker Bonaparte and a sign that says “Napoléon est fait / Tout en osier.” Nothing so flamboyant here, but note the sign painted on the house on the right: “vannier” means “basket-maker.” This might be as close as we’ll ever get to seeing Hugo’s conception of where the barricade was built–it’s dated 1839, the year after the Rue de la Chanverrerie was demolished to create the Rue Rambuteau, but the old houses in the Rue Mondétour would’ve been the same as in 1832. And Hugo’s knowledge of old Paris was so extensive that I wouldn’t be surprised if he was referencing a real basket-maker’s shop. -- source link