The movie Charade and my stamp collection

I watched Charade in 1964, again this week, and again thoroughly enjoyed it. I even remembered much of the rather silly plot that is full of non-sequiturs, the clever dialogue and improbable set pieces of action that are fun to follow. (Here for the plot and a history of the film.)  Plus, who would not enjoy seeing Gary Grant and Audrey Hepburn together, despite it being another instance of Hollywood casting a popular male actor as the romantic partner of a woman young enough to be his daughter.  In Charade, however, Grant, 59 years old, and Hepburn, 33, had the good sense to recognize the age difference and to devise an understandable, less incongruous path for their characters’ mutual attraction.

The movie’s action, and there’s lots of it, happens in Les Halles, on the Champ Elysees, in the Palais Royale, on the streets, at Metro stops (I wish the Guimard metro entrances were more on view) and in chases through the Metro, but the key scene has Hepburn and Grant in the Carré Marigny, a park off the Champs Elysees, and is the reason I watched the movie again.

This guide to a walk down the Champs Elysees helps locate the Carré Marigny and the stamp market between the Arc de Triomphe and the Place de la Concorde. I think in terms of the metro stops. First a stop at the Etoile and next the George V. For going to the Petit and Grand Palais one exits from the Franklin D Roosevelt stop at the rond-point or the Champs Elysees Clemenceau, for the Place de la Concorde, at the Concord.

Hepburn and Crant are twice in the Carré Marigny, the first time with a large audience of small children happily watching the traditional puppet show with its central figure Guignol. The second time we see more of the park and finally Hepburn and others in the stamp market moving through the narrow, crowded aisle between the two rows of temporary covered stalls, the sort set up by the city for weekly street food markets such as the one in front of my apartment building on Blvd Raspail, but here each table covered with innumerable stamps, books of stamps, sheets of stamps hanging from the top and side railings. It’s a scene I visited weekly for years, where I had my favorite venders and exchanged greetings with a few of the other regulars. On seeing it my heart skipped a beat.  (Here for photos of the stamp market)

I watched the stamp market scene one more time before returning the DVD. I suppose my stamp collection has become another of my curios, but one that is especially important to me. I still find my stamps endlessly interesting.

It was the Paris stamp market that turned me into a stamp collector. One afternoon, coming out of the Champs-Élysées – Clemenceau metro on my way to a favorite bookstore on Avenue Matignon, I noticed people milling about at the Avenue Gabriel, plus further into the park another center of activity, and stopped to investigate. At the street corner were tables covered with folders and various containers of postage stamps and men, most of them quite young, discussing, exchanging, purchasing stamps. Beyond that site was the stamp market. I joined in, began looking at the stamps and for the first time regarded them as something other than items necessary for using the postal service.

Seeing how attractive so many of the stamps were, some a miniature work of art, I bought a few, and later, at home, reflecting on how they called attention to places I’d never before noticed, decided to go again and look at other stamps. I had no idea of collecting stamps, had never known or known of a stamp collector. My husband, Ravi, had mentioned that as a child in India he saved stamps and kept them in an album that, unfortunately, his father, while traveling, long ago, had lost. As a child and into his teens, my son, Arun, without the fact registering with me, had collected stamps. When he discovered that I was collecting he gave me his stamps, which I, before I understood the personal importance of a collection, unwisely integrated into my own collection.

In Paris, as I examined that multitude of stamps, each beautifully printed with a different image, it occurred to me that someone on high was deciding what places, what objects, what events in France and French history were worthy of being honored by a postage stamp everyone everywhere could see, appreciate and use. I thought this meaningful and that I should pay attention, become informed. I knew virtually nothing about France. Ravi, not I, had decided we would live in Paris, just as his career choices and preference had always determined where we lived. I went along, made each apartment or house our home, saw to the children’s schooling and our family life. For myself, in the States, in Somalia, and in Turkey I managed to teach or do a research project part-time, all of which helped me make friends, engage in the environment and keep my professional identity intact.

Paris, however, was different. I soon learned that opportunities for working in my field, for working at all, were non-existent, but alternatively, that doing short-term consultancies in developing countries might be possible. Finally, with persistence and some luck, I became a consultant for UNICEF, WHO and other international organizations concerned with public health, work for which I had prepared myself. At home, in Paris, I spent much of my time preparing for another assignment elsewhere, hanging out in a social science library, talking with professors and mostly foreign students. I became friendly with a few French individuals but circumstances seemed always against our becoming friends. (discussed here in the letter dated New York 13 January 1995)

Becoming a collector of French stamps connected me to my life in Paris. I bought all the stamps of Paris buildings and places I could find in the market, now in my Paris album, and went from there to learn what it was they pictured. I had regularly walked by historic buildings, such as the historic Institut de France on the quai across from the Pont des Arts, without seeing them. After studying its stamp, reading and asking questions, a building took on meaning for me; it ceased being invisible.

After a while I also collected other French stamps, arranging them in an album by Region and Department as a picture guide for what would be interesting to see and visit when Ravi proposed that we drive somewhere over a weekend or for a vacation. I learned more this way than by following the usual tourist destinations. Soon, stamp collecting being additive, I spread out to small collections on other countries, especially Turkey, and to a collection on architecture. Most surprising is my album of stamps issued to celebrate the victory and the end World War II, a collection initially inspired by the American stamp of troops marching down the Champs Elysees, planes overhead, the magnificent Arc de Triomphe in the background.

In my fourth stage of life, my stamp collection reminds me of where I have been, of what I saw and experienced, of who I am.

