Who put these plaques in Rouen? We have solved the mystery, after an investigation full of twists and turns
Through Margot Nicodemus
Published on
The reflection makes you smile, and you might think that this is, after all, the only effect sought. ” Madame Bovary has never taken piano lessons here“, Is it written on a plaque, similar to those indicating the streets, located on the Marcel-Duchamp esplanade, a Rouen (Seine-Maritime). We walk past, find her funny and continue on her way, at least for the one who writes her lines.
And then the interrogation – worthy of the film Creation – really arises when, during a passage in the rue du Vieux-Palais, the gaze lands by chance on a second plaque: “Here too, Madame Bovary has never taken a piano lesson”. There, there is no longer any doubt, we have to trace the trail of this mysterious signage, a priori without an author. And we do not know it yet, but it will be not without difficulty.
Not the work of the museum, nor of the City …
Privileged trail: the Museum of Fine Arts, plaque facing the first. Everything that outside the walls of the museum belongs to the City, one breathes. Good. Contacted, the City transmits the contact of an artist from Rouen who, after a brief telephone conversation, is not quite sure of the link attributed to him with the said plaques, which are definitely more and more enigmatic.
Back to square one, we change direction: focus on the second plate. Visible at 33, rue du Vieux-Palais, it is displayed on a porte-cochère which leads to the literary hotel Flaubert. It smells pretty good … Optimism that is confirmed during a phone call to the reception of the place. “Don’t move, I’ll see… There is the name of Damien Dauge, underneath,” the hostess kindly tells us. Satisfaction mixed with frustration, since we understand that it would have been enough to stop two minutes to get the info. Anyway, let’s move on.
A message to Damien Dauge later, and finally, the hour of resolution has come. Damien is a teacher and researcher, and is preparing to publish his thesis on Flaubert and music. He finally gives us a more epic story than what we expect, awaits the effort of the quest even more tasty. And he laughs (mostly) to learn everything we did before we got to him, and we can’t blame him.
I had installed a plaque for an event in 2015, ‘Flaubert dans la ville’. And it has a story: the first plate was gray, but it was stolen some time later!
The City of Rouen, explains Damien, kindly offered to make a new one. In 2019, it was the Hotel Flaubert which asked the writer’s specialist to have his own plaque, which thus responds to the first (hence the “Ici non plus, Madame Bovary…”).
Emma Bovary’s false piano lessons
But then, how was the choice of registration made?
It is a reference to the book Madame Bovary : the protagonist, Emma, takes piano lessons with Mademoiselle Lempereur, “who lived in rue de la Renelle-aux-Maroquiniers, n ° 74”.
“I carried out my investigation, I went to see the old land register”, continues Damien, who thus discovered that if the street had indeed existed, “there has never been a n ° 74 in this famous street of old center of Rouen. The numbering stops at n ° 67. Did the writer want to prevent some onlooker from disturbing the very real inhabitants of his character’s fictitious home? »To this deception is added another: in the novel, Emma Bovary never went to piano lessons, it is an alibi to meet her lover, Leon. Thus, the location of the plaque on the Marcel-Duchamp esplanade is the exact place where there has never been a house in which Madame Bovary did not take her piano lessons. You follow ?
Aurélie Daniel, independent cultural animator, makes this detour during her Rouen walk * “Madame Bovary in Rouen”. It indicates that the authentic rue de la Renelle-aux-Maroquiniers, where Mademoiselle Lempereur lived in the novel, “was an old street in the tanners’ quarter”. “It is in the place of the square Verrel and was destroyed for the construction of the current rue Jeanne-d’Arc, then rue de l’Impératrice, and rue Jean-Lecanuet”, which bore the name of rue from the Hôtel-de-Ville (before being called rue Thiers). La Renelle was, at the place of the square, a river.
A whole neighborhood destroyed around 1860
“The whole district was destroyed around 1860, in favor of Haussmannian redevelopments [juste après la parution de Madame Bovary, en 1857, NDLR]. Great streets, avenues and large parks have been pierced to circulate the air and breathe in the city. »From this time, remains the rue Sainte-Croix-des-Pelletiers, the pelletiers being« those who work the skin », continues Aurélie Daniel. The square was created under the name of “Solférino garden”.
This is how our investigation ended. Damien Dauge, always amused by our tenacity, is not a little proud to have gone down in posterity. “I am not at all a street artist, it is my unique and only installation. I’ll stop there, ”smiles the researcher. For the investigation of the mad license plate thief, on the other hand, we pass our turn …
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