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Collecting antique maps and my Mystery Map

I wrote in a previous blog post that through many years of living and working in various countries, I acquired an odd assortment of items, things prized for no reason other than their having caught my imagination, been affordable and small enough to carry away with me. My house is full of them and they need to be catalogued so my children will know what they are and why they are here. (The ani-ani, a now antique Indonesian agricultural tool, is pictured here.)

My mystery map is from Istanbul, bought in 1998 in a huge, gorgeous tent set up to sell the most luxurious wedding party paraphernalia one can imagine. I was wandering with a Turkish friend from one stand to another, admiring ornate tableware in silver, luscious silk and linen garments sewn and embroidered with amazing craft, and noticing a curious small table isolated at the tent’s edge, worked my way toward it through the fashionably attired crowd of ladies, my friend patiently following me. I had guessed that the man behind the table, dressed in casual shirt and slacks, would be overlooking neat piles of antique maps and prints, and I was right. I stood there with friend and vender, magically returned to my life in Paris and my favorite Paris shop — the Galerie Jean-Claude Martinez, gravures anciennes,  21 Rue Saint-Sulpice.

Over the years, chez Martinez, with the elegant Chantal always ready to inform me,

1670 Nova Orbis de Wit

I studied antique maps in the shop, read about them

Mogadiscio 1460 Fra Mauro

and saved pictures of the famous ones, such as the 1670 Nova Orbis de Wit, and especially those of places where I had lived or worked, but bought mostly from 18^thcentury atlases of France, the U.S. and India and resisted purchasing elsewhere, as in Cairo or Delhi, where the prices were higher.

Once, in 1979, soon after the Shah left Iran and Khomeini arrived in Tehran, when Irani families were arriving in Paris, when rare and beautiful household and luxury items were for sale in the Place de Vosges shops, a tiny map store opened on rue de la Montagne St. Geneviéve. behind the Église St-Étienne-du-Mont, and disappeared within the week. Its truly ancient maps were marked at astronomical prices. I walked in, heard names like Ptolemy and immediately left.

My one fairly expensive gift to myself was a Merian Plan de Paris.

In the Istanbul tent, my friend, more interested in the antique prints, showed me a lovely small drawing of a lion and a dragon intertwined, painted in gold on a page from a Persian book, and I decided I must have it, all the while figuring out whether to pay in dollars or Turkish lira, continuing to look at one map after another, telling myself I really did not need another map. Naturally, the vender was watching. He quoted me a price of a hundred dollars, in dollars, for the print and any one of the several maps I had set aside. I yielded and chose the beautiful map, with no rational consideration whatsoever.

Carefully laying the map in the bottom of my suitcase, to be brought out and puzzled over at a later date, my friend and I left and on the following morning were in Ankara, where I visited friends, checked out once familiar places, had the Persian print framed and managed to spend hours in a shop attending to my hobby at the time, stamp collecting.

Back home in the States, I continued for a while with stamp collecting, browsing and buying in a shop and the occasional stamp and coin shows, but nowhere found anyone or anywhere for my antique maps. Eventually, trying to put my collection of prints and paintings in order, I took my mystery map out from storage to regard more carefully, to learn its provenance, what it is or where it came from. I thought it might be from the early or mid 1600s — the shape of the continents; the Spanish galleons; the drawing of a dhow in the lower right of the map; the elaborated astrolabe; the small side map of the Malaysian peninsula and Asia and the other of Andalusia and Gibraltar. Why the drawing of a whale in the lower left of the map?

The writing in Arabic surprised me but Arabic speaking explorers and traders were traveling the world. Why would Arab scholars/scientists not be making maps for them?

Yet, though the letters are Arabic, an Egyptian professor of literature who looked at the map for me said the words are not Arabic. He said the writing may be Persian, but a woman from Iran who reads Farsi said it is not Persian, or at least, she could not read the words. She did, however, read the numbers. I thought perhaps the language may be from the Ottoman Empire but a professor of Turkish literature assured me it is not. A friend, considering Arab history and the small map of Spain, said the words could be Spanish written in Arabic, but they are not. At the center bottom, across the map’s border, is a number and what I thought might be a signature in Arabic. I assume the number is the date in the Hijri lunar calendar. It is 1154, which translates into 1742 C.E.

The map is painted on the back of a paper with Arabic writing, so I asked a knowledgeable person about that. “It’s definitely Arabic, and it seems to be a dictionary, at least from the first couple of lines, which seem to be examples of how to use different forms of the root of the verb عين in context (to appoint, to designate, etc; as a noun, plural, etc). This is typical of old-style Arabic dictionaries. It probably has nothing to do with the map; in my limited experience of Turkey, old manuscripts are regularly used for the paper to print miniatures or other pictures on, so perhaps that is the case with this map.”

Finally, at long last, a reader of my blog kindly sent me this information on a map very like mine —

Anonymous Manuscript Map:  Turkish Map of America (Decorative Manuscript Map),  Map Maker:  Anonymous Manuscript Map,  Place / Date: Istanbul ? / 1975 ca Coloring: Hand Colored

Sebastian Munster

Description: Decorative manuscript map of America, based upon Sebastian Munster’s map but also showing California as an island, with decorative embellishments.

Maps of this type are typically hand drawn for tourists in Istanbul, using old paper which frequently includes earlier manuscript writing in Turkish.

While made to appear old, the maps are in fact modern tourist curiosities, but beautifully excecuted and certainly beautiful objects. Centerfold damage, which was probably present when the map was drawn.

 

My “map” is not authentic, merely decorative. I was disappointed but love it all the same. It is framed and hanging among the true maps from history, keeping them company on my dining room walls.

 

 

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